Comments by "SeanBZA" (@SeanBZA) on "Scott Manley" channel.

  1. Don't worry, by now most of it is no longer the same element, more lead than anything else.
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  2. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle did the same, using a massive ramscoop rocket that was using the hydrogen atmosphere of one of the outer gas giants as power source, coolant and reaction mass, with it pulsing and venting a plume to move the gas giant into a suitable orbit so as to draw out the earth moon couple to a wider orbit, along with doing other things like move Mars closer in, and also cleaning up the outer planets somewhat by tossing the one out to make the orbital mechanics easier. Big self repairing machinery that was designed to last essentially forever, and also to communicate with authorised personell.
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  3.  @TheExplosiveGuy  Synthetic sapphire is glass clear, as it is pure monocrystalline aluminium oxide, which is what a sapphire and ruby is, just the red and other colours comes from impurities. The actual laser rods themselves are totally clear, though when they failed they usually turned to a fine powder from the energy release.
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  4. SR71 you fly in a space suit, which will easily handle the temperature till you slow down, then keep you fed with oxygen till you get low enough that you can first have the larger drogue chute slow you down, then finally the seat parts company, leaving you in the suit alone, with a big parachute (your seat cushion in almost all cases) and a survival pack to land with.
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  5. Nice thing about them is, even in a very light polluted cityscape, they are very visible as well, just after sunset (or just before sunrise) if you are looking up to the sky.
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  6. Helicopters tend to avoid negative G for noise abatement purposes. Heck of a noise as the rotors hit the tail if you pull negative G past a point. Some helicopter designs include in the tail a heavy steel cutter bar, designed so that you get a very audible warning, as it chews the tips off the main rotor blades, that what you are doing is not a good idea. Yes you will need all new rotor blades, very expensive, and a good pit of panel work to fix the hole cut in the tail rotor, but still cheaper than losing the airframe. Do remember having a flight with some really stressed out pilots, who had spent 3 hours turning in circles to calibrate the magnetic compasses after a replacement, and I took the flight back instead of driving on the tractor. Sitting in the cabin, door open, legs out and holding to the strap, with the sky below my feet, and the ocean visible through the rotor blades, as they were doing barrel rolls in this 16 ton helicopter. Yes it could lift cargo, 16 tons max at sea level, and if you could fit it inside, it would carry it.
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  7.  @scottmanley  OK thanks then, I was thinking it was Kodak film.
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  8. Bond to the ring is a big failure point, you need to have rough surfaces to have a good bond, not a smooth surface. Needed that ring to have a rough surface to give it a large surface area to bond the metal to the composite. Then probably chemically etched to give a clean metal layer for bonding, right before the final solvent cleaning, and then application of the epoxy bonding it to the ring. Plus inner lip should have been a lot thicker, probably at least a quarter the thickness, with a transition to the inner diameter to keep the step stress down.
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  9. Probably supplied by the same company, just had a little more care taken in processing to keep thickness variation, always there with thin foils, to a minimum, and to have a single pass pressing, so both sides are shiny, unlike the regular foil in which 2 foils are done at a time, with a thin oil coat between to prevent sticking, so as to cut time and cost. the foil from the roller is rolled onto a wide long roll, then goes to a slitter, where it gets cut to a width, then the length of foil required per pack is rolled onto the disposable mandrel in the box.
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  10.  @logicalfundy  Should rename it New Horizons/Voyager 3, and leave a message in the spacecraft memory banks about that. Cold flash memory should last centuries without degradation.
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  11. It will sink, it was designed to float down in a 93 bar Venusian atmosphere, where water will float 30km up, just before it boils away. But will probably survive hitting the ocean though, seeing as 70% of the impact path is over water.
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  12. Outer layer would be destroyed by the sun, but the aluminium under will be mostly fine, except where the plastic of the threads has been destroyed, so the blankets will have sagged and deformed, with likely some of the structure visible now. Paint exposed will be basically only the oxide pigments, and the mineral powders and fillers, nothing organic left, except where sheltered. Glass exposed could likely be a lovely blue from photon and electron bombardment, though most of it would be brown for the same reason. Thin film of dust on everything, as it rains down from the sky, as a result of micrometeorite bombardment nearby causing dust to fly up, and also from static charge causing particles to levitate in the vacuum from charge generation due to impact from solar wind protons and electrons.
