No, the larger companies don't need numbers to crunch - they know the facts perfectly well, as does anyone that doesn't wear admantium blinders or otherwise wilfully disconnect themselves from reality. Donationware is a fine way to go stone broke.
Which is laughably silly - because creating a citable "secondary" [read: astroturfed] source is so simple.
It's also why Wikipedia is so badly broken, they trust someone's *opinion* of a source over the source itself... a complete inversion of traditional research standards and practices.
It's called donationware, a variant of shareware, and its an old way of getting paid for your work. I think I saw the first example of it back in the mid 80's on the BBS scene.
Why does it have brakes? Because when you're handling millions of pounds of irreplaceable hardware costing half a billion dollars or more - you want to be sure. You use belts, suspenders, *and* duct tape.
Because you'd need a couple of dozen rails per side, along with deep and expensive foundations, to support the weight of a loaded crawler. And it would be practically impossible to create a switching system such that multiple assembly locations could support multiple pads.
If you need lab rats to figure out how to have the food last the length of the mission, then you'll *really* need lab rats to figure out how to make them last while they're cached - since that means they'll be in storage even longer.
Indeed. I thought one of the benefits of the plasma engine was the ability to send large payloads very slowly to a destination for almost peanuts, while astronauts could arrive there very quickly with almost nothing. The linch-pin is that you send the payloads a year or two before the astronauts launch, so they arrive at a similar date.
With the plasma engines available in the foreseeable future, the cargo payloads will have to be launched around *three to five* years before the astronauts. And you won't gain all that much, since the weight of the power supply needed for the plasma engine will eat away a good portion of your available cargo weight.
Actually, there IS an option to re-supply. Carry a year's worth onboard, and send an unmanned cargo pod ahead to park in Mars orbit. Put an additional 12 or so months food in it.
That option vastly increases total mission risk. You add a launch, a parking orbit, an injection maneuver, a cruise phase, multiple trajectory corrections, an orbital insertion, an orbital phase, and a rendezvous and docking phase to the mission... thus adding many more chances for something to go wrong.
It's not a simple trade-off, and re-supply doesn't remove the need for the supplies to be stable for years. In fact, it makes stability requirements even more stringent since launch windows to Mars only open every (IIRC) fourteen months, the supplies have a much longer period in transit since you'll want to have them in parking orbit before launching the manned portion of the mission.
In this instance "reasonable" means "existing boosters can send a decently sized payload". It's not just about travel time, it's also (overwhelmingly) about delta-V requirements.
The reason it is about to run out of juce as you put it, is that the material in the thermocouples have degraded, the Plutonium in the RTG's is still very hot, it is just the part that converts this heat to electricity is breaking down. In a manned ship it would be a relatively simple matter of pulling out the worn out thermocouple and inserting a fresh one.
Part of the reason for the loss of energy is damage to the thermocouples. The rest is the loss of activity in the nuclear fuel. (Something a manned mission can't fix either, because a manned mission won't be carrying the nuclear reactor needed to create fresh fuel.) Even with "perfect" thermocouples, the Voyager probes would still be almost out of power.
These [CNC] materials are likely to only be cheap so long as they aren't widely used. There's already a well established market for the byproducts they're manufactured from that they'll have to compete in.
However, if the goal is to travel around the country and see things that other people also like to see, then cell phone service shouldn't be much of a problem.
And so we circle right back around to what I originally said - you obviously don't spend much time outside of built up urban areas if you believe that. If for no other reason than there's an awful lot of empty places you're going to travel through to get to those places "other people also like to see".
The technology-related issues are easy to solve these days. Unless you're in the middle of the desert, 3G/4G cell phones and personal WiFi hotspots should work.
Methinks you don't actually spend any time outside of built-up urban areas.
I just spent four days just a few miles outside of my town - and didn't have any data coverage at all. In fact, I spent a fair bit of time outside of the local urban areas and rarely have any data coverage when I am.
Only if they're within minutes travel of the target - otherwise, it's still an hour or more. Hypersonic is fast, but it's not magical.
