Honorverse "wedge" drive and hyperdrive principles to be tested by USAF

The Scotsman reports that a new gravity-causing electromagnetic drive is to be developed, which if pushed far enough flips the driven vessel into a kind of hyperspace, allowing — in theory, of course — an 80-day trip to Proxima Centauri.

The whole concept sounds uncannily like the “wedge” space-drive used in SciFi author David Weber’s “Honorverse” series, complete with a hyperspace mode. The only obvious difference is that Weber’s hyper-drive leaves you in hyper if it shuts down, but this one (in theory, remember?) kicks you back into normal space. Also, I imagine we’ll be a fair while working up to building eight-megatonne warships which can hit an evading opponent with a beam at a million kilometers even if all of this does work out anything like the theory predicts.

Some reference material: scientist wins 2004 AIIA “best paper” here, pictured here, based on this bloke’s theories. The paper in question is here [PDF] as a part of this collection. Enjoy! (-:

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new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

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every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

boundaries

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Plantagenet Penguinista

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