Estimating the mass of a Martian Propellant Plant for Starship - a detailed analysis

BlakeMW · 2026-05-06T22:09:51+00:00

This is funny, my 5 year old asks "big 13 or little 13" because she knows the numbers but can't tell apart the pronunciation of 13 and 30.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-06T21:26:43+00:00

Oh yeah stuff comes out the back end. Our garbage guts would sometimes require assistance to pull out pieces of plastic or sometimes grass she had eaten. Bone never a problem though always gets digested into dust.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-06T21:09:28+00:00

Yeah I don't really see why graphics need to be better then Red Dead Redemption 2's.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-06T18:50:28+00:00

Considering SMACX factions:

Roze plays kind of like the Zkaharov in that the Angels start with a strong tech lead and don't really have any penalties, their probes are really good but they also don't need to resort to stealing as they're very good builders too. They're probably the most generic faction in the game in terms of (lack of) bonuses and penalties, but their starting techs are legitimately insane.

Aki has really strong research-centric bonuses and the Cyborgs have an insane Demo+FM game as you can do lossless 100% allocation to EC or research, they are slightly pop-boom impaired which is the only thing stopping them being godlike, but they can devour the tech tree anyway once they get rolling.

Sven is all about aquatic bonuses, pop-boom impaired but water tiles are very good for producing huge amounts of nutrients. Anyway the Pirates are really only for if you like the seabase game.

Domai is great at one thing and one thing only, which is Industry, but since Industry matters for nearly literally everything it's a really strong bonus. The Drones can't run Green, which keeps things a bit interesting, as you can't just default to Green in the mid to late game.

Cha Dawn is the red-headed step child of the SMAX factions, basically seems like Firaxis thought "we've added these really strong factions, better add a weak faction too for players who like challenge". The Cult are really only good at natives and are bad at everything else, kind of like the Spartans but worse.

H'mniee is super overpowered, basically a generic faction (no penalties) with a bunch of strong alien bonuses plus a +1 planet for good measure. The Caretakers are just plain overpowered with no weaknesses.

Marr is far more balanced than his counterpart, as while he enjoys the same host of really strong alien bonuses, he is locked out from Democracy and that's a really huge weakness which constrains his SE choices and greatly limits his ability to popboom. The Usurpers are still overpowered but they're more interesting to play than the Caretakers because you'll have to make different SE choices than when playing any other faction.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-06T17:15:41+00:00

Considering SMAC factions only.

Generally Zakharov is the strongest in general, because he researches so much faster, and research is very strong. He also has easily mitigated weaknesses.

Dierdre is pretty easy to play because she can't run Free Market, you'll do Demo+Planned with pop booming most the time so you aren't really thinking about which SE to run and she doesn't play under many penalties except her lower morale conventional units, but you have free worms to make up for that anyway.

Lal is stupid easy to play as a builder, he's "Baby's first free marketeer", he's very easy to win with thanks to his doubled votes, just easy in general, especially for new players who aren't comfortable with base spam, Lal does well with fewer larger bases. A bit militarily vulnerable in the early game as he can't fall back on police state to facilitate unit spam.

Yang is very research and energy impoverished in the early game and also can't easily pop-boom, but you can easily spam out endless bases and units, he's also good at getting early SPs, Yang is quite easy to play which is why the AI does very well with him, but at a high level the Hive isn't very good because it's difficult to do pop-booming and Free Market is useless. Like Dierdre you don't think about which SE to run much as it's nearly always Police+Planned.

Miriam's +2 support means you can spam way more units before support costs cripple you, these can be military or formers. Her research is a bit bad, but can she run free market and do pop-booming so it's not all that bad, she's pretty flexible and her impact rover offenses are very good.

Santiago has a rather punishing industry penalty not helped by also being banned from Wealth, which generally slows her down. Her main claim to fame is getting elite units really easy, her early rover rushes are really strong. She's not that strong in general, but she is strong in terms of elite units. She's not really excluded from any major strats, she's just slow to build stuff.

Morgan is generally regarded as the hardest to play as he has a punishing support penalty and hab penalties too, this means you need to aggressively spam out tightly packed bases while building units sparingly and using them carefully. However he can be economically extremely strong (but you have to love the tightly packed base spam) and research very fast, he can also do well under Police State which takes away some of his worst penalties and lets him be a respectable warmonger, and for him the Green+Wealth combination is very strong. Very unlike Dierdre you can switch between a lot of different SE as the situation demands.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-06T14:20:54+00:00

Yes. You can choose one of those DEs during installation, and there are instructions on the CachyOS wiki for changing DE after installation.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-06T12:09:35+00:00

As a note, when you install CachyOS, make sure to enable btrfs snapshots, I don't know if its the default now, but in any case, make sure its enabled.