Hypersonic planes (such as the X-51A) can travel at 4,000+ MPH. Stationed at a remote base for the US or nearly anywhere in the country for the Russians they can hit any target within 2,000 miles (thats considerably more than the distance between Moscow and London or Tel Aviv, for reference) in 1/2 an hour. That would take 3 or more hours for a subsonic aircraft. So yes, minutes instead of hours.
In other words, exactly what I said - only if they're within minutes of the target to start with. Dipshit.
And at that speed, even a long range (270 mile or so, such as the AN/TPS-75 radar the Air Force uses, and thats pretty long range. The AEGIS radar system is less than half that) radar system will only give you 4 minutes of warning, which while more than enough time to react for an automated system, would be pretty hard to react to if humans had to be involved (such as would happen in a first-strike scenario).
Of course nobody would ever think of putting a missile launcher 270 miles *behind* the radar. Oh, wait. That's been a standard setup since the 1950's.
The US spent $700+ million developing a missile system capable of shooting down SCUD missiles traveling at speeds less than that (Mach 5). They pulled it off after decades of work... but those are ballistic missiles. I.e., they don't turn after launch, which means they are a really really easy target to hit by comparison. A guided plane traveling even faster is a considerably harder target.
This is laughable on so many levels... Hypersonic bombers aren't going to turn significantly in the engagement envelope either - they can't without tearing themselves apart. And ballistic missiles are a fraction of the size of any bomber, and the vulnerable area (the warhead) is smaller still and harder to damage. And they're in a dive, as opposed to level straight flight, which is much harder to hit.
Not to mention Patriot was developed 25 years ago - there's been a wee bit of technology improvement in the interim. Like many armchair generals, you've allowed all the improvements to one side while remaining blind to the fact that technology advances on the other side as well.
That sound you heard is the OP's point whooshing about a mile over your head. Bombers can't afford to do that.
...yet. Jet and plane technology has come quite a ways since the 1960s, and what was impossible then with technology of the time might well be do-able today.
No, bombers can't do that, now or for the foreseeable future. The structural materials needed to build a hypersonic bomber that can withstand the stresses inherent in outmaneuvering an incoming missile simply don't exist. They aren't even on the radar so to speak. On top of that, defensive missiles will always be cheaper than bombers because they're a fraction of the complexity, need a fraction of the operating lifetime, and endure a fraction of the stresses.
You really need to educate yourself on the technology of today, as well as standard air defense practices of the last half century, before you start talking about what's possible tomorrow - because you haven't got a clue.
Plus, even if the bomber isn't technically faster than the missile, missiles have limited fuel capacity and require a certain reaction time before they can be fired, so if you can build a bomber fast enough, by the time the missile is fired it can't reach you before it runs out of fuel.
So long as someone doesn't invent a method to launch a missile in front of the target and engage it head on, the bomber is good. Oh, wait. That's been a standard intercept/engagement tactic for aircraft and missiles (both SAM and AAM) for almost a century now.
There are other uses to a hypersonic aircraft than simply dodging missiles. The ability to arrive on target in minutes instead of hours, for example.
Only if they're within minutes travel of the target - otherwise, it's still an hour or more. Hypersonic is fast, but it's not magical.
A bomber can afford that. It's a lot harder for a disposable missile to do the same.
That sound you heard is the OP's point whooshing about a mile over your head. Bombers can't afford to do that. We (the US and Soviets) discovered that back in the 1960's - missile reaction time is short, fast bombers can be engaged from the forward quadrant, and defensive missiles are (relatively speaking) cheap. On the other hand, the bomber's reaction time is long (because of it's speed, it's not maneuverable), it can't force a tail chase engagement, and it's expensive as hell.
Not only did you not think... most of your "estimates" and "assumptions" are hilariously wrong. Let's just say your scenario is closer to fantasy than SF. (Way, way closer - just barely this side of bombs being delivered by sparkling pink unicorns.)
They're forgetting the single most important part of a space elevator: It needs to actually be useful.
