(urth) Terminus Est

[Gwern Branwen]

On 2008.07.02 17:00:41 -0500, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com> scribbled 0.2K characters:
> Gary wrote:
> And I'm very willing to assume they can make a "perfect" seal around a
> sufficient vaccuum using some arcane machine.

Honestly, I think everyone is overcomplicating Terminus Est.

Everything about its construction is explicable through simple mechanisms.

It has a channel running down the center but is still strong? Simple, it has an I-beam shape and one void is covered up to make a channel.

It requires an exotic method of forging which creates a vaccuum in it to let the mercury slosh around? Well, why do we need a vacuum at all, when we could just have air in it like normal and avoid displacement problems by making our channel a circular tube.

(This suggestion leads to a nice design where we have two channels, one on either side of the I-beam, and they are linked by a hole at the top and bottom; even better, a double-channel design would hide the I-beam shape and make it basically the flat rectangular prism shape we expect of a sword of justice.)

--
gwern
Hutsul Fox Abbas COSMOS Macintosh Ansar supercomputer Stego HAARP LABLINK
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