Toxn

Nah, it's pretty ugly. Like a Rooivalk with FAS.

Dark side? Bitch please, your system is called Imperial.

I thought Germans got a racial bonus to beer making and genocide?

I thought Germans got a racial bonus to beer making and genocide?

So, global warming is definitely a thing and definitely caused by human activity (see: vast majority of climate scientists, IPCC). And this makes sense, because humans have been, you know, digging up all the carbon laid down since the carboniferous and burning it.
 
And I have no problems with this at all.
 
Here's my logic:
 
1.
Earth's biosphere is apparently slightly better at burying carbon than recycling it. Therefore, liberating a bunch of carbon is a great idea if we want there to be a lot of it available for the rest of the 4 billion years that our planet has to exist.
 
2.
I love the idea of 2-metre millipedes and dragonflies with the wingspans of eagles. So I'm all for us returning to carboniferous levels of atmospheric oxygen (which is what an excess of carbon dioxide will eventually lead to as biomass increases)
 
3.
I also love the idea of verdant plant life, so lots of CO2 does not faze me overmuch. I'll miss the grasses when they get shuffled to niche habitats in favour of dicots, of course, but that's a separate issue.
 
4.
There is good reason to believe that humans are a massive fluke. After all, it took half of the lifespan of the planet for us to arrive and the earth has birthed no other similarly intelligent species in the past (as far as we can tell). Accordingly; there is good reason to assume that, once our species is gone, it will take at least hundreds of millions of years for something sapient to emerge. In the (unlikely) event that it ever happens again, it would be good for this new species to have a fuel source as potent as coal and oil to draw from. By liberating it now for recycling, we are making sure that it will stick around reasonably close to the surface for long enough to maybe get used by our successors.
 
5.
I've heard some pretty convincing arguments that our present civilization simply could not have arisen without copious amounts of energy. So fossil fuels are a must. We as a species probably have only one shot at becoming truly spaceborne - if we somehow crashed back to the Neolithic now there would be no rung on the ladder of energy sources are to climb to the point where intra-solar spaceflight is viable. So we'd probably be stuck with pre-industrial populations and technologies, spinning our wheels until we exhausted our time on the planet.
 
If we want to get ourselves and our ecology off planet, then right now is the only good time. It follows that we should expend as much effort as possible to push ourselves upwards and outwards before we inevitably fuck everything up. I see no reason why we should not opt, as a species, to burn hot and use as much energy as we can in the hopes of improving our chances.
 
 
So, yeah. Global warming - our fault, pretty inevitably, probably not that great for our present environment, probably pretty good in the very long run, hopefully a necessary byproduct of manning up as a species and taking ourselves and everything we love off-planet. And if we fuck that up; hopefully whatever comes afterwards will be able to make use of the new coal deposits while wondering about the thin, faintly radioactive layer of hydrocarbons and metal oxides that represents humanity's final mark in the geological record.

What's the range like?

So, global warming is definitely a thing and definitely caused by human activity (see: vast majority of climate scientists, IPCC). And this makes sense, because humans have been, you know, digging up all the carbon laid down since the carboniferous and burning it.
 
And I have no problems with this at all.
 
Here's my logic:
 
1.
Earth's biosphere is apparently slightly better at burying carbon than recycling it. Therefore, liberating a bunch of carbon is a great idea if we want there to be a lot of it available for the rest of the 4 billion years that our planet has to exist.
 
2.
I love the idea of 2-metre millipedes and dragonflies with the wingspans of eagles. So I'm all for us returning to carboniferous levels of atmospheric oxygen (which is what an excess of carbon dioxide will eventually lead to as biomass increases)
 
3.
I also love the idea of verdant plant life, so lots of CO2 does not faze me overmuch. I'll miss the grasses when they get shuffled to niche habitats in favour of dicots, of course, but that's a separate issue.
 
