Tires on the ground ...

Here's the wheeled rover. 50 mm wheels with 5mm clearance. The central body is 65 mm * 30 mm * 10 mm

Sloat, Great cartoon, wonderful scify.

Could someone take a look at this program for me; it's for windows and mac but I aint got mac osx.

[url] www.susqu.edu/facstaff/b/brakke/evolver/evolver.html [/url]

(edited) I e mailed this guy about it. Talked mainly about my ideas on least routes vis a vis Roman towns but did mention the Mars artifacts idea, just hope he doesn't think i'm barking mad [][8D]

Thanks Jim but it will only be sci fi if it doesn't get built.

(edited again) he got back to me and said that I would need to reformat the dem data for his dataset but it would work to create minimum strings. []

Since this program was not designed for the specific purpose you intend, there is a good chance that it will not produce the results you want. It might come close enough to be useful as a proof of concept, but be prepared for the other outcome.

And, reformating your data to fit the program's requirements can range from not-very-hard to just-about-impossible. The only way to know is to give it a try.

(It's a free download, so upgrade your OS and see what you can see. Or, download it and see if it will work on your current OS. Just because it was compiled for OSX doesn't mean it can't possibly work on an earlier version. It probably won't, but you won't know for sure until you try. Don't be afraid to experiment. I've done this on PCs. If it doesn't work, you usually get error messages that say "Windows can't find program "so and so". I go to a computer with the newer version of Windows and copy that program. And, believe it or not, this works about half the time. When it doesn't, it is usually because there are dozens of programs that need to be moved and I finally just give up.)

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Your idea seems to have some potential, but if you are not in a postion to write a custom program (or hire someone to do it) then it's not likely to happen. The effort to produce an app like this is large, and few but the originator of an idea will be willing to take the risk. Hmmm. This is the sort of thing that prompts some people to learn how to program ...

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If the overall project (project "Martian Tourist" ?) ever gets anywhere then this might become one of many sub-tasks that get evaluated, and either dropped or implemented. The more information you can gather about how to do it and what benefits it can provide, the better its chances at that time.

Please don't post all of those details here, but do keep us informed with brief summaries.

LB

Larry, I think you're narrowing the focus far too early. We need a business plan but it should be a film industry specific plan at this stage. We need to define our clients, and not the ultimate clients, who will be the global population.

I suggest that we declare next year to be "Mars Year." We present our mars tourist proposal as our contribution to that. This has narowed our list of primary clients down and also given us a handle on how to approach them.

We have to address the, ultimately political problem, of getting people to look upwards. NASA and the Soviet Union screwed up, because they failed to see space exploration as just plain sexy but as the icing on the cake of a rather tawdry missile race.

Our clients are going to be much more honest. They'll say, "if we give you money for this, will we sell more Coca Cola to the Taliban?" We can't simply say yes, we've got to pitch.

On the bucky ball design. Suppose we took two clear telescopic umbrellas and joined them in the middle. Then we could fold them up and fire them from Mark's gattling gun idea.