"Mars' atmospheric pressure: around 75% of earths"
No. Mars's average surface pressure is about 7 millibars, compared to about 1000 millibars on Earth. That's not 75%, maybe 0.75%, so Titan's atmosphere would be 200 times thicker.
"Now, I've always thought that Mars was so cold because the atmosphere was too thin to "hold back the heat"."
It's also farther from the sun than we are.
"Also, I've been told that Mars atmosphere was thin as it is because Mars gravity was too low to prevent atmosphere to escape into space."
That seems more complicated than necessary. It could simply heat and cool the balloon to alter its buoyancy, as it would have to have radioisotopes for heating and electricity anyway.
I think a balloon might work better there as well. As I understand it, the weather on Titan isn't that active compared to Mars or Earth. With the low gravity and thick atmosphere, a balloon probe could cover a lot more territory and probably still set down on the ground for samples sometimes.
"Which still has nothing to do with the original point."
You claimed portage was well thought of, and I agreed. I simply pointed out that portage being a good system didn't necessarily mean it was being used to good effect with Gentoo. It's closely bound to Gentoo, but I've seen it in action so I know it has unrealized potential.
"But you would have if you could. I can establish there exists people that have a problem with the reliability of any distribution you care to name."
Indeed. But I wasn't trying to show that nobody had problems with other distros, I was trying to show that people did have a problem with the reliability of Gentoo, and I succeeded. This is only meaningful because you claimed otherwise, your words were "There are many reasons why people dislike Gentoo, but Gentoo being unreliable or flakey is not one of them.".
"And of course Debian never causes people problems."
While I don't deny that Debian has problems, the link you provided doesn't do a good job of demonstrating it. Debian doesn't have a 'pkg_add' command, so the accuracy of that post is questionable. Also, you should keep in mind that Debian has several branches, like -unstable, -testing. One would expect these to have more problems than -stable, as they are essentially beta software. The -stable branch has sufficiently few problems that you can usually set a computer to update periodically and walk away until the hardware dies.
You're being intellectually dishonest. We can disagree about the reliability of Gentoo, because there's no way for me to prove conclusively that it's worse (though it is my informed opinion that it is), but in the peripheral issues such as what can be infered from my links and how meaningful Google numbers are, you have demonstrated a lack of understanding of statistics, and you have been contradicting yourself. I will therefore not continue this discussion, because I don't think you can participate in a way that will be productive.
"No, I'm not. You might like to try and change this exchange into "apt is better than portage" or whatever. Understandable as your position is, at best, a personal grievance, but that was not your original point. Nor the one I have issue with."
In no way am I trying to turn this into "apt is better than portage". I don't think that. I think apt and portage can both be used to implement a variety of policies. It's the policy I have an issue with, not portage.
"Not your best argument, as Gentoo has been around longer than Ubuntu or Kubuntu, and yet..."
You can't totally ignore all the confounding factors and expect to get meaningful results. Length of time of Debian's existence and larger user base are one of the things that make your Google comparison dubious. There are other things for other distros, for example the different users that Ubuntu attracts.
"I can see where your coming from, though. You tried to find something to back your claims up and managed two irrelevant pages, so now you consider the Internet to be unsuitable for the task."
I used the Internet to establish that there existed people that had a problem with the reliability of Gentoo, not establish numbers. Proof of existence is much easier than specific numbers.
"There you go again. You have an extraordinary inabiliy to back up your claims with other than personal anecdotes."
As no one has done any studies, none of us has anything better.
"No, I'm not. However it is part of Gentoo, and one of the defining parts."
But the point you're missing is that both package management systems can be used to implement either policy. Portage isn't inherently a constant-upgrade system, it's just being used that way by most of its users. True, Gentoo is the primary user of it, but that doesn't make what I'm saying any less true. Being capable of constant upgrades doesn't put portage ahead of the game, because other systems are also capable of it. Apt can be used to get constant upgrades, and that's what you'll get if you use Debian-testing or -unstable.
"Debian has two and a quarter times the user base, so it should have two and a quarter times the number of complaints. Oh no, it's more than that."
A Google search is a long way from what would be required to establish that that actually was the case. Also, Debian has been around a lot longer than most of the other distros, particularly Gentoo, and their list archives dating back to 1995 are all online. Even if a Google search would return all and only relevant results, there's still no way to account for the differences in activity over such a long period of time. Your results aren't even sufficient for a reasonable guess at how many problems people have.
