1,043 karma · joined June 11, 2013
As for Solar cells there are factors to consider - they would degrade differently than cells in low earth orbit since factors like atomic oxygen and thermal cycling are less of an issue while I imagine micrometeorites are just terrible. Modern cells degrade at at 0.5% per year in LEO. At 1%/year degradation that means you have 85% capacity after 15 years. So we are talking decades for cells once they have been manufactured here. Cells not in the sun would last forever so they do not degrade in storage.
In the case of the diggers I have not done the math on thermal propagation through bedrock but It would all depend on when the people in orbit start building a sunshade at L1.
the pingers are not in the deep ocean. They are whatever depth the water is below 30°. Some considerations of diving change if you cannot or not plan to surface - ever. We are talking open diving bell environments here and heh - topmarines or ü-boats :) They have a very easy source of energy in the gradient between the very hot atmosphere and the cooler ocean water. no need for nukes for power. you distill oxygen as a byproduct of that snorkeling process. main issue would be metals.
if you could get a starship booster to work with similar reliability you could put up about 2-3 times the m³ of the ISS with each launch (assuming a wet-workshop design for he upper stage where the empty fuel tanks are prepared to be made habitable).
assuming an "ISS" can host 10 people that means for 20k people in orbit you need 50 boosters launch 20 times each for a total of 1k launches. This is a very small amount for a larger country like the US on a war economy considering that the upper stages would be the somewhat easier to construct parts.
I would assume that basically every industralized country on earth put up at least as many.
I write this from memory so its possible that i misremember :)
On paper modernizing S3 made even sense since getting all the system components to work nicely with S3 is not an easy task. What wasn't thought off is that handling the same task in modern standby generally isn't easier.
Well not even high skill - for "security" reasons and to prevent support issues as well as to skimp on testing needed informations are often only accessible to a chosen few.
Paradoxically the effect of thes "security" concerns often mean that there are plenty of easily exploited methods in devices like that. And the only people that have them are the ones that you need to worry about instead of some 16 year old teenager finding it and playing blinkenlights with his friends parents house causing trouble for him but getting the hard coded backdoor taken out after the media got wind of it.
If I was dictator of infrastructure I would ban any non-local two way communication and would mandate all small grid storage solutions run off a curve flattening model thats uniform and predictable. Basically they would store first and only be allowed to emit a fraction of their storage capacity to the grid afterwards. Maybe regulated by time of day.
So if you store and analyze everything "locally" to your server you don't need cookies and therefore no banner no matter how much you "track" since its all request made to your own server you merly use the telemetry of.
You can't share that data without consent but thats a seperate data protection thing from the cookie banners.
Lets just think about your 3B weighloss thing leaving out complications like its a spherical cow in a vaccum - there are enough overweight people in the world that if you can sell enough of it to each of them at a 10USD profit in total you easily make that back. Imagine what a 20usd per cured overweight person profit would do. isn't doubling your money enough? And considering that new potentially overweight people are born every day it would be a perpetual (spherical) cash cow.
Looking in from the outside this whole reasoning seems to me like some kind of propaganda thats meant to me easily swallowed by americans.
It seems like a deflection that sells the disparity by leveraging american exceptionalism (US medicine is the best) to be swallowed resulting in variying thoughts depending on the disposition of the recipient ranging between "i am glad we are helping those poor people" to "WAAAA why should I pay for them".
But neither of it is really true. The truth as it looks from the outside is that the american people are simply taken for a ride by pretty much all the parts of the healthcare sector.
Many countries that are comparitively rich should see similar high prices. This is not the case. Also when looking at the develpment costs of some of the most expensive drugs the high prices are simply not justified.
Especially in cases where the main costs for a manufacturer is marketing because development was fully or partially financed from public money.
I mean aside from insulin the epipen price hikes are also well known about. As manufacturing technics improve and whatever cost overheads are payed off the prices should go down for all drugs. This is not the case at all somehow.
From your video you came to almost exact the same solution I have. :) I really can suggest trying to run it from a servo board - it has all the stuff for smooth movement already in it.
My one holdup is that its hard to find a TFT of exactly the right rize for the upper part. Also the volume/balance sliders get in the way a bit s the mechanical design is harder than anticipated. Also I feel that FDM printing doesn't do it justice.
Update: forgot to include the trick - cheap servos are crap because of the cheap potiometers. The electronics have to work and are the cheapest way to compensate for sub-standard parts elsewhere so they are somewhat ok. So if you combine the board from a 1EUR servo with an ALPS linear motorized slider that has a super high quality potiometer since its far larger and you would hear it being crap - the gears and motor are also good. This combined with the board from the servo gets you super smooth control.
The glas used would probably be ok if the flaps held up.