Welcome to Gaia! :: JimTheCactus's Post History

Problem is that the "timer" is actually a temperature sensor. Pull out the heating element and the toaster stops popping. I'd propose that you could shoot darts from a toaster fairly easily by simply breaking the latch mechanism on the "timer" and then cutting the wire to the heating coil (no reason to shunt it.) Then just put darts in, push down lever, and then let go with a snap.
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*Is also not an expert* Along similar lines I would thing the larger animals blood has more momentum in general, as such once it gets moving it stays moving a lot easier than a small animals blood. So as a consequence the small animal would need to give it a push more often to keep it in motion. It'd be interesting to know what the nominal blood pressure of a mouse is to check this.
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That's where the vaporized fuse comes in. But I agree; to be effective you have to lift your ammunition into space. To put that in perspective this means that if you want to make a nuke sized impact you have to spend a nuke's worth of energy (plus some for losses) to put it up there in the first place. If you drop a large chunk of liquid you'll find that it spreads out unless it has unb ...
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Osmium would burn and sublimate/evaporate once burned. Iridium is better, but still can burn.
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This is true, but once it melts the aerodynmics change a LOT. For that matter the mass is going to break up into little (much smaller) droplets that won't have anywhere near the impact that a single, solid rod would have. And computing terminal velocity depends a lot on the shape of the object and the finish it has; which shape did you pick and was it a polished projectile; ribbed; etc?
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Ah. This makes sense but you have to be careful; every time you vent some of the gas you lower the total thermal capacity of the coolant. Quite true :) However, you can also use the same flight time as before and hit a more distant target. The fact that there's falloff is why it's even possible to hit a target more than 20 miles out; a true straight-line shot can't shoot past the horizon be ...
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Essentially the premise is that you vaporize a portion of the projectile with excessive currents. This plasma is then both expanding, conductive, and negatively ionized. As a consequence as the current runs through the plasma a Lorentz force is generated on the plasma due to the magnetic loop formed with the two rails, the power source, and the plasma bridge. This then causes the plasma to be pu ...
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The problem is that we need the helium to be cold; not liquid. So yes we can keep it liquid at higher temperatures, but no it won't keep your superconductor cold. Actually at high speeds wind resistance is VERY significant (Wind resistance is a function of velocity squared so a 10-fold increase in velocity leads to a 100-fold increase in drag.) And gravity still applies; it's just a matte ...
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That's true for ferromagnetic materials. However, it still factors in with the 3 phase motor design since a field in present even after the slug passes Right and I agree completely; thus the earlier comment about maintaining turn density. In the section you quoted I was talking about why spreading the coil out wasn't practical even if leak wasn't an issue.
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Three phase has each phase shifted 120 degrees. What this means is that there will be significant current on the coil behind the slug and the coil in front of the slug begins to be attracted by the coil in front. This works fairly well with a magnetized slug as the current in the coil behind you then is pushing, and probably pretty well with a paramagnetic/ferromagnetic slug since the current ...
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Don't rule out reacting to a hit just yet. There's already a form of armor (conveniently called "Reactive Armor") that works in a very similar way. The basic idea is that the armor actually a large number of shaped charges. When a projectile impacts one of the charges it explodes outward. This causes indirect hits to be deflected away and causes direct hits to have reduced penetrating power and po ...
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Essentially you're looking at magnetic acceleration using a phase shifted coils. In theory it's a fairly decent methodology. However, there's two things in practice that become fairly limiting. The first is that producing multiple current phases like that requires either multiple high current pulse generators operating with a known phase relationship, or a way of delaying a single pulse so that ...
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I can think of a few systems that have j vectors in them and are strictly physical systems. For example, the Laplace form of a simple single pole low pass filter F(ω)=1/(1+RCS) where S is σ+jω describes the complex relationship between the capacitor and the resistor in the circuit. This simplified expression is WAY better than expressing it in terms of the integral that actually describes t ...
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I think the point of the OPs question was working with additional spatial dimensions so time isn't really all that important here. >.> And remember, a 3D object can exist cleanly in a system with 3 or more spatial dimensions; no wand waving required. For example, a triangular pyramid can exist in a 5D space. As a sample here's the coordinates for the vertexes of one on a 5D space. ...
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Artificial fusion is at a serious disadvantage to stellar fusion. In stellar fusion the star's gravity works to increase the pressure of the system and hold all the bits and bobbles together. This dramatically reduces the temperatures necessary to induce fusion and generally makes everything a whole lot easier. The current approach to artificial fusion is the Tokamak reactor. The problem is tha ...
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