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Tag Archive for 'Laser'

What has happened since the 8th of August - Part 1

Published
by
Kill coDer
on August 25, 2008
in General
. 0 Comments

I find it much easier to make big posts like this whenever stuff happens instead of writing lots of little ones…

 

Toribash

I got Toribash a few days ago, it is basically a game where you bash the crap out of an opponent.

It’s not a button smasher sort of thing though, you have control over about 20 ‘muscles’ which you can either relax, hold, contract, extend and in some cases turn left, turn right, raise and lower.

What the Toribash wiki says:

Toribash is a ragdoll-physics, turn-based fighting game created by Hampus Söderström (AKA Hampa), a Swedish software developer. Toribash was a “Best Game Idea” finalist at the 2006 Swedish Game Awards.

The basic aim of the game is to fight the opponent, scoring points for damage. Some limbs break easier then others, others give more points when hit. To get more points, each joint can be relaxed, contracted, extended or held. This makes the gameplay very open-ended as there are no set moves, although many people will copy a move which seems to work well.

Toribash is a shareware game. Simply go to [Toribash.com] to download it. Unlike Direct X, Open GL lets all formats of computers download and play the game including Linux and Mac.

When you do become a registered player it is not just for a month or yearly, it is for life. Many new features await you. You can become an official member of the Toribash forum. [[1]] A widely expanding forum that has been around ever since the administrator Veb, created it. Ever since that occurred, new opportunities awaited for the Toribash game as a whole. Two pieces are better than one.

Toribash has turned into a game that keeps getting better and better as time goes on; a developing experience. It makes the game stay refreshing every time you play it. From new updates, to new capabilites such as joint color, blood color, torso color etc., it all boils down to Toribash being one of the most improved games anyone has ever seen.

Here is a video of some of the stuff you can do:

It can also be artsy:

image

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Crysis

I got Crysis as well and it isn’t really that good. I made a custom config so I could play it with dx10 graphics on my dx9 system and sure it looked stunning but the campaign is pretty crap.

That said the sandbox is pretty awesome. I love making a hundred thousand barrels and just dropping a tornado into it all. I also love tearing down houses with my fists and picking up the enemy and using them to bring down a tank. I also like shooting a guy in the face in pitch darkness, having his friends come over, shine their gun mounted lasers at me, not notice because of my cloak, then me coming up behind them with a rock and crushing their bodies to mush.

Here are some pictures, and by the way, this is not the quality that I normally play on, I can’t stand anything less than 60 fps to I have to turn off DOF and motion blur, and a few other things…

That concludes part 1 of What has happened since the 8th of August.

The Laser Elevator

Published
by
Kill coDer
on April 24, 2008
in General
. 0 Comments

Solar sails suck.

In a 2002 paper, Laser Elevator: Momentum Transfer Using an Optical Resonator (available at your local school/library, possibly electronically — J. of Spacecraft and Rockets 2002), Thomas R. Meyer et. al. talk about a neat way to get a lot more speed out of light reflection than with a regular solar sail. The basic physics are pretty simple, and it’s a fun subject to think about.

When a photon hits a solar sail, it gives the sail momentum. If the photon has momentum P and bounces off a stationary sail, it looks like this:

Think of where the energy is in this system. Before it hits, the photon has energy E. After it bounces, the photon still has roughly energy E. But the sail’s moving, so where did it get its kinetic energy? (Remember, energy — unlike momentum — has no direction.)

The answer lies in the word “roughly”. The photon loses a tiny fraction of its energy to Doppler shifting when it’s reflected, but only a tiny fraction. It is this tiny fraction that goes into pushing the sail. This is a phenomenally small amount of energy — far less than a percent of what the photon has. That is, not much of the photon’s energy is being used for motion here.

This is why solar sails are so slow. It’s not that light doesn’t have that much energy, it’s that it has so little momentum. If you set a squirrel on a solar sail and shone a laser on the underside, do you know how much power would be required to lift the squirrel? About 1.21 gigawatts.

This is awful. If we were lifting the squirrel with a motor, railgun, or electric catapult, with 1.21 gigawatts we could send it screaming upward at ridiculous speeds.

This is where Meyer and friends come in. They’ve point out a novel way to extract momentum from the photon: bounce it back and forth between the sail and a large mirror (on a planet or moon, perhaps).

With each bounce, the photon loses a little more energy and adds another 2P to the sail’s momentum. The photon can keep this up for thousands of bounces — in their paper, Meyer et. al. found that with reasonable assumptions about available materials and a lot of precision, you could extract 1,000 times the momentum from a photon before diffraction and Dopper shifts killed you. This means you only need 1/1,000th the energy to levitate the squirrel — a mere megawatt.

This isn’t too practical for interstellar travel. It requires something to push off from, and probably couldn’t get you up to the necessary speeds. It may, they suggest, be useful for getting stuff to Pluto and back, since (somewhat like a space elevator) it lets you generate the power any old way you want (a ground nuclear station, solar, etc). But more importantly, it’s kind of neat — it helped me realize some things about photon momentum that I hadn’t quite gotten before. It’s like Feynman says, physics is like sex — it may give practical results, but that’s not why we do it.

Now we’ll let things get sillier. I spent a while trying to brainstorm how to use this with a solar sail (that is, using the sun). I imagined mirrors catching the sun’s light and letting it resonate with a sail.

But you really need lasers for this — regular light spreads out too fast. Maybe a set of lasing cavities orbiting the sun …

Supplemented by a Dyson sphere …

And since by this point we’ll probably have found aliens …

Why settle for interstellar communication when you can have interstellar war? And we could modulate the beam to carry a message — in this case, “FUCK YOU GUYS!”