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    1. TV Tuesdays Free Talk

      Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here. Please just try to provide fair warning of...

      Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

      Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

      9 votes
    2. Ask Tildes: Design a spacecraft! You've been offered to submit a space exploration misson, with a cost cap of $1 billion. What is your proposal?

      You've been asked to submit a proposal for a space exploration mission of your own desire, to the New Frontiers spaceflight program. These missions have a cost cap of approximately $700 million to...

      You've been asked to submit a proposal for a space exploration mission of your own desire, to the New Frontiers spaceflight program. These missions have a cost cap of approximately $700 million to $1 billion, and have famously produced the following spacecraft:

      • New Horizons, a flyby probe to Pluto.
      • Juno, a polar orbiter of Jupiter.
      • OSIRIS-REx, a sample return mission to a rocky asteroid.
      • Dragonfly, a drone lander to Saturn's moon Titan.

      These are medium-sized missions in both scope, and cost. You can't build the Mars 2020 Rover, or the James Webb Space Telescope. What do you send, and where? Things to consider:

      Technology Readiness Level

      Administrators are less likely to choose your mission if you choose to integrate risky or untested flight hardware, or novel concepts into the mission design. You're more likely to get selected with more conventional hardware.

      Power Source

      Your best bet is probably solar panels, maybe something commercial off the shelf like NG's Ultraflex panels? The downside is that these are only effective up to about Jupiter's orbit, and generate power according to the inverse square law. How much do these cost and weigh? How much energy do you generate?

      If you go further out into the solar system than that, you'll need a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG). There aren't many of those around, in fact, after Mars 2020 has taken its RTG, there's two left. What makes your mission deserving of an RTG? Is there enough power in the MMRTG to power your mission?

      Propulsion

      Does your mission need in-flight propulsion? Either for orbit insertion, landing, or maybe a long coast with Ion thrusters like Dawn? If the latter, you can get some pretty good Xenon-powered thrusters, like NEXT, which gives you 236mN of force from 7kW of input power (this rules out an RTG as your power source).

      Don't need long-term burn capability? Maybe a COTS bipropellant engine like LEROS is your thing. Watch your weight though, bipropellants aren't efficient! Often more than half the mass of large spacecraft can be dedicated to just propulsion alone.

      Instruments

      Go crazy. What are you looking to research? Do you need a long range camera, a wide angle camera, something outside of the visible spectrum, a spectrometer, ground-penetrating radar? Do you have a mass-budget in mind?

      Launch Vehicle

      Every dollar you save on your launch vehicle, you get to add to your mission profile. Your best bet in terms of performance and cost is probably Falcon 9, which retails for $62-90 million, depending on the amount of assurance for success you need. Of course, if you can find a cheaper launch vehicle, feel free to pick it if it fits into your mission weight.

      Objectives

      What scientific questions do you want to answer? What are you interested in exploring the most?

      13 votes
    3. You can now ignore individual topics, which will stop showing them in listings for you

      It's been quiet from my end lately—I mentioned in a comment last week that I had been taking some time off, but now it's time to get things moving again. As I said in that comment, the next major...

      It's been quiet from my end lately—I mentioned in a comment last week that I had been taking some time off, but now it's time to get things moving again.

      As I said in that comment, the next major steps for Tildes are going to be bringing in more people, along with more (and more varied) content. To help with that, I'm going to be working on some structural and functionality changes to make it easier for people to see the types of content they want, as well as avoid content they're not interested in.

      So, I've just deployed the first piece of that: you can now ignore individual topics when you don't want to keep seeing them in your listings. Thanks yet again to repeated open-source contributor @what, who got this started a long time ago in a merge request that I was able to finish up and add a little more on top of.

      Currently, the only thing that ignoring topics does is hide them from your listings, but I'm still thinking about some of the details and possible other effects and wanted to ask for input first:

      • If you ignore a topic that you posted a comment in, should you no longer receive notifications about new replies to you in that topic? What about username mentions?
      • Should users be able to ignore their own topics?
      • Should ignored topics be hidden everywhere, or should there be exceptions? For example, if you do a search that matches ignored topics, should they show up in the results? If you're looking at the poster's user page, should ignored topics be shown?
      • Is there anything else that ignoring a topic should (or should not) affect?

      A listing of only topics you've ignored is also available through the sidebar on your user page as "Your ignored topics", in case you need to check on any of them or unignore one of them.

