For example, while I do not condone Obama's actions in the Middle East conflicts, Romney would have been far more agressive and openly so. I actually believe he would start a war with Iran.
So, you voted for the guy who actually does drone strikes on American citizens in allied countries rather than the guy who MIGHT have started a war?
In a similar (no, wait, the SAME situation), I voted for neither.
Note that it's unlikely that Romney would have started a war with Iran casually - he's a businessman at heart, and wars are bad for business....
The Chinese argument is that their CO2 emission per capita is still less than of most developed countries.
Largely irrelevant. If the Chinese won't play till their per capita CO2 emissions are comparable to EU/US levels, then CO2 emissions worldwide will continue to increase till then even if the EU and US reduce our emissions to ZERO.
look at how badly we handled New Orleans after Katrina.
Resident of NOLA here.
No, things weren't terribly badly handled in NOLA after Katrina. Problem really was that when you fill the area inside the floodwalls with water, it takes a while for it to leave, since the area inside the floodwall is below sea level...
Note that there is a place I drive over pretty regularly with a canal between two rows of houses - the NORMAL water level in the canal is above the level of the roofs on either side....
Your math is a little off. If the density were the same as Earth's, the diameter would be proportional to the cube root of the mass ratios, or slightly less than 2 times that of Earth. The surface gravity is proportional to mass (7x) and inversely so to the square of the radius (~1/4) so 7/4 is about 1.75 surface gravity compared to Earth. If there were a comparable 'day' length, then the velocity at the equator would be about 2x that of Earth. An extra 1000 mph liftoff boost vs 1.75 local g, not so hard to overcome.
So is your's.
Basic conditions you assume are reasonable (I get 1.9g, not 1.75), even with the extra equatorial rotation, still leaves you with 14 km/s+ deltaV to put something into orbit.
which is rather more than Saturn V had to use to put Apollo into TLI (which was in the neighborhood of 12.5 km/s total).
The extra deltaV required would increase liftoff mass by a third or more (depending in Isp used) - a rocket that big for your first attempt into orbit would be...problematic at best.
Not impossible, mind you, but not something you'll consider without very good reason....
It does a lot for the current healthcare problems we have.. its not a band-aid on a gunshot wound.. to keep your analogy, its akin to a gauze patch over same said gun shot wound.. Better.. but its certainly not going to fix the big picture.. but mostly because there are many of forces that DON'T WANT IT TO CHANGE.
One of the interesting things it does is convince business owners to switch more people to part-time status, since they don't have to do to Health Insurance for employees working 30 hour a week or less. Look it up sometime.
Another thing it does is (occasionally) lower the quality of insurance available (my wife's company had to drop one of their plans because it might fit the definition of "Cadillac plan". Shame, because that plan would have paid more of the costs of my cancer treatments....)
On balance, I still think the solution was to redefine Medicaid to make anyone under 18 eligible, and lower age of Medicare availability by two (or three, or five, whatever makes a good transition period) years per year that passes.
Which has two virtues - it gives everyone (including the insurance companies) time to adjust, and it would fit on one sheet of paper, rather than being a "you'll have to pass it to find out what's in it" sort of law.
I knew most WW2 boats had them. Am I correct in assuming that their purpose is to snipe at pursuers (sinking them if you're lucky, or at least forcing them to take evasive action) while making a run for it?
Not really. Real reason you had stern tubes is that you had the space for them anyway, and it's SOOOO satisfying to dump your forward tubes into half a convoy and your aft tubes into the other half - so many surface pukes running around like chickens with their heads cut off, SOOOO many booms
If so, has that tactical need gone away, or are modern torpedoes smart enough that you can program them to do a U-turn, go to coordinates X,Y,Z and then attack the first thing they find or some other cunning plan?
And yes, these days the torps can be told to u-turn out of the tubes and then begin an acqquisition run.
Realistically however it's all about bigger, smarter fish and fewer targets available at any given moment.....
First, AFAIK, most subs have more tubes forward facing than rear facing.
We're talking a USN submarine - NO tubes aft.
Speaking as someone who (many years ago) did time in the boats, what happened is that the Sub captain decided that he could get away with being that close inboard of the cruiser, and then the cruiser commmander decided to clear his baffles, and things went downhill from there.
