Mazon Del

Except that as the devs have said, KSP is not a space simulator meant to include all the minutia of a space program, it is a game with a space theme.

My understanding was that for a Moon variant there would be a modified design, largely the same as the others but with additional fuel capacity in some format. At the cost perhaps of crew or cargo capacity.

How many modifications is a bit up for debate. The vehicle would certainly be specialized yes, but Musk has said now and then that he'd like to try to make it such that the one vehicle is capable of being used for both Earth and Mars landings, and there is some debate about the possibility that it could also succeed at Moon landings if done correctly.

Sorry Baggers, but there are plenty of ways around this "loophole" you bring up. A perfect atomic scan of my brain now being run in the computer is now a parallel process to the biological one, the same in every way. Sure, at some point the biological one ceases to function, but that's fine. That's not death of a being, that's death of a part, same as losing some skin cells. What represents ME is still continuing forth and doing what it has always done. If I wanted to, I could even just have the biological portion go unconscious, take the scan, then make the biological portion cease functioning without ever waking. As far as I'd be concerned, continuity was guaranteed as much as it is when you go to sleep and wake up in the morning as the same person. Furthermore, if you take the route of "But you are still 'killing' the other you!" I refute that by simply declaring that any singular "me" at this immortality point is not representative of ME. As an AI, I can make copies of my consciousness, toss them into a sundiver probe and watch it burn up, while of course BEING burned up technically, and be happy because what represents ME is continuing existence after all is said and done. Right now, there is but one of ME and I do not have an ability to make more, so this one "me" is critical to keep functioning. The instant I can make copies, the significance of this "me" drops dramatically. Oh it would still have some importance given that it was the "first" me. Maybe I decide to put it on ice to keep around as a souvenir? It doesn't really matter after that point. And sure, you can always go the route that one day after the heat death hits, I'll still shut down in the end. But so what? Even assuming we don't find a way to pop into other universes and so on, gaining trillions of years of life are plenty worth it! Especially if one were to decide to experience those trillions at such a high rate of mental thinking that in those trillions, I've experienced several orders of magnitude more.

Nuts! I forgot to mention one of the cooler parts of the system! So I described that you, the user, designed the hexapod in the Bowler Studio system. There is a very nice menu for doing this in, dragging an axis of movement around and such. Once you are done and like your design within the computer (which can demonstrate itself in software simulation), you can hit an export button. This generates a bunch of .stl files that if you shove into a 3D printer, you can now print out the robot you were trying to build. So the system takes away a lot of the back end coding, and a lot of the front end designing.

Hello everybody! Some friends of mine just put up their Kickstarter for a product that some of you might be interested in. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/neuronrobotics/wifi-dyio-robot-controller-w-24-channels/description The device is called a DyIO for Dynamic Input Output. This device ($120-150), when combined with their development software (free), offers quite a lot of power for you to develop projects for yourself. An example is the "Creature Creator" section of the software. That link points to a video showing a hexapod taking its first steps. That hexapod was designed in the Bowler Studio software, but not in the way that might sound. No CAD work was done by the user. No kinematics (forward or inverse) were done by the user. Technically for the game controller setup, no programming was even required to get it to move as the DyIO/BS default to attempting that if you never gave it any additional brains.However, actually coming up with a brain for it is not difficult. An example being that lets say you wanted to make the same hexapod drive around autonomously Roomba style (a simple sense->react loop). You slap a sonic range finder on the hexapod pointing forward. In your robot control file (which I'm going to refer to as the AI code from now on) you specify a link to the hexapod.xml file that was automatically created for you, you grab the import for using a sonic range finder (An asyncronous analog input, unless something else better matches the specific sensor you have) from the canned Bowler Studio code repository, tell it the port you are plugged into on the Dyio, do something akin to "If distance < 8, output to hexapod.xml drive function, turn right 45 degrees, else drive forward". The total coding done by you, the user, was likely less than 30 lines of code. Bowler Studio supports quite a few programming languages. Java is the big one that Kevin (the programmer) likes, but it supports any JVM language, so C, Perl 6, Python, etc. Some of you might be aware of a system called ROS, or the Robot Operating System. I am not particularly qualified to explain WHY the following statement is valid, for further information I can put you in touch with Kevin if you like, be prepared for an epic spiel though. ROS is fundamentally unable to be used as a real time system without a lot effort going into modifying the code. BS on the other hand is designed from the ground up to be real time compliant. The system is currently in use in experimental medical devices (including being part of an MRI safe medical robot) as well as other industrial uses. Full disclosure: I use it on my NASA Sample Return Robot Challenge rover. The system really wants to use Github for code repository purposes and makes that really easy and streamlined to do. If you lose connection to the internet then BS intelligently stores your data for seamless uploading at a later date. And so much more! Feel free to ask questions here and I will get info from Kevin and Alex (the electrical guy on the project) when I can. Mazon