This is Micheal Laine you're talking about here - useful is optional and definitely secondary to his Vision of a Glorious Future.
Did they ever get around to repossessing his 'factory' in (IIRC) New Jersey? He's come a long way from shilling for dodgy tech based initiatives, but that's long been his pattern - when one scheme falls apart, move on to another even more dubious one.
"we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems"
Even people who don't believe in evolution can still become engineers who "build stuff, solve problems"
Yep. Bill Nye is an ignorant jackass using his modest amount of celebrity to advance his political agenda. Any remaining respect I had for him just flew out the window.
He is arguably the most influential thinker of modern times.
If by "influential thinker" you mean "almost totally without effect", sure. Otherwise, not so much.
There's a reason it was his signature at the bottom of the letter in support of the Manhattan project. There's a reason he was asked to be the first prime minister of Israel. There's a reason that he's often listed as one of, if not the absolute, most intelligent person in history.
He was asked to sign the letter because he was a famous physicist. He was asked to be the first Prime Minister because he was a famous Jew. (And they knew there wasn't a chance in hell he'd accept.) Or, in other words, he was asked to do these things for the same reason an athlete is asked to lend his name to a marketing campaign - because he was famous.
As to the latter, that's because of his deep insights into physics. Not because of his insights into anything else.
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No, the larger companies don't need numbers to crunch - they know the facts perfectly well, as does anyone that doesn't wear admantium blinders or otherwise wilfully disconnect themselves from reality. Donationware is a fine way to go stone broke.
Which is laughably silly - because creating a citable "secondary" [read: astroturfed] source is so simple.
It's also why Wikipedia is so badly broken, they trust someone's *opinion* of a source over the source itself... a complete inversion of traditional research standards and practices.
It's called donationware, a variant of shareware, and its an old way of getting paid for your work. I think I saw the first example of it back in the mid 80's on the BBS scene.
It's not new, and it's not news.
Given the he organized and paid for the research that lead to the patents, I have no problems with him getting the credit.
Why does it have brakes? Because when you're handling millions of pounds of irreplaceable hardware costing half a billion dollars or more - you want to be sure. You use belts, suspenders, *and* duct tape.
Because you'd need a couple of dozen rails per side, along with deep and expensive foundations, to support the weight of a loaded crawler. And it would be practically impossible to create a switching system such that multiple assembly locations could support multiple pads.
If you need lab rats to figure out how to have the food last the length of the mission, then you'll *really* need lab rats to figure out how to make them last while they're cached - since that means they'll be in storage even longer.
No black-and-white reason, no. But it's not a black-and-white trade off as I outline here in another post.
With the plasma engines available in the foreseeable future, the cargo payloads will have to be launched around *three to five* years before the astronauts. And you won't gain all that much, since the weight of the power supply needed for the plasma engine will eat away a good portion of your available cargo weight.
That option vastly increases total mission risk. You add a launch, a parking orbit, an injection maneuver, a cruise phase, multiple trajectory corrections, an orbital insertion, an orbital phase, and a rendezvous and docking phase to the mission... thus adding many more chances for something to go wrong.
It's not a simple trade-off, and re-supply doesn't remove the need for the supplies to be stable for years. In fact, it makes stability requirements even more stringent since launch windows to Mars only open every (IIRC) fourteen months, the supplies have a much longer period in transit since you'll want to have them in parking orbit before launching the manned portion of the mission.
In this instance "reasonable" means "existing boosters can send a decently sized payload". It's not just about travel time, it's also (overwhelmingly) about delta-V requirements.
No, you're not crazy. Just ill educated and stupid.
Part of the reason for the loss of energy is damage to the thermocouples. The rest is the loss of activity in the nuclear fuel. (Something a manned mission can't fix either, because a manned mission won't be carrying the nuclear reactor needed to create fresh fuel.) Even with "perfect" thermocouples, the Voyager probes would still be almost out of power.
