@pieist @simonbp @nyrath When I was involved with the Asteroid Redirect Mission proposal a decade ago; one variation was to have a non-spinning spacecraft surround a spinning asteroid without touching it, seal the bag, and then very slowly despin the thing by pumping in nitrogen to create air drag and transfer the angular momentum to the shell to be canceled by thrusters.
That was quite complicated enough.
@pieist When my ex's head rotated 360, she emitted, from her mouth (NOT vomiting), a miraculous effusion of chilled Dom Perignon. I caught it in two glasses, and very good and refreshing it was. She actually summoned it astrally from nearby highpriced restaurant's bottles. That was one of her good qualities. I would then give her head a gentle kiss, so her head would spin counterclockwise, restoring it to its rightful position.
Having read a lot of #Wolverine-centric #Marvel #Comics, I have to say I think "The Bubs" would be a good band name
By contrast, 2001's Discovery centrifugal habitat ring, thanks to being wholly contained within the pressure hull, was not different in any important way from having a hamster wheel in an Apollo command module. You could plan it in such a way that you could avoid the need for much in the way of crazy-robust and complicated couplings. A single -- admittedly probably pretty elaborate -- coaxial power and data link, some WiFi (1968 version) and simple package transfer of solids and liquids and you're all set. In principle.
(2001: A Space Odyssey got one thing right, at least: the rotating section was fully contained within the pressurised hull, so you didn't need to build and worry about atmospheric and life-support couplings. 2010 and The Martian, etc, didn't even have this mitigation.)
(If you're using solar collectors and your path isn't radial to the sun, then you don't want the solar collectors to be mounted to the rotating part either. But we've already established that you'll want some minimal nonrotating section with power and comm links, so that's covered.)
My current #SF movie bugbear: Non-rotating #spacecraft with a large rotating section for the human habitat. Bonus points if the habitable part spans both the rotating and non-rotating portions and the crew can move freely between them.
It's an absurdly complex #engineering challenge to build it this way, it introduces an open set of failure modes that would not otherwise exist and there's no good reason for any of it that I can think of.
Instead, rotate the whole ship, and if there are a few things which for some reason must not be rotated (scopes, antennae and cameras, perhaps?) place them in the smallest and simplest possible unpressurised nonrotating segment at the axis.
@cherold (the age range is an idiosyncratic choice of my own, of course. 15 is about the earliest age with which I feel much connection to the popular music of the time, and 35 is about the point when I largely stopped feeling much one. Your mileage may vary. Not all stocks go up: some go down. Ask your doctor if highly subjective pop culture generalizations are right for you.)
@cherold We've both deleted our but I think you're missing a term in your algebraic expression. Let's try it as a story problem:
"Ed really likes a song that came out in 1982. What year was Ed born?"
Aa you see, unresolvable. I associate that particular song with people who'd have been somewhere between 15 and 35 or so in 1982, most of whose birthdates fall well inside the baby-boom period of 1946-64
@raulclima @reedmideke @supernovae@universeodon.com
Yes. And all that you say speaks to the larger issue of "energy conservation" device choices being a poor substitute for eliminating the device entirely. For example, buying an electric car might be better than buying an ICE car, but an indescribably worse choice than simply reducing the number of cars you have by one, and using transit, bicycles and -- in a pinch -- carshares.
I considered buying an electric car. But given that it takes 30-50K kilometers of driving to offset the embodied energy cost before any net savings are realized, I've decided to see if I can avoid buying _any_ car ever again.
#Art by Polish satirical cartoonist, Pawel Kuczynski:
http://45.media.tumblr.com/eb730b5be6140a32b4c0504d9ff72bea/tumblr_mvaa8zN2Ko1ryvq99o1_500.gif
#artist #poland #SocialMedia #politics #media #culture #life #today
Software Engineer, mostly in the Pacific Northwest of late
Medical Informatics - Carrier-Grade Network Video Distribution - Real Time Clinical Telemetry
Formerly: Motorola, Tektronix, Intel, HP, Qualcomm, Nintendo; others you're less likely to have heard of.
Will code for pie. 🥧