Rocket Man

firstly, don't. if you want to make a spud gun, go pneumatic. theyre way more reliable and far safer. other than that, pneumatics are versatile. how many combustion guns can be converted into water guns that rival a garden hose. i had to build a miniature for an in-class physics demo. really light, compact and sturdy, i could reliably strike a falling target from 6 metres. however, i built it modular. it behaves like a mortar in one configuration and a water rocket in another. i have never seen a combustion spud gun that can fly further than mine. i used a 600ml soda bottle, sprinkler solenoid and a valve from a bike tyre assembled using 25mm pvc pipe (mains rated) and an assortment of heavy duty glues and O-rings (my teacher commisioned a duplicate)

take a plane with a really low stall speed, and land it in a stiff head wind. i've heard of military pilots off-loading troops without touching the ground. the only factor that makes this different to a standard takeoff is excess drag. more throttle isn't difficult to come by, very very few aircraft need full throttle to takeoff.

theres the scientific method which is making a theory to fit the facts, and then theres the unscientific method which involves taking a theory, messing around with all applicable variables in an attempt to make evidence to support the original theory and hoping no one will notice the vast number of errors.

i just read that the surface of the bread needs to get between 150 and 260 degrees celsius to brown properly without charring. all toasters run on IR. a convection toaster is called an oven. insane alien, in my last post, i did not mention lasers, nor any form of stimulated emmision. my last post basically describes a toaster with relocated elements and a suitable reflector to keep the glare off your telly's receiver.

i reckon someone should build an engine block with a sterling cycle built in. BMW has a steam assist prototype on the way, it heats water using the heat from the exhaust gas.

i'm not convinced that padding on the inside of the sub will fix the problem, you still have solid relfections off the hull. the angled panels are used to scatter the sonar reflections. i think that anything like military grade armouring will have horrid acoustic problems. even a thin compressible layer stuck on the outside of the hull isn't perfect. it can end up with cavitation problems at high speed.

oh yes, nothing a direct feed from the local grid can't handle... actually, there are a few unfesable designs like this to make a maglev train. when a suitably powerful permanent magnet moves quickly over copper or aluminium, you get a repulsive force. so if you get the train moving fast enough (several times the speed of sound), levitation is a direct result of motion. however, a lot of energy is absorbed by the rails by ohmic heating and forward force is a big issue

get an ac magnet and a thin-ish copper floor. magnetic feild builds up in the floor to oppose the boot, by the time ohmic heating has taken over, the boot has reversed polarity and induced a current. you could come up with some funky electronics to sense motion and apply a retarding force to lateral motion if you had enough control over the feild. this sort of thing would end up with you using much the same technique as inline skates on glass with viscous lubrication

i think the closest you can get to measurable "free will" is basing decisions on thermal noise, otherwise you can predict people's actions and manipulate them accordingly. the vast and complex network that is the brain has some pretty simple reactions to stimulus.

bah, use active panels and peizo electric sensors to dampen the sonar/ project the sound on the other side. shape would be irrelevant, crew would be deaf.

i think it's more the way quantum scale events outside the brain compound to make something operate very slightly differently (to other ways it could turn out) to give us a different stimulus to process.

righto,

if it's deterministic, you're playing to a script. pretend to enjoy yourself.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/July97/guitar.ltb.html try this one..

i'm not sure i see the resemblance, tossing two magnets together isn't quite the same as powering a pulse magnet from an explosively pumped flux compression generator. interesting find, insane_alien. perhaps it's possible to make it non-destructive.

right, so the "propellers" give the water linear velocity (around the axle), where does the force to do this come from? the top being stationary is irrelevant, the water still has centripetal force acting on it. don't just think 2d, which direction is the water actually going? it's moving up yes, but it has much more horisontal velocity so centripetal force stops it from moving to the centre. it clings to the edge of the baffle going around and around before accellerating down due to gravity, away from your aparatus.

"the indium phosphide was spiked with aluminum gallium indium arsendide to give it added speed." like painting a car red... I suppose the electrical systems have limits imposed by magetic feilds etc, optic switching is very promising

the term is virtual photon. it carries no energy energy = plancks constant x frequency frequency is null so wavelength is irrelevant. the way i understand it is it has no energy, so no momentum, therefore it can curve around easily when it interacts with charged particles.

the first is phonetic

i think the ammonia systems were first, they used water to absorb ammonia gas to create a low pressure zone (cold) then heat to separate the two again then cooled the components back to room temperature to finish the cycle. solid-state heat pump fueled entriely by heat... work that one out.

what about lateral velocity, it must accelerate inward against the centripetal force that put it there in the first place. so the only place it could actually go is up, around, out, then down. how does the water increase linear velocity as it moves outward within the container? where does this energy come from?

hmm, you can't draw energy from a permanent magnet. the wattage spike in magnet a is due to b being a non polar ferrous object. if magnet a is permanent and magnet b is a non-ferrous coil, when magnet b turns on to attract to magnet a, the wattage spike will be in magnet b as it moves. it's essentially the same as the first scenario but a and b are swapped. one point i'd like to make is that wattage where inductive loads and motion are concerned are rarely constant, you'll have current induced in one, energy taken out of another, so you really need to draw distinctions between permanent magnets and electromagnets even though the mechanics behind them are the same. the only time you can use them interchangably is when you have a current loop with no external power source, ie: a loop of super conducting material with a current already present.

what do you mean "cryogenics" do you mean cooling systems or the means to freeze a frog and thaw it some years later only to watch it come back to life? cooling systems were developed slowly over a long time, the early ones were simply a wet hessian sack then someone worked out they could do it with ammonia then freon. edit: seeing as though you put this under engineering you're probably talking about heat pumps

hmm, i hear that, triboelectrics makes a minimal constant voltage which is compounded by the belt drive. so really the simplest alternative is a HV supply and a diode. what if you use a series of coils stacked up around the stem of the van de graaf to pump the electrons up from the cathode ray and into the dome, all oscillating to apply lateral momentum which is attracted to the next coil? another thought, have a single powered coil and stages of coil, diode, coil, diode, one end connected to ground the other connected to the dome. it'd work much the same as a CW but you can utilise flyback to stack up some serious voltages.

you're not actually creating energy here, and never will. you'll have a wattage spike in magnet a as b appraoches. if you have a charged coil, (super conducting to match ideal circumstances) and allow a lump of iron to move towards it the iron gains kinetic energy. the energy you can take back from the magnetic feild in the coil will drop. now if you then pull the lump of iron away again, you apply a force over a distance thus introcdcing energy into the system. that energy can then be extracted from the coil itself. so really, you need to think about where the energy comes from, in this case, it's magnet a.