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  13. Yes, return means you have to dissipate the exact same amount of energy as what was used to get you up there in the first place, and with no way to store it, it has to go as heat.
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  14. Yes but they all have common adaptors for interconnect, so you can remove parts as separate pieces for the final orbits, and each section can go down with it's own Progress or Dragon providing thrust and some control.
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  15.  @keepernod2888  They might not all have a docking adaptor, but for sure they do all have a way to connect them in space, that also allows them to come apart. Both will have the plans, if not spare flight ready hardware, that they can use to cobble up a way to attach them to a booster stage.
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  16. Falcon Heavy launching another Falcon 9 up, partly fuelled, with a second launch with another tank to fill it up. Your first one just needs a single vacuum Merlin engine on it, and then you will be able to get to a graveyard orbit up past GEO easily, or even put it into a lunar orbit. Going to be stressful on the station though, as the walls are not exactly thick, so only a low thrust long duration burn will do, thus only the one engine on the otherwise massive rocket, with most of the thrust going into making the fuel move.
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  17. Coolant changed to something less flammable, to the great delight of the ground crews, who could now use neat in the after work drinking, and also because they now had free de icing fluid for the cars.
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  18. Yes, just that crumple zone also has tiny complications, in that it is not empty space, but a lot of liquid that will combine, with a lot of gusto.
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  19. The fate of 10 is still to be broken. When that occurs is still a question though, it might be one flight, or it might be a dozen, but it will be driven till it fails to get data.
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  20. According to the song it always rains in Sunny California.
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  21.  @-danR  High pressure gas comes into the check valve, then there is a orifice plate to provide some flow restraint, and then the burst disk. In the space between the 2 units you can add a simple leak detector. For the oxidiser just use a high pressure electric feed through and a plain low carbon steel thin wire that will be corroded open if there is any leakage, and similar for the fuel, as it is also corrosive. Cheap, and can be integrated into the flange and orifice plate as well with ease, along with a pressure test port. You could also add in pressure transducers and a low pressure fill with gas, but pressure sensors that will survive that fuel and oxidiser are not cheap, nor are they low mass, as you need a diaphragm and transfer fluid to keep from melting the silicon strain gauges, which are ironically the cheapest part of the sensor.
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  22. Just proves only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. They are waiting for afternoon so it is cooler, and lucky for them afternoon lasts for over a week. But it gets really cold at night though, hope they took a blanket and heater that will keep themselves warm till morning.
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  23. Vodka powered.
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  24. HF reacts with everything, but in a lot of cases the metal flouride is a stable layer passivating the surface. Thus you can store HF in nickel tanks, and use pure nickel plant to handle it, because NiF is at least similar in size to Ni metal, and bonds well. Just like Aluminium oxide is a passivation layer for insanely reactive Aluminium. Just do not have any sort of cavitation that will scour this layer away, and pour your liquid in slowly and carefully.
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  25.  @paulhaynes8045  The phone has GPS yes, but also the towers, because they have a fixed nearby location, also will send the ephemeris data for all the locally visible satellites to the phone on request, so the phone GPS can lock really fast, and it also uses the time difference between local towers to gat a very fast and somewhat accurate location if indoors, so that it can at least give a position to within 30m almost immediately, even if there is no sight of the sky for GPS signals. The GPS signal is used outside in your car, to track better, but rough location is done using the signal strength and timing of local towers. Did once turn on a phone GPS with no coverage from the network, and it took around 20 minutes to finally position me, within a 100m sphere, while another phone, with service and data, took under a minute to position, using data and the 2 visible towers to get a rough area to gain coarse position fast. GPS in your phone needs data, stand alone GPS can do without it, though your accuracy improves with time on, as it refines errors out long term, though you also get the map used providing some sort of sanity check, as there is an assumption if you are moving you are on a road, allowing it to remove parallel paths easily.
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  26.  @abarratt8869  Yes the phone does not use GPS time info, it just in most cases uses the time, date and UTC offset sent as part of the phone network operator control data stream to set time and date on the phone, along with the time zone, and that is then visible to apps and the user. The cell data control uses the time it gets from the GPS and reference cells to time stamp the packets of data sent to and from the phone, so as to allow message blocks to be sent out of sequence, if that helps with the instantaneous power and bandwidth management, and then each side will reconstitute the streams of data back into a single seemingly monotonic stream.
