Okhin

My all time fav' is Strange Days, by Katherine Bigelow with Ralph Fienes, Juliet Lewis and Angela Basset. It's a techno thriller about events similar to the one who started the LA's racial riots of 1995. You have paranoid infused conspiracy, SQUIDS which allow you to record your sensory input on minidisks and to replay it later, a live concert of Skunk Anansie and a racist, violent and militarized LAPD (we're talking checkpoint in the street defended by tanks), all with a end of the world feeling that you can only feel during the 2000 new years eve in a society on a brink of chaos. Second one would be Jonhy Mnemonic probably. Or the John Wick trilogy. But I do have a soft spot for anything Keanu Reeves soooo...

Well, the question is how many people would you save ? And how ? I agree that there might be some limitation on how many fissile materials we can found, so mass Orion'ing our way out might not be doable easily, there might be a limit (I have no idea if uranium and/or thorium are rare materials or not). And please, leave Africa alone. Or take them with you. There's already equatorial launch sites in remote-ish area (like Kourou, French Guyana. Ok population mangament in the jungle is near impossible to do, but still), but I think that if you want to evacuate a lot of people, you need to shorten the time of travel from where they live to the space center. Or assume that most of the people you'll evacuate are people already living near the launch sites. I see no issue with turning Central Park into a mass evacuation center for instance. Yes, you'll have to work some orbital mechanics at some point, but having ships jumping from plane to plane to get all the evacuee on a better intercept course with the closest ark is something manageable. It's like flight control but for space. Plus were already doing it (with unmanned satellites, granted). So I really don't think that you want or need to be that far away from your home. Ok, if your nuking your way out, you might want to have a no man's land around your launch center, but that should be like what, one hundred km radius ? People are going to take some Sivert anyway while they'll be in space so... The getting the people up there is not really the hardest part of the plan, and you can probably spend your last year or two doing just that. Meaning that you need to have something to host them starting year 8. Probably a bit before, even if it's not complete. An habitat seeded with population and enough engineering tutoring can probably grow the habs to host more people, to grow the habs even further. That's skills and community building. We're good at that as a species. I do not think you really need to screen people before hand, just give the tools and training. Maybe the first hardcore engineer who will have to live in cramped space doing the seeding would need to be screened somehow, but with a good enough education system that should not really be a requirement. Sure the work is harder, but the incentive is you'll be out of danger sooner, that should help kickstarting volunteers. And you need a lot of people. You need cooks to arrange for food from nutritious paste. You need social workers to help settle with things. You need designers which will try to pack more functions and more elegance in objects. You need arc wielder and drone operators. You basically need a lot of people to get that ark done. Sending people in space is easy. Training them is easy. motivating them and having them coordinates is ... a bit harder, but it's easier than we can think of. Really, the issue, for me, is the bootstrapping of things. The first seeds. What do you need to send up there first to host your first crew of habitats and community builders ? Yu'll still have Earth for ten years, so you can run supply run until biosphere are started up. And you need multiple seeds too. In case some of them go bad. Also it allows to have more people working on growing living space at the same time. You'll connect the habs later on. Or not. But start a lot of projects, iterate and share the design, send regular people up there do the building, and gives them skills to do it. Resources might be an issue though. But then you do not rely on a single space center. Or ten of them. Convert any airport into a space port, and every planes into a space fairing thing, You do not need planes anyway, everything you're building is sent up there. Convert the oceans into hydrolox, you'll have enough rocket fuel, batteries and electronics requires a lot of rare earth materials, but we're currently stock piling them in densely populated neighborhood where those rare earth are left to kills anyone living nearby. That would be my plan (After a long bike ride, my head got cleaner)

I was wondering how this would translate into a KSP challenge. I mean, even in career, ten years is a long enough time to send and build crazy excrements in LKO and fil it up with tourists. And maybe we do not want to play the tedious part of running a space travel agency which basically takes people of KSC and send them to LKO for transfer aboard an ark or something that will go somewhere (I mean, refuelling run are tedious enough, sending a thousand or more kerbal in space will probably be boring), but maybe 2 years to get as many kerbals as you can in some habitable structure above the Mun orbit (just to not have everything sitting in 75km orbit waiting for the destruction of Kerbin at very close proximity. Even if it would be very kerbal). No need to fly each runs, but is tehre a way to make it a playable ad interesting challenge ? in Stock and/or with mods ? Anyone interested to do it (worst case will be I'll give it a shot anyway :p)

