Elukka

Gazing

Volumetric clouds are cool. My poor old GTX 1080 disagrees.

I feel I have a head of unremarkable size and for me to be eight heads tall I would have to be way taller than average male height (in a country where people average relatively tall). Eight heads tall is some weird aspirational thing.

Spidey?

There isn't actually any reason I can think off why you couldn't enclose the shock absorbers of an Orion drive. This is a normal Orion setup otherwise. The things around it are a tensile structure hanging off the base thrust plate.

The end result

@chuwol.bsky.social made this unhinged anamorphic lens stack in Blender where the lenses are raytraced to produce an image like a real camera, and rendered my ship through it.

Finished up this one with some unit markings

It's incredible how business and government are suddenly falling onto a very pro-piracy stance. I'm not sure why they think anyone should care about their copyright either if it's going to be like this.

I learned Neil Armstrong backwards is Gnorts Mr Alien so I immediately had a vision

Yup! A huge 10 meter wide thing, shaped to resemble the expected pressure and temperature profile of the nuclear plasma at the pusher surface.

It's interesting how much computer simulation was involved. The document talks about it. They also validated it against Starfish Prime and other tests.

I get how this works now, thanks to @nyrath.bsky.social digging up the source document, GA-6307.

I didn't even think that they wouldn't be projecting anything at the pusher but just blowing up sheets of high explosives affixed to it.

Damn, nice find! That's also a whole Orion document I've never seen before. I wonder how many more are out there. I know my GA-5009 series (I think vol. 2 is not available), right from Atomic Rockets, of course...

Is this the tip of the iceberg for the giant underground nuclear spaceship lair

Yeah, but I don't see how the shock absorber assembly would work if it's hanging off the pusher like this. Not like the pusher can move forwards. Also there's no obvous place there for pulse tests, what's with the pit and the building and the wall...

So many questions. Why upside down? How are they supposed to move through this facility? There appears to be a solid rock wall between the one inside and the one hung outside, which is also in a pit. Are the ones outside actually just plates and the one outside the only full craft?

Some kind of Project Orion faciltiy where the craft are hung upside down from the pusher plate

Can anyone parse what the heck is going on with this Project Orion facility? This is from George Dyson's book which describes it as a HE test facility. I don't get how that would work the way they're hung with some kind of cradle in the way of the pusher. @nyrath.bsky.social have you ever seen this?

leaf stock

I'd just want them to do the same thing they do but be cheaper tbh. There was this kind of development in phones pre-smartphones (I'm marking myself as an old here) where part of the expected way phones developed was that they'd be cheaper every year.

Sketching a plane

yeah that's weird

I like seeing cities in space habs. When it's all parkland or low density suburbia it either implies only a small elite lives there, or people live most of their lives under decks and only visit the top side occasionally. Space hab urbanism implies people get to actually live in that environment.

My water dragon had an interesting thing where he would also posture at a mirror, but learned that whatever it is, it isn't a real threat. He'd go to the mirror deliberately to do his posturing, then left when he was done. Didn't show any signs of stress from this. Grew out of it eventually.

Ooh I wanna see that! Also it's strange and very cool to think it influenced you in that way.

This has big 70s space art vibes, it's great. Not really a look you often see in games.

I don't want my stuff stolen for some company to make money off.

In some industries it also involves taking artist output to try and create their replacement. It's taking their labor but removing them from the loop completely when it comes to being paid.

The AI business involves taking the creative output - actually, all human output of any sort - with no permission and no compensation, and turning it into a commercial product. Can't do anything anymore without someone commercializing it to make a buck.

As the cover of the book it's also what immediately caught the eye of maybe six year old me at the library.

I never did end up outgrowing dinosaurs.