Posts by DJO

Put some load cells in the landing gear, weigh the plane before and after boarding to calculate the average passenger weight.

It's not like they can adjust the fuel load while boarding so getting an accurate weight for each passenger is unnecessary for any given flight.

Re: Those funds are needed, in part, because Twitter is moderating less content

"freedom of speech without repercussions" is freedom to oppress.

Most countries have "Freedom of expression" which mean you can say what you want but inciting hatred is against the law and you will be prosecuted for it.

Re: Those funds are needed, in part, because Twitter is moderating less content

What they want is not "freedom of speech" but "speech without repercussions" and then only for themselves, the last thing they want is proles being able to say anything they want.

Re: "the fight against crime and terrorism"

The annual mortality attributed to C19 during the epidemic far greater than the average yearly flu mortality.

The UK flu mortality rates seem to vary by who you ask but there are the ONS figures:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/influenzadeathsintheukbetween2012to2022

The National Institutes of Health think the figure is higher than due to misreporting,maybe 15,000 to 25,000

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1676118/

The worst of C19 lasted 3 years over which period in the UK there were 24,603,076 reported infections and 225,324 deaths - annually significantly more than the worst flu season since effective treatments existed.

When you look at excess deaths which do show an increase over the C19 period there's a secondary effect to consider, as many people did take precautions like distancing, masks and hand washing the spread of other diseases was significantly reduced - I for one didn't get a single cold or flu over the entire period.

Re: "the fight against crime and terrorism"

And lots of deaths which were due to C19 being reported as flu or pneumonia so that metric will roughly balance out though given that many governments wanted to downplay the problem the under-reporting is probably greater than the over-reporting.

mRNA vaccines have been subject to the most rigorous testing regime a new type of drug could have, we were very lucky that C19 came at a time where a whole new technique of vaccine production was ready to be employed.

As for deaths due to the vaccine, possibly a handful due to some unexpected allergy but that is true of all drugs - you administer something to billions of people then it's guaranteed a handful of people will have adverse reactions. But the vaccine has saved billions of people from contracting C19 or in those that still caught it they experienced far milder symptoms then unvaccinated patients.

The "crackpots" are the fools who still cling to easily disproved rubbish like "masks don't work" when they clearly do prevent the spread of droplets. The reason to wear masks is not so much to protect the wearer but to protect everybody else from the wearer, but selfish jerks think if it's not going to help me, why should I wear one.

The military insist on members of the armed forces being vaccinated for multiple illnesses and nobody objects to that so why is it suddenly a problem?

Re: "the fight against crime and terrorism"

Yes, lots of people like you flocked to the ludicrous conspiracy theories - those people are the real "sheep".

There have been to date around 7 million C19 deaths worldwide, many of them were gullible sheep who refused to take the appropriate precautions such as masks and vaccines and just being careful and they paid for that stupidity with their lives.

Re: "Success" at the Coronation

The Met are not representative of policing in the UK. There are no depths of nastiness the Met will not plumb, the other forces are comparatively just "a bit unpleasant".

The Met needs root and branch reform and far better accountability but that'll never happen.

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

Everybody here seems to be forgetting that Chaz is also the head of state of Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, The Bahamas, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu.

Any election for a head of state would have to include them all with equal representation - Good luck in making that one work.

Re: The future is only Science Fiction

...all the black holes start to swallow each other, will there be one super-massive black hole...

Unless our understanding of the expansion of the universe is completely wrong, not a chance. If black holes swallowed everything in their host galaxies the gravitation attraction between the black hole remnants of galaxies would never overcome the rate of expansion.

Re: Acronym-Ignorant

With The Company Logo On It

Re: MEGA pedantry here

If you are going to be "mega" pedantic then you should also dispute the word "gases" - no gas in the sun, it's all plasma.

But you are on sticky ground with "burning" with relation to stellar fusion as stars are said to "burn" by astrophysicists and the "official" definition of "burn(ing)" relates to heat not fire so as it's pretty toasty in the sun "burn" is OK. I do understand exactly where you are coming from, but I really don't think it's of any particular importance so can be argued over just for the fun of it.

Re: Apologies in advance for the super-pedantry here...

Close but no cigar - Supernovae are not energetic enough to make most of the really heavy radioactive elements, they need something far more violent like merging neutron stars.

Supernovae can't make anything heavier than Rubidium (#37). Surprisingly it's low mass stars which burn cool and long that make elements up to Lutetium (#71). For elements from Niobium (#41) to Plutonium (#94) you need to smash pairs of neutron stars together. (or a neutron star and a high mass star or possibly a pair of high mass stars).

https://science.nasa.gov/origin-elements

Re: Good thinking that man

They are looking at sending a *thousand* starships to Mars in a transfer window

Wow! - You actually believe a word of that?

I will bet any sum you care to mention that will never happen. I'd be quite surprised if a single StarShip makes a successful landing on Mars.

With current technology colonising Mars is a death sentence for anyone daft enough to go, maybe a research base with a small rotating staff of a dozen or so but a mass colonisation is a fantasy for at least 50 years at the most optimistic, gradual colonisation over a few centuries is more likely to succeed and be both practical and affordable.

Just who is going to pay for ~10,000 StarShip launches? At the moment SpaceX is existing on government handouts, when that ends they are screwed.

Re: Good thinking that man

There is a slight difference between something that is made by the million every day for decades by a myriad of producers to published designs for a fraction of a penny per unit and something highly complex with extremely limited demand which had to be designed from the ground up for which there is no available off-the-shelf tooling to build it with.

Re: Good thinking that man

When do you stop amortising, or rather when do you plan to stop amortising.

