Nikolai
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That makes a lot more sense. Thank you.
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It's funny. When I was young, TOS was the only thing out there -- there weren't even any movies. I developed a love for it, since it was the only thing really like itself. When TNG came out, I was skeptical that another crew could be interesting. And to be honest, the first season kind of confirmed that. (Unbeknownst to me, Roddenberry had decided to rule that there would be no interpersonal conflict among crew members. That, and the fact that a lot of the plots were simple re-hashes of some TOS plots, brought me close to just walking away.) But as the series matured, it really grew on me. It evidently grew on a lot of people, since they started making other series in the same era: DS9 and VOY. I realized as I was watching it, though, that I missed the feeling in TOS of "We're out here and we have no idea what we're doing" that were in a lot of TOS episodes. By TNG era, they seemed to understand space travel pretty well. In TOS, they seemed to be flying more frequently by the seat of their collective pants. By the time ENT came around, then, my fandom had wrapped back around to TOS. I tried to get into ENT, but it seemed much more sloppily written to my eyes; your mileage may vary, of course. (Plus, TOS had a sort of campy feel to it that reminded the audience that This Was All Pretend. I'm still a little freaked out when people say, apparently in all seriousness, that Trek represents future history, or that its treatment of science is unparalleled in its accuracy.) And for my money, Mr. Spock is still one of the most intriguing characters ever to appear in American televised science fiction. I still enjoy Trek whenever I bump into it; the stories are often engaging, and certainly more thought-provoking than a lot of television. I don't go out of my way to watch it anymore, though.
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I still remember the first time I saw Saturn in a telescope. Realizing that I was seeing something hanging right there, magically suspended in all that inky black, a tiny little yellow pea surrounded by a ring... it all seemed so delicate that I couldn't speak loudly. I had to whisper. It was amazing to think that I was looking at this entire world, the way it appeared right then, not just some photograph already seen by a million eyes and that would be seen by a million more. I wasn't just looking at this other planet; I was witnessing something. It could be that you were also close to a time when we see Saturn's ring edge-on. (When Galileo saw that for the first time, it drove him nuts. "Has Saturn devoured his children?" He didn't realize it was a separate ring -- I mean, humanity had never seen such a thing. He thought it was two things on the sides of Saturn somehow.) You're also right that things slide out of view surprisingly quickly in a 'scope. Nothing quite like that to convince you that the Earth is rotating.
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Saw this in the 0.17 Status Update #1 (specifically, 0.17.0x3): Fixed the Sun flare effect jittering at high warp rates So, wait. Am I reading this right? The sun has dynamic flares? They're not just pasted-on irregularities that remain fixed on the surface? I should get used to Squad going above and beyond, but I'd have been perfectly happy with sunspots, and thrilled with a fixed flare or two. The idea of dynamic flares has me stunned and amazed. I could be reading this wrong somehow, and I know I'll be unspeakably grateful no matter what I get... but dynamic flares? Wow!
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Venus gets closer to Earth than Mars ever does. EDIT: In fact, while I type this, according to Stellarium, Venus is 0.9315 AU from Earth and receding, while Mars is 1.865 AU from Earth and receding (more than twice the distance).
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It's hard to tell how much of the general opinion among companies this represents, but I can recall various companies touting their latest DRM scheme as hacker-proof. Nolan Bushnell of Atari back in 2008 (at the link below), the designers of SecuROM, the designers of the Sony UCD, and several others. Every once in a while, some CEO will come out and announce the imminent end of software piracy. Some companies clearly do expect DRM to stop piracy in its tracks. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/84079-Atari-Founder-PC-Piracy-About-to-be-Eradicated From a technical standpoint, of course, claims like these are ridiculous, because software manufacturers can't wrest control of the end-user's machine. In the meantime, large amounts of money are spent (an article estimated $1 billion in 2007 and $9 billion in 2012; I don't know where to get accurate and more current numbers, but even a tenth of that seems disproportionate to the problem) that do nothing but jack up the price for legitimate customers. http://www.defectivebydesign.org/blog/964 I expect that we'd be closer to getting piracy to stop (though I doubt we'll ever stop it completely) if we could shift our view from seeing companies as some faceless entity (so that it can be justified as "not really stealing"). From that point of view, I'm grateful for the willingness the devs have had to poke in here from time to time to say something, or to write an entry in their dev blogs. I think it makes them look more human to the end-user. But I'm not a sociologist of any stripe, so take my musings with a planet-sized grain of salt. EDIT: The report on DRM spending the blog post above seems to have gotten its information from is "Wireline and Wireless Digital Rights Management: Securing Content Distribution 2007-2012", published by Insight Research. http://www.insight-corp.com/reports/WWD.asp
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So much this. When you operate on a business model that makes an illegally-gained product superior to the product you have to pay money for (because you don't need to type in nuclear launch codes or keep the DVD in the drive or whatever), you've set yourself up for failure. Personally, I wish the transaction were simple. I don't want to be a jerk; here, I'll give you my money if you give me your game. Done and done. But as long as we continue to treat piracy as if it is a technological problem and not a social one, I fear software companies are going to continue to waste piles of money on protection schemes that are cracked in a very short time and only serve to drive up the price of their final product. Long story short: Thanks for the no-DRM. I won't betray your trust.
