Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Sci Fi Forum Orion, Mission to Alpha Centauri

well an aircraft will take off as long as its payload is not too heavy.




yea SEE , I went through around 8 of the 12 in the pack
and I used the pump that came with them.



I think that something so earth shattering should be done properly , with proper documentation , thats why.




I thought you agreed that a metal tank would be much better
I still think it would and that is why Im going to use one.

of course I could just make a tank out of 12 inch PVC pipe that would hold 420 psi because its minimum bursting pressure is 420 psi.

my compressor will only pump up to 130 psi.

so that should be safe enough.

Better to start half-assed then move up, than to have grand plans that never get finished because of too many details.

But yea if the balloon thing worked there'd be a possible excuse that the changing shape somehow pushed the external air around, propelling it. So it can show you're wrong but not right. The rigid tanks can clearly show right or wrong.



Be careful, that might explode. If the pipe's designed only for liquids, then it won't have the same safety features (like perhaps leak-before-break) as compressed air parts. Also an OSHA violation.

I expect that there will also be other codes that would need to be followed.

I will have to check to see if I can legally experiment
I wouldnt want to violate anyone.

What's wrong with the two-tanks way? Are you worried that the outlet is too small and won't allow enough flow rate to move it?

Anyway did you get a filling valve?

Hey it could be on an even smaller scale. Get an aerosol can of anything (maybe air), and just attach it to another container.

I have to admit I havent been trying at all , I could
probably build one in a day but the weather changes and I
decide not to do anything.

or mostly I forget to try.

for the last week I have been speculating moving to vb 10
from vb 6 , by attempting to convert some older vb 6 stuff
to vb .net.

Im not sure what Microsoft was thinking when they changed
99% of the language around but from my experience this last week there must have been a extremely large turn over in the vb programming field.

vb 10 seems as if nobody remembered what the real programmers did when they made the vb 6 compiler
so they just scraped off a few layers of the windows api and made a ide from what was left.

Im contemplating assembly again.

but I know I wont.

If you actually believed it would succeed, and recognized the enormity of the discovery, you'd be forgetting to eat or sleep in your unstoppable pursuit of it. I think you know that it won't work, or just don't appreciate the spectacular possibilities it would open up.


Once you get used to it you'll love it. It really is much more consistent and elegant. But it's like enjoying a delicacy food, you have to be ready to change your way of thinking to appreciate the beauty otherwise it just feels like eating a scorpion. If you use the default migrated code and try to force the old fashioned approach onto the new design it'll be ugly because of bodgy legacy support.

Im sort of getting used to it , but when it comes to using a control array I find that the amount of extra code needed is ridiculous.

dim X as integer

X = index

for i = 1 to 20
commandbutton(X).text = i
commandbutton(X).tag = Y
X = X + 1
next i

turns into

commandbutton1.text = 1
commandbutton2.text = 2
commandbutton3.text = 3
commandbutton4.text = 4
commandbutton5.text = 5
commandbutton6.text = 6
commandbutton7.text = 7
commandbutton8.text = 8
commandbutton9.text = 9
commandbutton10.text = 10
commandbutton11.text = 11
commandbutton12.text = 12
commandbutton13.text = 13
commandbutton14.text = 14
commandbutton15.text = 15
commandbutton16.text = 16
commandbutton17.text = 17
commandbutton18.text = 18
commandbutton19.text = 19
commandbutton20.text = 20

commandbutton1.text = Y
commandbutton2.text = Y
commandbutton3.text = Y
commandbutton4.text = Y
commandbutton5.text = Y
commandbutton6.text = Y
commandbutton7.text = Y
commandbutton8.text = Y
commandbutton9.text = Y
commandbutton10.text = Y
commandbutton11.text = Y
commandbutton12.text = Y
commandbutton13.text = Y
commandbutton14.text = Y
commandbutton15.text = Y
commandbutton16.text = Y
commandbutton17.text = Y
commandbutton18.text = Y
commandbutton19.text = Y
commandbutton20.text = Y

its a ridiculous amount of code that replaces the control array.

and its extremely difficult to manage in code.

You can make a control array, unsuprisingly, by using an array of controls, then fill it with CommandButton objects programatically. They can be copied from a single button created in the designer to duplicate all the properties.

It's more elegant to reuse the same general features like arrays that were already there, than to depend on a special one that just serves special cases. Of course you could make your own control array class if you wanted some unique behavior - and you can actually program in unique behavior, unlike VB6.

Certainly duplicating code 20 times is bad practice.

but I dont want all the properties duplicated.

each command button needs at least three assignable properties.

I have found that I can use the
.tag
.assignabledeffinitions

but I need 1 more to use to define the control.

.text is used by the control to represent a item in the array.

I did get the buttons array to work by making a database with buttons using the above three assignable properties.

this entailed using a seperate file for each button.
and a list of button names.

but all of the above could have been done with
this

for i = 1 to 20
button(X).tag = a
button(X).accessabledeffinition = b
button(X).text = c
X = X + 1
next i

but because there is no control array in vb.net
my 28 kb program is already over 800 kb

and Im only half way finished converting it.

in fact I havent touched it today because of the stress.

I have thought today about making a user control that would work exactly like a old style control array.

and the control could have a few more tweaks.

That's part of the beauty of .Net. You actually can customize the controls. No need for hideous ActiveX interfaces and all that.

Sounds like you did it the hard way. This code will create an array full of buttons



This might not be the most elegant way, but it's certainly easy. Stress comes from craftsmen blaming their tools :P

just using a loop to create buttons is easy.

but can you use the following to change the information
in the properties of any chosen button.

suppose someone clicks on button (0) in your array.

will they be directed to this?
-------------------------------------
private sub button()_click
-------------------------------------

or this

-------------------------------------
private sub button()_text changed
-------------------------------------

the only way I have been able to perform the above is to
use a 0-10 in each buttons tag.

then assign that value to a lable when the button has been clicked.

------------------------------------
private sub button1_click

label1.text = button1.tag
end sub
------------------------------------


then when the label text has changed

--------------------------------------
private sub label1_text changed

the code to change the value in the selected buttons properties.

if button1.tag = label1.text then button1.text = "you clicked B1"
if button2.tag = label1.text then button2.text = "you clicked B2"
if button3.tag = label1.text then button3.text = "you clicked B3"
etc ... 1 for each button in the array

anyway I have the above working well in a program.

but I do like vb.net only because it can build a 64 bit
application.
and can use multi threading.

so I suppose there are better ways to do the above
and make a user control that will perform even better than
the older vb control array.

Yea, you can use .AddHandler to specify a common click event handler for all the buttons. And that can be passed the button that was clicked, so it can identify it by the tag or name property or however.

Well as long as it works. I just hope you don't have to modify it a year later and not have a clue how all those labels and things interdepend on each other!

over a quarter of a million views.

226,228 views

looks like this topic must be an interesting one.

Certainly this is one possible interpretation.

Do you think that the lack of posts between April '11 and Sept '12 might indicate that a lot of those quarter million were disapointed?

looks like this topic must be an interesting one.





well , if nothing else it shows that there arent alot of people who are active posters on this forum!

but it could be that those quarter million were disapointed.

then again there might be something very interesting somewhere inside this topic.

226,463 views right now!

apx 235 hits since I posted 6 hours ago