tal

I thought that the Hornet was an interceptor drone.

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Oh, no, my mistake. That's "Sting", not "Hornet".

The caption on Wikipedia: "Giant huntsman protecting her egg sac."

I was looking for small systems a while back, and the situation is surprisingly disappointing there. It should be technically possible to get portable and window heat/AC units (not split-mini, as one needs a duct for ventilation) that can maintain CO₂ and humidity levels. For putting a floor on humidity, one would need a water intake, and for doing energy-efficient ventilation, one would want a counterflow heat exchanger. As far as I can tell, small all-in-one systems like this just don't exist.

You can get ERV or HRV ventilators with flex duct attachments, which do the heat exchange bit. They don't cost that much, though given that it's basically two fans and a heat exchanger, I was still kinda surprised how expensive they are. I mean, an air conditioner is a lot more complicated. I suppose that there just isn't enough demand to produce the kind of sales volume required.

looks for an example

https://www.amazon.com/Aprilaire-V22BEC-Recovery-Ventilator-Easy-Install/dp/B0CXQ8RPTR

You could drive one of those off an indoors CO₂ sensor and that'd give energy-efficient ventilation with CO₂ control.

Thanks.

@Vergissmeinnicht@lemmy.ca, just look at what you've done.

Yeah, I had a year of school in a very elderly school building with limited ventilation. When it was raining and all the windows were shut, I remember it being really hard to stay awake and focused. Didn't learn until many years later to recognize that and that those are the symptoms of excessively high carbon dioxide levels (at the time, I thought maybe it was "low oxygen", that everyone's breathing had used up the oxygen, since I knew that fresh air would wake me up).

I've been in some office buildings with poor ventilation that do the same thing, though not as severely as that school.

IIRC, lime or something like that can be used as a carbon scrubber, but it's not something that you'd want to do constantly and everywhere. Looked this up some time back.

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Soda lime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_lime

Soda lime is a mixture of sodium hydroxide (NaOH) and calcium oxide (CaO). It is used in granular form within recirculating breathing environments like general anesthesia and its breathing circuit, submarines, rebreathers, and hyperbaric chambers and underwater habitats. Its purpose is to eliminate carbon dioxide (CO2) from breathing gases, preventing carbon dioxide retention and, eventually, carbon dioxide poisoning.[1][2]

Probably, if you want to regulate CO₂ levels in HVAC systems, best to ventilate to the outside and then run the exchanged air through a counterflow heat exchanger to preserve indoor temperature as much as possible.

If you're playing a non-Esper mutant and get the physical mutation Regeneration to level 5 prior to Golgotha, you can more-or-less ignore disease.

https://wiki.cavesofqud.com/wiki/Regeneration

I normally go for Regeneration just because (a) it's so much of a pain in the butt to deal with fungal infections, and just at level 1, the mutation makes it mathematically extremely unlikely for incubation to complete and (b) gamma moths can inflict mutating and at level 5 or above, Regeneration has a reasonable chance of curing it before it completes incubation. Level 9 and it becomes very unlikely, though that's a lot of points to spend.

Level 5 Regeneration has a 2% chance of curing a major debuff per turn. Mutating has a short incubation period, 100 turns. So your chance of incubation succeeding at level 5 is 0.98¹⁰⁰, or about 13.3%.

At Level 9, it has a 4% chance per turn. So the chance of completion of incubation of mutating goes down to ~1.7%. And there's a small chance that mutating will have a beneficial effect even if it completes.

There are a few other ways of dealing with mutating, like becoming friendly with the insects faction to keep gamma moths onside or building a character that can stay out-of-phase, and I imagine a character with a high DV might also work.

rarest and most expensive one

Wine isn't the rarest and most expensive liquid. It is more expensive than water, four times by volume. You can easily get it at the Six Day Stilt.