Oh of course they could be interested in the original. That was part of my point. Either they want the original, in which they have to transport mass. Or they are fine with a reproduction, in which case they are only transporting data. The guy in that book had made the case, again, that while they probably couldn't tell the difference between a finger painting and modern art (most humans cant. >;D ) and thus could be convinced to value a childs work as much as a master, they want to treat the art of a culture with the respect that the creating culture would. We do not see a non-prodigy 3 year olds artwork hanging next to a Picasso in a museum, so they posit that why should they do so? Think of it perhaps this way, lets say you are as uncultured about artwork as myself. And suddenly you have a billion dollars, but you also found a girl that is into art that you want to impress. So you are looking to snag a bunch of art. How do you know what is good and what isn't? Sure, unlike the alien, you can tell the difference between a child and a master's work. But what about a giant blue canvas painted with a single bluish-white stripe down the middle? Would you pay $44 million for that if an art expert (that you presumably hired to find the good stuff for you) told you that you should? Why? That's stupid, you could make that work yourself! He could be lying to you. But that's the point, you don't know. You just have to trust that you are not being lied to. As far as a "how much to charge" question for the Statue of Liberty, that entirely depends on what they are willing to offer. If they say "Hey, if you give us the SoL, we'll put an atomically perfect recreation in its place, AND give your world the technology to produce things at the atomic scale like that." then quite frankly, that is worth it. Incidentally, that white stripe artwork: http://twentytwowords.com/canvas-painted-blue-with-a-white-line-sells-for-nearly-44-million-4-pictures/

Not an answer from me, but I could believe that if the world knew about a definitely extinction event (the comet version) on the way with 3 years worth of time, that there would be an effort to just hurl as many resources as possible into a lunar colony. I don't think it would necessarily amount to a whole lot, especially given how the random civilians and whatnot would either not participate, actively harm the project, or only passively harm it by causing resources to be diverted. But I think we'd give it a good showing.

Mostly what my point about the artwork isn't the value in any given piece so much as it was that unless they are interested in the original piece, then they don't need a physical object, they just need the data to reconstruct it. Incidentally, there was a book I read once where Earth gets visited by an interstellar art dealer. He goes around to various civilizations, trades random super-techs in exchange for artwork, then moves on. The way the alien describes the galaxy's interest in an alien art forms is that while yes, it is probably fairly easy to trick them into taking a child's finger painting as opposed to a masterpiece, they value artwork that the culture it comes from values. Not because of some universal metric of "good" but because it just makes more sense to value something of greatness from a culture instead of fawning over what turns out to be a fossilized dirty diaper instead of a sculpture.

Thanks for that! This was a good read.

Really though, unless their FTL system uses a surprisingly small amount of energy, it generally speaking just isn't really worth sending most physical items. Sending the Mona Lisa? Sure, there's only one real one. Even an atomically perfect copy isn't "the original" and thus if you are doing that anyway, just get the scan and rebuild it once you get home. But for DNA and biological samples? Physical presence not needed. Any sufficiently advanced alien species on really needs the data making up the genome and ideally an atomically precise representation of a single cell. Everything else about the animal can follow from there. People are a valid thing to move if only because we can't be electronically packaged (though it would be fascinating if they had that tech) at this time.

K^2: Fair enough.

My understanding is that one of the current prevailing theories (that is starting to look weak though) is that yes, there should have been roughly an equal amount of M/AM made during the big bang, but that something about AM causes it to degrade faster than M thus resulting in the imbalance that we currently see in the universe. K^2: Regarding the sublight warp drive, that is pretty much what is going on at the White-Juday Micro Warp Field Interferometer. The end goal for them is indeed an FTL warp, but since we don't have any real method as of yet for experimenting with expanding space (the back end of the drive for those unaware) they are working on proving that the front end is possible (contracting space). So far there are no definitive results, but early tests look promising. Their lab has detected something that they think is the contraction they are looking for, but they are currently undergoing (or seeking to undergo) upgrades to up the power and thus the obviousness of the result. Their two grad interns from a previous year went back to their universities and started their own efforts using different methods to detect the same result and are also showing similar detection spikes. These are the results as of about a year ago, supposedly we'll get an update during the next Starship Congress that happens.