"But you are prepared to say...the probability of problems with Gentoo is much higher than with other distros..."
Yes, since I have used most of the major ones and Gentoo is the worst of the ones I have used. I never claimed to have used every distro, only a significant sample of the major ones (and I gave specifics on which ones). Based on that sample, Gentoo is much worse than the average. If there's others that are as bad or worse, I'll avoid them like the plague as well.
"None of which detracts from portage, which has the benefit that they don't freeze things so you can upgrade when you want."
You're confusing the package management system with the distro. Gentoo is a distro that uses portage, but portage is not the only package management system that could support Gentoo's frequency of updates, nor would it be incapable of supporting a more conservative approach like Debian. It's Gentoo developers that make Gentoo policy, and they're the ones that decide to freeze or not freeze things.
I don't blame portage for Gentoo's problems, because it's only doing what the developers tell it to do. Garbage in, garbage out. In the hands of another development team, I think it could do a much better job.
"In fact, if you take the problem you had unmasking fam to upgrade KDE, and do a quick Google, you get these unscientific results"
You're right; it's very unscientific. Particularly given the dramatic differences in the numbers of users those various platforms have.
"Don't take things so personally. If you are doing something wrong it doesn't mean there is something wrong with you. Nobody is infallible."
I'm not taking it personally... if I'm doing something wrong, I want to know so I can stop. What I found when I investigated was almost always broken packages, and the fix was almost always to wait for someone to update the repository or post a patch. I'm not taking it as an insult, I just don't see any way I could do something differently when a package that's broken as released doesn't work on my machine.
"I'm sure you spotted the error with this, but in case you didn't:- It ignores the fact that packages are masked, which means the package is, in effect, in beta. It is your choice whether to use it or not."
It's not optional if a stable package requires a masked package. In the example I used earlier, the stable package I wanted was KDE, which I didn't consider optional. It required a masked version of famd.
"You will also note there is a lot of talk here about problems with Mandrake"
I haven't used Mandrake or whatever they're calling it now. I can't speak to its reliability.
"Why did you have so many problems that your installation was unusable"
It wasn't unusable. It was just more trouble than it was worth.
"Slightly off topic, but this is why portage is so highly thought of. Yes, all the major distributions have a reasonably easy update mechanism, but with Gentoo and portage, although my original install was years ago, I still have the latest Gentoo. Can you get from, e.g., SuSE 7 to SuSE 10 without starting again? I couldn't, I had to buy 8 and 9."
Other package management systems can handle the same upgrade philosophy (Debian does something very similar for the testing branch). Apt is also well thought of, which is why there are so many Debian based distros. The reason they freeze things is to avoid breakage between upgrades, with a single upgrade you can choose the timing and deal with everything all in one go. This is better when you need availability in the interim.
"I understand you don't like Gentoo, and you had problems with it, but I like it and, along with many other users, don't have problems with it."
If you think the problems, however serious they are or aren't for you, are worth it, then that's fine. In my case, dealing with problems took too much of my time. For all I know, we've had exactly the same problems, and you think it's worth it and I found it prohibitive. I don't have a problem with that.
"I know you did, I said so in my reply to you. If you hadn't I wouldn't have been able to say it was strange."
Okay, well it's great that you think it's strange, but since the solutions to my problems usually came from forum postings of the form "This is what broke, this is how to fix it." I am confident that a) it's not just me, and b) it's not something I did wrong.
If it were something wrong with me, I would consider it strange that I have used Linux distros like Slackware, Fedora, RHEL, Suse, and Debian, and other OSes like OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Solaris without similar problems.
"Yes it is, thats my point. Look around in discussions where Gentoo pops up as a subject. There are many reasons why people dislike Gentoo, but Gentoo being unreliable or flakey is not one of them. If this was as common as you are trying to make out it would have been easy to link to a source, which I notice you didn't."
"You sometimes see Gentoo users talk about how their system helps them easily keep all their packages up to date. Of course, the downside to this is that with the Gentoo system, you have a QA department of one. You are really the first and last person in the package testing system. I know that even with Debian sid, sometimes packages get held back for a bit so they can be better tested before releasing them to a ton of users. Even with that, sometimes Debian sid packages have problems that the package maintainer didn't see (or simply made a mistake). On Gentoo, you are either stuck with potentially untested programs running on your system (or possibly beta/CVS programs), or not upgrading."
