Except - it wouldn't save around 60% of the fuel. A rocket spends much of it's mass lifting it's own mass. A gun spends much of it's energy overcoming atmospheric drag, boosting the shielding needed for that process, and boosting the deadweight of the propulsion system needed to circularize the orbit. It also adds the complexity of splitting the payload down into lots of small chunks and the having to re-assemble those chunks at the far end.
A gun isn't a magic wand or a free lunch - it's an expensive and risky solution wandering around looking for a problem to attach itself to.
You can always find somebody proposing some damm fool hare brained scheme or another. Finding someone to actually *pay* for it, is however another matter entirely.
The key issue with a gun is that it's a very expensive and risky solution wandering about in search of a problem. The folks with the bucks know this. The dreamers, since they aren't required to be grounded in the real world, don't.
No, that's a bug - because the weight of the shield and the cost of the energy needed to accelerate it a significant contributor to construction and launch costs.
After the construction of the gun, each launch is relatively cheap.
Only if you somehow handwave away the considerable cost of building the gun in the first place - because if you don't each launch has to bear a portion of the debt service as part of it's costs.
It's a perfect system for putting lots of dead mass into orbit cheaply, though (water, soil, construction supplies).
In some distant future world where we need lots of dead mass launched, very expensively, into orbit... then a gun will make sense.
This is a departure from the way Boeing has done manufacture in the past where most things are done under one roof.
Boeing has been making parts in one place, from small ones like doors or control surfaces all the way up to entire fuselages, and shipping them to another for final assembly for many years now.
They started assembling 737 fuselages in Wichita and then shipping them by rail to Renton for final assembly back in the 80's. The production of smaller bits (doors, seats, empennage, etc...) overseas (notably in China and Israel) started back in the 90's. (And was a huge issue in one of the machinists strikes.)
If you ruin another geek culture icon, there'll be hell to pay.
if by 'hell" you mean "more nerdrage on blogs and forums by a meaningless minority that will have no detectable effect on the bottom line", then sure. Otherwise, not so much.
Get over yourself. Nerds don't pay the bills, never have. never will.
Why was it modded down? Probably because the mod was tired of the rampant tinfoil hat paranoia and the tendency to leap directly to the downsides so prevalent here on Slashdot.
Which part of "it's stupid to spend a lot of money to save fuel because fuel is so cheap" did you fail to comprehend? Pedantic parroting of things you only understand because someone reduced it to your level by producing a cartoon does not contribute usefully to the discussion.
Swearing is for people with no imagination or poor command of the language.
Not quite - obscenities (and profanity) are (usually) for people with no imagination or a poor command of the language. Swearing, which may or may not contain obscenities or profanity, is an art form on par with poetry or high class literature. The two terms have become synonyms in the modern mind, and while there is some overlap they aren't actually the same thing.
If you can split the carrying of fuel for your journey from getting your rocket in to orbit you would not need to waste as much fuel lifting itself.
You spend the same amount of energy either way. (Probably more given massive losses to atmospheric drag such schemes suffer from.) TANSTAAFL.
Not that it makes much sense to spend more than the most miniscule of effort to avoid "wasting" fuel. Fuel is cheap, and the cost is all but lost in the noise at current launch costs. (It cost something like a million dollars to fill the Shuttle's external tanks...) Launcher costs scale only weakly with size - and very strongly with complexity. So if you want to reduce launcher costs, complexity is where you start. (Which is a huge part of how SpaceX has reduced launch costs.)
You could set up an automated system that would fire a 10kg payload of fuel every 10 minutes and get what you need over time far cheaper than one big launch.
That's the theory. It breaks down when it encounters reality... It's the equivalent of pouring the foundation for a 1500ft skyscraper by using armies of messengers on motor scooters, each carrying a bucket of cement, because motor scooters are cheaper than cement trucks. It actually ends up being *more* expensive and taking longer because of the increased labor, increased fuel, increased planning and management... not to mention the traffic jams at the receiving end. There's a reason why bulk goods are transported in bulk - it's cheaper, easier, and more efficient to do so.
