insane_alien

yea, but the most visual people are the most fun to rant about.

heck, i'm 20 and i agree with pretty much everything you said there. i honestly can't understand the sagging jeans thing, i mean underwear is called such for a reason. everytime i'm walking behind someone like that i get the urge to pull them down. i don't follow fashion very much at all, i'm usually found wearing jeans and a t-shirt, possibly a short sleeved shirt if i'm on a night out. and always wearing trainers(i actually only have 4 pairs of shoes, the trainers, proper shoes, boots and climbing shoes.) on the subject of shoes, what is it with women and cramming their feet into shoes that are incredibly uncomfortable for them? i mean, seriously us guys are probably not staring at your shoes if staring at all and we definitely don't like hearing you complain about your feet. wear something comfy.

no, it is far from a new concept, it is just that it tends to require a fair bit of electrical power to generate a powerful enough field covering a large enough volume. there are also technical problems in manipulating the fields effectively without causing interferance with onboard systems. we are only beginning to be able to get the power generating capacity into space in order to produce them.

well, a lot of radiation in space is made up of charged particles, magnetic fields can be used to deflect these particles away from the craft(or to designated hard points where the radiation can be safely absorbed). it could also be used on reentry as the plasma generated by friction will be affected by magnetic fields, the plasma could be kept at a distance from the craft to minimise contact heating and funneled around the craft safely.

well, thats really just moving the solid objects out of the way and passing through where they used to be. the same principle is used in doors but usually with a less destructive mechanism that can be reset.

jgjenson, nobody responded to your question because it is based on faulty assumptions and crap science. not only this but it requires that several physical laws be completely wrong and that reality goes on holiday for a while. the question is meaningless.

well, you seem to be under the assumption that they must bond immediately. this is not so, the carbon atoms will hapily sit in a radicalised form until something to react with bumps into them. seeing as its usually done in air, oxygen is the most likely thing for it to bond to.

remember, the surface layer is only going to be a few angstroms thick, this isn't going to cause major structural damage, and isn't going to affect the colour noticably as there simply isn't sufficient density. impurities from formation have more of an effect on colour and hardness than anything happening at the surface.

if its the same mass then for the same distance from the center the gravitational field will be the same strength. to calculate surface gravity of the iridium sphere just plug in the new radius and kep the mass term the same as earths.

work done is force and distance...

Yt, the force applied(torque) will change, but the power will not. if you only put say 100 watts into the system, the most you can get out of the system is 100watts- losses. energy conservation, the speed of the machine makes no difference.

basically, the atoms are jittering about really really fast. the acceleration of charges(as atoms are composed of charged particles) causes the emission of photons. this process is called thermal radiation. note, this may have some inaccuracies, i'm remembering it from years ago.

you can divide zero by two to get zero. and 8/2 is much less than infinity

okay, as i said in the second post: Climate models are based on physical laws which HAVE to be obeyed. Economic models are based on filamentous rules that have loopholes and can be broken by fallible humans choosing to ignore/work round them. and the rules themselves are subject to change on a whim. this inherently causes error in any model based upon the rules which will result in complete failure of the model. also the feedback loops of people using the model to make changes to the system to get a more desirable outcome will affect long term predictions significantly. in the climate, the rules never change, they cannot be avoided and the feedback loop of humans changing the system for a more desirable outcome is a lot less pronounced. data that the models work is seen in them retrodicting the global climate to a good degree of accuracy. you say they are no better than a ruler but this is obviously not true as the graph is not a straight line, the model also predicts by how much the temperature will rise and it does so successfully. to sum up the problems with your comparison: 1/ you are comparing two completely different types of system, somewhere akin to saying newtonian mechanics fails on a quantum scale so how can we trust the quantum model. 2/you are asking for an unrealistic degree of presicion for evidence that the models work correctly. we simply do not have the necessary computing power to get that kind of resolution. in the future we will achieve this. 3/ you seem to assume that the people who make climate models just bodge it together like a monkey at a typewriter. this is not so. i suggest that your knowledge of climate modeling is insufficient for you to make valid comments on how useful it is. please do some research into how these models are generated. better yet, start with some simpler models, like heat transfer or fluid flow.