What was the amount of population moved ? And the population density at startup and destination point ? I mean, moving machinery is easy compared to move population. Also, you do not need to feed the machine, and there was no buffer zone for stacking hundred of thousands of people while you send the up there hundreds by hundreds. Not to diminishes the work being done there, soviets seems to have a good comprehension at logistics (since they were kinda resources limited, they needed too, US would probably have built new plants elsewhere and sabotaged the old ones). That's a feat I knew happened (thanks to Heart of Iron IV), but never really red about before Also, related : https://what-if.xkcd.com/7/

Few people are needed to develop and launch them, yes. On the scale required to evacuate as much people as possible ? That's another issue. The evacuation part of it would be nightmarish. We're barely able to evacuate small town when faced with fires and floods, I do not want to think of the logistics of a plan to take billions of people in space, or even millions. I mean, evacuate a town like NYC or Paris and sent its population to space ? Good luck with tha. Can be done, but that would involve a lot of diplomacy, yelling and waiting in lines for days with no real source of food nearby. Those earth evacuation project are not much an engineering project as they are a population and crowd control one on a planetary scale. But then, people are also able to gather in pack for days and listen for music, so maybe setup some giant concerts with drug and food distribution at the spaceport for evacuating everyone will makes things easier for everyone. Instead of having them just waiting in line (I suppose the most angry people will eventually get calm and starts to talk to people while facing boredom and / or extinction, but those first days will be hard core)

While I'm at it, Becky Chambers, in her book Record of a Spaceborn Few describes the Exodus fleet, which basically is the result of a common effort to evacuate Earth. But I'm not sure they did it in ten years (it was more like fifty years iirc), or what was the technology already known to them when they started it. The Homesteader class ship are built around taking care of each inhabitants, and do with what you have at hand, meaning a lot of recycling, even corpse are turned into soil to grow stuff. At some point they make contact with other civilizations, but I do not remember them being able to move their ships past a certain point, they're orbiting a star in their Homesteaders. Becky Chambers made the assumption that, faced to the emergencies, people would set aside their differences to be able to work together. I think their was a government collapse involved in that, and the project was the result of mainly engineers and scientists cannibalizing what was left of nation based space program. That is definitely a more optimistic view of human being than mine, and for once that's a civilian space project, not a military one. But agin, not sure if the Exodus Fleet was built in ten years or more. That's a tight schedule, and what you can do basically depends on what exists when the ten years clocks fires up.

Every bits of media produced and relayed exist in a complex world (ours), and as such come with context and refers to this context. As such, every bits of media is political, whether it's intentional or not. It's especially true in fiction (not only science), because the author wants you to see a world that is more or less different than ours and making you dream about those differences and makes you build the gap between those worlds and yours (because we all perceive the world in different ways, we don't understand it the same way, and so we live in different worlds). Heck, even advertisement is political. The existence of it, but also the messages they convey. There's nothing that do not carry a political meaning. The questions, if any, are more about discussing and dissecting those messages, how we relate to them, how much do we agree to them and how can we use those views in our worlds. And yes, every bits of media reflects the world views of the authors, even if they know their own biases, acknowledges them and tries to work around them, the fact that their trying to work around their bias (or not) will be seen into their works and it is political. Does it change the global quality of stuff being written ? I think it's not related. A highly political work can be badly written. This is an issue I have with a lot of essay, I tend to find them boring or unreadable, except for some exceptions, and I prefer my political messages being carried by fiction. But that's because having to work through a linear argumentation from point A to Z is painful, that's not how I think.

Not sure if intraverted nerds are the best kind of people for teamwork and lng term isolation. Because you do not have online socialization anymore, everyone being dead, even the bots, you'll only have the people living around you to talk to. And even intraverted people need to talk to others at some point, I mean, even I, after what's almost 6 month with seeing only my housemates, I'm starting to miss human contact. Or you'll have pets. But pets in zero-G might be weird :p And you need to reproduce them, because they tend to die faster than humans. So maybe engineer and train them a bit too have them running parts of the maintenance stuff and they'll be able to take over when humans will die. A whole generation of cryo babies raised by fluffy animals. What could go wrong ?

