tunetardis

joined 1 year ago
[–] tunetardis@lemmy.ca 1 points 9 months ago

Oh interesting, so there's a glimmer of hope at any rate. Thanks for the feedback! Maybe if there's a big steam sale…

[–] tunetardis@lemmy.ca 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

True. That could be deadly with a sim since the amount of detail grows like crazy as you build it up. Even the amount of RAM it would take to store all those polygons sounds insane!

[–] tunetardis@lemmy.ca 14 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Even the old game had a noticeable dip in performance by the time you were building airports and stuff, though it never reached deal-breaker levels for me. I suspect you're right that it's the modelling?

[–] tunetardis@lemmy.ca 19 points 9 months ago (10 children)

That's a shame. I played tons of the original game and must've got most of the DLC over the years, but while 2 looked awesome in demo clips, the system specs were outrageous. Above my pay grade lol!

I wonder where the performance bottleneck lies? Is it graphics or modelling the city? I know in the demos it looked almost photo-realistic, but tbh I don't need that. The new gameplay elements like better control over traffic at intersections were the interesting part to me.

[–] tunetardis@lemmy.ca 6 points 10 months ago

I treat self-checkout as a game with 2 goals:

  1. Make it through the process without getting any help.
  2. Do it as fast as a trained cashier.

In a good season, my batting average for #1 might be .300, which would not be bad were the game baseball. As far as #2 is concerned, I have never come close. It's like I throw 30 mph pitches. Things get real when I'm trying to look up bananas or something and the helper comes up behind me. "It's 4198. Here, let me do it." Thanks, I already lost #2 and you just made me lose #1…again.

[–] tunetardis@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago

Oh you're right, the Zhuque-2 apparently launched successfully in July, 2023. (There had been an earlier launch in '22 but it ran into trouble.)

[–] tunetardis@lemmy.ca 5 points 10 months ago

I am also fairly new to the game. I had an iMac from around 2010 that was starting to show its age. Newer macOS versions were glacial on it. I eventually realized they were meant to boot off SSDs, but my options in that regard weren't great. I would either have to take the whole thing apart to replace the internal drive or live with USB2 speeds on an external SSD. Then it dawned on me I could just put Ubuntu on there and call it a day. This worked great and bought me a few more years out of that machine.

More recently, we started buying threadripper workstations at the office for scientific modelling. These have since migrated into a server room where they are currently acting as a small compute cluster.

And most recently, I've been tinkering around a bit on my Steam Deck. It's a little walled-garden-ish but it let me put VSCode and a few tools on there so I'm playing around.

[–] tunetardis@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 months ago

Ok, so we're onto capacitors and fuel cells now. Here we go with my mental image of those.

On the pros side, capacitors can charge/discharge in an instant, have nearly perfect energy recovery (almost everything you put in comes back out), and have almost limitless charging cycles with no memory effects or any of that nonsense. On the cons side, even a supercapacitor can't match battery tech for energy storage density and they tend to be not so great for long-term electrical storage.

Fuel cells are sort of the opposite. Once you've sorted out the challenges in producing/storing/transporting hydrogen (these are all non-trivial but not necessarily deal-breakers either?), you're looking at essentially limitless storage duration since it's, well, a fuel. Like you can stockpile it for next year. The energy density is enviably high, though with pure hydrogen, you're doing better by weight than by volume. In any case though, it's looking pretty good compared to batteries.

But pulling the energy out of them in a timely manner is a major pain. You need either a chemical or thermal catalyst to speed it along for most applications. And the chemical of choice is platinum, which is not exactly abundant. If you wanted a fuel cell in every car, is there even enough on Earth for that? I'm not so sure.

Also, I have read impurities in the fuel can really mess up this type of fuel cell. The thermal type is purportedly more forgiving in this respect, though I picture thermal fuel cells as these hulking things that would work best as stationary power plants? Well, maybe they would be a good fit for large ships? It's hard to picture some giant container vessel plying the oceans on battery power, at any rate.

[–] tunetardis@lemmy.ca 4 points 10 months ago

Thanks for the clarification. ULA it is then.

But wow, that's so cool that you got to work on Vulcan! Must be a huge relief that it aced its inaugural launch given all the new tech in there. I hope you're out celebrating someplace. You've earned it! :)

[–] tunetardis@lemmy.ca 10 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Ok, I am interested in anyone with specific knowledge on this topic indicating whether the first order mental image I have of battery tech is correct?

The way I understand it is that the highest energy density batteries are your non-rechargeable lithium cells like watch batteries. Rechargeable lithium-ion cells have perhaps half the capacity due to the fact that they need to add measures that prevent these dendrites, as mentioned in the article, from forming. So the Holy Grail here is to develop a rechargeable technology that prevents the dendrite problem without sacrificing capacity so that you can get the best of both worlds? And that is what they are working on here with the solid state design. Am I close to the mark?

[–] tunetardis@lemmy.ca 10 points 10 months ago (4 children)

I've been reading up on this a bit. Apparently, the Vulcan Centaur is the ULA's new rocket which replaces Russian RD-180 engines with BE-4s they sourced from Blue Origin. Blue Origin themselves are working on their New Glenn rocket which will use these engines. It's interesting that the ULA (United Launch Alliance: Boeing and Lockheed's rocket company) got to try them out first.

It's also interesting that they are powered by methane. If I'm not mistaken, this is the first successful launch of a methane rocket? SpaceX's Starship also uses methane engines. Apparently, they have a number of advantages over the more traditional kerosene. For example, they don't leave any residue that can gunk up the works and affect reusability. I am not an expert on any of this, however, so feel free to correct me.

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