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Dave70 said:
Real muthaphuckkin G's. (of forging).


That's one heck of a washer. I'd love to see them making the nut and bolt to match.

I'm also amazed by the state of the art safety gear these guys use. Particularly their fantastic hearing protection.
 
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Airgead said:
That's one heck of a washer. I'd love to see them making the nut and bolt to match.

I'm also amazed by the state of the art safety gear these guys use. Particularly their fantastic hearing protection.
Its drilled around the circumference, so a bunch of smaller nuts and bolts. Presumably forged by the mens children with a Fisher Price furnace & steam hammer set.
Yes, a bag of cotton wool wouldn't go astray..
 
It's a flange for what looks to be around a Ø1m pipe. It's the part welded to the end of a pipe to join pipe sections to other components like valves and turbines. It's probably used to carry steam (which is why it has the raised lip). Seems like a crapload of effort but has a few benefits -
  • Saves on steel by not having to cut a big hole in the centre or machine extra off the face for the lip
  • Makes the steel harder
  • Orients grain structure to improve various material properties
Looking at this it's no wonder the world struggles to compete with China. Out in the open, minimal safety gear (note the QA checker at the end covering his face to protect from the heat), ~8 blokes on a job for probably 1.5h each per flange not including the manufacturing of the slab. For Aussies, that'd be a cost just shy of $1k in labour. For the forge. Then there's machining, drilling, QA/QC and shipping - a lot of money for a big lump of steel. No other signs of money spent on roadways, offices, safety signs etc. Though they have spent a few dollars on the tarp for shade, I hope that was budgeted for.
What impresses me is the teamwork, everyone's ready with the right tools, and full credit to the bloke on the forks - much skill in the fork driving.
 
With his stomach rumbling loud enough to tell him that he’s going to be much more hungover for choosing to not eat, Charlie is now eyeing off the complimentary lamingtons placed next to the coin machine in the air-conditioned smokie pokies.
 
Young bloke comes in, I tell him that the Oils are reforming. response is, "well, the aliens will know it's safe to return".
 
It's an acronym so exempt from the name protection stuff (if they even cared about such things) TRAnsiting Planets and PlenetIsimals Small Telescope.

It's one of those really forced, convoluted and awkward acronyms NASA types come up with just so their project can have a cool project name (like MAVEN - Mars Atmosphere and Volatiles ExploratioN... They were doing so well but ran out of steam on the last word). TRAPPIST is a particularly bad example though... Pretty much zero fucks were given about that one. They didn't even try.
 
The ******* thing is 39 x 9.5 trillion kilometers away. The quickest buggy we can currently manage to fire into space, so far as I know is the acronym free Juno probe that tops out under 350,000 kph.
By way of comparison, we're only a stones throw 7.5 billion k's from Pluto.

Interstellar travel will - at least for flesh and bone primates - forever remain the stuff of science fiction, end of.
Best we could hope is to download our conscious selves into some kind of avatar and keep the batteries charged for however long it takes to truck 370 trillion light years to the lazily named TRAPPIST 1.
 
39 light years. Pretty much in our backyard... Cosmically speaking.

Speed wise the fastest spacecraft at launch was new horizons (the Pluto mission) that clocked in at 58000km/h. Juno is 265000 relative to the earth but only because it is whizzing around in Jupiter's huge gravity well (which is kind of cheating).

There is a sun probe planned for next year that will get up to 450000 but only because it will be plunging directly into the sun at the time. So again.. Cheating somewhat.

Breakthrough starshot is a plan to use a laser pumped solar sail to accelerate a flock of 1 gram spacecraft (maybe each carrying someone's avatar in slico) to 0.1C giving a trip time of 40 years to proximia centauri or 390 years to Trappist1....
 
Dave70 said:
Perhaps the universe isn't as big or as old as we think anyway. What we need is a reliable eyewitness, to know for certain that is.
Some fascinating and incisive points are discussed here.

https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/does-distant-starlight-prove-the-universe-is-old/

excerpt:
That is why, ultimately, the only way to know about the past for certain is to have a reliable historic record written by an eyewitness. That is exactly what we have in the Bible.
They'd love this!

http://www.livescience.com/57674-bag-like-animal-is-human-ancestor.html
 

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