shynung

Having running electricity while others were still living in caves implies vastly superior intellect, hence the term 'übermensch'. Also, engineering requires cooperation in addition to intelligence. Otherwise, the engineers would be limited to making things small enough for a single person to build.

Dry, as in, no liquid water? Yeah, maybe. Dry, as in, no water at all? There's ice all over the place.

True, but it does get somewhat complicated if the person resists being stopped, and started doing things to impede your efforts to stop them. Why are we talking about this?

If there's water around, CO2 can be made into methane (CH4) using the Sabatier process, which also produces oxygen. Both are usable for chemical rocket propellants. Though, admittedly, Mars is easier to reach for those kinds of things, not to mention its much less hostile environment.

There are people that are open to other's ideas and willing to think about it before agreeing or disagreeing. Then, there are those who think people around them don't know half as much as themselves, and thinks of others who disagree with them as persona non grata (unwanted persons). It's usually the latter group that makes a lot of noise. That said, let's not talk about it.

Not the smileys themselves; I meant the standard smiley shapes (smile, sad, laughing, etc.). I assumed Squad looked at these stock smileys and decided to replace it with Kerbal faces.

It was there when I got in. Not really sure where to use it, though; I never used it myself. Maybe it was vBulletin's standard feature?

I've seen one of those 'awful' posts every once in a while. Almost always, it's gone within minutes. Honestly, I'd give a +1 to the mod teams here, working like F1 pitstop crews despite being volunteers and all.

Okay, edited. Don't take it too seriously; it's just for LOL.

Ee, ada yang maen KSP juga di sini. Kok dikit?

Interesting. Let's hope we get to buy it before we perish. How so? I haven't seen any argument of yours that completely refuted mine, or anyone else's. Though, you were being notably aggressive on defending it. *laughs diabolically

If there's anything left. It's been 30 years since V14 launched.

A trip to a sports stadium can be planned and done within hours. A trip to the ISS takes months to plan, and have a much higher safety risk(remember, there's literally tons of liquid explosives sitting right under the astronauts' feet at launch). In the sense that people disagree with you and posts their own opinions and knowledge, yes. No, you haven't realized it. Do some more research. You wrote earlier that cars have no technological advances. This is the evidence refuting it. Whether it reduces the car's cost is irrelevant. If the precooler fails, Skylon won't go to space that day. They'll have to abort it. There's still the satellite payload onboard that can't simply be jettisoned. Skylon is designed to land empty; it'd still be overweight. REL has not published any reliable data about the Skylon's estimated cost-per-kg-to-LEO, and SpaceX's numbers are for their expendable rockets. Instead, I'll quote the estimated launch cost-per-kg-to-LEO of the reusable Space Shuttle vs. the Proton rocket from here. Space Shuttle costs $10.416 per kg to LEO. Proton was $4.302. Problems? It demonstrates the complexity of the economy system associated with both rockets and cars. To put it simply, one cannot control demand by controlling the price. None. Absolutely none whatsoever. You seem to be under the impression that everyone around the world is eager to launch spacecrafts of their own. I must inform you that they don't. The only significant customers of launch services are communications companies, government agencies, and research institutes. SpaceX needs decades before launching a reusable rocket for a paying customer. The rocket design life cycle is that long. Not if the launcher themselves is expensive from the start. See the Space Shuttle. The payloads themselves already cost more than the launcher. Plus, the launchers are already optimized for cost-efficiency. Dropping launch costs lower means building another Aquarius rocket. Which was first flown by Robert H. Goddard in 1926. Not exactly a breakthrough. MMOD stands for micrometeoroid debris. Paper-thin panels certainly would not survive such an impact in one piece. What he was trying to say was, there is no market segment that can utilize that 90% drop in price. Do clarify from which laboratory are this results taken from. It's a pipe dream, just like Mars One, and will never happen in the next remaining few years of our lives. If we were to accept it, we'd be nuts. You never seem to properly acknowledge any facts that happen to contradict your position, yet you keep arguing against it anyway. Hence the 'ferocity' mentioned. [EVILGRIN]Nope. This conversation is incredibly amusing.[/EVILGRIN]

Considering that Canada has colder climates than equatorial areas, and a much snowier (more slippery) roads, I'm not surprised a built-in SAS (yes, it does stand for stability augmentation system) in cars is now mandatory. But let's not get carried away.

Venus has an unforgiving atmosphere. The last Venus-bound probe that actually landed on the surface was the Soviet Venera 14 lander in 1981, and it only lasted 57 minutes before going offline, despite having a hermetically-sealed chassis.

Did you just say your car has SAS? How much was it?

