...include a C-shaped macro cross-section, many independent strands, building and deploying in modular sections.
A terrorist would have to hit a non-metallic target only a meter or two wide from a distance of many kilometers with something quite substantial.
Basically, anything big enough to do serious damage (like an air-to-air missile) would be so much cannon fodder for a space-based laser array or (close to the ground) even a perfectly ordinary Vulcan. And would require very special targeting software. You couldn't port a laser big enough to do real harm unless you were prepared to power it with a (suitcase?) nuke, and be damn sure your aim was perfect (you only get one short shot, after which defenses wouldn't be a problem for you).
And of course, there's not much point once we get a dozen or so elevators up and/or spares in orbit.
You have to have seen the flick to understand the joke (`You will be famous! Your music will be heard [...insert connection here...] the land!'), but the web page does bring out a lot of interesting trivia and spoilers.
They fling 2 entire reels of cable into geosynchronous orbit, then lower one end and extend the other end outwards. Once a strand is tethered, they send up climbers every 3 days with additional strands. When the thing's complete, they ship up reels for the next elevator.
It'd probably be worthwhile keeping a complete spare elevator kicking around in a can in orbit, unwinding all strands at once you could probably deploy a replacement within a week if one broke or got terrorised.
If it would do enough damage to the stuff below it if you could make (the bottom section of) it fall
About as much damage as dropping ten square kilometers of individual newspaper sheets would do. Do you have any more malignant plans for ASIO and the CIA to consider? (-:
Of course it's not like anyone would miss Perth:)
Ask Yvan about that. (-: And Greebo seems to like the place:-)
True, the nice elevator will drop costs well below Mr Walker's $1300/kg and will loft up to 22t in one chunk (instead of 2t), but we should be trying both methods in parallel, walk before we run as it were.
For $0.5G/a (ie cost of about one shuttle flight per annum) we can loft over 700t each year using existing technology. It's hard to see why we don't.
All geosynchronous satellites occupy positions in the same orbital path, which forms a ring in the plane of the earth's equator.
Wrong. Geosynchronous != geostationary. Geostationary implies an infinitely thin ring around the equator, geosynchronous implies only keeping pace with the Earth's rotation, and even that can be done sloppily.
Unfortunately for them, the war was almost over already.
That wasn't the problem. The problem was that Hitler was a gonzo and first prevaricated, then ordered that they be built for bombing - which they were mediocre at, rather than air defense - which they were good at. Mind you, some of the big Yank prop planes could still catch them and shoot them down with a diving start.
The really innovative German 'planes were the Blohm und Voss models. My personal favourites are the asymmetrical 237 and mid-engined mid-propped 192, although other models like the 111 and 170 have their own special shock value too. (-:
I remember in the 80's, they were talking about the shuttle loosing heat tiles then..
Didn't so much lose tiles as had the wing break off. Bit of a showstopper. Looks like the original cause was insulation (not heat tiles) breaking off the external fuel tank and smacking into the wing (at, I guess, roughly 700km/h and possibly carrying an extreme ice burden).
BTW, loose == rattling (as in `loose change'), lose == not win/not find (or in this case, `fall off').
So it would therefore not be possible to aim for the moon, and latch on.
Weeeell, yes, just not for very long. I suppose you could build tracks around a meridian and put up with trains constantly hurtling around the planet at over 1000km/h, but it would hardly be economical.
The station could be connected to more ribbons for journeys on to the moon or beyond.
How do you connect the ribbons together without the entire system rotating with the original ribbon.
Assuming the original poster was not just practicing rectal ventriloquism, `connected' doesn't mean literally bolted together. You would slingshot a load off the end of the elevator and catch it again on the end of another elevator at the destination. You could also use elevators (even just spinning tethers in free space) to accelerate and decelerate traffic out- and in-bound.
Surely we should make two on opposite sides of the earth, so as not to overbalance ourselves...
Translation: `I have no sense of scale'. (-:
On top of this, since the elevators are in orbit, they don't make the planet wobble at all (caveat: the mass of the elevators would move the center of mass of Earth, perhaps by a measurable amount).
After a few km, the waste would be pretty well dispersed. Coriolis and other effects would carry it well clear of Perth, to say nothing of wind etc. From, say, 70 or 80km up, it would arrive conveniently freeze-dried.
