Because when the Apollo project was ongoing, they only built what they needed to build. Everything was a prototype basically and there were usually different versions of everything going around. Afterwards a lot of the stuff was re-used for later programs, often modified or taken apart for parts. As the budget shrank they needed to be creative. Take a look at the work CuriousMarc and his team is doing with repairing and restoring old Apollo Moon hardware, along with documentation and preservation.

Why can’t we simply build the Apollo lander today. Well a couple of reasons.

First of all, like I said it were prototypes, so you’d have to figure out what design to use. All of the documents back then were on paper and not all of it is digitized by a long shot. The amount of documents they produced back then was crazy. And a lot of it was lost over time unfortunately. Puzzling all of that together would be quite some task. Most folk from back then are since dead or at the very least retired. And I for one sometimes forget entire projects I worked on, so good luck getting small details out of those people.

Our idea of what is acceptable, a good idea and safe has changed since the Apollo times. A lot of the design back then included components that were very dangerous and toxic. Not only to be used, but also to manufacture, which we wouldn’t find acceptable these days. And things we’ve later learned were a bad thing to do. So the design would need to be modified to be safer, which would probably cascade into an entire new design.

We’ve lost so much of the support infrastructure the program relied on. It’s hard to understate how much this matters. This is a big thing when people say the moon program was fake. It wasn’t just one rocket, one lander, one crew, it was millions upon millions of pieces of infrastructure supporting the whole thing. From jigs to electronics, test equipment, custom tools, handling facilities etc. All with their own backstory, design requirements, documentation etc. A lot of this has been lost, especially when it was outsourced at the time. You’d have to reverse engineer and re-create a lot of that.

Time has moved on and so has technology. Whilst the Apollo program had some cutting edge stuff back then, these days it’s ridiculously outdated. It would be very hard to manufacture any of those components today. We’re talking about the first generation of integrated circuits, on very expensive ceramics. Using crazy analogue electronics, only understood by the best gurus at the time. Even mechanical computers were used, a lost artform last used in the 80s. You could start redesigning stuff to modern equivalents, but again that would probably snowball into just designing a whole new thing.

Recreating something from that long ago is simply not possible I’m afraid. And even if we could, it would probably make for a pretty shitty lander compared to modern standards.

If I’d have a skirt around up above my navel, you could park a jumbo jet underneath the skirt in front of my cock

Well it all depends on what you want to do. I interpreted your question as we need to go there asap, what can we do? And then the answer is we can do an crewed orbit in about a year time.

If we just want to do it with a good chance of survival, building all the shit we need, but still get there soon, the answer would be different. If we just want to go fast, we would probably use all our heavy lift vehicles to build a moon vehicle in LEO. Then put a big ass engine on that and a bunch of fuel and launch the whole thing to the moon. That’s something we could do within 5-7 years if we would put our minds and money to it. I feel the suits we currently have in development could be ready within that time as well. The lander would be a problem however, we don’t have any of those in development right now. Blue Origin has their Blue Lander, but that’s been on the drawing board for so long now. They did get extra funding to get it ready for 2030, but haven’t shown their progress publicly, so who knows how far they are. On the other hand, if we want to take some risks for this special mission I’m sure we can get something together in 5-7 years if humanity unites and puts their weight/money/faith behind it.

However if we keep going like we’ve been going since Apollo was cancelled, we are never going to get there at all. The politics are complicated and the private sector has been hit or miss. Plus with the Musk factor, we don’t know what’s going to happen. I have zero faith in anything we have going right now.

At the moment, we just cannot.

We don’t even have space suits that can operate on the moon. The stuff they use on the ISS is made to be used in a total vacuum only, not walking around in the dust and on sharp rocks. There are new suits in development, but nothing final as far as I know. I’m not sure if any are close to being finished, let alone tested and certified.

