78stonewobble

No and I'm not gonna tell the x number of billions of other people in the world, who hasn't had it as good as us, they can never have that, to the cheapness that is coal.... We did...

1. Yes, but people seem to forget just how big of a mega scale project it is to supply the earths energy needs through solar and/or wind. It IS a mega scale project and it has it's very own enviromental consequences. 2. That is true... but concrete and steel might be a bit easier to come by and reserves last longer. There is reserves for 230 years of current use of nuclear power. With breeder reactors that could be extended to 60,000 years. That is ... atleast some time to go on. 3. It's not area so much, as it is the fact that you have to drive around that area and put up the solar panels and maintain them. Remember they also degrade over time and thus will need to be changed at some point. And the sheer mass of raw materials going into and out of those panels... and whatever the necessary energy storage systems require. Eg. world wide production was silicon is 8,000,000 tonnes in 2011... if panels were made entirely out of silicon it would (I know they're not, but as an example), per the above example, it would take 1984 years to produce enough. Possibly someone can make the same calculations for nuclear power for comparison... heck or point out mistakes I made... I probably did... ... We can't solve eg. global warming by throwing up a few solar panels on rooftops or a few windmills... We need to throw up ALOT of them if that's the path we take and maybe it doesn't make sense to do it everywhere...

Sorry, if the tone was somewhat dismissive... but it doesn't seem like many actually looks at these things. 1. If my math is correct... Using the Topaz Solar Farm, as a point of comparison, you would need 141,368 plants of the same size to match the worlds energy supply in 2012. 1,272,313,636,363 individual solar panels that themselves take up 945,614 square kilometers or roughly the size of Tanzania. The weight of the solarpanels and thus the materials necessary to construct them would be... 15,870,573,350 tonnes. For comparison of that number the world wide plastics production was 280,000,000 tonnes in 2011, so if the solar panels were all plastic it would take 56,6 years to produce them, while leaving the world without plastic for anything else. 2. Take the different panels composition and multiply by whatever it would take to cover the worlds energy supply with those solar panels. 3. As a point of comparison the Andasol powerplant in spain vaporizes 2,610,000 cubik meters a year of water. To match the worlds energy supply in 2012 via similar methods would vaporize 819,935,454,545 cubic meters a year. Which is equivalent to 124,402 amazon rivers. 4. Again using the Andasol 1 powerplant for comparison it uses 28,500 tons of molten salt for energy storage. To scale the plant to match the worlds energy supply in 2012 would require 28,049,952,531 tonnes of salts, which are 60 percent sodium nitrate (16,829,971,518 tonnes) and 40 percent potassium nitrate (11,219,981,012 tonnes). PS: Depends on how this is supposed to be understood "The storage tank consists of two, 14-meter high tanks with a diameter of 36 meters and a capacity of 28,500 tons of molten salt." ... If the capacity is for 1 tank rather than both, we would need to double the above numbers. I don't know about sodium nitrate production, but afaik. potassium nitrate comes from potash, whose production was 37,620,000 tonnes in 2011. It can't all be potassium nitrate, but even if all production went to solar energy storage it would take 298 years to produce enough, but the lack of fertilizers would probably solve the energy problems in a quite different way. 5. Define safely and define large scale? How much hydrogen storage is required for the 104,426 TWh consumption and 155,505 TWh supply? 6. Indeed... And I genuinely don't think they account for eg. just the massive square footage area of eg. solar panels and what that implies for distribution and maintenance of them. ... I will leave you with this: And for comparison we would need "just" 3,456 nuclear powerplants like Bruce power station to match the total world wide power supply of 2012.

1. That's true. 2. It's the... "provided there's wind or sun available" that's a problem... You still need to have some to quite a bit of power available if the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine. 3. Hydro is pretty awesome, untill you flood a historical town with it, cause landslides and a small manmade tsuname and so forth, but it is geographically limited and the energy storage systems of solar power plants can't practically be scaled to a significant portion of humanity's energy needs (atleast not molten salts) as far as I can see... See my other post here... ... If wikipedia is to be believed in 2002 Denmarks windpower network generated less than 1 percent of average demand for 54 days... In 2013 it generated 100 percent... for 90 hours. That is quite variable and our (being Danish myself) other powerplants (coal, oil and some biofuel) had to pick up the slack or we had to buy power from German coal or nuclear powerplants or Sweden and Norway.

So what is the enviromental footprint of building, maintaining and safely getting rid of the necessary solar power generation and energy storage equipment to cover the worlds energy usage (155,505 terawatt-hours in 2012) and considering transmission losses and that our heating will have to be electrical? Specifically... How many square kilometers of solar gathering area? How many tonnes of silicon, cadmium, telluride, copper, indium, gallium, selenide and so forth will be needed? How much water needs to be pumped to what height, with associated risks? How much salt will be needed for molten salt storage and how long will it take to produce it at current rates? How much hydrogen in how many tanks of such and such a size and what risks does that entail? What is the co2 and other enviromental concerns of all the above? ... And how does solar then stack up against nuclear fission and/or fusion? Without answering those, we can't know whether solar or wind is the way forward or if it's just repeating the mistakes of the past... So do you have those answers? Or did you just look at the kWh cost?

