/me sulks

@Everyone why? what's wrong?

@TildalWave: haha nothing wrong. just thinking about the Voyager RTGs

@Everyone real-time gross settlements? :P

@TildalWave: No.. I was like - let's power up the instruments on Voyager again so the RTGs approach brown-out, then expose part of the thermocouple junction to the cold of space; use raw heat as motive force ... or raw cold (to be politically correct)

there's something i'm missing there; can it be as simple as that? or is it just a pipe?

@Everyone Well there isn't much in terms of "coldness" having it exposed to open space. There's nothing much in the near vacuum to dissipate heat. And you radiate heat as infrared wavelength energy even if not exposed anyway, actually you might be able to do that better with larger surface area of heat spreaders. ;)

@TildalWave: Make the heat-spreaders retractable but right; nothing to dissipate to

@Everyone We tried, but they just end up going in a circle until they drop dead. And dead tend not to relay the message about their findings well enough :D

Do the voyagers spin?

@Everyone I meant the ants

ah

sorry (+:

Could a ramjet be coupled in series ... when human science reaches that stage?

@Everyone it wouldn't make sense, you'd want the intake as large as possible and compress whatever it's capable of gathering into the engine, then expel that at higher velocity per mass at the heat exchange... if you serially coupled them, you'd only be hitting your other intake with this same reaction mass you just used to propel yourself and "hit the brakes"

@TildalWave: Series but not hard-coupled - like playing tag. Then the other intake wouldn't get a mass/velocity advantage? smaller intake, and more mass from the exhaust of the first one?

@Everyone well your velocity gain would be "first block gain at exhaust - first block decrease at intake" + "second block gain at exhaust - second block decrease at intake"... but as the "second block decrease at intake" would be almost equal but negative to "first stage exhaust gain", you just end up with more mass to propel and double the engine inefficiencies. You don't really gain anything.

Why more mass?

@Everyone two compressors / engines and two intakes

that would be if they're on the same body... What if they're independent bodies?

@Everyone then they're not serially coupled ;)

they are parallel then

but OK let's assume the 2nd ramjet is following the exhaust of the 1st one...

eh? independent but with one following the other yep

the 1st one gets the velocity gain from the reaction mass having much smaller velocity at the intake... the 2nd one would not have this benefit any more, the reaction mass is expelled from the 1st one at the speed greater than it travels. Assuming two equal performance ramjets, the 2nd simply wouldn't have anything to gain from it.

Right. I'm a moron. It's official

Why didn't the high velocity of the exhaust from the first come to mind?

@Everyone well in reality it's a bit more complicated, maybe that set you off course, dunno

@RoryAlsop morning! ... wait, where did your gravatar go? :O

My mistake (+: I do lots of them. no worries

@Undo - Re that flag to protect the moderator nominations thread in meta, I've asked @JonEricson before what he thinks of protecting it, and quoting him this is the reply I got: "If someone comes along to answer it in the future, it might be weird. But we might need to add a mod and a nomination from someone new might be nice. ;-)" So on second thought, I think we should be fine leaving it as is. We check meta often enough to see if there was any trolling in the thread and reverse it. ;)

@Tildal - erm...dunno. Is it back?

What's with the unseasonal rain?

@RoryAlsop Oh yes... but I just saw you there and wanted to wish you good morning, when it disappeared with the chat escape velocity on me :|

@Everyone - I don't understand the question (disclaimer: I live in Scotland...there is no such thing)

@RoryAlsop: Hm? You a travelling man?

pretty much, yes @Everyone - although this current role only has me covering a few countries, I used to work all over- with a team based in 18 countries from Argentina to Singaport

@RoryAlsop: (+: Ouch - How do you coordinate a meeting across so many TZ? Was enquiring of TildalWave earlier about raw heat as motive force in the vacuum of space. What do you think?

By not sleeping much, and by trying to visit them at least once a quarter where possible

Raw heat as motive force - well, if you have a heated plate, it will expel photons in infra-red - which will provide impulse.

Why would you want to do that though when you have much more efficient ion drives?

@RoryAlsop: Only in an emergency

I do wish SE wouldn't post titles like that ...

First a frog croaked at the launch of LADEE, now the SO blog talks of forty-four million frogs ... What's with all the frog business?

so I'm playing a bit with community banners... whatcha think?

it show me that animated 'loading' gif; the one that goes round and round

@Everyone man, I uploaded it to SE CDN... hit F5

ngek; it shows me that animated 'loading' gif

@Everyone better?

No )+: I even opened up another tab

@Everyone Dunno you shouldn't have problems, it's uploaded to SE, so I don't see why you wouldn't see this one, but you see others. Have you tried disabling HTTPS Everywhere, sometimes it makes problems and disabling and later re-enabling it solves it for me.

SE is not on an HTTPS link at this end. No idea what's going on ... FB plays up at times too, but there an F5 eventually works. What others?

@Everyone SE has some subdomains on SSL/TLS and my HTTPS Everywhere also acts up sometimes in Chrome

Version 2

Not on chrome. IE10

@Everyone Well there's your problem then :P

O.o

I can't stand Chrome. Bright lights hurt me eyes lately ...

how's now?

Now it says 403

@Everyone Now?

Yep. I see it - on your site in a different tab; still not visible in here though ...

Is that the Solar System with the Milky Way in backdrop?

@Everyone yup, part of it... the gas giants

@TildalWave: I assumed the terrestrials were too small to be visible (+:

I don't suppose the colours could be made a little brighter ... ?

@Everyone I'm a bit short on time today, but I might play with it some more tomorrow. ;) Of course, I'm open to suggestions. And it doesn't have to be designed by me either, so don't hesitate to submit your own ideas. I'll try to find time tomorrow to post a meta thread where we can vote on them and track where they're used for our promotion.

@TildalWave beautiful

Whaddup astronaughts!

@TildalWave Wow this is fantastic

A bit lighter version ;)

@TildalWave no, i refuse to look at this, im sure whatever my eyes tell my brain will not do it justice!

@RoryAlsop & @RhysW thanks :) I'm uploaded the 1st one to a few sites, upvotes needed LOL

meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/2517/11634 and meta.physics.stackexchange.com/a/4965/21740 and meta.scifi.stackexchange.com/a/3126/12950 for now.

@TildalWave conviniently for you i have an account just about everywhere! vote vote vote complete :D

Hehe cheers! It's all for the good cause :D

personally i prefer the lighter one, but the other is still deserving of a vote!

@RhysW I can just replace them... but I thought to edit the lighter one a bit at that dark part at the bottom, maybe add lights of the night shots of Earth

@TildalWave i think keeping the bottom bit dark is good, lets you read the words!

my vision isnt what it used to be, so the easier to read the better!