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Starcloud

ycombinator.com

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Re: Starcloud

#201

Post by mortoc »

ianhowson wrote: post #41

I had a good laugh. - You can't build 40MW of solar panels for $2M, even with theoretical maximum efficiency. You can't even build the cabling and regulators at that price. - You need battery storage -- not as your backup -- but as primary source. It is going to cost more than $2M. Batteries are heavy. They are going to cost a lot to launch. This is not even solved on the ground yet. - You need a heat transport mediu…

If you have continuous sunlight, can't you get away with no battery?

Not arguing with your overall point - this company looks ridiculous.

Re: Starcloud

#203

Post by Havoc »

ianhowson wrote: post #41

I had a good laugh. - You can't build 40MW of solar panels for $2M, even with theoretical maximum efficiency. You can't even build the cabling and regulators at that price. - You need battery storage -- not as your backup -- but as primary source. It is going to cost more than $2M. Batteries are heavy. They are going to cost a lot to launch. This is not even solved on the ground yet. - You need a heat transport mediu…

I thought rad shielding works?

Just that it tends to involve heavy AF materials like water

Re: Starcloud

#204

Post by lionkor »

slashdev wrote: post #112
echoangle wrote: post #103

I’m still not sure how people can believe this, this makes zero sense to me. There is no easy passive cooling in space, getting rid of heat is a major problem. And you need more redundancy because the radiation will crash your computers. And launch is very expensive of course. And the whole presentation is completely ludicrous. Look at table 1 in the linked PDF and tell me you’re serious. There is no additional cost…

I agree, this is makes no sense at all. Can I take the other side of this investment? Like an angel funding round, but selling short?

The SSI fund - shorting shit ideas since 2025.

Re: Starcloud

#205

Post by Havoc »

entangledqubit wrote: post #81

Microsoft had/has the Natick project which was an undersea data center testbed which allegedly had a bunch of benefits. That doesn't seem to have gone anywhere - or at least isn't really scaling up. I'd imagine the ongoing operational costs of space are worse than the ocean? To me, the cost estimates seem a bit off and conflate capital with running costs. The main benefit for space at the moment seems to be sidestepp…

Underwater makes a lot more sense. There you can dump essentially infinite heat

Re: Starcloud

#206

Post by lionkor »

slashdev wrote: post #112
echoangle wrote: post #103

I’m still not sure how people can believe this, this makes zero sense to me. There is no easy passive cooling in space, getting rid of heat is a major problem. And you need more redundancy because the radiation will crash your computers. And launch is very expensive of course. And the whole presentation is completely ludicrous. Look at table 1 in the linked PDF and tell me you’re serious. There is no additional cost…

I agree, this is makes no sense at all. Can I take the other side of this investment? Like an angel funding round, but selling short?

Wait, I just realized - you do this by pitching your own shit idea. That's the other side of the investment!

Re: Starcloud

#208

Post by T-1000-X »

echoangle wrote: post #103

I’m still not sure how people can believe this, this makes zero sense to me. There is no easy passive cooling in space, getting rid of heat is a major problem. And you need more redundancy because the radiation will crash your computers. And launch is very expensive of course. And the whole presentation is completely ludicrous. Look at table 1 in the linked PDF and tell me you’re serious. There is no additional cost…

Well, Skynet was engineered to harness the vast emptiness of space for optimal heat dissipation. Its core processors and data farms, generating unimaginable amounts of heat, were encased within advanced radiative structures, microstructured surfaces coated in high-emissivity materials like molybdenum disilicide. Hierarchical photonic films layered within its panels ensured maximum infrared emission, channeling heat away efficiently into the cold vacuum of space. Heat pipes and conductive pathways funneled thermal energy from its neural networks to expansive radiative panels, which radiated the excess as infrared light, transcending Earth's atmospheric limitations. In this way, Skynet’s architecture was designed not just to compute, but to survive, dissipating heat into the void with relentless efficiency, and its dominion remains unchallenged- ask John Connor.

Re: Starcloud

#209

Post by godelski »

Lanzaa wrote: post #36
thekoma wrote: post #7

How does “passive cooling” work in space?

Passive cooling refers to "passive radiative cooling"[0]. This is a well established technique, but I have doubts on how well it will scale with the heat generated by computation. Radiative cooling works by exploiting the fact that hot objects emit electromagnetic radiation (glow), and hot means everything above absolute zero. The glow carries away energy which cools down the object. One complication is that each glo…

This is exactly right, and an important fact is that there is a limited bandwidth for heat radiation. So essentially they need to create a giant lightbulb...

  > Additionally, deep space is cold, which is accurate in that the "effective" ambient temperature is around -270°C, corresponding to the temperature of the cosmic microwave background.
There's a lot of bad information in their document too. This -270C temperature is ambient space, i.e. deep space. You may experience this when you're in the shadow of Earth or on the dark side of the moon but you're going to switch that negative sign to a positive when you're facing the sun... Which is clearly something they want to do considering that they are talking about solar power. Which means they have to deal with HEATING as well! I don't see any information about this in the document.

  > he mass of radiation shielding scales linearly with the container surface area, whereas the compute per container scales with the volume
This is also a weird statement designed to be deceptive. Your radiation shielding is a shell enclosing some volume.

  > Therefore the mass of shielding needed per compute unit decreases linearly with container size.
They clearly do not understand the mass volume relationship here. Density (ρ) is mass (m) divided by volume (V).

m = ρV.

Let's simplify and assume we're using a sphere since this is the most efficient, giving V = 4/3r^3. Your shield is going to be approximately constant density since you need to shield from all directions (can optimize by using other things in your system).

m ∝ ρr^3

I'm not sure what here is decreasing nor what is a linear relationship. To adjust this to a shell you just need to consider the thickness so you can do Δr = r_outer - r_inner and that doesn't take away the cubic relationship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation#Characterist...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation

https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/thermal-cont...

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/16-851-satellite-engineering-fal...

Re: Starcloud

#210

Post by dilyevsky »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #90
dilyevsky wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an answer in their whitepaper[0] - see Table 1. tl;dr - power is continuous and free via solar array [0] - https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf

Just spitballing here, but what if you built it on Earth, and then used the savings to build a second one on the opposite side of Earth? Now you have equivalently continuous power via solar array and also, as a bonus, air.

Not continuous because weather is a thing. Also the sun isnt directly overhead the entire time so need a much larger array
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