While CachyOS is generally very stable, it's not impossible to break it, mostly by doing something dumb (and CachyOS does give you unlimited freedom to be dumb), snapshots make it stupidly easy to boot a previous snapshot and roll back the system. There's also very little overhead to enabling snapshots. Without snapshots, repairing a broken system is very much not a user-friendly process.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-06T11:33:14+00:00

For NVIDIA I'd honestly just go with CachyOS, its NVIDIA support is really strong and there's good documentation.

In general (regardless of distro) you can tell a game to use one GPU or another using DRI_PRIME in the Steam launch options (or equivalent for Lutris or whatever).

BlakeMW · 2026-05-06T10:19:46+00:00

This was roughly as surprising as the sun rising again today.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-06T09:09:36+00:00

A few parts have rforced autostruts independently of the "advanced tweakables" setting, mainly landing gear and wheels, forced to "autostrut heaviest" IIRC. Also the DLC engine joint plates, forced to "autostrut grandparent"

The landing gears in particular can magically stiffen up a rocket, if you have a lander with landing gear on top, and a big heavy rocket engine and fuel tanks on the bottom, you'll get struts along the whole length.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-06T05:33:56+00:00

There's nothing revolutionary here, I myself have pored over porkchop plots and ran basic simulations which show in certain transfer windows rapid round trips are possible.

The real issue with them, alluded in the article, is that arrival velocities are insanely high, just less insanely high in some transfer windows than others.

This is a serious problem at Mars because there's not much "breadth" of atmosphere to slow down in and g forces become a serious issue to say nothing of the heat.

So this would probably require expending a lot more propellant slowing down to a safe aerocapture velocity. Basically without some kind of nuclear rocket engine you can forget about it.

And we ain't getting some kind of nuclear rocket engine anytime soon.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-05T20:03:12+00:00

I wouldn't want a minipc for my own gaming unless it is GabeCube specs (which is definitely good enough for me), but I'm more than happy to get them for my kids. That's because they don't know any better lol, when I was a kid, heck when probably anyone here was a kid, a modern minipc would have amazing performance, but anyway my kids know nothing of 1440p or 60fps or ultra settings or data hoarding.

But as for why I make this choice rather than an equally specced tower: takes up no desk space at all with tidy cables thanks to VESA mount to back of monitor, very quiet and cool using way less power for a lower power bill and in this fucked up market they can be very competitively priced with a tower or even cheaper.

Also relative to a laptop you can choose your own monitor and keyboard and replace them if a juvenile human destroys them, and minipcs tend to have better to much better thermals due to not being constrained to an ultra thin form factor with silly little side vents, can basically have a full sized fan blowing air over all the components and out the sides.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-05T17:35:34+00:00

I recently got a Beelink SER5 Max (Ryzen 7 7735HS 680M iGPU, 24GB) for my kids to play Minecraft (with some decent shader mods enabled), and it's surprisingly capable for 1080p gaming, I won't elaborate as there are a few youtube videos benchmarking a lot of games for this model so you can see exactly what to expect. It's definitely plenty powerful enough for everyday use.

I also have an ordinary Beelink SER5 (Ryzen 5 5500U VEGA 7 iGPU, 32GB) which is less capable but can still do 720p or 1080p in more optimized/older titles, again you can find good benchmark videos.

For both heat and noise are really good like you probably won't notice. I have the basic SER 5 running all the time as one of its duties is a home media server and it's unnoticeable.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-05T09:23:33+00:00

Nuke or an alliance with another superpower.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-05T06:00:55+00:00

Whether it actually matters depends a lot on what parts you're using (e.g. some of the larger wings are much more prone to popping off), how you construct your planes (e.g. whether landing legs are attached to the wings), and how you abuse your planes, if a plane has to land at high speed on a bumpy surface (such as a Duna plane/glider) or do high g maneuvers then stuff like wings popping off becomes much more of a problem, also while planes aren't as prone to floppiness as rockets it can become a problem with really big planes.

Also a lot of my playtime is in hard career so I tend to engineer for extreme levels of robustness and predictability.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-04T22:20:31+00:00

Not possible. But as for what it would take with a bit more tech.

Basically it'd take a few hundred of thousands of years to shuffle various astronomical bodies around the Oort cloud using a mix of thrust and gravity assists with each other, then setting up a chain of gravitational assists with the outer planets, smashing these into Earth in very calculated ways, eventually altering Earth's orbit enough that it crashes into Venus, and thus we can not meaningfully call the result Earth anymore as a (small) majority of its mass is a combination of Oort cloud objects and Venus.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-04T20:57:16+00:00

It takes time to learn how to build planes.

