McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
an engineering problem which I need to solve for a story
Snowleopard:
If it's coming out of China I wouldn't be surprised.
The Chinese almost destroyed the jade carving industry in their country.
All the jade carvers were sent out to do 'useful' things like farm.
It's only been in the past 10 or 20 years that they realized their mistake and began to train up
a new generation of jade carvers. A LOT of it - is Communist propaganda stuff (what a waste of good jade)
but there are some very fine artists doing it. So, that they'd found or got a way to make lesser quality jade
a viable thing would not surprise me at all.
Quantus:
Not exactly what you are talking about, but close enough to be interesting: A LunarX startup to send your DNA to the moon.
http://www.parabolicarc.com/2012/07/06/gxlp-update-omega-envoy-launches-kickstarter-campaign/
EDIT: Also a truly crazy idea about an theoretically possible crystal based computer that would be symetrical in 4 dimensions, allowing it to survive even the heat death of the universe...
Figging Mint:
Err... I don't understand. Why can't you use a Gerald Bull-type supergun? NOT nuclear?
And why can't you use the original bullet as a deceleration-sabot for records coded onto a kinetic penetrator?
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: (FM) on July 09, 2012, 11:19:42 PM ---Err... I don't understand. Why can't you use a Gerald Bull-type supergun? NOT nuclear?
--- End quote ---
They don't really scale well to a hundred-thousand-tonne shell by my back of the envelope calculations. (Also, the folks making this have a certain weakness for the grandiose.)
--- Quote ---And why can't you use the original bullet as a deceleration-sabot for records coded onto a kinetic penetrator?
--- End quote ---
I'm not seeing a way of doing that that does not again fall foul of too many people knowing about it.
Basically, the existence of the hidden object has to not be deducible from the shell's design, by someone who has access to most of the records and many of the people involved, or from examination of the impact site.
lt_murgen:
Here is my suggestion, and it came out of the idea of solving your guidance problem as well:
The designers of the “bullet” realized they needed to be able to control the center of mass in-flight. To do that , they designed a simple guidance mechanism. It is a pressurized, fluid filled series of tubes criss-crossing through an open sphere. Syspended in the fluid are small ball bearings. A gyroscope/magnet system can make the ball baerings move/clump about the device, altering the center of mass enough to make small adjustments.
The spy could have encoded the data onto a series of ball bearings. The system would be big enough that the bearings could be in multiple sets of the data. Thus if one or more was damaged, the possibility of redundency still maintains data integrity. All the spy would have to do is swap out their ball bearings for the ones in the guidance package sometime before launch.
Add in somewhere that the bearings and fluid would be put together just before launch, and put into the system just before launch, so as to avoid contamination.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version