371–380 of 385 posts
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If fusion power takes off, could you produce helium as a by-product?
Basically, no: https://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2922/ And that assumes perfect capture, too. If you're going that route it'd probably be better to just use hot air with the energy.
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I think the key is in the wikipedia article: You only gain 14% lift with a vacuum vs helium. The tradeoff is either: - Build a pressure vessel to withstand the differential to the atmosphere - Let the helium do the pushing from the inside but make the thing 14% bigger I don't see how the vacuum ever wins.
> I don't see how the vacuum ever wins. 3 ways. - Vacuums aren't combustible. - Vacuums can be created without sourcing a gas. - Vacuums allow you adjust buoyancy without requiring you to carry extra gases. The major downside of a vacuum is finding something ridged enough, light enough, and cheap enough to maintain a vacuum.
If you have that much real estate in the lift body, cover it with solar panels. Especially since I figure they would flatten it at some point to get some sort of wing effect as well, but I'm no aero engineer.
But 388m x 78m is 30264 square meters
A 400 watt panel is 2 square meters, assume it's 1/2 yield, so you get six megawatts of power. That sounds... pretty good? Even 3 megawatts?
Again, you could probably flatten it further for more panels.
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Build a second basket for our eggs. There are obviously better baskets than Venus though. I'd sooner choose an orbital habitat.
There is no second basket possible and the idea that there is one is a recipe for disaster
Like we keep being told that population will level out, but I've seen, what, HOLY CRAP, 4 billion people added since I was born, 3.7 --> 7.7.
Because we are totally on top of species depletion? And the world government totally is stable with China and Russia and the US and EU and North Korea and Islam-land and everyone trying to get nukes?
You know what is mind blowingly dumb? Wasting a trillion dollars a year on defense spending, in the US alone.
With China starting to get greedy over space, I think we'll see plenty of investment soon.
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what are we going to do from mars
Everywhere but Earth is really inhospitable, but if it were up to me, I'd pick the Moon first, then Mars, then some asteroids, then way down the list — after we've got space industry sufficient to make planet-sized mirrors — then I'd pick the planet where the surface-level condensation is lead vapour in an acid pressure cooker.
1) getting enough stuff out of Earth's gravity well
2) getting a reasonably self-sufficient population for survival and manufacturing of survival goods
But once you get there, the lack of a big gravity well makes this a lot easier. Low-G or zero-G is a lot easier to move stuff around at the small scales. How much could I lift on the moon?
I'm torn between a moon base and doing enough near-earth asteroid captures to build a space hab. Political support would probably be behind the moon base first, but a space hab built from captured asteroids might be cheaper.
Anyway, once you get a big enough base in space and some manufacturing, build a couple orion pulse nuclear ships, or some nuclear thermal equivalent to hop around the solar system quickly. Then we can probably start mining high value asteroids.
Then Mars and Venus start making sense.
Maybe we can find a closer brown dwarf than Proxima.
THEN, we can go for some nearby stars.
This, my friends, is why we should colonize the upper atmosphere of Venus, where you could chill outside with only a respirator, rather than the inhospitable, irradiated, mangnetosphere free mars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Altitude_Venus_Operationa... https://spectrum.ieee.org/nasa-study-proposes-airships-cloud...
I've always felt people with these ideas are doing pie in the sky thinking and missing the other trends that would beat this concept out. Humans aren't suited for these environments. We evolved to fit this planet. These gasses, radiation levels, terrestrial foods, etc. The economics of going to Mars, Venus, etc. are iffy, and humans probably won't enjoy being there. It's McMurdo times about 1000. Getting back is hard…
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Why would we deliberately cripple the economy? Who would want worse service?
I don't want worse services. I want services that don't break the environment. I want services that respect a proper balance. If it means that it's a bit worse to my "customer experience", then so be it.
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> You start with N kites and connect them, each kite retains its airworthiness and connecting them doesn't change that. If you do that, you have N wires between the kites and the ground. Keeping them untangled may be a problem. Your best bet probably is tying them together and having only one thicker wire towards the ground. Making sure each of those wires takes 1/Nth of the load from the wind definitely will be a pr…
One possibility would have a large membrane with wires connected to a pendant load. The wires would be fractal: the lines from each small kite in a unit would combine to make that unit's single line, and those units' lines would do the same, and so on. In terms of keeping the load balanced, I figure the individual kites can modulate their surface area somehow. Maybe they fold like butterfly wings, or dilate, or have…
It’s a suspension bridge if you keep “one wire per kite”, but I mentioned that example to help make clear that the “we won’t need 1 wire for each small kite” scenario would scale the weight of the kite at a speed that’s faster than linear, and that’s not the suspension bridge scenario.
I think your suggestions to modulate the surface area/adding motors or propellers/etc. also mean the larger, composite, kite would be heavier than the set of smaller kites. The structure certainly would be more complex than “just tie a thousand kites together”.
(But according to the article, bigger really is better.)
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I don’t know that I’d call it a traditional visual novel. Or at least not the kind with really trite stories. The way the story is structured, you unlock scenes where you just read the text, and occasionally make branching choices. But the scenes are not very long. It’s also interesting in that it borrows from modern TV non-linear storytelling; you do not see the story in chronological order, nothing is as it seems,…
I’d say the RTS segments are closer to an action RPG as well, such as Final Fantasy’s ATB but on a kaiju/mecha city map. Or, you could suggest that they’re Diofield Chronicle ’s structure with Nintendo-style puzzle development, plus Persona 5 ’s pop.