I’m cranking out 3D printed knives as fast as I can, but maybe my problem is that I’m doing it for free? I don’t know what to tell you guys.

That’s the main hurdle.

Re-finding this was a pain in the ass because I didn’t save it. https://lemmy.world/post/19485246/12219336

Editing to add some more meandering. Now this is even longer than the first one.

In addition to surface area limitations, there’s also a pretty obvious line of sight problem in that if your satellite is positioned such that its shiny side is facing the sun, by definition it must be facing the same direction as the Earth’s currently lighted side. The further past the dusk line onto the dark side of the Earth you’re trying to hit the further you have to rotate your mirror until ultimately the surface of it is perpendicular to the incoming sunlight. This is the angle of incidence, in optical terms, and it reduces the effective reflection not only off of the mirror proportionally to the increase in angle (in a roughly geometric manner, I believe) but also where that reflected beam of light hits the ground at its oblique angle. In real terms, it will be impossible to hit any target more than a few degrees past the dusk line with any meaningful amount of energy. Insofar as this harebrained scheme could possibly hit the ground with any amount of energy at all.

The diagram (which is surely not to scale) on these idiots’ website seems to depict a mirror in orbit around the Earth that’s about the size of Massachusetts, which is orbiting at a height that’d put it somewhere in the vicinity of the Van Allen belt, which is also a bad idea (no radio communication for you!) and would result in an orbital period of around 2.5 hours. If so, that means your mirror is whizzing over the surface at something like 14,000 MPH, and you would have some kind of line of sight to it from the ground for maybe 25% of its orbit. So even with the best will in the world and absolutely mathematically perfect rotation control it’ll only be able to remain on a surface target for about 37 minutes at most, most of which would be while it’s uselessly passing through the Earth’s shadow and is reflecting no sunlight at all, and for the remaining handful of minutes with its effective output tapering off to uselessness as it sets over the opposite horizon.

“I’ll just position my mirrors in a geostationary orbit,” says Mr. Clever. “Then I’ll have line of sight to a big chunk of the surface and my satellite won’t move relative to it.”

Well, the further you park your mirrors from the surface, the harder they are to aim. You can’t have it both ways. A geostationary orbit is about 22,000 miles from the surface, a distance from which even the tiniest error in alignment will result in you hitting the wrong target. You can use some middle school trig to calculate this for yourself: At a distance of 22,000 miles, an alignment error of just 0.01 degrees will result in the centerline of your beam missing the target by four miles, which in terrestrial terms is what we refer to as kind of a lot. Maintaining an alignment precision that high especially taking into account gravitational perturbation by the moon, etc., is a rather tall order. To maintain targeting precision within 223 feet, which is probably already unacceptable, you need a constant alignment precision of 0.0001 degrees, and you need to hold it there 100% of the time.

I don’t care how big your rocket is, that’s not happening.

All of this also assumes perfectly flat and 100% reflective surfaces on the mirrors, which never degrades or gets scuffed up or punctured by space debris. Which is also impossible.

To recap:

• You can’t reflect any more energy than strikes the surface area of your mirrors, end of story. The mirrors will be tiny, relative to the size of the Earth, and the Earth is huge, relative to the size of any mirror we can launch.
• The efficacy of your mirrors diminishes geometrically with how far you must angle them relative to the direction of incoming sunlight.
• Most of the time your mirrors will either be in the Earth’s shadow, where they are useless, or over the already illuminated side of the Earth, where they’re pointless. In easily achievable low Earth orbits, their time on target will be very short.
• Positioning the orbits high enough to mitigate either problem will make aiming mathematically impossible, and also magnify any imperfections in focus, which are certain to be vast. That won’t work either.

TL;DR: The whole thing won’t work.

In addition to being a moronic idea, this is also physically infeasible as I outlined in excruciating detail in my comment the last time this came up. The takeaway is that this is an investor scam for sure, and the side effects outlined in this article are just a fun (!) and exciting (!) sideshow if these bozos actually do mange to get a single mirror off the ground and deployed. Which they probably won’t.

Exciting enough for me to use on a daily basis, and I’m actively following their development progress. Not contributing, mind you. Nobody wants me of all people touching their codebase.

FreeCAD - The open source alternative to various proprietary parametric CAD and solid modelling software such as Solidworks, Fusion360, OnShape, etc. This recently passed its milestone 1.0 release at which point it could finally be considered actually broadly functional for actual real world use. Among various other widgets, I prominently used it to make this and this. Yeah, you guys know how it is.

I consider FreeCAD pretty important coming from the 3D printing hobbyist’s perspective because its the lone bulwark (well, okay, maybe also along with Blender and OpenSCAD) standing firm against the tidal wave of predatory bullshit being peddled by the commercial modelling software options, all of which at this point are genuine full-blown instruments of evil desperately trying to strangle, gatekeep, and paywall humankind’s ability to just make some goddamned shapes to 3D print.

In other news, I complied UZDoom from source the other night because somehow I missed that zdoom.org has precompiled binaries on their site, which I haven’t had to visit in years, but the UZDoom Github page doesn’t. We live and learn. UZDoom is pretty exciting because it’s a continuation of GZDoom with the added feature of kicking its insane former lead developer off of the project, or rather forking it out from under him. And everybody loves to play Doom.

Some AI or central computer going haywire and destroying everything is, like, the third or fourth stock RPG trope just behind the Dark Lord burning down the protagonist’s village in the first act or the mysterious waif girl actually turning out to be a princess.

You really think they’d know better.

Apparently it is.