Cloning draught is the most expensive liquid, 1250 times the value of water by volume. Once you have one dram of it and a gyrocopter backpack (which can contain 128 drams of it), a late game strategy

tedious though effective

is to farm metamorphic polygel. Various merchants, especially Tillifergaewicz at Yd Freehold, have a (small) chance to stock polygel. Polygel can be used to duplicate any item in the game. Cloning draught can duplicate any character in the game, including Tillifergaewicz, effectively increasing the chance of polygel being available when you visit Yd Freehold after a restock. Once you have a metamorphic polygel, you can duplicate a container and all of the liquid it contains, such as a gyrocopter backpack and all of the liquid in it. If you have two containers partially full of liquid, you can pour all of one container into another (well, except for neutron flux, which requires special handling). It takes 7 doublings to turn one dram of cloning draught into 128, enough to completely fill a gyrocopter backpack.

Once a polygel farm is up, you have effectively infinite money, an infinite supply of any item that you can obtain one of in the game, and an infinite supply of any character in the game.

Parking drive heads is indeed the term for the drive moving them off the platter, which it does when cleanly powered down to protect the platter.

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Apparently, though I wasn't aware of this until now, some DOS hard drives required manual parking by the user.

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11545/on-dos-computers-what-would-the-park-command-do

Hard drives have read/write heads which fly above the spinning disks when the drive is powered. When power is removed, the heads no longer fly... For a long time now, the arms which hold the heads have been designed to “auto-park” the heads away from the disks’ surface, or over a safe “landing zone”, when they lose power¹, but early (up to the mid 80s) hard drives didn’t have this feature, so their heads would land on the disk surface, which could sometimes damage the surface.

So early PCs had a PARK command which would park the heads away from the disk surface. Typically, this would attempt to move the heads past the last “official” cylinder (over an “engineering cylinder” on MFM and RLL drives), or, starting with ATs, use the landing zone specified in the BIOS drive parameter table (accessed using the vectors stored at interrupts 0x41 and 0x46). You can see one such implementation in Roedy Green’s PARK which comes with source code, or in Jim Leonard’s disassembly of SpinRite’s PARK.

On PCs with auto-parking heads, it was safe to wait for the DOS command prompt, and the lights to switch off: COMMAND.COM ensures that I/O is finished before it displays the command prompt (and in-memory disk caches are supposed to honour that too).

(In fact, this feature is what allows Roedy Green’s PARK to work too: you’d wait for the command prompt, so there’s no outstanding I/O, then run PARK, which would be loaded from disk, then run with no I/O apart from parking the heads, then either loop forever or return to the command prompt which would normally not result in any I/O either, so the heads would remain safely parked. SpinRite’s PARK waits for the user to press a key, so the user can power the computer off without pressing a key and thus ensure there’s no untoward I/O.)

New PCs in 1994 wouldn’t need this, but it was common for schools to have very old computers, and an early PC requiring PARK wouldn’t be unheard of. Old habits die hard too, so it’s possible that the advice to run PARK was kept alive long after it stopped being relevant, but that would have involved copying the PARK command since it was system-specific and not part of DOS.

If I remember correctly, IDE drives never needed PARK, so you’d only find it on PCs equipped with pre-IDE drives (commonly referred to as MFM or RLL drives).

You could use centrifuges, but there are larger fundamental issues, like the cost of moving the mass of a refinery and inputs into space and deorbiting the outputs. The vulnerability of space launch infrastructure itself. Probably heat dissipation, though I'm not gonna go look up specifics.

Just the time to develop, manufacture and deploy something like that compared to the kind of timeline permitted by war.

I mean, I assume that Russian dude isn't trying to do a deep analysis here, just throw out encouraging outside-the-box ideas, but even with that for context, "space" is pretty bonkers.

EDIT: Oh, saw the bit about shooting things down before they take off. Just gallows humor.

It's probably not very cost effective compared to better-suited alternatives, but if they don't have those alternatives, it's probably better than letting the thing hit its target.

For this one, I assume it's because she just saw her check engine light.

Huh. She says that she's driving a diesel car. What I've read so far suggested that, unlike with gasoline, there was still enough diesel available for domestic use. Capacity had been reduced, but it was still a matter of not being able to export as much.