Minus the Space part. It's just a plane now. Except that it now has to land awfully overweight. Carrying a mostly-full tank of liquid hydrogen, in addition to a very expensive payload. And as I said earlier, such a launcher would either be lacking in testing, or it is very small. In the earlier case, no insurance company would be willing to insure it in the first place; insurance costs would be zero because there is no insurance. Not a good idea of business, IMO. Yes. At the very least, you would have known what the potential customers are, now that you dropped one part of the cost. Now you'd have to ask those people if they really want to launch something to space. Most would say they don't.

Before you accuse us, or anyone else of not reading your posts properly(which is outright condescending), it's a good idea to actually find out why we responded as we did. The Skylon spaceplane depends on two precoolers within its engines, which themselves are a new, prototype technology that has been barely tested. What's more, the failure of either precoolers will render the spaceplane unable to reach space. Insurance companies will take this into account when insuring a Skylon flight, so their prices might not be as low as you think. The launcher and the spacecraft are different objects, and lowering the cost of one only reduces the insurance cost attributed to that object alone. If the launcher price dropped by a factor of 10, the total insurance costs would drop by much less, not more. Did you actually think that launchers do not undergo testing? If similar safety standards compared to other launchers is observed, testing costs would not change much, even if hardware costs fall to 1/10. If the total launch cost is actually 1/10 of other rockets, it is a sign that proper safety standards might have been skimped on. For the reasons stated above, astronauts typically object to being launched on a cheapskate rocket. They will always prefer a reliable rocket with high safety standards and good track records. It is an SSTO rocket, designed purely to reduce launch costs. Reusability does not always reduce costs; see the Space Shuttle for example. You may not, but I believe you could learn a lot by knowing how expensive these things actually are. After you see the results (at the very least, you should know the minimum cost/kg to GTO), slash it to 1/10, and see for yourself how much it would cost under your price estimations, and what kinds of things would be profitable to do with it. (And don't start blabbering about space tourism; not a lot of people are interested enough to actually spend a vacation in a tin can floating in the void as of today.) And no, I will not do the maths for you; I have a feeling you would skip it off entirely anyway.

I suppose it's just me, then. I don't fly heavy spacecrafts often TBH, I leave those to MechJeb.

It can't, but it's also far more stable, and generally easier to fly. The S25 felt like a flying brick in comparison, not to mention its RCS yawing problems; it takes quite some time to get used to.

Ah, finally! That S25 thing eats up RAM space like a bunch of Mainsails. Kind of awkward to fly, too(imperfect RCS maneuvers being only one problem); the original KSO is tame in comparison.

I disagree, because: Not necessarily. The price of the launch vehicle is independent from the price of the payload(the satellite). Insurance costs may go down, but not as much as you think. Launch vehicle testing costs are independent from the actual cost-per-launch. Generally, more testing means better vehicle reliability, but will raise the total vehicle cost, so absurdly low launch costs are usually a yellow flag for the launch client. Manned rockets require the highest standards of safety, therefore high testing costs, and high total vehicle costs. Astronauts also have problems with being launched from a safety-unproven, cheapskate rocket. They're not Jebediah Kerman. This concept has been studied (and discussed in KSP forums) once. The fact that the study does not produce a practical launcher implies problems with the concept as it is. Do us a favor, and conduct a cost-benefit comparison analysis of using a fleet of Falcon 9 Reusable rockets vs. Skylon SSTO spaceplanes vs. Aquarius Launch Vehicle rockets.

It'd be pretty disappointing, yeah. Though, I bet it's better than watching a rocket explosion. The Challenger disaster happened because the managers hurried the launch; SpaceX certainly wanted to avoid repeating history.

Space is useful, but only to a very few groups of people. There's the GEO communications satellite, and the occasional research satellites/space telescopes/ISS missions (all of which are rare in comparison to GEO comsat), but nothing more. Also, space tourism is a very small market; only a very small number of living humans would actually be willing to pay for a short flight to space. And no, we have no space-worthy manufacturing technology that is proven profitable, not enough PV panel production to justify solar power satellites(if we do, we would build it on the ground first), no reliable nuclear waste storage facility that won't suddenly and randomly deorbit itself, and no proven technology to mine asteroids profitably (not to mention the asteroid itself).

Demand is limited because the profit is limited as well, and only useful to a few kinds of people(space research agencies, communications companies, and intelligence agencies, and there aren't many of either). Unlike transoceanic flight, spaceflight isn't very profitable; there isn't much in space to make money out of, as of now. Not to mention that a spaceflight journey takes a massive amount of energy, and therefore cost, to ever happen in the first place.