There’s also no vehicle that can land on the moon with crew right now. Nasa is relying on SpaceX to get their Starship program to the point they can do it. People are divided on this, but anyone with technical knowledge I heard about this say the SpaceX program is very challenging and probably not feasible. Especially with the super optimistic timelines they’ve been throwing around.

In theory you could put a Crew Dragon with a big trunk of supplies on a Falcon Heavy, which has the delta-V to go to the moon. But obviously that’s pretty risky, once you go you’re committed. When working in LEO you almost always have some kind of disaster recover scenario available where you abort and get back to earth asap. If you are underway to the moon, there is no turning back. The Crew Dragon has very limited mobility. But I think a trans-lunar injection and orbit around the moon would be possible, with a free return trajectory. So if going around the moon is good enough, that would be possible.

Still it would probably take 9-12 months to put such a mission together and it would be very risky indeed. And like I said, landing on the moon is a total no-go right now.

We should ask Scott Manley to do a video about this, I would love to hear his thoughts on this.

Joe could go out like a real chad if his last words as president are: “It’s Joever”

Luckily there is a distro for anyone. There’s plenty of super stable distros out there. But if you want the cutting edge, stability will be comprised. And the cutting edge is pretty cool at the moment, so for me it’s worth the issue once and again.

No, but depending on what’s wrong that might not be the best thing to do. If the new version is broken, rolling back to a previous working version might fix it. But when the update broke something, it might not fix it and could even make it worse. I’d rather figure out what went wrong and how to fix it, it’s a good skill to have. And if the new version does turn out to be broken, it’s good to have dug into it so you can make a proper bug report.

I use Arch BTW.

Today the liquidctl integration of cooler control died, making all my fans go into a safe profile which makes a lot more noise than normal. Imagine having to listen to that for an hour trying to get it working again. I did get it working luckily, somehow the coolercontrol-liqctld python module didn’t register properly. Once I got the module registered everything was working, for now…

My idea of a responsible adult: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmsbP13xu6k

Sure just saying, not trolling at all.

Solar drives energy prices down, not up. In the summer the energy price regularly goes negative because there is so much solar available.

And it isn’t even remotely true, other countries have higher energy prices than Germany within the EU. The Netherlands for example has crazy high energy prices. And that’s in absolute numbers, not even corrected for things like GDP.

Yeah that sucks, they haven’t shared the source, only what site it’s from.

This is the closest I could find: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year&year=-1&source=public

But this includes all sources, where the chart shown only includes renewable sources. I can’t find it on the site, but I’m kinda dumb so maybe somebody else can find it.

Hollow Knight

But depending how you feel about bugs it might not be as much cute as it might be nightmare fuel

People calling each other at new years was a thing in the before times when texting was non-existent, expensive or not widespread. People would call each other usually on land lines and caused a lot of stress to the network. It could take hours to get through. When mobile phones became a thing, people tried to be trendy and call from a party, leading to total collapse of the local cell network.

Later when texting became the norm, it would also be easily overloaded and texts could take a while to get through. These days since everything goes through the internet, I wouldn’t expect there to be any issues. The internet can handle sudden increases much better.

All of the Kirby games are really fun for kids, especially the 2D ones. I recommend Kirby Star Allies, I played it a lot with my nephew when he was 5

I know you don’t want to hear it, but forget about the solar panels my man. It’s not going to work and it isn’t going to be worth it. You can charge the battery from the grid a thousand times for the cost of the solar panel. And that’s excluding all the other extra components you’d need to include if you want solar charging. Plus all of the time you have to put into it.

But if you just want to do it for shits and giggles, just go look up a panel that fits your size and other specs. The watt peak is right there in the specs.

Alright, now we get to the real question, that’s something we can help with.

