FleshJeb

I think it was Feynman who said (paraphrasing) that the Space Shuttle was an insult to Tsiolkovsky because the heavy part went to space. I'm in the minimal-downmass camp. Most of what you launch to space should stay in space. Someone will come by to reuse the material eventually. I've had this on my office wall for a decade:

"Several studies have been conducted in recent decades on the effects of eCO2 on vegetable quality, including parameters related to taste, flavor, nutritive value, and industrial processing. These studies show that eCO2 can promote the accumulation of soluble sugar including glucose and fructose, and the accumulation of antioxidants including ascorbic acid, total phenols, and total flavonoids, but reduce the levels of protein, nitrate, Mg, Fe, and Zn in products. In practice, it is advisable to enhance vegetable quality by (1) selecting species or cultivars that respond well to eCO2; (2) providing optimal environments together with eCO2; (3) harvesting vegetables earlier than standards set at ambient CO2; and (4) combining with moderate environmental stresses. The promotion by the increased carbon fixation and thus the precursor, dilution effect, stress induction, and limitation by transpiration or N assimilation can generally explain the shifts of vegetable quality under eCO2. However, research is still required to reveal the underlying physiological and molecular mechanisms more specifically." https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2018.00924/full

I'm arguing that it SHOULD. I remember when games never got above 1.03. They were FUN. As it happens, I left them a very nasty note on their bug tracker asking them why the "heck" there were now blue LED lights and robots in my pastoral beaver game. All they needed to do was provide some good colony management tools, and it would have been perfect, but they decided to add marginally useful food items and ROBOTS. We still don't have adequate colony management tools. I quit playing Timberborn too. Oh no, I have to go outside more. Tragic. I might re-install Ghost Recon 1, or just keep playing Factorio. DSP is one of those games seems more fun to watch than it is to play. Especially since they added the proliferator mechanic. I really want to play ONI because the gas mixing and thermodynamics are fascinating, but I understand it's really buggy and non-performant. It doesn't really matter because I have the wiki memorized, a base theory-crafted and drawn on paper, and all the math done--Purchasing the game and building it would be redundant.

I'm never buying an early access game again, including this one. Between perpetual feature creep, lousy performance, and abominable QA/QC, I'm just done with supporting that method/culture of software development. Call me when the game is finished and at a high standard (and I don't mean 1.0). I quit KSP 1 after 6000 hours because I just couldn't take being an unpaid software tester for an increasingly bad product anymore. This game is easily going to make 10s of millions, you can afford the staff. I also remain convinced that 99% of UI designers of the last 15 years are blissfully unaware that people actually have to use their product to do things. The execution of what you've got is really good, but it's still noisy, flat, and has transparency, so it's flawed at a very fundamental level. A pig with great lipstick is still a pig.

I chatted with a fellow behind my office today. He works for a neighboring business that makes some fairly mundane/everyday electrical components. He told me that some of their sensor parts are on a Mars rover, and they’ve got some that are going on Artemis as well. I googled the company and it turns out they also have stuff on JWST. Mind sufficiently blown. Needless to say, I invited him to come back and chat ANYTIME he likes. ( I’d be more specific but I’d end up doxxing myself.)

A lazy joke for the hurr durr crowd. Try: —Tory has finally accepted the superiority of the Oxford Comma. —Meant to login to Tinder.

And the only thing that smells worse is nihilism.

Y’all need some John Locke.

Let me summarize: It’s a character study of the lead flight director. My assessment is that if Artemis fails, it definitely won’t be Rick LaBrode’s fault. Also, the newscasters back in the studio were offensively vapid. The forum filter prevents me from giving a proper take on the contrast.

I’ve used a single claw with landing legs arranged radially around it to brace. It’s been a few years, so I’m not sure if that’s still viable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_(Clarke_short_story)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_interferometer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferometry

Jet engines work as normal in atmosphere. They need an air intake to work. Yes it's unrealistic. Breaking Ground props were explicitly coded not to work underwater. Yes, I think that's a stupid decision. Normal wing/control surface pieces WILL work as props when attached to Breaking Ground rotors. I's pretty fiddly, so most people avoid it. (I've never done it, and I LIKE fiddling with details.) Tips: A submarine is just an airplane in a much denser medium, so minimizing drag should be your primary design constraint if you want any speed at all. A jet sub that can do 20m/s seems to be a good average target, although I've gotten up to 40m/s on more optimized (but not outlandish) designs. Very few parts are natively denser than water, so making a sub sink is hard. The most commonly used one is LOTS of full ore tanks. I've ended up building a few subs in the 600-1000 ton range. I've not been able to maintain approximate neutral buoyancy with more than about an hour's worth of fuel. Once that gets burnt, you're headed to the surface without active control. There are design tricks/exploits you can do to have variable buoyancy. The primary one is clipping a lot of the smallest ore containers into a cargo bay. It works in reverse of normal physics, since the mass stays the same, but when you open the bay, suddenly the volume of all those ore containers is in the water and you float. I recommend using the Vessel Mover mod to get to the water from the runway, although trying to get there with wheels is a fun challenge.

