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3: He bounced and bounced until he reached escape velocity.

Floor 4762: A door, with a timeline next to it, which has the date October 11, 1968 at the left end, and December 14, 1972 on the right end. You can type in any date on a keyboard below it. After selecting a date, the door opens, and you enter the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, on the date you set. Oddly, everything seems to be rendered in the Bluey art style, and you see cartoon dog versions of famous NASA employees and astronauts walking by. You decide to move on, but you write down the floor number so you can visit again.

I don't mind moving. Like I said, we've been here thirteen years, and that's the longest I've lived anywhere since I left home at 18. Same for my wife. I'm positive that if it weren't for the kids we would have moved again. We almost did, came that close to moving to Idaho six years ago, but jobs didn't work out. In hindsight, should have gone anyway, things probably would have worked out better for us financially. But, it is what it is. I guess we don't mind moving because we're not stuff people. I go out in my garage and look at all the stuff that's accumulating and think, "Yeah, it's time for all this to go." Moving makes it easy to be ruthless about that. I remember when I moved to South Africa, the cost to ship stuff there was $35 a pound. So I was basically looking at everything I owned and asking myself, "Is this thing worth more than $35 a pound? Can I replace it for less than that when I get there?" Almost everything went out the window when you looked at it that way.

It's the biggest explosion you're ever going to see in your life. Possibly more mass than the Earth undergoing thermonuclear combustion, surpassing a temperature of 100 million degrees, visible in city lights from 3000 lightyears away. It's literally like a planet exploding. https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/269/2/323/992661

2: Suddenly, landing strut 2 collapses after Tigger Kerbal hits his head on it, stranding him on the Mun.

Granted: But you now know too much. A man in a black suit comes to your door. He tells you to come with him and you refuse. you black out shortly after you hear him say, "No." To the people who know you, you simply went on a drive late at night and disappeared. Nobody knows what really happened to you. I wish for an F/A-18E Super Hornet

Wow!

I don't think the parts are what are holding them back. As you noted, new parts and modules aren't challenging. The fundamentals of the system including improvements to performance to support them aren't something easily released early. The requirements are quite extensive and why I have always felt the original 6-8 month timeline was a bit optimistic. A lot has to be done if they are aiming for it to be complete to the extent that they can fully shift new development to interstellar.

It's also not exactly expected to be giant. More like something of the magnitude of Polaris. Which is a lot, considering it's usually about magnitude 10, but not quite enough to put the sunglasses on.

Yes nuclear also has practically unlimited range. Radiation shielding is an issue, would work better on an long plane. You could simply use electricity to make heat, way less efficient than propellers, however electrical propellers might be more effective than an an turboprop if you have to bring the oxidizer because the very high efficiency of electrical engines offset lots of the low power density of batteries. Electric cars is an bad comparison, they work well as your rarely use more than an faction of the engines power.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/metafluid-gives-robotic-gripper-a-soft-touch/ tl;dr adding hollow rubber spheres to a liquid allows you to make a colloid that decreases in volume but doesn't increase in pressure when exerting an external force. Thus, if you overpressurise a 'soft' gripper, the force it exerts does not exceed a certain threshold. This lets you engineer behaviours without using any control algorithms or electronics. It can be tuned by varying the size of the spheres, and stepped by adding different sizes of sphere. By reducing the size of the spheres to micrometre sizes and using the right materials, they found that they could also tune the rheology (thickness) and opacity with pressure, as the clear spheres collapsing turned themselves into something like lenses. I love simple things like this that have emergent behaviours. I don't love the resistance the researchers faced because "this was not an interesting idea".

I’m at our family’s Cranberry farm for Take Your Kid to Work Day. Walked out onto the bogs and got these pictures.

(Offtopic)

If you're willing and able to sail through the radiation belts of Jupiter, of all places, you're not going to be afraid of onbord nuclear. And nothing less than onboard nuclear will keep your ship adequately powered in the time it takes to get to Jupiter and at any distance beyond Mars. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. Electric is also limited in that it doesn't give heat to the air passing through it. Electric engines would have a hard time reaching transsonic speeds, meanwhile, any turbofan (nuclear or chemical afterburning) could do so and even go well into supersonic. Magnesium. Some Mars jet engine concepts use that

It's fictional, but it's probably something that could have been easily done if they needed a Vacuum F-1 variant

Ja, ich verstehe, was Sie meinen.

https://lsic.jhuapl.edu/uploadedDocs/meetings/docs/2441-DISTRO A LunA-10 LSIC Performer Binder.pdf Lunar base stuff in PDF form with the plans from many of the players.

I'm playing this nice "little" game called Dome Keeper, suggestion of my son. Hard as hell initially, I took weeks until I finally got a grasp on it and started to win a round now and then. There're less demanding modes, as no enemies (essentially, digging without worries) and automatic weapons (that do the service by themselves, but you need to upgrade them or you will be overrun). But they are available only after completing a full cycle, damnit.

(height actually a feature here because of shallow angle sunlight in polar regions)

That's just for full citizenship (the right to vote), not for actual existence—"Get to work, hippie, or out the airlock you go!"

drew some bluey art. might post it here, idk. also i got 7 victory royales at once lol i was bored.

This was a quick one. 2 missions in one go by sending a small satellite to orbit.

It's near Arcturus.