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Comment Re:Crypto... (Score 1) 108

Do we actually know how accurate GLONASS is? The only accuracy data we have is on the low-precision unencrypted signals. As far as I know, Russia hasn't released any information about the precision of the encrypted high-accuracy signals, but there's no reason to believe they're not similar to GPS, block II at least. There are also other global systems in operation that they can use, such as Galileo or BeiDou.

Comment Re:Not Quite (Score 4, Insightful) 122

You can do a lot with half a gigawatt hour of capacity. Peak shaving. Frequency management. Load shifting. Power for black starts. They're super valuable. But they're not a replacement for baseline capacity. Not at this scale. Scale it up by an order of magnitude and you can start doing that sort of thing with it, but that's not economical yet.

Comment Re:How to use JustWatch (Score 1) 259

You could do that if the site was working. It currently works fine on mobile, but on desktop, it's super broken. The buttons don't do anything, if you hotlink to a country page there's no search box, and only the first five posters load on any given page.

It's not a good first impression for anybody who might try to check it out.

Comment Re:The math is simple (Score 1) 130

It's actually a lot worse than that, for two reasons:

1) 325kg mass is not accurate for iROSA, as that was for a prototype unit that was permanently jettisoned after the test and presumably didn't provide the same power as the final design. For the final design, SpaceX CRS-22 launched the first two permanent iROSA arrays with a combined mass of 1380kg, or 690 kg per array (https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/spacex_crs-22_mision_overview_high_res.pdf). This also ignores the mass of the parts of the existing solar system that are being re-used, which includes everything from the mounting hardware to the station, the motors to re-orient the panels, and all the electrical systems. 690kg is for basically just the bare panels and nothing else.

2) You did the math of 325kg against the entire iROSA system instead of just a single array. The new arrays (at 690 kg) provide 28 kW of power each, expected to drop to 20 kW within 10 years.

Even if we ignore the mass of all the electrical equipment and mounting equipment a standalone install would require, we still get 690kg for 20 kw, which gives us 185 watts = 6.4 kg, more than an order of magnitude more than 0.5.

Comment The math is simple (Score 1) 130

Let's assume that the only advantage of space-based is that it can produce stable power 24/7 from geostationary orbit and thus doesn't need storage (any differences in efficiency or amount of power is simply a potential mass reduction). How much would a traditional land-based photovoltaic and storage system cost that can provide constant stable power 24/7 (meaning it has to be over-spec'ed to provide a certain minimum amount of power even on days with poor weather conditions)? Your space-based power system, including the cost of launch, orbital infrastructure, and ground infrastructure, needs to be cheaper than that.

Instead, I think you'll find that the space-based approach will cost multiple orders of magnitude more, and as the cost of ground-based solar power systems continues to fall, space-based solar power will probably always be orders of magnitude more expensive.

Comment Re:Upscaling (Score 1) 60

Each interlaced field represents a separate point in time, 60 discrete points in time per second. Interlaced television was not typically 30 progressive frames split into two fields, it was effectively 60 progressive frames with half the scanlines of each discarded.

Comment Re:Upscaling (Score 1) 60

480i60 content when viewed on a CRT does indeed look like 60 FPS. In fact, compared to modern displays, it would have looked even smoother than what we think of as 60 FPS due to CRTs being low persistence displays. The only time it would look like 30 FPS is if it's poorly deinterlaced for progressive display.

As far as I can tell, there is no motion interpolation going on here. The 24 FPS telecine'd film content of the special still looks much lower framerate than the 60 FPS live action scenes.

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