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Before I read the rule of thumb posted that one should launch towards a moon from a circular orbit as it rises over the horizon, I worked it out accidentally as I was idly mentally playing with the idea of phase angle while drifting in a circular orbit, hoping to boost towards Mun. My thoughts went roughly like this: "Hey, there's Mun coming up. I wonder how high that should appear to get if I want to swing towards it in a higher orbit. I mean, it can't be as easy as just aiming at it, right? Let's see... if I boost from a circular orbit, I raise the apoapsis right across from where I am. And if I ignore Kerbin's size, my semimajor axis would be about half that of Mun. If we normalize it, T^2 = a^3 (where T is period and a is the semimajor axis), so roughly speaking, half my period would take... a fourth of Mun's! I gotta go now!" And it worked. I didn't even think to check my math and go around again, I was in such a hurry to hit the throttle. I felt stunned and amazed that it worked out so nicely. It still feels like a crowning moment of geek awesome. My current favorite lander is four-way symmetrical; one of the engines fell off when I headed back toward the lander from a distance on Minmus (there's this thing where it re-draws the physics when you're 250 meters from the craft, and that makes it go off the surface somehow), and it ended up on its side. I got in anyway and lit it up -- there was nothing to lose -- and to my surprise, it left the surface (though it was tumbling pretty well). With judicious engine power applied only when the craft was more-or-less pointed up, managed to leave Minmus' sphere of influence well behind me... and when I finally made some serious distance, cut the power, and checked the orbital map, I found that my trajectory was just right to enter an aerobraking orbit around Kerbin. I've never felt so lucky, or so strong a desire to claim that it was all intentional somehow.
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[UNOFFICIAL/FANMADE] 0.17 Discussion Thread 2
Nikolai replied to kacperrutka26's topic in KSP1 Discussion
Technically true, but it's also the case that if Minmus' lakes were actually frozen methane, that should be sublimating at Kerbin's distance from Kerbol, right? I think the devs are concentrating more on making the Kerbal System fun more than worrying about simulating chemical state transitions accurately. Different things break different people's sense of mimesis; I'm sure there's someone out there still muttering to themselves about Kerbin's impossible density and insisting that the game makes no sense on that basis. As far as I'm concerned, the devs can do as they please. They seem to be making good decisions so far. -
I'm not sure what you think the difference is. If you're within a body's SOI, you'll accelerate toward its center according to specific formulae. The SOI is how it determines that you're "within x distance of body".
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Excellent stuff. You've heard of "Apollo Applications", right? The idea was to brainstorm all kinds of uses Apollo could be put to. One of my favorites was replacing the LM in the Saturn V stack with a pack of consumables and using it to dock with an NEA. (Some of those NEAs require less delta-vee than a Moon landing!) That sort of thing really tweaks my own imagination.
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[Question] Dealing with Space Junk
Nikolai replied to jonathan_92's topic in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
In theory, that's good. In practice, it's much more difficult. You have to match position and velocity with the debris you want to clear. Then you have to move you and it to a velocity that will eventually fall into Kerbin, using nothing but the Kerbal's jetpack. Then you have to move the Kerbal to match position and velocity with the rocket he used to get to orbit. I don't think it would be at all easy to do if you don't plan to use any cheats. As I type, though, the idea of designating a bunch of Kerbals in strategically-placed capsules to stay in permanent orbit and clear debris is kind of appealing, just because of its audacity. -
Love your points, Nibb31, and I absoltuely agree. Have you heard of the plans to use Gemini to land on the Moon if Apollo didn't work out? The most ambitious involved using a Gemini in place of an Apollo CSM and having the Moonwalker land in what amounted to a rocket-powered lawn chair: http://www.astronautix.com/craft/gemnilor.htm ... or we could have used a Gemini with a booster stapled onto it for landing: http://www.astronautix.com/craft/gemander.htm http://www.astronautix.com/articles/bygemoon.htm It would seem that Gemini was the vehicle that really got creative juices flowing once it proved itself as a spacecraft, and for that reason, it will always hold a special place for me.
