a wonderful woman that I'd never call "illogical", in fact her reasoning is often clearer than most anyone else I know
Funny thing is - that itself is a very widespread and... "illogical" cognitive bias;p (not saying it must be like that in, say, this case... but the odds are never on our side;) )
It's a natural need to feel our choices are the best; especially as profound one as the choice of life partner (which in larger picture is fairly insignificant vs. essentially random pairings between humans; typical for us modus operandi close to "she/he is the best" can't be really reconciled with how minuscule population of potential mates we probe). To feel that we are above average, hence also our mate, relationships or children are above average (we deserve as much after all, ourselves being... above average) / throw in here many more examples of illusory superiority aka the Lake Wobegon effect (OK, few always worth mentioning: 80+% of drivers think they are in the top half in driving skill and avoiding risky road behavior; when questioning people about positive abilities, typically only single-digit percentages state how they are "below average"... and often those who do that are in fact definitely above; then there's recent "Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks")
Hardware needs to be only "good enough", especially if there's not much gaming or video editing involved. But hey, keep up, less you might fall behind in consumptionism
PS. Heck, getting rid of the manual-transmission-phobia would also help... (especially since such transmission is less of a "problem" with an urban planning involving long commutes)
Second, entry levels cards don't make the kind of margins you need to sustain an 18-month release cycle while keeping the fabs busy
High end cards are probably the only loss leaders in the equation, by themselves. Yes, almost certainly in the green when it comes to their production itself - but they are primarily "positional" products of sorts, to give their lines better press (in other words: meant to increase the sales of mid & low segments), unable to recoup the R&D (but the same R&D is used and financed by mid & low segments)
Cutting edge is just too niche... (look at Steam stats; and those are gamers)
Sure - as far as their perceptions are concerned, what they are willing to spend on. Similar thing with mobile phone contracts or... buying anything on monthly payments.
And yet, sadly, no Fallout-like mutants...;/ (or even in places like river Ob and lake Karachay, lake Chagan, or another "atomic lake" which appears to be "a popular fishing place for the residents of the other nearby villages, while its shores are known for the abundance of edible mushrooms")
But watch out, too many of those pesky Iranians might be somewhat more resistant to the weapon!;) And I wonder what the analysis after the decades, of me & my peers, will show - in the general (western PL) downwind direction of Chernobyl, (too late) Soviet announcement on the day of my third birthday, stuffed after that with Lugol's solution.
Even if we had the technology to do a full body prosthetic I am not sure humanity is ready to accept it yet.
And sadly, it would be probably a possibility mostly limited, for some time at least [*], to those whose brains are still highly pliable. Meaning mostly the young. Oh, imagine the moral panic caused by that one...
* If I were to guess, it will be limited like that for all of our (perceptibly ever faster nearing to an end at that point) lifetime - talk about frustrating.
That's also ultimately about what kinds of vehicles those people want to drive, where they pushed their car market & available options.
Superminis are often very fuel efficient; and not only the new ones (if I'd want to get something like that locally, it would probably have VW SDI engine - very comparable in mpg to greatest and latest diesels, partly because of how "underpowered" it is; and hellishly reliable, so even better for "the poor")
The bigger problem is how minuscule portion of road maintenance needs is covered by fuel taxes...
Also, ultimately, govs are a reflection of their society; "sin" costs can be seen as perfectly consistent with that, with where said society wants to direct itself (and if it and its gov cannot embark on this - then would be the point of the latter?)
