Zeropoint

Re: More Railgun As I understand it, the light gas guns are a more mature technology, but they've been developed mainly for exploring high-velocity impact science. Neither light gas guns nor railguns (to say nothing of coilguns, which seem to be more of a hobbyist thing at the moment) are ready for deployment as weapon systems yet, so I would think that it's premature to declare one technology as "better" than the other. I'm tempted to say that the electromagnetic weapons will win in the end by virtue of being simpler, with fewer moving parts and no need for a working gas and burst disk to be replaced after every shot. On the other hand, you've got rail replacement to worry about, and it would certainly be possible to package the powder charge, gas, and burst disk into a simple cartridge. Holy bleeping bleep, that's scary! . . . I'd be very interested in reading about penetration vs. splashing at those velocities.

Re: China's new space station: If they have trouble with supply chains and logistics on Earth, how the heck are they going to keep an installation in ORBIT supplied?

Re: "Neat" Pictures No, but I have a link to the site where it came from.

Re: Cool Guns for your Games You'd need a chamber adapter, basically a self-contained chamber and very short barrel that would fit inside the .45 Colt chamber. It wouldn't look like the picture--it would look like a .45 Colt cartridge machined out of steel with a 9x18 chamber and barrel running through it. Similar items DO exist--you can get inserts like this that allow you to fire .22 ammo in a gun chambered for .45 Colt.

Re: Virtual Reality addiction? I figure it's worth about "this character doesn't go on adventures because he stays at home in VR. Write up a different one!"

Re: Build the Enterprise Crackpot? Nope, that figure is realistic. I don't have time for the math right now, but a pre-worked example for 0.01 g says it's a 30-day trip. Check Nyrath's excellent Atomic Rockets site for details.

Re: More space news! Or 25 missions with one of these babies.

Re: "Neat" Pictures It would be hard for Eowyn to pass as a man with those legs showing like that.

Re: Cool Guns for your Games Because aiming is for losers!

Re: Around the World in 584 Days Didn't someone point out that since the sun drives our winds, a sailboat is ALSO solar powered . . . and much faster? Does it make sense to brag about "no sails" when sails are BETTER than what you've got?

Re: "Realistic" gun damage If you just chopped off ONE leg with an axe or something similar, the victim would bleed out through the femoral artery very rapidly.

Re: Jokes It's also without exploiting the fact that no one can remember a string of eight random characters, so the password is likely written down somewhere near the computer.

Re: Like Cold Fusion... Except It Works? I don't want to destroy the world! It's where I keep all my stuff!

Re: Cool Guns for your Games Wait, if this guy has access to skilled artisans, why not just have someone make him a small crossbow? Sacrificing irreplaceable high-powered rifle ammunition to kill SQUIRRELS strikes me as a very foolish move any way you slice it. I'll repeat the question that someone else asked: WHY is it so important that he hunt the small game with the Garand? Edit: a boomerang would also be useful: not the returning toy boomerangs, but basically a heavy stick, carved to fly straight and true and also to present a narrow striking edge. Something like that would take out a squirrel, bird, or rabbit quite nicely.

Re: Cool Guns for your Games If I were trapped in another world, with no source of new ammo, I wouldn't even consider wasting a precious round on small game. The meat gained would be far too little.

Re: More space news! Oh, that's easy . . . there's no such thing as time.

Re: More space news! It was a bit before my time, too . . . but there are STILL people who have a very hard time accepting, for instance, that things can be truly random, that there aren't "hidden variables". Well, better than having it fail for lack of testing, I guess.

Re: More space news! Just because it could yield highly counter-intuitive results doesn't mean it's not true . . . remember how reluctant people were to accept the idea of quantum superposition?

Re: Planetary Resources I've been daydreaming about trying to get investors to fund a startup asteroid mining company for a while . . . looks like someone beat me to the punch. Well, they're people who ALREADY have money, so they're better positioned than I am.

Re: More space news! You heard the man; time travel is possible!

Re: Cool Guns for your Games You can also get a backpack that holds 500 rounds of 7.62 NATO ammo belt. Of course, you'll need something a bit bigger than a pistol to use it in.

Re: Human bird wings In that case, you can buy future science for 30 dollars from Amazon.com. Ornithopters WORK. We can, have, and do build them. The question at hand is, can the technology be scaled up to carry a human, or is there some factor not obvious to aeronautical engineering laymen such as ourselves that would prevent it? Are flapping wings too inefficient, doomed to failure when scaled thanks to the square-cube law? There have been some freaky big pterosaurs that flew, which proves that it's at least plausible. I would expect that the relatively low sophistication of man-made flapping wing systems would be offset by the improved strength-to-weight and power-to-weight ratios of inorganic materials and power plants, but I don't KNOW. In any case, this is certainly a case that modern science could answer, if anyone with the money cared about it.

Re: Killiing a lot of zombies from a safe position. Yep, that's the way to do it. "Heroes" may get all the glory, but engineers make civilization happen.

Re: "Neat" Pictures Is that in Pennsylvania? I remember driving through there and being amazed that they were farming on all those hills, until I realized that they must be doing that because they don't have any flat land to farm.

Re: Human bird wings Indeed, the square-cube law strikes again: double a flyer's size, and they get eight times as heavy but only four times the wing area, doubling the wing loading. That's why a hummingbird's wings are tiny and an albatross's are huge, compared to the bird's body. True, but the contraption depicted in the hoax was supposed to merely be CONTROLLED by the flapping motion of the arms, and powered by a motor of some sort. I'm no aeronautical engineer, so my opinion here isn't worth much, but I don't see why the basic idea is fundamentally unworkable. We know that we can build working ornithopters, and we know that something light enough to be backpackable can support a human in flight (hang gliders). I'm sure there's a large number of difficulties with the concept, but I don't feel brave enough to say that it can't be done.