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guest
· 9 years ago
· FIRST
The writer of this wins all the awards
21
guest
· 9 years ago
That sounds great, except non-graphite pencils exist.
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chu
· 9 years ago
I feel like you could literally just get a normal ballpoint pen and instead of the plastic tube use an enclosed metal one and fill it with atmospheric pressure nitrogen or some other benign thing, then seal off the top. It really shouldn't be that hard.
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omglmnop
· 9 years ago
So each individual pen should be pressurized? I'm sure that was considered at some point, but that sounds extremely dangerous, not to mention expensive
3
omglmnop
· 9 years ago
After doing more reading on the pen, it turns out that is indeed how they operate. However it is important to note that the pen was developed privately, through capital, not through government funded research and was also designed to withstand extreme temperatures for underwater/high altitude writing.
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chu
· 9 years ago
Alright see, that second part is important. If it was simply to write in any orientation, that's one of the easiest engineering feats ever. You could either have atmospheric pressure in the ink tube so that when you bring it to the lower pressure space capsule there's a pressure difference, or install a one-way valve and blow into the tube every so often to slightly increase the pressure manually.
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