People would just use unsafe tires (as is pretty much the case in large parts of the world, or unsafe regeneration; "as long as it looks like a tire..."). And people would have incentive to avoid distributing the load on more tires... (avoiding less damage to the road)
How "electromagnetic launcher" also requires [1] a non-trivial rocket is of bigger significance. A rocket in the size range of current ones - but with much stronger structure, stricter tolerances, and more complexity (remember, not a simple stationary launch platform; also what makes Pegasus an apt analogy - also a rocket which gets a nice initial kick & height... but evidently this doesn't help much)
In other words, if the humanity would really try to get a return of investment in said megastructure, at the least we would need to start... a mass production or rockets required for slugs (even ignoring for a moment the question if sustaining such massive launch campaign would be possible from a single tube - but it does BTW put very nasty limits on the range of orbital inclinations)
So why not just do the same, but adding larger / multiplied first stage... and dropping the orders of magnitude of complexity / tolerances / megastructure costs? Gradually, in an organic & sustainable way; having already something very useful on the way there. And when a massive presence in space will become sensible by the possibility of having the infrastructure there, it will also lessen the need for launchers...
Yes, it is about methodology - too often people were willing to overlook such problems, too often willing themselves into believing bright future. Well, at least we're rather safe now from such train-wreck white elephants of rampant spending, IMHO. Partly because of past lessons, partly because each of so many very different projects (each requiring very non-trivial part of GDP...for what returns, exactly?) has its true believers, infighting with any "competition":D
1. Not only orbital mechanics demands circularizing the orbit, or else the launch attempt will come crashing down to Earth - also, if the engine fails at the worst possible time, it might even go down near your expensive megastructure - that's a fun failure mode, eh?
PS. And Atlas... I'm not sure if you can call ~3 launchers per year, for its current incarnation (almost a reboot) "mass" anything; not even when compared to an average of ~40 per year for R-7 over the last half a century; and it shows in their relative costs. Even better: Zenit actually manages to be the least expensive launcher around... with 2x bigger version of the Atlas main engine (so there does seem to be some wasteful way of doing things in the latter). And it also isn't even mass-produced (but look at its shape). Too bad Buran (hence also STS) sucked the blood out of Zarya "Super Soyuz", meant for Zenit - for two decades we would have a reusable "Dragon-like" spacecraft on the free market
both are malformed in the darwinian sense, the sense that neither, biologically, results in offspring
That might be a bit too broad statement to make - for one, what is often called pedophilia is really ephebophilia - a perfectly understandable drive, at least on an individual (well, pair...) level ("true" pedophilia being that normal and expected drive going too far). Because also not necessarily on social level! (with how the practice could perhaps, say, destabilize societies; societies on which homo sapiens sapiens builds its strength; hence why it ended up being largely a taboo in successful & influential ones)
Which brings us to second point: how homosexuality might be beneficial in the darwinian sense, but for a group (coincidentally - any possible traits determining homosexuality in human males appear to result in greater fertility of their sisters and their offspring...); generally, evolution doesn't really care "why?" some trait is passed on, etc.
That's dangerously close to "you need to spend (butt-loads of) money to save money" fallacy (why "routine space travel" dream should be of much significance, anyway? Also, I gave one or two replies nearby, no reason to repeat large parts of them)
The question isn't what's "doable", that's beside the point. Shuttle and Buran were doable, much easier in fact... and didn't deliver on any of its main points as advertised (it was supposed to be inexpensive and reliable, with fast turnaround, remember?). Set us back around 2 decades at least. Bled their space agencies dry for cash, caused cancellation of many great projects (many fantastic science missions, always the first to the axe...)
The question is what's practical. Spending half of GDP of the planet (or more...) isn't; no exploration in history operated on such basis.
And I didn't say "dumb payload" in the case of electromagnetic launcher, but "dumb rocket" - how it requires essentially the same tech as current rockets (yes, requires - at the least, there needs to be a massive kick at the apogee, otherwise what's being launched will deorbit at perigee), how it must (not just "most likely") be very similar to current launchers was the point; the "Pegasus" needs to be there, flying out of the end!
Again, not on a nice stationary platform (maybe with some simple multiplication of first stages (again, check Angara, from ~3 IIRC to 130+ tons in essentially single design) for the same effect as a megastructure), but moving on a high-g dynamic one... are you sure it will be inexpensive and reliable, with fast turnaround? Where have I heard that before...
