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CarlBar

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  1. I've heard a few different specific values stated elsewhere and haven't had chance to check them myself but i've seen multiple claims that the fine amounts to a few percent of Apples gross profits last year within the EU. Compared to Apples total income it's small, but it's not remotely small compared to what apple actually earns from the EU. They're also facing several more cases about how they're planning to do things under the new rules the EU's bringing in which could see multiple additional fines of a similar size levied. And of course if apple doesn't comply with the ruling much larger fines as a percentage of their profits will be imposed.
  2. Pardon me for asking but does anyone have a breakdown of the smarter everyday video. This is the third time i've tried to watch it, (turned up in my recommendation the day it was posted), and i've bounced off it everytime. Something about his style completely fails to hold my attention. That or a transcript, i imagine i'd read through it better than listen to it.
  3. Cool your jets, i get the frustration but getting angry won't help. I'll be doing my own big reply at some point, but too unwell to focus that long atm. Ughhh stomach bug:(.
  4. @Uttamattamakin Meant to get round to this thread again but the Hyperloop thread took all my energy. needed a breather after that but will try to get this written up quickly. Let me start with the "why didn't Space X build off an enlarged Falcon 9". There's several factors. First and foremost you cannot literally scaleup somthing and expect it to work perfectly, and when your pushing the limits of what is physically possibble with the technology your working with, (which Falcon 9 absolutely is doing), it adds a lot of risk factors. Thats why a lot of design upgrades over the years in other rocket programs have seen a failure or two in their first few flights of an upgraded stage. Upscaling or otherwise significantly modifying a stage can be almost as tricky even on a conventional rocket as designing something completely new from the ground up. Thats why traditional US rocket development has focused on a single stage being modified at once, (the Arianne series ha also done the same at times AFAIK). It reduces the risk factors to a single stage making troubleshooting and improvement easier as your not fighting two different sources of failure at the same time. But of course Faclon 9 isn't a conventional rocket, it's lower stage is reusable. When you upscale a lower stage without significant modifications to the upper stage you pretty much allways end up with the upper stage separating at a higher speed and/or altitude. It has to otherwise your throw weight to orbit wouldn't increase. Falcon 9 simply can't handle returning from those higher speeds and altitude without major design modifications, (which carries extra risks). And even with all that they probably wouldn't get any increase without first building a bigger barge to land on as return to launch site would rob them of most of their extra payload. The superheavy booster in terms of performance really is just the Falcon 9 concept scaled up and modified to address all of this, yes there's Methlox and catch instead of landing legs as well, but i'll get back to those. Ignore them for a moment to look at the rest of the design and it really is them doing all the modifications needed to make a really enlarged falcon 9 style booster work. Even the change to stainless steel is heavily driven by it. With Falcon 9 style construction they'd have had to add a thermal coating to the exterior of the rocket to handle the higher thermal loads on the return, stainless steel handles the heat better so they can avoid that. Even some of the other changes to the thrust characteristic, grid fins, e.t.c. are to address area's where a scaled falcon 9 would run into structural or other issues because of how loads would scale too much with an increased design size. But then why the new upper stage you ask? Well thats where we get to the meat and potatoes of why they went with a clean sheet design. And that brings us to the second reason to go with a clean sheet design. Yes, they probably could have made a scaled up Falcon 9 booster work with some compromises along the way. But it wouldn't have solved the other reasons they had for building starship. And no i'm not talking Mars. Mars is mostly Elon PR speak again. Yes it's an aspirational goal, but at best it's third or fourth tier priority for SpaceX right now. They'll include Mars relevant stuff, but not at the expense of their other priorities. Their first major Priority is getting Starlink fully built out. Despite what they've managed to do with Falcon 9 so far it just isn't capable enough for doing the whole thing. The full capabilities are going to require larger individual satellites in some parts of the network, and the cost per satellite with falcon 9 is too high even with the smaller less capable V1.5 and V2 Mini types they're launching on Falcon 9. Their Second more understated goal is t open up space ventures to even more private entities, thus allowing them to make money from a wider array of customers increasing both the absolute size of the revenue stream, but also how stable that revenue stream is. And thats why they didn't just do a clean sheet for the booster, they also developed a new and much more ambitious upper stage to pair with it. There's a limit to how far you can scale the booster without also scaling the upper stage, and the existing upper stage from Falcon 9 is very weedy compared to the Booster. There's just a limit to how low cost they could get things on a per launch basis with it. Now i did mention i'd come back to the Methalox and the Catch System. I'll address the Methalox first as it's the bigger and more complicated part to explain. First things first, the reason they're going to MethLox really has nothing do with mars. It's a nice thing to have as an aspirational goal helper, but any version