      One other piece of this is that there's now an "Actions" dropdown available on every topic in a listing, underneath the vote button. This dropdown allows you to bookmark or ignore topics without having to go into their comments page first. I'm not totally certain about this yet, and will probably make some more adjustments related to it. In particular, it's pretty far off to the right on a wide desktop monitor, so I might try some other options after seeing how it feels to use on the live site.

      Let me know if you have any feedback about these changes, or notice any issues. Hopefully there should be multiple more updates coming up over the next week or two.

      And as usual, I've given everyone 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.

      65 votes
    4. What are you doing this week?

      This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their week. If you have any plans, goals, accomplishments, or even failures, whether they be personal or work...

      This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their week.

      If you have any plans, goals, accomplishments, or even failures, whether they be personal or work related, I'd love to hear about them. This is a place for casual discussion about your week, past, present, and future.

      A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

      So, what (or how) are you doing this week?

      12 votes
    5. Any custom themes using Stylus?

      I switched to the light theme the other day. I'm typically all-in with dark themes for everything, but there was some convincing research. I started working on a light theme, but it's fairly...

      I switched to the light theme the other day. I'm typically all-in with dark themes for everything, but there was some convincing research.

      I started working on a light theme, but it's fairly basic.

      I was digging through the old thread and found a few gems, but I'm wondering what everybody has been up to since. Time for some show and tell!

      10 votes
    6. An active user count

      I would like a current active user Count for the whole site. I find them very useful for knowing when people are on I’m not a fan of group specific ones but one that said how many people where...

      I would like a current active user Count for the whole site. I find them very useful for knowing when people are on I’m not a fan of group specific ones but one that said how many people where currently on I would like

      19 votes
    7. Which movies had a major influence in your formative years?

      I can mention many movies that influenced me in major ways. Stand By Me made me realize the importance of friendship High Fidelity helped me understand romance is not entirely about passion. It's...

      I can mention many movies that influenced me in major ways.

      • Stand By Me made me realize the importance of friendship
      • High Fidelity helped me understand romance is not entirely about passion. It's also about respect, love, and care. There's value in something that's simply "good", and "good" is not something to brush off.
      • Goonies and Godfather showed that, when shit hits the fan, family is everything.
      • Manhattan taught me love is nothing without courage
      • A Bronx Tale taught me that our parent figures can be imperfect and even downright criminal, but this doesn't mean they don't love us.

      Ant the list goes on...

      18 votes
    8. What have you been listening to this week?

      What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as...

      What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

      Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

      You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

      http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

      Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

      10 votes
    9. Year of the planet, environmental activism, and us

      Hi! I'm Micycle_the_Bichael! I'm a pretty passionate local environmental activist. Short summary: I think climate change is bad, but even if climate change wasn't happening the way we interact...

      Hi! I'm Micycle_the_Bichael! I'm a pretty passionate local environmental activist. Short summary: I think climate change is bad, but even if climate change wasn't happening the way we interact with nature is still gross and leaves a lot to be desired (ex: over fishing, whaling, landfills). While there definitely needs to be governmental action on corporations on climate change, there are still changes that can be made in your daily life to help make the world a better place! Enter the year of the planet. This is a community group for making one small change a month to help the environment. Some may be things you're already doing, some may be new. For example: the January goal is to start using a reusable coffee cup when ordering coffee at a cafe since most paper coffee cups are lined with polyethylene and thus not recyclable. The biggest difference for me between this and many other (very great and valid) projects like it is that it heavily emphasizes building a sense of community.

      The group who organized this is The Good Empire, who describe themselves as:

      "Year of the Planet is an initiative of Good Empire. We’re makers of startups and projects for good.
      Inspired by and aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, we bring ideas to life that are good for the world. We help change the things that need to change.
      And most importantly, we’re a tribe. A global community of good people, united in purpose, to help create a better and more sustainable future for all.
      Good Empire is not a registered charity, but we partner with registered charities in everything we do.
      We will take no management fees from Year of the Planet, nor will any of the funds raised come through us. All donations will go directly to our charity partners."

      Some of those partners being Wildlife Emergecy Fund and the seabin project which is a project close to my heart along with the ocean cleanup project

      This post has been what feels like a really long rant on a couple of groups and causes that I'm very passionate about. I'll probably DM one of the other Tildes members who does scheduled posts and see about making a bi-weekly environmentalism thread to discuss what people are doing to make a positive change not only in the local environment, but in their community (a lot of good environmental initiatives also make your neighborhood/local community nicer and happier places :) ), struggles people are having, questions, products they have found, etc. and we'll see if it sticks or if it is just me shouting into the void.

      11 votes