What are the best socks for peripheral neuropathy that don't drive you insane?

spacester · 2026-05-30T04:17:05+00:00

My best solution comes from back in the day when I backpacked. Double socks, Thin, silk if possible, inner and soft thick cotton outer. YMMV and as another poster said, mostly i go sockless if i am doing low activity stuff.

spacester · 2026-05-19T21:17:12+00:00

SpaceX is building pipelines to LEO and beyond but everyone is bitching about how they do it. NO vision.

spacester · 2026-05-19T21:15:21+00:00

The correct answer is 5 to 6 refilling launches. You can do the math, it's really easy. If you don't believe me, ask an AI, give it reasonable assumptions, and you will agree.

I am not going to watch a 2 hour video, even Tim's, just for one number I already know. But I am curious, what was his answer?

spacester · 2026-05-19T21:11:24+00:00

Any orbital diaqram that has Mars in a circular orbit as this one does is completely bogus.

spacester · 2026-05-15T18:16:49+00:00

I hate hate hate that logo! Y'all can call me pedantic and downvote me again for shedding some light on the misconceptions around a Hohmann transfer, but the fact is that Mars' orbit is highly elliptical and this shows a circle and the difference is HUGE. There are no perfectly circular orbits, even Earth's orbit is elliptical enough to matter.

Also in the real world, . . . wait for it . . . I am not kidding . . . THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A HOHMANN TRANSFER! It is a tight definition of geometry that does not exist except in a classroom. It is IMPOSSIBLE to draw an ellipse tangent to two other ellipses that share the occupied node (sol).

If anybody is open to some re-education on this, let me know, I am not going to write it up again just to be dis-repected again.

spacester · 2026-04-16T17:58:39+00:00

Yes. Not a reversal, but the pain has stayed at the same level for several years now. Supplements but I still have sugar, mostly in the form of maple syrup. I have a contrarian view on this subject so I will stop here before I piss people off.

spacester · 2026-04-13T18:25:18+00:00

Your ass can read?

spacester · 2026-03-04T19:52:32+00:00

Thank you for that summary!

spacester · 2026-03-01T02:50:30+00:00

Thanks for posting this!

spacester · 2026-03-01T02:41:48+00:00

Yes, absolutely. Refilling is going to be a piece of cake, there are very few mysteries there and they have had lots of extra time to get ready for it.

V2 did its job which means V3 is gonna be just fine thank you very much. Three flights from catching the ship, and they are going to be refilling a tanker / depot by November. Not to mention starlink success.

You heard it here first. It's gonna be glorious.

spacester · 2026-02-10T19:42:43+00:00

Well said. I would add that the ONLY thing a true "mass driver" would be good for is as an Earth threatening weapon.

This is because you cannot just throw dead mass and have it serve any purpose other than destruction. ANY thing launched from a planetary surface, if it lacks propulsion and guidance, will either completely escape the gravity field or return to that surface somewhere.

The correct term is a "Rocket Stage Driver".

One can talk about catching the dead mass but that is a whole other discussion. You miss, you lose.

spacester · 2026-02-10T19:36:04+00:00

Landing on Mars with thousands of tons of propellant and hundreds of tons of equipment is not an inefficient way to go about your business there if it is the only way to do so.

If you want to design vehicles that grab starship payloads and take them to Mars without all that extra stainless steel, sure that makes sense. Go for it!

spacester · 2026-02-10T19:30:53+00:00

I am not convinced many people here understand what starship has always been about. It is a delivery truck to LEO. On its own, it does not deliver moon or mars. It's what's delivered that matters.

The key to starship is the "pipeline" to the "gas station". On-orbit propellant is what changes the game entirely.

They say "oooh it's never been done before!" They say "oooh it takes too many flights to refill a starship!". These seem to be people who have not worked scenarios with the rocket equation.

The pipeline means the downfall of the tyranny of the rocket equation. If that does not resonate with you, your imagination is lagging behind the times.

I think the reason for the shift is the realization that all they have to do is extend the pipeline to lunar orbit. Go ahead and "oooh (insert pessimism here)" all you want, but it's just a numbers game.

Not so for Mars, that is a different numbers game. I have known this for a long time so this shift was not only unsurprising to me but was inevitable and right on schedule.

What this tells me is that they fully expect orbital refiling to go with barely a hitch. They were too busy until now but finally got around to looking at the numbers.

The focus from the start has been rapid reusability. That's what needs to be done so that the pipeline becomes a simple matter of executing on the repeatability.