"Gentoo is sometimes criticized for poor QA (though possibly this is an unavoidable consequence of focusing on having more "up-to-date" versions of software available), unstable "stable" branches and for having a closed "upper management elite".
Many of the difficulties experienced in past years from the "stable" branch have dissipated due to the addition of a separate "unstable" branch, and will most likely continue to improve with time and effort. However, Gentoo, having a bleeding edge repository of software, often relies on the "upstream"'s (i.e. original authors) QA process. This works well for highly-used software (such as Apache), but less so for little-used software."
I suppose things like KDE and the kernel qualify as "little-used software" by this definition, but it's sufficient to establish that people other than me have a problem with the QA.
"Actually, it is true. But that doesn't mean there are no "reasonably easy update mechanisms" in other distributions."
Not only do they exist, but all the major distros have them. The other claim I was taking issue with was your claim that there are fewer annoyances. I suppose that depends on how you define annoyances, but as I define "breakage that I'm not responsible for" as an annoyance, I'd say Gentoo has it.
"The strange thing is you say things were *always* breaking, and that you *regularly* experienced problems."
I did. Those are just the examples that came to mind.
"Judging from the response of other people and going by my own Gentoo installation this is unusual."
It's not that unusual, there are plenty of people that don't care for Gentoo. The fans are just a lot more vocal.
"Not that there have never been problems, but one of the reasons people like Gentoo is that once it has been set up it is a lot less hassle to keep up to date than other distributions, and has fewer annoyances."
That's certainly not true. I've used most of the other major distros and they all had a reasonably easy update mechanism.
"I've always had the impression that portage was considered one of the best package management systems out there."
Portage is a good system. The problem is not portage, but the maintainers of ebuilds asking portage to do stupid things because they didn't bother to test things.
No, as things that broke did so in such a way that I'm sure it wasn't my fault. For example, one of the updates required a version of famd that was masked. I know that wasn't my fault, the developer had released the changes without testing them on a stable installation first. For another example, Xinerama was made optional and off by default where previously it had been on by default with no option. This was done without warning, so when I rebuilt the system Xinerama suddenly stopped working.
These are examples of things I experienced regularly. I always had to track down the problem to fix it, so I generally had a pretty good idea of what I could and could not have avoided, what was and wasn't my fault. I realize many people probably had better luck in their updates than I did, but the probability of problems with Gentoo is much higher than with other distros.
"The cool bit about Gentoo for me was it was very easy to maintain once you got the bloody thing installed and running."
I always found it to be an enormous PITA to maintain because things were always breaking due to undocumented changes, untested changes, etc. With other distros, I don't have to crawl through forums every other weekend just to keep the thing running, I've had fewer problems with updates on Debian than I have with MacOS.
""Reasonably assured reserves" aka "what we are pretty sure we can get if we dig for it" aka "what's still in the ground needing to be mined." Those are not figures like it's sitting in a warehouse somewhere. That's all this planet's got to offer. Your oil/oil-sand comparison doesn't work because oil sand... well... isn't exactly oil, is it? That's why it's not counted in the reserve figures."
This is wrong in several ways.
a) The oil industry defines "reserves" as that which can be economically recovered at the current oil price. This is the terminology that everyone uses. If you disagree with this philosophically, take it up with the industry.
b) The tar sands are oil, they're just not light oil.
c) Now that oil is expensive, the tar sands are counted as reserves (some of them anyway).
"That's a nice trick. How does one make 100 tons of Uranium from 1 ton of Thorium?"
Presumeably he means the energy content is similar to that of 100 tons of low enrichment Uranium.
"but the given kinetic energy from initial exterior acceleration should do a lot of good in making rockets and whatnot much more efficien (less fuel to carry, larger loads, etc)"
a) You've now got to build a rocket that can survive a trip up this thing, it would have to be much stronger, more complex, etc. And the more optimistic you make the acceleration numbers for the ramp, the harder it is to make a rocket that will survive. Current rockets can take a few G's along one axis, and practically nothing in other directions. You'd have to reinforce them a lot to survive this ramp.
b) If we're still talking about using rockets, the multiple orders of magnitude of savings you're looking for are already out of reach, since you're still using large, complex rockets.
