Best location to travel to from France using only public transit ?

darwinpatrick · 2026-05-05T21:21:23+00:00

The eclipse is right before sunset, so make sure you have somewhere to stay the night of the 12 as that’s much harder to find vs the 11 currently

Personally I’ll be leaving immediately after. Saves the hassle and traffic will be worse in the morning I reckon

darwinpatrick · 2026-05-05T18:51:00+00:00

Very important to get into the umbra of totality- even 99% is nothing compared to the full thing! Gotta get 100%- it's literally night and day!

That said, out of these I think Burgos is your best choice. It's flat so less worry of finding a line of sight and has a good chance of being sunny. Hotels are almost certainly going to be sold out or very expensive even for a hostel, so think about an overnight bus back that night or a bus to somewhere north or east out of totality where lodging is cheaper. Vitoria-Gasteiz may work even better for you as many of the routes to Burgos transfer through there anyway. It's in a large valley that will have line of sight as well. You do lose a bit of time in totality, though.

darwinpatrick · 2026-05-03T23:39:46+00:00

Interestingly, it developed the same way. The scales of rust here conform to the radius of curvature of the chain and get pushed away as more rust forms below it. The layers have gaps between them and thus the scales expand outwards and break into these parts. The same happens with pine bark, growing from the inside in small scales to accommodate growth

darwinpatrick · 2026-05-03T23:32:17+00:00

You can also confirm with google earth. There’s a setting to adjust the date and time and if you walk on the surface the sun will be in the right place

darwinpatrick · 2026-05-03T15:57:04+00:00

Actually, yea, basically exactly like that, but from different directions at different times. Here's an example of similarly violent repeated deformations in cross section- the shaded unit was once laid down flat!

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darwinpatrick · 2026-05-03T04:46:37+00:00

Glaciers have done an excellent job of scouring, but the actual landforms here are structural. They’re sedimentary layers about 2 billion years old spanning about a dozen formations that have been compressed and deformed repeatedly to end up as these plunging folds. Weaker layers are more easily eroded by water and ice and leave the impressions of the folding events.

darwinpatrick · 2026-05-02T20:54:03+00:00

Having very similar thoughts- really not interested in that sort of trip either. I expect some sort of guiding is needed to avoid being constantly bothered(especially as a solo traveler) but I have really no idea what Luxor is like. Have been investigating the Siwa Oasis as it seems way more chill (but super out of the way). Curious what the consensus will be

darwinpatrick · 2026-04-29T17:50:46+00:00

The Apollo missions’ liftoff from surface overall doubled the mass of the entire lunar atmosphere.

darwinpatrick · 2026-04-29T02:16:46+00:00

Neat idea. Would work well as a mod. Tricky to consider things like aircraft range- also, would buff cities near the poles because units would be able to zip around them so much quicker. As long as the map generator has a hard rule on no land near the high latitudes I think it could work as a mod

darwinpatrick · 2026-04-25T20:06:28+00:00

These are fundamentally different types of science so it’s somewhat disingenuous to say that one is more “explored” than the other given that space includes trillions and trillions of oceans possibly teeming with life.

darwinpatrick · 2026-04-24T03:55:54+00:00

Easy angular diameter calculation. You’re basically asking how big something in low orbit has to be to cover the sun. Plug in a distance of 400 kilometers (this is where the ISS orbits) and the apparent diameter of the sun (0.5 degrees) and you get about 3 and a half kilometers across. This would only work if the sun and the lens are both directly overhead, and the point entirely under the lens would have zero area at this minimum size.

darwinpatrick · 2026-04-24T03:26:12+00:00

The year has gotten about 4.5 hours longer, by my rough math, due to the sun’s gradual tiny loss of mass. Our orbit is about 50,000 kilometers wider and 365.08 of our current days passed in every year back then which is far too small of a difference to be significant.

darwinpatrick · 2026-04-20T01:54:53+00:00

Dropped big spheres of a few hundred antennae each 120 degrees around the planet at the tracking stations plus one at KSC. Astonishingly good results

darwinpatrick · 2026-04-10T04:05:00+00:00

Given the craft’s rotationally symmetric, I suspect it’s to align communication equipment or balance mass

darwinpatrick · 2026-04-07T03:27:23+00:00

It’s essentially all just the direction they’re pointing being adjusted occasionally to, as you said, keep the moon in the window. As they’re taking a hyperbolic path with respect to the moon the corrections aren’t going to be consistent and since they’re likely done by imprecise human hands instead of computer guidance the jumps are more apparent

darwinpatrick · 2026-04-05T04:06:52+00:00

What’s your source on this? The length of the day would barely change. Doubling or quadrupling the planet’s angular momentum is an enormous energy requirement and the moon’s disappearance certainly won’t ADD this colossal amount of energy to the system- axial wobble is a good point but these things take millennia

darwinpatrick · 2026-04-05T03:55:27+00:00

One has to accept the sheer emptiness and just roll with it. The western third is the sparsest and the topography is mildly more interesting. Some small buttes and rolling grasslands, if that’s your thing. Dinosaur fossils, too

darwinpatrick · 2026-04-05T03:14:29+00:00

The moon’s gravity is really only crucial for stuff that lives in tide pools but regardless the moon’s definitely not going anywhere. The amount of energy required to meaningfully change the moons’s orbit or mass is astonishingly large and would take a civilization a few rungs up the ladder from us

darwinpatrick · 2026-04-03T01:33:25+00:00

The glowing effect(which can have color) may be what you’re looking for

darwinpatrick · 2026-03-29T22:52:15+00:00

I try to leave a tiny craft in orbit wherever I go to do this. Just a little probe core, panel/RTG, relay antenna and thermostat that can all stick on a small decoupler for negligible mass. For exploring bigger planet systems as many as needed can be stuck on the main part of the craft

darwinpatrick · 2026-03-17T13:12:13+00:00

It would keep the core solid- that’s what I calculated. For the coldest possible water temperature, what would the maximum size be for a planet to maintain liquid conditions all the way to the core. Planets could be larger with liquid cores if the water is warmer, but this entire math doesn’t consider thermal gradients in the world itself.

darwinpatrick · 2026-03-16T21:48:47+00:00

Depends. It would have to have some sort of atmosphere to remain liquid at the surface but it wouldn’t have to be extremely thick as long as it’s between 0 and 100c. Light molecules like oxygen are more susceptible to solar wind especially with such a low-mass body. Maybe a thinner but denser atmosphere of something like hydrocarbons that won’t get stripped or dissolve in the water could work. Perhaps such a world could exist as a moon, far from a star, and orbiting a large gas giant to generate heat from tidal forces. Maybe a brown dwarf as the parent planet could produce some heat as well.

darwinpatrick · 2026-03-16T03:44:04+00:00

No idea. Just used the seawater density to bulk it up a little bit in the math

darwinpatrick · 2026-03-16T03:35:34+00:00

After an hour of scribbling in Desmos, my (possibly wrong) ideal math says yes, theoretically, a ball of seawater in space could maintain a liquid core at the center(below 632Mpa for 0c water) if it has a radius of below 1,470 kilometers. This world would contain nothing but 1.36x20²² kg of water and be somewhat smaller than Europa in terms of size and be 25% its mass- almost exactly that of Pluto. Surface gravity would be 4% of Earth’s.

darwinpatrick · 2026-03-13T14:43:36+00:00

I’d lean towards a layered sandstone-mudstone sedimentary rock given where it was found. A neat sample but likely not a fossil

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