It makes no sense to spend more to tiptoe through costly incremental steps of infrastructure buildout buying stuff you crave to be rid of when you can hop right to the conclusion. Fuel is bad. You use it and then you need more fuel. That's a vulnerability to the fuel supplier, the logistics, the free market for fuel, changing government meddling. Fix it right once without fuel and be done with it for 30 years. It's not like there won't be another problem to solve the next day.

>as they are not allowed to use oil or coal

Or natural gas. No carbon. Carbon fuels amplify the already obscene thermal output by at least 2.5.

Also, none of them is dumb enough to go fission. The time to power is an order of magnitude greater than their expiration date if they don't have it. And their server and power costs are bad enough. They don't need to compound those expenses with the costliest source of energy available.

Never sounded so good.

The transistors aren't actually smaller. They fit more of them in the same 2 dimensional area by using layers. The layers are the Z dimension. The thermals are an interesting question.

The transistors aren't actually smaller. It's standard in the field to market the next chip generation as a smaller size when they mean equivalent to the new size. In this case the transistors are stacked vertically so looking down you get layers X areal density of the 2 dimensional surface. We don't do this with flash stacks, which now have up to 321 layers and are mapped to 1000+.

The angstrom scale business is marketing fluff to make the density increase understandable to consumers. But this is one of the developments leveraging the Z dimension that are legitimate progress. The Z dimension gives more than just the same chip folded like origami. The net distance traveled by a signal in a cycle can be reduced, which yields massive improvement in performance without additional cost of power/heat.

typo, more decentralisation not centralisation

Ok, but propaganda is basically the problem and has been for over a hundred years. And it's everyone. Not just far right or Russia or today's bogeyman. It's everyone doing it.

The antidote can't really be "curated information" because all the propagandists want to then be the curators. And that's what they do.

The only real antidote is more dissemination, more distribution, more centralisation, more alternatives, and people just being exposed to all this stuff having to get smarter about integrating and comparing and contrasting what they read.

Welcome to 1995.

Might as well spread the joy around developing challengers (not like that!). It's not like the prime mover in New Space is going to need any part of NASA's whopping $40b annual budget.

Selling your body scans as a VR skin. AI enhanced, naturally.

Yes, makes sense.

What I mean about the floor level is that, if you look at the outside of the door on the central module, and you take that door's floor height line and follow it right the way through the craft, then when you get to the front, inside the command module, in order for the pilots to be able to see out the top window, their chairs would have to be higher not lower. I gather it's the only place where the inside doesn't match the outside.

There were the four pods, two at the front and two at the rear, above the landing struts, though. But in any case, whatever fuel source they were using must have been extremely compact. Something nuclear-based, perhaps.

I love the design. I just wish they'd worked out the floor level in the interior into the command module, because it doesn't line up.

Thanks, yes I enjoyed The Expanse tv show. I'll look at the books.