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Bimfred

@ Bimfred @lemmy.world

Posts
1
Comments
86
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • IO Interactive have fixed the crazy PC specifications for 007 First Light

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  • Fidelity creep is also a thing. Unless you're going for a deliberately retro or stylized look, you need high detail assets and lots of them on screen at once. Otherwise you'll never hear the end of "gaem bad cuz PS2 grafix lol."

    Environment textures are huge. Main character textures are huge. And you're not loading just one file, you're loading multiple files per model. The diffuse map, the specular map, the reflection map, the normal map, the subsurface scattering map for any organic models. And gods help you if your character model has interchangeable parts, because you'll be loading the whole set of textures for every element of those as well. These things add up very quickly.

    And you still need space in the RAM for your code and physics and worldsim calculations, animations, everything going on under the hood. So I dunno, 16 doesn't sound outlandish these days.

  • IO Interactive have fixed the crazy PC specifications for 007 First Light

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  • The OS takes its chunk of RAM. And I'd imagine most people don't close all unnecessary background processes when launching a game. So they'll have Steam and Epic and Discord and the management software for their RGB (multiple, if the individual components are mismatched) and their browser with like 30 tabs open in the background. Under these circumstances, it's not outside the realm of possibility that 8GB of RAM is gone even before the game is launched.

  • The Witcher 3 could receive a major DLC in May 2026

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  • Let people enjoy things and set your games difficulty setting to where you have the most fun, now sit down.

    So install the mod and set your difficulty where you like it, while the rest of us don't need to deal with any of that git gud shit.

    I have nothing against mods like that existing. I'm very much against having an official DLC that enforces it as the new default, which was the implication of your first post.

  • The Witcher 3 could receive a major DLC in May 2026

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  • Not everything needs to be a soulslike.

  • Starlink in the crosshairs: How Russia could attack Elon Musk's conquering of space

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  • No. Just pointing out that a collision in LEO physically cannot create a situation where we're locked in on Earth for more than a decade or two. The orbits will still have a perigee in LEO. They will still decay. The debris will still burn up eventually. Kessler syndrome is impossible in LEO. And in higher, larger volume orbits, it's overblown, because we don't even have enough mass there to create a notable debris field to lock ourselves in with.

    A Kessler cascade is one of those things that people read about and it sounds really scary and plausible and happening, like, in a week cause Starlink exists. And that's where the thought process stops and the Chicken Little everyone has in their brain takes over.

  • Starlink in the crosshairs: How Russia could attack Elon Musk's conquering of space

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  • But it won't be a uniformly higher orbit, because there's only one event where energy was added to the fragments. The perigee will still be in LEO and anything that'd raise the apogee to a point where the new orbit would be stable for a decade would require so much energy that it'd vaporize the satellite on impact.

  • 'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

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  • What about the Covid period? Kinda hard to have a school shooting when kids aren't going to school, I'd imagine.

  • Don't crucify me

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  • My local PC hardware store offers assembly and setup services for ~20€. Includes installing and updating the OS and drivers, as well as stress testing to verify that the components perform as expected. More places should offer that option, really. Especially if they also sell pre-built PCs that are assembled in-house.

  • What if I told you that refusing to trade your life time for money is a good and respectable choice

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  • "Respect" is commonly used in two wildly different ways. To some, it means being treated as an authority. To others, it means being treated as a person (aka common fucking courtesy). Then there's the absolute shitstains who say "If you won't respect me, then I won't respect you," and what they mean is "If you won't treat me as an authority, I won't treat you as a person."

    Being treated as a person is given. Being treated as an authority is earned. And if you don't do anything to prove you're capable of being an authority, you don't deserve to be treated as such.

  • Russia accidentally destroys its only way of sending astronauts to space

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  • Russian crew launches are done for an indefinite period. It's entirely possible that Baikonur is just out of commission. If the pad is even capable of launching in its current condition, doing so would likely cause even more damage. So while the pad itself isn't exactly destroyed, its capability for crewed launches certainly is. Until repairs are made.

  • The existence of billionaires is a policy failure

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  • That they also won't use on R&D. Or healthcare. Or housing. Or feeding people. Those things aren't shit for a lack of resources to fund them, they're shit for a lack of interest in funding them. That's not a problem you can fix with more money.