4.
There is good reason to believe that humans are a massive fluke. After all, it took half of the lifespan of the planet for us to arrive and the earth has birthed no other similarly intelligent species in the past (as far as we can tell). Accordingly; there is good reason to assume that, once our species is gone, it will take at least hundreds of millions of years for something sapient to emerge. In the (unlikely) event that it ever happens again, it would be good for this new species to have a fuel source as potent as coal and oil to draw from. By liberating it now for recycling, we are making sure that it will stick around reasonably close to the surface for long enough to maybe get used by our successors.
 
5.
I've heard some pretty convincing arguments that our present civilization simply could not have arisen without copious amounts of energy. So fossil fuels are a must. We as a species probably have only one shot at becoming truly spaceborne - if we somehow crashed back to the Neolithic now there would be no rung on the ladder of energy sources are to climb to the point where intra-solar spaceflight is viable. So we'd probably be stuck with pre-industrial populations and technologies, spinning our wheels until we exhausted our time on the planet.
 
If we want to get ourselves and our ecology off planet, then right now is the only good time. It follows that we should expend as much effort as possible to push ourselves upwards and outwards before we inevitably fuck everything up. I see no reason why we should not opt, as a species, to burn hot and use as much energy as we can in the hopes of improving our chances.
 
 
So, yeah. Global warming - our fault, pretty inevitably, probably not that great for our present environment, probably pretty good in the very long run, hopefully a necessary byproduct of manning up as a species and taking ourselves and everything we love off-planet. And if we fuck that up; hopefully whatever comes afterwards will be able to make use of the new coal deposits while wondering about the thin, faintly radioactive layer of hydrocarbons and metal oxides that represents humanity's final mark in the geological record.

Hilariously, this also makes him more computer savvy than 90% of politicians.

Been following EXACTO, I take it?

So, global warming is definitely a thing and definitely caused by human activity (see: vast majority of climate scientists, IPCC). And this makes sense, because humans have been, you know, digging up all the carbon laid down since the carboniferous and burning it.
 
And I have no problems with this at all.
 
Here's my logic:
 
1.
Earth's biosphere is apparently slightly better at burying carbon than recycling it. Therefore, liberating a bunch of carbon is a great idea if we want there to be a lot of it available for the rest of the 4 billion years that our planet has to exist.
 
2.
I love the idea of 2-metre millipedes and dragonflies with the wingspans of eagles. So I'm all for us returning to carboniferous levels of atmospheric oxygen (which is what an excess of carbon dioxide will eventually lead to as biomass increases)
 
3.
I also love the idea of verdant plant life, so lots of CO2 does not faze me overmuch. I'll miss the grasses when they get shuffled to niche habitats in favour of dicots, of course, but that's a separate issue.
 
4.
There is good reason to believe that humans are a massive fluke. After all, it took half of the lifespan of the planet for us to arrive and the earth has birthed no other similarly intelligent species in the past (as far as we can tell). Accordingly; there is good reason to assume that, once our species is gone, it will take at least hundreds of millions of years for something sapient to emerge. In the (unlikely) event that it ever happens again, it would be good for this new species to have a fuel source as potent as coal and oil to draw from. By liberating it now for recycling, we are making sure that it will stick around reasonably close to the surface for long enough to maybe get used by our successors.
 
5.
I've heard some pretty convincing arguments that our present civilization simply could not have arisen without copious amounts of energy. So fossil fuels are a must. We as a species probably have only one shot at becoming truly spaceborne - if we somehow crashed back to the Neolithic now there would be no rung on the ladder of energy sources are to climb to the point where intra-solar spaceflight is viable. So we'd probably be stuck with pre-industrial populations and technologies, spinning our wheels until we exhausted our time on the planet.
 
If we want to get ourselves and our ecology off planet, then right now is the only good time. It follows that we should expend as much effort as possible to push ourselves upwards and outwards before we inevitably fuck everything up. I see no reason why we should not opt, as a species, to burn hot and use as much energy as we can in the hopes of improving our chances.
 
 
So, yeah. Global warming - our fault, pretty inevitably, probably not that great for our present environment, probably pretty good in the very long run, hopefully a necessary byproduct of manning up as a species and taking ourselves and everything we love off-planet. And if we fuck that up; hopefully whatever comes afterwards will be able to make use of the new coal deposits while wondering about the thin, faintly radioactive layer of hydrocarbons and metal oxides that represents humanity's final mark in the geological record.

