This is awesome, nice work! In case it's useful, I made a Python package for calculating solar irradiance at altitude: https://github.com/gusgordon/airmass
Takes into account lots of stuff (e.g. attenuation from air, ozone, and water vapor) with the goal of estimating solar power at any altitude/latitude/day/time.
Totally - right now it's using the USDA food nutrient database [1] which has all nutrients, so all the nutrients on the back-end are there. Calories is the most important thing to the majority of people (in my experience), so there's a balance between showing too much information vs. keeping things simple. Probably should just add a setting to show everything, though.
I got a minimum wingspan of around 8m for self-sustaining flight on the winter solstice with a small payload — pretty close to what you all built.
The biggest problem I ran into when creating this analysis was accurately estimating solar irradiance at different altitudes. Here's the module I built for estimating that, in case you find it useful: https://github.com/gusgordon/airmass
Given that there have been multiple mass extinction events in Earth’s history, it seems reasonable to spend a small fraction of GDP on colonizing another planet. How about something roughly equivalent to the amount we spend on chapstick?
What’s your recommendation in terms of tooling for cases where it’s not just prototype -> production, but an iterative process? I love notebooks for prototyping, but I find it’s a lot of work to make sure notebook code and prod code are in sync. Maybe just debugging with IPython?
Seems feasible, never went past the analysis phase though :)