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I haven't fully processed exactly what it is about KSP that I like so much. It could be the way that it simulates how space travel requires extraordinary patience punctuated by moments where quick action and a cool head are called for. It could be that it lets me exercise whichever kind of space travel I want at any given moment, be it trying to be a hotdog pilot or trying to meticulously calculate every little detail to optimize some resource (e.g., fuel or time). It could be the ability to create space exploration with constraints, and send things to explore whatever I want according to whatever priorities I dictate, making me the rocket and mission designer I wish I could be (with so many ways to get it hilariously wrong). Whatever it is, I want to thank everyone here. The people who put the program concept together; the people who continue to add content and new wrinkles in play; the people here, full of interesting ideas and thoughtful opinions; the moderators, who have to walk a tough line (keeping people with high-octane interests civil!)... I can't believe I found this corner of the Internet. I wish I had deep pockets and resources to give back to each and every one of you. Thank you all so much for being who you are, and sharing that with the group. In the same vein, I know I've been more contentious in some threads than I want to be. Thank you all for being patient with me. I tend to be my own worst enemy when it comes to people I treasure. I really don't want to be argumentative. But I'm rambling. Again, everyone, many thanks. Here's hoping the KSP community remains the same awesome community I've seen so far.
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Space-themed TV shows (that care a little about realism)?
Nikolai replied to Nikolai's topic in The Lounge
Even sadder if one considers how much easier it is to do that research now than it was then. Yeah, that's a very good point. It seems that the larger sticking point -- as you mention later on in this post -- is finding and keeping an audience willing to stay with something "realistic", especially when there's much outside everyday people's everyday experience. And, ultimately, if you're selling a show to people who would pay for it (and expect a return on their investment), the absence of that kind of audience seems fatal indeed. I guess we agree in the final analysis, but for different reasons. Still, it seems a shame. -
I'd say that's a vast oversimplification. Simply because exploration can be done doesn't mean that people care or want to pay the bill. Do you think the man on the street knows what Apollo 17 found that other missions did not? Do you think the man on the street could name anything discovered by the Apollo missions? Do you think the man on the street cares? Like it or not, NASA runs on PR, not on pragmatism. The fact that its budget is limited and robotic exploration is all we can afford does not even imply that robots can do what humans can. Sure, for a narrow range of tasks. But I'd argue that those tasks are a mere subset of the tasks needed to conduct thorough exploration.
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Okay. But we're still not at the point where robots can replace humans in exploration, and won't be without an as-yet-unknown leap in computing. (Reconnaissance is, arguably, a form of tourism, insofar as we know salient characteristics of what we'll find even before we look. That is, by definition, not exploration.) Moreover, insisting that machines might be as capable as humans in the future is not a reason for humans not to go now. Point taken. But the assertion I was replying to was not that we do robotic missions because we can afford them (and not their manned counterparts); the assertion was that robots can do everything humans can do, and at a fraction of the cost. That simply isn't so, even though we can't afford the full cost (and doing what we can afford is better than doing nothing at all). Yes, certainly, you're right. But in terms of the destiny of our species, it's certainly the most important (hence the "ultimately"). If we want to list secondary objectives of space exploration, we could be here all month.