One problem, as I understand it: a projectile launched from a big space gun would need to have its orbit adjusted or it will return to Earth. The video mentioned this issue briefly
All gun schemes mention this 'briefly', if they mention it at all (most don't) - mostly in hopes that nobody will notice. The mass of the engines and fuel needed to circularize the orbit dominates the payload, and is *very* difficult to make resistant to the shock and acceleration. It's pretty much a showstopper all by itself, without even mentioning the need for (the currently non-existent) heat shielding needed to protect the payload on ascent. As the vehicle bleeds off energy to atmospheric drag and gravitational forces as it coasts upward, it has to leave the muzzle of the gun at considerably more than orbital velocity... essentialy exposing the payload to re-entry conditions at launch.
P.S. I saw proposals for an Apollo-style mission from Earth to Mars: a single giant rocket launches everything in one launch. Why is anyone even looking at doing it that way?
Nobody that I'm aware that's even remotely serious is proposing to do it that way.
No, Chuck E. Cheese and similar businesses (like carnival midways) run games that are (at least theoretically) games of skill rather than games of chance - because it's the latter than run afoul of the gambling laws. What you're playing for is irrelevant.
I disagree, while I was being rather grandiose on the submarine bit, my point was we routinely do long mission type activities.
You're quite welcome to disagree. What you're not welcome to do is make shit up out of thin air like you are - because we don't "routinely" conduct long duration activities of this sort. Even the longest and most isolated (something like an Antarctic winter over) are shorter and much more in contact than a Mars bound craft.
Rather than do an artificial study, there is a wealth of real world data to draw from and analyze. But apparently that leap of logic was too much for your amazing brain, and you took too literal an interpretation.
I gave you real world data, but you choose to ignore it because it doesn't fit the preconceived notions you've pulled out of your ass.
Doing a considerable amount of historical searching, one thing is clear we have not changed much in 500 years.
Right. So, we still tolerate slavery. And routine abuse of women (as well as treating them as property). And the divine rights of the nobility are widely taken as grants from God... Oh, wait. None of those things are true - but somehow societal expectations haven't changed and we're the same people we always were.
Lastly, I'm impressed at your extreme powers of intelligence detention being able to determine an idiot from a single paragraph of a written opinion
You should be. And the additional evidence you've provided have merely served to confirm the diagnosis - you're an ignorant fuckwit.
Classic - kudos to you for a great laugh. I was thinking though, "this study doesn't help much because it's rare to find places where people write more than a line or two anymore." Go back to the old days of Usenet (80s, early 90s) and posts were long, well thought-out, and useful.
Not particularly... you just hang out in the 'wrong' places (not just websites/forums, but usenet groups as well), both for the length and for the nature of the writing.
It's been tough to get people to pay attention to the forum at www.dictatorshandbook.net for two reasons: I think people are reticent to opine on various dictators, all of whom might put them in jail, and because hardly anyone posts on forums anymore (yes, I know, there are some exceptions).
As far as getting people to visit and pay attention to your forum... I suspect people pay it no mind because it looks like one of the many crappy-ass and pointless websites on the 'net. At first glance it seems like a site mostly designed to sell what looks like either a parody or a tinfoil-hat book with no reason to pay further attention or treat it seriously. Your idiotic twitter feed doesn't help either... Nor does the way you hide the forums or your use of a weird forum format...
It can also alter the meaning of your text. Translation is an inexact art, at best, even for skilled and experienced practitioners - which automatic translators emphatically are *not*.
This goes times ten if your text includes technical terms, or wording which relies on alternate meanings or connotation. (Things a native reader would either know, or would be reasonably expected to infer from context.) This is why writing in English from non-English speakers (for example) often looks so funny when you encounter it. It's often almost robotically precise, yet it still stands out from (say) an English major or grammar nerd because it lacks those subtle contextual cues and clues.
I don't know offhand whether it's dissolved or suspended, but either way recovering and reprocessing is probably going to be disproportionately expensive. It's not just sterilization either, contaminants of various kinds will have to be removed as well. (And contaminants doesn't just include the obvious stuff - my feces may contain drugs you are sensitive or allergic to, as well as food allergens, etc...)
