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mircea_popescu: basically "cannonball made of chain, unwraps in flight."
mircea_popescu: ancient marine warfare thing. like linked shot but smaller.
mircea_popescu: quite reminescent of the "man half penis" medieval things.
mircea_popescu: (why 45 degrees ? maximum distance. which means maximum friction.)
mircea_popescu: in fact, this is a study on ballistics. fire from center of mass at 3pi/4 angle, go for a parabolic ride.
mircea_popescu: so. that item above : for 200 bucks, can fire a 38. you will have to add some software for it to fire in a convenient direction for itself while also hitting target.
mircea_popescu: !~later tell diametric do you know of a good reason a 2-3kg chopper couldn't be built on aluminum alloy frame ? not whether it is, nor why afficionado's don't, but whether couldn't.
mircea_popescu: and a kg of duralumin hull will cut a hole through a pile of plastic choppers.
mircea_popescu: serious application chopper will be made of aluminum alloy, not vinyl.
mircea_popescu: so basically, a beam made of 1kg of plastic could be made of 1gram of duralumin.
mircea_popescu: whatever vynil toy store uses has what, 60 ? if you're lucky and it's very good, pvc has like 15
mircea_popescu: yeah, but plastic is heavier than duralumin per strength.
mircea_popescu: but really - using plastic for a serious (as opposed to toy) chopper is stupid, you want duralumin anyway
mircea_popescu: also the chopper not being a plane, it can tolerate a lot more than the warthog could.
mircea_popescu: however, the constraints are material durability and relative density, because the main factor is atmospheric response.
mircea_popescu: meanwhile the scheme contemplated here expells 100 grams of material per second, and weighs 3kgs.
mircea_popescu: seems the cannon fires 400gram projectiles, about 70/s. so it expells 30kgs of material per second ; and it weighs 150 tons.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: hey, warthog does manage to fire those "girl you'd fuck" sized bullets...
mircea_popescu: big whoop, over ten seconds friction + your engines reduce it to .5
mircea_popescu: anyway. 38 shot is about 300 W at barrel exit. for a 3kg shooter this translates to say 10 m/s
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform eh, what, it can't handle a few g's ? why not ?
mircea_popescu: and coupled with gossipd, it becomes impossible to establish "whose chopper this is". owner reports his choppers stolen, good luck "enforcing".
mircea_popescu: the expense of servicing cameras is getting crew to mount pole etc. not the parts. the parts are all cheap - great satan just prints to cover.
mircea_popescu: also, a chopper fleet able to do anon cctv takeout missions is something with a future.
mircea_popescu: yeah BingoBoingo is right, we also had the "add to people's cars, without asking the people, have it powered from heat exchange etc"
mircea_popescu: eh, the plane-to-glider conversion is a sort of "my car is also a submarine"
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform as implicit here, "be a station in flight"
mircea_popescu: re plane vs chopper : afaik per watt, chopper offers more flight than plane.
mircea_popescu: shinohai i don't think anyone seriously contemplates importing the aferations of random soi dissant sovereigns.
mircea_popescu: Framedragger ideally you want it to empty the balloon and return "home" sometime.
mircea_popescu: anyway. this sketch of a discussion should suffice to show that the enemy has no hope of ever getting a perimeter around the network again.
mircea_popescu: Framedragger the copter itself would be most of the mass.
mircea_popescu: also top of balloon makes the perfect surface for solar cells.
mircea_popescu: this is calculable, energy loss to course correction vs energy saved from buoyancy.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform if i wanted it to stay put i'd simply add a baloon.
mircea_popescu: anyway, the beauty of bitcoin is that it actually allows one to permissionlessly serve.
mircea_popescu: the thing with the 10minute / 2km range is that in most circumstances, this is a half hour distance. if you have to drive it - gotta park, unpark, holy shit. most people live within 2km of their friends anyway.
mircea_popescu: this, incidentally, is quite viable, if the animal spends ten minutes in flight and carries say 32 GB sticks you're looking at
mircea_popescu: another thing i'd like to see prototyped is quadcopter mediated data exchange. have the guy plug out a usb stick from one back panel, fly it over, plug it into another back panel.
mircea_popescu: truth being that this is a historical occasion, with actually correct, well designed internet within grasp
mircea_popescu: as people (alf, mostly) pointed out in the intervening coupla years, there's absolutely no sane reason to marry gossipd to extant-internet, or tcp/ip or etc, as the original draft was trying to
mircea_popescu: but honestly, gossipd as a finished product can not possibly come other than with a mesh-over-wifi and mesh-over-radio ready made.
mircea_popescu: once we have some sort of acceptabru spec all sorts of prototyping work can begin
mircea_popescu: (it's also a wonder why they don't teach girls to masturbate in sex ed / have special sherub camps etc.)
mircea_popescu: but in the meanwhile, why not try everything see what works. you could call it fuckd-dc
mircea_popescu: i was just being facetious! no such article is being prepared! sorry to disappoint.
mircea_popescu: coming next on trilema, a butterfly classification by preferred wrist motion. learn to distinguish the circular girl from the more common sideways girl and the very rare vertical motion girl.
mircea_popescu: now you know what "baby i'm spent but if you wanna come over we can watch porn and do the butterfly" means.