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A new pyramid-like shape always lands the same side up

(www.quantamagazine.org)
594 points robinhouston | 5 comments | 25 Jun 25 20:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.43s | source
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boznz ◴[25 Jun 25 20:26 UTC] No.44381514[source]▶
maybe they should build moon landers this shape :-)
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1. emporas ◴[26 Jun 25 02:11 UTC] No.44383625[source]▶
They could do that, but a regular gomboc would be totally fine. There are no rules for spaceships that their corners cannot be rounded.

Maybe exoskeletons for turtles could be more useful. Turtles with their short legs, require the bottom of their shell to be totally flat, and a gomboc has no flat surface. Vehicles that drive on slopes could benefit from that as well.

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2. waste_monk ◴[26 Jun 25 02:56 UTC] No.44383833[source]▶
>There are no rules for spaceships that their corners cannot be rounded.

Someone should write to UNOOSA and get this fixed up.

3. nextaccountic ◴[26 Jun 25 04:00 UTC] No.44384079[source]▶
Note that a turtle's shell already approximate a Gömböc shape (the curved self-righting shape discovered by the same mathematician in the linked article)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6mb%C3%B6c#Relation_to_a...

But yeah a specially designed exoskeleton could perform better, kinda like the prosthetics of Oscar Pistorious

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4. fruitplants ◴[26 Jun 25 04:14 UTC] No.44384129[source]▶
Gábor Domokos (mentioned in the article) talked about this on one QI episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggUHo1BgTak

5. voidUpdate ◴[26 Jun 25 08:20 UTC] No.44385327[source]▶
> There are no rules for spaceships that their corners cannot be rounded

If the inside is pressurized, its even beneficial for it to be a rounded shape, since the sharp corners are more likely to fail