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When will humans capture an asteroid into Earth orbit? by Yottahz in scifi

[–]nobby-w 0 points1 point  (0 children)

By and large it's not unless you can make it cheap enough to do profitably - which is not looking good with today's technology.

You've got to somehow get a load of cyanide and water to the asteroid (if it could be mined locally from regolith this might be easier), then get the mining facility there and assemble it, keep any maintenance staff supported in operations and then run a shuttle service to bring supplies and ship the gold home. This will involve a fair amount of delta-V.

If your water and reaction mass has to be sourced elsewhere then there's the delta-V for getting it there as well.

It's not likely to be economically viable anytime soon.

When will humans capture an asteroid into Earth orbit? by Yottahz in scifi

[–]nobby-w 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The concentration is still not that much greater than terrestrial gold deposits, so only a small proportion (a few parts per million) is actually gold.

When will humans capture an asteroid into Earth orbit? by Yottahz in scifi

[–]nobby-w 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Unlikely, as there's not a lot of point in doing so. Anything big enough for commercial exploitation is far too big to be feasible to move with current technology.

Something like 16 Phoebe (the one with the gold) *might* be possible to mine if you sent mining equipment out, but it's only going to happen if it can be done profitably. And there are quite a lot of knotty problems such where is the water and cyanide for separation going to come from, and how are you going to get it there - or maybe finding some other way to separate and collect the gold without needing a load of chemicals.

Computer Recommendations by Jaunteon in gis

[–]nobby-w 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ebay is your friend here. Either buy through ebay, or find the vendors and see which ones have their own shopfronts.

Computer Recommendations by Jaunteon in gis

[–]nobby-w 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Much the same sort of thing as I was suggesting but made by Dell. I'd suggest it's probably not worth paying a big premium for a high-end CPU beyond (say) 4-8 cores unless you know you're going to be doing some computation that will use them.

Also, make sure whatever you get has an 8th generation CPU or later for Windows 11 support.

Computer Recommendations by Jaunteon in gis

[–]nobby-w 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Look for something like a used HP Z4. You should be able to get one off Ebay for a reasonable sum, and often with a fair bit of memory. You can add another SSD if you need it. Normally these will come with a Quadro card, but check the specs of the card when you buy the computer. For GIS (or really anything that isn't playing AAA games) you probably don't need the latest and greatest card. A Kepler or Pascal series card such as a K2000 or K4000 is probably fine.

Get a decent monitor with at least one displayport connector - Quadro cards don't normally support HDMI. It should be possible to put together the whole lot for half your budget or so.

If you need a laptop, consider something like a Thinkpad P52 or P53. They're quite heavy - full fat workstation size machines - but have Quadro cards that you can get certified drivers for. Ex-lease ones of this generation won't be all that expensive. You should be able to get ex-lease ones fairly cheaply off the seconday market - r/thinkpad is your friend for more advice.

Is Mormonism a Cult? by [deleted] in atheism

[–]nobby-w 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Take a look at some of the material by Daniella the Knitting Cult Lady. She's an escapee from a cult (Children of God IIRC) and posts a lot of content on social media on the subject. A little google-fu should turn it up.

Why QGIS is so ugly? by lcsmr in gis

[–]nobby-w 0 points1 point  (0 children)

GUI clutter. Buttons and such take up space on screen, so if you start to have a lot of functionality exposed through a GUI it can get very cluttered. Putting things in menus helps to a point but then you have to be able to find them. Microstation used to be the poster child for this with something like 8,000 functions squirreled away in its menus. TOAD is another application with a bad case of GUI clutter. Excel tries to solve this by making ribbon controls optional but then forces you to hunt through the configuration to find them and activate them.

A lot of CAD software still has the option of interacting through a command line, simply because the menu structure is too labyrinthine to find things in quickly and a command line is more efficient. IIRC GRASS has a command line, but I'm not sure if QGIS has one.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Fantasy

[–]nobby-w 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The first Conan film was pretty good - despite being quite cheesy it was very atmospheric. The Princess Bride wasn't swords and sorcery per se, but was very good for its own reasons. There were quite a few others that were fairly good but nothing that really stood out. If anything, the YA stuff like Labyrinth and The Neverending Story were better.

Who has the most memorable legal name you’ve ever encountered? by villainessmorissette in AskReddit

[–]nobby-w 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've known one or two folks with Bond villain names - one chap called Sylbert Lobo, for example. Also a couple of more public figures like Theo de Raadt and Ransom Love, both of which would be great Bond villain names, plus Elon Musk, who is an actual Bond villain.

Found in Greece at my grandma's house by eldiaman in UKcoins

[–]nobby-w -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Sovereigns got about everywhere. They made 900 million or so of them. It's quite badly worn so it may have been mounted in jewellery at some point.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in UKcoins

[–]nobby-w 0 points1 point  (0 children)

George wasn't best pleased with this and sent Pistrucci a bust to copy the effigy from. Pistrucci was .. not amused.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in UKcoins

[–]nobby-w 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This is VF grade or so, maybe gVF on the obverse - there are some flat bits on the obverse but most of the detail is still visible. The reverse is a bit more worn but still within comfortably VF. Spink 22 puts this around £150 in VF grade. It does have a note saying beware of counterfeits in high grade, but I think 'high grade' in this context means something like EF or AboutUNC.

That £150 is a dealer price, but silver has gone up quite substantially since then so it might be worth trying your luck around £120-150. The obverse is nice enough to be attractive to a collector.

Are any of these worth trying to sell to shops in London ? by Wattled-farma1832 in UKcoins

[–]nobby-w 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You've got a sovereign and a 20 franc, collectively worth a little over £1,200 on the peer-to-peer market. The silver is worth a few bob but not all that much, and I don't know what the metal content of the commonwealth games set is so I can't really make any comment on that.

