Satellites are the high ground

thats how it works isnt it

DoD is the institution that basically bankrolls most of what musk ever did, to me this just feels like a modern howard hughes, a flashy rich public person that does “crazy” things, very usefull thing to have to hide big military projects in plain sight…

I dont even know what the implications are when the guy that was supposed to be the diversion ends up that close to the power that funds him.

Yes, for i have no light

And i thought that meme was simple enough to understand…

my fav from that thread (and i propose to make this a copy pasta):

My entire gripe around these scopes is the instruments being offered today, the sub-aperture lens arrangement is not doing any corrections. The lens is a straight up Barlow, nothing more.

If you look at the Bird-Jones design, the design is very specific in the design of both the primary & correcting lens. This means that both elements need to be not only matched but also well manufactured in order to work as designed. When you then look at the few true Bird-Jones instruments that were manufactured, such as the Tasco 8V (which was manufactured by Vixen), the Celestron G8-N and one other (escapes my mind right now but I’ll add it when I remember), these scopes were not cheap but pushing flagship status for these brands & supplied with swish mounts. And none of these scopes can be readily collimated by the end user as the alignment of the optics is so precise it is done in-factory. The 8V alone still maintains almost cult status.

The Bird-Jones design is not without its own shortcomings. It is not perfect without aberration. It is important to remember the ideas behind its design, to provide a short tube OTA option with what was able to be readily manufactured at the time, that being good spherical mirrors.

What is made today is a far cry from what a Bird-Jones offers performance wise. Made cheap with a poor spherical primary & that they are totally collimateable by the end user shows these are not a precision scope. Add to this that not a single Bird-Jones instrument is to be found anywhere else besides these cheap things. Doesn’t this say something?

These cheap instruments, really all cheap instruments are a double edge sword. They make astro more accessible, yes, but their poor quality ends up killing off more people’s enthusiasm for astro than firing it up. Add to this that for many novices if the mount is not a complicated equatorial one then it isn’t an astronomical instrument, & the difficult manner of using a wobble-tron mount & tripod with the mental gymnastics required just too much for most people who buy these and just give up way too soon.

Yes, there will be a few people who will be able to make these scopes work, being all they can afford, and all power to them. I will support such persons. But these are very few compared to the overwhelming number of people who just give up after the poor experience they get from these instruments. Too them astro is just all too hard, and mainly because of a poor instrument.

Call these cheap instruments what they are, a barlowed Newtonian.

Its like a newtownian just that it has a spherical mirror (cheaper to make) and uses a corrective lens in front of the eyepeace.

There are basically no “fantasy” elements, the book keeps you on edge with every page, its the most tense book i have ever read, i fr could NOT LAY IT DOWN until it was thru. Stuff why u should read the book:

• Liquid nitrogen hand granades
• magnetic pneumatic shootable grappeling hook
• French special forces beeing assholes
• more Deus ex machina moments than i ever saw before in a singular book

credible solution right there

A device like this actually appears in the plot of Matthew Reilly’s Temple, tho in the book the nuclear material used was from a meteorite…still tho it was basically sundial

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_(novel)

the birds thing is a feature, high protein snack precooked via tracer

ok throw in 20$ more for 2 servos to gumball the thing in the right direction

Edit: maybe switch that laser distance sensor for a Ultrasonic one, since ultrasonic dosent show up as bright flickering dots in night vision…

communication satellite, not for espionage

if i see a person struggling with english and still trying to make educational content about niche topics no one else covers, i have the upmost respect for them

I have seen Bias Tee injectors for up to [email protected], thats enough for a decent output booster. But yes in reality 99% of those where used for preamps in analog TV/Radio Rx

Shellgame time

IR homing sensors before the digital age where a piece of analog signalpath art. Its mostly rotating a singular ir sensor in 45degree and then mapping the inputs rotation compensated to the control surfaces. Simple at core but cant tell the difference between a jet exhaust, the sun, or a flare.

Modern version are boring is a High resolution ir cam and some blackmagic AI picking targets apart from flares.

source for the information in the title: i made it up, or did i?