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[UNOFFICIAL/FANMADE] 0.17 Discussion Thread 2
Nikolai replied to kacperrutka26's topic in KSP1 Discussion
Just to throw in a monkey wrench into the discussion, the new planets were named after Greco-Roman gods eventually -- but when the first planets were discovered that couldn't be seen with the naked eye, there was actually some discussion about nomenclature. When Herschel discovered Uranus in the eighteenth century, a lot of people wanted to name the new body "Herschel". Herschel himself wanted to name it "Georgium Sidus" (George's Star), after the patron (England's King George III) that gave him the money to build his telescope in the first place. Maybe the debates went a different way on Kerbin. Or maybe they were better at keeping track of people who first identified naked-eye planets than humans were, immortalizing them in song: "... and wonderful, smart, handsome Bobfern Kerbin / Who discovered Meander and made really swell blueberry pancakes." (It rhymes in Kerbish.) -
Just a suggestion, since I'm currently trying it myself, something that occurred to me after running into the bug that causes my Minmus landers to pop off the surface if I go far away and return: EVA from a spacecraft orbiting Minmus. Land on Minmus using the jetpack. Explore. Return to the spacecraft in orbit and go home. The only cheat you're allowed is infinite EVA fuel. I'm currently in Phase III ("Explore"); I have to find a solid chunk of time to work out how to accomplish Phase IV using my altimeter and my Mark I Eyeballs. Later, I plan to see what I can do if I don't allow myself that cheat. I don't know how much total delta-vee the jetpack offers, so I don't even know for sure that it's possible yet. (Phases I and II turned out to be a lot easier than I'd expected.)
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Space-themed TV shows (that care a little about realism)?
Nikolai replied to Nikolai's topic in The Lounge
I think part of the problem seems to be that you're accepting it as a given that NCIS is a "realistic" cop show. If so, I think you're setting the bar for "realism" rather low. Not that there haven't been realistic cop shows. Dragnet was about as real as could be squeezed into an episodic format, and it did well for years, both on the radio and on television. And again, for the reasons I cited, I fail to see why those reasons are particular to realistic science fiction. The hurdles are higher, yes, but I do not think them insurmountable. -
Um... wut? Seriously? If you want to compare apples to apples, consider the return of science on the unmanned versus the manned programs to the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The manned program cost more, yes, about a hundred times more -- but it returned far, far, far more than a hundred times the science. Steven Squyres, scientific leader on the MER Mars rover missions, was often referenced after he pointed out that the Mars rovers could do in a day or more what it would take a trained geologist a minute or so to do. (And that excludes other things that humans do that, for machines, is simply impossible.) Ultimately, the entire point of space exploration is to find new places to live (as well as develop the technologies needed to live there). After all, we know there are (albeit rare) catastrophes that could wipe out all human life if it continues to exist on one planet, and that we're rapidly inventing more and more ways to do serious damage to our species' livelihood with nowhere besides Earth to conduct our tests. That enterprise -- vastly increasing the odds of human survival (and the survival of other kinds of life) by spreading out -- is doomed to be left with certain fundamentals left permanently untested if humans never try.
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Space-themed TV shows (that care a little about realism)?
Nikolai replied to Nikolai's topic in The Lounge
Travel at, sure. Why not fight at those speeds? On the show, I rarely see them fight while moving faster than a few meters per second, never mind tens or hundreds of thousands of kilometers per second. I'm familiar with it. But one maneuver doesn't impress me all that much. Why not explore the logistics of fighting where both spacecraft are maneuvering at higher fractions of light speed? This changed warfare in the air. In WWI, fighters generally got into a furball with perpetual shooting until someone went down. WWII saw the advent of faster and faster fighter craft, and this changed dogfighting into cycles of encounter-maneuver-encounter-maneuver, with the "maneuver" cycle lasting longer and longer as planes got faster and faster. Missiles changed the game again, and if it ever came down to a dogfight (missiles having been expended), the speed of jet aircraft meant that there were often minutes taken up with the "maneuver" cycle. (Planes fighting it out over Korea had to be careful not to overshoot the country's boundaries!) Now, in the future, you have faster and more intelligent computers (which would doubtless be incorporated into the weaponry) and much faster starships. Starships equipped with inertial dampeners, yet, if we're willing to be handwave-y with the physics. It seems to me that this would change the game yet again. Still, the kind of battle tactics I see have more to do with ancient Roman naval warfare than anything that helps us to realize just how different the environment we're talking about is. Well, if we're going to be that general, why not point out that all conflict falls into broad categories and is always boring? "Oh, it's another 'man vs. man' plot, followed by another 'man vs. nature' plot, followed by another 'man vs. self' plot, and finally, a 'man vs. society' plot. Can't they come up with anything original?" Part of the problem, I think, is that we're not used to things having consequences for more than one episode for anything other than interpersonal conflict ("soap opera plots"). But it doesn't have to be that way. Conflicts are not frequently resolved quickly in the real world, and even whether or not they are resolved can be an open issue. Consider Apollo 12 (the actual mission). They had a problem on launch (the rocket was struck by lightning twice during ascent), and they were unable to check whether or not the pyros that would open the parachutes were still in working order. They knew that when they brought the crew back, there was a chance that they would fall into communications blackout and never come out (hitting the ocean at high speed). That's kind of an extreme example, but it's the sort of thing that generates dramatic possibilities for more than one episode. But we're not used, as an audience, to having technical conflicts that have lasting effects. I disagree that keeping things realistic forces us into a repetitive corner. (Of course, one can always say "And then what?" until creative ideas are exhausted, but I maintain that that's true for any genre; it's not a particular weakness of realistic science fiction.) At the end of the day, my point is not to bash anyone's favorite sci-fi franchise. It's to point out how difficult this is, but that it's clearly not impossible (since examples do exist, and I'm always hoping someone has found more that I'm not aware of), and to bemoan the fact that there aren't more of them (to scratch my particular geeky itch -- my brain likes to be entertained, too, really). -
Space-themed TV shows (that care a little about realism)?