The amount of doublethink it would take to reach that conclusion from what I said, not to mention external evidence plain to anyone with an IQ over room temperature is absolutely astounding.
US subs, regularly stay submerged for 9 months at a time. No sunlight. When's the last time you've heard of a nuclear sub being lost because the crew got lazy?
USS San Francisco - 08 Jan 2005. OK, so they didn't lose the ship but they came awfully damn close. Why? In part, I believe, because they'd been gone a long time and were headed for a liberty port. And in the years I spent at sea, it was always the end of patrol when I got nervous... because things could tend to get sloppy and guys tended to get lazy towards the end of a run. And that went times ten when we went non-alert and started making turns for King's Bay and turnover.
Stupid studies. Why not look at history?
We aren't the same people we were a century or more ago - society has changed, people's expectations have changed, etc... etc...
Idiots and their surveys. Whatever editor allowed this post needs to have his/her Geek and Nerd credentials yanked.
The idiot here isn't the editor - it's looking back in your mirror.
Because tweets aren't useless - they're as much a part of societies communications as post cards, phone calls, etc... etc... There's a lot of information there about the day-to-day interests and communications patterns of a lot of ordinary people.
For a historian or a sociologist, that archive is going to be a gold mine.
A year and half in simulated mars mission where you know it is a simulation has to be worse.
Since you seem to have have no actual experience in significant simulators, you couldn't possibly understand how wrong you are. You're on the line in the simulator too, and you damn well know it. You honestly think the guys in the simulator aren't motivated to do the best job possible?
In a real Mars mission, the crew will be know their activities are important: for the excitement to be first on mars, for the knowledge that a serious screw up could them their lives.
You can't sustain that kind of excitement/attention for months at a time, it's mentally extremely exhausting. And, having been there done that, the knowledge that a serious screwup could cost you your life eventually fades into the background noise. Back when I was making SSBN patrols, we saw the same things they saw in the study... guys tended to sleep more, lag more, and get lazier and sloppier as the patrol wore on. It took real effort to counteract it. Unlike these guys, we had experience and a culture (pride in your crew and boat and in wearing the fish) that made counteracting it something of a priority - but it was still hard to be as on top of things on day sixty five of a patrol as you were on day one.
Disclaimer: Not a photo professional by any means, but I do pay attention to industry trends.
My mom occasionally prints photos. I have not printed a photo in years, since computer monitors are now more than good enough. My kids have never printed one. I don't think "printing photos" is a growth business.
Once again, proving the danger of extrapolating from your personal experience to the population-at-large - combined with knowing pretty much nothing about the topic.
Contrary to popular belief, photo printing *is* a growth industry. That's why Kodak sold off it's photo patent portfolio, but kept it's printer business. It's why all the big chain drugstores (Rite-Aid, Walgreen, CVS, etc...) have been rolling out expanded print-your-pictures-here kiosks. It's why Costco and Sam's Club and Wal-Mart have been revamping and expanding their photo printing services. (Not to mention Fed-Ex/Kinko's or Staples and Office Depot) Etc... etc...
It's an open question where the market is going to go, but currently and for the near future, the market is there and growing.
As far as my personal experiences go, as an amateur photographer, I've been asked once if someone could download and keep a picture. Once if they could set one as wallpaper. Once if they could download a set and make it their screensaver slideshow.... But in the last year alone, I've sold six prints (all requested, I don't offer or advertise that I print) and a seventh is sitting at my elbow awaiting delivery even as I type.
That would be useful, if I only ever had to open multiple books in my computer room.
And you've never heard of bookmarks?
Nor do you have the imagination to think that just because *you* never do something, somebody else must never do it too. (I do it almost on a daily basis when I'm deep in culinary research, for just one example.)
I went to Stanford University bookstore to see if I could purchase a few graduate level textbooks in human motor development, neurology and (a separate interest) particle physics (easy stuff like alpha particles).