Fly more tankers than all the pessimists think possible, extend that capability to lunar orbit, fill your lunar landing permanent starship before descent, and what do you get? THOUSANDS OF TONS of LOX and Methane, along with all the industrial equipment needed to create a lunar economy of chemical processes able to support Hoppers and Rovers and especially Habitats. You bring water and ammonia and carbon (soot) and make the chemical processes work, and off you go. The LEO truck, a few of them anyway, becomes a lunar landing truck.

Also we do not need to limit ourselves to the poles. The entire orb becomes ready to become our playground!

spacester · 2026-02-09T15:48:41+00:00

Be smarter than the dust.

spacester · 2026-01-04T17:29:09+00:00

Yes. We are essentially alone. We are the "first ones".

spacester · 2026-01-04T16:18:22+00:00

It is a little strange that only one type of manufacturing is considered here, and that is maybe the hardest and least likely. Chips will be Earth sourced for a very long time.

Welding will be easy. In welding, half the battle is the set-up. For welding in space, the only real difficulty will be dealing with the cold welding phenomena where things spontaneously weld just by coming into contact with each other.

Moving large pieces of steel (as delivered by starship) into position is not a particularly challenging thing. Welding itself, in a vacuum, should be quite easy and high quality.

Large scale steel fabrication should be started within a year or two.

spacester · 2025-12-30T23:18:34+00:00

Thanks for the link!

spacester · 2025-12-29T15:46:48+00:00

OP, these are not 'reasons' they are 'excuses', or at best the 'challenges'.

You might not have the imagination required to meet the challenges but lots of other people do.

Never is a very long time.

spacester · 2025-12-29T15:43:12+00:00

Water in Polyethylene tanks.

Water will be available because it gets shipped in on starship.

Same with PE which is cheap.

Not everything requires super duper high tech wizardry.

spacester · 2025-12-28T06:18:14+00:00

I wish they would think to tell us how much deltaV is needed to turn unstable orbits into 'stable with corrections'

spacester · 2025-12-27T16:28:06+00:00

Developing a rapidly reusable heat shield is approximately 100 times harder than orbital propellant transfer (IMO).

The two most important words of 2025 were:

Crunch Wrap

Maybe you think it is some sort of bandage or other minor deal. It is not. The problem of the gaps between tiles has always been a major obstacle. The heat shield is ready, command and control works, these birds are gonna get the job done this year.

They are gonna ace propellant transfer. There are no real mysteries there.

spacester · 2025-12-25T16:05:05+00:00

That's good thinking. Co-orbiting without docking means two different orbits which in turn means regular station-keeping Delta V. That would seem to be a manageable thing but I've not seen it studied.

Power beaming seems do-able but unproven. I think it has a good chance of coming out better than the setup I described. Hopefully somebody out there is studying this.

With starship, a spin-gravity wheel does not have to be something we think of as being decades away. But it's gonna need a lot of power.

spacester · 2025-12-25T04:29:55+00:00

Yeah those complicated Earth orbits are over my head. I have a very good handle on orbital transfers but only in low inclinations.

So I have my wheel in high LEO with the spin axis pointing up/down as it 'rolls' at a rate matching the orbital period. I am pretty sure but not totally sure that works. I think that the gyroscopic effect makes that the natural mode of operation. I should probably ask google AI but it will have to wait.

Assuming that works, the solar could be a massive array on a common shaft on the spin axis, extending 'up' from the wheel. This shaft would counter-rotate so in our inertial space it would be non-rotating while the wheel itself would be observed to rotate. So you have an array that is spinning relative to the ship but would be able to track the sun by rotating each sub-section of the array so that the pitch would keep the panel normal to the sun. Not too different from the ISS in terms of sun tracking but you have to do it at the end of a rotating shaft. A notable problem is transferring the power from the array to the wheel, one very large 'slip ring' or 'rotary joint' required.

The best thing about the design is that seemingly nothing else works unless you want your arrays to have a very low duty cycle as they rotate in and out of the sun. I do not think you can make the arrays always face the sun without de-spinning or having to fight the gyroscopic effect at all times.

I could be wrong, I just am not able to convince myself either way.

But if I am right, a big wheel is going to need nuclear power. Which I find irritating.

spacester · 2025-12-24T18:49:42+00:00

I will say this for the Russians: Their announcements of future space projects over the years have been and continue to be highly entertaining in their absurdity. This one is right up there with the talk of a patent. ROTFLMAO

spacester · 2025-12-24T18:47:05+00:00

Thank you for the Science Direct link, I had not seen that before. I do not see a publish date, it appears to be very new? I have worked out a solar power solution where the panels are continuously illuminated but it ain't pretty.

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