I wasn’t sure if a flywheel would be good for something like this given just how much mass needs to move and how fast it needs to move to produce close to 1G of force. If it can manage something like that, that would be a super good solve for this.

That said, even if it wasn’t a good solution for the actual ring, it might be a perfect solution for the core’s movement. Given that it can be much less mass as it’s pretty much exclusively used for docking, it could basically just be a pressurized tunnel with attachment points for the ring. Spinning that up and down with a flywheel seems super reasonable.

This is already quite a bit beyond where I have any definite knowledge, but I guess if you had a core completely separated by magnets that might work, but you’d still need points of connection for people who docked to join the actual ring from.

If you did that, the core would also need its own propulsion system to spin down and spin up so that anyone docking could actually go out into the ring.

It’s worth noting here, too, that the inner core would need to spin like crazy fast for a small station to have anywhere close to 1G in the ring, so that would be its own fun thing in the core.

For clarity: I don’t know for certain. I am not involved in the community, not an engineer.

Opinion: It’s incredibly difficult to do. A spinning station needs to be designed to do such a thing. It needs to be balanced and have thrusters positioned in such a way to both spin up and maintain the rotation as it goes. The ISS has been built and expanded over decades by tons of new science modules over time as new breakthroughs happened.

Spinning objects can behave in strange ways and having a regularly shifting center of mass can be a challenge by itself, and that’s before you start planning for yet uncertain experiments to bring aboard.

In addition to this, it would be an ENORMOUS challenge to dock with a station that is spinning, and the added danger to do this (or increased fuel consumption of spinning down and then spinning back up) just isn’t worth it. The alternative of maintaining a central core that is static relative to the spin wastes power and creates a massive risk (more moving parts, especially those which might create friction against metal aren’t easy to maintain in space).

Also, a small spinning station is much harder than a massive spinning station because it would have extremely noticeable differences from normal gravity to the people on board. Your head and feet would likely be moving at noticeably different speeds, which by itself is disorienting, but moving either towards or away from the direction of the spin would feel different (dropping an object would mean it falls away from the direction of spin).

Lastly, maintenance would mean that every single EVA either wastes a tremendous amount of fuel to spin down/up again, or risking flinging a person into space every time they exit.

Realistically, on a much larger station, artificial gravity via spinning might be a fantastic idea, especially for longer-term living aboard, but for the ISS, given its history, its goals, and especially where it’s at, it’s just not a great idea.

People can get tuxedos, too!

This is so absurdly funny

I actually found it also. I didn’t wanna give traffic to the site, but I just couldn’t see anyone actually showing it.

I can’t find where he’s said this, just reports that he had. Does anyone have a link to it?

I’m fairly certain the RAM is soldered and capped, but it has 16gb, so more than I could reasonably touch anyway. It has a 500gb soldered SSD, but I know there’s a slot for another. The only reason I wanna ‘start’ by getting a rack and hard drives is because I watched my friend lose his mind one weekend while he migrated multiple terabytes of data and he has since repeatedly recommended keeping the storage separate and plug and play, haha.

I’m 100% down to give all this a shot, though. As soon as I upgrade, this laptop is immediately getting recycled into the first step server (and very probably the final step unless something drastic changes in my life).

Wow, I really loved this analysis. It’s so coherent and clear on reflection, I really have trouble believing any other interpretation is as accurate.

The unfortunate reality is ‘what I’ve got’ is a 6 year old laptop that represents 60% of my net worth. 😅 Hopefully soon that will change, but for now, I’m taking the free/borrowed friend’s setup.

My game plan in the future is just to turn this laptop and a couple hard drives, though. I think comments like yours and a couple others have convinced me I really don’t need to invest all that much to get started, or really finished with the setup.nif you’re running all that on 8gb of RAM, I think the only thing I’m missing is the storage.

My friend shook me of any notion that I needed all that much, haha. I made a joke about getting a room set up for this and he shamed me by showing my resource use versus his. 🤣

Realistically, I think the only thing I’d ever end up needing is a ton of hard drives. That’s like… the biggest physical thing I need and as someone else in the thread pointed out there are some pretty solid smaller racks for that. My “starter” setup is going to be my current laptop when I upgrade in a year or so.

Edit: Whoa, that sounds like an incredible setup! All that is running fine on 16gb of RAM? Man, I really just need to do more reading about this so I can get a better sense of how all this works.

