"Engineer's disease" is where the viewer can't stop thinking while watching a mindless show. Like Tenchi Muyo.

This picture has always bothered me. If the the main cables of a suspension bridge are severed in the middle, the towers will lean out, not in.

Why are Saturn's rings and Saturn's stripes not in the same plane?

NO, no, no... It's not Ryu-oh's key, it's Ryu-oh's ki. As in æ°—, which means "spirit, life force".

UPDATE: One thing that isn't wrong with that second picture is how dark it is. Saturn's orbital radius is between 9 and 10 AU, which means it receives about 1% of the sunlight that Earth does. If one of us was on one of Saturn's icy moons in full sunlight, it would look like night with a full moon. We could see, but we probably could not see color.

All probes intended for the outer solar system (defined as "everything outside of Mars") have to carry nuclear thermal generators for power, because solar cells don't cut it.

Which is kind of a problem for Heinlein's book "Farmer in the Sky". I love that book, but there are a large number of reasons why it isn't practical. (Which I'm sure Heinlein knew, too; he was telling a story, not doing an engineering design.) There's no way you could do open-air farming at that distance from the sun. Jupiter varies between 4.9 and 5.2 AU, which means on average it gets about 4% of the sunlight Earth gets. That would be less bright than deep shade here, and most crops will wither and die in deep shade. If you wanted to grow plants on a terraformed Ganymede, you'd have to use greenhouses and artificial lighting.

What am I doing posting at 3:00 AM? I get punchy and start free-associating.

A different problem with terraforming Ganymede, leaving aside the sheer difficulty of it, is that after you melted all the ice and released all the gas, you'd end up with one hell of a lot of ocean. If you could somehow raise the temperature of Ganymede to Earth normal and keep it there, there would be no dry land anywhere. The now-complete and much-recommended web comic "A Miracle of Science" handled that correctly. All cities would have to be floating.

And now I'm going to bed.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 10:45 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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