It's a bad idea because you'd have trouble saving money even if the ramp was free. And it wouldn't be free, it would be the most expensive project in human history.
The elevator is worth it, if it can be built, because it reduces launch costs to practically nothing in comparison to current stuff.
Okay, I can see the misunderstanding here. The post you replied to was talking about why large ramp (~100 km) wouldn't be a good idea. I thought you were addressing the ramp idea.
The elevator would indeed go to geostationary orbit. We don't disagree, we were just talking about different things.
Geostationary orbits and escape trajectories take more energy than low earth orbits. The eventual velocity might be lower, but they have to climb a lot higher up in the Earth's gravity well.
Well, I can't say how much something like that would cost to build, but it probably wouldn't provide enough speed to get something into orbit. Velocity given constant acceleration over some distance is given by:
v[f]^2 = v[i]^2 + 2ad
So, from a standing start, taking optimistic values for acceleration (say 10 G's), and the length of the ramp (say 100 km):
v^2 = 2*10g*d v^2 = 2*10*9.81*100000 v^2 = 19620000 v = 4425 m/s
Which isn't even close to what you need for orbit, so you still need a significant rocket. Except now, you need a rocket that can handle your launch ramp, which isn't trivial.
You'd end up spending a lot of money for not much gain. You'd save some fuel, but complexity is already the expensive part and you're increasing that quite a bit.
"Why don't we just build a 500 mile high pyramid of some description? And maybe run a ramp up it, and a pulley system maybe so we can use very simple earthbound techniques to get projectiles to an incredible speed before liftoff?"
Assuming I were willing to risk a dislocated shoulder handwaving the logistical considerations away, the Earth's crust couldn't support that much weight.
Slashdot Mirror
"Mars' atmospheric pressure: around 75% of earths"
No. Mars's average surface pressure is about 7 millibars, compared to about 1000 millibars on Earth. That's not 75%, maybe 0.75%, so Titan's atmosphere would be 200 times thicker.
"Now, I've always thought that Mars was so cold because the atmosphere was too thin to "hold back the heat"."
It's also farther from the sun than we are.
"Also, I've been told that Mars atmosphere was thin as it is because Mars gravity was too low to prevent atmosphere to escape into space."
I don't know what the mechanism is.
"NASA might even consider something like this."
That seems more complicated than necessary. It could simply heat and cool the balloon to alter its buoyancy, as it would have to have radioisotopes for heating and electricity anyway.
"Titan rover"
I think a balloon might work better there as well. As I understand it, the weather on Titan isn't that active compared to Mars or Earth. With the low gravity and thick atmosphere, a balloon probe could cover a lot more territory and probably still set down on the ground for samples sometimes.
"Which still has nothing to do with the original point."
You claimed portage was well thought of, and I agreed. I simply pointed out that portage being a good system didn't necessarily mean it was being used to good effect with Gentoo. It's closely bound to Gentoo, but I've seen it in action so I know it has unrealized potential.
"But you would have if you could. I can establish there exists people that have a problem with the reliability of any distribution you care to name."
Indeed. But I wasn't trying to show that nobody had problems with other distros, I was trying to show that people did have a problem with the reliability of Gentoo, and I succeeded. This is only meaningful because you claimed otherwise, your words were "There are many reasons why people dislike Gentoo, but Gentoo being unreliable or flakey is not one of them.".
"And of course Debian never causes people problems."
While I don't deny that Debian has problems, the link you provided doesn't do a good job of demonstrating it. Debian doesn't have a 'pkg_add' command, so the accuracy of that post is questionable. Also, you should keep in mind that Debian has several branches, like -unstable, -testing. One would expect these to have more problems than -stable, as they are essentially beta software. The -stable branch has sufficiently few problems that you can usually set a computer to update periodically and walk away until the hardware dies.
You're being intellectually dishonest. We can disagree about the reliability of Gentoo, because there's no way for me to prove conclusively that it's worse (though it is my informed opinion that it is), but in the peripheral issues such as what can be infered from my links and how meaningful Google numbers are, you have demonstrated a lack of understanding of statistics, and you have been contradicting yourself. I will therefore not continue this discussion, because I don't think you can participate in a way that will be productive.