Worse, the shuttlecraft set stoops as far as having an Ensign Ro Laren minifig but still no O’Brien.

https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/tbdst-bfcm-40768

Woo, a post in here by someone other than me! We’re not completely just a vanity community!

Imagine my surprise and amusement to discover that https://www.realultimatepower.net/ is still online.

They already sell their vehicles to Altima drivers. I think doom was already on the menu.

And also, The Dork’s Equation: Always remember that the shadowy government conspiracy that is allegedly hiding aliens and crossbreeding Bigfoot is also made up of the very same government chucklefucks that couldn’t cover up Watergate, and can’t even reliably fix a pothole.

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Just for anyone wondering, because I was sure wondering, existing continuous fiber filaments from other brands run upwards of $450 per spool at the moment. Jesus.

Not even. The rainbow was god’s covenant with man (or Noah, specifically) that he would not flood the world again in future hissy tantrums. Some wingnuts have not RTFM.

Well, okay. A lot of them.

Most, even.

Electric motorcycles don’t have transmissions because they don’t need them. Same as electric cars. Your cargo and range requirements are going to be a tall order for an electric moto, but not impossible — just, not cheap.

Guys, is this it? Do we suggest OP should buy a Harley Davidson Livewire? I think so! Sidecars for motorcycles are pretty much always custom or at least semicustom, and a competent motorcycle shop should be able to either find and fit one for you, or point you in the direction of a custom shop which can.

Note also that out of the box the Livewire and most/all “traditionally” laid out motorcycles including electric ones will require the use of your right foot because that’s where the rear brake is located. Relocating that brake to the left handlebar (the front brake is traditionally on the right handlebar end) is probably not impossible, and is a fairly common mod for oldschool motorcycles for people who are down a leg.

Oh, and these things will also require getting a motorcycle license.

If you can’t stand being a Harley dude, various Energica and even — if you can hold your nose — Zero motorcycles would work. (Zero tried to float some pay-to-unlock and subscription bullshit a while back, and because of that they’re on my ban list. Up to you if you want to try trusting them. I wouldn’t.)

Well, I do I have tucked into a random bookshelf one of those “World Atlas” book safes that everyone already knows is a storage box and not a book, because they’ve been sold virtually unchanged as far as I can tell since at least the early 1990s. As a little treat to anyone observant who notices this and thinks they’re so damn clever, inside I have nothing but a scaled down 3D printed replica of a cinder block.

It is astoundingly unlikely anyone will find where my valuables are actually hidden in my house, nor am I going to admit it on the internet.

Likewise, back when I built my first big pants real PC out of actual new components and not just hand-me-down bullshit cannibalized from decommissioned office stuff, I put the plethora of stickers that came with everything on the little rear triangle windows on my car. As if they were riceboy components instead, which in a way I suppose they were. Many of them were those textured stamped aluminum ones and they survived for quite a long time.

Surely at least one confused tuner saw this and puzzled over what the hell G.Skill and MSI “car parts” were supposed to do.

Here’s another sign of the times: Out of all the parts for my current rig, only two of them came with stickers. What a rip-off. My processor came with an AMD sticker (just a cheap vinyl one this time) and my motherboard came with an Aorus sticker which is at least textured metal. I stuck both of them to the inside of the front door on my case.

I worked at a Chinese restaurant for some years, and my boss natively spoke Mandarin but whenever he was muttering to himself about something or another he would always cuss in English. I have no idea why this should be but it was always hilarious.

Not to be a stereotypically insufferable Stallman style neckbeard about it, but the only two objectively correct answers to this question are FreeCAD for mechanical parametric things, and Blender for organic shapes or decorative models. (You can also bully Blender into doing parametric CAD work with plugins. And I guess OpenSCAD also counts, if you would rather program your models rather than model your models.)

All of the other available commercial options are some combination of:

• Proprietary vendor lock-in bullshit
• Subscription model “software as a service” perpetual money sinks
• Always online cloud services that either steal your models/make them available to anyone/probably also report you to the Feds
• Loaded with quasi-legal licensing restrictions that prevent you from distributing or selling your own creations made with it

Or for extra bonus points, all of the above!

FreeCAD isn’t exactly slick and it has a rather precipitous learning curve, but it’s also basically the only viable truly free option that won’t spy on you, steal your stuff, or turn you upside down and shake you for money on a monthly basis.

That’s the real deal, right here.

The SNES vs. Genesis war from the 1990s never really ended. The banners being flown have changed over the years but the battles are pretty much the same. Me personally, what with having the luxury of being a perfectly responsible fully grown adult — that’s what it says on my driver’s license, anyway — I have at least one example of pretty much every console from the Atari VCS up to the PS3.

My beef with consoles now is that they’re all, with the exception of the Switch and its sequel, just watered down PC hardware anyway. That’s really not interesting, and I already have a PC. And by and large my PC plays what I tell it to, not what Sony and Microsoft and for fuck’s sake not what Nintendo try to dictate at me. Thus, for modern games I play on PC.

As far as insufferable computer users go, that all started with Doom. Doom was the killer app of the 90s and every console maker at the time either wished theirs could run Doom but it couldn’t, or barely managed it and the experience was dogshit. Before that, it was the opposite: PC games and their developers fervently wished they could match the capabilities of the game consoles of their era, which all had specialized hardware specifically designed for the types of things games from that time did. It’s probably no coincidence that id software’s formative outing started with John Carmack and Tom Hall’s Dangerous Dave In Copyright Infringement, which as dumb as it sounds was genuinely showing off at the time in that they managed to make a bog standard PC pull off a platformer with smooth(ish) scrolling, which is something the NES can do in its sleep.