All while the chemical "dumb rockets" are far from showing their full potential. We barely tried with what we know to significantly reduce costs - mass production (vs. skyrocketing (puns and all) costs with one-off massive projects). Maybe not necessarily to such or even such degree, but there's definitely a space for improvement. It's most likely not a coincidence that "the most reliable means of space travel" and "the most frequently used launch vehicle in the world" (plus one of most inexpensive ones) is about one and the same launch vehicle.
There were a lot more "exciting" concepts... and fiction, half a century ago. Remember, such dreams gave us the cows of Shuttle and Buran (their designers and decisionmakers probably raised on scifi of ~40s, with lots of "spaceplanes", undoubtedly fueled by rapid advances in airplane technology; like those airplanes from "our" times, fueled by marine tech advancements (and we can even build them! Take a Harrier, remove wings and canopy); like nuclear age taking over culture); big grandeur projects which set us back immensely. Detracted for steady, sustainable growth.
How is that "nuclear electricity will be so cheap that it will be pointless to measure its usage" going along, BTW?
Nothing except chemical is needed, in grander picture, for launchers. LEO is already not far from Kessler Syndrome, even with our "puny" launch capabilities. You don't really want to put much more mass in there. Many interesting places have hardly any atmosphere, you really want to tread softly around them...
Outside of launching - where have you been? Many sats have electric propulsion since the 70s (reactors, too...). ISS is getting one soon. Thing is, one big crash project in the style (or grander) of Apollo is not the way for interplanetary. It will be fairly slow and expensive anyway (and we bet since some time on electric propulsion + advanced solar cells or reactor).
Then there's JIMO, something NASA evidently wanted to do... but the people want bread, circuses, and empty promises of manned missions.
An why so in a hurry? Surely you don't think socioeconomic realities from Earth to be of any significance "out there"... Especially once we master space manufacturing sometimes during the next millennium (only then the expansion will start, and it might be solar sails + ITN for all we know; or, further, gradual asteroid and comet hopping over thousands of years into the Oort cloud, and some groups eventually hitching a ride with a cloud of some passing star - that still gives very rapid colonization of the galaxy)
But there's one thing you can bet on. A continuation of what is very much the case on Earth, even with easy travel available. But much stronger. You're very likely to die near the place you were born And vast majority of initial travel might very well be, say, mostly when you're highly miniaturized and in deep hibernation; awoken at the destination (and again, most likely dying there) - something which we already routinely do to thousands of people every year, and we can already send hundreds if not thousands on one medium chemical launcher to any place in the system (but not many people seem to realize that; their "broad" imagination seems to be ultimately quite shallow; maybe in the style of "a mind open to the point when brain falls out" saying)
(and the Saturn improvement with NERVA stage wasn't anywhere so dramatic, don't make it sound much better than it is)
Scram-Jet / etc. "spaceplanes", when you have serious effort at costs estimation (HOTOL, for example), turn out not really better than "dumb rocket" using comparably advanced materials science (which for the "spaceplane" is required to even make it barely possible)
Electromagnetic launcher / etc. - first, remember how such proposals talk about building a megastructure (often... dynamically suspended; do you see many normal (puny) buildings like that?). Secondly, not assuming gargantuan fantasies, the projectile still will be largely... a "dumb rocket", essentially the same tech as now (but with complexity of highly dynamic launch system; vs. stationary launch platform + more first stages as boosters, for basically the same effect - like with Delta IV Heavy, Atlas V HLV, Falcon 9 Heavy, and to a most striking degree with Angara). Third - Pegasus rocket is basically it. It's also one of the most expensive launchers around.
