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“Lower the inertial mass.” – Miles O’Brien, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Season 1, Episode 1.
Lower the inertial mass
—what to say when you want your obese Trekkie friend to take care of their health
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Remove all the tanks and shit on the bottom to really save weight and just let the shuttle fly? It’s not rocket science.
Found the Kerbal Space Program player?
Though isn’t that decreasing the aerodynamics and increasing the friction?
Probably, but the slowest part of the trip is in the most dense air. Probably still a net benefit!
SIX HUNDRED EL BEES? HOLY FUCK THAT’S A LOTTA PAINT.
That’s why American Airlines had the “cheat line” livery. Bare hulls saved them enough weight to carry like an extra 2 passengers.
Plus, polished metal on airframes looks sweet IMHO. Real “DC3 golden era of aviation” vibes.
And why McLaren went with a silver colour
Orange makes it go faster. Not the fastest color but it’s up there.
Is NASA run by orcs
No no, that’s Roscosmos
Although tbf all those achievements were by the Soviet space program, where Roscosmos has been… well, less successful especially recently thanks to all the money going to murdering Ukrainians
We put a lot of meaning on ‘Boots on the ground.’
“First to invade the moon”
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US just put enough into the
CHAstat to decide which achievement is worth bragging about.
Oh boy. That was funny.
I always thought it looked cooler with the orange tank anyway
Cooler with white, but heavier.
Cooler with orange, and lighter.
Cooler depends on the amount of sunlight available
No that’s cooler
Someone remove the white paint
I thought Cell was green?
No that’s when Cooler fuses with Picollo to become even cooler.
Pooler? Coocollo? Picoler?
Coolio.
Context hat
Back when NASA was flinging things into space for the first time, the tolerances that were even possible were extremely tight. Every pound mattered (every pound still matters, but because we have other things to do once we get to space nowadays, plus every pound is expensive).
600 pounds of white paint for the fuel tank was considered unnecessary, once the engineering team figured that it didn’t actually protect the special foam covering of the fuel tank anyway. Thus the distinctive orange color!
For all the people in the world except the ones from Liberia, Myanmar and the United States, 600 freedom units = ~272 kg
So about 31 adult badgers.
Tsss, it’s barely 1/6th of a skateboarding rhino.
That’s 4 and half men. Or a minivan’s worth of kids. Or 100 buckets of KFC
also Canada. because we don’t use metric in contexts like this
You weigh in beavers?
Thank you, finally something sensible
You can just give a conversion without being snarky about it
You can just be quiet, what has snarky ever done to you?
Oh, I thought the pictures were backwards. The orange being the natural color and the white being paint is really critical information for it to make sense lol
Yeah same. Orange is much more iconic, glad this happened.
Oh my eyes glossed over the word “paint”. Thanks.
High end bicycle equipment has weight specs in grams.
It’s always hillarious to me to see boomers on expensive bikes that aim to save every gram while they could save 20kg on themselves.
In the cycling community we call those guys Freds.
And it’s more of a light ribbing than a condemnation, since at least they’ve got themselves on a bike.
I can’t say I’ve ever seen that.
Or skinny dudes with enormous ballsacks wearing tight Spandex on 15 pound carbon fiber bikes, but a 20 pound motorcycle lock.
If you are trying to lose weight, you should be using the worst, heaviest bike possible.
There’s a bell curve. If you burn out too quick you’re not gonna get nearly as much cardio, and the torque required to move a real clunker is extra stress on your joints. Plus it’s just not as much fun, cycling is a sustainable exercise largely because it’s fun. But it’s very true that a decent workout bike can be had for $100 if you look. My two workout bikes were both built in the 90s.
Well, not if you still want to have some fun while doing so.
But I agree, that a regular bike should suffice and you don’t need to worry about optimizing gear weight if you’re not competing for anything and just ride it for your own well-being.
Well, not necessarily. A bike that’s got a full carbon frame also absorbs shock and vibration from the road better. This means you can ride longer distances without getting fatigued in places like your wrists or ass. Longer rides = more exercise.
But once you have a carbon frame, chasing grams on other components gets to be a bit silly.
Steel is real. The road feel difference between carbon and steel is negligible, steel is usually way cheaper, survives a whole lot longer, is more often built to widely compatible standards, is fully recyclable, and in my humble opinion just straight up feels better under you on a ride. As for weight, unless one is a pro race cyclist there is never any reason to chase gram shavings, you will almost always lose more weight and go faster by working out your own body. But FWIW my default steel rig is 19 pounds and competes on weight with most carbon builds.
I’ve yet to ride a carbon frame for any amount of real distance, so idk how good they actually are.
But having a less harsh ride can also be archived by not using the thinnest pizza cutter tires at 10 bar. Especially if we care about time ridden and not avg. speed.