"No, I'm not. You might like to try and change this exchange into "apt is better than portage" or whatever. Understandable as your position is, at best, a personal grievance, but that was not your original point. Nor the one I have issue with."
In no way am I trying to turn this into "apt is better than portage". I don't think that. I think apt and portage can both be used to implement a variety of policies. It's the policy I have an issue with, not portage.
"Not your best argument, as Gentoo has been around longer than Ubuntu or Kubuntu, and yet..."
You can't totally ignore all the confounding factors and expect to get meaningful results. Length of time of Debian's existence and larger user base are one of the things that make your Google comparison dubious. There are other things for other distros, for example the different users that Ubuntu attracts.
"I can see where your coming from, though. You tried to find something to back your claims up and managed two irrelevant pages, so now you consider the Internet to be unsuitable for the task."
I used the Internet to establish that there existed people that had a problem with the reliability of Gentoo, not establish numbers. Proof of existence is much easier than specific numbers.
"There you go again. You have an extraordinary inabiliy to back up your claims with other than personal anecdotes."
As no one has done any studies, none of us has anything better.
"No, I'm not. However it is part of Gentoo, and one of the defining parts."
But the point you're missing is that both package management systems can be used to implement either policy. Portage isn't inherently a constant-upgrade system, it's just being used that way by most of its users. True, Gentoo is the primary user of it, but that doesn't make what I'm saying any less true. Being capable of constant upgrades doesn't put portage ahead of the game, because other systems are also capable of it. Apt can be used to get constant upgrades, and that's what you'll get if you use Debian-testing or -unstable.
"Debian has two and a quarter times the user base, so it should have two and a quarter times the number of complaints. Oh no, it's more than that."
A Google search is a long way from what would be required to establish that that actually was the case. Also, Debian has been around a lot longer than most of the other distros, particularly Gentoo, and their list archives dating back to 1995 are all online. Even if a Google search would return all and only relevant results, there's still no way to account for the differences in activity over such a long period of time. Your results aren't even sufficient for a reasonable guess at how many problems people have.
"But you are prepared to say ...the probability of problems with Gentoo is much higher than with other distros..."
Yes, since I have used most of the major ones and Gentoo is the worst of the ones I have used. I never claimed to have used every distro, only a significant sample of the major ones (and I gave specifics on which ones). Based on that sample, Gentoo is much worse than the average. If there's others that are as bad or worse, I'll avoid them like the plague as well.
"None of which detracts from portage, which has the benefit that they don't freeze things so you can upgrade when you want."
You're confusing the package management system with the distro. Gentoo is a distro that uses portage, but portage is not the only package management system that could support Gentoo's frequency of updates, nor would it be incapable of supporting a more conservative approach like Debian. It's Gentoo developers that make Gentoo policy, and they're the ones that decide to freeze or not freeze things.
I don't blame portage for Gentoo's problems, because it's only doing what the developers tell it to do. Garbage in, garbage out. In the hands of another development team, I think it could do a much better job.
"In fact, if you take the problem you had unmasking fam to upgrade KDE, and do a quick Google, you get these unscientific results"
You're right; it's very unscientific. Particularly given the dramatic differences in the numbers of users those various platforms have.
"Don't take things so personally. If you are doing something wrong it doesn't mean there is something wrong with you. Nobody is infallible."
I'm not taking it personally... if I'm doing something wrong, I want to know so I can stop. What I found when I investigated was almost always broken packages, and the fix was almost always to wait for someone to update the repository or post a patch. I'm not taking it as an insult, I just don't see any way I could do something differently when a package that's broken as released doesn't work on my machine.
"I'm sure you spotted the error with this, but in case you didn't:- It ignores the fact that packages are masked, which means the package is, in effect, in beta. It is your choice whether to use it or not."
It's not optional if a stable package requires a masked package. In the example I used earlier, the stable package I wanted was KDE, which I didn't consider optional. It required a masked version of famd.
"You will also note there is a lot of talk here about problems with Mandrake"
I haven't used Mandrake or whatever they're calling it now. I can't speak to its reliability.
"Why did you have so many problems that your installation was unusable"
It wasn't unusable. It was just more trouble than it was worth.