Wikipedia beat Stanford University Bookstore on each of these topics.
Sure, Wikipedia beats a bookstore on price... but on pretty much every other factor, not so much. Wikipedia tends to be a summary, essentially a high level overview - which is useful unless you actually want to learn more about the topic. Wikipedia also tends to very atomic as everything is split off at the lowest possible level (consistent with it being a summary), thus disrupting the narrative flow. Etc... etc...
As a tool for finding specific facts, which is what an encyclopedia is designed for, it excels. (Subject to the usual caveats about Wikipedia.) As a learning tool, it has serious drawbacks - ones not always obvious to autodidacts unfamiliar with the topic the seek to learn about. (And nowadays, increasingly unaware of the difference between knowing individual facts and know which facts bear which weight - and how they interconnect.)
Of the topics I specialize in - there's not one single one I'd refer any but the rankest beginner to Wikipedia to study. There's topics that I have chapters on, or even whole books that Wikipedia summarizes in a scant paragraph or sometimes in a single line! (When they mention them at all.)
Amazon and Nook make their reader apps available on a myriad of devices, PC, Mac, tablets, phones, etc. So, you could open a collection of books on just as many devices as you want.
Right - so if I want more than two or three (e-reader, smartphone, laptop) books open at a time... I have to spend hundreds of dollars per device in order to open another book. That's neither very economical or convenient.
Slashdot Mirror
Except - it wouldn't save around 60% of the fuel. A rocket spends much of it's mass lifting it's own mass. A gun spends much of it's energy overcoming atmospheric drag, boosting the shielding needed for that process, and boosting the deadweight of the propulsion system needed to circularize the orbit. It also adds the complexity of splitting the payload down into lots of small chunks and the having to re-assemble those chunks at the far end.
A gun isn't a magic wand or a free lunch - it's an expensive and risky solution wandering around looking for a problem to attach itself to.
You can always find somebody proposing some damm fool hare brained scheme or another. Finding someone to actually *pay* for it, is however another matter entirely.
The key issue with a gun is that it's a very expensive and risky solution wandering about in search of a problem. The folks with the bucks know this. The dreamers, since they aren't required to be grounded in the real world, don't.
No, that's a bug - because the weight of the shield and the cost of the energy needed to accelerate it a significant contributor to construction and launch costs.
Only if you somehow handwave away the considerable cost of building the gun in the first place - because if you don't each launch has to bear a portion of the debt service as part of it's costs.
In some distant future world where we need lots of dead mass launched, very expensively, into orbit... then a gun will make sense.
Boeing has been making parts in one place, from small ones like doors or control surfaces all the way up to entire fuselages, and shipping them to another for final assembly for many years now.
They started assembling 737 fuselages in Wichita and then shipping them by rail to Renton for final assembly back in the 80's. The production of smaller bits (doors, seats, empennage, etc...) overseas (notably in China and Israel) started back in the 90's. (And was a huge issue in one of the machinists strikes.)
if by 'hell" you mean "more nerdrage on blogs and forums by a meaningless minority that will have no detectable effect on the bottom line", then sure. Otherwise, not so much.
Get over yourself. Nerds don't pay the bills, never have. never will.
Why was it modded down? Probably because the mod was tired of the rampant tinfoil hat paranoia and the tendency to leap directly to the downsides so prevalent here on Slashdot.
Which part of "it's stupid to spend a lot of money to save fuel because fuel is so cheap" did you fail to comprehend? Pedantic parroting of things you only understand because someone reduced it to your level by producing a cartoon does not contribute usefully to the discussion.
Not quite - obscenities (and profanity) are (usually) for people with no imagination or a poor command of the language. Swearing, which may or may not contain obscenities or profanity, is an art form on par with poetry or high class literature. The two terms have become synonyms in the modern mind, and while there is some overlap they aren't actually the same thing.
You spend the same amount of energy either way. (Probably more given massive losses to atmospheric drag such schemes suffer from.) TANSTAAFL.
