If Supes is doing it to stop some dickwad from destroying the Earth, enslaving humanity, or erasing the concept of pizzas, I’ll be yelling at him to do it again. Fuck the car, I can walk!

It’s apparently not okay when someone you don’t like says something you’d otherwise agree with. Can’t have complexity like that these days.

If the interesting thing about your character is that they’re not human, you don’t have an interesting character. Fite me.

Nope. Not until they’re going for a Ship catch. It has to come down somewhere and the only places it can safely come down are either the ocean or the catch tower. So until they get the catch hardware to a state where they believe it would work out, every Ship is going to fly a trajectory that ends in the ocean.

Fuck yes. I don’t have first-hand experience, but by most accounts, the Battlemage GPUs were a huge improvement over Alchemist. If Celestial follows a similar path without jacking up the price, it could be amazing for the average PC gamer.

How’s their driver support on Linux?

Suppose we’ll see. Not unusual to have a long gap between the early launches, lots of data to analyze for the first time. Was 8 months between the first and second launch of Ariane 6, for example.

Their first orbital rocket, New Glenn, had its inaugural flight earlier this year. IIRC, it performed rather well in the “launch to orbit” aspect, but they lost the booster as it was coming back to land on a drone ship. It’ll take them time to iron out the kinks, but as long as they don’t scrap the project, I don’t see why it couldn’t become a contender in heavy lift.

The basics (getting the OS installed, some initial settings to your liking etc) is quick. Managed to go from “completely untouched build” to “we gaming on Linux now boys” in a couple hours and most of that was waiting for BG3 to download on my 100Mbit connection. Pretty much everything I needed worked right on the first boot. Then again, I didn’t have much data to transfer over.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong about this, but wasn’t the original thruster problem, on the second uncrewed flight, that the thrusters were too insulated and couldn’t dump enough heat, so they overheated? So for the crewed demo, they removed some of the insulation and the thrusters were dumping heat into adjacent thrusters, once again overheating? Seems like the doghouse is a poor design, at least in Starliner’s case.

I found a reddit post from a year or so ago, reportedly Bazzite has drivers for the dongle out of the box. I’m a little more concerned about the keyboard+touchpad combo, since I’d imagine that’s not quite a standard device. Fortunately, I give negative fucks about any RGB, so I really don’t care if any RGB the components happen to have don’t even light up.

Sure, buddy.

Planning for the future has nothing to do with whether or not one fears death. And it’s perfectly okay to live more in the moment, because the moment is all we have. The past is gone, the future is yet to come, you exist in the now. So go ahead, procrastinate a little! The vast majority of our problems are not so time-critical that an hour long walk is going to ruin your future. Treating yourself to a coffee and a donut every now and then doesn’t leave you fated to be destitute in 5 years.

There’s no use in fearing the inevitable. It will come, whether you like it or not, and no amount of fighting can stop it. Fearing it only makes you focus on some indeterminate time in the future and lose sight of the now.

NATO not expanding eastward was never put to paper. No one ever officially signed off on it, nor was it ever an official decree. It was never anything more than words of appeasement. Russia “agreed to democracy on its doorstep” because they were going through a regime collapse and were a tad preoccupied with preventing the collapse from going further. Even if they had kicked up a storm about it, what were they gonna do? The breakaway nations weren’t going to just unpack their bags and stay with the abusive ex cause the ex said they can’t leave. Russia would’ve had to suppress them militarily once again, and they didn’t have the resources to do that.

NATO expanding eastward was because the former Soviet bloc countries wanted it. Because if you’ve regained your independence (for some of them it wasn’t even the first time) from an aggressive neighboring nation, would you not wish to protect it with the means available to you? If Poland and the Baltics believed that, for the first time in centuries, Russia would stop doing Russia things, would they have sought to join? Because the only reason they’ve been spared Ukraine’s fate is that Russia was in no position to execute militarily when those countries were accepted into NATO. And look at us now, thirty some years later, Russia is doing Russia things.

But how are you going to space if the pointy end is down and the flamey end is up? It should be the other way around!

Deeper IR, microwave and radio. Within a galaxy, redshift can be ignored. In another galaxy, the issue is moot, you don’t need to worry about them and they don’t need to worry about you.

Our current scopes can pick up brown dwarfs with a surface temperature below freezing. An object the diameter of a planetary orbit, with the gravitational effect of a main sequence star and giving off just black body radiation is gonna stick out like a neon “Interesting stuff here!” sign the moment someone does a long wavelength survey of your general region.

Even if you build a swarm instead of a solid shell, you’re still going to shift the star’s apparent spectrum towards IR, from the swarm radiating waste heat. A star whose mass, diameter and emission spectrum don’t match up with the math is inviting investigation, regardless of how you try to mask what you’ve been doing.

I would think it’d make it more likely that you’re discovered when you turn your star into a black ball with a gigantic IR signature where a star should be. Any civilization with a cursory understanding of gravity and stellar spectra would turn every telescope they have on you.

The average velocity across the entire trip would have to be several hundred km/s. Average. Peak velocity would have to be a lot higher, to account for acceleration and deceleration. They’re claiming to have built a torch drive that beats the thrust power of all other (currently existing or in early development) propulsion methods by an order of magnitude. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The centripetal acceleration. It’s going to ramp up fast. There’s also the concern of what’s gonna happen to the payload when it’s released, exits the vacuum chamber and smacks right the fuck into the dense low-level atmosphere at a significant Mach number. Cause that’s what has to happen if the goal is to reduce the need for onboard propellant.

I’d imagine having the propellant tanks, plumbing, valves and engines survive 10,000Gs without crumpling or deforming to the point of failure is going to be a bit of an issue. Any thin and lightweight structures like foldable solar panels (and their deployment mechanisms) are also going to be tricky.