Full power 45-70 is extremely punishing to shoot out of a lever action rifle much less a derringer

Starship Troopers

The fact of the matter is that people will happily pay for content if it is made available in a convenient and affordable way. Hell, many people will voluntarily pay artists for content that is available completely for free. That’s how patreon works, and there are self published authors approaching $1M/year in income due to readers choosing to support the author for their hard work.

People have no issue paying content creators.

Piracy rose to prominence in the 2000s because a few executives were funneling massive amounts of money into their pockets by the sale of CDs and cable services that were simultaneously expensive and inconvenient. The studios attacked pirates directly to little effect because you simply can’t stop the free dissemination of information among the public.

Piracy almost completely died when streaming made the alternatives affordable, user friendly and convenient. In a world where the proliferation of streaming services is making content just as expensive and inconvenient as in the old days of cable, it’s only natural that piracy will once again rise to prominence.

If they want to get paid, they simply need to stop fucking with the customer and offer a service people want to pay for.

Did you know they don’t eat garlic bread in Italy?

Ergo, “Italian Food” in America is better than food in Italy. They have to take us out as a matter of self defense

It certainly has the potential to be. Remember most of the costs related to fission are safety measures, plant decommissioning, and waste disposal. If we merely had to operate the reactor without concern for those issues, fission would be incredibly cheap. The fuel costs and basic technical requirements to operate a reactor are trivial in comparison.

Fusion produced 4x more energy per mass of fuel compared to fission, isn’t at risk of meltdown, and has the potential to produce negligible radioactive byproducts. In addition, it outputs helium which is an important and finite strategic resource.

Even if the cost of fuel goes up dramatically compared to uranium reactors, it might still outperform nuclear in a big way. However, sourcing He-3 from the moon might be a lot cheaper than you think. My day job is related to space resource utilization. Transporting resources off the surface of the moon could be quite economical once we reach a sufficient level of development.

The usual joke is that fusion is always “30 years away”, not 10. The reason is that fusion projects have historically faced an issue where funding is chronically below predictions

However, this past decade is seeing a number of promising changes that make fusion seem much closer than it ever has. Lawrence Livermore managed to produce net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time. Fusion startups are receiving historical levels of VC funding. ITER is expected to produce as much as ten times as much energy as used to start the reaction. The rise of private space infrastructure is making helium-3 mining on the moon more possible than ever before.

The US built the XF-85 goblin parasite fighter, which was supposed to be deployed using a robotic arm from the bomb bay of a B-36. The idea came from ww2 when we had escort fighters for most major bombing missions to keep the bombers safe.

It wasn’t practical to build a fighter with enough range to escort strategic bombers into the Soviet Union so they thought, “why not carry the fighter inside the bomber?”

Even that is meaningless because the vehicle you put a battery in is as important or moreso than the battery.

Aptera has a claimed 1,000+ mile range with a 100 kWh lithium battery. Meanwhile, the Rivian R1S has a claimed 270 mile range when equipped with a 106 kWh battery.

The main difference is that the Aptera is a light and aerodynamic car built for maximum efficiency instead of a 6,000 lb pickup truck. Any battery can boast amazing numbers if you are flexible enough with the use case.

Copying weapons is a completely different thing from an ethical and technical difficulty standpoint over reselling digital art.

I don’t think that is the case. A stratified fluid, in the absence of continued energy exchange with the outside environment, will eventually reach a homogenous temperature distribution due to diffusion.

That said, even if you are were correct, in the context of brewing tea we would only have a few minutes of brew time in which the stratification would have an impact on the extraction.

Search the literature for thermal stratification. There are many contexts where it is used outside of lakes and other large bodies of water, many of which do not consist of three distinct layers. Hell, the paper I cited SPECIFICALLY refers to the temperature gradient in the microwaved glass as “stratification”.

If you can’t understand the use of a term outside your specific area of expertise then thats honestly a you problem and that’s all I can say on that.

If the heating methods were as similar as you say, there wouldn’t be hundreds of publications accepted to various journals across the past two decades investigating the problem where microwaves produce a strong temperature gradient between the top and bottom of a body of liquid. It’s a well known process control problem.

That’s not really showing temperature stratification which is a more extreme separation of temperature from surface

I think the definition you are using is far too restrictive, in many contexts temperature stratification simply refers to a situation where you get temperature gradients across a fluid with the warmer fluid gathered near the top of the body. For example, in a factory you will often have “destratification” fans operating because warm air from equipment rising to the ceiling results in a temperature gradient from floor the ceiling.