These [CNC] materials are likely to only be cheap so long as they aren't widely used. There's already a well established market for the byproducts they're manufactured from that they'll have to compete in.
And so we circle right back around to what I originally said - you obviously don't spend much time outside of built up urban areas if you believe that. If for no other reason than there's an awful lot of empty places you're going to travel through to get to those places "other people also like to see".
Methinks you don't actually spend any time outside of built-up urban areas.
I just spent four days just a few miles outside of my town - and didn't have any data coverage at all. In fact, I spent a fair bit of time outside of the local urban areas and rarely have any data coverage when I am.
In other words, exactly what I said - only if they're within minutes of the target to start with. Dipshit.
Of course nobody would ever think of putting a missile launcher 270 miles *behind* the radar. Oh, wait. That's been a standard setup since the 1950's.
This is laughable on so many levels... Hypersonic bombers aren't going to turn significantly in the engagement envelope either - they can't without tearing themselves apart. And ballistic missiles are a fraction of the size of any bomber, and the vulnerable area (the warhead) is smaller still and harder to damage. And they're in a dive, as opposed to level straight flight, which is much harder to hit.
Not to mention Patriot was developed 25 years ago - there's been a wee bit of technology improvement in the interim. Like many armchair generals, you've allowed all the improvements to one side while remaining blind to the fact that technology advances on the other side as well.
No, bombers can't do that, now or for the foreseeable future. The structural materials needed to build a hypersonic bomber that can withstand the stresses inherent in outmaneuvering an incoming missile simply don't exist. They aren't even on the radar so to speak. On top of that, defensive missiles will always be cheaper than bombers because they're a fraction of the complexity, need a fraction of the operating lifetime, and endure a fraction of the stresses.
You really need to educate yourself on the technology of today, as well as standard air defense practices of the last half century, before you start talking about what's possible tomorrow - because you haven't got a clue.
So long as someone doesn't invent a method to launch a missile in front of the target and engage it head on, the bomber is good. Oh, wait. That's been a standard intercept/engagement tactic for aircraft and missiles (both SAM and AAM) for almost a century now.
Only if they're within minutes travel of the target - otherwise, it's still an hour or more. Hypersonic is fast, but it's not magical.
That sound you heard is the OP's point whooshing about a mile over your head. Bombers can't afford to do that. We (the US and Soviets) discovered that back in the 1960's - missile reaction time is short, fast bombers can be engaged from the forward quadrant, and defensive missiles are (relatively speaking) cheap. On the other hand, the bomber's reaction time is long (because of it's speed, it's not maneuverable), it can't force a tail chase engagement, and it's expensive as hell.
"I think not."
Not only did you not think... most of your "estimates" and "assumptions" are hilariously wrong. Let's just say your scenario is closer to fantasy than SF. (Way, way closer - just barely this side of bombs being delivered by sparkling pink unicorns.)
You keep using that word... it does not mean what you think it does.
This is Micheal Laine you're talking about here - useful is optional and definitely secondary to his Vision of a Glorious Future.
Did they ever get around to repossessing his 'factory' in (IIRC) New Jersey? He's come a long way from shilling for dodgy tech based initiatives, but that's long been his pattern - when one scheme falls apart, move on to another even more dubious one.
Yep. Bill Nye is an ignorant jackass using his modest amount of celebrity to advance his political agenda. Any remaining respect I had for him just flew out the window.
You do understand the difference between anecdote and data don't you? And problems with extrapolating from a small data set?
No, thank you. I might as well ask a palm reader if I'm not of a mind to ask an expert.
If by "influential thinker" you mean "almost totally without effect", sure. Otherwise, not so much.
He was asked to sign the letter because he was a famous physicist. He was asked to be the first Prime Minister because he was a famous Jew. (And they knew there wasn't a chance in hell he'd accept.) Or, in other words, he was asked to do these things for the same reason an athlete is asked to lend his name to a marketing campaign - because he was famous.
As to the latter, that's because of his deep insights into physics. Not because of his insights into anything else.
Are you ever bored on a Saturday afternoon?