Well yes. Also, I wonder what might be the mindset of the people going up there. I mean, you want them to survive on the longest time possible, so not getting suicidal too fast. They will have lost all their relatives and friends, and being stranded up there with strangers (but skilled ones), so you might want to avoid some specific psychological profiles. You probably want to pack some shrinks in your crews, and other kind of people to help with coping with the trauma of losing several billions of people just under your eyes. So, you'll have to have ways to blow some steam. Which will likely involve altered states of consciousness. Meaning, being high on drugs and/or hormones somehow and then being able to work on your trauma. So of course you'll have party up there.

Well, the project is supposed to be about saving as much people as you can, not about building a gene-seeded cryo arch that will automate itself to rebuild life on earth :p. But if I were to do that, I would probably send some of these arch toward other star system, you know, just in case. Also sterilized does not means no romantics. On the contrary, it means as much romantics as you want, without any long lasting consequences, except for the emotional ones.

Well, even in this case, you'll still have local politics issues and an overhead for working on this scale (man, the chain of information would be messy). Also corruption. I think that what makes it impossible is the emergency. It would require a lot of resources just to maintain enough of a dedicated workforce to build the thing and run the lottery* that you'll probably end up in an industrial authoritarian worldwide government. However, one thing that can makes it a bit easier to function is preexisting infrastructure. If you already have colonies in space, even if they're non purely closed loops system, they have some reliability in them and can probably be assembled in a bigger and more reliable system. That's what's being done in The 100 (at least, that's the opening of the series), and it did not last long. It lasted long enough though. So, if you already have part of your population airborne, with orbital industrial facilities, then you can focus on sending people up there, and have those orbiters manage to build the breathing space needed. You'll get more people up there but you'll have over crowded life support systems. Which can be figured out on the go. So yeah, my plan for that is to rely on what's being done up until now. That's the whole Musk plan with the Mars colony. And the whole reason a lot of people are working on having space program, to be able to have that pre existing infrastructure before needing them in an emergency. So my plan would be to get fundings for space agencies, before we're in that kind of situation. * Because in the end, I think that lottery is the most efficient way to get enough diverse people and skillsets up there. The other option is to send people you know up there, which gives your project a bit more reason to be hated

10 years to have most of governments on the world working together ? Nope, can't do it :p Not even because they won't agree to work together. They probably would. Some of them at least. But then, you need to have commitees up and running to decide who does what, what protocols to use to share science, who will be in charge of what, which people will go up (because not all of them would, so you need to chose who will survive, and I do not think it can end well). And given how much bureaucracy you need to decide how much salmon Canada will exports to the EU per year, I do not believe anything can be done on a planetary scale at this point. Not in ten years. After that, the most effective plan I can think of, will be to be in charge of a country with enough power to be able to seize aluminum, steel and fuel in abhorrent quantities and to launch whatever the biggest ship I have at this time, as often as possible, like once a day. I cannot convert the industrial line to produce only rocket part. That part alone would probably takes 10 years. So I have to do with current capabilities (I can probably boost them a bit), but I'll end up launching one, maybe two starship-like a day. That's not a lot, and already feels like a lot The closed loop environment is way harder than it seems. Hydroponics are nice, but you need a full fledged ecosystems, able to recycle everything back to nitrate, oxygen and water, while protecting yourself from radiations and stuff. And you need enough people to breed without too much inbreeding too. Or genetics patching facilities (hey, let's go down the eugenics way at this point). You better have nailed it down, because if the environment fails, then all you have a space tomb. WHich is kind of cool too, but still. Vat grown food still needs intrants. And the closer you'll get to the date of impact, the less people will agree to help you back on earth. Because most of them won't make it to the surface. Organized crime will probably be emerging from lottery rigging to get people ion the list and sell tickets, corruption will sky rocket with politicians and program employee wanting to save their families, and in the end you'll be less and less effective. So, my personal plan, would probably to lean back and enjoy the last ten year on Earth, beofre having the best party ever while everything else collapse and explode in fire.

