>possibly permanent hearing loss — to anyone within 100 ft.
This is so scary to me. We all ride in cars or busses with tires and the pressure and power of even an average tire is incredible. I'm a little surprised the tweel concept never took off or other alternatives. Tires are dangerous and fragile and if possible would be great to replace.
While this is true, the Space Shuttle tires held three times the pressure of tires in a bus, so sound levels in the event of an explosion would be much higher.
Side comment - can I just observe how modern web has become an absolute hellscape of ads? The article was very interesting but literally in between every paragraph there's a giant ad, at least for me every time it's for the same thing - some random garbage from Temu. When the site opened I had three full-screen ads that I had to dismiss to read the article, and two more popped up as I was scrolling down. It's just.......too much.
Mobile chrome. Not sure if there is even an option for an adblocker here. I used to just have a PIA VPN always enabled with the built in ad killer, that worked well system wide but it kept tripping up my bank apps so I stopped using it.
NextDNS is an ok option - there’s semi decent ad lists, and I rarely go over the free 300k requests per month tier on mobile.
You can also set it to ignore wifi networks if you’ve got PiHole or whatever at home.
Not for everyone I guess, but I haven’t perused the privacy policy in great detail.
I have an adblock browser installed. Google defies any attempt to make it the default but it shows up in the options on the Chrome browser. When a site is too obnoxious I reopen it in the adblock browser for some relief.
It's awful. I don't know what the threshold was for me, but after I saw enough comments like yours with replies to "just use Pi-hole," I finally gave it a shot.
I'm happy to report that it is indeed possible to enjoy the web again, even noxious sites like this--you can finally walk down the street now that the sea of garbage is gone.
I consume hn mostly on mobile. Websites like TFA are almost impossible to peruse. I made it about half way through, looking for a picture of the damn thing before I gave up and came here looking for a link to an alternative article.
Even on my iPhone (who’d test against that rare platform?) I got repeated strange delays and redraws. Granted, it’s an XR which is hardly the latest model, but… your page is unusable.
God that second page. Some crazy tiling background that serves pretty much as a militarily camouflage pattern and hides that there is even a popup on top that you need to close or none of the links work
Recommend checking it in an incognito window to add to one's shitty UX collection
Completely offtopic, but how the hell do you think to earn money with these amount of ads. If will turn people away instantly. Cant believe these sites have a strong retention. Also which adnetworks are willing to accept so many ads simultaneously.
I bought a 1/16 King Tiger in 2013, intending to gut it and put a small Linux computer in it. Had some progress (took a while to understand the motor controllers were really bad i2c, couldn't read values out, only write), but ultimately didn't get far.
Alas I never turned it into a mobile webcam, which would have been amsuing during covid - a lone computer-tank wandering the office.
I'm imagining it with a little speaker that plays a theme song which pauses whenever it stops moving, one tuned to the correct mix of triumphal amusing attention seeking [0] versus annoying a human into disabling it.
Just remember to stop before making it able to recharge/replace its own batteries. For safety reasons.
I never understood why omni/mecanum wheels hadn't replaced every wheels on everything ever. It's so cool, functional, and cool. Apparently it's something every real roboticists know from having handled it, that they don't work on slopes. So it stays on my bucket list too.
Lol. I want to have a reason to buy that. It's obviously been built to try to cover a lot of use cases, being capable of returning to charger remotely, working as a low-end camera plaform for temporary surveillance / notifications of movement, mic/speaker etc
> However it was, for the time and size, quite a faithful rendition of a Tiger II. Its lower hull was made of metal, as was its suspension swing arms and some of the running gear.
A few years ago, I had a work assignment that had me with full pit access to the Indy 500. I can't remember which tire manufacture had the deal, Firestone maybe??, but all cars ran on the same manufacture's tire. They were extremely friendly with sharing information, and it was with a bit of pride, but they told me that there hasn't been a wreck due to tire failures in a really long time. The tires have become that good. After every tire change, the pit crews take readings from the tires, and set them aside to be examined later.
Unfortunately for NASA, I think this really long time was after the designs of the shuttles. But you gotta think that some racing slicks on the shuttle would have been pure awesomeness
Take it from someone who grew up among gun-happy USA-ians and stupidly fooled around with guns in their youth: Don't shoot tires. Not even an old economy tire left from the target car someone dumped in the abandoned gravel pit. Eventually you may hear a zip going the other way, and it might break your buddy's car window behind you and he'd be super mad and want you to pay for it. [0]
All rounds that don't embed will hit something downrange, for somewhat arbitrary values of "downrange" expressed in terms of angle and retained energy. A core principle of firearm safety is that you only get to pick a round's first target, the round picks the rest. And that's why airports and space centers are generally considered by experts to serve poorly as firing ranges.
[0] it's some kind of miracle that we survived to adulthood
I think because they wanted to let the air out gradually so they could inspect the tire afterwards, they weren't interested in tearing a big hole in it from a high velocity projectile. They even started with a hollow drill bit, but decided that wasn't needed.
They used the camera on the tank to pre-inspect the tire before deflating it, which would have given them close ups and angles of view that wouldn't be possible with just a distant telephoto lens.
And for only $3000, it was probably much cheaper to build this than to put in place all the range safety procedures they would have needed to shoot it.
A gun is not a bomb. It is a reasonably precise tool. If the point is to puncture a wheel, and there is one guy at NASA who isn't bloody blind, I really don't see how this becomes less safe from the tire exploding anyway.
I'm sure that there exists a real reason, but I choose to believe that it's because NASA is made of engineers, and engineers are by nature not practical people. They want to design a solution, not find a solution.
If they'd asked the technicians then they would've landed on Steve with his target rifle, or just a plate with a few spikes in it to drive the wheel over. Y'know, simple, straightforward, and absolutely no drawings required.
NIH doesn't describe this. They bought a model tank from a hobby shop and strapped a drill to it. For an organization plagued by accusations of excessive costs, this is downright cheap. NIH would involve a purpose-built rover to the tune of millions of dollars.
The point isn't to puncture the wheel, it's to measure the exact failure modes. They know if they puncture the wheel, it will burst.
A drill, for example, tells you the characteristics of exactly when and how it will lose structural integrity given a partial puncture of a given diameter and depth.
There's the chance of a ricochet, possibly into the body of the shuttle or bystander. Or they miss, hitting whatever was on the far side of the shuttle. I think it would also be not as controlled a release of air as they'd want - the drill bit shown is much smaller than a rifle bullet. And a bullet would add it's own energy to the mix.
Oh.. somehow I missed that the tire didn't explode with the needle. I was thinking, if the tires are exploding anyway, is a bullet much worse? But that makes sense.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/cv-990-landing-systems-re...
Way more readable.