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a wonderful woman that I'd never call "illogical", in fact her reasoning is often clearer than most anyone else I know
Funny thing is - that itself is a very widespread and... "illogical" cognitive bias ;p (not saying it must be like that in, say, this case... but the odds are never on our side ;) )
It's a natural need to feel our choices are the best; especially as profound one as the choice of life partner (which in larger picture is fairly insignificant vs. essentially random pairings between humans; typical for us modus operandi close to "she/he is the best" can't be really reconciled with how minuscule population of potential mates we probe). To feel that we are above average, hence also our mate, relationships or children are above average (we deserve as much after all, ourselves being... above average) / throw in here many more examples of illusory superiority aka the Lake Wobegon effect (OK, few always worth mentioning: 80+% of drivers think they are in the top half in driving skill and avoiding risky road behavior; when questioning people about positive abilities, typically only single-digit percentages state how they are "below average"... and often those who do that are in fact definitely above; then there's recent "Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks")
Yes, and if you involve the period...
...only to have, strictly speaking, not exactly a valid license.
Hardware needs to be only "good enough", especially if there's not much gaming or video editing involved. But hey, keep up, less you might fall behind in consumptionism
PS. Heck, getting rid of the manual-transmission-phobia would also help... (especially since such transmission is less of a "problem" with an urban planning involving long commutes)
Second, entry levels cards don't make the kind of margins you need to sustain an 18-month release cycle while keeping the fabs busy
High end cards are probably the only loss leaders in the equation, by themselves. Yes, almost certainly in the green when it comes to their production itself - but they are primarily "positional" products of sorts, to give their lines better press (in other words: meant to increase the sales of mid & low segments), unable to recoup the R&D (but the same R&D is used and financed by mid & low segments)
Cutting edge is just too niche... (look at Steam stats; and those are gamers)
Sure - as far as their perceptions are concerned, what they are willing to spend on. Similar thing with mobile phone contracts or... buying anything on monthly payments.
And yet, sadly, no Fallout-like mutants... ;/ (or even in places like river Ob and lake Karachay, lake Chagan, or another "atomic lake" which appears to be "a popular fishing place for the residents of the other nearby villages, while its shores are known for the abundance of edible mushrooms")
;) And I wonder what the analysis after the decades, of me & my peers, will show - in the general (western PL) downwind direction of Chernobyl, (too late) Soviet announcement on the day of my third birthday, stuffed after that with Lugol's solution.
But watch out, too many of those pesky Iranians might be somewhat more resistant to the weapon!
Even if we had the technology to do a full body prosthetic I am not sure humanity is ready to accept it yet.
And sadly, it would be probably a possibility mostly limited, for some time at least [*], to those whose brains are still highly pliable. Meaning mostly the young. Oh, imagine the moral panic caused by that one...
* If I were to guess, it will be limited like that for all of our (perceptibly ever faster nearing to an end at that point) lifetime - talk about frustrating.
That's also ultimately about what kinds of vehicles those people want to drive, where they pushed their car market & available options.
Superminis are often very fuel efficient; and not only the new ones (if I'd want to get something like that locally, it would probably have VW SDI engine - very comparable in mpg to greatest and latest diesels, partly because of how "underpowered" it is; and hellishly reliable, so even better for "the poor")
The bigger problem is how minuscule portion of road maintenance needs is covered by fuel taxes...
Also, ultimately, govs are a reflection of their society; "sin" costs can be seen as perfectly consistent with that, with where said society wants to direct itself (and if it and its gov cannot embark on this - then would be the point of the latter?)
And close half of those vehicle types should really be pushed to use non-IC engines...
People would just use unsafe tires (as is pretty much the case in large parts of the world, or unsafe regeneration; "as long as it looks like a tire..."). And people would have incentive to avoid distributing the load on more tires... (avoiding less damage to the road)
an expert in breasts. 8 years working in the adult entertainment industry can teach you an awful lot
Good sir, what are you doing on this website? Are you lost?
(well, I suppose they needs 'techies' too...)
"Or"? Ever heard of V?
EDSAC, too... (including the likely first computer game! With its unsettling relation to WOPR...)
Or just post-realization of more flexible interrupt handling?