Part of the issue with cloning mammoths is that your surrogates are going to be elephants, and elephants tend to have ridiculously long pregnancies (edging up to two years). Meaning that you'll be spending an enormous amount of money and will only get the payoff decades down the line (if at all*).
 
Anyway, here is the program I worked out for the project. Note that this assumes a stepwise germline-transformation approach (rather than a one-shot attempt at full genome synthesis) piggybacking off of a standard cloning study:
Phase 1a: elephant cloning program. Expected timeline: 5-10 years. Phase 1b: elephant/mammoth genome comparison and transgenic strategy study. Expected timeline: 2-5 years. Runs in parallel with 1a. Phase 1c: elephant/mammoth hybrid cell line transformation and culture. Expected timeline: 2-5 years. Runs after 1b. Phase 2: round 1 elephant/mammoth hybrid nuclear transfer/IVF experiment. Expected timeline: 2-5 years. Hybrids would include partially and fully-transformed cell lines. Interphase: follow-up rounds of nuclear transfer and IVF, growth and maturation of F1 generation (if any). Expected timeline: 9-14 years. Phase 3 (optional): follow-up hybrid nuclear transfer and IVF on F1 generation. Expected timeline: 2-5 years. hybrids would all be from fully-transformed cell lines. Phase 4: beginning of conventional breeding program. Total time: 16 - 35 years.
 
The budget would be in the billions of dollars, and would include things like a large molecular genetics lab, clean lab for cell line propagation and transfer, stable and paddock facilities for elephants, elephant-capable theatre facilities and a number of park areas for the parent population and hybrids.
 
A one-shot approach would, of course, be cheaper and quicker. But it would also have a much lower chance of success. On the other end of the spectrum; an incremental breeding/transformation program would be very likely to succeed on some level (and might also be cheaper), but would take something like 50-100 years to complete.
 
* One of the biggest issues with interspecies surrogates is that we just don't have a clear handle on what might cause rejection. As an example, there are two closely-related rat species that have been tested for surrogacy using lab rats. One works fine, the other doesn't work at all and there is nothing much that points to why. Worse, we still don't have a strong handle on why cloning fails either. So most of the interspecies surrogacy experiments end with the foetus being rejected or the animal dying a short while after birth.

Mountains kill people. Tall mountains kill proportionally more people. Mountains with parts in the death zone kill the most of all.
As someone who regularly does passes in the Drakensburg and did Kilimanjaro years ago (where a bunch of folk in another group died while we were doing the summit and one of our group had to be rushed down due to altitude sickness), this is pretty much non-news.
Edit: the above is not intended to buff my credentials or anything - I'm very much not a pro hiker. It's just to point out that even a bit of exposure teaches you that mountains kill.

Mountains kill people. Tall mountains kill proportionally more people. Mountains with parts in the death zone kill the most of all.
As someone who regularly does passes in the Drakensburg and did Kilimanjaro years ago (where a bunch of folk in another group died while we were doing the summit and one of our group had to be rushed down due to altitude sickness), this is pretty much non-news.
Edit: the above is not intended to buff my credentials or anything - I'm very much not a pro hiker. It's just to point out that even a bit of exposure teaches you that mountains kill.

Steam's commitment to being the games delivery service the gaming community deserves, no more and no less is pretty admirable.

How much would you like to bet that the presentation for that idea included the words 'platform' and 'monetization'?

OK, gotcha.  Worst-case scenario with a reactor designed by complete drooling idiots.  No passive negative feedback loops, and no prevention of a prompt super critical core configuration.
 
It'll explode, but relatively little of the fissile material will fission.  By bomb standards it's a fizzle.  It will still be a mighty explosion by non-nuclear standards, but even with a bunch of steel acting as a tamper as you suggested, it will be a very inefficient bomb.
 
In a bomb, you try to prevent any fission from happening until the core is completely collapsed on itself.  Since the collapsing core is in a super prompt critical state, any fission reactions will self-multiply and the device will self-disassemble before most of the material fissions.  Sexual metaphors apply.
 
