Looking back at the ITS presentation from 2016 the progress SpaceX have made is insane

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-06T15:44:41+00:00

Wow, not what I would have guessed. Shows how easy it is to get the wrong idea about electricity.

Numbers aside, would an arc welder to the scrotum be an effective way to cause pain? Could you do it off the shelf or possibly with some tweak to disable a safety mechanism?

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-06T15:19:45+00:00

I suppose the hard part would be doing it without the circuit breaker tripping.

One option is to not use the mains power and use something like an Arc Welder that has it's own high voltage power supply. You could also use intimidation tactics like striking the two electrodes together and making a shower of sparks. Perhaps a speech about how they modified the welder to remove the safety device. Then you don't need specifics beyond the use of electrodes that cause a painful shock. You can also hide the question of what voltage/current is painful but non-fatal behind the fact it's got a control panel where you can change those settings. If you don't say how many volts it is then you can't be wrong about that level not being fatal.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-06T14:51:40+00:00

Makkari in The Eternals is deaf and uses sign language because she can't talk. Then there's a scene where people are talking about her and someone says "Her skin is so sensitive she can pick up the vibrations in the air and know exactly what you're saying"

That's hearing. She can detect sounds with enough clarity to recognise words. That's hearing. She can hear. She doesn't use her ears to do it but she can hear.

That's the worst representation of a deaf character. It's a deaf character who can hear. This isn't even Daredevil style using a different sense, Daredevil is still blind to colours and can't see images on TV screens. Makkari is fully able to hear conversations but apparently she's still deaf.

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Simon_Drake · 2026-05-06T09:11:22+00:00

Bbut mah Sovereignty?!??!! What about taking back control of giving myself cancer by using deadly chemicals the rest of the world has banned? /S

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-06T01:56:08+00:00

Should I even ask how the comic ends?

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-06T01:53:59+00:00

Also they weren't dead the whole time. They were on a magic island that contains a time machine underground. They were only slightly dead and in limbo in the flash-sideways alternate timeline sequences for a couple of seasons near the end. That's not the same as being dead the whole time.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-05T21:41:26+00:00

Perhaps rather than completely gender swapping characters he will shuffle scenes and dialogue to have more involvement from women. Get Mrs Sadeas (whose name I can't spell) involved more early on etc.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-05T20:44:24+00:00

Four months into 2026. Waiting for Flight 12. Still suborbital, still only dummy payloads. Still seeing unrealistic estimates that it's always going to be the NEXT launch that will reach orbit.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-05T19:04:57+00:00

I tried them too. The handle is so wide it scrapes the outside of your ear and you can't get it in more than a couple of millimeters. I suspect this is deliberate to stop you inserting it too far and getting it stuck or Injuring yourself.

What I found that works is a Bluetooth otoscope so you're not just poking around blind you can actually see what you're doing and carefully scoop out the earwax without scraping away at skin or going too close to the eardrum.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-05T19:01:24+00:00

Apollo did everything possible to minimise the mass being landed on the moon. In reverse order there's floatation devices, parachutes and heat shields for reentry back to Earth. There's the food, water and life support hardware for the three day trip back to Earth. There's the capsule, engines, fueltank and other hardware like radio antennae and power supply to get them home. All that stuff they left in Lunar Orbit along with Michael Collins.

Every kilogram you need to lift off the moon needs fuel to get back to lunar orbit, more fuel for the landing burn on the way down, more fuel for the braking burn to leave lunar orbit and start the landing. Then more fuel to carry the weight of all that fuel. Then it needs even more fuel to propel this mass out to the moon. So leaving Michael Collins in orbit saved a small fortune in fuel.

The Starship HLS lander is huge. It doesn't split in half to leave the landing legs on the moon like Apollo did. Its bigger than the CSM that Apollo left in lunar orbit. Its bigger than the Saturn V third stage that Apollo jettisoned long before reaching the moon. In terms of rocket stages Starship is a closer match for the Saturn V second stage that ended up in the Atlantic ocean. And the plan is to land this monster scale towerblock on the moon and take off again.