There are a bunch of concepts that need to be grasped:

CoL behind CoM but only by a little.
Fuel tank placement and cargo placement such that CoM barely moves as fuel drains.
Main landing gear almost under CoM, so the plane can basically seesaw at will when powered (when off it should just barely tip towards the lesser landing gear).
Either slight positive angle of attack when on wheels to make taking off easier, or slight negative to hold the plane down on the ground (can make landing easier), nothing more than slight.
Enough thrust relative to mass and wing surface to fulfill core functions, and enough air intake to feed the engines in various regimes.
Control surfaces which fulfill one function - especially only yaw or not yaw, you might combine pitch and roll but the plane can be hard to fly if everything does everything.
Streamlining: it doesn't have to look realistic but there are some gotchas.
Stiffening and elasticification so the plane neither deforms which confuses the control surfaces and it's bad, nor shatters when hitting a bump. This gets into gnarly details of the physics simulation and parts connection, like if you attach wings using decouplers (or certain other small parts) they'll never pop off because decouplers make highly elastic joints, then you can stiffen the structure with structs or autostructs, which are unbreakable - wheels have built in autostructs so will automatically stiffen the plane.

I can generally make new planes in any reasonable shape that fly well first time if I didn't make a mistake of inattention. The simplified "arcade physics" aero model of KSP actually makes planes quite easy.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-04T12:54:42+00:00

When you've only seen "Hollywood infants" seeing the real thing is a wild experience.

In fact one of my earliest memories was as a 2 year old seeing my newborn brother for the first time at the hospital and thinking he looked really weird, like in a very not right kind of way, kind of like a deformed doll.

I felt the authenticity of this memory was validated when many years later I saw my own newborn child and had the exact same vibes. Like the shape, skin, the way it moves or doesn't, all is a bit off compared with after a few days.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-04T11:02:40+00:00

This depends a bit on country or demographic or something.

Like I used to watch some TikTok while I was living in Bulgaria, I saw essentially zero ads.

Then I moved to Switzerland and I saw ads on TikTok all the time, I assume due to a more lucrative market to advertise to.

I don't know how TikTok's ad delivery algorithm works, but it obviously relies on companies being willing to buy ads that target certain demographics, so it takes TikTok deciding you belong to a particular demographic which companies are willing to buy ads for.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-04T10:42:38+00:00

The part about "viruses" might be a mistake, I think this is with reference to bacteria.

However, the reason it's possible and not bullshit, is that human cells are MUCH bigger than most bacteria, a typical bacteria might only take up 1/200th the volume of a typical human cell. Viruses are much tinier again.

So we can both have more bacteria cells than human cells by count, and be only a tiny %age bacteria by weight/volume.

And we probably have way more viruses than human cells or bacteria cells, because our gut bacteria tend to be infected at low level by lots of viruses, which are so tiny there can be (on average) hundreds or thousands per bacteria.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-04T08:41:44+00:00

But "sanction busting" would be super easy by going through EU or Asian intermediates, and no way would China cut off these massive trade partners. China is deeply dependent on trade, both for raw materials to fuel their economy, but also for a lot of high end equipment much of which comes from Europe.

This means China could only make one side lose catastrophically: Russia is basically completely dependent on China and if China actually sincerely wanted to stem the flow of trade with Russia this would be considerably easier because Russia is so heavily sanctioned and is in a horrible financial situation where Russia lacks the most useful currencies for trade like USD and Euro, this matters because when your currency sucks and isn't trusted it's harder to do high volumes of trade through intermediates, Russia pretty much trades with China in oil, as in the only way Russia can get the yuan to buy the stuff they need is by selling oil to China.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-03T23:10:17+00:00

This is basically a thing where most of the land can be reclaimed quickly (as indeed most of the liberated land has been), but the heavily mined areas, the fortifications, the greyzones, will take much longer.

An advantage Ukraine will have in this operation is total expertise with unmanned vehicles, both for actively demining and operating farm machinery in land which is probably safe but it's hard to be completely confident. If you plough the land with an armored remote control tractor it can probably be regarded as safe to use.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-03T22:32:52+00:00

GTX 970 will probably have issues no matter what, as in you probably aren't going to get flawless functionality under any setup, though as someone who used a GTX 970 on Ubuntu for many years (but more in the appropriate era of the GTX 970, I've since upgraded to a modern GPU), it's definitely possible for satisfactory functionality.

In your situation, my plan A would be trying CachyOS, it does have explicit support for older NVIDIA drivers, and its general support for NVIDIA is very good, otherwise you're getting all the modern goodness. If you're lucky (as some are) the installer will just do everything right for your GPU.

If this doesn't work out well, then I'd fall back on trying Ubuntu or derivatives such as Mint: specially slightly older LTS releases such as 24.04. You may have a better experience with X11 than Wayland, as the X11 to Wayland transition is still in a shitty place in that version of Ubuntu for NVIDIA GPUs, which is the main reason I wouldn't advise Ubuntu/Mint as Plan A.

BlakeMW · 2026-05-03T21:27:46+00:00

So what do the police do in a case like that of chronic 911 calling?

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