  • The existence of billionaires is a policy failure

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  • Governments HAVE the resources. They CHOOSE to not spend it on R&D.

  • An Italian Company Builds the First Known Propellantless Space-Propulsion System

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  • So what's the operating principle? An actually working reactionless drive is a bloody bold claim to make and there's going to be a lot of eyes on this one.

    EDIT: It's oscillating magnets.

  • How close are we to human hibernation? Takes roughly 3 years to get to mars and thought more planets would need us to stay in a state of hibernation kind of like a pod or something?

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  • Three years? A low energy transfer orbit gets you to Mars in less than a year. In the past, theoretical crewed missions were planned with an 8-9 month travel time. With enough propellant, could get that down to just over three months. And that's with chemical rockets, not some hypothetical nuclear or torch drive.

  • ESA will pay an Italian company nearly $50 million to design a mini-Starship

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  • That would make things worse, because now you're carrying the extra mass of fuel, tanks, plumbing and engines for the descent. Can't run a rocket engine on two different types of fuel and oxidizer.

    The rocket equation is a harsh mistress. As long as you're limited to chemical rockets, you're not gonna have enough spare propellant for a powered descent. The energy density just isn't there. We don't do direct burns to pretty much anywhere farther than Mars and a Mars Hohmann transfer (the most fuel-efficient trajectory) burn takes ~3.6km/s. Less than half of LEO velocity.

  • ESA will pay an Italian company nearly $50 million to design a mini-Starship

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  • Tanking up a satellite to extend its lifetime is quite a different beast from tanking up a whole-ass second stage for a powered descent. You're looking at hundreds of tons of cryogenic liquid fuel and an enormous vehicle. For context, a Starship carrying no cargo has about 8km/s of delta-V.1 That's with 1500 tons of LOX and liquid methane. That's barely enough to lose the orbital velocity. Assuming that prop load doesn't include the header tanks (but it does), a fully tanked up Starship could maybe pull off a powered descent and landing from LEO. And that thing is huuuuge.

    1: I ran the numbers for a block 2 Starship and came out with 11km/s of delta-V. That sounds like too much, so I'm going to assume I got the math wrong and go with the latest "official" numbers I could find.

  • ESA will pay an Italian company nearly $50 million to design a mini-Starship

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  • I don't see a way to make powered descent work while we're still bringing fuel from dirtside. There's just no point, cause we can't lift enough fuel to bring down one vehicle, let alone two (the tanker and whatever it's loading up). A second stage with more than 7.8km/s of delta-V is going to be absolutely massive, as long as we're using chemical rockets. Electric engines don't work for a powered descent, they don't have enough thrust.

  • ESA will pay an Italian company nearly $50 million to design a mini-Starship

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  • A capsule design will likely never be fully reusable, since it doesn't allow you to shield the second stage engine(s), propellant tanks and anything else that usually goes in the trunk section. For a fully reusable design, you need to go with either a spaceplane or whatever it is that we're calling the Starship's cylinder-with-control-surfaces design.

    EDIT: Looked into Stoke's design a little more. It's a fascinating idea and I will be looking forward to test launches!

    There's one more option - propulsive re-entry. You point your big engines retrograde and burn until your velocity is effectively zero, then descend on a <1g burn. Won't need heat shields if you don't have to endure re-entry heat. But this ain't happening until we develop ludicrously more efficient high thrust engines and orbital fuel production.

  • ESA will pay an Italian company nearly $50 million to design a mini-Starship

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  • Preface: I'm no rocket surgeon.

    Wish they weren't scribbling off SpaceX's design so hard. It's entirely possible that examining the conditions and dynamics of re-entry would lead to a very Starship-like design in the end, but there's merit in exploring the possibilities. Especially since this is supposed to be a smaller vehicle, so it won't be experiencing the same exact conditions as Starship at any stage of flight. Fingers crossed that it really is just a render for publicity and the actual design will be informed by physics, not FOMO.

    But it certainly puts a smile on my face to see ESA gradually pulling its head out of its ass and realizing that reusability isn't a fad.

  • Linux Gaming @lemmy.world
    Bimfred @lemmy.world

    Bazzite & wireless peripherals