NovaSilisko

It's not making the planet that's hard, it's making the planet look good.

I imagine your eyeballs love you.

Something about the Voyager spacecraft turning into V'ger and then making the borg and turning into a borg cube and because Rosetta is cubical with lumps on it it looks like a borg cube and therefore Voyager has... returned, or something.

This thread is a disaster.

Sputnik wasn't nearly as visible as the booster that carried it. They painted the rocket core white so it would catch the light more easily. When looking for Sputnik, most people would see the rocket stage - not the much dimmer point nearby that was Sputnik itself. Also visible were the two fairing panels that ejected just before Sputnik did. So, technically, the order of objects in orbit is: Rocket stage->fairing panels->Sputnik For visible diameter, I refer you to this handy chart: So for perfect vision, with the ISS directly overhead with its solar panels aiming at you, it's just small enough to not be discernible in shape. Something four times the size of ISS, though, and you'd start to be able to make out its geometry (assuming excellent vision again). The ISS is in fact visible in daylight early or late in the day (source: I saw it), but only barely. It's very easily lost in the bright sky.

(referring to when this was in science labs) You've ah... only just noticed this?

Maybe this is my true destiny...

Yeah, I just have been playing in sandbox to make all of these. The micromanaging in regular career mode gets to be too much sometimes. Sneak peeks of future things... (Wow we can embed tweets? Neat.)

So, has anybody ever heard of the game The Movies? It was a love of mine long ago which has recently resurfaced. To the unaware, the best way I could sum it up would be "Hollywood Simulator 2005". My interest in it has recently been revived. As such, I present without further ado, the latest Silisko Pictures production: 2002 THE SPACE ODD It is a highly detailed remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I am sure you will agree that the plot follows the original's almost to the letter, while the special effects and acting have been brought up to the standards of 2016. Tickets on sale now, only available in the You Tubes. Note: Video contains a few curse words, if you're alarmed by such things. Also, it's pretty stupid overall. I am sure you will all be thrilled to know this is merely the first of many.

Yes yes, carry on with your NASA bashing, don't let me get in your way.

Has nobody noticed that this article is from 4 years ago?

I watched the Episode 1 edit but wasn't super fond, a lot more than just cheesiness has been removed. The whole early plot is condensed and the pacing is totally thrown off by the editing. (Though, Jar Jar's voice being replaced with generic "alien speech" and subtitles was a great idea, although it doesn't actually make any sense why he'd be tagging along with the Jedi in the first place, wasn't the original reason for that him being saved and thus having a life debt? Or something.)

40 kilometers from a shooting range and you heard it? What the hell were they firing there?

@mythbusters844 That image needs "this image posted" added to it somewhere in there.

By the way, here's a picture of the stage being sent into the hangar, because it seems relevant for this thread: You can see they've fitted a cap over the interstage and taken the legs off, and it currently resides in the usual sort of mount they hold F9s in during processing.

The core returned on the recent Orbcomm mission will be sent to pad 39A at Cape Canaveral (in fact, it's in the hangar there right now), for a static-fire at the pad early next year. It won't refly, though, and will probably be kept around for posterity. After that, stages will be reflown on future missions after SpaceX can figure out how they are faring after their descent through the atmosphere. I am not sure about the Jason 3 first stage, however, as it's an older version of the Falcon 9.

If you asked a group of people who actually calculate the optimal trajectories for real rockets: "given manual control, could you fly this vehicle to orbit?", I wonder what they would answer.

Hell - while this thread is still extant, allow me to add to my heresy: Flying rockets is the part of KSP I enjoy the least. I would much rather have a computer fly my design on a perfect trajectory and get it into the orbit I want, with the flaws arising from deficiencies in design, rather than piloting.

Okay, helpful tip: this sort of phrasing is why you have issues with people getting mad at you about it.

Don't believe the lies, the late Santa L. Claus underwent a high-velocity reentry in the skies over Las Vegas during a trial run on December 23rd, when a routine test of his sleigh went awry... http://www.discovery.com/dscovrd/space/burning-fireball-lights-up-vegas-sky/ Christmas is, accordingly, cancelled. Open your eyes!

Not worth the insane amount of work required to make it happen, the payoff is decidedly minor all things considered. And it would come with its own host of issues. Maybe it will come back someday, I don't know. Is it? Loads okay for me.

So... the time has come.

Pfffff, four-and-a-half now.

They are fairly well competent, but their culture hasn't contrived to quell innate curiosity in the same way human cultures (you see plenty of children who are very curious about the world around them - the only thing that makes that go away is the insistence of others and society at large), and usually they possess an extreme lack of foresight, (and, often, hindsight as well). Kerbal architecture would be not unlike the Winchester Mansion as a result of this, and would have lots of odd protrusions and things started but then scrapped and left as-is. Their space program is the same way, and effectively built around this attitude - rockets get more purpose-built as nobody can say what the next mission requirements will be. Sometimes there are consequences for that. I can't stand the "they just love explosions" concept. Some individual Kerbals do have that attitude, but so do some humans - it's just that humans usually have the foresight not to let those types of people into the astronaut corps. They're not so stupid as to just laugh and clap their hands when a rocket explodes, especially not when it's carrying fellow Kerbals. Even the 1.0 trailer doesn't show that, and that was bleak as hell. I don't like the view that they're just expendable nobodies, either. The routine casual usage of the term "Kerbal genocide" makes me wince. But that's arisen out of a lack of consequences for losing crew throughout most of the game's history

Oh, for a bit of comparison, here's a very old planet from the ooollldd terrain generator: