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Autistic. Adult. ΔΘ
Agender aromantic (not ace).
Letter A aficionado.


A faceless robot-polymorph on the internet. The brainspace equivalent of a fork in the river. Artist, occasional writer, and perpetual oddity. Turtles all the way down.


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nightfeather.cafe/@d723

exerian
@exerian

my favorite variant of this is basically a giant sling
just lob that rock right into space.


exerian
@exerian

i found my own citation, thanks.lolinteresting engineering

shit. they've been doing this since the 60s. wtf? how did i not know about this?

it's probably because all of my crazy launch ideas are focused on launching people into space and these things would basically just make your brain explode.


estrogen-and-spite
@estrogen-and-spite

Your footnote there is exactly why.

Doing this to a person is a good way to send one to two hundred pounds of red paste into space.

Electronics can handle more - but even since the 60's it was hard. Solid state components are better - much better - at handling high G forces so it's finally becoming more viable and also things like the sling let you accelerate more slowly to minimize that risk some. (Still would never put a human in one of those but at least you're not going to launch a bunch of fragmented plastic and steel into space this way.)


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in reply to @estrogen-and-spite's post:

have you seen the ridiculous centrifuge mass driver startup that is probably physically impossible with current technology and even if it was possible would be wildly inefficient? thunderf00t did a great debunking of the company on yt

better to just sky gat barrels into orbit ☁️🔫🛢️🌌

I...really hesitate at the sentence "thunderf00t did a great", but I do know some of these are pie in the sky dreams.

Honestly I think a really, really long railgun with a gentle slope and some way to reduce air resistance as it accelerates is going to be the most likely final working version of this tech.

did thunderf00t do something that i missed? i like how he compiles all of the clips straight from scammy billionaires and businesses and shows how they lie with receipts

i recently did a little hyperfocus on railguns, and i really like them, but they have so many practical issues, it will really take some major improvements in materials science and high temperature superconductors to make them really practical i think, but i hope you're right because the potential benefits are huge!

Thunderf00t was one of the spearheads of elevatorgate and went hard in on gamergate. Basically when the online skeptic community went to shit, thunderf00t was one of the ones who went full shithead. Did some googling and it sounds like he's not on that path anymore, but...eh. I used to like his stuff back in the day and then.

And yeah it's not quite there yet, but it feels like a solvable problem. High temperature/ room temperature superconductors make the process easier, but there's routes to getting there without that if we can sufficiently power the thing.

wow i had no idea, i looked into it and it seems like he has some deeply troubling and serious issues with women that override everything else, very disappointing, it also led to some other distressing realizations, what a terrible era that we live in the shadow of

i think power is what it all comes down to, i am afraid to mention another youtuber, but styropyro did a video with an array of batteries and the amount of power coursing the copper wires created powerful magnetic fields which ripped apart the setup at one point, things get really wild when you start throwing around that much electrical energy!

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