Not that it makes much sense to spend more than the most miniscule of effort to avoid "wasting" fuel. Fuel is cheap, and the cost is all but lost in the noise at current launch costs. (It cost something like a million dollars to fill the Shuttle's external tanks...) Launcher costs scale only weakly with size - and very strongly with complexity. So if you want to reduce launcher costs, complexity is where you start. (Which is a huge part of how SpaceX has reduced launch costs.)
That's the theory. It breaks down when it encounters reality... It's the equivalent of pouring the foundation for a 1500ft skyscraper by using armies of messengers on motor scooters, each carrying a bucket of cement, because motor scooters are cheaper than cement trucks. It actually ends up being *more* expensive and taking longer because of the increased labor, increased fuel, increased planning and management... not to mention the traffic jams at the receiving end. There's a reason why bulk goods are transported in bulk - it's cheaper, easier, and more efficient to do so.
All gun schemes mention this 'briefly', if they mention it at all (most don't) - mostly in hopes that nobody will notice. The mass of the engines and fuel needed to circularize the orbit dominates the payload, and is *very* difficult to make resistant to the shock and acceleration. It's pretty much a showstopper all by itself, without even mentioning the need for (the currently non-existent) heat shielding needed to protect the payload on ascent. As the vehicle bleeds off energy to atmospheric drag and gravitational forces as it coasts upward, it has to leave the muzzle of the gun at considerably more than orbital velocity... essentialy exposing the payload to re-entry conditions at launch.
Nobody that I'm aware that's even remotely serious is proposing to do it that way.
No, Chuck E. Cheese and similar businesses (like carnival midways) run games that are (at least theoretically) games of skill rather than games of chance - because it's the latter than run afoul of the gambling laws. What you're playing for is irrelevant.
You're quite welcome to disagree. What you're not welcome to do is make shit up out of thin air like you are - because we don't "routinely" conduct long duration activities of this sort. Even the longest and most isolated (something like an Antarctic winter over) are shorter and much more in contact than a Mars bound craft.
I gave you real world data, but you choose to ignore it because it doesn't fit the preconceived notions you've pulled out of your ass.
Right. So, we still tolerate slavery. And routine abuse of women (as well as treating them as property). And the divine rights of the nobility are widely taken as grants from God... Oh, wait. None of those things are true - but somehow societal expectations haven't changed and we're the same people we always were.
You should be. And the additional evidence you've provided have merely served to confirm the diagnosis - you're an ignorant fuckwit.
If you want to be taken seriously and understood unambiguously, yes.
Not particularly... you just hang out in the 'wrong' places (not just websites/forums, but usenet groups as well), both for the length and for the nature of the writing.
As far as getting people to visit and pay attention to your forum... I suspect people pay it no mind because it looks like one of the many crappy-ass and pointless websites on the 'net. At first glance it seems like a site mostly designed to sell what looks like either a parody or a tinfoil-hat book with no reason to pay further attention or treat it seriously. Your idiotic twitter feed doesn't help either... Nor does the way you hide the forums or your use of a weird forum format...
It can also alter the meaning of your text. Translation is an inexact art, at best, even for skilled and experienced practitioners - which automatic translators emphatically are *not*.
This goes times ten if your text includes technical terms, or wording which relies on alternate meanings or connotation. (Things a native reader would either know, or would be reasonably expected to infer from context.) This is why writing in English from non-English speakers (for example) often looks so funny when you encounter it. It's often almost robotically precise, yet it still stands out from (say) an English major or grammar nerd because it lacks those subtle contextual cues and clues.
I don't know offhand whether it's dissolved or suspended, but either way recovering and reprocessing is probably going to be disproportionately expensive. It's not just sterilization either, contaminants of various kinds will have to be removed as well. (And contaminants doesn't just include the obvious stuff - my feces may contain drugs you are sensitive or allergic to, as well as food allergens, etc...)
The amount of doublethink it would take to reach that conclusion from what I said, not to mention external evidence plain to anyone with an IQ over room temperature is absolutely astounding.
Is it a natural talent, or did you practice?
