Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26130 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
Which was itself a kludge to get it low enough to the ground to allow it to carry its own airstairs onboard so it could operate from airports that didn't have the infrastructure to handle jets.
So we have bodged software to allow efficient engines on an airframe designed to be able to fly between JFK and LAX if neither of those airports were setup for jets and if the 737 still had onboard stairs.
Parachutes don't give you a soft enough landing (at least on land) to reuse the rocket.
So either land on water and hope to clean it out before it rusts, or a very-very big net, or try and catch it by helicopter.
SpaceX reckoned that the extra % of fuel it needs to hold back for the landing weighed less than the parachute, was more reliable and meant they didn't have to give it a sponge bath
Attempt to open spreadsheet in teams app - most features don't work
Right Click to 'open document in browser; - different subset of features work
Now have a right click to 'open document in sharepoint' - get a few more features
Finally 'open in app' starts excel so you can actually do stuff.
Thanks to physics a spinning liquid naturally forms a parabolic surface.
We already make mirrors like this, currently by melting glass then spinning it while it cools. You still need to polish the surface to make a perfect fraction of a wavelength smoothness, but it's a lot less effort than grinding from a solid block.
Biggest issue with a mirror made from a solid block of mercury is that it would change shape as the temperature changed. The spinning mirrors are made hollow so there is very little mass of glass so it comes to temperature very quickly and the glass is special super-low expansion stuff.
The satellites are only visible when they are lit up by the sun - so for a LEO object only a problem near sunset/sunrise which is useless for most astronomy anyway.
In the middle of the night having dark objects cross the image doesn't make any difference.
A much bigger issue is the moon lighting up the sky for a week..
Now if somebody could arrange to remove that - or at least paint it black - that would really help
Spinning liquid mirrors are a thing that is done on Earth already. They are way cheaper than real mirrors and so are mostly built by small universities - you just have to live with the limitations in pointing it.
If you are a national lab building a $bn observatory then the cost of a real 8-10m mirror is a small part of the bill. But if you want to build something on the moon, where the cost of sending onsite engineers to align things is a problem then this isn't quite so daft.
Obviously the whole thing is silly season - but it gets a couple of unknown researchers on the front page of a slow news day.
>All sorts of issues against nuclear power
Principally the inability of BAe to sell copies of them to 3rd world countries once the UK has paid for the development costs for the 2 prototypes
> end of life disposal (so would probably need a brand new dock be constructed to handle the nuclear issues, meaning it has to be to silly-high standards).
Alternately declare war on a superpower and send your remaining carrier in a last ditch one-way Kamikase mission against massively superior forces in the East China Sea. Cheapest way to get rid of them.
I'm frankly amazed how well it went off.
I had expected school-shooter events at polling places Or Barr's 'special' police squads teargassing lines of black voters. Anything to discourage democrat suburban-mom type voters from turning out.
Followed by a supreme court ruling that states are people and so have freedom of speech to announce who won - irrespective of any votes.
I'm torn between they thought they had enough of a poll lead to win anyway, or they were too disorganised to organise a coup
>I cannot believe that each state, and sometimes county/city can decide how to hold elections. Why would you do that?
Because the states wanted "sovereignty" - they saw the danger of throwing out a British monarch for an emperor. Imagine if the Whitehouse was directly in charge of the election
>Boundries should be decided by an INDEPENDANT body and NOT by party politics.
Ideally, but at this point where the Center for Disease control is a political football - who do you get to do it, the Canadians ?
For multiple people meetings - certainly, I don't need to see a grid of 49 men in suits looking like a bad version of the muppet show opening scene
For daily one-one calls to my minions it's nice to have a bit more of a connection, especially for picking up are they ill/stressed/tired/depressed. Of course I solved that in true engineering management style by having a bit-field of psychiatric state and having them update it regularly.
Video conferencing for 1-1 works very well, for non-technical calls between people who might be uncomfortable talking to a computer (ie granny to 3 year old) it's excellent.
It would be nice if you didn't have to spend 15minutes explaining to granny why she needed to sign up for an outlook.com address to use microsoft teams but have a facebook account to use wibble and buy etherium to register an account on pling-plong cos that is the only platform supported by her grand-daughters school play.
Servo control systems are amazing when they work.
Remember decades ago watching some "fuzzy-logic 5th-generation buzzword-thingy" crane control where the crane gantry was flying backwards and forwards apparently randomly to keep a load on the end of a long line almost stationary in the wind
> it's whether that reconditioning is any harder than what SpaceX have to do,
Remember the shuttle SRBs are (almost) literally empty metal tubes that you fill with explosives.
The SpaceX engines are more like the shuttle main engines - ditching an entire shuttle in the sea and refurbishing it would be a little trickier.
Significantly the real commercial driver for recovering SpaceX is probably speed rather than direct cost. If you want to reach the sort of launches/day rate that spaceX would like to make real money then the sheer effort needed to manufacture/ship/assemble and test new rockets may be impossible
