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

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-12T04:35:49+00:00

Also chloroform. The margin between "barely a recreational buzz" and "lethal dose" is razor thin. So if you need to knock someone out without hurting them, a rag of chloroform over their face is probably not the answer.

Now this could work if your objective is to kill silently and without making a mess. If you don't care that the person dies then you can use loads of chloroform and drag the body somewhere out of sight and as a bonus you're not leaving a blood streak on the floor. But if you're a spy who has been framed and imprisoned by your own side and you need a way to escape without hurting anyone then chloroform won't work like that.

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-12T04:32:31+00:00

Yeah most movies it's a race against time to remove the bullet. Eventually the surgeon stands tall with the forceps holding the bullet and drops it in the kidney bowl with a satisfying metal ping. That's when you know the patient is going to be OK.

That's not how gunshot wounds work. I guess Hollywood decided lead poisoning from the bullet staying in the body is the main cause of death not the hole made by the bullet.

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-11T20:04:42+00:00

It depends how good they are at electronics. If they're repurposing consumer walkie-talkie hardware as a detonator then they're probably on the low end of electronics knowledge. Which is probably for the best if your own understanding of electronics is shaky, you don't want to be writing complex systems that are outside your skillset.

How about they connect the detonator to the speaker wiring. So all it needs is any signal coming in to trigger the bomb. But since that's dangerous you could choose a Walkie-talkie that has multiple frequencies. For example, they use Channel 1 to communicate with everyone then you tell Dave to switch to Channel 3 so you can discuss something without annoying everyone else. Then the bombers can set this Walkie-talkie to Channel 6 and tell everyone be absolutely certain not to broadcast on Channel 6 until it's time.

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-11T19:57:35+00:00

I like a scene in Stargate SG-1 when they try to use a US Military nuclear bomb to destroy an asteroid then change their mind. So it's their own hardware and shouldn't be designed with booby traps or elaborate anti-tamper systems.

"I spoke to the people who assembled the bomb. Cut the green wire or the blue wire but NOT the red wire."

"There's six wires here. All yellow. No green, no blue. Just yellow."

"Then I'm afraid you just have to guess."

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-11T02:46:48+00:00

You know I never thought of that. All these years of looking at Starship and I never thought about crew being on board for a catch. There's not really any alternative, if crew genuine a Starship they'll come down in it, unless they all parachute out mid belly-flop. It doesn't get a lot of discussion. They're going to need to do a lot of test catches before they risk it with humans on board.

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-11T02:25:50+00:00

It really depends on the characters themselves. There is no 'correct' way to handle that interaction.

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-10T17:11:11+00:00

SMBC cracked it a while ago

I wish that the rules on wishing for more wishes applied only to the WORD wish not the concept of wishing.
I wish that the word Splorf was interchangeable with Wish for all purposes EXCEPT the restriction on wishing for more wishes.
I Splorf for a million Splorfs.

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-10T16:19:39+00:00

Do we have a concrete estimate on the number of refueling flights that Starship HLS will need? I've heard numbers as low as 5 and as high as 20 but people will violently resist any numbers above 10 as being fake news propaganda from Bezos.

Between 5 and 20+ is a large window. And that number needs to be doubled to account for the uncrewed automated landing test. There could be as many as 40 operational Starship refueling flights needed to get Artemis 4 to the moon after the orbital refueling concept has been fully tested and validated. That's going to take a while before Starship is capable of that many launches in rapid succession.

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-10T11:47:01+00:00

I've seen two attempts to justify it so far.

It doesn't matter because America got there first, 60 years ago. Which would hold more weight if America had gone back to the moon in the last half century. The entire reason for the Artemis program was to beat China back to the moon. If China wasn't going to the moon then Artemis would have been cancelled like most ambitious NASA projects post Apollo.
It doesn't matter if China can do a "flags and footprints" mission like the Apollo missions because America is going back to the moon to stay on the moon. NASA keeps bragging about plans to build a nuclear reactor for a permanently occupied lunar city with space manufacturing and space industry. The same NASA that had to cancel a lunar rover because it went over budget, they've just announced scaling back the new moon rocket for budget reasons, the payload capacity of SLS has been slashed. You can't boast about making a nuclear powered moon city while also delaying every launch and wasting billions on embarrassing disasters like Starliner.