True, but when you add in the deltaV to get to the Moon in the first place... plus all the costs associated with getting the base built and supported and boosting the materials and equipment to the Moon... The few tens of thousands of dollars you 'save' in fuel start to look like the chump change they are
This is only true if the only thing you're using the Moon for is a fuel depot. Actually building large parts of your Mars vehicle on the Moon.makes a certain amount of the problem of boosting those same large parts out of Earth's gravitywell.
Note also that a base on the Moon will be unable to actually manufacture everything, aluminium and titanium are available inn quantity.
Note further that lifting things off from Earth to LEO requires that you burn fuel (in large amounts) just to carry the payload (that fuel you want to brush off as important.
Fuel usage to carry fuel to LEO in large quantity - like 1/5th the takeoff mass (best case, using SSME).
On the other hand, using a 350 Isp rocket fuel gives you something like ~2% of your boost mass over to fuel.
You also make your [Mars bound[ space craft more expensive by requiring to boost from the surface of the moon, and by adding the need to endure the [harsher than LEO] lunar temperature environment.
Won't argue about temp issues, but it takes rather less deltaV to go from Luna surface to a Mars transition orbit than it does to go from LEO to a Mars transition orbit.
Never mind that we can get reaction mass and/or fuel from the Moon....
To me that's faster than the speed of light. If I has a vdeo camera filming my approach to a distant star on board then, ignoring doppler shift, I would see the star's apparent rate of approach to be faster than the speed of light.
Actually, no.
What you'll see is the Universe getting flatter and flatter along your direction of travel. As you reach the halfway point, you will NOT see the target star as being 25 lightyears away (when you'll be going 99.93% of c, as the Universe measures such things), you'll see it as about 0.94 lightyears away (and moving toward you at...99.93% of lightspeed), which distance you'll cross in five more years....
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.
No, the linchpin is that you send the supply ships ahead of the astronauts. The manned mission doesn't leave the ground till all the supply ships are safely in Mars orbit (or landed at the target site on Mars, whichever).
If you built a spaceship that accelerated at 1G constantly then in 100 years it would be going the speed of light.
No, you won't. You'll be going near the speed of light. Of course, you'll be doing that in ten years.
Note that if you can handwave a constant 1G boost, you can reach anywhere in the galaxy in 20 years, including deceleration time.
And no don't tell me I can't accelerate faster than the speed of light. You can. in your own frame.
No, you can't. In your own frame of reference, you'll still be going sublight, and the Universe will look rather odd (blue shifted in one direction,red-shifted in another, and VERY, VERY FLAT!).
If you experience 1G of acceleration for 100 years, you know you have changed your speed by about 3E10M/sec.
Alas, it doesn't actually work that way....
Now an outside observer might not see it that way of course. But who cares. It's me that's going somewhere not them.
Not only will an outside observer see that you're not going lightspeed+, he won't see you at all. since it will take you ~3E44 years as the universe measures time for you to accelerate for 100 years at 1G. And you'll be about that many lightyears away by then (note that the universe is only about 1E13 lightyears across, by one estimate).
Note, by the way, that by that time, the Milky Way Galaxy, if it still existed (it won't - the collision with Andromeda in a few billion years will see to that, much less the death of every star in both galaxies long before), would appear (to you, in your speedy little spaceship) to be ~1/1000,000,000,000,000 of a nanometer wide.
Oh, and the entire sidereal universe would by approaching a nanometer in width (to you)....
We should freakin know how well plants grow in gravity based on the nearly 3decades of shuttle experiments... Did this Mitchell not bother to look that up?
Low gravity is NOT no gravity. Or even free fall. Shuttle and ISS experiments do no gravity (properly free fall), not 1/6 g.
Good on California legislators for reacting quickly to a potential source of licensing revenue.
If they look at the revenue part of the equation, they'll never do this - they get a LOT of revenue from traffic tickets, and won't make that up if the cars never make mistakes....
People who are not racists do not have to explain why they are not racists.
Alas, actually they do.
In the USA today, pointing to a black man (or Native American (by which I mean, early immigrant, since there are no "native americans")) and saying "he did bad things" will invariably produce an outcry of "RACIST!!!".
Not that it matters in the end. A white man accusing a favoured minority of misconduct will be assumed to be racist automatically.
The scheme was promising 7% return per week. Even among the gullible and greedy it takes a special breed of idiot to believe such guarentees can be anything but a scam.
Hmm, that's 3270-odd percent per year.
Yah, it takes a special breed of idiot to buy into that.