Hahaha, my friend said the exact same thing. He was debating downsizing and then moved into a house. Once he got situated, he was like, “Fuck it. This is the server room now.” It worked out because it heats that side of the house during winter. 🤣

Ooh, thanks for the tip and the link, I’ll join that community as well! As far as I can tell, just based on what my friend has taught and what I’ve read, these smaller racks are basically all I’d ever need. I’m just a weeb who likes to read… and maybe host a PDS. Possibly a Lemmy instance. And you know, it would be nice to handle my own password manager… (I promise I’ll stop).

I built one myself a year ago. I have a small pcengine APU Box for OpnSense firewall, two Lenovo tiny boxes as Proxmox hosts that run as a high available cluster, and a Mini PC with a JBOD as NAS.

I understand some of these things now! :D (Also, that is such a cool setup. That’s exactly what I wanna end up with!)

His use-case also went up over time, too. I’m in no way qualified to explain, but he trains neural nets for his PhD and does some remote work stuff for some people on his team. As insane as that thing sounds, he’s one of the most frugal people I know and this is like the one thing he really splurges on, and as far as I can tell, he’s not quite using all of it but it’s close.

I definitely don’t see myself ever getting quite that crazy with it, but I definitely want a slice of that capability for myself. If just to host all my tentacle porn. 😔

The full idiom of “speak of the devil and he doth appear” seems like it would be chaotic and bizarre.

Comedy is often a banger for depressed people.

casually searches for the catgirl distro to completely upend my life for a weekend

Seems pretty reasonable to use it as a grammar checker. As long as it’s not changing content, just form or readability, that seems like a pretty decent use for it, at least with a purely educational resource like Wikipedia.

I think I’m following what you mean. To me, though, (using your house analogy) it isn’t that your ex has a key, it’s that the government is demanding that your door remain open. Sure, it’s already off the hinges, but it’s a whole lot easier to put a door back on than to fight the government about it. It’s not currently illegal to protect your data through extreme measures, but this is the beginning of laws that make it illegal. That is why this is worth fighting over to me. What’s more, I can hate and fight against more than one thing, so it’s not a huge issue to be against this.

And sure, all this data is out there, but that isn’t true for future generations. Old data becomes stale. It just seems like such a defeatist attitude to me to cede ground on this, especially when the laws you mentioned actually being worried about would use this as precedent. It’s certainly easier to argue for an ID requirement when you have the data on millions of users lying about their age and use it as justification for a more controlled implementation.

But either way, I think I need to step away here. I feel like I understand you, I just disagree and to continue beyond this without doing more reading on the topic, laws, and trends won’t really help, I think (the last I saw for the New York law was that determining what was an adequate attempt to verify age was fell on the AG, who seemed to be leaning towards third party verification. I’m already out of date with developments there).

I… didn’t say that? Not sure if you replied to the wrong person? But I’ll try to respond to what I can?

Oh whoops, if I did, my bad. That’s what I was understanding your comment about “it’s literally the same check we already have” to be. You’re saying there are already age checks for certain sites (and analysis of your web traffic and associated data being sold) and that this is no different, if I understand correctly. It is worth pointing out that while the California law requires no verification, the New York law potentially requires more than just a declaration of age. It’s worse elsewhere in the world.

All of that is the same thing. It is about building profiles…

Right, but you see how this is also a bad thing right? Given that the FBI has now spoken about buying this data and uses it to target people, I would think that we would all want better privacy protections, not fewer.

1. This is not exclusive to the US.

I don’t see how that should sway opinion about this being a good or a bad thing. It’s a bad thing for everyone, right?

2. I never said this is “the first step towards something >worse”.

No, I am saying that. I was saying that calling this a slippery slope doesn’t feel like it is based in the history of privacy erosion. I’d love to learn more about the original sin in all of this, but just because it isn’t the first step doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight against consolidated, government-mandated privacy violations, right?

Yes? I am sorry that protecting your privacy takes effort? I am >sure that if you pay a random sponsor on an LTT video that >they’ll claim to do everything for you? Like… I really don’t know what to tell you?

I think you’re misunderstanding me. I’m not complaining that it’s difficult. I’m asking why we don’t try and just fix the problem instead of letting something like this slide by because there are other, similar issues.