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Comment Re:Only 2.5Gbps? (Score 1) 38

Clouds will depend on the frequency.

X-Ray lasers are extremely difficult but they exist. Stepping down from extremely difficult to merely difficult may have some merit.

Whether it's worth the cost will be interesting. Microsats is curious - geostationary would be an easier place to start without the steering complexity.

An interesting project for sure.

Comment Re:9WM? (Score 2) 46

> All that stuff has to react rapidly

Just to add color ... equipment that has to do a lot of work quickly, even if intermittently, has a huge draw. Like your well pump or air conditioner when it starts up.

Now imagine you need to start a few dozen air conditioners simultaneously. The startup energy can be 10x the operating energy.

I've been doing the math on some of this for home solar. In my case I can ramp up the voltage over a few seconds but AIUI rockets still need instant action in many cases.

It's possible future reusable spacecraft could be more proactive, lowering costs and necessary chassis strength. Most of our technology starts off brute force and gets refined with more elegance but also more complexity over time. We're still early days in spaceflight.

Submission + - CERN Open Sources Its KiCad Component Libraries

ewhac writes: CERN, a long-time Open Source pioneer, has made several contributions over the years to KiCad ("KEE-kad"), an Open Source EDA (Electronic Design Automation) package widely used in the hobbyist and professional electronics communities. It's gotten so widely used that users can now submit their KiCad design files directly to several electronics fabricators (rather than the traditional step of converting the layouts to Gerber files). Over the years, CERN have also developed their own symbol and footprint libraries to support their own internal electronic designs. Last week, CERN released those KiCad component libraries, containing over 17,000 symbols, under the CERN Open Hardware License (permissive version).

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