Yeah, you're right... I meant it more in the sense, that it wasn't based on MOND per say, or Newton's laws and would presumably have to agree with Einsteins descriptions of gravity as a limiting case.

If you've got a shiny new nuclear powerplant for base load, why not run it all the time and not waste rawmaterial and energy to produce and maintain wind, solar, wave, tidal plus their associated storage requirements? Apart from wanting to spend the least amount of money that is.

Sorry for cutting into your post here and this is more general questions at... well... everyone: A: Just what will be the global energy demand in the year 2100 and what is 10 percent of that? B: What is the carbon foot print and other enviromental issues from using wind turbines and the associated energy storage (batteries, hydrogen tanks, hydro, moltensalt and what not)? If wikipedia, of all places, are to be trusted, then the global energy consumption in 2012 was 104,426 terawatt-hour and supply at 155,505 TWh. Windpower accounted for 534,3 TWh and would need to reach 10,442.6 TWh (20 x current wind capacity) to account for 10 percent of consumption and 15,550.6 TWh (30 x current wind capacity). Alta Wind Energy Center generates on average 2,680.6 GWh and consists of 600 units taking up 3,200 acres. If my math is correct and that is far from certain... would we not need around 3,896 such Wind farms to just generate 10 percent of current consumption in 2012 (much less 2100)? With the associated 2,337,322 individual turbines and taking up 12,465,985 acres or 50,448 square kilometers (about the size of Costa Rica)? To reach 10 percent of energy production in 2012, we would need 5,801 windfarms of that size, 3,480,698 individual turbines and 18,563,724 acres or 75,124 square kilometers (around the size of Panama)? Factor in energy storage and transmission losses and not to mention possibly going for heating via electricity rather than central heating. PS: In Spain there's a solar power plant using molten salt for energy storage. It requires 57,000 tonnes of molten salts (60 percent sodium nitrate and 40 percent potassium nitrate) for storing power for 7.5 hours of usage for a plant that on average generates 495 GWh a year. To store enough energy for 10 percent of world wide energy consumption this way requires 1,202,481,212 tonnes of molten salts total, 721,488,727 tonnes of sodium nitrate and 480,992,484 tonnes of potassium nitrate. I don't know the global production or supply of sodium nitrate, but potassium nitrate comes from potash (correct me if I'm wrong?) and that supply is limited to around 37.62 million tonnes a year, which if 100 percent used for energy storage, would take around 12 years of production or at 1 percent about 126 years to produce enough. PPS: Every time I take a look at these numbers, and granted my math be completely bonkers, nuclear power to be hopefully replaced by fusion looks more and more attractive.

It does mean, that you have to travel further to maintain the windmills, with associated costs in energy, risks during transport and more losses to energy.

More like Modified Einsteinian Dynamics? PS: Personally I like the idea that galactic rotational curves of spiral galaxies could be explained by matter introducing a rotational current or movement of space itself in the disk (space acts like a fluid getting dragged by the stars, but equally dragging the stars along). Not Verlindens idea I think... But that's just my aesthetical sense talking

Well is there any hindrance in carrying seeds to eg. another planet or place with gravity? Because if not, there's nothing stopping us from breeding different plants specifically for a zero-g enviroment.

Well, when you put it like that... No... Just to be a contrarian. EDIT and PS: Naw, I agree... but sometimes... I'm gonna use the wrong word... It happens.

I must admit, that I allways preferred a variable gravity theory to dark matter and/or dark energy. This is purely from my limited intellects "aesthetical" reasoning. I don't understand the physics or even maths well enough. The universe proooooobably doesn't care about my subjective aesthetical preferences (too much orange and purple in the world for that).

Well, I presume any scientist or just scientifically curious person would be excited about the discovery of something new. In regards to your middle part... Well, it could be that the effect has allways been there, it's just now that our ability to measure it is sufficient (if it isn't measurement errors in some way). I'm trying to keep an open mind as well, but I usually takes things like these with a large grain of salt... Basically I think it should be researched and checked out, but I'm not gonna throw my money after a supposed miracle product.

Well there's 2 options? Either you can violate conservation of momentum, under certain circumstances... Or it doesn't really violate conservation of momentum. EDIT: Well and there's the third offcourse... That it doesn't work.

How much "lazers" would it take to etch in a visible raised middle finger on it? I could go along with leaving that for the world, future generations and aliens.

