mikegarrison

For any prograde orbit doesn't KSC get some free V compared to Baikonaur just because it's got a bigger lever arm from the axis of rotation?

Well, all Science articles are free one year after publication. And I assume the raw data is freely available from NASA. Peer-reviewed journals cost money and don't pay for themselves with advertising. Somebody has to pay for them. But at the same time, it is a recognized issue that it's a problem for the advancement of science if journals cost too much money. And some of them (not Science) appear to be more interested in making a profit for the publisher than in making sure the science in the journal is of the highest quality. Anyway, the whole issue of peer-review is a bit much to go into on a video game forum post.

No, not at all. Science is one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world. (The shorter the name, the more prestigious: Nature, Cell, Science, etc.) It's a career highlight for most scientists to get an article published in Science. They will follow any rules they have to follow in order to get it to happen.

Maybe they should hire that guy who jumped from an airplane into a net.

Yes, that's a difference between parimutuel betting and bookmaking. Under parimutuel betting (common at horse and dog tracks), the listed odds are not fixed. What is fixed is the percentage of the total take that will go to each winning bet (win/place/show/exacta/trifecta, etc.). As more money gets bet on favorites, the payout gets smaller so that the total amount that will get paid out remains at the correct fixed percentage of the total take. With bookmaking, the bookies try to do approximately the same thing by setting odds that they think will end up with one side of the betting covering the other side, leaving them with their rake-off. But unlike a horse track, if they guess wrong about where bettors want to put their money then the bookies can end up holding one side of the bet themselves. So typically as money builds up on one side of the book, the bookies change the odds to encourage it getting balanced out. However, each bettor gets the odds that were in place when the bet was made. What many people overlook when they talk about the betting line is that the bookies are not really setting a line for how they think the odds in the sports event are split. They are really setting a line for they they think the money that will be bet on the sports event is split. If everyone was rational and had access to the same information, then in theory this distinction would be irrelevant. But in practice, the bookies have to understand which teams are (possibly irrationally) favored or disliked by the betting public and adjust their odds according to that.

That's a loser strategy. You end up risking a very tiny win versus the loss of your entire starting stake. The only way it is guaranteed not to lose is if your starting stake is infinite and also if the casino accepts infinitely sized bets.

Of course they do. They know GPS, satellite TV, satellite weather photos, the Hubble, military spy satellites, and the space station. Just because they don't care about space station servicing missions or whether there is a delay in launching some weather sat for Bangladesh doesn't mean they are unaware of space stuff. They may not know a Falcon from a Long March or an Atlas from a Delta, but they do know the moon.

Yes, the point was to sink the cargo ships. They avoided the escorts because the escorts were dangerous and because it was the cargo that was important for the war effort.

Mr/Mrs J Average does care about trips to the moon.

When we run out of national parks to strip mine here on Earth, I say we head to the next planet and do it there.

Are you sure you are thinking of Niven? Asimov wrote a short story that relied on Mercury being tidally locked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dying_Night Maybe Niven did too. Yeah, I liked the first season of Blake's Seven. I never saw the later seasons without Blake. The thing is, Science Fiction originally consisted more of what we might call "visions of the future" than what we now think of as "hard science". Stuff like Doc Smith and AE Vogt and HG Wells and Hugo Gernsback. Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. It was more about the future than about science, although the common vision was that in the future the rational "man of science" (always a man) would end up dominating society instead of politicians or businessmen.

Brakes are off, right? Because if the brakes are on, then you don't need a treadmill. An airplane on a regular runway with the brakes on is moving nowhere even at full engine thrust. I assume you have "ideal" wheels that spin completely freely. Obviously these are not possible in the real world, but neither is a runway-sized treadmill that can move at 200+ kts. So ideal wheels. Now sit the airplane on the treadmill and turn the treadmill on. What happens? The airplane just sits there. No matter how fast the treadmill runs, the wheels spin the same speed and no force is transmitted to the plane. Thus you see that the treadmill can not transmit any force to the plane. Period. So it doesn't matter how fast or slow the treadmill is turning. The only force being transmitted to the plane comes from the engines. Therefore the plane accelerates as normal, and takes off when the airspeed gets up to Vr.

I don't know why they ever bothered with all the complicated wing/tail/airbrakes/geometry. They are basically doing the same thing the X-15 did back in the 1960s, except with people in the back seat. The X-15 didn't need all those shape-changing wings.

How?

And just how would a conveyor belt make an airplane stand still relative to the air? I agree this whole thread is nonsense, but not for the reason you state. It's an old puzzle with a known correct answer -- that the plane ignores the conveyor belt and takes off.

To some extent, you are being a snob in terms of what you allow "real SF" to be. Anyway, The Expanse is certainly real SF. So was Babylon 5. Firefly. The Twilight Zone did a lot of adaptations of classic SF stories. In fact, Star Trek did some too (e.g. "Arena"). There have also been a number of non-space SF shows on TV, like Seaquest and Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea. If you get away from the US, you also open up shows like Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, UFO, Thunderbirds, and a personal favorite of mine, Star Cops.

In many sci-fi stories, ships that are capable of other things sometimes enter orbit simply because it is convenient. It allows you to turn off the engines, which may give you a chance for maintenance or just save money, etc. While we don't actually see much of a money-based economy in Star Trek, presumably there is some cost to running the ship's engines.

I don't know. Yeah. OK, so "doomed" is an overstatement. But it wouldn't be trivial.

Not if you have the rocket at one end of the tether and the living quarters at the other end. How are you going to catch up to that rocket that is now flying away from you?

It's an old idea. NASA was proposing it back in the 1970s when they were working on a NERVA mission to Mars. They proposed putting the rocket and reaction mass one one end of the tether and the crewed part of the ship on the other end. Let the tether out for a km or so and then spin both around their common CG. (Of course, if the tether breaks you are doomed.)

Actually, that might be more scary than funny. It's the nature of aerospace that you have to start with the mission before you can even start on the design, so people are always promising new planes and rockets and such before they have started building them.

Yeah, nobody else would do something like promise a Mars landing based on a rocket that exists only on powerpoint slides.

Keep in mind that he's trying to do this for KSP. We're telling him how it works in real life, but the game may be a little different. In particular, looking up air density v. height for the Earth is not likely to give the right answer for KSP.

Area is a reference. For cars, it is the frontal area (ie. looking at it from the front, how big is the total outline of the car). For airplanes it is the wing area (ie. looking down on the airplane, what it the area of the wings, including the bit that goes through the fuselage). I don't know what area the previous poster assumed when he suggested 0.21, but my guess is that a rocket would use frontal area like a car. So probably take the widest part of the rocket and calculate the cross-sectional area.

Maybe there was some subtlety in the conditions of the contract that you failed to notice. There can also be issues with mods sometimes -- for a while many of the Near Future crewed parts did not work to satisfy tourism contracts because of a technicality in how the parts were defined.