The moon rotates once every 28 days, not 24 hours. Too lazy to calculate the numbers, but I think a lunastationary orbit would have a ridiculously long radius. Not practical. Better do do what the GP suggests: put the upper part at Lagrange point.
A lunastationary orbit would have a radius of ~384400 km (the distance from Earth to the Moon).
If you put the upper point at L1 or L2, you'll still have to put an anchor farther out to keep tension on the cable. Which may or may not be really useful, but it's an interesting idea, anyway.
And clearly the car companies agree. A quote from the NYT article:
Thirteen major automakers, including General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, have endorsed the new standards.
Carmakers know perfectly well that the teeny little cars they'll have to make to meet these standards will result in more SUV (which don't have to meet standards for a "car") sales...
The solution is to not test the vehicles at 80 MPH and, instead, test them at 55/65 MPH, which is the speed limit. If you choose to go over the speed limit, your gas mileage will suffer.
Where do you live that Interstate speed limits are as low as 55/65? Where I live, speed limits on Interstates are 70. And there are places where the limits are higher.
Why the hell would he stay there? Ecuador is just one of the ways to get out of where he is now. Once he's there, he has many more options.
Not so many as all that. Interpol is after him now, and the UK can extradite him since he's conveniently made himself a criminal under UK law by jumping bail and fleeing the country.
If you assume the US is after him, that'll pretty much leave him with a choice of which shithole third-world country to live in....
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So, it's perfectly reasonable to attack the other guy, then ask for a ceasefire (and presumably concessions to go with)?
I think we call that sort of thing "extortion" where I come from....
So, you voted for the guy who actually does drone strikes on American citizens in allied countries rather than the guy who MIGHT have started a war?
In a similar (no, wait, the SAME situation), I voted for neither.
Note that it's unlikely that Romney would have started a war with Iran casually - he's a businessman at heart, and wars are bad for business....
Largely irrelevant. If the Chinese won't play till their per capita CO2 emissions are comparable to EU/US levels, then CO2 emissions worldwide will continue to increase till then even if the EU and US reduce our emissions to ZERO.
Resident of NOLA here.
No, things weren't terribly badly handled in NOLA after Katrina. Problem really was that when you fill the area inside the floodwalls with water, it takes a while for it to leave, since the area inside the floodwall is below sea level...
Note that there is a place I drive over pretty regularly with a canal between two rows of houses - the NORMAL water level in the canal is above the level of the roofs on either side....
So is your's.
Basic conditions you assume are reasonable (I get 1.9g, not 1.75), even with the extra equatorial rotation, still leaves you with 14 km/s+ deltaV to put something into orbit.
which is rather more than Saturn V had to use to put Apollo into TLI (which was in the neighborhood of 12.5 km/s total).
The extra deltaV required would increase liftoff mass by a third or more (depending in Isp used) - a rocket that big for your first attempt into orbit would be...problematic at best.
Not impossible, mind you, but not something you'll consider without very good reason....
One of the interesting things it does is convince business owners to switch more people to part-time status, since they don't have to do to Health Insurance for employees working 30 hour a week or less. Look it up sometime.
Another thing it does is (occasionally) lower the quality of insurance available (my wife's company had to drop one of their plans because it might fit the definition of "Cadillac plan". Shame, because that plan would have paid more of the costs of my cancer treatments....)
On balance, I still think the solution was to redefine Medicaid to make anyone under 18 eligible, and lower age of Medicare availability by two (or three, or five, whatever makes a good transition period) years per year that passes.
Which has two virtues - it gives everyone (including the insurance companies) time to adjust, and it would fit on one sheet of paper, rather than being a "you'll have to pass it to find out what's in it" sort of law.
Not really. Real reason you had stern tubes is that you had the space for them anyway, and it's SOOOO satisfying to dump your forward tubes into half a convoy and your aft tubes into the other half - so many surface pukes running around like chickens with their heads cut off, SOOOO many booms
And yes, these days the torps can be told to u-turn out of the tubes and then begin an acqquisition run.
Realistically however it's all about bigger, smarter fish and fewer targets available at any given moment.....
We're talking a USN submarine - NO tubes aft.
Speaking as someone who (many years ago) did time in the boats, what happened is that the Sub captain decided that he could get away with being that close inboard of the cruiser, and then the cruiser commmander decided to clear his baffles, and things went downhill from there.