So instead, bombs are designed to reach maximum compressed density, and then start fissioning as quickly as possible.  A little device called a modulated neutron initiator squirts a bunch of neutrons into the bomb core as soon as the implosion crushes it, and the fission gets going as crisply and efficiently as possible.  This is also why plutonium from a typical reactor is garbage for bombs; it has too high of a spontaneous fission rate, and it goes super prompt critical prematurely.  Instead of an earth-shattering kaboom there's a fizzle and a bunch of survivors and it's very embarrassing and the engineers swear that it never happened to them before.
 
In a reactor, there's fission going on all the time, so any rapid, super prompt critical excursions will happen without anything close to optimal fuel density.
 
So you'll get a big bang that breaks the reactor and probably anything in the immediate vicinity, and a good deal of radioactive nastiness in the air, but it won't flatten cities or anything.

How much would you like to bet that the presentation for that idea included the words 'platform' and 'monetization'?

How much would you like to bet that the presentation for that idea included the words 'platform' and 'monetization'?

Now for something completely different:
 

 
This is the Solaris infinite duration drone. With four electric motors (KAX), a gargantuan battery system and a bunch of solar panels stuck everywhere except the most obvious spot (too much bother), it is currently being tested to determine total flight time.
 
With luck, the results will never be in.
 
Update: Okay, so the Solaris is a failure on all counts. I'm going to try and fit more panels, wing and battery onto this bird and try again.

Now for something completely different:
 

 
This is the Solaris infinite duration drone. With four electric motors (KAX), a gargantuan battery system and a bunch of solar panels stuck everywhere except the most obvious spot (too much bother), it is currently being tested to determine total flight time.
 
With luck, the results will never be in.
 
Update: Okay, so the Solaris is a failure on all counts. I'm going to try and fit more panels, wing and battery onto this bird and try again.

February 14, 1988. This is evidence of battle was made by South African soldier on the border with Angola. BMP "Ratel" during operation "Hooper" suddenly stumbles upon T-54B tank, belonging to MPLA (Liberation Forces of Angola). Crew of the "Ratel" managed to shoot three times, and managed to destroy it.

So You Want to Build a Fission Bomb?
There are many reasons why one may want to build a fission bomb. Killing communists, for example, or sending a spacecraft to one of the outer planets. Building a bomb is not easy, but it can be done (see also Project, Manhattan). Even with publicly available information.
 
Obviously, I’m not going to detail every little bit of our hypothetical bomb down to the last millimeter of wiring. First, I don’t know all that. If I did know it, posting it here might earn me a very long vacation to ADX Florence. The stuff here is just some equations and such to give you a general impression of how the design looks.
The core of our hypothetical bomb is a sphere of highly enriched uranium. We want it to be subcritical (keff<1), but not by much. The more subcritical it is, the more we have to compress it to make it critical. In a real bomb, the core is usually surrounded by a layer of dense material such as tungsten or depleted uranium called the tamper. This helps keep the core together longer, and if it’s made of U-238, you can get some extra yield from the tamper fast fissioning. To simplify our analysis, our bomb won’t have a tamper. Then, you have a bunch of chemical explosives on the outside. This is what compresses the core, and takes it from subcritical to a super prompt critical state.
 
When the core is super prompt critical, it’s going to heat up very quickly. Within milliseconds, the uranium at the center is going to become hot enough to be a gas (at very high pressure). At the edge of the core, you’re going to have very high pressure uranium gas next to an area of very low pressure. This is going to result in the uranium gas blowing off very quickly. This results in a “rarefaction wave” forming, as the core progressively evaporates away. This rarefaction wave proceeds inward at the speed of sound, and once it gets far enough in, the core becomes subcritical, and the reaction stops.
Now, I’m going to make a few assumptions. These will result in some inaccuracy in our calculations, but the results will be close enough (also, it makes everything much simpler). Here they are;
 
1. The super prompt critical condition of the core will terminate once the rarefaction wave reaches the critical radius (rc).
2. The super prompt critical reactivity will remain constant until the core is subcritical.
3. The core is spherical with no tamper.
4. The temperature of the core is high enough that it can be treated as a photon gas (radiation pressure is the dominant force.)
5. No energy is lost to the surroundings during the process (adiabatic).
6. Our core is made of pure U-235.
 
