Re: Swedes
Australian subs have a reputation for leaking water. Having said that, the new ones will be built by other countries, which means it will be intelligence leaking not water.
Posts by Martin Budden
2493 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2007
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Chinese whispers: China shows off magnetic propulsion engine for ultra-silent subs, ships
Dome, sweet dome: UAE mulls Martian city here on Earth ahead of Red Planet colonization
Monday 2nd October 2017 10:48 GMT 
Re: Domed to failure
Mars will need an extra dome as a place to send the worst of its criminals (e.g. people who steal a loaf of bread, a very serious crime in any developing society). This dome will be located in the part of Mars which has the most deadly conditions, and is not claimed by any other nations (except the local Martians who have lived there since forever but they don't count). This dome won't legalise same-sex marriage until long after every other dome has done so. It will also have the best stretches of sand on the planet, so we can forgive everything else. It will be called Marstralia.
Brit prosecutors fling almost a million quid at anti-drone'n'phone ideas
Musk: Come ride my Big F**king Rocket to Mars
Boffins: 68 exoplanets in prime locations to SPY on humanity on Earth
Sunday 10th September 2017 03:54 GMT
@Lee D Re: Fait accompli, mate
"The planets and systems you're looking at are billions of years old."
Many of the exoplanets we've found are less than 100 light years away, none are billions of light years away. We are looking at them as they were towards the end of the last century, i.e. within my lifetime. Some are only 4 or 5 light years away.
Uh oh, scientists know how those diamonds got in Uranus, and they're telling everyone!
Ten spacecraft – from Venus Express to Voyager 2 – all tracked same solar flare
Talk about cutting-edge technology! Boffins fire world's sharpest laser
Shoebox-sized satellites made by civs win trip on NASA's newest rocket
Nukes tests caused space weather, say NASA boffins
Warm, wet, mysterious... sound familiar? Ah, yes, you've heard of this second Neptune, too
New MH370 analysis again says we looked in the wrong places
Pack your bags! NASA spots SEVEN nearby Earth-sized alien worlds
Thursday 23rd February 2017 06:51 GMT
Tidal locking bothers me.
Those planets must be rather uncomfortable, with one cooked side and one frigid side and craaazy winds.
We keep finding earth-sized planets in the goldilocks zone around various dwarf stars but they are necessarily always close to their star and therefore tidally locked. I think our best chance of finding alien life will be on planets orbiting larger stars, so that the planets are orbiting far enough out to be spinning. Unfortunately those ones are not so easy to spot.
Gulp! Drones dodge spray from California's gaping moist glory hole
NASA spunks $127m on SSL-powered robot to refuel satellites in space
Cargo capsule goes AWOL, explodes on its way to Space Station
Watch: SpaceX finally lands Falcon rocket on robo-barge in one piece
Sick burn, brah: SpaceX test fires rockets for SES bird launch this week
Wednesday 24th February 2016 02:24 GMT
And of course if one engine fails on the way up the satellite should still get there but the water landing will probably be scrubbed (i.e. the first stage will just ditch) because of the extra fuel needed to fly with just 8 remaining engines. All of which is fine by me, it's great to see such a flexible system with built-in redundancy.
NASA boffin wants FRIKKIN LASERS to propel lightsails
Wednesday 24th February 2016 01:27 GMT
Re: Starwisps
Great question. I think the answer might be something along these lines:
The detached outer parts of the sail are angled to reflect the light *inwards* and back at the central part, which means the force on the outer parts is both forwards and outwards to the sides. The outwards forces don't move the craft because the outer parts of the sail are attached to each other and are merely tensioned by the outwards forces.
The central parts of the sail push the craft directly backwards.
So, add up all the forces, and we get slightly more backwards force from the central part than forwards force from the outer parts, with the difference giving tension to the outer parts. The craft decelerates.
Someone please tell me (politely) if I've completely stuffed this up, as I'm no expert!