thats actually going to land and take off from mars is going to have to be a custom model, (like HLS), so it's not a requirement on the base starship, it just eases things a bit when designing the modified version. The real reason they moved to it is just how much better a propellent it is than the alternatives. The main reason it's taken this long to become a thing is entirely down to the fact that as i've noted a huge amount of rocket designs throughout history have been the same as the previous one with one stage modified or occasionally changed out. RP-1/LOX and H2/LOX where good enough, (without being the best they could do in a given stage most of the time), that switching away from them never felt justified from a risk PoV. You can see just how good the propellent is from just how much of an improvement Vulcan Centaur is over preceding designs despite the BE-4 engine being effectively 2 generations or rocket engine tech behind in some respects. Despite such a hyper conservative design its still dramatically better than preceding engines for a first stage booster. There are some additional factors beyond that, for example the steady shift from 3 stage to 2 stage designs, where the benefits of MethaLox as a first stage propellent become more pronounced. The catch system is a whole other thing though, i get why they're going for it, one of the biggest problems for Electron and Falcon 9 is the turn around time of transporting the boosters from wherever they land back to the launch pad, and catching it in mid air also lets you lose weight you'd need in the form of landing legs. But of all the things they're doing this is the one i'm most sceptical of. It's a cool concept with a lot of very practical benefits, but it's also doing something really ambitious. I think it's completely plausible they could do it, it's certainly not forbidden in any way, i'm just not confident enough in their ability to turn possability into reality to not feel a large amount of concern over it. Someone at some point in the future WILL make it work, but i'm not sure it's going to be SpaceX with Starship. Before i continue on to my last point of this post, (which has now taken way too long), i want to point somthing out. I can't remember if it's somthing you've said, so don;t take it as aimed at you if you haven't, but i see it often enough i want to address it. Specifically i see a lot of claims that SpaceX haven't even started on the modifications they need to make for HLS. This isn't strictly true. we haven't seen a full scale HLS mockup or anything, but several modified sections with features that only really make sense for HLS have been spotted. SpaceX doesn't just prototype Starship stuff with full size ships, somtimes they'll buiold a small segment like a nosecone, or a couple fo barrel sections, or a thrustpuck with new features they want to experiment with. We haven't seen anything that is likely HLS related since they moved production into the starfactory, but that might just be because they're keeping it all indoors away from prying eyes. Now i want to come back to the Methalox and a general point regarding spaceflight risk management. Yes Methlox represents a significant risk factor, (alongside a number of other risk factors in Starship), but that doesn't mean the old way of doing things wasn't also high risk, they just moved the majority of the risk from the launch vehicle to the payload. Harsh volume and mass limitations mean payload have to be either very low capability or very harshly engineered with all the risks that came with it and often large cost and time factors. The Ultimate example to date was of course the James Webb telescope. They had to make everything fold up so much whilst keeping the weight extremly low and it made several aspects fairly high risk as a result. Getting it to the point where they were willing to launch it took enormous amounts of time effort nad money as well because of how much they had to do to keep the size and mass down. Starship represents such a huge increase in payload volume and mass, (both are going to be at least 5 times that of existing launchers, and may well be even greater), thats it going to make an enormous amount of things possibble that were impractical previously because of either the risk or the sheer cost to develop of the payload. Building a telescope with greater capabilities and a lower cost than the Webb will be relatively straightforward once Starship is functional. The launch vehicle is going to be higher risk till it proves itself, but it's going to allow for very conservative and safe payload as a result of the enormous jump in capabilities. And that even if the cost per KG to orbit wasn't lower would have a dramatic effect on the ability of various entities to do stuff in space. Before i vanish, found this in the time i've been working on this post, (about a month, took some big breaks), try not to start laughing at the failure sound :p.
  5. Most of the stuff you see called AI atm isn't AI at all. It's an Expert System. A program designed to do a specific task and highly flexible within that, but incapable of stepping outside it. And some things being called that don't even qualify as Expert Systems. They're a step down from that.
  6. @leadeater What source? This isn't someone inside a terrorist cell or who knows a potentiol terrorist as a family member who made a mistake but might have genuine information in future. A source is only valuable enough to protect if you think it might be useful in future. @wanderingfool2 The judge seems to have accepted the long standing joke explanation. And yes it may have been anonymous. That hasn't stopped the british justice system from going after people for fake reports, it just takes more effort to track them down. The friends have all come out and stated that they knew it was a joke so if one of them was responsible they've incriminated themselves and i'd expect the british justice system to g after them. The lack of movement on that makes me think it's very unlikely to be one of them and is probably some other source.