"Slightly off topic, but this is why portage is so highly thought of. Yes, all the major distributions have a reasonably easy update mechanism, but with Gentoo and portage, although my original install was years ago, I still have the latest Gentoo. Can you get from, e.g., SuSE 7 to SuSE 10 without starting again? I couldn't, I had to buy 8 and 9."
Other package management systems can handle the same upgrade philosophy (Debian does something very similar for the testing branch). Apt is also well thought of, which is why there are so many Debian based distros. The reason they freeze things is to avoid breakage between upgrades, with a single upgrade you can choose the timing and deal with everything all in one go. This is better when you need availability in the interim.
"I understand you don't like Gentoo, and you had problems with it, but I like it and, along with many other users, don't have problems with it."
If you think the problems, however serious they are or aren't for you, are worth it, then that's fine. In my case, dealing with problems took too much of my time. For all I know, we've had exactly the same problems, and you think it's worth it and I found it prohibitive. I don't have a problem with that.
Okay, well it's great that you think it's strange, but since the solutions to my problems usually came from forum postings of the form "This is what broke, this is how to fix it." I am confident that a) it's not just me, and b) it's not something I did wrong.
If it were something wrong with me, I would consider it strange that I have used Linux distros like Slackware, Fedora, RHEL, Suse, and Debian, and other OSes like OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Solaris without similar problems.
"Yes it is, thats my point. Look around in discussions where Gentoo pops up as a subject. There are many reasons why people dislike Gentoo, but Gentoo being unreliable or flakey is not one of them. If this was as common as you are trying to make out it would have been easy to link to a source, which I notice you didn't."
Very well.
Mandrake Expatriate Syndrome: Gentoo Criticisms:I suppose things like KDE and the kernel qualify as "little-used software" by this definition, but it's sufficient to establish that people other than me have a problem with the QA.
"Actually, it is true. But that doesn't mean there are no "reasonably easy update mechanisms" in other distributions."
Not only do they exist, but all the major distros have them. The other claim I was taking issue with was your claim that there are fewer annoyances. I suppose that depends on how you define annoyances, but as I define "breakage that I'm not responsible for" as an annoyance, I'd say Gentoo has it.
"The strange thing is you say things were *always* breaking, and that you *regularly* experienced problems."
I did. Those are just the examples that came to mind.
"Judging from the response of other people and going by my own Gentoo installation this is unusual."
It's not that unusual, there are plenty of people that don't care for Gentoo. The fans are just a lot more vocal.
"Not that there have never been problems, but one of the reasons people like Gentoo is that once it has been set up it is a lot less hassle to keep up to date than other distributions, and has fewer annoyances."
That's certainly not true. I've used most of the other major distros and they all had a reasonably easy update mechanism.
"I've always had the impression that portage was considered one of the best package management systems out there."
Portage is a good system. The problem is not portage, but the maintainers of ebuilds asking portage to do stupid things because they didn't bother to test things.
"Ever thought it may be you, not Gentoo?"
No, as things that broke did so in such a way that I'm sure it wasn't my fault. For example, one of the updates required a version of famd that was masked. I know that wasn't my fault, the developer had released the changes without testing them on a stable installation first. For another example, Xinerama was made optional and off by default where previously it had been on by default with no option. This was done without warning, so when I rebuilt the system Xinerama suddenly stopped working.
These are examples of things I experienced regularly. I always had to track down the problem to fix it, so I generally had a pretty good idea of what I could and could not have avoided, what was and wasn't my fault. I realize many people probably had better luck in their updates than I did, but the probability of problems with Gentoo is much higher than with other distros.
"The cool bit about Gentoo for me was it was very easy to maintain once you got the bloody thing installed and running."
I always found it to be an enormous PITA to maintain because things were always breaking due to undocumented changes, untested changes, etc. With other distros, I don't have to crawl through forums every other weekend just to keep the thing running, I've had fewer problems with updates on Debian than I have with MacOS.
"Also, good mechanical berings are already very efficient; it's not like you have a lot of efficiency gains to make."
Wouldn't they be handy for applications where an extremely long service life is necessary, as there's no physical contact?
""Reasonably assured reserves" aka "what we are pretty sure we can get if we dig for it" aka "what's still in the ground needing to be mined." Those are not figures like it's sitting in a warehouse somewhere. That's all this planet's got to offer. Your oil/oil-sand comparison doesn't work because oil sand... well... isn't exactly oil, is it? That's why it's not counted in the reserve figures."
