Seems like an ideal use case for the hybrid airship designs that came out a few years ago. Like the one that looks like a giant butt.

I don't disagree. I also don't view it as an exclusive either-or situation. An airplane like this can cover distance at speed (2000 km at 700 km/hr) and get you pretty close. The airship can handle the last mile (airstrip to turbine-in-progress) and aid with assembly by hovering.

I'm thinking in transport from seaport to seaport and from there by waterways to the final destination. Or maybe, if we're talking about wind farms to last several decades, building capable railroads (if possible and economically viable) just as we do with ore mining regions.

That may work in some cases, but I don't see that being a viable solution for, say, the middle of the Dakotas. There are navigable rivers, yes, but not something you're going to float a 100-m turbine blade along all the way from, say, New Orleans. The typical Mississippi barge maxes out at ~200 ft (60 m). Rivers have turning radii, too, and locks have maximum lengths.

I don't see how building a railroad is a less-impactful solution than widening a 1-km stretch of access road, which they're going to have to build anyway.

Sea and rail transport still seems the best way to do it.

As the article points out: ground transportation is the limiting factor for larger on-shore turbines. Rules of the road and rail place a practical upper limit of 70 m. So, sure, you could build a 100-m blade - similar to the largest offshore turbines - at a coastal facility, and you could transport it to a large port nearest to your wind farm. But then what? How do you get it the last mile (or last 1000 mi) to your site?

To answer the question "why this design vs. other nuclear rockets?" it comes down to operating temperature. Previous nuclear-thermal rocket designs, like NERVA, were designed with solid nuclear fuel in mind - similar to most nuclear reactors. On the relative scale of rocketry, that's a pretty simple design. ("Simple" != "Easy") However, this means your thrust is a bit limited by the melting point of the nuclear fuel assembly - the hydrogen (or whatever propellant) is being relied upon to keep the nuclear core from (literally) melting down. So: the propellant can only be heated to, say, 2500K before it hits the nozzle.

But if your design assumes that the nuclear fuel is already liquified by its own prodigious heat, then the propellant can be heated much higher. Earlier work by NASA and AIAA talks about getting up to 5500K. But, it seriously complicates the engine design, because now your design needs to handle molten nuclear fuel, usually at high pressure (to ensure it doesn't boil off), and separate it from the propellant (so you don't spew U235 out the back end). So we have this centrifuge design.

It seems to me that some kind of heavy lift helicopter solution might make more sense. My understanding is that a reliable 100m turbine blade can be made weighing about 35 tons. Although the most capable current helicopters can only accommodate an external lift weight of about 20 tons, it seems easier to build a more powerful helicopter than a massive aircraft that can land on a makeshift dirt runway.

An airplane provides two major benefits: range and efficiency. Radia is targeting ~2000-km range at max payload. This permits a factory to turn out giant blades and move them pretty much wherever. Need to refuel? Just land at any airport and gas up. A Skycrane, by contrast, has a maximum range of 370 km with no payload. Need to refuel? First you need to hover and detach your payload, then go over somewhere else to refuel, then re-hitch your payload and continue on. Generally speaking, fixed-wing aircraft a vastly more fuel-efficient at moving things than helicopters, whose main advantage is hovering and not needing a runway.

Despite LIGO being a revolutionary tool for astrophysics - Nobel Prize work, already built and paid for - the Trump Administration is proposing to drastically cut its funding, so that one of the two observatories would have to shut down. [1] [2] [3]

As the NYT succinctly put it in their headline: "Happy Birthday, LIGO. Now Drop Dead."

Eppur si muove!

(to distract us from some totally-fake-hoax-thing..)

Which one?! There are so many awful things that I'm supposed to not be paying attention to, it's hard to remember.

I guess you have no clue what the power requirements for a cell tower are.

Who says it has to be a cell tower? There's plenty that you could do with LoRa. Or you could have a local operative do a slow drive-by and check in over WiFi or Bluetooth.

Nobody can compete with Tesla on this. Once Tesla owners can simply add their vehicle to the robotaxi network, how will anyone be able to compete with that?

Tell ya what: you put down the KoolAid, and I'll try to stop laughing out loud. How many years has Elon been stringing people along with this vision? About as long as he's been upselling people on the FSD package with the promise that it'll provide Level 5 autonomy via a SW update. Soon. Any time now. For almost a decade. There are Model 3 cars out there that were sold with the "FSD" package that'll be in the scrapyard before a single dime is ever made by a Tesla robotaxi service.

This'll be a fun exercise, I suppose, and will generate some laughs. However, the whole purpose of the Darwin Awards was to recognize people who, through their own stupidity, removed themselves from the gene pool. How are these new awards fitting with that? Perhaps if they gave out an award to someone who, through using AI, ended up poisoning themselves with some idiotic concoction that AI ginned up. Aromatic water mix, anyone?

Government officials using personal devices to conduct government business has become normalized since at least W. Bush's administration. There should be an executive order to ignore all e-mails from government officials if it doesn't originate from a .gov address and the penalty should be immediate termination. Hey Donny, instead of waging wars on paper straws and low-flow toilets, why don't you use your power to get your administration in order?

Except that using gov email addresses ensures there's a messy (virtual) paper trail that could be FOIA'ed, discovered in a lawsuit or criminal proceeding, or just plain archived for some egghead liberal communist to wade through during their ivory tower research. Can't have that! Someone might discover we're doing something wrong! Donny hates writing anything down, and prefers using vague, Mafia-like verbal directives to his subordinates for these very reasons.

Remember: this is the administration that was circulating realtime military strike details using Signal, and manage to CC a journalist to boot! Separately, SecDef Hegseth had parallel Signal groupchat that included his wife, brother, and lawyer. Consequences? Bah!

According to the ever-informed policy wonks at Fox News, the reason they can do this is because "Germany has got lots of sun."

But does it run wearOS? My understanding about the galaxy watches is that they need to be charged often because of wearOS.

No. Garmin develops almost all their own software (not just for fitness watches, but also for bike computers, boats, airplane avionics, etc.). I can't think of any compelling feature of wearOS that would entice anyone to use for anything.

But how many years of charging daily will it last? I know current Galaxy watches are around 3 years, then it's garbage because the charge won't even last a day.

I have a Garmin Forerunner 955. It's over 3 years old. I use it for workouts (duh), activity/sleep tracking, and some smartwatch functionality. I only need to break out the charging cable once or twice per week.

For those that want better content about the Fenix 8 (and sports technology generally), a much deeper dive can be found from DCRainmaker. Given his profile, he often gets pre-release devices, but he always buys his own materials and does not get paid for reviews.