frederikvs

I would've called it "a sickly kind of purple"

Sounds like it could improve the production efficiency of glyptal-impregnated, cyanoethylated bushings for turbo-encabulators!

I'm a diver, DAN is the only company I can name that specialises in diving insurance.

Huh, apparently they're registered in Malta, what a coincidence...

Removing the brown ones from a bowl of M&Ms is a 5 minute job that can be handled by anyone. I would expect a lot of people would go "well that's a bit eccentric, but if it makes the band happy, why not".

I doubt the band would say "you didn't redline this weird but inconsequential request, we can't work together.

If they wanted to be sure the redlining process worked, they should have put in something like "remove all fire extinguishers from backstage".

> To use a dog metaphor, a chainsaw tends to growl before it bites.

I believe the author is mistaken about why chainsaws don't cause more harm than they do. There are multiple of ways in which a chainsaw will kill or destroy, without any warning. Kickback is very quick. A tree falling in the wrong direction comes without warning.

Personally, I suspect there are 2 main reasons why chainsaws don't cause more harm.

A) They've been around for 100 years, and they've been causing fatalities and injuries for 100 years. People have invented ways to reduce the risk. Any chain you can readily buy is a low-kickback chain, and the saw comes with a chain brake. It doesn't completely remove the risk, but it substantially reduces it.

B) They've been around for 100 years, and they've been causing fatalities and injuries for 100 years. People are aware that chainsaws are inherently dangerous. Even someone without any training, and without looking at the safety instructions, understands that one of these will take off a limb without blinking.

What this means for the rest of the metaphor, I'm not sure.

This is why I need to have 10 different map apps on my phone. I hate it.

Google maps is good enough for find my way in a city, or getting to a destination by car. And when I get there, I whip out another app to pay the parking. If I forget where I parked, my car has an app with a map. To plan a longer trip with an electric car, ABRP is better. And when I'm just looking for a charge pole where my card will work, Plugsurfing. If I want to use car sharing, another app with another map.

If I want to go for a run or a hike, outdooractive has some routes. Komoot has some others. But if I want to find some rock climbing routes, I need 27crags. Meanwhile, my sports watch also has a map which can show me the route I just ran.

None of these are fundamentally different. All show a very similar map, just with other points of interest, other routes, other layers, other navigation algorithms.

But all of these apps have different UI, different features, and just behave slightly differently.

I wish I could just have a single map app, where I enable the layers I'm interested in.

From the article, Proba-3 has 10 thrusters, so that would bring the total to 150 Watt.

I don't know the power budget for the satellite, but we can make an educated guess : the occulter is 1.4 meter diameter, or a surface area of 1.54 square meter. That's an upper bound for the surface area of the solar panels - there's nothing sticking out beyond the disk, that would interfere with observations.

Solar power at earth is about 1.3kW/sqm, solar panels are maybe 20% to 30% efficient. That puts you in the ballpark of 400 to 600W.

150W on standby would be a pretty big bite out of your power budget.

I'm not familiar enough with the project to answer why specifically cold gas thrusters were chosen. What I can say : if old, proven technology will get the job done, there's a strong preference to use that.

When needed to achieve the mission, new technology will be developed - sometimes the whole point of a mission is specifically to develop new technology. In this case, one of the major goals of the mission is to develop formation flying technology. Learn what the pitfalls and the tricky bits are, and make the technology available for future missions.

But when the mission can be achieved with old technology - technology with a long record of being used in space, where the problems are known and understood, where we know what works and what causes problems - then the mission will use old technology.

If you use newer technology, there's always a risk that you'll hit a new issue, previously unknown. Maybe you can work around it, maybe you can't. But this isn't web development where you can refactor, switch to a new framework and continuous deploy your way out of it. For the hardware, you get one launch and that's it. Why run the risk if you can avoid it? It'd be a shame if the mission can't achieve its primary objective (learning about formation flying) because it chose some new type of thruster, and encountered some new issue with it.

The goal is to have them a bit more than 100m apart. During observations they aim to maintain millimeter precision.

I'm pretty sure the risk of collision has been analysed to death. I would expect they've analysed what would happen if one or both devices suddenly stop listening to commands, and that even then there's essentially no risk.