Justin Carmichael

@Xaraphim ebay.com/itm/3262800789…

@aegrabs @afshawnl Having used all the major brands aside from CATIA it's very robust and has amazing surface tools for complex geometry. Helix around a helix while ending tangent to another curve easy. I hear it's very expensive otoh. SpaceX started with SW switched to NX iirc

@afshawnl what’s the difference between an advanced software like nx and say solidworks

i wonder which cad software spacex uses

@Robotbeat @andrewmccalip Rim-driven thrusters work great for this apparently! CPS drone on youtube talks about them, little pricey but you could design a 3D printed version with coils and permanent magnets.

@andrewmccalip I've seen propellers designed to cut entanglements like seaweed or fishing line.

Sigh. Seaweed. Again. Now to go find him...

@CJHandmer I had a Physics BS, ME MS made me employable...

Don't do a Masters unless you have a really good reason. I interview hundreds of mechanical engineering candidates. I can't think of a single candidate where a Masters made their candidacy stronger.

@MediaKing @PalmerLuckey Everyone I know that used those services saw no noticable change as well

@PalmerLuckey Are you being targeted? That sounds like way more than normal people get.

@MediaKing Already done. I still get pounds of junk mail every single day, hundreds of pounds a year.

@PalmerLuckey FTFY

Gemini 2025:

It’s time for a new inside look at the SPARC facility, where we're about 75% done building our machine to demonstrate fusion energy’s commercial viability. In this tour, Alex Creely, Chief Engineer of ARC Conceptual Design, SPARC expert, and your tour guide shows the tremendous progress we've made over the past 9 months since our last virtual tour. As SPARC nears full assembly, much of that progress is visible inside tokamak hall. That room houses the SPARC tokamak where we’ll be making plasmas and producing fusion power. "We’re now operating the plant, now putting the actual tokamak together," Creely says. "We’re really excited for what comes next both here at SPARC and down in Virginia for the first ARC power plant.” Watch to learn more and see SPARC for yourself. #FusionEnergy #SPARC

@brandonkxo @Xaraphim @formlabs @MaxLobovsky This is really cool work! I notice a dead github link, did you by chance open source this?

@Xaraphim @formlabs @MaxLobovsky Yeah it took me a month plus to get my parametric tooth calculator running, since many of the papers omit the modifications they make to avoid gear locking I’ve put mine online if you wanna check it out: harmonicgearboxcalculator.com

In my spare time been designing a harmonic drive using Formlabs resins @formlabs and @MaxLobovsky make incredible resins video in the pipeline showing the design process behind this harmonic gearbox. V2 is gonna be way better

True. Most 20-year-olds are actually starting life behind the starting line. They accumulate student loan debt, graduate with a useless degree, and can’t get a job paying above $60,000 Meanwhile, fraudsters defraud the government, making millions Stopping fraud will benefit my generation more than any other as our dollar gets devalued and we have less money to put in the markets to hedge against inflation The idea that a foreigner can start a “business” that collects welfare dollars from taxpayers while 20-year-old college graduates can’t get a good paying job is unbelievable End the fraud.

@PoptartNoahh Can it run non-axisymmetric complex designs?

Something I'm working on Compressible flow solver for muzzle devices Take any random silencer CAD and check its muzzle gas dynamics

@Simon_Cleret @PoptartNoahh Nice! Tesla valve machined with a sleeve? I had Tesla valve designs in mind with 3d printing but this is very elegant.

@PoptartNoahh This doesn't have any baffles yet, but...

The US has a tungsten shortage. China produces over 80% of the world's tungsten. The US produces zero. Our last mine closed in 2015. Beijing added tungsten to its export control list in February 2025 and as a result, exports fell over 40%. Prices surged 557% in thirteen months. Tungsten goes into armor-piercing rounds, jet engine superalloys, and drill bits. With 19.25 g/cm³ and the highest melting point of any metal, nothing fully substitutes. The first Western alternative mine started producing in South Korea five days ago. It covers 3% of China's output. New US mines will take 29 years from discovery to production. The DFARS ban on Chinese-sourced tungsten takes effect January 2027, but the supply chain to replace it doesn't exist.

