I never understand why the rotating station concepts seem to all have rigid tethers, either in the form of a central boom or a rigid circular structure. It would seem like you could get a much larger diameter, so less rotational velocity and more comfort, by attaching rigid, or inflatable in this case, structures with a tether. Compressive loads are non existent, you just need to resist tensile loads.
There are compressive forces. If mass inside the ring is not balanced, it can drag the ring into an ellipsoid. The inner sides of the ellipse are compressed.
A rigid ring can resist some of this inherently, but a rigid spoke to the hub cleanly takes up all the inward forces.
If your ring is not rigid, any perturbations can cause oscillations that throw the whole thing out of balance. Like a gas leak in one compartment adding thrust at a weird angle. Soon the whole ring will be oscillating along its plane, which is obviously bad. You can actively correct with thrusters on each segment, but that's a lot of extra complexity.
Basically it's all about stability. A big rigid object is much harder to shake apart. A metal circle will stay a circle in a lot more circumstances than a circle of rope will. Doubly so when rotating in zero gravity.
Flexible tethers are mainly good for small scale. Swinging a crew capsule about a big mass (Project Hail Mary, Stardancer) is indeed cheap and easy. With the complication that you must completely spin down to maneuver or dock.
I don't think your reasoning here is correct. Take a bicycle wheel for example. The spokes on a bicycle wheel do not take any compressive forces due to the way they are attached to the rim, and yet bicycle wheels can take surprising compressive loads without going oblong.
Maybe I'll go ask the AI oracle, it's only slightly fallible
Or
Maybe I'll go poke an ML model a few different ways to see if it emits interesting word sequences, that I'll then fact-check and study to develop real, deep knowledge.
I'm actually optimistic we can increase the second one, but it requires everyone to help educate our less-technical friends, family, and colleagues.
This isn't new. It's the same person who used to say "but Google said...!" This is a solvable education problem, because we've solved it before.
If it had been solved before we would not be in the predicament we are now, i.e. people might be able to learn but that doesn't mean everyone does. In fact, most do not because we are too busy figuring out how to die leading less fulfilling, more angst-ridden lives.
When its such for my personal edification and idle wonderings, usually the former. If its something that is any way critical to a meaningful decision or something I'm going to publicly share, its the latter.
An array of steerable ion engines hanging below the station (ie on the edge not in the center) can provide both reboots / stationkeeping and precess the axis, eg once per year to track the Sun.
Because trig, by "mixing" both maneuvers together it uses less propellant vs doing the two maneuvers separately.
There are quite a few specific procedures unique to crossing the North Atlantic. Part of it has to do with the absence of radar and VHF comms requiring HF or satellite communications which pilots will otherwise never use. I'm sure Pacific crossings have their own peculiarities but I'm less familiar.
Are they killing unwanted minorities and political dissidents on an industrial scale? No, they aren’t. Ergo, they aren’t N*is. Labeling them as such is unfair to them and an insult to the memory of those killed by the actual kind.
There can be widespread bigotry that falls far far short of N*ism. Words and precision matter.
nope.. its symmetrical about a bunch of axes. at most they'd need a 60 degree rotation, not 180 like USB-A. So this standard is precisely 3x better than USB-A
This may come off as a little inappropriate but one thing I think about when learning another language is the usual mistakes or quirks that native speakers of that language display when speaking English. It turns out that quite often those are reflective of the correct form in their language.
It's helped me sound more natural in Japanese and Hebrew.
I speak a bunch of languages, and this is especially helpful when learning languages that have a specific own idiomatic sentence structure. You get a pretty good insight into how people form sentences in their native language based on how they garble English. You can often derive where people are from based on those typical mistakes, even in a few sentences on an online forum.
Counterpoint - Tesla is trying to avoid a local maximum where they are able to do robotaxi's in cars with $300,000 of equipment on roads that are precisely mapped down to the centimeter.
Waymo and Cruise may have beat them to "first robotaxi" but I'm not convinced that they have anywhere near a scalable, sustainable model.
This is analogous to saying "we're trying to avoid a local maximum where we are required to use expensive chemical propellants in order to fuel our space rockets; therefore we're going to double down on stuffing them full of larger and larger quantities of gunpowder".
Maybe I'll go ask the AI.
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