How big is this robot going to be? Because to tell you the truth: solar panels kind of suck. If the angle isn’t perfect and you don’t have a lot of square meter, the output is terrible. That means putting them on mobile things is kind of hard. There usually isn’t a lot of surface area available and almost always the angle to the sun is going to be terrible. And keep in mind they don’t work in the shade. So inside won’t work, in between buildings won’t work, under some trees won’t work, a bit of clouds and it won’t work etc. So you need a big ass battery onboard to buffer energy, so the robot can charge up in the sun and then run on battery power the rest of the time. Then we get to weight, those regular 400Wp panels you were calculating with are regular roof panels. Those have a aluminum frame, plastic back and glass front. They are around 120x180 cm and pretty heavy. They are also sturdy but can break easily since they are made of glass. For mobile applications you need to look at RV panels. Those are usually flexible, rugged and much lighter. The spec you are looking for is Watt peak. That gives you the amount of watt the panel produces in perfect conditions. You can then calculate the losses you get in your situation because it won’t be perfect. The batteries used in combination with solar are normally lithium iron phosphate. These can store huge amounts of energy and are very safe. Plus they last a long time and can do a lot of cycles. However they are very heavy and to get enough energy storage you need a big ass battery. They are also very expensive. For robots you are probably going to want lithium ion instead. These are cheaper, lighter and can still store a lot of energy. However they are very dangerous to work with and wear out faster. In a mobile application to prevent losses you also don’t want an inverter that converts stuff from DC coming from the panels to AC. It’s a lot better to stay at DC all the time, for example 24V. That way conversion losses are kept to a minimum. But you’d still want a good inverter with builtin battery charger, as the voltage coming out of solar panels fluctuates a lot. Just connecting them directly to batteries is a really bad idea. Solar panels also don’t like it if you draw as much current as possible, that ruins their efficiency. Because of how they work, there is a sweet spot in the voltage and current. Be sure to get an inverter that takes this into account (keyword mppt).

Take a look at something like this panel:

https://www.amazon.com/Flexible-Monocrystalline-Semi-Flexible-Trailer-Surfaces/dp/B0BQ1Y8JMH

If you get three of these you can get something going. If you do it right you can get about 100W of energy under perfect sunny conditions with 3 of these panels combined. That isn’t a lot of energy.

That’s why you don’t really see solar panels on anything mobile, it really kinda sucks. My advice for solar power robots: put a solar installation on the roof, put all of the energy generated over a year into the grid and simply charge the batteries for the robot from the grid. This way you can’t just charge when there is sun and if there is sun and you don’t need to charge the energy isn’t wasted. And being on the roof they are sure to be at a better angle and without any obstructions. They can also be as big as the roof, which helps a lot. This is what we do with electric cars and it seems to be the most efficient we can get.

You aren’t posting correct information, you are making assumptions that are unwarranted and therefor claim stuff that simply isn’t true. Most things aren’t true or false in an absolute way when it comes to complex systems, they are only true under specific conditions or when taking into account certain assumptions. Often it’s easy to generalize and handwave away small details, because they don’t matter for the end result we are going for. But you then can’t say this is a fact and works in all cases, sometimes the details matter a lot.

When it comes to solar installations, those are very complex things. That’s why you only find the resources you found, they are meant to convey a specific understanding of a complex system as it applies to the general audience. For example how many panels should I get, or how much money will I save on my energy bill if I get solar. If you go into the nitty gritty of solar installations it gets complex super fast and small details can matter a whole lot.

For example I have a micro-inverter system where each inverter doesn’t take full advantage of the capabilities of my panels. However due to my location and the angle of my panels, the panels don’t reach that peak capability for almost all of the year. Maybe in perfect conditions on a couple of days a year in the middle of the day, I go over the peak. I could change the angle, but that means more ballast is required for the bigger wind profile, which means I need a structural calculation done which costs money. So I opted to go for cheaper inverters, saving something like $300 on the whole installation, but that means I miss out on about $100 over the lifetime of the system in generated energy. Since that’s a nett positive of $200, that’s what I went with. I could have optimized a bit more to make use of the low-end of the solar output better if I went with a single inverter system instead of the micro-inverters, but that means a large device in a place that was inconvenient and the pricing calculation was tight.