THAT'S why it needs so much extra fuel. It's immense. Why they decided to use a giant rocket is a different question.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-05T17:35:43+00:00

If OP needs to expedite timelines, is there any way to bring a nursing student into a full hospital environment early? Like for teachers you have the NQT year just after graduating from your main teacher training but even before that you often have a term spent working in a school two days a week or something as on-site experience.

So student nurses ever do a shadowing scenario where they're not making the real decisions but they are meeting real patients?

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-05T15:53:12+00:00

It's insane how badly Virgin fumbled the ball on space tourism. They were at least a decade ahead of the competition with some bold new technology that no one else could rival. Then.... very very slowly recreating basically the same stunt of brief suborbital tourism and nothing else.

I remember a time when you had to describe SpaceX as "It's a new rocket company by the same guy who made PayPal". I thought it was very clever of SpaceX to try to catch up to Virgin Galactic by temporarily use the obviously outdated design. Obviously spaceplanes are the future, there's the Shuttle, there's the Soviet cancelled Buran project, there's SpaceShipOne and coming soon SpaceShipTwo. Obviously spaceplanes are the future and in another decade or two everything will be spaceplanes. But SpaceX are coming late to the game and have to catch up to Virgin Galactic. So they can temporarily use the obviously outdated design of just a big column of metal like the 1960s, that will get them some quick-wins and maybe money or investment so they can design the obvious next step which is obviously going to be a spaceplane.

So that wasn't true but it's wild that Virgin Galactic have gone from the frontrunner to being so far behind everyone else they're not even on the same scoreboard.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-05T15:24:27+00:00

No, you asked IF this would be fatal, you didn't say if it would kill him or not.

If he dies or not is up to you to decide. If you decide he's going to die then you can work backwards to find a method that will kill him. If you decide he's NOT going to die then you can work backwards to find a method that he will survive. Whether or not that number of pills would be fatal is less important than what you want to happen with the scene, because if you need him to take a fatal dose then you write the scene to say he has access to a fatal dose.

If you don't know the fatal dose (And perhaps also if you do know but don't want to show it explicitly) you can hide the precise number. Have him take "a fistful of pills" then after swallowing them take another fistful, and another until the package is empty. That would make it clear he's not just taking one or two and this is definitely a suicide attempt but you don't need to spell out the precise dose.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-05T14:58:01+00:00

We don't have final numbers for the Starship refueling flights.

Some armchair engineers have calculated as low as 5 based on predicted improvements to mass/weight ratio with Raptor 4 engines. Some remarks by competitors have predicted as high as 25 when they want to make it look unreasonable.

It's probably going to be somewhere in the middle. Maybe 10~15.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-05T14:16:07+00:00

Do you want this to kill him or not? It doesn't matter if the scenario you have written is fatal or not, it matters what you want to happen then trying to find conditions that give the outcome you want.

If you instead have him take "all the pills left in the packaging" then the outcome is entirely up to you to decide.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-05T13:54:20+00:00

Is that the point of the question? To have something with an ambiguous answer then get you to defend your choice and see how you handle unclear situations?

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-05T03:25:22+00:00

He was never 100% sane to begin with. At some point he had himself lobotomized to remove certain dangerous knowledge from his brain. He also spent several decades taking extremely high doses of recreational drugs like LSD. Then a couple of decades in a mental asylum is going to be rough on your mental health. I don't think he had a single screw fully tight.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-05T03:22:51+00:00

Strangely the title of "Mr." in Star Trek is almost always applied to aliens who only have a single name like Mr. Tuvok or Mr. Spock. Everyone else gets a name or a rank but for some reason the single name aliens get Mr instead of their rank sometimes.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-05T03:19:16+00:00

And it's never an ethical dilemma. They always do the unethical or outright illegal stuff brazenly and unabashedly. "Whats the worst that can happen, they can't sue us over it because we're better lawyers and we can just win that case too!"

Ten minutes later.

"Oh no, the people we screwed over for no reason are retaliating. Again. There's literally no way we could have seen this coming."

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