Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Mephansteras]

This thing is ridiculous. I hope someone makes an easy to scroll version of it. Click and drag is too painful to go through everything

[forsaken1111]

This thing is ridiculous. I hope someone makes an easy to scroll version of it. Click and drag is too painful to go through everything

er...

Amazing. This is like 100 XKCD strips in one.

Here's a much better map. It works like Google Maps, which means it doesn't spoil the entire map instantly.

[i2amroy]

Yeah, the rent_a_geek.de link works fairly well, though it can take forever to load whatever it is you want to see at any given moment.

[Flying Dice]

If you are using the click&drag version, uh. Beware of following the Mario hole all the way down.

[Dutchling]

If you are using the click&drag version, uh. Beware of following the Mario hole all the way down.

SSSSSSssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.....

[Mephansteras]

This thing is ridiculous. I hope someone makes an easy to scroll version of it. Click and drag is too painful to go through everything

er...

Amazing. This is like 100 XKCD strips in one.

Here's a much better map. It works like Google Maps, which means it doesn't spoil the entire map instantly.

Huh, must have missed that post somehow. Thanks!

[alway]

Hmm, seems pretty much everything in that is to scale. With that scale being stated to be 2 miles from the start to the left edge.

[Hubris Incalculable]

everything in that is to scale

This is XKCD we're talking about, you know. 

[alway]

Yes, but it also means the length of the surface he drew, to scale, is a whole 5 miles long. O_O

[andrea]

I think somebody in another forum did some rough math, and they were nautical miles. which are longer.

ah, found
"Anyway, assuming the scyscraper is Burj Dubai, which is about 800m tall and it translates to about 7.5 images in today's XKCD, 2 miles distance is equal to about 30 images, which would mean, the started near the skyscraper. If they used nautical miles instead (plausible considering the sea they crossed) it would be almost 34 images, which is the starting point."

[mainiac]

Aw man, I was pretty close to the edge when I gave up and went to work this morning.

Though, to be fair that one has some serious holes in it. It ignores the fact that all power plants (Including nuclear ones and hydroelectrical plants) are computer operated, and also forgets that the same counts for sattelites.(Orbital bombardement is dangerous.)

Not quite 100%.  There are still some hydro plants that still use legacy style governors to regulate the operations.  It's true that they have computer interfaces for the mechanical governor and control units but the human operators would be able to restore the plants very quickly when they noticed the power output started declining.  I doubt the computers would be able to disable the plants at all given the limitations imposed by the mechanical systems.

I know this because three years back I interviewed for a position at the company that services the legacy systems.

[Zrk2]

IIRC in Ontario our reactors run using mechanical logic controllers.

[Techhead]

Also, not all satellites have active station-keeping, and not all that do have sufficient delta-v to deorbit.

[Starver]

Offtopic1: I personally think the best What If? is the Glass Half Empty one, but YMMV.

Offtopic2: Google tells me there are approximately 3000 satellites in orbit (a lot of 'space trash', but not so much of that is going to be of sufficient size to survive re-entrywith still sufficient mass), and elsewhere I see that the total number of satellites launched is slightly above 6000.  (Wiki lists 8300+, but that'll probably include all easily trackable fragments.)

Let's do an abbreviated What If? on those facts.  Assume a full 6000 viable projectiles to land on the surface of the planet, which is 510,072,000,000,000 square metres.  That's one projectile for 85,012,000,000 square metres, or a circle around 331 kilometres in diameter (ignoring issues of spherical geometry, of course, but would not be overly different if I hadn't).  Restricting to land areas only, call that a 180 km diameter circle.  Aiming at cities?  There are... hmmm... it's an arbitrary designation at best, so let's take the 1054 (or so) cities with half a million population or more, and drop (almost) six whole satellites within their limits...  Except that's probably far less impacts than car accidents than they'd normally suffer, on any given morning during the rush-hour.

You're going to have to hope to bop a particular person (or perhaps building) on the head with judgement from on high, strategically.  It's going to be of limited use, unless you pick the target very carefully, or happen to have something (like a subcritical reactor) in the satellite that can cause substantial (useful) damage outside the initial crater.




Maybe not offtopic, while editing the above, my browser has crashed (and had to be recovered) twice.  I've just navigated the XKCD tab back to the Fridge one (1109?), so that if it crashes again, I can rule out.  I also lost Audacity (doing something in the background) or, because of Audacity I lost the browser.  I shall re-open that to do what it was doing, to replicate conditions accordingly.  This is an old machine, and might just benefit from a reboot or something.