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PuddleOfKittens

@ PuddleOfKittens @sh.itjust.works

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1 yr. ago

  • Vote on your cellphone now!

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  • If the modern air force can take out some modern ground troops, the ww2 ground troops could loot their corpses to be somewhat modern-ish ground troops. The modern air force could use radio to explain how to use the equipment, if they have access to wikipedia.

  • Vote on your cellphone now!

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  • WW2 forces will get obliterated at nighttime, no night vision. Assuming modern ground forces are still alive by nighttime, that is.

  • The world's first solar powered train

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  • The rail area gets vibrated by the wheels (which would shorten the solar panel lifetimes directly), any dust that the vibrations kick up would settle on the panel and reduce its efficiency, and anything dangling underneath the train would absolutely destroy the panels.

    Besides, if you have the solar panels on the train track then it still needs to be wired to the train, which means you need an overhead wire and you might as well just put the panels next to the train track, where it's quieter and less vibrated.

  • Could the airship be the answer to sustainable air travel – or is it all a load of hot air?

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  • The onboard electrolysis isn't as useful as you'd think - electrolysis is energy-intensive, you need water, acquiring water is energy a intensive, and water is heavy. Like, 8/9 of the weight of water is oxygen.

    With current tech it doesn't make sense, but in a more sci-fi sense I think it does - the sky is full of dense patches of gaseous water, commonly known as "clouds", and if going through a cloud wasn't incredibly dangerous for airships then they could just do that, catch handfuls of cloud, then condense it and electrolyze it. That way the airship doesn't need to lift huge amounts of oxygen from lakes then dump it.

    And if we're speaking sci-fi, making airships stormproof is basically mandatory, they can't outrun storms and due to their long flight-times (due to low speed), they're more likely to encounter them mid-flight.

  • Could the airship be the answer to sustainable air travel – or is it all a load of hot air?

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  • Airships face three main problems, AIUI:

    1. They're slow (100km/h to airllanes' 600km/h), which means their flights are ~6x as long and thus their staffing costs are 6x as much.
    2. Airships still have trouble adjusting their buoyancy - if they pick up/drop off cargo, they become heavier/lighter and start to drop/lift up. That causes a bunch of problems.
    3. Weather screws them - as you can imagine, they catch a lot of wind with their sideward profile. And by definition they're lighter than air, which means they get knocked off course. Water ships don't have this problem because they're heavy as hell and literally made of steel, and of course because jet streams don't reach sea-level. The end result is that airships tend to fair-weather flights by necessity.

    2 can be mitigated and in the future might be solved, and #1 might become irrelevant if fuel costs get high and a niche for airships appears. 3 is a killer for reliability and safety both, though - you preemptively avoid storms by just delaying the flight until the weather prediction turns in your favour, which might take weeks. It just can't handle a schedule, because putting an airship into a storm is too risky. And if time isn't important then you can just put stuff on the cargo ship and then a train.

  • Could the airship be the answer to sustainable air travel – or is it all a load of hot air?

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  • The "hot air" part was nonsense. Most aircraft are painted white (to reduce radiative heating IIRC) so it's not surprising that an airship would be white too.

  • A Traditional City Primer (and how modern cities are utterly broken, and even New Urbanism doesn't fix the core issue)

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  • You can combine a traditional city with a train system, to get the best of both worlds. It's not either/or.

  • How video games are going green without turning off gamers | To prevent greenhouse emissions and save gamers money, developers are looking for ways to make video games more energy efficient

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  • but if games didn’t require expensive (to own and operate) graphics cards

    They don't, if you buy games that came out 5+ years ago. This doesn't contradict your point, but it can mitigate it somewhat.

  • Questions

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  • Okay so statistically speaking, in agrarian/preindustrial societies more than 9/10 of them would be farmers, which means they would (hopefully) have pitchforks. And if you don't have a pitchfork, then you shouldn't be at the front because then you'll be blocking someone with a pitchfork. You can carry a torch or something maybe.

    Also, some farmers might have multiple pitchforks (so the wife/kids can pitch in, I'm pretty sure that's the literal meaning so not a pun BTW), and would know you probably don't have a pitchfork so would kindly bring along a spare to the angry mobbing.

    Point is, the stereotype is at most off by 10%.

  • Turning automotive engines into modular chemical plants to make green fuels (discussion: is this a useful tech?)

