They’re not producing fuel to continue the same reactions, which would be a violation of conservation of energy. They’re producing fuel to run a different reaction. Less “perpetual motion machine,” more “spinning a turbine to charge a battery to run an EV.”
Edit: A better analogy is cracking water to capture the hydrogen, to later burn it in a fuel cell.
A Deuterium-Deuterium reaction produces Helium-3 and a neutron, or Tritium and a proton. Roughly even odds on which products you’ll get. And a ton of energy. A Deuterium-Tritium reaction produces Helium-4, a neutron and a shitton more energy.
Basically, the DD reaction is used to create fuel for a more predictable and energetic reaction. From the article, seems they’re also bombarding Lithium with neutrons from the DD reaction to create more Tritium. Problem with Tritium is that while it does occur naturally, it’s extremely rare and volatile. Tritium has a half-life of about 12 years, so if we want to use it in a fusion reactor, we need a feasible way to produce more of it at scale.
It’s all stepping stones to a greater goal though. DD and DT reactions produce neutrons, which will make your entire reactor highly radioactive thanks to neutron activation. D-³He and ³He-³He reactions produce ⁴He and protons, which are actually able to be controlled by magnetic fields and won’t irradiate your whole shit. But then sourcing ³He becomes your new biggest problem.
Since you were so insistent that it’s simple, I told you to go and implement non-rigid capes to two old games that never had more than a rudimentary physics engine, and report back just how easy it was. And seeing how your reply, three minutes later, started with the words “Already done,” I can only assume that you did it. So do tell, how easy was it?
Cause that was the task. Add soft body physics to Jedi Outcast, which is running on a modified Quake 3 Arena engine. Or create a new animation rig and redo all of the character animations. And you did it in three minutes. So show your work.
Took you three minutes to implement soft body physics in the Quake 3 engine, huh? Show your work.
Right. Go add capes that aren’t just rigged to the existing skeleton to Jedi Outcast or Morrowind, then come back and tell me how easy it was.
I didn’t think I’d have to point out that adding a cape is a similar pain in the ass. Dynamic objects like scarves and capes are not the same as a shirt. If your character framework isn’t set up for them from the start, implementing them is not as simple as “just plop it in there bruh”.
A character model is made up of “slots”. The head slot, the chest slot, the legs slot and so on. When you equip a piece of gear, it replaced the body mesh in that slot. So a helmet model replaces the head, a cuirass replaces the chest, I think you follow. If you want a piece of gear to only partially cover the character, you need to create a new slot. But gear is easy to implement, since it conforms to the character’s “body” and uses the same animations.
Now add a scarf. First, you need to create a new slot, so that equipping the scarf doesn’t replace the head or chest. And then comes the question of animations. Are you going to have the scarf just lay flat against the character? That’s the easiest approach, but it’ll be completely static, look like ass and probably clip through at least some of your armors. You could use a cloth sim. If your scarf mesh has enough polygons, it’ll look the best. But it’s also computationally expensive, especially if you go with mesh-based collisions for maximum eye candy. And what types of objects can the scarf collide with? Just the character, or world objects as well? Every object the scarf collides with will create a whole new slew of physics calculations, all the time, dropping your performance in the gutter like a mob snitch. Or you could create a bespoke rig for the scarf. It’ll look better than a static object and won’t have a notable performance hit, but won’t look as good as the cloth sim, especially since it won’t collide properly with whatever else your character is wearing. And you’d need to create matching animations for literally every animation the character can possibly do. Every. Single. One. Your animators would want to murder you. And they will, when you come back to them a little later and say “Okay, real impressed with the scarf, now let’s make 5 different ones. And I want capes.”
TL;DR: It’s not just another piece of gear.
Counterpoint: Blender was the first 3d modeling tool I tried and I bounced off that UX so hard that I haven’t touched it in nearly 20 years. Sometimes a bad UX is just bad UX.
Definitely interested to read your take on why colonizing Mars is never happening. Far as I’m aware, there’s no laws of physics stopping it, it’s rather a number of complex engineering problems.
Nope. Not until they’re going for a Ship catch. It has to come down somewhere and the only places it can safely come down are either the ocean or the catch tower. So until they get the catch hardware to a state where they believe it would work out, every Ship is going to fly a trajectory that ends in the ocean.
Whenever the Roci’s railgun is fired, it’s accompanied by a momentary burn of her main drive to cancel out that impulse.
The basics (getting the OS installed, some initial settings to your liking etc) is quick. Managed to go from “completely untouched build” to “we gaming on Linux now boys” in a couple hours and most of that was waiting for BG3 to download on my 100Mbit connection. Pretty much everything I needed worked right on the first boot. Then again, I didn’t have much data to transfer over.
I found a reddit post from a year or so ago, reportedly Bazzite has drivers for the dongle out of the box. I’m a little more concerned about the keyboard+touchpad combo, since I’d imagine that’s not quite a standard device. Fortunately, I give negative fucks about any RGB, so I really don’t care if any RGB the components happen to have don’t even light up.
Sure, buddy.
Planning for the future has nothing to do with whether or not one fears death. And it’s perfectly okay to live more in the moment, because the moment is all we have. The past is gone, the future is yet to come, you exist in the now. So go ahead, procrastinate a little! The vast majority of our problems are not so time-critical that an hour long walk is going to ruin your future. Treating yourself to a coffee and a donut every now and then doesn’t leave you fated to be destitute in 5 years.
There’s no use in fearing the inevitable. It will come, whether you like it or not, and no amount of fighting can stop it. Fearing it only makes you focus on some indeterminate time in the future and lose sight of the now.
NATO not expanding eastward was never put to paper. No one ever officially signed off on it, nor was it ever an official decree. It was never anything more than words of appeasement. Russia “agreed to democracy on its doorstep” because they were going through a regime collapse and were a tad preoccupied with preventing the collapse from going further. Even if they had kicked up a storm about it, what were they gonna do? The breakaway nations weren’t going to just unpack their bags and stay with the abusive ex cause the ex said they can’t leave. Russia would’ve had to suppress them militarily once again, and they didn’t have the resources to do that.
NATO expanding eastward was because the former Soviet bloc countries wanted it. Because if you’ve regained your independence (for some of them it wasn’t even the first time) from an aggressive neighboring nation, would you not wish to protect it with the means available to you? If Poland and the Baltics believed that, for the first time in centuries, Russia would stop doing Russia things, would they have sought to join? Because the only reason they’ve been spared Ukraine’s fate is that Russia was in no position to execute militarily when those countries were accepted into NATO. And look at us now, thirty some years later, Russia is doing Russia things.
But how are you going to space if the pointy end is down and the flamey end is up? It should be the other way around!
I was gonna call out omitting the Sea Dragon, but I see you already did.
The Boeing freighter had to be a joke, right? No one thought that’d actually work?