I want to use BSD code without crediting its original authors.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1691850/?tool=pmcentrez (+ related articles)
(and its really trivial to stumble upon many sources via googling the keywords, you might try it sometimes)
How "electromagnetic launcher" also requires [1] a non-trivial rocket is of bigger significance. A rocket in the size range of current ones - but with much stronger structure, stricter tolerances, and more complexity (remember, not a simple stationary launch platform; also what makes Pegasus an apt analogy - also a rocket which gets a nice initial kick & height... but evidently this doesn't help much)
:D
In other words, if the humanity would really try to get a return of investment in said megastructure, at the least we would need to start... a mass production or rockets required for slugs (even ignoring for a moment the question if sustaining such massive launch campaign would be possible from a single tube - but it does BTW put very nasty limits on the range of orbital inclinations)
So why not just do the same, but adding larger / multiplied first stage... and dropping the orders of magnitude of complexity / tolerances / megastructure costs? Gradually, in an organic & sustainable way; having already something very useful on the way there. And when a massive presence in space will become sensible by the possibility of having the infrastructure there, it will also lessen the need for launchers...
Yes, it is about methodology - too often people were willing to overlook such problems, too often willing themselves into believing bright future. Well, at least we're rather safe now from such train-wreck white elephants of rampant spending, IMHO. Partly because of past lessons, partly because each of so many very different projects (each requiring very non-trivial part of GDP...for what returns, exactly?) has its true believers, infighting with any "competition"
1. Not only orbital mechanics demands circularizing the orbit, or else the launch attempt will come crashing down to Earth - also, if the engine fails at the worst possible time, it might even go down near your expensive megastructure - that's a fun failure mode, eh?
PS. And Atlas... I'm not sure if you can call ~3 launchers per year, for its current incarnation (almost a reboot) "mass" anything; not even when compared to an average of ~40 per year for R-7 over the last half a century; and it shows in their relative costs. Even better: Zenit actually manages to be the least expensive launcher around... with 2x bigger version of the Atlas main engine (so there does seem to be some wasteful way of doing things in the latter). And it also isn't even mass-produced (but look at its shape). Too bad Buran (hence also STS) sucked the blood out of Zarya "Super Soyuz", meant for Zenit - for two decades we would have a reusable "Dragon-like" spacecraft on the free market
both are malformed in the darwinian sense, the sense that neither, biologically, results in offspring
That might be a bit too broad statement to make - for one, what is often called pedophilia is really ephebophilia - a perfectly understandable drive, at least on an individual (well, pair...) level ("true" pedophilia being that normal and expected drive going too far). Because also not necessarily on social level! (with how the practice could perhaps, say, destabilize societies; societies on which homo sapiens sapiens builds its strength; hence why it ended up being largely a taboo in successful & influential ones)
Which brings us to second point: how homosexuality might be beneficial in the darwinian sense, but for a group (coincidentally - any possible traits determining homosexuality in human males appear to result in greater fertility of their sisters and their offspring...); generally, evolution doesn't really care "why?" some trait is passed on, etc.
That's dangerously close to "you need to spend (butt-loads of) money to save money" fallacy (why "routine space travel" dream should be of much significance, anyway? Also, I gave one or two replies nearby, no reason to repeat large parts of them)
The question isn't what's "doable", that's beside the point. Shuttle and Buran were doable, much easier in fact... and didn't deliver on any of its main points as advertised (it was supposed to be inexpensive and reliable, with fast turnaround, remember?). Set us back around 2 decades at least. Bled their space agencies dry for cash, caused cancellation of many great projects (many fantastic science missions, always the first to the axe...)
The question is what's practical. Spending half of GDP of the planet (or more...) isn't; no exploration in history operated on such basis.
And I didn't say "dumb payload" in the case of electromagnetic launcher, but "dumb rocket" - how it requires essentially the same tech as current rockets (yes, requires - at the least, there needs to be a massive kick at the apogee, otherwise what's being launched will deorbit at perigee), how it must (not just "most likely") be very similar to current launchers was the point; the "Pegasus" needs to be there, flying out of the end!