Since the rarefaction wave proceeds inward at the speed of sound, the device is critical for the following period of time;
 

 
Where rmin is the radius of the core at maximum compression, and a is the speed of sound. We’ll also assume the gaseous core has a specific heat ratio of 4/3, so . 
Since the process is adiabatic, we know the following;
 

 
Where Ecore is internal energy of the core at the end of the period of prompt criticality (this is the amount of energy released in the detonation). Substitute that into the speed of sound equation, and we get
 

 
Putting that aside for a moment, let’s take a look at the point kinetics equation, which describes how power increases in a reactor following a sudden increase in reactivity (our bomb is essentially a reactor that’s undergone a massive increase in reactivity);
 

 
(In this case, ρ represents reactivity, instead of density. β is the fraction of fission decay products which decay through neutron emission, and Λ is the average prompt neutron lifetime.)
The second term in that equation gives us the power contribution from delayed neutrons, so we can ignore in this case (the bomb will have long since detonated by the time they become a factor). Also, in the case of super prompt criticality, ρ >> β. So our equation reduces to
 

 
So to get the total amount of energy produced in the core during super prompt criticality, we need to integrate the power equation over the amount of time the core is super prompt critical. If we call that time tc, we get the following expression;
 

 
Where E1 is the amount of energy produced by one fission event (202.5 MeV). Substituting that into our first equation and the speed of sound expression, and then doing a bit of algebra (which I’ll leave out for the sake of brevity), we end up with this;
 

 
Solving for the Ecore expression, and defining Δr as the difference between criticality radius and the radius at maximum compression;
 

 
Which gives us the total amount of energy released by the detonation.
The main unknowns here are the reactivity (ρ) and critical radius (rc). Fortunately, both of these are fairly easy to determine. The critical radius is the radius at which a sphere of material has a keff (ratio of neutron production to neutron absorption) of 1.
 

 
ν is the average amount of neutrons produced per fission event (~2.5), Σf is the fission cross section (σf = ~1 barn for fast neutrons), D is the thermal neutron diffusion distance (.00434m for U-235), Bg is the ‘geometric buckling’, and Σa is the absorption cross section (σa=~.09 barns for fast neutrons). Convert from σf to Σf using the following formulas;
 


 
Bg for a sphere can be calculated using the following formula;
 

 
Setting keff to 1 and solving for r, we find that the critical radius rc is roughly 5.2cm. A sphere of U-235 of this size will have a mass of about 11.25kg.
Now that we have the keff equation, determining ρ is fairly simple.
 

 
 
Since keff is going to be higher the more you compress the core, you obviously want to compress it as much as possible. The following equation gives the amount of explosive needed to compress the core by a given amount;
 

 
Escfc is the amount of energy needed to compress the core by a given amount.


 η is the amount of energy contained in each unit of chemical explosive (4184kJ/kg for TNT), and ε is the efficiency of the implosion process. ε is about 30% in well-designed nuclear weapons, crude designs are probably closer to 5-10%.
 
 
Congratulations! Now you have (a non-trivial portion of) the knowledge you need to build a working fission device!
 
Edit: Updated 4/24 with corrected cross sections

GPC seconded as something only sperglords could get erect about.

I've wondered about this as well: from what I've heard the evolution in insurgent small arms (which represent a sort of support-free version of infantry tactics) has been towards squads with more RPGs and machine guns than rifles (something along the lines of 2-4 RPG gunners, 1-2 ammo carriers with ARs, 1-2 LMG gunners and perhaps a dedicated marksman). If this trend is accurate, then the future might involve rifles being used in the same capacity as SMGs or DMRs - as relatively specialised weapons meant to complement the core firepower provided by other weapons.
 
I'd also put money on cheap guided munitions coming into their own in a big way, making something like a small missile launcher the default infantry weapon.

Oh ye of little faith. We have not even begun plumb the depths of silliness.