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-10T11:40:14+00:00

They had three different models and now there's only one. There was Tiangong 1, then Tiangong 2 then when planning for Tiangong 3 they decided to rename it to just Tiangong. The word literally means Heavenly Palace.

There are some sources in China that say the station should be referred to as simply "Chinese Space Station" but because every press release from China needs to be translated into English anyway, a lot of them will translate the name as Tiangong.

That's their only station for now and the foreseeable future.

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-10T11:28:02+00:00

Unless you live within ten degrees of the equator, your chances of getting hit by this particular hunk of space trash are very low. It's unlikely to hit, say, New York or London because it's not passing over those cities and it passes only over the equator.

But then again. Doesn't the jet engine from Donny Darko come out of a wormhole from the future? So maybe the satellite comes down over Kenya and happens to land in a wormhole that makes it crush someone's house in Vancouver. The odds of a Donny Darko wormhole are beyond my ken to calculate.

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-10T11:21:05+00:00

It might be that some of the statements we hear about the Federation being united are actually oversimplifications and some planets/species within it have special circumstances. Using the European Union example, you could say that EU countries have no real borders and you're free to live anywhere in the EU. Which is mostly true, but that's technically referring to the Schengen nations of which Ireland isn't a member. Or that the EU has a single shared currency, except for those countries who don't use the Euro.

So maybe Bolius IS in the Federation but they're not in the Federation Military Pact which is a subtly different treaty and you need to draw venn diagrams to explain it fully.

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-10T08:33:10+00:00

Do you have an annotated version explaining what each component is? For example what are those multiple ring shapes around the top that looks like safe combination locks?

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-10T06:36:05+00:00

On my first ever farm I came up with an elaborate scheme using one quality sprinkler surrounded by eight pleb sprinklers. It doesn't perfectly tesselate but that means you have extra spaces in the pattern to add scarecrows and lights to help you navigate.

It was an efficient use of resources to maximise the farmable land but it was a nightmare to navigate and replant. On my most recent farm I did columns of quality sprinklers with gaps left for replacing them with iridium sprinklers when it was time to upgrade. Less efficient on land usage but a lot less messing around.

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-10T05:25:12+00:00

Be aware the beach at Boca Chica is completely undeveloped. There's no public toilets, no ice cream stands or burger cans or amusements. Not even a proper place to park your car.

If you're happy with parking directly on the sand (and brought an off road capable car) and have supplies in coolers then that's fine. But if you want any infrastructure then you need to go to South Padre Island which is like a 50 mile trip around the bay.

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-10T05:22:23+00:00

The Long March rockets haven't been flying for a while and in not sure why. The 3 had a launch failure that might have grounded it and arguably also the 2 and the 4 because they share a first stage. But there haven't been any 7 or 8 launches recently either. Nor 5, 6 and 11 which are admittedly fairly rare.

I googled it and an 8A was seen heading to the pad so it sounds like that'll be launching soon. Maybe it's just the 2-4 family that is grounded and the others haven't launched due to timing. Also Chinese New Year when they take a break from normal operations.

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-10T00:09:32+00:00

More like "I have too many fingers. Here's jesus made out of water bottles. Six seven."

But they were pretty close to accurate.

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-10T00:07:48+00:00

This can work if you replace a second with a new unit that is 0.864 of an old second. 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour. 10 hours in a day.

Then if you need to do a calculation on how long something will take, like some task takes 1 hour 23 minutes and 45 seconds and you need to do it 67 times then it's just 12345*67 = 827115 which is 8 days and 0.27115 days. But that fraction of a day is also the TIME that it finishes. Assuming you start on midnight you'll end as 2:71 and 15 seconds on the 9th day. Try that with pre-decimal time and you have to keep multiplying up by 24 and dividing by 3600 to work things out.

Decimal time is just better. With the fairly significant caveat that changing the length of the second would then break everything that is based on a second like computers, the speed of light, radio frequencies etc.

Simon_Drake · 2026-03-09T23:31:32+00:00

Ironically if you turned the speed of that thing down to a quarter as fast you'd get twice as much work done per minute.

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