And so, I've been part hunting and after killing a lot of solar panel and other small parts, here it is, a small O'Neil cylinder like (not closed, no environmental control), at just a bit above 1000 parts. So, that's from the side, just after all the docking have been adjusted with the telescopic arms. Before freeing the cylinders. I've stopped myself at two stack of 5 MK2 modules, so that's a short O'Neill. Deployed, and the rotor have started to move their weight. An emergency braking test was ran and concluded successfully (at least, rotor brakes aren't like wheel brakes. They do brake.) Valentina is having lots of funz in the simulation, and really wants to build this thing for real. The main issue is time. I mean, there's two cylinders. Each made of 8 sections. Plus the central spar, which is still not complete (lacks of docking port for instance). That's a bunch of launches. I need to figure out RCS'ing all of these and dual dock the ring sections, before docking them to the retractable arms of the central spar. Maybe I should assemble the ring first, and then dock the central spar inside of it. I've got telescopic arms for that, should do it. Anyway, if you want to try it, the O'Kerman cylinder is on Kerbal X. And all this "engineering" happened, because I'm procrastinating building a return craft for Eve. Oh, and yes. It's pure stock (with Breaking Ground though)

Working on a sort of O'Neil cylinder around my hollow station design. 1800 part count. The seconds last forever (took me almost one minute to go through 10s of game). Or it's so massive it's a black hole and times goes slower ? Anyway, the game got out of memory killed before I could take any screenshot (and it's mostly R&D, so launching the thing is a different topic). So, now I'm working on lowering the part count somehow. 1800 of them is too much for my poor laptop it seems.

The Non-Commercial close does not forbid the licensor to use a patreon to fund its project or effort. It does so for the licensee, according to the creative commons wiki (it's a wiki, it's not legal counsel, if you really need legal counsel, seeks some to a lawyer, license clause might work differently in some legal contextes) In this case, it means that @Gameslinx can very well lock his module behind a patreon for instance. But if another team uses the mod as a dependency and wants to have their mods behind a paywall, they would not be allowed to do so. Basically, the creator of the project can do whatever they want with it, they're not bind by the license. The license is for everyone else.

Well, I do not run KIS and I have no issue with filling the stock container, so there might be some mods interaction involved at this point.

You can open all your Oscar b windows and pin them, and then open one other tank and click the "Out" button on it, it will transfer from this tanks, to all other tanks with opened windows. Works the other way around (to fill one big tank with a cluster of smaller one). But yeah, transferring fuels is a bit tedious in stock. I have space station with tens of tanks docking to each other for refueling purposes and it's a pain (also there's a bug in 1.10.x which makes refueling not working all the time). I'm using a mod to make my life easier (also, you can balance your tank to keep the Center of Mass at the same point, which is good for plane I've heard, I would not know, I don't do planes). The mod is TAC Fuel balancer.

The KSP stock inventory is weird, and is something different from the KIS inventory system, for historical reasons I suppose, meaning, forget about putting deployable science in Seats inventory. You need to use parts form the Cargo categories, which are the SEQ 3 and SEQ 9 cargo units from stock (I suppose the SEQ 6 is from KIS, but it should work as the stock inventory system). Then, in the VAB/SPH, you open the container by clicking on it. It should opens up a layout of what's inside (6 little empty boxes in your case, since I assume the SEQ 6 has 6 slots). Then you click on your deployed science parts to grab it, and you click again in one of those empty boxes, which should now not be empty. No drag and drop involved. And while I'm at it, it works the "same" way to unload them in game. You open the cargo, click on one part, hover over the destination (say, Bill), which should open the menu of action for Bill, which showcase one slot for deployed science, and then just click the part into the empty box. Of course, there's a range (10m for a Kerbal to reach the cargo box). And to deploy it, once your kerbal is in position, you open their menu, and click on the white arrow on the Deployed science. Not on the part itself (you'll just try to transfer it), the little arrow in a white circle in the bottom left corner.

You need landing legs, wheel can't really achieve stability. Or you need to be on top of the baobab, and let your plane slide into it until it won't move. Maintaining craft (or even kerbals) static is harder than anything else in this physic engines. There's mods who mitigates this iirc, but I do not have their name on top of my head.