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  27. Very carefully, probably by having a counterweight that changes position to compensate for the mass loss on the one side, likely using some form of stored energy in the arm to move it inward to a balancing position.
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  28. Those tiles, just like MH370 parts, will start to wash up on beaches all over the Indian ocean soon enough, along with any light floating parts. Probably time to start making the beachcombers and cleaners on the tropical islands aware of the need to look out for floating stuff that is hard, so they can collect them instead of dumping them.
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  29. Not necessarily that the parachute will fail to operate, it could, because of the Russian space program wanting simplicity and robustness, have a very simple pressure capsule that was only armed by a pin being pulled during separation, that now is waiting for the pressure to approach a part atmosphere, which would be the opening pressure in the upper Venusian atmosphere, and thus acting as a backup for the electronic trigger, or it also acts to power up the lander, as it would assume it was doing reentry, and thus connect the internal batteries to the electronics. 50 years and the batteries might have still some residual charge, enough to have it give a final few seconds of swansong, as the radio transmitter operates for a few moments before they deplete completely.
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  30. Another thing about that old steam turbine is the ends of the shaft, where the thrust bearings are. Multiple bearing faces, with pressurised oil feeding them, because no ball bearing of the time could withstand the thrust and rotational speed, so they simply used lots of bearing surfaces, and put them in parallel, so the oil film could still provide protection.
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  31. Problem is flight needs a great deal of power, as you basically are flying in what would have been classed 150 years ago as a pretty good vacuum.
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  32.  @OkieOtaku  Well, I normally do this for things like chicken and rabbit when they are being done over a nice set of coals, though you can save a lot of time with judicious precooking in a pot with water and spices, to keep the meat moist and get heat all the way through, along with flavour, and finally just do the outside to get the nice flavour from the Maillard reactions.
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  33.  @jasoncdebussy  Henny Penny pressure cooker will do that sucker in 15 minutes right through, though you will have a lot of oil in the meat. That is what KFC uses to do the chicken, and those take 12 minutes per cycle when you are running flat out.
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  34. Remember every survivor of an ejection does get a tie pin from Martin Baker, as testament to surviving the event. Fun thing is the speed at which it does eject you does compress your spine, so you will only ever eject once, as the second time might kill you. Your legs get pulled in with straps, but your hands are not pulled in, instead you have both hands on either the top ejection pull ring, or the one between your legs. You do though want to pull your legs in before, as there is a rather good chance if you do forget that those straps that pull your legs in to the seat are there, and that they pull your feet in by being attached to the airframe, and pull in while the seat is busy making you 10cm shorter. You have a greater than 50% chance that unprepared your ankles and shins will be broken. Yes have chatted to pilots that survived landing separate to the plane, and met the one who landed missing large parts of the airframe behind his seat, but still had a working engine (sans afterburner, seeing as the missile hit that), and no parachute or brakes. Him ejecting would have been fatal, he is a little past the design envelope for that particular seat design, and ejecting would mean his head was the canopy breaker. Fighter pilots are in general short and stocky, because the cockpits are designed for short and stocky people. Very uncomfortable for bigger or taller people like me to fit in there.
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  35. Would say they will not put those samples in nitrogen, entirely too reactive, most likely the samples will be stored half in a high purity vacuum, and then the half that is to be examined will come up to atmospheric pressure in an argon atmosphere, as that at least can easily be gotten as an isotopically pure gas, and is a common enough trace gas in atmosphere, but not reactive easily, unless you have elemental fluorine in the sample.
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  36.  @stevevernon1978  Probably no time, or they did not think to include this ability in the uplink channel command set, so they could command the first stage to do an early MECO and force separation that way.
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  37. As more satellites were added in different orbits, accuracy improved. With low numbers of satellites, and also with long paths through the air to provide diffraction of the signal, you got poor accuracy. More orbits meant more visible at any time, and thus a more precise position. You need, IIRC, at least 4 to get a coarse position in 3 axes, and with every added satellite visible at the same time your error reduces. At 6 you get 100m, and with more the error reduces further, with most receivers able to handle up to 12 simultaneous decodes at a time, and with more sophisticated receivers using ADC units that can sample at the actual chirp bit rate, timing each individual bit as it comes in, and thus being able to correct for smaller drift with each cycle. Some of the software defined units have no real limit on the number of satellites they can view simultaneously, just depends on the amount of memory and processor speed, as you can always add more of both, and make the rake receiver scale with visible satellite numbers. Some of those have impressive cold start capability, being able to start from cold within a few minutes, and with warm start capability of seconds, provided the data they have is not too stale. Big issue is with noise, you find that often GPS signals in urban areas are poor, lots of RF noise desensitising the receiver, and also urban canyons making for lots of multipath distortion, and limiting visible sky to use. Sometimes I need to restart the old Garmin I have a few times, as it is unable to start, but often during RF quiet times it will be up and running in 2 minutes, from a warm start.