  7. My experiance is that a random report usually gets mentioned in the press as having come into the police regardless of who handles it. Though since it was passed to a foreign nation maybe it would get reported differently. Whilst thats true, if it was one of the friends, given the context i'd expect the spanish authorities to at least be considering charges against them. Since their not i suspect they probably don't. MI5/MI6 may not share info publicly, but i imagine they and the spanish authorities have communicated. And the judges comments seem to indicate he believes the claim. @Biohazard777 cheers on the update, judges comments are basically my thoughts much better communicated and with the confirmation on the legal side.
  8. I misread a few comments earlier in the thread and thought they were throwing terrorism charges at him, thats what really raised the red flags. oops/ Sorry. That said even the scenario you gave, i'm not 100% on the law but again i think they have to prove intent , (or gross negligence), to cause a panic. But thats the point, the people he made it to did know him well enough and the authorities are not disputing that. Also according to the BBC article it was UK security services, probably MI5 or MI6. Sounds more like GCHQ at work than someone reporting it.
  9. I didn't say it was smart or in good taste, neither is remotely true. But ask yourself this, lets say instead of talking via snapchat they'd all been sat on a bench talking in a low voice where normally no one could hear them but for whatever reason someone ends up in a position to listen in. They overheard the joke and rush to security. What do you think will happen? Answer; security pulls them in questions them, finds out about the joke history does some checking into them via other messages and lets them go, probably with a caution and a reminder to be more careful about where they make such jokes and a note on the bad taste of it. They are very unlikely to be charged, and if they are at the most it will be with wasting police time. Not with fuckign terrorism offences pardon my french. The issue here isn't that the authorities reacted initially, it's how they've proceeded since then. As for someone in the snapchat reporting it, that makes this even stupider. Based on the info we have to date, (and the authorities do not seem to be refuting the joke claims at all), everyone in the chat should have known it was a joke. Now if someone in the chat reported it to cause trouble because that would make the joke funnier, by all means nail that person to the wall with wasting police time and the other related charges, but at least the last time i remember this happening it still wasn't a terrorism offence. @wanderingfool2 addressed most of it above but for the case of saying something in your own home when the authorities are listening. Unless you know they're listening they still would have a potentially shaky case. They definitely can't charge you with what you said you where going to do if there's no other evidence and i'm not sure if they can charge you with wasting police time and related stuff as you had no expectation or good reason to believe the police would even be aware of the joke. I think they not only have to show that you wasted police time, but that you did so either deliberately or through gross negligence. Which a conversation that would normally be private probably doesn't count as. You'd still have a bunch of legal ohh ahh and need to have a long sit down with the police, but it's not likely to end up as a court case.
  10. It's a private chat, no normal person should expect that someone is monitoring that 24/7. Thats why you can make jokes like that in the safety of your own home and cannot be charged over them, yes the police could have randomly bugged your house, (we'll ignore the warrants situation), but it's not very likely. A private chat is absolutely an example of right time and place. I don't necessarily have an issue with someone elsewhere flagging it and them responding just to be safe. But the moment they investigated and determined that yes this was not remotely serious and there's no other evidence of terrorist activity thats it, someone got overcautious in this case no harm no foul.
  11. Probably not,whilst it's not an ideal material for compression loads you can use it there with the right method of construction and a lot of very careful behind the scenes design and testing work. Oceangate where just really slapdash about the whole thing, and when your pushing a material into an area thats not well understood thats not a good idea.
  12. US navy built deep diving underwater RoV's with it. In fact the designs are so similar that it looks a lot like they scaled up the US navy RoV design. The issue seems to be more to do with how they manufactured the hull and the safety margins they assigned.
  13. Half the speed means a quarter the drag at normal atmospheric density, at a tube running a pressure equivalent to 60,000ft half speed would have 1/56th the total drag, thats the equivalent of needing around 1800HP. Honestly though for an electrically driven system the HP requirements of a given sped aren't a huge concern, it's the cooling aspects as noted that are a major pain in terms of carriage design, that and safety. By it's nature a hyperloop is going to need reinforced and very levelled tracks. Thats actually how i expect it to come into use if it ever happens. We keep improving on existing high speed rail with the ever increasing track strength and track smoothness requirements to the point we start building it either elevated or below ground to let us control the smoothness to extreme amounts and eventually the extra challanges of pumping it down are just a minor addition to an allready complex program so we start building it in, (probably at a fairly high value, say 0.7-0.8 atmospheres, a value for which you don't need to seal the carriage as it's perfectly breathable), and we just scale it bit by bit until were running low pressures and super speeds.
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