China 'evacuates' 9,000 around monster radio 'scope
Brits unveil 'revolutionary' hydrogen-powered car
Easter Islanders didn't commit 'ecocide' after all, says archaeologist
CSIRO says it hasn't sacked the LIGO mirror-makers
How to build a plane that never needs to land
Monday 15th February 2016 01:14 GMT
Re: Much more useful when batteries improve
Hooray! I had thought I might be the only one who had sat down and worked out that replacing the UK's car fleet with electric cars would require an approximate doubling of the UK's power generation and distribution infrastructure.
@Neil Barnes Not only would it need the doubling of the power available but it would require that power to be available 24/7/365 - something that renewable power is unable to do (wind generate with no wind and solar doesn't cut it at night) Another thing is that the power would have to be so cheap otherwise people could not afford to use it - again something renewable energy isn't.
There is no need to double power station output or upgrade the distribution network. This is how it will work: solar panels on the house roof, Powerwall battery in the garage, charge your electric car overnight while you sleep. (On the rare occasions you need to drive more than 400km in one day you can use a fast-charge station at lunchtime). As for pricing: solar panels + Powerwall will pay for themselves in a decade at current prices so they are already financially viable, and pricing will improve further as the tech is refined.
Scariest climate change prediction yet: More time to eat plane food
Sunday 14th February 2016 23:38 GMT
Re: A suggestion for those worried about all that extra time, fuel, CO2, ...
"A similar but much more ambitious strategy has worked out very well in Hong Kong."
I was on holiday there a couple of weeks ago. Although I do miss the excitement of landing at the old airport, the new airport is very impressive. What makes the new airport work so well is the excellent express train into Kowloon & Hong Kong Island*, and the big fast road as well. Basically they've thought very carefully about transport infrastructure and they've spent big as required.
*A nice feature when departing is that you can check in your bags and collect your boarding pass at the central station on Hong Kong Island, thereby avoiding check in queues at the airport itself.
London seeks trials of Google's robo-cars
Thursday 11th February 2016 23:40 GMT
Re: There won't be any driverless cars for a long time.
The driverless cars (at least for anothe 20-30 years) will require a licenced driver fully capable and able to control the vehicle at all times when needed.
Nope. Google has already managed to persuade the US government that the computer can be classified as the car's driver: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/09/google-computers-self-driving-cars-human
Norks stabilise non-threatening space speck ... for about five minutes
Lights out for Space Vehicle Number 23: UK smacked when US sat threw GPS out of whack
Friday 5th February 2016 00:35 GMT
Re: 'precision docking of oil tankers, as well as navigation'
it's on the order of 13,000 feet. About a foot per ns. It'd be a pretty poor navigation system that depends on absolute time, as opposed to relative.
It'd be a pretty poor navigation system that depends on 1/6th of a dead king's armspan as a unit.
LIGO boffins set to reveal grav-wave corker
CSIRO says it's not firing scientists, it's re-balancing
That's cute, Germany – China shows the world how fusion is done
Boeing's X-Wing 737 makes first flight
Friday 5th February 2016 01:31 GMT
infinite improvements
The winglets help reduce wasteful wingtip vortices. But I'm concerned about the tips of the winglets: there is nothing there preventing them having their own little vortices. The winglets need wingletlets, and the wingletlets need wingletletlets, etc. A branching fractal wing.
BOFH: I want no memory of this pointless conversation. Alcohol please
Samsung trolls Google, adds adblockers to phones
Tuesday 2nd February 2016 02:02 GMT
Layers and layers of libraries, scripting languages etc. might be fast and convenient for developers, but they're wrecking the end user experience.
As a developer I totally agree with you. I remember the days when web page file size was all-important, now nobody seems to care. Most of my fellow developers have the attitude that it's more convenient to just bung in the MegaAwesome library which has a function for that tiny little thing you need to do because it's easier to add multimegabytes of bloat which will never be used than spending three minutes writing and testing a few lines of js. Madness. Now where's me false teeth and pipe?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