Nikolai replied to Nikolai's topic in The Lounge
I respectfully disagree. Part of what makes space travel exciting is that it is a *hazardous environment*. The dangers of space travel need not be limited to (a) radiation and ( aliens with ray guns. The very fact that we need to rely on our cleverness and our technology to survive can be exciting in and of itself. It's not even the case that the *actual* space program was limited in problems to radiation, and our imaginations can come up with problems we never actually faced. Your other point -- that TV shows tend to keep running until the ratings falter -- is, I'd argue, a weakness in the way we do many TV shows here in the States; it imposes limitations on *any* drama, not just realistic science fiction. (And novelty is not exactly a cure-all, either. There are countless shows that introduced a new cast member when the ratings were relatively strong and promptly lost their faithful audience.) The fact is that accurately representing circumstances that are quite far removed from everyday experience is *hard* (never mind bringing your audience up to speed). I suspect this keeps more TV producers out of the subject than the limitations in setting. EDIT: Everything below came from a sudden flash of memory. Consider "Planetes", which I mentioned at the start. It's about a group of orbital debris collectors, and they're based on a space station, but they still find room for a lot of variety -- different locations on the (somewhat large) space station, visiting family back at home, taking a vacation to an underground Moon colony... and one of the main characters ends up training for the first manned mission to the Jovian system, so there's the training facilities, the ship's drydock in orbit, and on and on. Just because the series features main characters employed by a more robust space program than any currently on the planet doesn't mean that they were stuck with "sit[ting] in the same spot with the same problems occurring over and over". -
Space-themed TV shows (that care a little about realism)?
Nikolai replied to Nikolai's topic in The Lounge
So why don't they fly around at 0.25 c while fighting? The tactical advantage someone might be able to get by moving slower isn't that much greater. Or even 0.01 c? (I assume they aim with computers or something, since aiming at something moving at close to light speed when you're traveling at 0.25 c would seem... difficult... otherwise.) Or do they just conveniently ignore that? What about the "huge tactical advantage" created by the positional uncertainty involved when someone's traveling at close to light speed relative to you? Or do they just conveniently ignore that? This seems to be handwaving. "We know there's this problem with physics with what we're describing, okay? So there's this... *thing*... that takes care of it. See? No problem." Kind of like the "Heisenberg compensators" in Star Trek's transporters. I appreciate that they're throwing me a bone by recogizing that there's this apparently insurmountable problem in doing what they want the people in the show to be able to do, but let's not kid ourselves. They're ignoring physics when it's convenient to do so. Hyperspace is more of this kind of handwaving. It allows them to circumvent a problem with physics by inventing a storytelling mechanism. And sometimes, those technologies violate physics as we understand it. For example, Heisenberg compensators *should not be possible to make*. We're not talking about an *engineering* problem here, like "We can't imagine material strengths that could survive traveling through the atmosphere at supersonic speed." We're talking about a *laws of the Universe* problem here. Think of it another way. Conservation of mass-energy is, as near as we can tell, completely inviolable. If a show existed that could, through some unexplained mechanism, violate conservation of mass-energy, allowing the characters to make golf balls by sneezing (in a plot and setting where golf balls are extraordinarily handy to have), would that seem to be an "explanation"? Of course, I can enjoy these shows because I like the stories, even if they're physically impossible. But it's a mistake to think that, for example, Star Trek explains how stuff works in a way that's consistent with science and merely has more advanced (and currently inexplicable) technology. Of course, it's completely possible that I've misunderstood your point. Please feel free to set me straight.