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  • A port is a slot for ships. Really big ships requires really big slots. The biggest modern ships are over 500 meters long. And dry docks require you to float the ship in, then seal it in and be able to drain the water out - given that those ships are ~50m wide, you're talking about a huge construction project just to serve one ship at any given time. Turnaround for ships can be hours or days, so you might want multiple bays.

    It might well be cheaper, to just have a small ship with a crane or something. Then you don't need to build a 500mx50m swimming pool. In imperial, that's 20 olympic swimming pools.

  • Battery Electric Vehicles still being shunned by EU buyers

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  • What happens in a society when EV reach 90-95% market share? What happen when the last petrol station goes bust?

    The same thing as when cars were first invented, before petrol stations existed: you buy fuel in cans from stores. They used to buy petrol from chemists in the 1900s, but I imagine that today/in future they'd be sold at hardware stores or ordered online.

    I'm somewhat doubtful petrol stations will all go bust though; long-haul trucking really favors petrol/diesel, and by their very nature of having a long range, they don't need the petrol stations to be that frequent. Especially since the infrastructure is already built, it just needs to be maintained.

    Also, obligatory reminder that electric cars are not the solution: fixing car-centric cities so they're more walkable and have decent train systems is the solution.

  • Honda readies its first electric motorcycle for the masses

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  • Cars don't make sense in a well-built city, you can walk or take a train and they scale much better. Electric motorbikes are five figures, which is waaay too expensive. Buy a motorscooters or ebike, either would be just as good.

    Motorbikes are great in car-centric cities, but that's because car-centric cities are failed urban-design abominations. It's like building a city without stairs/elevators and then claiming jetpacks are practical.

  • Turning automotive engines into modular chemical plants to make green fuels (discussion: is this a useful tech?)

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  • "In the future, we’re going to need green fuels because you can’t electrify a large ship or plane — you have to use a high-energy-density, low-carbon-footprint, low-cost liquid fuel,”

    Large ships are perfectly capable of being battery-powered. In fact, battery cargo ships might well be cheaper than oil-based ships: https://austinvernon.site/blog/batteryships.html

  • ATACMS have now been fired inside Russia. I'm trying to get a head count everyone please raise your hand if you've been nuked already 👋

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  • If Russia drops a bomb, then NATO immediately deploys conventional bombs with their own air force on all Russian forces in Ukraine, and China/India both sanction Russia (which basically means the whole world is sanctioning Russia, since nobody will want to piss off the USA and EU and China and India - even NK might sanction Russia).

    In other words, if Moscow drops a nuke then their military and their economy both disintegrate.

  • Palworld Dev Reveals Patents at the Heart of Nintendo and The Pokémon Company Lawsuit — and How Much Money It’s Being Sued For

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  • Oh absolutely, it's asinine. But it does avoid Pokemon Red as prior art.

  • Honda readies its first electric motorcycle for the masses

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  • IMO, electric motorbikes don't make any sense - they're not for cities, and they're not for road-tripping because their range stinks. They're an insistence on round-peg in a square hole; they're a mechanical horse.

    What we need is tiny one-person electric cars - the limit on range at highway speeds is aerodynamics, and motorbikes just aren't as aerodynamic as putting the human inside a shell.

  • Palworld Dev Reveals Patents at the Heart of Nintendo and The Pokémon Company Lawsuit — and How Much Money It’s Being Sued For

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  • "In a 3D space" rules out Pokemon Red. Still bullshit, though.

  • Don't break the laws of war. Be the reason there needs to BE a law!

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  • The reason chemical weapons are banned is because (they're monstrous and) they're useless. You can fire a chlorine shell and if the wind is juuust right, it'll kill anyone within a few meters. You know what else will kill anyone within a few meters? A normal artillery shell.

    Except, chlorine gas can be blocked by an airtight gas mask and a chemical suit. They cost less than $500 for complete immunity to the weapon. Good luck finding a $500 flak vest that'll stop a mortar though. And meanwhile, if you want to press the attack and benefit from your chemical weapons, there's one slight problem before you advance: there's a bunch of chlorine gas in the way.

    In other words, it's an unreliable and inferior weapon that gets in the way of modern military doctrine. Although there are some good niches in shitty armies by dictators who are too paranoid of coups to give their junior officers any independence or proper kit. Like the Iraq army that the US army utterly steamrolled in 2005.

  • Elder Scrolls 6 likely won’t revert to “fiddly character sheets” after Baldur’s Gate 3 success, explains Skyrim lead

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  • You don't just spam jump, you wedge yourself under an arch or something so that you can trigger more jumps per second.