@Xaraphim Subscribed!

welp, im a youtuber now LINK BELOW

The remaining Iranian players have been forced onto a plane back to Iran. Suffering, torture and possibly execution awaits them for defying the regime. And Australia allowed it. I have no words. This picture will live in infamy.

BREAKING: Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has been killed and his body has been recovered per Israeli media outlets

This is terrible – and so important to highlight: bannedincalifornia.org Thank you @sdamico

I think it's time for us to accelerate the development of antimatter production as the most compact form of energy storage for high performance space propulsion applications. caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/11/26/ant…

Incredibly brave post from Peter about the insane regulatory friction our society must endure and which is directly responsible for the premature deaths of the startups attempting to build wealth for our future, as well as millions of people whose emancipation from (inter alia) air pollution is delayed for *decades* by the same regulations that were intended to drive improvement of the environment. Peter is brave because, descriptively, the regulatory state functions collectively as a cartel with a monopoly on the veto and can apply it essentially at will with no real accountability. If one of the thousands of officials Peter's companies work with takes a dim view of this post, they could quietly and anonymously kill the company by shadow banning progression of any of hundreds of strands of regulatory approvals needed to obtain permission to operate. What are Peter's companies trying to do? Crush babies into gold? No, they're finding economic ways to fix air pollution. He's going to spend the better part of a decade of his life fighting some avatar of "the department of improving the environment" for the right to spend his own money improving the environment. I too have heard, and experienced, insane horror stories. The US is currently rapidly losing an energy production war with China. We have all the money and natural resources anyone could ever want, and China - a communist dictatorship - is deploying more electricity generation capacity in months than the US has deployed, ever, since the invention of electricity. Why? Solar photovoltaic power, which is approximately free and works best in uninhabitable deserts that are otherwise so economically useless that they remain federal land and are used for such things as atomic bomb testing, must go through the same environmental impact assessments, which take many years, as an oil refinery or explosives plant. Solar energy, which has a lower impact than practically any other land use and is by far the best per dollar spend for improving the environment. We should be granting 99 year solar leases on BLM land and inviting the top 10 deployers to an annual dinner at the White House! This is not a market failure. This is a regulatory failure, and it is actively killing us. More Americans die every month than on 9/11 from the impacts of air pollution that would have been addressed a decade ago if builders were allowed to build. This is not some academic niche issue. Thousands of people are actively killed by our neglect of this problem. Two years ago I wrote this: terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/11/10/per… The situation, expressed in real world time-to-deployment, has not materially improved. The regulatory state is a bizarre hydra where, somehow, painstaking reforms to speed up review often end up taking longer. Such is the case for California's fire hazard reduction burn process, which takes so long that the forests often burn up in the mean time. (caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/01/17/the…) Earlier this year, the fires took 10,000 houses and nearly 100 people with them, and now, nearly a year later, almost none have been rebuilt, while the city council's response to housing scarcity is ... rent control. Elon, I'm ready to go to Mars! My radical view is that if McMaster-Carr can fit 500,000 SKUs into its 4000 page catalog, the federal government should be able to fit all its laws and regulations into the same space. The constitution can be on page 1. In 1875, the federal code was less than 2000 pages. Today it is over 12 million. At the current rate we are generating new law faster than anyone could ever read it. The law of the land should be portable.

@ToughSf With modern maraging steels those aren't terrible pressures at all, though of course depends on the munition diameter.

Railguns don't actually have an advantage over gasdynamic launchers, with only coilguns having the potential for >>3km/s velocities: osti.gov/servlets/purl/… However very high launch pressure (>2000 bar) are needed for short barrels within the atmosphere, restricting efficiency.

@Robotbeat Coworker had a bottle for a neutron polarizer. I brought in a balloon and inhaled it, he came around the corner to me holding the bottle doing a mickey mouse voice. Should have seen his face.

This stuff is insanely expensive.