It's hard to please everyone... I get where the op is coming from, but I also understand the counter arguments... My personal oppinion slash suggestions is this: A: I don't think an overarching story would fit in the game beyond possibly scenarios. Elsewhere it would be better with "hints" at a story. Anomalies and eastereggs and so on. B: We need interesting places to go... In addition to the in A mentioned things, it could be interesting terrain and natural features. C: To a certain degree spacestations, but specifically bases on moons and planets need some love, through parts. D: Life support... It just seems to be such an integral thing to any real life space program, that I think it belongs in the game in some form... Specifically it can be allmost ignored in the beginning, but becomes necessary beyond the moons of kerbin. E: Production times... It also seems to be a bit silly to be able to fire rocket after rocket of any and all sort of designs and have spaceplanes be ready for launch again instantly. I do think you need to limit production in the beginning til at some point you can ramp up production. F: Techtree needs to be expanded, not so much to make existing things that much harder to get, but to lets expand to some feasible future technologies and technologies facilitating bases and lifesupport. G: Tools to run multiple concurrent missions, that are reliable and not subject to eg. rounding errors. H: Possibly linked to kerbonaut experience or possibly by outsourcing missions to the other space agencies... Some degree of automation in regards to resupply missions, refueling missions, docking and possibly even your 10th plus mun landings and so on... You will still be able to do everything hands on if you wish. ... This might not completely address or set an overarching goal or give a story... but: It would expand and delay the "endgame". It would bring new challenges that are relevant to real world space agencies (but it needs the kerbal touch offcourse). It would give us more and specific places to go and explore. Better tools for multiple concurrent missions and automation would let us concentrate on eg. the interplanetary mothership, the giant spacestation or building a base, rather than having to do the same basic things, we've done hundreds of times before. Enable a bigger "endgame" and let more people get there (those who get bogged down in the massive infrastructure and launchschedule necessary). To let us make kerbals truely a spacefaring species.

And as I said before... I have no problem with squad making the change. I have a problem with people thinking a non offensive game is a good way to make a game, because then we can't have any games at all, since someone somewhere will find anything offensive. The only way out of that fix and have a game, is to then say that it's ok to be offensive to some people, but not others. Which implicitly leads us to value some people over others and give more rights to some people than others and that is a step backwards, which isn't good. Or in other words... Not offending anyone is unworkable. Only not offending some people is being unfair and giving unequal rights (it's actually discriminating)... Whereas to say that you can offend everyone is inherently fair and equal. Just something to think about...

Well, as I said, I have no problem with Squad doing this. They're a company... I just, personally and generally, don't think people need to change their stuff to fit my sensibilities and subjective tastes and I also think it's unfair to push those on other people. If people wanted to afford me and my tastes the same courtesies, people would frown upon people wearing the colours orange and purple in public (they would say it could be offensive to people with my aesthetical tastes), there would be protests to paint over that huge orange building around here and campaigns to boycot the local sushibars (I don't like fish). ... That's not actually a society I want tho... people can wear what they want, frequent what restaurants they want... and I have the choice to avoid those things for myself, not to dictate it for others. EDIT and PS: But that's a whole nother debate... my comment wasn't at squad doing what a business should, but at people seeing this as necessarily a good thing.

Well, the problem being that anything and everything can and will be offensive to someone somewhere and thus we can't have any games, music, clothes or no clothes or be outside our homes. For the sake of argument, what if people are offended by rockets in general or green anthropomorphic beings? I don't mind squad did it... but it's something to think about... ... More on topic... thank you for yet another update/patch squad.

This is the one I'm most impressed about ... finding the exact thickness to perfectly cook a pizza.

I presume that would create a waterhammer of sizeable proportions and embed the payload underwater... Wouldn't a desert be better? Can't ablate asymmetrically tho can? Still leaves the problem of eg. finished goods and returning those properly.

That's kinda what im curious about... Capsule like shape or lifting body with or without wings ... for breaking and returning materials.

Well now I'm curious... Suppose we go into orbital manufacturing in zero-G or asteroid mining and we do need to bring back from orbit sizeable quantities. Or just for the mental exercise of it... How would we best bring back somewhat sizeable and heavy loads repeatedly? Can you make a simple winged or lifting body reentry vehicle that is single use as opposed to a possibly too advanced multiple use one? Possible reuse underlying structure and control surfaces and landing wheels, but the heat resistant parts are all one time use (like putting a shoe on)?

Well, unless it's human error in the measurement... Then I think it's probably human error in regards to: "Borra and Trottier ruled out other possible explanations for the pattern, like rapid pulsations in the atmospheres of the stars themselves and rotational transitions in molecules. “We have to follow a scientific approach, not an emotional one,” says Borra. “But intuitively – my emotion speaks now – I strongly suspect that it’s an ETI signal.”" Either they didn't rule other known possible explanations... or there is an alternative explanation in the form of new stellar science to be discovered.