This is only true if the only thing you're using the Moon for is a fuel depot. Actually building large parts of your Mars vehicle on the Moon.makes a certain amount of the problem of boosting those same large parts out of Earth's gravitywell.
Note also that a base on the Moon will be unable to actually manufacture everything, aluminium and titanium are available inn quantity.
Note further that lifting things off from Earth to LEO requires that you burn fuel (in large amounts) just to carry the payload (that fuel you want to brush off as important. Fuel usage to carry fuel to LEO in large quantity - like 1/5th the takeoff mass (best case, using SSME). On the other hand, using a 350 Isp rocket fuel gives you something like ~2% of your boost mass over to fuel.
Won't argue about temp issues, but it takes rather less deltaV to go from Luna surface to a Mars transition orbit than it does to go from LEO to a Mars transition orbit.
Never mind that we can get reaction mass and/or fuel from the Moon....
Actually, no.
What you'll see is the Universe getting flatter and flatter along your direction of travel. As you reach the halfway point, you will NOT see the target star as being 25 lightyears away (when you'll be going 99.93% of c, as the Universe measures such things), you'll see it as about 0.94 lightyears away (and moving toward you at...99.93% of lightspeed), which distance you'll cross in five more years....
No, the linchpin is that you send the supply ships ahead of the astronauts. The manned mission doesn't leave the ground till all the supply ships are safely in Mars orbit (or landed at the target site on Mars, whichever).
Exactly right. Standard TL12 infantry weapon.
Does the fact that I remember this, but not where I left the gas can for my lawnmower, mean anything?
No, you won't. You'll be going near the speed of light. Of course, you'll be doing that in ten years.
Note that if you can handwave a constant 1G boost, you can reach anywhere in the galaxy in 20 years, including deceleration time.
No, you can't. In your own frame of reference, you'll still be going sublight, and the Universe will look rather odd (blue shifted in one direction,red-shifted in another, and VERY, VERY FLAT!).
Alas, it doesn't actually work that way....
Not only will an outside observer see that you're not going lightspeed+, he won't see you at all. since it will take you ~3E44 years as the universe measures time for you to accelerate for 100 years at 1G. And you'll be about that many lightyears away by then (note that the universe is only about 1E13 lightyears across, by one estimate).
Note, by the way, that by that time, the Milky Way Galaxy, if it still existed (it won't - the collision with Andromeda in a few billion years will see to that, much less the death of every star in both galaxies long before), would appear (to you, in your speedy little spaceship) to be ~1/1000,000,000,000,000 of a nanometer wide.
Oh, and the entire sidereal universe would by approaching a nanometer in width (to you)....
Low gravity is NOT no gravity. Or even free fall. Shuttle and ISS experiments do no gravity (properly free fall), not 1/6 g.
The keyword you're looking for is "Calibre". It's for ebook library management on your PC, but it can also convert from one ebook format to another...
If they look at the revenue part of the equation, they'll never do this - they get a LOT of revenue from traffic tickets, and won't make that up if the cars never make mistakes....
Alas, actually they do.
In the USA today, pointing to a black man (or Native American (by which I mean, early immigrant, since there are no "native americans")) and saying "he did bad things" will invariably produce an outcry of "RACIST!!!".
Not that it matters in the end. A white man accusing a favoured minority of misconduct will be assumed to be racist automatically.
Those sorts of laws don't come under "free market". They come under Government Regulation of the Market, which pretty much means "NOT Free Market".
Hmm, that's 3270-odd percent per year.
Yah, it takes a special breed of idiot to buy into that.
A lunastationary orbit would have a radius of ~384400 km (the distance from Earth to the Moon).
If you put the upper point at L1 or L2, you'll still have to put an anchor farther out to keep tension on the cable. Which may or may not be really useful, but it's an interesting idea, anyway.
Carmakers know perfectly well that the teeny little cars they'll have to make to meet these standards will result in more SUV (which don't have to meet standards for a "car") sales...
Where do you live that Interstate speed limits are as low as 55/65? Where I live, speed limits on Interstates are 70. And there are places where the limits are higher.
Note that even if the rape allegations can't be proved, the jumping bail thing is now an offense he can do jail time for....
Not so many as all that. Interpol is after him now, and the UK can extradite him since he's conveniently made himself a criminal under UK law by jumping bail and fleeing the country.
If you assume the US is after him, that'll pretty much leave him with a choice of which shithole third-world country to live in....