Again, not on a nice stationary platform (maybe with some simple multiplication of first stages (again, check Angara, from ~3 IIRC to 130+ tons in essentially single design) for the same effect as a megastructure), but moving on a high-g dynamic one... are you sure it will be inexpensive and reliable, with fast turnaround? Where have I heard that before...
All while the chemical "dumb rockets" are far from showing their full potential. We barely tried with what we know to significantly reduce costs - mass production (vs. skyrocketing (puns and all) costs with one-off massive projects). Maybe not necessarily to such or even such degree, but there's definitely a space for improvement. It's most likely not a coincidence that "the most reliable means of space travel" and "the most frequently used launch vehicle in the world" (plus one of most inexpensive ones) is about one and the same launch vehicle.
There were a lot more "exciting" concepts... and fiction, half a century ago. Remember, such dreams gave us the cows of Shuttle and Buran (their designers and decisionmakers probably raised on scifi of ~40s, with lots of "spaceplanes", undoubtedly fueled by rapid advances in airplane technology; like those airplanes from "our" times, fueled by marine tech advancements (and we can even build them! Take a Harrier, remove wings and canopy); like nuclear age taking over culture); big grandeur projects which set us back immensely. Detracted for steady, sustainable growth.
How is that "nuclear electricity will be so cheap that it will be pointless to measure its usage" going along, BTW?
Nothing except chemical is needed, in grander picture, for launchers. LEO is already not far from Kessler Syndrome, even with our "puny" launch capabilities. You don't really want to put much more mass in there. Many interesting places have hardly any atmosphere, you really want to tread softly around them...
Outside of launching - where have you been? Many sats have electric propulsion since the 70s (reactors, too...). ISS is getting one soon. Thing is, one big crash project in the style (or grander) of Apollo is not the way for interplanetary. It will be fairly slow and expensive anyway (and we bet since some time on electric propulsion + advanced solar cells or reactor).
Then there's JIMO, something NASA evidently wanted to do... but the people want bread, circuses, and empty promises of manned missions.
An why so in a hurry? Surely you don't think socioeconomic realities from Earth to be of any significance "out there"... Especially once we master space manufacturing sometimes during the next millennium (only then the expansion will start, and it might be solar sails + ITN for all we know; or, further, gradual asteroid and comet hopping over thousands of years into the Oort cloud, and some groups eventually hitching a ride with a cloud of some passing star - that still gives very rapid colonization of the galaxy)
But there's one thing you can bet on. A continuation of what is very much the case on Earth, even with easy travel available. But much stronger. You're very likely to die near the place you were born
And vast majority of initial travel might very well be, say, mostly when you're highly miniaturized and in deep hibernation; awoken at the destination (and again, most likely dying there) - something which we already routinely do to thousands of people every year, and we can already send hundreds if not thousands on one medium chemical launcher to any place in the system (but not many people seem to realize that; their "broad" imagination seems to be ultimately quite shallow; maybe in the style of "a mind open to the point when brain falls out" saying)
(and the Saturn improvement with NERVA stage wasn't anywhere so dramatic, don't make it sound much better than it is)
Scram-Jet / etc. "spaceplanes", when you have serious effort at costs estimation (HOTOL, for example), turn out not really better than "dumb rocket" using comparably advanced materials science (which for the "spaceplane" is required to even make it barely possible)
Electromagnetic launcher / etc. - first, remember how such proposals talk about building a megastructure (often... dynamically suspended; do you see many normal (puny) buildings like that?).
Secondly, not assuming gargantuan fantasies, the projectile still will be largely... a "dumb rocket", essentially the same tech as now (but with complexity of highly dynamic launch system; vs. stationary launch platform + more first stages as boosters, for basically the same effect - like with Delta IV Heavy, Atlas V HLV, Falcon 9 Heavy, and to a most striking degree with Angara).
Third - Pegasus rocket is basically it. It's also one of the most expensive launchers around.