USS San Francisco - 08 Jan 2005. OK, so they didn't lose the ship but they came awfully damn close. Why? In part, I believe, because they'd been gone a long time and were headed for a liberty port. And in the years I spent at sea, it was always the end of patrol when I got nervous... because things could tend to get sloppy and guys tended to get lazy towards the end of a run. And that went times ten when we went non-alert and started making turns for King's Bay and turnover.
We aren't the same people we were a century or more ago - society has changed, people's expectations have changed, etc... etc...
The idiot here isn't the editor - it's looking back in your mirror.
Because tweets aren't useless - they're as much a part of societies communications as post cards, phone calls, etc... etc... There's a lot of information there about the day-to-day interests and communications patterns of a lot of ordinary people.
For a historian or a sociologist, that archive is going to be a gold mine.
Since you seem to have have no actual experience in significant simulators, you couldn't possibly understand how wrong you are. You're on the line in the simulator too, and you damn well know it. You honestly think the guys in the simulator aren't motivated to do the best job possible?
You can't sustain that kind of excitement/attention for months at a time, it's mentally extremely exhausting. And, having been there done that, the knowledge that a serious screwup could cost you your life eventually fades into the background noise. Back when I was making SSBN patrols, we saw the same things they saw in the study... guys tended to sleep more, lag more, and get lazier and sloppier as the patrol wore on. It took real effort to counteract it. Unlike these guys, we had experience and a culture (pride in your crew and boat and in wearing the fish) that made counteracting it something of a priority - but it was still hard to be as on top of things on day sixty five of a patrol as you were on day one.
No, really it isn't.
Disclaimer: Not a photo professional by any means, but I do pay attention to industry trends.
Once again, proving the danger of extrapolating from your personal experience to the population-at-large - combined with knowing pretty much nothing about the topic.
Contrary to popular belief, photo printing *is* a growth industry. That's why Kodak sold off it's photo patent portfolio, but kept it's printer business. It's why all the big chain drugstores (Rite-Aid, Walgreen, CVS, etc...) have been rolling out expanded print-your-pictures-here kiosks. It's why Costco and Sam's Club and Wal-Mart have been revamping and expanding their photo printing services. (Not to mention Fed-Ex/Kinko's or Staples and Office Depot) Etc... etc...
It's an open question where the market is going to go, but currently and for the near future, the market is there and growing.
As far as my personal experiences go, as an amateur photographer, I've been asked once if someone could download and keep a picture. Once if they could set one as wallpaper. Once if they could download a set and make it their screensaver slideshow.... But in the last year alone, I've sold six prints (all requested, I don't offer or advertise that I print) and a seventh is sitting at my elbow awaiting delivery even as I type.
That would be useful, if I only ever had to open multiple books in my computer room.
And you've never heard of bookmarks?
Nor do you have the imagination to think that just because *you* never do something, somebody else must never do it too. (I do it almost on a daily basis when I'm deep in culinary research, for just one example.)
Sure, Wikipedia beats a bookstore on price... but on pretty much every other factor, not so much. Wikipedia tends to be a summary, essentially a high level overview - which is useful unless you actually want to learn more about the topic. Wikipedia also tends to very atomic as everything is split off at the lowest possible level (consistent with it being a summary), thus disrupting the narrative flow. Etc... etc...
As a tool for finding specific facts, which is what an encyclopedia is designed for, it excels. (Subject to the usual caveats about Wikipedia.) As a learning tool, it has serious drawbacks - ones not always obvious to autodidacts unfamiliar with the topic the seek to learn about. (And nowadays, increasingly unaware of the difference between knowing individual facts and know which facts bear which weight - and how they interconnect.)
Of the topics I specialize in - there's not one single one I'd refer any but the rankest beginner to Wikipedia to study. There's topics that I have chapters on, or even whole books that Wikipedia summarizes in a scant paragraph or sometimes in a single line! (When they mention them at all.)
Right - so if I want more than two or three (e-reader, smartphone, laptop) books open at a time... I have to spend hundreds of dollars per device in order to open another book. That's neither very economical or convenient.