I've got an Athlon 1800+ with 512MB of DDR, too, and on nForce-based mobo. It takes a while to boot, mostly because I've got a lot of services running on it, then it flies. Since I upgraded to release 4191 of the NVidia drivers, it's never crashed except when I'm pissing around with experimental ring-0 programs.
It runs Mandrake Linux 9.0 and I sleep well at night, knowing that I won't wake up to find my loopback interface renumbered to 169.254.42.69 because the damn silly OS spontaneously decided that my loopback interface needed to be auto-configured but for some reason couldn't find a DHCP server there (true story from an XP-wielding friend, one of many).
Not sure whether I want Adobe to port DreamWeaver to it, or whether they should wither on the vine for being terminally stupid about an exploding new market.
And an FTP or HTTP server (running chrooted, just in case, and owning none of its own files) in user-mode (after the connect) and with the authentication and other fruit stripped out is dead easy to make effectively unbreakable.
It wouldn't be hard to fake up an encryptionless scp server either, and don't forget Gopher!
OTOH, if I was expecting perfect comprehension, I'd have been posting to the wrong forum (on the wrong planet). And you did come good in the end.
every time I say anything that can even remotely be perceived as pro-microsoft, I feel the Torches and Pitchforks coming after me
You're an ogre? (-:
Just MESHO again, but in order to be pro-MS you need a rosy-glow view of capitalism, and to not have understood very much about Bill Gates, Microsoft, how they came to be where they are, and why.
Bill's first product was vapourware, written largely by others who didn't get very much credit, delivered late, full of bugs, and over-priced. There has been no fundamental change since. Bill still throws a hissy fit when people want to share software. (-:
...in fact, I'm delighted that they do, because it puts the lie to their claims both of virality for the GPL, and that you can't make money from Open Source Software.
Again, show me whare I claim that them selling GPLed software is bad, and I'll recant. Otherwise, I want a clear statement from you that you've been a zealot and you made a mistake because of that.
Slashdot Mirror
And that part would have about the same impact as loose sheets of newspaper.
A terrorist would have to hit a non-metallic target only a meter or two wide from a distance of many kilometers with something quite substantial.
Basically, anything big enough to do serious damage (like an air-to-air missile) would be so much cannon fodder for a space-based laser array or (close to the ground) even a perfectly ordinary Vulcan. And would require very special targeting software. You couldn't port a laser big enough to do real harm unless you were prepared to power it with a (suitcase?) nuke, and be damn sure your aim was perfect (you only get one short shot, after which defenses wouldn't be a problem for you).
And of course, there's not much point once we get a dozen or so elevators up and/or spares in orbit.
You have to have seen the flick to understand the joke (`You will be famous! Your music will be heard [...insert connection here...] the land!'), but the web page does bring out a lot of interesting trivia and spoilers.
It'd probably be worthwhile keeping a complete spare elevator kicking around in a can in orbit, unwinding all strands at once you could probably deploy a replacement within a week if one broke or got terrorised.
The end would probably describe something like a figure-8, on about a 7-hour cycle. Might be helpful for doing polar and other non-geosync placements.
About as much damage as dropping ten square kilometers of individual newspaper sheets would do. Do you have any more malignant plans for ASIO and the CIA to consider? (-:
Ask Yvan about that. (-: And Greebo seems to like the place :-)
...which is an 8-fold improvement, using existing technology. I can't see why nobody has done it. It's cheap enough that even Australia could do it.
We can already do that for less using not-much-beyond V2 technology and without the $17G flagfall.
True, the nice elevator will drop costs well below Mr Walker's $1300/kg and will loft up to 22t in one chunk (instead of 2t), but we should be trying both methods in parallel, walk before we run as it were.
For $0.5G/a (ie cost of about one shuttle flight per annum) we can loft over 700t each year using existing technology. It's hard to see why we don't.
And the book was Fountains of Paradise, I've still got a copy somewhere.
Wrong. Geosynchronous != geostationary. Geostationary implies an infinitely thin ring around the equator, geosynchronous implies only keeping pace with the Earth's rotation, and even that can be done sloppily.