The reason you aren’t getting a straight answer is because it appears to be a XY problem situation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem). You are asking for something that doesn’t really make a lot of sense to ask. So it’s likely you are actually trying to figure out something else, have come to the conclusion this is the information you need and thus asked the question. However that conclusion probably wasn’t correct, as the question doesn’t make sense. So it would be really helpful if you ask the initial question you are trying to figure out and let people help with that instead.

When talking solar it would also really help if you state where about you are located on the planet and if you feel like sharing which country, as each country has very different ways of structuring the pricing of energy and that matters a lot when it comes to solar.

You can’t convert the kWh to W, that’s not how it works. The amount of sunlight is highly variable during the day and the way the sunslight gets converted into usable energy differs a lot depending on the installation.

Normally those calculators assume you can connect the solar installation to the grid and use the grid as a buffer. So when there is sun and you’re not using it, you deliver the power back to the grid. And when there is no sun, you get your power from the grid. When there is a little sun, or you’re using a lot, you use some energy from the solar panels and some from the grid.

It starts getting complicated depending on how your local grid works. Often supplying back energy to the grid means the power provider credits you a certain amount. Depending on your contract, this might be a day price or even hourly. Or it may be a fixed price. This often means you pay a lot more using power from the grid then you get back pushing power back into the grid. So you need to think more in terms of money and using the energy in a way that’s cheapest.

If you are thinking about an off grid installation, the amount of power is almost always dependent on your equipment and not so much the solar panels. For example you can charge up a large bank of batteries from the sun during say a week. Then when fully charged, you can draw huge amounts of power from them till the bank is empty. But depending on the batteries used and the inverter used to convert DC into AC, the amount of amps it can push can be limited.

When thinking of something simple like a use case where you directly use the DC from the solar panel, the panel specs always include the Wp value. You can use that to calculate the exact amount depending on your location, time of day and angle of the panel. Weather services these days also include a watt per square meter of solar energy for different locations, which is useful. And keep in mind it only works when it’s sunny, with clouds the output drops a lot.

I’ve seen huge swings in my pv installation year on year. So it isn’t a sure thing how much energy you get from the sun.

One thing I’ve also noticed is people doing code reviews using ai to pad their stats or think they are helping out. At best it’s stating the obvious, wasting resources to point out what doesn’t need pointing out. At worst it’s a giant waste of time based on total bullshit the ai made up.

I kinda understand why people would think LLMs are able to generate and evaluate code. Because they throw simple example problems at them and they solve them without much issue. Sometimes they make obvious mistakes, but these are easily corrected. This makes people think LLMs are basically able to code, if it can solve even some harder example problems, surely they are at least as good as beginner programmers right? No, wrong actually. The reason the LLM can solve the example problem, is because that example (or a variation) was contained within its training data. It knows the answer not by deduction or by reason, it knows the answer by memorization. Once you start actually programming in the real world, it’s nothing like the examples. You need to account for an existing code base, with existing rules, standards and limitations. You need to evaluate which solution out of your toolbox to apply. Need to consider the big picture as well as small details. You need to think of the next guy working with the code, because more often than not, that next guy is you. LLMs crumble in a situation like this, they don’t know about all the unspoken things, they haven’t trained on the code base you are working with.

There’s a book I’m fond of called Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler. I always used to joke it contained the answer to any problem a software engineer ever comes across. The only trick is to choose the correct answer. LLMs are like this, they have all these patterns memorized and choose which answer best fits the question. But it doesn’t understand why, what the upsides and downsides are for your specific situation. What the implications of the selected answer are going forward. Or why this pattern over another. When the LLM answers you can often prompt it to produce an answer with a completely different pattern applied. In my opinion it’s barely more useful than the book and in many ways much worse.

Nah I went over to camp Debian for a long time, switched when Debian Potato was released. Then when Debian kinda stalled I was lured into Ubuntu because they had the latest and greatest. I know it isn’t the cool choice these days, but I have stuck with Ubuntu ever since.