A scene where they actually do gold mass correctly:

The mechanism is exactly as you describe it in World Out of Time, and he uses it twice, but the setting is different. I have the book and re-read the relevant parts this morning. We might be conflating two (or more) different stories. "Falling into a hole and discovering magic" is older than Merlin. My ex wife let me keep a big chunk of her extensive science fiction collection. I should call her and go bum some more.

In the not-too-distant future these kinds of torturous odysseys of failed remembrance will be trivial to resolve. It will be a loss. Thus far I've dug into The Closet Of Dooooom to retrieve my two Saberhagen books, and speed-flipped through them to see if I can find any references. I've slowed down to devour a few choice chapters, then moved on to wikipedia to see if I can get a sense of which author would have written such a thing, or if any titles ring a bell. Thus far I suspect it was written somewhere in the 50s to the 70s, by one of the New Wave-or-adjacent authors. However, I recall the story being more prosaic than something that Delaney or Bester would have written. Somebody functioning in the space between New Wave and Golden Age SF. I've re-familiarized my self with quite a few authors who I now KNOW didn't write it. Taking a journey and chasing down rabbit holes and dead ends is fun and enriching. I hope people always find ways to continue to be driven mad by their own obsessive curiosity. In any case, if there's any two other people here who I think might know the answer, it's @Gargamel and @NovaSilisko. (Sorry for the ping fellas, there's a literary conundrum afoot--You know how it is.)

I know I've read this, but it's such a common trope, I can't remember. My gut is saying Saberhagen, but I've never read the Empire of the East. Perhaps this event was referenced in the later Swords books, which I HAVE read. Otherwise, possibly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_World_Out_of_Time https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LongevityTreatment https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FountainOfYouth

You Fool! RIP to one of the dirtiest, nicest men in Hollywood. (This is probably a SFW video.)

I didn't read the news item, but I'm assuming they're intended to be at least partially sacrificial and rapidly replaceable. In which case we have our old friend, Elastic Failure. Band name, calling dibs!

Hey FLAP YOU, buddy! Hey, I'm glad it worked. (I bet it would have taken off without the flaps ;P ) They've definitely changed some stuff since I last played (1.9ish)-The turboprops didn't have alternators, and the optimal AoA for all blades was the same. Did you have the aero debug options on? The PAWs will show lift AND drag from the blades. I still have never gotten dihedral main wings with incidence to contribute to roll stability in any configuration. I HAVE gotten a zero incidence T-tail to work with 5 deg ANhedral, because Surface Prograde tends to hold my planes a fraction of a degree nose-down. I set my abort button to undeploy the props. Magic airbrake.

Your COL is still way too far back. Put it right on top of the COM and let SAS handle the stability. I think those engines decrease in mass if you set the max torque lower on the part (the electric ones do). Drop them to about 10-15%, they have PLENTY of torque. That should push your COM back to a reasonable spot. Don't bother with flaps in KSP, they just push your nose into the ground. If you have to, put some control surfaces on the leading edge that deploy upward. I think one of those icons is RCS Build Aid--Check your center of thrust by putting a tiny rocket engine on the axis of the motor. You can also get a better handle on the aerodynamics by temporarily taking the blades off and looking at the plane with CorrectCOL. Incidence + dihedral on wings is generally counterproductive in KSP. Anhedral vertical stabilizers is good to help the counter-roll issue from rudders. With props, max RPM always. Vary the torque to just barely keep the RPS maxxed. For blade angle, I build them as a flat disk, and deploy from 0 to about 65 deg. I keep a KAL linked to my throttle and do a linear torque from 0-100, and blade-pitch is 0-10% @ 0 deg, 10%-67% is 25-55deg with a slight curve. 67%-100% is 55deg-65deg, although most low-power builds can't get to 65 and it's actually counterproductive to go that high. So throttle ends up being about picking what's best for the speed regime, rather than just MORE POWER.

Invited you to the PM conversation that contains the resources. I think once you've got your stuff dialed in, I might appropriate some of your methodology. It should be a similar process, just different things to optimize. Now to find the energy...

I see we're still going with: "so glossy it looks like it has 2cm of ClearCoat on it." "enough light bloom to embarrass JJ Abrams" The recent fad of flat monochrome UI buttons still hasn't died, eh? Despite studies pointing to serious usability issues? https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/

In case anyone doesn't know: Booots wrote Kerbal Wind Tunnel. Booots, speaking as someone who finds the thermal system the most interesting and challenging aspect of KSP, and has done a LOT of atmo-diving in planes, you can only handwave it in cases like Duna and Sarnus. That said: I would definitely limit your calcs to between 5 and 25 degrees AOA, for reasons I'm sure you're aware. Disregard the subsonic regime, since it's a discontinuity, and will be pretty much a rounding error on range. Inclination/course is going to be your second-most influential variable, due to the effects of centripetal acceleration. You will get wildly different ranges flying east vs. west. I don't know that this project has an operational utility (other than fun) given that one can stay in orbit for "free", and just re-enter later. If you're looking to use it to make big changes in landing latitude (as opposed to longitude), see my prior point. This is really similar to a project I shelved last year, seeing if I could calculate re-entry flight paths that minimize total heating, and/or max radiated wattage. I suspect there are some fascinating windows in there. I have the atmo/temp models, I just don't have the drive to get it done.

Anton Petrov's (science and space communicator) son Neil: