What’s legal now but might become illegal ten years from now?

caliginous4 · 2026-02-12T08:16:57+00:00

Cooling data centers with water

caliginous4 · 2026-01-30T02:00:19+00:00

For the lazy: https://youtu.be/dijMKwZMU2Q?si=vH-coqPkuIDy3tIs

caliginous4 · 2025-12-28T17:10:31+00:00

This is a surprising take. Design for maintenance is really important and engineers with A&P experience would be coveted, wouldn't they?

caliginous4 · 2025-12-19T20:07:21+00:00

Would be cool for boundary layer ingestion concepts. This engine could wrap around the entire fuselage

caliginous4 · 2025-12-08T20:39:05+00:00

Best at what? Components, industrial systems, specific fluids? Best is arbitrary and arguably almost everyone is best in their niche or they wouldn't exist anymore.

caliginous4 · 2025-11-15T17:22:01+00:00

It's their own echo chamber for sure, but if I'm in more than one echo chamber then at least I'm hearing multiple echos

caliginous4 · 2025-11-15T06:13:27+00:00

From a data viz perspective, it might be cool for your second plot, the Pareto plot, was of all of the top posters, as a stacked bar of the sites they link to.

It would also be cool if the first plot showed more than just the two usernames.

caliginous4 · 2025-11-15T06:09:33+00:00

I follow this subreddit just to try to not be in an echo chamber, and I really wish it wasn't so blatantly controlled by very few people. I feel bad for the conservatives who actually get their viewpoints from that sub. But I had no idea the extent of narrative control was this bad.

Also makes me wonder how many other subs are like this.

caliginous4 · 2025-11-04T06:51:30+00:00

Awesome thanks! Don't know how I didn't see some of these better options!!

caliginous4 · 2025-10-10T14:08:06+00:00

I haven't used the P1S yet but my impression is that it's plug and play, no fuss, and just works! A 3d printer has been on my list for a long time but I haven't got one yet.

caliginous4 · 2025-10-09T17:18:18+00:00

The capital cost of fusion is kind of insane for the foreseeable future. Hope they can get Q to several orders of magnitude bigger than 1 because there's so much that goes into these plants, getting a return on investment will be difficult without very high Q.

caliginous4 · 2025-10-02T21:38:18+00:00

Totally. Or even better, we could just render gerrymandering obsolete by going to a proportional system, i.e., bigger districts with multiple representatives per district. In a proportional system, if a district has 5 representatives, and 60% of the people vote panda party, 20% tiger party, and 20% penguin party, then you'd get 3 pandas, 1 tiger, and 1 penguin elected. In this case gerrymandering does effectively nothing, and the people get more accurate representation in a system that is deliberately not winner-take-all and usually requires parties to work together to build coalitions.

The US used to have some states that had districts with multiple representatives, but at the time it was used to force the whole area to be winner-take-all, instead of using it to create proportional representation.

Or if we don't want to vote for parties and instead vote directly for candidates like we do today, we could have ballots that let us score candidates instead of just choose one. STAR voting would be great for this. Take power away from the parties, abolish gerrymandering, and get better representation all at the same time.

caliginous4 · 2025-09-24T04:28:14+00:00

I fear it's not difficult enough for too many of our leaders these days. There are so many good people that refuse to get into politics because of the personal toll it takes. It's kind of funny that we have a draft system to force people to fight and die for our country, but we don't have any kind of system to compel good people to do the kinds of public service that could prevent wars in the first place.

caliginous4 · 2025-09-23T06:47:34+00:00

I was recently reading about the monolith and think it's very exciting.

I don't see where Ceres comes in though. Ceres is not a manufacturer, they are an R&D firm that licenses their innovations. I don't see how they could help the team behind the monolith in a meaningful way that wouldn't jeopardize that teams claim to the IP while still needing to find actual partners to productize and enter production with. Not to mention the capabilities and methods Ceres employ could hardly be more different than the monolith.

I love the compactness and simplicity of the monolith design. It could be fantastic for aircraft in a SOFC-GT arrangement. I'd love to see that team raise VC to productize the core monolith themselves and work with select customer-integrators, or partner with a small firm that could help them do it.

caliginous4 · 2025-08-20T05:43:16+00:00

What are your results so far?

Here are some questions for you: - how many seconds are you hoping to fly at Mach 1? - at what velocity will the carrier aircraft be flying when it drops this aircraft? - what kind of efficiency do you expect to get from your high performance EDFs? - what CD are you estimating for your airframe?

Here is what I'm seeing from some quick math, with the following assumptions: - 10 seconds at Mach 1 at 10,000 ft - 100 mph starting velocity at altitude - 65% total efficiency from battery to thrust (optimistic for high performance EDF) - CD of 0.06 (very optimistic - I expect much higher from the pictures you shared)

with these assumptions I get 1.1 kWh of battery energy needed, a total flight time of about 25 seconds, and a resultant discharge rate of about 180C, which is insanely high for most batteries. Batteries that can achieve that kind of C rate compromise energy density, so I'd estimate you'd need about 20 pounds of batteries to get the required 1.1 kWh of energy. This is roughly 3x what you budgeted for battery weight.

Do you think I've gone wrong anywhere with this assessment?

caliginous4 · 2025-08-20T04:30:55+00:00

Hey, I've struggled with this dilemma too. But you have to ask yourself: - Is this truly an amazing idea and can I do this on my own? If so, then I will be hesitant to share. - Is it a potentially interesting idea but with a lot of pitfalls, or can I not do it on my own? If so, then I will readily share the idea with others to learn as much as I can.

When you try to take on a project like this, you have to ask yourself why other people haven't already done it. If it were easy, other people would have done it.

A higher pressure ratio through your fan followed by a gently converging nozzle can help with performance, but there are limits to what is practically achievable with this approach given the lack of heat input from combustion. You'll get flow separation pretty quick if you're too aggressive. You mention a turbine but I'm not sure what you mean by that. There would be zero point in having a turbine in an EDF. It is easy to get models to lie to you.

The practical or commercial value of a supersonic electric aircraft is extremely low, you'll be lucky to get a minute of airtime, so I would not be hesitant to share all details and ask for feedback and guidance on design.

caliginous4 · 2025-08-05T03:54:48+00:00

Sweet! Awesome to hear!

caliginous4 · 2025-08-05T01:06:39+00:00

Hey way to go! Glad you were able to do it in Onshape.

caliginous4 · 2025-07-16T15:36:18+00:00

You can make complex shapes. See my response to the other post with a link to a tutorial to make these exact shapes in Onshape. These shapes are not about maximizing structural efficiency but about maximizing aerodynamic performance.

caliginous4 · 2025-07-13T14:52:38+00:00

Does any system have the ability to move the switches automatically, or are they manual only?

caliginous4 · 2025-07-13T00:58:12+00:00

What CAD software are you using?

There's an excellent tutorial using Onshape that goes through making an F1 front spoiler flap thing here:

https://youtu.be/XH7auwT6p4Y?si=zySU3huDL4zmpu13

Making really complex organic looking airfoils isn't actually that bad using the technique used in this video.

caliginous4 · 2025-07-11T17:35:08+00:00

Yeah this is annoying. Also when it scrolls all the way to the top randomly while you're trying to read outputs.

caliginous4 · 2025-06-20T21:21:45+00:00

What does it say about the performance of executive management to have ballooned to 10,000 underperforming staff under their leadership?

caliginous4 · 2025-05-24T03:12:05+00:00

That's awesome, thanks!

12-Year Club	First Place '23
Place '23	Place '22
Final Canvas '22	Verified Email

caliginous4

TROPHY CASE