My limited experience with lasers is the heatsink problem is significant, so worry about dissipating a couple KW of heat in your hand or backpack, not carrying around a mere couple KWh of energy.
I imagine it would sound and feel much like holding an industrial heat gun for awhile. This might be a problem.
No Man's Sky doesn't have a seamless world. It is separated between space and planets. The first clue is the incorrect size ratio of ships to planets when in space and when on planets. The second clue to this is the video, at 2:16 in the video[0], two ships most far away from the player( not the three close in front ) disappear into the planet's atmosphere, that is the line that separates the two worlds.
The discrete version of fast Fourier transform essentially does a matrix vector multiply faster than usual. If you are not familiar with matrix vector multiply, then think lots of multiplications and additions. Now, what fast Fourier transform does is take advantage of the fact xy + xz = x(y+z) that we know form mid school algebra. Note the right hand side has fewer operations to perform. The other thing that FFT uses is symmetry. It recognizes that two things that it needs to compute are really the same in value, so it computes it only once.
You can understand FFT without much deep math, it is just clever use of these two properties. Study it, you will really enjoy that cleverness. It is one of those algorithms that still makes me break out into a grin.
That said FFT can get more mathematically involved when you want to compute them on vectors whose lengths are not powers of two. Then it gets into primality, Chinese remainder theorem etc. However, for basic understanding and coding it you need none of these.
EDIT:
I would say dont get lost in the details, those butterfly diagrams etc. Just focus on what is the key idea that it is exploiting. There are essentially just two ideas: ditributivity: xy + xz = x(y+z) and symmetry/associativity.
May be a good idea is to sit down and derive a different way to group the multiply and adds, using those properties, to make it go fast. Dont worry if that does not beat the best algorithms out there. You will just get a better feel for the underlying mechanism.
I did implement those, but the deeper understanding eludes me. Honestly I never gave them much though, when it comes to choose whether to take a week and learn it properly I always rather code or do something tangible. Except for linear algebra, which is something I might use in the future.
> because I don't have the background, and I wish I could. Differential equations and fft come to mind.
You should just resolve learn these things and work through a section a day.
I have a math degree but never learned these things because my department was more pure than engineering oriented (an ode course wasn't required) and wanted to learn both for my day job. Turns out they are both fairly simple, and there are tons of free books. Esp differential equations have this mysticism to them before you start, and it turns out they're actually very straight-forward. Almost depressingly so, until you get pretty deep into the analysis behind them.
So... here's my encouragement to you -- just do it!
Or the artificial Swatch time, which doesn't solve anything. We already have an international time, Coordinated Universal Time. It only takes to know your offset and some basic addition to convert.
Converting longitude and latitude to some other character base, like someone suggested would be better.
