Iron Lynx

Of course there’s an xkcd for everything!

A decakilogram would be 10 kg though. But fuck, that’s quite an unwieldy word.

You’re in a community dedicated to science memes. That is a total compliment.

With the previous ELI12 under control, let’s ELI>12 overhead line catenary a little more. For instance, why do you need tension in the first place?

Fact of the matter is that using a rigid conductor is problematic with high voltage AC (skin effect and such), plus it’s more visually intrusive than wires. Meanwhile, a wire will sag, regardless of how much tension you can practically apply. So you need a few devices to help keep the wire at height.

For one, the wire is supported every few dozen metres. Secondly, there’s a second wire strung above the first one. And while both wires are pulled taut, there are dropper wires between the upper and lower wires, which vary in length. Longer near the poles, while at the shortest near the middle between two poles, which creates a structure similar to a suspension bridge to keep the contact wire within a tight margin of vertical space.

In case people don’t want to click a link, let me explain it here:

If you want to use overhead line electrification, you need to suspend a wire over the rails. In theory, you could simply hang up a wire, but whichever amount of tension you choose, if it’s warmer outside, the wire will droop, potentially causing damage, while if it’s colder outside, the wire will pull taut and may snap. So you want a system to account for external temperature.

Instead of picking a tension at a standard installation temperature, you pick an amount of desired tension and use weights to pull it taut. Now, if the wire heats up and extends, the weights drop, and if the wire cools down and contracts, the weights are pulled up.

And to keep the amount of weight you need to add under control, you use a series of pulleys to control the tension in the wire.

In NL, the mainline system looks a lot simpler: They have only one wheel, but that’s two pulleys: a larger one and a smaller one. The larger one holds the weight, while the smaller one holds the wires.

(do it again now!)
Hard like heroic, more than you can handle

Also, fair. Railguns are a Cryo science thing.

And try non-explosive Uranium shells and a few gun speed upgrades. You need to overcome the healing with DpS, and the worms are weaker against kinetic shells than explosive ones.

Add some poison capsules and you can deal with at least small worms fine.

Gonna find out later myself if and/or how well mass Teslas work against worms. First build a factory on Fulgora that can get me to space, then research something with EM science, then unlock Purple and Piss Yellow science (yes, I’m trying for that super rare achievement), then work on the other fun gadgets and upgrades, before finally flying off to Vulcanus.

Railguns are better for big worms and only really necessary when/if you’re gonna push Vulcanus to megabase levels.

I heard one tip where, if you want to throw a FUCKTON of materials at worms, build a 4×4 square of nuclear reactors, let them heat up to 1000, then aggro the worm to try to chomp down on the reactors, causing it to nuke itself.

Advantage: available with only up to chemical science

Disadvantage: you’ll have to build four nuclear reactors, just to blow them up

Try taking rail guns to deal with the worms. Apparently even the handheld one easily does enough damage to casually oneshot mediums. 10k base physical damage and the shot keeps going and hitting things until it reaches end of range.

ETA: if you shoot roughly in line with the worm, you’ll easily get multiple segments. Each one takes the full shot of damage before resistances are applied, so the worm takes a ton of damage in a single shot, even with its resistance.

There are only two things or people that I don’t tolerate:

People intolerant of others’ ways of life…

And the Dutch.

…

Wait, I am Dutch 😨

You could say he murdered it.

Take any tech bro take on transit, and if you try to perfect it, you’ll almost always end up with a train.

… it’s very hard experimenting when you’ve no idea of potency or dosages.

This.

Fun thing I bumped into a few weeks ago: the guy who’s credited with inventing LSD tried a bit to see how it worked and how it felt. But he had no idea just how ridiculously potent LSD is. I forgot the exact numbers, but I do recall the ballpark. So he had a Fermi-estimated 100 μg while he only needed like 10 μg for a good time, so not only did he have the first known LSD trip, he had the first known bad trip.

After reading this, for some reason, the phrase “cryogenic hellfire” lives rent-free in my brain.

I’m thinking There Is No Planet B by King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard

Half year day, half year night only really holds on the poles I guess. And it goes paired with a long twilight in between.

Sorry mate, Tom couldn’t make it, so here we have Bill.

Weather update: it’s raining rocks from outer space

Relevant xkcd about these xkcd’s:

If we’re going to assume the copyright of the body would rest with the first Homo Sapiens, that was tens of thousands of years ago, so even under Jamaican copyright (life of the author + 95 years), that’d be public domain.

Plagiarise away!

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