Rocket Man

when its cooled, the elements generally react again to form more stable configurations. however, from what i've learned, this rule is often broken. oxygen gas is diatomic and quite stable. a common product of oxygen plasma is ozone which is far less inert. basically, there's enough energy in the collisions of cooling plasma to make practically any random compound. plasma is just the nuclei and the electrons. the nuclei still have the same number of protons so the element won't change. i'd assume that if you made it hotter still you could start breaking the nuclei into it's component parts, beyond that is quark gluon plasma where the protons and such fall apart. as for reality, there is no system aside from a particle accelerator that can shatter a nucleus

if you get one to flash point, it stays at flash point. if you starve it of oxygen and then remove the cover, the flame reappears. blowing at it simply makes it hotter, the flame is all over the surface of the wax, you can even remove the wick if you have long enough tweezers. as for hands, hands contain water, wax is a heavy oil. deep fried hand perhaps? the tea light candles you've met were just lazy sods

i think your cell is going to be based on two inert metal sponges semi immersed in the electrolyte. whether or not you can run methane is dependant on how the fuel is catalysed. depending on how much you'll sacrifice to science in terms of beverages, ethanol can be run in fuel cells, it just takes more to catalyse. (but i can think of better uses)

50 x 50 metres. not that unreasonable. the only problem is actaully getting around to building a plant that scale. the only way i can see it being feasable is if the energy could be recovered in the condenser to run... reverse osmosis in parrallel? or would you pre heat the feed water?

heat a compound from solid, you'll probably go through liquid to gas. keep heating it, the collisions can get so violent that the compund itself starts breaking up. when the petroleum industry "cracks" larger carbon chains, it heats the initial compound in a very specific environment that favours the breakdown to a certain length chain, say, petrol. but if you go to something more stable, where all the electrons fall off before the compound falls apart, you enter the realm of plasma physics. plasma is not a fourth state of matter. plasma is a soup of nuclei and electrons.

just dont over-heat a tea light candle and expect to blow it out. you can get one of those candles in the little aluminium tins to reach flash ignition point before they reach boiling point. don't toss water on an oil fire. it's got plenty of primed combustibles and ready heat than water can remove so as the water boils, it exposes more flaming wax or oil to the air allowing a faster combustion.

the am radio has a filter on it so you only get the recurring pops and crackles. if you can bypass the filter you'll get the actual wave shapes over the speaker. a suitably hacked radio can give you that.

i've got an old x8 cockroft walton voltage multiplier in a parallel config, i'm looking to get it running again after it fried my oscillator on a number of occasions. what type of oscillator would i be able to run it off? considering it tends to drop it's guts through the oscillator lead as well as the output. it's limited to 100v due to the caps i used

an aluminum spire with an artificial ground underneath an upturned fishbowl generallly gives a more cohesive ball of plasma. i think it forms a torus which holds itself together via magnetic effects. search plasmoid.

i think i've seen the actual schematic for his death ray, as well as the a news article about it. the records didn't vanish or get snatched up, they were simply unfeasable at the time. i have no doubt that they were of interest to government agencies but they wouldn't bother covering them up. iirc, the death ray used a tremendous charge that could be released along some (unproven) ray device which could be substituted for a laser. the beam the assembly emitted was then suposed to be seeded with droplets of mercury which were accelerated by the electric potential and also held in the line of fire via Z-pinch. consider proposing this to an audience of investors who have seen millions of dollars dissapear. the technology was at the time, almost impossible and ridiculously expensive. who would buy it?

i think it's meant to be vague to give students the opportunity to put some quaint principles into practice.

actually, it makes sense as a secondary effect. if you make the gas more dense, you don't need to compress it into the inlet. if you have a regulated fuel injector, it'll keep the fuel/oxidiser in the right proportions giving it a bit of an effect like a turbo as well as burning hotter.

are you sure you can't use liquids? does the device need to suffer 1 or 2 drops?

nitrous oxide is used in some hybrid rockets as the oxidiser, i'm not sure whether that's because it's easier to obtain than oxygen or simply easier to liquify, but it might be more reactive than O2.

true, but we were also talking about the propulsive behaviour of compressed gasses so i thought the simple water rocket was appropriate. as for proportions, it really depends on the nossle diameter. a fine nossle will use a different water level to a wide nossle. compressing water into ice; was it 15 or 40 different types of ice that form under different conditions?

the plastic is normally only there for transport, it's a big round thing that encompasses the entire valve set. purely protective.

can we call a saturn V an aircraft? we have lots of things which go up very fast. there's also a number of existing fighters which have enough grunt to support their weight stationary, it's just the matter of getting them to go up that's impractical

true, but as a whole, water liquid is more dense than xenon gas. so i'd expect you'd get more propellant mass in a cylinder using the cheap stuff.

iirc, "myth busters" did a take on this one. they managed to completely remove the valve almost instantly with the cylinder lying horisontal facing a cavity brick wall. the cylinder went dead straight with no modifications, put a neat hole through the test wall and nearly made it through the next wall (also cavity brick... yay for foresight) i personally am a fan of pneumatic propulsion. but it works so much better when the propellant has more mass. like water for example.

you can also make decent booster amplifiers for the reciever, at which point the distance is very much dependant on the radio noise in the area. if you go out to where they're going to build the square kilometre array, you'd get far better reception than under a tesla coil for example.

vb... it's the one code i bothered to learn. now i've got the thing rendering 3D wire frames in stereoscopy, tens of times per second with unrestricted view points using the just built in draw functions. basically, the only thing limiting anyone in gaming is the graphics engines they work with. vb can't draw a triangle so i'm stuck at wire frames. the most useful language any programmer can learn is mathematics. edit: klick and play is not something i'd recommend to beginners or anyone else. it's not code, it's not teaching anything, and most of all, you'll out grow it's built in subs in no time flat leaving you at square one wondering what language to learn. i like vb becasue i can control everything. ps: if anyone has any suggestions regarding a sub for a quick loading triangle in vb, it'd be much appreciated (i am not going directX)

oh... all the gas stoves i've seen all have glass tops, mine has a glass top. none the less, most stoves are designed to keep the top cold. (except those funky induction electrics)

a chunk of iron in the centre of the dice suspended by a few films of latex immersed in.. some low density viscous fluid. (i'll leave it up to the chemists here to recommend something) magnet in the high roller's hand placed against the down side of the dice pulls on iron and gives you some time to make a fortune. other players simply roll a (semi)standard die. nothing stops the iron from sinking a little but the person with the magnet gets a substantial advantage depending on the strength of the magnet. you could also swing the dice violently to fix the landing position.

electric or gas? did you take a photo? most gas stoves have glass tops, i suppose if you have all the elements on full in a cold kitchen you could get a decent gradient, but most are built that the glass stays fairly cold; rubber seals between aluminium troughs and plenty of air flow underneath. did anything spill or was it just running normally?

...yeah, when i wrote that, i think went a bit over the scale you'd be gambling under.. the earth's magnetic feild is too weak to have much effect on a dice but perhaps you could load a dice with a weight and a sprung time delay. some sort of simple timer or something to return the centre of mass to the centre of the dice before the opponent picks the dice up.