i think skeptic is missing the point there, historical data is the only concrete data we have on which we can test our models NOW. it would be useless if we had to wait several decades in order to see whether a model is correct or not.

lol, i missed that bit. what a div.

not only are there technological limits(which can usually be over come given enough time, funding, brainpower and caffeine.) but there are also physical limits and these can't really be overcome even if you have all the coffee in the universe.

they do affect electric currents. specifically, they will provide a force perpendicular to the flow of current and the magnetic field. moving a magnet over a metal plate will also induce electric currents in the plate. this is the whole principle behind electric motors.

3.333... is not an infinte number. it just takes an infinite number of decimal places to describe it. the number is still between 3 and 4. very far from infinity i think you'll agree.

well, it could have been sucked out of a hull breach when the shuttle began to disintegrate and due to its high surface are to mass ratio rapidly decelerated before much frictional heating occured. also, the low oxygen up there would have prevented it from combusting as normal. its actually quite feasible that it survived a partial reentry.

actuators like that ARE built. they are only useful in certain circumstances though, typically fail safes or for scientific experiments where something like a valve needs to be shut as quickly as possible.

so basically, you want explosively powered actuators. well, these are good at providing shock load but not sustained load. hydraulics can provide both greater force and sustained load. it still isn't going to get around the fact that you have basically turned a small nimble soldier into a lumbering hulk more akin to a tank than a soldier.

1/ i think you have severely underestimated the minimum weight and size of this. you really are looking at the equivalent of carrying a fully loaded medium size lorry(both in mass and volume) MINIMUM. 2/ you are not factoring in issues that arise with scaling, from what you have said it is more like you are unaware of them than purposefully ignoring them. in this case they are very very significant in that power will always drop off faster than size. i really would advise looking at other power sources, especially for individual use. EDIT: another thing i should mention, in addition to the weight of the reactor, you would also have to consider the weight and complexity of armour for the reactor. because they aren't going to do you any good if your cooling, or god forbid, core is full of bullet holes.

fuel cells are not gas tanks, they ARE the generator, you still need a tank for the fuel. yeah, see you are assuming scaling down means you can use the same technology as you can in larger reactors with no penalties. in practice, this doesn't work. making this assumption usually results in one of two things, the device fails to work at all or you get catastrophic failure. the fact that you proposed weapons grade fuels leans it over to the catastrophic failure side. its going to be a lot, even for some sort of exo skeleton to carry. yes, it does scale with reactor size. i accounted for that. 20kW is a fair amount of heat to disperse if all you've got to disperse it in is air. and the reactor would likely need to be more than 20kW due to the size of the equipment needed to move it. you do realise you would be better off with a giant nuclear tank don't you? and i haven't even started on the cost of this thing. miniturisation is a costly thing.

fuel cells do not work like internal combustion engines. and yes, it would need refuelled every now and again but so would a nuclear reactor that small. cold fusion is a bunch of crap, there have never been repeatable experiments performed. fission reactors have a minimum size because: 1/ you need more than a critical mass of uranium, but in the right geometry 2/ you need thick shielding as these thins are as radioactive as hell if not more so 3/ cooling requirements are MASSIVE to keep it from melting down. 4/ if cooling water cannot be piped to it from a source like a river, your going to need a big ass radiator. and we're talking huge. not only will this make your super soldier easy to spot, but also easy to kill as you just need to put a few holes in the radiator. its not so much that the reactor core needs to be huge, its just that all the supporting equipment and control systems take up a heck of a lot of space. weapons grade uranium/plutonium would decrease the necessary size of the core, but not the overall reactor.