It is not a phenomena exclusive to surface heating.

That’s just showing that the hottest atoms gather to the top, which btw, proves Convection currents.

Yes. My point was not to establish that convection is magically absent from fluids in microwaves, but to establish that it differs significantly from stovetop heating. Convection currents in stovetop heating create a strong stirring action that produces a substantially uniform temperature. Microwaves do not create the same stirring action and this produce a significant nonuniform temperature gradient.

The modified glass is just diverting the hotpots to the bottom to make the convection less “unusual”.

Clearly. They make the heating more akin to a stovetop, which is really the point here.

They aren’t claiming that convection doesn’t accrue, only that it’s “unusual convection” resulting in less even heating like that of thermal stratification, not literal thermal stratification where the layers have separate convection currents that prevent mixing all together.

Once again, you are using a definition of thermal stratification that is far too specific. However, arguing over it is really just being pedantic because the core point at issue here is whether or not heating a cup in a microwave or a stovetop produce the same final product. They do not unless you apply some mechanical agitation to mix it up.

I’m well aware of temperature stratification. It doesn’t happen in a microwave.

It empirically does. We can argue about the theory all day but the research says microwaves produce stratified temperature gradients when heating liquids. However, I’d point out that, in atmosphere, when we have localized hot spots the warm air can effectively travel in bubbles without significant mixing for quite some distance. There seems to be a similar phenomena at work when microwaving liquids.

See the screenshot below.

I pulled this from “Multiphysics analysis for unusual heat convection in microwave heating liquid” published in 2020 in AIP Advances.

Relevant excerpts:

“ Usually, the fluidity of liquids is considered to make the temperature field uniform, when it is heated, because of the heat convection, but there is something different when microwave heating. The temperature of the top is always the highest in the liquid when heated by microwaves.”

“ The experimental results show that when the modified glass cup with 7 cm metal coating is used to heat water in a microwave oven, the temperature difference between the upper and lower parts of the water is reduced from 7.8 °C to 0.5 °C.”

“According to the feedback from Midea (microwave appliance makers), when users use the microwave oven to heat liquids such as milk or water, the temperature at the top of the liquid will be significantly higher than the temperature at the bottom.”

I mean, it’s not really a matter of debate TBH. There are a number of peer reviewed journal articles documenting the temperature stratification. Here is one source, where the authors attempt to create a special cup to heat the water more evenly.

From a utility side perspective it’s true to say 240v is the standard we just wire our outlets to use one of the two hot wires instead of both of them.

Convection currents don’t stir water in a microwave because the heat source isn’t on the bottom. That’s the difference. You get temperature stratified water where the surface is hotter than the bottom of the cup and they don’t naturally mix.

Of course, here in America, we have this incredible technology called a spoon. Pull that bad boy out, give a little stir, problem solved.

Sure thing!

Honestly I wish we didn’t have to design manned spacecraft to be manually pilotable because you have to make design sacrifices to get there. However, that is unlikely to happen in the lunar program anytime soon

There was a significant amount of manual piloting in the Apollo missions

The guidance gets more difficult in the terminal stages and they didn’t really trust computers to safely control the spacecraft near the surface, so their solution was to have the computer fly 95% of the way down and have the crew take over for the terminal phase.

The Apollo algorithms work fine for non-manned missions as well, but you have to vet the trajectory targets more fully in simulation and add some active retargeting scheme to avoid obstacles near the surface.

Combine the added complexity of a robotic lander with groups like intuitive that have never landed one before, and this sort of thing happens

I find it funny this comment got upvoted more than mine. I am a guidance engineer that worked at NASA on lunar lander programs, it’s literally my job to be an expert in this stuff. Modern computing has reduced propellant usage a bit and improved targeting accuracy, but we have had usable solutions to this problem since the 60s.

Atmosphere makes the problem MUCH harder because the dynamics are far more complicated and the uncertainties are higher.

Yes but a moon landing is fundamentally easier in most respects, while using substantially similar technology, than landing a rocket booster on earth or a rover on mars.

Landing on the moon is, as far as it can be, trivial for a group like NASA. It’s much more challenging for a small private company like Intuitive that has never built a lander before.