You amortize over the projected manufacturing run. So if you are going to produce 1 million units each unit will have 1/1000000th of the setup and design costs added to the production costs and profit. If you go over the projection you can either drop the sale price or (more likely) increase the profit margin, if you go under the projection you fire your forecasters.

Rocket engines are never going to be a mass consumer item, even using 33 at a time (and they claim they'll be able to reuse which reduces demand) they'll never need significantly more than 1000 working units which raises another cost, poor quality of the engines, the cost of each engine that fails QC must be wrapped into the cost of the ones that do work if they intend to stay in business.

Re: Good thinking that man

Look at my message just above yours.

Re: Good thinking that man

Mea Culpa - they don't use hydrogen but methane so the containment costs will be a bit less than for hydrogen but the principle remains - the tanks are a minor cost compared to the pumps, plumbing, control gear and structural members.

Re: Good thinking that man

Once you factor in all the ancillary equipment and amortize the failed units the cost starts to (for want of a better phrase) rocket.

Also Musk always underestimates future costs, you can generally add a zero to any sum he mentions.

The rest of the stack is mostly steel pressure vessel

I hope not, have you any idea what cryogenic hydrogen does to steel? (obviously not). The containment is probably aluminium with steel on the outside for structural integrity and such vessels are far from simple or cheap. Then you have plumbing, turbo-pumps and a shitload of other odds & sods which all cost over your $200,000 each. Rocket stacks are expensive (if you want them to work).

Re: Good thinking that man

The cost (not price) of a fully expendable Starship launch is about $100M.

Bullshit. There are 33 engines which at a minimum cost $3m each so just the engines are over $100m so the full stack (there are more engines in the second stage) is going to be at least $250m, probably a lot more.

The true cost of the engines once everything is considered is probably nearer to $10m pushing the stack cost to probably over $500m.

To prevent the accusation of cherry picking you could do a search for "SpaceX starship test flight objectives" yourself.

Anyway here's some but don't forget it's only really worth looking at reporting dated before the launch:

space.com The plan was for the Super Heavy to give an initial boost to Starship, which would then use its engines to achieve orbit. Starship would fly nearly one orbit around the Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and performing a controlled splashdown in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.

Reuters: Barring further show-stoppers on Thursday, the two-stage rocketship, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty at 394 feet (120 m) high, was due to blast off between 9:30 and 10:30 a.m. EDT (1330 to 1430 GMT) on a planned 90-minute debut flight into space, just shy of Earth orbit.

https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-first-orbital-launch-explainer

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/elon-musks-spacex-set-launch-first-test-flight-starship-rocket-system-2023-04-20/

While in those reports "separation" is not explicitly mentioned it's impossible for StarShip to achieve orbit without separating first so it is implied.

I quoted the original stated mission objectives - separation was the main goal which might have succeeded if so many engines hadn't failed.

Retrospectively changing the mission objectives to fit the mission outcome is at the very least, disingenuous.

Oh you are 1 million percent wrong about missions not having "stretch goals" or "secondary objectives" - This sort of test almost always has stuff they would like to do if everything else works perfectly but are not part of the primary mission objective such as getting into orbit which his Muskiness himself stated was a target with a 50% chance (according to the link you provided) so plainly not a primary objective.

The original mission objectives were:

1) Clear the tower - success.

2) Climb - limited success - it wasn't going as fast as it should have but it went in a general up direction.

3) Stage separation - total failure.

4) Escape velocity & orbit - not primary objectives but a nice bonus if achieved - failure.

Somehow #3 seems to have been forgotten.

Re: Thunderbirds are Go!

More like the ship in the cinematic masterpiece (sic) Flesh Gordon.

Black holes get a bad rap. They suck no more than an uncollapsed object of the same mass, you can safely orbit a black hole just like any other massive object and you won't get pulled in unless you pass the event horizon, the difference for back holes is the event horizon is external while objects made of uncollapsed mass have an event horizon that is internal so can never be reached. Even a single atom has an event horizon but it is deep in the nucleus, the event horizon (Schwarzschild) radius is calculated as r = 2GM/c² (where G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of the object and obviously c is the SoL).

There is a region called the Innermost Stable Circular Orbit which as the name suggests is the closest escapable orbit to the event horizon. It is not easy for an object to fall in just like it takes a lot of energy to send a spaceship to the sun. To get from ISCO to the event horizon an object needs a kick like a collision which sends one object in and ejects the other - this is part of the reason why some black holes are amongst the brightest objects in the universe. Of course an object aimed at the middle will go straight in but anything coming in at an angle will either be deflected or get caught in an orbit.

What becomes of matter once it's entered a black hole is by definition unknowable but it's a fair guess it's not dissimilar to a neutron star but far, far worse.

Re: As with many "accidental" discoveries.

...Supermassive black holes don't usually collide...

Not sure about that, how do you think they grew to supermassive size in the first place, the universe is not old enough for them to grow only by accretion, mergers are (probably) the only way for them to grow that big.

Re: That's just what we want you to think Earthlings

The first creatures to walk on land were fish.

Obviously there's no fossil evidence of human type intelligence, it takes longer than the genus has been around for fossils to form. But some cephalopods and cetaceans exhibit intelligence and they are found in the fossil record.

You may also want to update your cosmological knowledge, theories of the very early universe are being updated on an almost daily basis now with JWST probing further back than any previous instrument.

Re: That's just what we want you to think Earthlings

No idea why you think fish and plants are simple.

If you have fish you are 99.9% of the way to intelligence - all intelligence needs is macroscopic multi-cellular life (fish definitely qualify) and an environmental niche which needs intelligence to fully exploit, and time, possibly lots of time.

Not saying that last 0.1% is easy but in evolutionary terms the jump from lungfish to people is trivial compared to the jump from stromatolites to sponges.