ravi-delia

Propellant is still used for rotation control. Reaction wheels can "saturate" if they compensate for rotation more in one direction than the other on net, so propellant is needed to get them back down. Ion engines, generally speaking, do not use background dust. They still carry propellant, they just eject it electromagnetically. An photon engine, basically just a laser pointed backwards, uses pure electricity to produce thrust. But of course the numbers all work out, since photons have momentum. They're extremely weak though, even lasers of staggering power produce very little force. There's no way you could put one on a satellite

I mean I guess you could say they have different semantics. They're just different types, int and Int64 aren't any more different from each other than Int64 and Int32. You can treat all of them exactly the same, just like how you have ints and longs and shorts in C and they all have the same interface.

Regardless, I don't think C's "probably 32 bit" non-guarantee is the make or break feature that makes it a systems language. If I care about the exact size of an integer in C I'm not going to use an int- I'm going to use explicit types from stdint. Rust makes that mandatory, and it's probably the right call. OCaml isn't really what I'd use for a systems language, but that's because it has no control over memory layout and is garbage collected. The fact that it offers a 63-bit integer doesn't really come into it.

Ok, running this by you one more time. There is a type called "int" in the language. This is a 63-bit signed integer on 64-bit machines, and a 31-bit integer on 32-bit machines. It is stored in 64 bits (or 32), but it's a 63-bit signed integer, because one of the bits is used in the runtime. There is also a 64 bit integer, called "Int64". It has 64 bits, which is why I call it a 64-bit integer rather than a 63-bit integer. An "int" is a 63-bit integer, which is why I call it a 63-bit integer rather than a 64-bit integer.

So the "one bit" you refer to is what makes the standard int 63 bits rather than 64. If you could do things with it it would indeed break the runtime- that's what tells it that you're working with an int rather than a pointer. But full, real, 64-bit integers are available, in the base language, same goes for 32.

The usual int type is 63 bits. You can get a full 64 bit int, it just isn't the default.

This is why we never should have invented the phonograph. People who want to listen to music can just buy a record, making it literally impossible for them to perform an activity humans ENJOY doing. Without it everyone would surely be making all their own music, and nothing valuable would be lost

The question wasn't "why do protons have +1 charge", it was "why do protons have +1 charge, *considering electrons have -1 charge". The fact that possible charges are restricted to a few values is a much more satisfying answer to the latter than the former

Not so much for takeoff! Most rocket designs better than chemical rockets trade off thrust for specific impulse. That's an improvement in orbit, since delta-v is delta-v. But imagine a 10kg rocket- it's receiving ~100N of gravity. If your engine doesn't put out 100N of thrust you'll just sit there on the launch pad. As you pick up speed you no longer have to deal with that (after all, LEO has basically the same gravity and doesn't have to burn against gravity at all) but when you're launching off something other than a point mass, some of your thrust has to go towards ensuring you don't hit the planet, or you will not into space today.

The practical designs we have for NTRs are solid core, which after long effort got up to a thrust to weight ratio of 7:1, meaning they could in principle carry up to 6 times their weight and accelerate up in Earth's gravity rather than down. Chemical rockets can get 70:1. No one ever had plans to use NTRs in lift platforms- instead they could serve as more efficient upper stage engines, for orbit-orbit transfer burns and the like. In principle there are engines which are technically NTR and offer much better performance, but no one's ever gotten a working prototype. Also you probably wouldn't want to launch with an open cycle rocket, since the open part describes how the radioactive fuel is ejected out the rear. Unfortunately, with the technology we have, we have to make tradeoffs between efficiency and thrust. For the lift stages chemical rockets are, for now, unrivaled.

(Unless of course your nuclear propulsion is of the more, shall we say, entertaining variety. Project Orion has its proponents...)

You know what, that's a sufficiently cursed workflow that it wraps back around to adding nerd cred

It isn't

It actually bottoms out pretty low though. The apparent fractal dimension changes over scales, but is sufficient that ruler length really does make a huge distance in coastline length

I think what you're referring to is the false proof suggesting that pi=4. That is not what squaring the circle is, and does not in fact become smoother and smoother but rougher and rougher

Sure, but if you're gonna have a space heater (and people do) there won't be any difference in efficiency between any possibility, including computers

Large carnivores are kind of the pricey boondoggles of evolution. They work, they are successful, but they're balanced on a knifes edge. Every step a large carnivore takes consumes vastly more energy than it would cost a smaller animal. It is all too possible for such a creature to expend more energy pursuing small prey than it would get back. That is why lions don't hunt small game- they'll scavenge small game by driving off smaller carnivores from their kills, and they certainly won't turn down eggs if they find any, but they will not pursue prey beneath a certain size. Imagine trying to catch a rat with your hands- exhausting work, and the rat isn't much food

I mean this is a crazy thing to know about 37. And we know it!