And it’s going to be slightly harder to get the same speed out of comfy tires, so that’s also more exercise.
It was really funny about a decade back watching the entire bike industry all at once acknowledge friction coefficients, and suddenly the tires all went from 24mm/90psi to 38mm/40psi. All because the roadies started riding on gravel.
You could argue that TPI tubes / tubeless made larger road tires practical. But we all secretly know it was because people at the time just thought thin tires looked cooler and more aero.
You could also just walk whenever possible, burns more kcals/distance
That’s less efficient time-wise though, since it takes significantly longer to walk the same distance compared to riding.
Ie, riding 2 hours burns FAR more calories than walking for 2 hours.
I enjoy walking and don’t mind walking even for 40 minutes in the morning. Not every day, but if it fits in the schedule it gives me more movement in practice than a bike (also due to some local circumstances).
The point was more generally that walking is a great alternative. Everyone hypes bicycles, walking has no lobby and is one of the healthiest things to add to your day.
Also, if the goal is to lose weight, cardio is fine but only supportive at best. It’s way more effective to eat less calorie dense food than trying to run/bike it off. The difference between an hour walking and biking is negligible for most people compared to dietary changes.
That’s a stationary bike
Perhaps that’s why they are on a bike?
Well, it’s also fun to go places you know. If a shitty bike can only get you 20mi / 30km but a on a good one you feel confident doing a 30mi / 45km ride then the purchase makes sense.
But, why ? You drink a bit more water that day and it’s void.
A cup of water plus 250g is less than a cup pf water plus 500g. That’s why.
It’s a competition between brand. They’re at the point where decrease a single gram is incredible task and are all racing to become the lightest weight and aero-est bicycle and get to claim that.
And then you have E bike companies producing lead bricks that are non-functional without the motor doing 90% of the work. Or with the massive motorcycle seats that make pedaling actually impossible.
But what if you drank more water and you didn’t have the weight savings?
I’m too dumb for maths because I have dyscalculia, but i am always amazed by the engineering crowd on how they could improve efficiency by finding and tweaking just the little things.
- Artemis tanks were 10m wide and 30m tall.
- Cylinder surface Area = (2.pi.r2) * (2.pi.r.h) [1]
- 2 * pi * 5 * 30 ~ 1100m2 to paint
- Paint paints about 10m2 per Litre paint
- Need 1100 / 10 = 110 Litres of paint
- 1L of paint weighs about 2kg
- 110 Litres of paint weighs about 220kg
curved area plus top and bottom circles ↩︎
Til dyscalculia. I hope you weren’t born in asia
I am Asian 😂 I refuse to live up to the stereotype!
Or expectations!
Or are you a doctor?
I won’t go too specific but my background is in biotech.
So… you’re going to be a lawyer then?
I already work on STEM, without the E, but a little bit of M.
How are you doing m without being m?
It’s regulatory requirement to use calculators in my field to make calculations, so that has been saving me.
Its simple rocket math. Every lb of weight must consume fuel.
Si.pky. 1 lb of weight needs 1 lb of fuel to escape orbit. But the fuel has weight also. So the effective fuel you need to lift the rocket and payload is exponential.
The harder stuff is orbital mechanics. Getting things into orbit is easy. Having thwm go where you want is the hard part.
The tyranny of the rocket equation. Generally, 1% of weight is payload, 85% is fuel.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/escaping-the-tyranny-of-the-rocket-equation/
The sooner humans can move past rocket tech the better to be honest.
Stop living in a gravity well and we wouldn’t have to expend energy to get out of it!!
The real question is why the default color is orange and not white or gray.
The polyurethane spray foam insulation is orange.
That’s the default skin. It costs 100,000 doubloons to unlock the sick neon green and black skin.
That’s only if they release the DLC. Devs keep blowing their budget on the tech tree
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Fun fact: Columbia, pictured with the white tank, was the heaviest shuttle and was not modified to have the airlock necessary to dock with the ISS because the performance losses compared to the other shuttles made it difficult to use for ISS operations.
But didn’t it have ejection seats at one point?
IIRC the original Shuttle design called for an ejection mechanism around the entire cockpit. During STS-1 and I believe STS-2, which was also Colombia, there were extra emergency mechanisms present, but I don’t think the seats themselves ejected through the roof like a fighter pilot’s would. For the most part though these were useless as they could not be used above 30,000 feet or something like that so it could only be used during the first minute or two of the flight.
Several of the safety mechanisms and other things that were going to be part of the original design that had not already been scrapped for weight (like jet engines for powered decent) were scrapped for weight when the DOD stepped in and offered NASA extra money for the Shuttle if the Shuttle could hit very specific, higher and less fuel efficient, orbits. This came from an offhand comment that Jimmy Carter made, and then had to make good on the threats and implications of.
