tomf

Pretty much everything bigger than a cm is tracked on radar but for smaller objects you have to rely on shielding and the size of space. I expect missions leaving Leo don't spend any time in place where debris is thickest. Perhaps a few orbits low where debris will have decayed away quickly and then away.

My parcel contains an alien camping power generator. "Just feed a litre† into the reservoir of this handy 2kg acme fusion generator and the p-p fusion will generate enough energy to power your acme anti-gravity mattress for the whole night"* † units translated to earth units *real alien campers think this is cheating

But it does in theory exist? Edit: I only mentioned alcubierre because that is why I believe negative mass is theoretically possible.

Alcubierre dive plans rely on negative mass don't they? Could you generate lots of negative mass and drop it into your black hole?

It's a little hard to see, but it isn't what you would normally term a hohmann transfer. That is normally used to travel between two bodies in orbit around the same third body e.g. mun and minmus or kerbin and Duna. It also has the characteristic that the pe is exact at the orbit of the inner body and the ap is at the orbit of the outer body.

I assume the regenerative cooling is enough to take the heat away from the bells where the rs-68s ablative cooling wasn't enough. Raptors were designed to be used in clusters after all.

There is the ISO standard for dates and times https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 The problem with time is that the units that are most important to people on earth, years and days, aren't constant, aren't nice multiples of each other Are only relevant on one tiny blue spec in the universe. Any attempt to make something so inherently messy make sense is always going to fail somewhere.

The person responding played it well "I'm not going to call you an idiot in this public meeting, instead when I have thought of a polite way to explain it I will email the explanation to you"

I think people who think spaceX is primarily about money are underestimating Musk's ambition. He is already rich, but he wants to be the man who Saves Mankind. In his mind Tesla will save mankind from global warming Space X will save mankind from asteroid strike etc. The ai company will save mankind from a rogue ai scenario. He was going to be the man to save the Thai boys. Even the boring company is supposed to save mankind from the tyranny of traffic. In most men this would be a Messiah delusion bordering on mental illness but through luck and skill Musk has got to a position where he has to be taken seriously.

Wikipedia does have some stuff about using neutron bombardment to reduce nuclear waste https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_transmutation

Airfix appear to have made lots https://www.ebay.co.uk/b/Airfix-Rockets-Space-Models/1189/bn_37573175

It's going to depend on the temperature, close in to a bright star with a strong wind it is going to be hard to hold on to anything

Looking at the video I can't believe that is the most efficient air swimming stroke. I would have thought something like breast stroke would be best. I have also had to do some experiments in blowing. I reckon I can blow 5l (I have unusually large lungs) through a 4.5mm diameter straw in 3.5 seconds for a velocity of 90 m/s¶ and 0.5 kgm/s momentum. I could do that about once every 10 second without getting to dizzy giving me an acceleration of 0.0006m/s^2 The intake is going to be pretty directionless so should have minimum momentum. ¶ 90m/s is about double what an internet search suggests is an upper bound.

I think the usual plan has it being lowered down from geostationary orbit. If you keep the centre of mass at the right height then it will remain stationary relative to earth's surface. Because it isn't moving you can just continue down into the atmosphere until you got the ground, no re-entry heating or anything. There well be problems with the cable having angular momentum, spinning but those will have to be solved well before it is long enough to get to the atmosphere.

Contracts have been awarded to build a reactor in space to revive nuclear propulsion. https://spacenews.com/general-atomics-wins-darpa-contract-to-design-nuclear-reactor-to-power-missions-to-the-moon/

I don't care how clever and good your sheilding material is. Nothing short of magic is blocking the radiation in this scenario https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/

Ian M Bank's Algebraist has portals that only work in flat areas of spacetime so any nearby mass, e.g. a planet causes the portal to explode. That leads to ships being used to get around inside a system and get to and from the portals which are in distant orbits. It isn't very compatible with portal based fuel transfer though.

One of the mission objectives for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is to provide hish speed data relay for rovers on the surface of mars, which technically aren't satellites themselves are close enough.

I'm afraid I don't have time to look after this mod any more so I am going to leave it in the more than capable hands of @linuxgurugamer Thank you to everyone who has downloaded it over the years.

I think that the angle to the horizon is pretty much a red herring. The star nearest the zentith (the point right above you) is determined by you latitude, the position of earth in it's orbit and your local time. You could calculate the local time from the fact that it is sunset, the position of earth in it's orbit and your lattitude if you had too though.

Today's launch is supposed to be passing over the UK at a good time for seeing. Does anyone know a website that will predict when and where in the sky to see it?

I've found an interesting feature. The config and the description text for the toroidal antiproton tank say that it should hold 10,000 antimatter and it is priced with a base cost of 10,000 + 100*10,000. However when I add it to a craft it has an antmatter capacity of only 250 and costs 985,000when empty. This is in a test install with only warp plugin and community resource pack installed. I also tried deleting the dlls in the plugin directory and then the tank behaved as normal, so I think it is something in the plugin code that is messing with the capacity. All the other antimatter tanks are behaving as expected.

I'm landing on Troni from the other worlds pack and I'm finding that wheels, lander legs and drills keep falling through tthe surface. Is this likely to be an issue with Kopernicus itself or with the planet pack? It doesn't look like the planet pack has been updated in a while. can anyone suggest a similar pack that is still being worked on?

I think that with interstellar bon voyage is seeing the same problems as mentioned with kerbalism a few pages back. Interstellar has replaced the modules on all the solar pannels to ones that bon voyage doesn't recognise. Would it be possible to add this support as well?

That does sound like a bug and I have no idea what is causing it. Would you be able to pm me a save file so I can try to reproduce? I'll need to know what other mods are required to load the save.