Perhaps you're really the 999,999th monkey? (-:
Pitch the skydiving and tourism possibilities to dear Mr Gallop and see if you strike paydirt. (-:
All hail the mighty Ter^H^Hourist Dollar! (-:
...and what are you doing posting during work hours anyway? (-:
RTFWP! 1-5 years from today for technology to mature and test, 6 years to construct.
True, and the first rocket fighter, the Messerschmitt Me-263 `Komet' and later the Bachem Be349 `Natter'.
That wasn't the problem. The problem was that Hitler was a gonzo and first prevaricated, then ordered that they be built for bombing - which they were mediocre at, rather than air defense - which they were good at. Mind you, some of the big Yank prop planes could still catch them and shoot them down with a diving start.
No, commercial jets were quite different in design from the start. The British Meteor jet fighters did look quite similar to the 262. However, many of our modern rockets are descended in one way or another from the V2.
The really innovative German 'planes were the Blohm und Voss models. My personal favourites are the asymmetrical 237 and mid-engined mid-propped 192, although other models like the 111 and 170 have their own special shock value too. (-:
Didn't so much lose tiles as had the wing break off. Bit of a showstopper. Looks like the original cause was insulation (not heat tiles) breaking off the external fuel tank and smacking into the wing (at, I guess, roughly 700km/h and possibly carrying an extreme ice burden).
BTW, loose == rattling (as in `loose change'), lose == not win/not find (or in this case, `fall off').
The cable may well not hit anyone, but if it happened during daylight hours, Perth's excellent beaches might get a bit, er, stained...
People in canoes have been doing this for thousands of years already. It's actually possible to accelerate towards a star, on average.
Weeeell, yes, just not for very long. I suppose you could build tracks around a meridian and put up with trains constantly hurtling around the planet at over 1000km/h, but it would hardly be economical.
Assuming the original poster was not just practicing rectal ventriloquism, `connected' doesn't mean literally bolted together. You would slingshot a load off the end of the elevator and catch it again on the end of another elevator at the destination. You could also use elevators (even just spinning tethers in free space) to accelerate and decelerate traffic out- and in-bound.
Translation: `I have no sense of scale'. (-:
On top of this, since the elevators are in orbit, they don't make the planet wobble at all (caveat: the mass of the elevators would move the center of mass of Earth, perhaps by a measurable amount).
After a few km, the waste would be pretty well dispersed. Coriolis and other effects would carry it well clear of Perth, to say nothing of wind etc. From, say, 70 or 80km up, it would arrive conveniently freeze-dried.
...and `Estimated time to exit: five weeks. Please carry adequate supplies of food and water for the journey.'
I've got an Athlon 1800+ with 512MB of DDR, too, and on nForce-based mobo. It takes a while to boot, mostly because I've got a lot of services running on it, then it flies. Since I upgraded to release 4191 of the NVidia drivers, it's never crashed except when I'm pissing around with experimental ring-0 programs.
It runs Mandrake Linux 9.0 and I sleep well at night, knowing that I won't wake up to find my loopback interface renumbered to 169.254.42.69 because the damn silly OS spontaneously decided that my loopback interface needed to be auto-configured but for some reason couldn't find a DHCP server there (true story from an XP-wielding friend, one of many).
Not sure whether I want Adobe to port DreamWeaver to it, or whether they should wither on the vine for being terminally stupid about an exploding new market.
Yeah? Go fish! Does require version 3.1 though.
And an FTP or HTTP server (running chrooted, just in case, and owning none of its own files) in user-mode (after the connect) and with the authentication and other fruit stripped out is dead easy to make effectively unbreakable.
It wouldn't be hard to fake up an encryptionless scp server either, and don't forget Gopher!
Yup. (-:
OTOH, if I was expecting perfect comprehension, I'd have been posting to the wrong forum (on the wrong planet). And you did come good in the end.
You're an ogre? (-:
Just MESHO again, but in order to be pro-MS you need a rosy-glow view of capitalism, and to not have understood very much about Bill Gates, Microsoft, how they came to be where they are, and why.
Bill's first product was vapourware, written largely by others who didn't get very much credit, delivered late, full of bugs, and over-priced. There has been no fundamental change since. Bill still throws a hissy fit when people want to share software. (-:
Again, show me whare I claim that them selling GPLed software is bad, and I'll recant. Otherwise, I want a clear statement from you that you've been a zealot and you made a mistake because of that.