Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Scott Manley" channel.

  1. Sounds like a good place to set up an interplanetary tech support service. “Good evening, you are talking to Glork. Haumea help you?”
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  2. I don’t see why they’re squeamish about the term. It’s only used for recovery of unmanned boosters, after all. A passenger rocket, on the other hand ... “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We are due to land at Luna Base in 20 minutes. Landing maneouvres can be a little bumpy, so please make sure your seatbelts are fastened and your trays are returned to the upright position.” “Cabin crew, take your positions for suicide burn.” “AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!” “Dammit, Fred! Next time check the PA switch to the passenger cabin is off before announcing that part of the procedure!”
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  3. So you end up hiring a lot of constipated staff...
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  4. Ahh, but are they “thermodynamic photon blasters” (incandescent bulbs) or “quantum photon blasters” (LEDs)? Or even “plasma photon blasters” (fluorescents)?
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  5. 0:37 The Russians also have something else: sponsorship placards.
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  6. Even if it detonated after being poured into the propellant tank, that still wouldn’t be much use. Ignition ≠ detonation.
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  7. Maybe he’s not into the whole rubber S&M thing...
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  8. 12:15 “Boring hunk of junk” ... actually an apt description of every piece of real-world technology that we rely on to work reliably to get through our lives. If ever space travel becomes routine, that will apply to spacecraft as well.
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  9. And you have explained, in less than 6 minutes, more than I have been able to gather from the local TV news reports (both channels).
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  10. The story by Edward Murphy involved a jacket being worn by a volunteer undergoing g-force experiments on a rocket sled. Except every time they launched the poor guy on the sled, they kept getting back readings of zero. The jacket had accelerometers sewn into it--not just one, but a whole bunch of them, to measure forces at different points. Each one could have been put in the right way, or the wrong way--you’d think, by chance, that about half of them would work. But they had all been put in the wrong way round.
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  11. It’s a comment on the ridiculously convoluted arguments offered by conspiracy believers.
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  12. They did something like that on Apollo 10.
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  13. Wow, I thought you were some kind of conspiracy nut. Then I realized you meant “thrust”, not “trust” ...
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  14. Depending on the chemicals, he might be flying, all right ...
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  15. 4:03 Note that “1I/” prefix on the name: that indicates it is the first interstellar celestial object ever detected in our solar system.
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  16. 3:33 That window-frame colour keeps screaming “Windows XP” at me ...
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  17. 10:34 “Klb”? Way to keep resisting those SI units, kicking and screaming until the last, eh?
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  18. One optimistic comment I heard was that PAN-STARRS discovered this object very soon after receiving a system upgrade. So maybe it’s not coincidence, and with its increased sensitivity we might be seeing more things like this in future...
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  19. NASA has published models of Voyager and other craft in various formats for free download and use. Because these were funded by the US Government, there is no copyright on them.
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  20. It is good that they got most of the kaboom out of the way early on.
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  21. Going to say, his “Opticks” would be more sort of, ahem, “light" reading. “Principia” would be somewhat heavier, being about gravity, you know...
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  22. Actually, coarse and rough sand is getting harder to find. It’s in high demand for making concrete. The stuff that deserts and beaches are full of tends to be fine and smooth.
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  23. “realistic” + “flat-Earth” = “does not compute”
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  24. Amy “Vintage Space” Shira Teitel did an item on the comparison between hypergolic rockets and ones needing explicit ignition. For example, the Gemini craft took off on Atlas boosters, which were hypergolic. You can see from the footage of the launches how the exhaust flame is barely perceptible at all. This also has to do with why Gemini had ejector seats, while neither Mercury nor Apollo did. But I digress...
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  25. To model elaborate shapes, they were first sculpted in wood, I think it was. This was then sliced into thin layers, which were individually scanned to build up the mesh data in the computer.
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  26. Read his PhD thesis http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/12652 to find out why he was nicknamed “Dr Rendezvous”. Edit: Hey, why the past tense? The guy’s still alive and kicking, you know.
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  27. So there was no beer during that dip in the global temperatures? Dry As!
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  28. 9:42 ... just not on Boeing. ;)
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  29. One famous name tragically died young--Bui-Tuong Phong. He gave us Phong shading. Who knows what else he might have done ... Also I don’t know if Pierre Bézier and Paul de Casteljau are still alive ...
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  30.  @michaelmoorrees3585  Yeah, that’s actually the secret to orbiting, not flying.
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  31. The OP is talking about how spaceships maneouvre in vacuum versus how aircraft fly in an atmosphere. The “Star Wars” fighters banked and turned like aircraft, not spaceships.
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  32. Hanlon’s Razor: “Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
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  33. Could work in theory. I remember many years ago Toyota talking about a magnetic air purifier to separate N₂ from O₂ to provide more oxygen-rich air into the car. Or maybe that was just a patent, as opposed to an actual working system...
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  34. The Last Starfighter looked so far ahead of its time because the rendering was done on a multi-million-dollar CRAY-X/MP supercomputer. Even compared to stuff done 10 years later, it still looked pretty good.
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  35. Stick it in an RTG and get electricity out of it.
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  36. 2:45 What are the odds that a vector would be named after someone called “Poynting”? ;)
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  37. You’re not supposed to take them up into space!
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  38. 1:45 I immediately think of the Steve Martin film “LA Story”, and one of the running gags is that Victoria Tennant’s character always drives on the wrong side of the road. Maybe this visitor is from a solar system where they drive on the other side of the, um, space...
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  39. 4:06 “perchlorate”? SrClO₄?
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  40. Lucasburn!
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  41. It was. Those were monster mainframes, in specs as well as size.
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  42. The relative velocity is so huge, it would be very expensive in fuel. Currently, missions to comets take years to get to their target--it’s like playing a very slow game of rocket-assisted billiards in the solar system, bouncing off planetary gravitational fields here and there, to build up speed in the right direction to get close to the target.
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  43. A diverse ecosystem is valuable. That’s why Linux supports something like two dozen different major processor architectures—more than any other OS in history. And it also supports a wide variety of filesystems, not just NTFS.
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  44. The mathematical theory of how to deal optimally with noisy, imperfect sensors via noisy, imperfect actuators was worked out decades ago as “the Kálmán filter”. Fun fact: the NASA engineers working on the Apollo mission didn’t initially know about Kálmán because, you know, he wasn’t American. So they ended up reinventing a lot of his theory.
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  45. Remember the Clarke short story The Sentinel , that was part of the basis for 2001: A Space Odyssey ? Maybe this is the real test. Getting to the Moon was child’s play (comparatively), let’s see the fledgeling civilization rendezvous with an object orbiting in completely the wrong direction. Or maybe there’s another test beyond that...
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  46. 2:28 Speed, not velocity. The change in velocity is the whole point.
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  47. Very wide-angle lens?
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  48. It’s one of those movies that nobody seems to remember. I remember my mum taking me to see it as a child. Then more recently I dug it up again, just to refresh my memory. And yes, it is a gripping plot, with a bunch of big-name actors from the time. Quite watchable. Oh, and no theme music at all.
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  49. Sampling theory comes into it as well: the ideal digital pixel is a point with zero dimensions*. Which is physically impossible. Because real-world sensors have a nonzero size, this has the effect of lowering the contrast of fine details close to the Nyquist limit. The cure for this is the “unsharp mask” filter, well-known to all users of photomanipulation software. *That’s right, pixels are not “little squares”.
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  50. Where’s Orson Welles when you need him?
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