What PB666 refers to is not the standard fusion reactor style. That is something the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) is working on. Normal fusion projects, like ITER, use Tokamak style reactor which has a torus (think a donut) with contained plasma. Generally speaking so far the issue is that in order to increase the reaction rate (and thus energy output) you have to do things that push the magnetic containment systems closer to their failure points. What ITER is hoping to do is to be so big of a reactor that it uses efficiency of scale in order to overcome this limit. Basically to use efficiency of size to overcome the inefficiency of method.

In the physics world of academia and certain aspects of tech development, sure, finding out that our current understanding of the universe is effectively flat out wrong would upend quite a lot of things. On a practical level though, you might see a slowdown in some aspects of research while we suddenly start taking looks (spending R&D funds) on projects we once thought were crazy because apparently they might not be as crazy as we thought. But really at the end of the day, even if our current physics descriptions apparently have no idea why something like a transistor works (just a random example), the calculations we have previously been using have allowed us to invent, build, and use newer and better transistors consistently for some time, so they are clearly good enough for most purposes and will continue to be used until such a time as better calculations and such are provided. Even if the underlying "deep physics" of something are completely different than what we thought they were doesn't mean that for practical purposes we need to immediately abandon the original methods for doing it. V=RI still holds true even if WHY it holds true is different than we thought.

But this article didn't exactly aid the idea that graphene can be used to make super batteries. We already knew that, and a battery that requires you to spend an absurd amount of energy just to keep it in a special state is not necessarily very useful.

To be fair, having a double walled hull filled with neutronium liquid might still be at all useful.

Did they actually say 6 Kelvin? Or was it something else?

No welding needed, you can just get a 3U kit and its a 1x1x3. Three times as expensive, but worth if if that is your goal.

Of course! Except that sending up cargo beyond certain sizes is impractical. If trying to construct full on ships and whatnot, it is far more efficient (and safer) to construct them in orbit. Partly because you don't need to design the craft in question to deal with the G loads and vibration of launch, the components just need to survive that and it is fairly easy to rig up containers that ensure fragile cargo survives the transition. Designing everything to handle the launch in an assembled configuration is a giant pain.

Need is perhaps a strong word, but it does end up making a lot of things far more simpler for you. All of those robots, which need to be cooled and such, no longer need to be vacuum rated and can kind of just dump waste heat like any other object instead of needing ridiculously complicated systems for doing so. Working in an atmosphere is just far easier for both man and machine. Cheaper too if you consider how much faster a human could build it in atmosphere than out and how much cheaper those robots get when they don't have to care about vacuum issues.

If all of your support staff are on the ground, what happens when an incident occurs that the robots cannot handle even with teleoperation? And if you say "just build robots that can do everything a human will be able to do" then you have added enough cost to the project that you probably just want to go with humans anyway. And if you say "Well only have one of THOSE robots and just have everything else be its 'cheapish' specialized cost', then you again reach the problem that people are nervous without humans in the loop. In the near term people WILL be involved, there just isn't too much point trying to get around it.

Of course, robots have yet to prove themselves in orbital construction tasks. While I agree that largely in the end state robots will take up the majority of the task, humans are going to be involved if for no other reason than people don't trust robots to solo any task costing billions of dollars if they don't have to. It only costs a couple extra million to put a person or two up there to watch over things, even if they never are needed the funders will feel better.

Actually the big reason for an orbital drydock is that your workers end up being FAR more efficient if they can work in basically a tshirt/shorts environment than a space suit. Wearing a space suit and operating in one is immensely tiring. That thing is STIFF. Plus your manual dexterity pretty much goes out the window. Yes you can do all the things they did to build the ISS in a suit, but it is just so. much. harder! In the end, your work per unit time goes up because of this, and also the time you save not having to go through all the crazy effort of getting ready for an EVA and such. Incidentally, the way they'd get people back and forth between the two stations was basically a soyuz-like pod.

I'm sure Mission Control TRIES to keep that level of babysitting, but as unobtrusively as possible.