Oh, sorry, I was still on the use of an overpowered server as a router + VPN (which is a not too bad use for a raspebrry pi), yeah, if you wanna serve VM you obviously need more.

You can have several klaws grabbing a roid. I've done it several times already, but you can rarely get all the klaw grabs at the same time (even if I had, at times, two klaws grabbing the same asteroid in one successful harpooning). That is why, in multiple klaws setup, I generally add a piston behind them to allow to throw them at the asteroid one after the other. I've described the sequence I use here : It's a bit tedious at time, but then I have 4 klaws linked to an asteroid, and I'm center of mass targeted. And I can move the asteroid easily (given I've packed enough reaction wheels and engines). Short version : Extend the first piston to maximum, grab the asteroid with the klaw on it and unlock (not disarm) the klaw to be able to rotate the ship Keep center of mass targeted, and retract the first piston to half it's extension. Extend the opposite klaw to full extension, unlock and target center of mass. Rince, repeat. Once done, keep target CoM, lock your klaws, retracts your piston has much as you can, and have fun with your nice asteroid. And for reducing drag at launch, maybe stick a big stage separator and a 5m rocket nose cone ? Or maybe insert a fairing just above the girder section. You'll add your central klaw to the fairing, and you can use the fairing to cover the girder sections. Once deployed it should be ok.

Raspberry pi are nice. Low on power, for small servers / routers they do the job (even if they lack ethernet ports for my taste). I mean you can run your personal wordpress + email setup + a VPN, throw a 3G or 4G routers in it, and you now have a fully self hosted solution that you can carry on you (I know a guy who stick one in his hat, with battery, walking around with hsi blogs and email on top of its head). If you don't need the graphical chip of the raspberry pi, go for a banana pi, they're more server oriented. but a bit bigger and expensive (plus, i do not think they can run on a battery alone). No need for that much computational power for a server, the main bottleneck will usually be the bandwidth anyway, not your computational power.

For the virus* damaging hardware part, it can be possible. After all, the speed at which your disks turns are controlled by computer, and even the check in place there are software and can be tempered with (as any other piece of software). I mean, we now have multiple processors in hard drive, to the point you can run Linux on one of them (I mean, Malwaretech even wrote a detailed series of article on how to do it, yes it requires physical access). That's why a lot of hardware control point have been implemented those years on motherboards (like shutting down the CPU before it reaches destructive level of temperature, etc). And SSD are a bit harder to mechanically destroy since they don't really have mechanical parts anymore. You can probably over heat them somehow, but then again, a temp fuse will fire up somewhere to shut down the computer. And then, what's the point of destroying the computer you hacked ? You generally have more profitable things to do. And you can mess up with a system without destroying it, including corrupting backups, altering data and, in case of factory sabotage, mess with the hardware they control. Also burning the computer you've got access means that you'll leave proof of tampering on it (you cannot clean up a shut down computer), while you still have a possibility to reduce the trace you've left when the computer is active. So yes, I guess it is still possible to burn some hardware with a virus. But it's harder than, say, in the nineties, because of hardware switches and safety. Also it has almost no interest (except for theatrical in movies) for an attacker to do so. -- * any malicious code

I remember having to convince people that a Macbook Air for a mission in Abidjan was a bad idea, for thermal reasons. They did not understood that the mean heat over there was too high for the fanless computer to manage. I mean, when we reach 30°C and more in the office, in EU, those computer already seemed to have some issues with heat, when the mean temperature over there is a little bit above 32°C I don't want to touch them, I'll get burned (iirc the aluminum case was used as a poor man eat sink, don't put them on bare skin). Anyway, they got around us and got those mac book air. Two month later I got complaint that the battery life of those are bad (the internal temperature will go above 40°C, which shorten the battery life for chemical reason), and that they sometime shut down for no reason (well, the reason was heat, but they would not admit that). It's not like I tried to propose toughbook with fans and way more batteries for the same price than those expensive coffee heaters. Sure they were not fancy, but they would have worked. Instead you bring your European and north American centric hardware, not really made for hot countries, and you try to put the blame on me. I've quit the job sometime after that, for other internal shenanigans.