cicatrix

If the FTL ship appears on the orbit of Mars at the instant we have issued the order, it would have appeared 'in the past of Mars' so we should see it appearing there instantly (or taking the 20 minute lag into account) 20 minutes before we told it to fly to Mars. In other words, we should see the ship there 20 minutes before we issue that order. What if we seeing it already there then decided not to tell it to depart?

Here's a simpler illustration of FTL paradox: Imagine we have a FTL-capable ship waiting in low Earth orbit (let's assume it can warp at the speed of 20 light minutes per second). We also have a very good telescope able to detect a baseball on the orbit of Mars. Let's assume, the current distance to Mars is around 20 light minutes. We point our telescope to Mars, start looking through it and then issuing an order for the FTL ship to depart to Mars. Now, will we see the ship appearing on the orbit of Mars BEFORE 20 minutes have passed?

Just a thought - what *IF* causality gets violated regularly, but the universe simply exludes these paradoxes as they are somehow deleted from objective reality and thus we don't perceive them. So if someone creates a paradox he simply disappears (along with all the memories and traces he had left in this reality) so we act as if that person never existed. I know that this theory is unfalcifiable and unscientific, but it can explain the apparent absense of time travellers.

10/10 for being a real one.

Theoretically, *IF* Alcubierre's Drive ever works, we could go several light years away and 'catch up' with the light reflected from Earth in the past. Then we need to build a HUGE telescope (with aperture diameter of several hundreds if not thousands kilometers). Then we would be able to actually see the past on Earth. And yes, from the point of view of external observer, Alcubierre's drive allows FTL travel.

Welcome to the XXI century.

PLEASE, DO NOT RUN THIS SCRIPT! (OR DON'T SAY I DIDN'T WARN YOU)

Just press the button:

Provided it's not radioactive which seems hardly likely.

Heavy station (120 tons), made a mistake on ascent, fuel tanks emptied at Pe being still in atmosphere. Achieved orbit 70.1 x 72 km literally on the last drop of monopropellant (used RCS to gain the last few m/s) - ended with dry fuel tanks. Docking with it to refuel was another exercise.

As I said - Win64 is buggy. Some people claim it works more or less stable, but not in my case. I ran Win32 version with astronomer's pack with medium texture size + normal AGP. Didn't install lightnings, snow and dust, and auroras. Overall, it was rather pretty with ~20 FPS. Of course, I don't run all that many mods so your results can be different.

Under Linux I'd recommended 64x, but not on Windows. Decide for yourself D3D offers better FPS under Windows but consumes more memory (and since Win x64 version is glitchy you stick with 32 bit version and only 3.7 G allocatable memory). OpenGl uses less memory but drops down in FPS. It's trial & error really, after I got frustrated with it, I switched to Linux x64 + proprietary NVidia opengl driver. Been happy ever since.

Real men use tracks:

Use CKAN to install. It's much easier than to install Astronomer's pack manually. Besides, it's updated as far as I know.

Sooo, you trust your passwords to an online storage? I was perfectly content with Google notes but then they discontinued the support and offered to upgrade to Evernote. They didn't even offer any way to retrieve my notes so they were lost. I've never trusted any sensitive information to any online service and never will. I simply assume that anything that goes online is public domain.

Hermes and Mark talked to each other without any delay because they were close (Hermes was near Mars). What was heard on Earth came there with 24 minute delay. So Mark had been already rescued when it was still unknown on Earth. - - - Updated - - - *UDMH, probably (C2H8N2), not hydrazine (N2H4). They're not the same thing, still they're both poisonous.

It's iridium. I sort of missed where did he get it.

I've encountered a problem which I don't know happens by design, caused by some mod or it's a bug. I'm assembling a transfer vehicle in orbit - it's a rather big Eve lander with just enough dV to get it down and make it to orbit once again. It uses complex Asparagus staging and I don't want it to mess with tug modules that have to transfer that monster to Eve. The problem is - I specifically right click docking ports and disable cross-feed, but once I dock another tug module to it, this setting gets undone and I have to re-disable crossfeeds of all connected docking ports again. Is there a way to disable the fuel crossfeed so that it stays disabled?

It could be a disposable crane (like the one that delivered Curiosity, for example).

An operating system by itself has no value without the software that runs under its control. So, any operating system is as good for end users as good the software is. Sooo, between the two I find little differences. Both offer any service I might ever find useful. Of course, Android is more flexible in some ways, I like my smartphone acts as a flash drive when I need to transfer files to or from it which iOS doesn't allow, as I understand. Apart from that, the choice between the two is a matter of aesthetic preferences.

Just watched this awesome movie that out of the three latest sci-fi major movies (The Martian, Gravity and Interstellar) I rate the first and the most accurate one. Still, I have noticed several inaccuracies that I find hardly possible: 1. The dust storm which caused all that - is it really possible for a storm to be so violent with so thin an atmosphere? 2. Mark burns hydrazine to make water but isn't it highly toxic? Yet, he wears no protection when breathing near it. 3. He punches a hole in his space suit glove to make the outgoing air act as a reaction mass for him to fly towards Hermes - although it may sound theoretically possible I doubt it can be done IRL. Most probably this action would make him spin uncontrollably. 4. Gravity - as I understand the makers didn't focus on simulating of lesser gravity on Mars to cut the expenses. 5. Apparent lack of radiation protection - Mark spends much time outdoors but seems not to suffer from much higher radiation level. Of course I give the benefit of doubt to his suit, perhaps it offers at least some protection from it. So far this is the only things I find inaccurate in this great movie. Did anyone notice anything else?

This's been done before in different versions - search for 'KSP Grand Tour'. With ISRU and new atmo it's even easier.

This is valid ONLY if English is your native language or you know it good enough. I know .Net developers in my country who know no more than 10 words in English. For them, C# with less keywords is less stressful. Then again, class names is a separate pain (up to a point that I have seen once a whole bunch of class wrappers that simply renamed English class names to make them more meaningful for coders).

It's the stupidest idea about VB.Net. It tried to maintain backward compatibility with VB6. It a) forced Microsoft marketing department to set the default setting for Option Strict and Option Explicit to Off, include Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace. I shudder to think what would happen if the same approach was used to make C# backwards compatible with MSVC++.