FleshJeb

To economically justify that kind of launch cadence you have to have demand. While I recognize that reduced launch costs help drive a "virtuous cycle", the rest of the space industry isn't going to have that much tonnage to throw into orbit within the next decade or three.

Given that accidents and failures are not and "if", but a "when", that Mechazilla setup looks like a great way to lose a substantial amount of hardware and infrastructure. Maybe building a backup tower onsite is cheaper than a crawler/crane, but that thing is going to make Hindenburg look cute someday.

I took a look into it, and I rescind my earlier assertion--It's just something I've heard a couple of times, but it may very well be the product of unconscious bias or chauvinism. Yeah, that's not going to be a productive avenue of inquiry. Their bit on looking in LEO is also bunk. IIRC we have every object down to about 1cm^2 fairly-well cataloged out to HEO. Techno-signatures farther out in the solar system may be worth looking for, but even that's going to be moot within a couple hundred years as our descendants expand and explore more with increasingly sophisticated tools. That's just inevitable and doesn't require some "hurry up" initiative. I checked out the Galileo Project project website, and this is almost certainly a grift. (If there's one enduring epiphany I had from reading Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, it's that the best salespeople CAN'T believe in what they're selling, no matter how good it is--The "meta" of sales requires a certain cynicism [Edit: and the ability to understand the structure of something from the outside] that is mutually exclusive with being a True Believer. Edit: In the book, the protagonist was selling Buddhism to further his own ends.) My experience with meeting some of the "alternative health" crowd is that the people at the top may have a certain amount of belief, but they're very, VERY conscious of where there's money to be made.

My understanding is that (for complicated linguistic reasons) English is uniquely well-suited to wordplay. Also, almost every native English-speaker is required to study Shakespeare as "serious literature", and he engages in almost constant wordplay. So, I think there are structural and cultural reasons why it's considered valid (even encouraged) for intellectuals to engage in it. Short Answer: Blame Shakespeare for being a cunning linguist with a mastery of his tongue. https://www.curioustaxonomy.net/puns/puns.html --- Back to the original topic: Even if the primary aim might not be taken very seriously, with proper data collection, we might get some great secondary science out of this initiative. It could be a fantastic opportunity. I just started listening to an interview with Avi Loeb and he doesn't sound particularly crazy. The same channel has interviewed Stephen Wolfram multiple times regarding the "Wolfram Physics Project", and he sounds flarping bonkers. I get the impression his research assistants are using his project (and $) as an excuse to play with interesting ideas in computer science. Interview here (fantastic channel--John always asks some very sharp and insightful questions): As to Loeb's money sources? Fleecing wealthy crackpots has been a tradition probably since before recorded history. I just like to think of it as "alternative taxation."

I wonder if they sanity-checked the automatically-generated drag cube, or if the thrust axis is aligned with the center of the model...Or any other thing you learn in your first week of drafting school.

@swjr-swis @Hotel26 This is exactly the type of discussion I was hoping to foster. No, we don't have any material disagreements. I wonder if one could retain the horizontal flight control scheme while using a vertical reference by using Action Group Sets. (I'm not sure this is possible.) Bind all reaction wheels, control surfaces, and gimbals to KAL-1000s. One for each axis. In AGS 0 (horizontal flight), assign each KAL to its respective axis as normal. In AGS 1 (vertical flight), assign the KALs and swap the Roll and Yaw axes. Then use the reverse input button for whichever the "odd" axis turns out to be. Things I'm unsure of: Can reaction wheels and gimbals even be assigned per-axis? (I haven't played KSP since April.) Can Action Group Sets be switched by a button push? IF this works, you could transform ANY 90 deg rotation of control axes you wanted.

I'll make the argument that using a second, vertical reference necessarily reverses at least one control axis from the "expected" direction. From a cognitive standpoint, I find manually holding my heading indicator on the horizon line leads to more instinctual and timely error correction in the hover. I would be interested in a comparison of the two techniques when VTOLing in uneven terrain. I can't even boot KSP right now, otherwise I'd test it myself. However, I've taken off and landed next to every monolith on Kerbin multiple times.

Autostruts DO cause more calculations, because they're adding an additional connection between parts. Try building a craft with no autostruts that gives you a noticeable performance degradation, and then reload it with everything autostrutted. You WILL see a difference. (A good way to test this is with Editor Extensions, which allows you to turn autostruts on and off for all parts.)

Trim only works when SAS is off.

An almost hour-long interview with Tory Bruno. Between the Tortoise and the Hare, I'm putting my money on the Tortoise.

How does forum-posting etiquette differ from Discord-posting etiquette? Compare and contrast.

I don't want to live in a world where human beings don't spend ridiculous amounts of money satisfying their raw curiosity. Booo! Booo! I say!

Here's the how the main mirror of the Extremely Large Telescope will look: https://elt.eso.org/mirror/M1/ 798 hexagonal segments = 6 sectors x 133 segments. Those 133 segments are all uniquely-shaped.

Sorry, I don't know. I haven't tried anything above 1.8.1, and I've quit playing after 8 years due to all the bugs and changes in basic mechanics. If I do start up again, I'll probably stick to 1.7.3 or 1.3.1.

I would disagree with the usage of "pretty good"--In a plane whose wings have AoA, you're going to end up very far off course if you walk away from it for a few minutes. Wings have AoA and zero dihedral. I don't find that dihedral works very well on mid-low-winged planes with wing AoA. SAS set to Prograde. A portion of the tail has zero AoA, and is fixed (not a control surface, or a locked control surface) for passive pitch stability. This configuration will result in SAS Prograde giving the plane a slight nose down attitude relative to the velocity vector. With the above in mind, I give the zero AoA tail 5 degrees of ANhedral, which will passively correct the roll.