You don't even need to complete the ring so that you can start with a lot bigger radius. The larger the radius the less the weird gyroscopic effects when people turn their heads in certain directions and the closer it replicates earth's gravity. Then you can expand the ring by increasing the arc coverage.
Right, start with three cans, two of them swinging at ends of a cable, one at the hub with a docking port. Add onto that, two cans at a time, lowered from the hub; link them up to existing cans. When the ring is full, tada! Then, extend the center can out a ways, on the axis, and start over, nestling new cans honeycomb-wise. Or maybe give the next ring a bigger radius; each existing can gets a pair of basement cans.
Or, just extend everybody's cable a notch so there is room to shoehorn in the next pair of cans. As you add cans, the radius grows.
"Cans" is the only practical way to think of building a rotating station. Of course, the cans are really Starships, hanging by the nose. Passageways between cans are fabric tunnels. Each can has a mass on a column that is automatically raised and lowered as people and things move around, to maintain rotational stability, and keep the hub centered.
> Of course, the cans are really Starships, hanging by the nose.
Realistically, you'd want to keep re-using the expensive parts of the starship rather than park them in space, which makes me wonder what's the best way to re-use a starship while leaving cylindrical body sections in space?
You could have a Starship body with sections that are removable -- like maybe you have a 50 foot section that unbolts from the nose and the tail which you leave in space, while the nose and tail get re-connected and return to Earth as a shorter version of Starship. Or maybe you could just launch two Starships, and in space remove the engine from one and place it inside the other as cargo, so you land one complete starship and the extra engine, but leave one complete body in space.
I doubt it's possible to have a disembodied engine land itself using its own thrust without a lot of clever and novel engineering, but maybe it can land by parachute? Or use thrust to slow its re-entry so it doesn't overheat, then parachute the rest of the way?
I could imagine unbolting the Vacuum Raptors and stowing them before you hang the can. (Once you have enough Raptors, you can redeem them for a free can!) They get packed as cargo in one of the non-can Starships and landed for re-use.
Maybe you vent the tanks and open a hatch on top, and there is a stairway inside with floors, ductwork, and places to clip on lights and electric outlets. Probably you roll out insulation onto the walls so you don't burn yourself or get frozen-stuck if you touch them, depending on what is going on outside.
The best explanations I've heard is that these theores are not mutually exclusive. They can all be true at the same time and merely describe the physics from a different angle.
That's true for some explanations — for example the various proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem — but you still have to watch out for explanations that are flat-out wrong, and can even be harmful because they obscure the real explanation. I think equal-transit theory seems to be one of those, haha.
Maybe the damage is limited because very few of us will be designing airfoils. That may also be why it has been so hard to correct! The consequences for getting it wrong are minimal.
Something much more dangerous would be an untruth that directly harms people. The debate around those tends to be much more rigorous, although I'm surprised how long some of those can endure when people get attached to them!
Many generations of professional pilots have been taught the "equal transit theory." It's often as an answer their licensing exams.
So, most pilots have little idea how wings actually work. (But since the rise of the internet, things have been sloooowly changing. At least the pilots have started questioning and arguing!)
Yachts don't rely on solar. Sometimes they have solar but only as a small auxilary system. They primarily rely on propeller regen where the prop flips into drag mode stealing a fraction of a knot from the sail-driven ship. I've seen some yacht owners try to install a small wind turbine but it's not worth the trouble because of the noise it creates. They also tend to have at least one gas generator as an emergency backup.
I watched it in 4K on a large 43" 4K Samsung from 2 feet away and I can see a lot of problems. Some of it is compression artifacts but some is the iPhone. Honestly it doesn't look that much better than my 2014 OnePlus One phone with 4K camera.
I really hate the pitch and all these photog pros showing you how you can shoot movies or professional photos with a phone. They either use daylight which is 1000 times brighter than indoor or they use $10,000 of pro lighting. In that situation, any camera will work great. But wait till sunset or try and do some indoor shots and the tiny phone sensor and/or try and shoot some fast moving subjects that require decent shutter speeds and the phone will fail miserably.
The whole point in using a higher end $1000+ camera is that you can use it in 50% to 80% of lighting and motion conditions that a phone sucks in.
It was frustrating how my Dell XPS Laptop would frequently wake up in the laptop bag. When I open the bag, the laptop was near smoking hot. I fixed it by disabling Modern Standby but a Microsoft update killed that registry hack and I was forced to fully shut down the laptop.
Then my work Dell Precision 5530 started doing the same thing and I'm forced to shut it down. The problem was that particular laptop took several minutes to boot due to a slow BIOS post and corporate bloatware.
11 hours in a private plane with lots of room and being able to lay down flat or be in a zero gravity chair would be sheer luxury compared to many flights I've taken. My last long distance flight took 24 hours of travel to get from San Jose to Israel with 3 legs in Coach and going through multiple security gates. One time I flew 16 hours Coach from LA to Guanzhou China and that was a second leg. My tail bone was in pain for a day from sitting that long.
If an airplane like this meant being able to fly private, it's completely worth it. One other factor you have to consider is that this plane can probably use tiny airports which shaves a 4 hours of additional driving and security gates. I'd rather be in a slower flying plane for 7 hours than fly for 4 hours but spend 4 additional hours at security gates and car traffic.
"Using the 1 watt as our transmitter power translates to 0.000507 watt (0.507 milliwatts or 507 microwatts) at the receiving end. "
But it's even worse than this! The FCC does not allow you to transmit at the full 1 watt (30 dBm) if you focus the energy with more than 6 dB gain. If you want to use a phase array to get 21 dB antenna gain, you must drop your transmit power to 25 dBm or 0.316 watts. Every 3 dBi of antenna gain must be accompanied by 1 dBm decline in transmit power.
If you read the FAQ on eevblog, 100 KHz frequency ultrasound will lose 90% of its energy at 2 meter range or just over 6 feet. That energy goes to heating the air that the sound travels through.
Then you have to contend with any orientation offset. If the receiver is off by 90 degrees or more, there is zero energy received. If your hand blocks half the surface area, that's another 50% power loss.
If you boost the power above 140 dB safety limit, you can burn your hands or cause other problems. At 140 dB at 2 meters, the theoretical best case with 100% efficiency transmitter and receiver will deliver 0.85 watts. You obviously lose even more than that.