This is wrong in several ways.
a) The oil industry defines "reserves" as that which can be economically recovered at the current oil price. This is the terminology that everyone uses. If you disagree with this philosophically, take it up with the industry.
b) The tar sands are oil, they're just not light oil.
c) Now that oil is expensive, the tar sands are counted as reserves (some of them anyway).
"That's a nice trick. How does one make 100 tons of Uranium from 1 ton of Thorium?"
Presumeably he means the energy content is similar to that of 100 tons of low enrichment Uranium.
With Cedega, you actually can.
"but the given kinetic energy from initial exterior acceleration should do a lot of good in making rockets and whatnot much more efficien (less fuel to carry, larger loads, etc)"
a) You've now got to build a rocket that can survive a trip up this thing, it would have to be much stronger, more complex, etc. And the more optimistic you make the acceleration numbers for the ramp, the harder it is to make a rocket that will survive. Current rockets can take a few G's along one axis, and practically nothing in other directions. You'd have to reinforce them a lot to survive this ramp.
b) If we're still talking about using rockets, the multiple orders of magnitude of savings you're looking for are already out of reach, since you're still using large, complex rockets.
It's a bad idea because you'd have trouble saving money even if the ramp was free. And it wouldn't be free, it would be the most expensive project in human history.
The elevator is worth it, if it can be built, because it reduces launch costs to practically nothing in comparison to current stuff.
Okay, I can see the misunderstanding here. The post you replied to was talking about why large ramp (~100 km) wouldn't be a good idea. I thought you were addressing the ramp idea.
The elevator would indeed go to geostationary orbit. We don't disagree, we were just talking about different things.
Geostationary orbits and escape trajectories take more energy than low earth orbits. The eventual velocity might be lower, but they have to climb a lot higher up in the Earth's gravity well.
"Solar power, wind power, and water power are the way of the future."
Nuclear is the only thing that can fill the gap.
"And you're prepared for the possibility of legal action for potentially illegal things you do, I assume?"
Had you read my post, you'd know that the legal risk and not my concern for Apple would be my reason for not doing it.
"Not impossible, I'd say."
I never claimed it was impossible, just that it wasn't worth the trouble."
"And somewhat more workable than a space elevator at this time."
Let's not kid ourselves. Neither is even remotely workable at this time.
Well, I can't say how much something like that would cost to build, but it probably wouldn't provide enough speed to get something into orbit. Velocity given constant acceleration over some distance is given by:
v[f]^2 = v[i]^2 + 2ad
So, from a standing start, taking optimistic values for acceleration (say 10 G's), and the length of the ramp (say 100 km):
v^2 = 2*10g*d
v^2 = 2*10*9.81*100000
v^2 = 19620000
v = 4425 m/s
Which isn't even close to what you need for orbit, so you still need a significant rocket. Except now, you need a rocket that can handle your launch ramp, which isn't trivial.
You'd end up spending a lot of money for not much gain. You'd save some fuel, but complexity is already the expensive part and you're increasing that quite a bit.
"I was coming at it from the angle of beating gravity by just climbing (literally) above it."
Gravity 500 miles up isn't much weaker than it is on the surface.
"Put the ships in evacuated tubes, You would only need, what, I have no idea. 5km? 10? To avoid atmospheric drag."
10 km isn't above enough of the atmosphere to be useful. That's about 33000 feet, the altitude most aircraft fly at.
"Still a fantastical undertaking, but we could do it."
We could probably do a 5-10 km tower to launch things, but we shouldn't because it wouldn't be beneficial.
"Besides in a pyramid, the weight is distributed around the base, so its not like the many gigatons are all resting on the one spot..."
The weight is distributed, but there simply wouldn't be any way to construct it that wouldn't deform the crust enough to render it pointless.
There are ways to build tall structures that might work, but the one described isn't one of them.
"Why don't we just build a 500 mile high pyramid of some description? And maybe run a ramp up it, and a pulley system maybe so we can use very simple earthbound techniques to get projectiles to an incredible speed before liftoff?"
Assuming I were willing to risk a dislocated shoulder handwaving the logistical considerations away, the Earth's crust couldn't support that much weight.