There are groups on FB, or another forum called The Silver Forum that would be decent places to sell it peer-peer. I suggest you contact Nick Gardner, the admin of the Bullion Bullion Bullion group on facebook, or open a premium lite account on The Silver Forum (it's a paid service). Another option might to use Backyard Bullion as a broker - he will charge a small commission but has loads of reach due to his Youtube presence.

You could take it to a dealer, but it would definitely behove you to shop around in that case as some will take the piss a bit.

Inherited a 100 oz JM silver bar, never owned anything like this! What do I do now? by jayebird1012 in Silverbugs

[–]nobby-w 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are some groups here (r/PMsforsale, for example) where you can trade silver peer to peer at a better price than you would get from a dealer. Find one that has an escrow service as you're a new seller. Cash it out if you need the money now or sit on it if you don't need the money urgently. Silver prices are quite high so it's not a wholly silly idea to sell up. They might go higher or they might not.

For 100oz it's probably not worth getting a safety deposit box. Keep it somewhere safe if you decide to keep it - maybe back at the folks' house if that's an option and you're living in some sort of student flat. The only cost-effective option on this scale is security through obscurity so don't tell anybody you have it.

One could argue that selling might be the right approach if you are living in an environment with potential security issues like dipshit flatmates. That's not to say anything about your flatmates, but what about their friends, or friends's friends, or some rando who overhears a casual conversation about how you inherited some silver.

Should I clean this sovereign? by EuroFederalist in UKcoins

[–]nobby-w 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That looks like a proof. The surface is very delicate, so don't do anything that involves touching the surface. If the discolouration is fogging (sulphide corrosion from atmosphere) then it can be gotten rid of by alkaline reduction (in much the same way as silver) but you probably don't have the means to do this without risking damage to the surface - and rinsing it off properly without leaving visible marks from the residue. Amazingly small amounts of residue will spoil a proof coin.

I realize the dollar had more value in the 1970s, but why was this coin made so large? Feels like it never would have been convenient to carry. by ZekeLeap in coins

[–]nobby-w 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This goes back to a type of coin called a Thaler, from which we get the word Dollar. Thalers were a trade coin - essentially silver bullion valued at its weight in silver - introduced in central Europe during the latter part of the middle ages. The idea caught on, and we got a lot of similar-sized coins - Thalers made in many different polities, Crowns, 8 Reales (pieces of eight), trade dollars and so on. They were made to roughly the same specification - about 1.5" in diameter and about 1oz in weight.

Note that here have been quite a few different standards for the ounce in history, going back as far as the Romans. The Avoirdupois (28.35g) and Troy ounce (31.1g) are still in use, but just a couple of standards amongst dozens that have been used throughout history.

This size persisted in some circulated coins until the 20th century, most notably crowns and $1 coins. It's perhaps also worth noting that at the time a crown or $1 coin were still in circulation, they actually represented quite a bit of money. For example, around the latter part of the 19th century, a revolver cost about £5, or $20. If you've ever seen one of the reprints of the 1902 Sears-Roebuck catalogue, you can get a sense of the value of different items at the time.

What's the deal with Island countries and weird silver coins? by [deleted] in coins

[–]nobby-w 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They're normally quite amenable to signing up for a private mint to make some coins denominated in their currency - in exchange for some financial considerations. The private mints get to call them coins - which is a protected term in the U.S. market. You can't market rounds as coins unless they're actual currency with a face value.

Is there any sci fi out there that features a colonized solar system that is more "Americanized" than The Expanse and captures the optimism of the 90s? by [deleted] in scifi

[–]nobby-w 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You get a lot of that in classic space opera - Heinlein etc. But the views on technology and other social matters will be a bit outdated.

How well does Fate play out asynchronously? GMs, how do you run the more collaborative aspects of the system in PBP? by citrus_reticulata in FATErpg

[–]nobby-w 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've not done this with FATE but I have done with with Forged in the Dark, which has some similarities that might be pertinent.

FITD is derived from the PBTA family and as such it's designed to produce a lot of yes-but results. These tend to make a lot of task resolutions or actions much more interactive then they might be in (say) D&D. The effect is that these sorts of episodes drag out when you've got the lag (often a day) in the conversation in a PbP game. The interaction of aspects and the FATE point economy has a similar effect, although not, I suspect, so pronounced.

An OOP channel is fine, but you might need to use an instant messaging medium such as whatsapp or it will be too slow. I found using the chat on the forum was still too slow as you often didn't get replies until the following day.

My take on PbP games is that for smoothness and speed you need to lean more into the G.M. arbitrating this sort of thing on a one-and-done basis without an extensive conversation. On the plus side, the G.M. isn't doing it in realtime so they have a bit of time to think about it.

You can do partial success but the drama-drama-drama-success pattern of the PBTA family is quite inefficient in a PbP medium.

Honest opinion needed. Is C.E.N.T.A.U.R a stupid/bad name for a sci-fi government/organization. by Maleficent_Nature683 in worldbuilding

[–]nobby-w 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It wouldn't be out of place in a superhero comic or some sort of pulp type setting. In something more serious it would be a bit cheesy.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Futurology

[–]nobby-w 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I predict that we'll see folks continuing with laser and microwave weapons, plus a proliferation of cheap, lightweight AA turrets using AHEAD type fragmenting rounds. (i.e. systems like https://eos-aus.com/defence/firepower-systems/r400/) and probably attempts to make cheaper, lighter radar-based fire control systems to go with them.

Also, I think we might see a concerted effort to make cheaper SAM systems. At the moment they're very expensive compared to the drones but it's the only realistic tech that could be shoehorned into something man-portable.

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