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  38.  @DrDeuteron  They use Plutonium 238, which is relatively safe, and yes the decay products are mostly alpha and beta emitters, at least the early products, though somewhere there are neutrinos produced, but not much. Mostly heat, so good for energy, but yes by the time you get to further down your battery is long gone.
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  39.  @iancooper8777  Yes they dump most of the electron energy by using a high bandgap semiconductor to capture those electrons. Think large area Silicon carbide LED's used as electron capture devices, dumping the rest as heat. You stack the thin film detectors on either side of the source, to capture the most energy, and pump the assembly down to a pretty good vacuum as well.
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  40.  @ericlotze7724  Not much about VFD's other than they all die eventually. The SOS construction because you have to grow a film on an insulator for electrodes, and sapphire in pure form is transparent, and making the whole clock in the display area is possible, as the electronics can all be coated with silicon nitride to provide isolation afterwards, except for some bumps at the edge of the device that are built up with aluminium to make the top layer connections. You probably will want to use an electrochromic display instead of LCD though, as that saves a lot of power, though you will still need to have a capacitor to store the energy needed to refresh the display, which likely will only update once a minute. But same construction physically as LCD, just needs a very low current high voltage (around12V) power source to do the update. Going to be fun to do the crystal drive though, with nanowatts of power available, and typical watch crystals being in the microwatt range for drive. Battery array likely to be a lot bigger and thicker than the display. your wristwatch is going to be Rolex Oyster size, and only rated to 10m depth.
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  41.  @casualbird7671  They are running on the failed receiver, that has lost the ability to track frequency and doppler shift, and are running on the backup thrusters, originally used for orbital insertion when launched. But still working after decades of use. I would say that the big Dish just ramped power up to full power, meaning they shortened the life of the Klystron tubes a bit by eroding the filaments and anodes, but not by too much. They do have at least a full set of hot spares there, and another set or two of tubes in storage to replace them, and then send out the tubes to be rebuilt. There are a few companies that still rebuild both CRT tubes and large transmitter tubes, because there are some applications where replacing them is either very expensive, or very difficult.
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  42.  @heuhen  They also had a launch where the astronaut commented he had hoped to be a little higher at MECO.
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  43. Well, not being American, and also not liking turkey, can we replace the bird with something else. For me that would be Ostrich, which is a much larger bird, but which does taste a lot better than turkey, and which is quite common these days world wide as an exotic fat free meat.
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  44. Falling into a singularity you would, provided it is big enough that you are not turned to particle soup before actually reaching the event horizon, not notice anything, though you will at some point be able to see the CMB as visible light, telling you that you likely are about to pass the event horizon. Of course this also says that you will long have lost the ability to communicate this information to an outside observer, as they likely will be millennia dead, at that point outside of the steep gravity well.
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  45. That is woven polyamide, same as the plastic, with a polyamide thread used to sew them together, in a loose stitch so the packing could keep the layers apart.
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  46. No, just too heavy.
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  47. Peroxide not too common because of contamination issues. LOX if you get a tiny bit of steel fluff not too much of a problem, instant rusted away. Peroxide you get catalysed reaction, that makes nice hot steam and hot oxygen, which then causes reactions with other parts, and lots of extra pressure in there. Small volumes and exotic materials are cheap enough, but when you have to make entire tanks out of exotic stainless steel alloys, and not use any sort of grinding or machining operation, that might have small ferrous particles in it, it gets real expensive real fast.
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  48.  @johnladuke6475  Probably there, but they instead fitted TEMU airbag emulators instead, because those are cheap.
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  49. Apollo was the same, and before that Mercury also had troubles.
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  50. Possibly a lubricant leak into the methane causing the colour change, from contaminated methane, burning slower hydrocarbon chains. That would account for the flame as well, venting from an overpressure relief on the hydraulic system, and the faster landing was to get down as fast as possible, before the hydraulic systems totally failed.
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