Jump to content

JB0

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    13241

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by JB0

  1. JB0
    They actually call out in SDF that they're putting people in planes and promoting people faster than they really ought to be. Right from the start, the Macross is trapped behind enemy lines with a massive shortage of pilots and a lot of uncrewed planes(with roughly half of their Valkyrie complement having come from the not-airtight Prometheus). They need butts in seats faster than they can train them.
  2. JB0
    Hey, it's not MY fault they're clumsy barbarians that don't know how to handle quality merchandise! Jerks were probably throwing it at the wall like a bunch of three-year-olds.
  3. JB0
    I love Isamu.
  4. JB0
    Okay, that's kinda awesome.
  5. JB0
    It gives me an idea! I shall start my own toy company! Our products may not be as good as the others, owing to a lack of engineering skill and budget for quality manufacturing, but I'll make it up by mounting lead weights in the torso!
  6. JB0
    Trufax: When I watched that movie with family the other day, my mother sang along with, I believe, every song on the soundtrack.
  7. JB0
    All but the first stage of the mighty Saturn V were H/O engines. Which was novel at the time, if I recall.
  8. JB0
    If it happens and if Capcom manages to not QBert it up beyond all recognition.
  9. JB0
    Yeah. Windows strongly believes that it is the only operating system on a computer, so it blows away any existing bootloaders during install.
  10. JB0
    Also to sell toys. Much harder. In the atmosphere, you can dump a lot of heat into the air around you. In space, the only wayss to get heat out are infrared radiation and ejection of heated mass. Conduction and convection cease to be viable cooling mechanisms.
  11. JB0
    Because BOMBA! ... Or possibly he has a CRAZY tobacco addiction.
  12. JB0
    It's interesting that you call kerosene horrible stuff while hoping for a rocket fueled with hydrogen peroxide or hydrazine, as both are horrible fuels to deal with. That hydrazine is the fuel used in most attitude thrusters says far less about how nice it is than it does about how terrible the rest of the monopropellants are, because hydrazine is nasty stuff. I mean, I suppose hydrogen peroxide has the advantages of being relatively non-toxic and clean-burning, but it also has the disadvantage of being WILDLY unstable. In that it breaks down exothermically(releasing heat), and breaking down with heat(among many, many other things). Which results in a vicious chain reaction as it begins to break down, heats itself up, breaks down faster because of the heat, heating itself more, in a race to the combustion point. And since it's a monopropellant, it's fuel AND oxidizer. So when it reaches that combustion point, the entire mass bursts into flame all at once. Bad in a spill, worse in a tank. That said... we Americans use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for our main engines these days. If you can find a copy, I strongly recommend reading John Clark's "Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants". It is both hilarious and educational, and written to be accessible to non-physics majors.
  13. JB0
    Man, and I thought Tatooine was a poor place to call home. I pity any child that grows up on Pluto.
  14. JB0
    ALL of us are moving there.
  15. JB0
    Don't know yet. You do have a year to consider this, so I'd wait a few months and see what the consensus is after the launch sh!tstorm and inevitable growing pains have died down.
  16. JB0
    I think I ranted during Frontier about their explaining why there's a time difference between the folks inside a space fold and the folks outside it. (I still maintain that it was dumb and inconsistent.)
  17. JB0
    It's what NASA's New Horizons team wants, but official names are subject to IAU approval. So unless the IAU hates fun, those are "real".
  18. JB0
    I throw it in every now and then. It's a sort of pretty-but-dumb that I find very enjoyable.
  19. JB0
    HE'S GOT A BOBOMB!
  20. JB0
    All I'm sayin' is if they reinstate Pluto as a planet instead of just the first and best of the Kuiper Belt, they better do the same for Planet Ceres. Man, that article makes all KINDS of factual errors. I mean, impulse drives are TOTALLY newtonian! They eject mass out one end to generate an acceleration, and use inertial damping fields to allow a large acceleration from a small force. This is more like Larry Niven's reactionless thruster, which does what it says. If they're going to get something as basic as THAT wrong, it casts doubt on everything they write! More seriously... 1. NASA carefully avoided making any claims about how or why it appeared to work. They very much did not claim it was "manipulating subatomic particles which constantly pop in and out of existence in empty space." They DID claim to also measure a thrust on what he assured them was a non-functional thruster, though. 2. And what the heck is a "standard photon rocket", anyways? Why aren't they comparing it to ion drives, which ACTUALLY EXIST and offer many of the same advantages as the alleged reactionless thruster? I am interested, and await more information, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and "violates conservation of momentum" is a hell of an extraordinary claim. I expect to see this eventually deflated, but... he's successfully conning experts who expect a con, so it's inherently interesting even if it gets debunked eventually.
  21. JB0
    Oh, also... The naming scheme is a little more complicated than that. http://www.ourpluto.org/pluto It involved a public, global vote/write-in campaign and a calculated effort to maintain a multicultural presence. Macross, as it happens, was "Favored by 30% of the voters from eastern Asia."
  22. JB0
    Awww, we got a canyon? I was really hoping for a mountain.
  23. JB0
    Why is KITT missing? I feel snubbed!
  24. JB0
    That clay model was pretty sweet, yeah. And I too would like a Sophia 3rd/Metal Attacker. Even if it didn't do hover mode.
  25. JB0
    That's awesome! I have a soft spot for the M-308 Gunner. Especially the big clamp that attaches the gun to the forearm. Game itself is wildly overlooked, too. Hurts to be an NES game hitting the same year as the Super Nintendo. Not even looking better than early Super Nintendo games can save you.
×
×
  • Create New...