problemecium

http://parameciumkid.tumblr.com/post/141567499096/the-noodle-incident

Heh. I just watched this a few minutes ago when it appeared in my Subscriptions feed. Mad props to the guy for his retort about centrifugal force. Mother Nature does not care what high school physics teachers say, and she will kill you, push you around, and apply whatever forces she wants anyway ^^

MOOSTAAAHCHE

Ooooh, so YOU made Mercury Simulator? Mad props, man. I can only dream of Scott Manley taking any notice of my spaceship game xP

I have nothing to offer you aside from my sympathies, as I too frequently face paucities of replies to threads I start :\

I have also confirmed that the Jeb aboard Kidonia is my own, but I'll have the crew keep eyes out for any anomalies. In the meantime, Squadspeed, Kappa Jeb.

Indeed, there's quite a large and obvious orange circle visible on the KerbalMaps image, even without zooming in, but since I've never noticed it in-game, I suspect that it's just an idiosyncrasy of the KerbalMaps website.

Now that you guys remind me, I also own a telescope. I better go and get it so I can have a look too xD

Not to derail, but OP gets a reputation point for proper use of an Oxford comma ^^

Well yeah. But you've already set the ball rolling by explaining some of the rebranded rules, so I can easily imagine someone around here will be tempted to write the rest ^^

I eagerly await the publication of a complete Cheks rulebook and beginner's guide by one of the forum users... I know it's inevitable xD

While I was waiting for Kidonia's correction burn, the transfer windows for both Duna and Eeloo came up. This is me deorbiting the launch stage for my Eeloo mothership, which while very large is much more conservative than Kidonia.

I use Intel HD Graphics 4000, an integrated GPU, for lack of a dedicated graphics card. Any time I complain about a game crashing or performing poorly, people are quick to say "you need graphics card," yet every game that does run on it runs just fine (albeit not on max settings, but hey, who does that) and when I do manage to fix problems it also runs just fine. And in games like KSP, educated players know that it's the CPU that bottlenecks it, not the GPU. Does that count as funny? :\

Okay yes. I meant "around 10x" as in "tossing an asteroid into it won't transmogrify it into a star." So thank you for reinforcing my general point

I know that feel, bro. My previous Jool-5 mission took so long to prepare that the new KSP came out before I did the ejection burn. In the current one, Kidonia has made the burn... but still has a month to go before the inclination correction and then around a year before actually getting to Jool xP

Ugh. I just finished catching up on the last THIRTY PAGES. Blast this thread grows fast. Remind me to check it more often. I had it subscribed before, but when every real page is accompanied by 479 replies, it wasn't doing me much good ^^; I'm glad the numbers finally came in. At 1360 tons... it's actually heavier than Kidonia o_o I still win for part count though (1398)... if that counts xD I also don't recall the length measurement, but it's definitely close. I'd been starting to feel a bit burned out KSP-wise, but you've rekindled my motivation to finish up my mission so when 1.1 comes out I can roll out an even bigger one! Actually, on that note, when this is all done would it be possible to provide a download of the full craft, or at least the main hull (sorry if I missed that being brought up before... again, the thread grows fast)? I want to compare your ship to mine side-by side xD

Welp. I was looking for something completely different, but when this image showed up I knew it was a winner xD

This thread confuses me. Are we talking about: - "Burning" as in "on fire?" If so, remember that gas giants such as Jupiter contain a lot of flammable hydrogen, but only trace amounts at best of oxygen, which is just as important for combustion. If a hypothetical planet did form with large amounts of oxygen and hydrogen, it would all have combined shortly after formation into water - after all, planets are hot when they form. - "Burning" via nuclear fusion? In this case, sure, a vaguely Jupiter-sized object could support life. Such an object is literally what a brown dwarf is, albeit more massive (at this size, gas giants don't expand significantly with increased mass but just get denser). However, Jupiter would have to be around 10 times its current mass to sustain nuclear fusion on a large scale. While a hydrogen bomb could be deployed to initiate a small amount of fusion in its atmosphere, the process would not be self-sustaining and would stop within minutes, not even covering the entire surface but just leaving a little spot in the clouds that would dissipate after a few days.

Yeah, A: He could have put it, well, anywhere. Why assume it's the back door? and B: I got the joke in 0.2 seconds. It wasn't that hard o_O

I recommend a visit to the "Open-Source Construction Techniques for Craft Aesthetics" thread in the Spacecraft Exchange, both to share this idea and to get more.

First things first: clearing up misunderstandings: "centripetal force" means "whatever force is pulling the object toward the middle so it goes in a circle" - in this case, gravity. In a rotating reference frame such as that of an orbiting spaceship, the force that makes it resist gravity and push itself out to higher orbits is centrifugal force. When high-school physics teachers say it isn't real, they mean it isn't being generated via work and is not one of the fundamental forces, not that it should be called "centripetal" force instead. "Centrifugal" is indeed the correct term, and the force acts real enough regardless of what the physics teachers say about it. So anyway. If I understand the setup correctly, we're putting two ships near each other and gravitationally connecting them via what amounts to a wormhole. When they are moved apart, the distance between them in normal space increases, but the strength of the gravitational force does not decrease, producing huge amounts of free potential energy. My gut tells me this shouldn't work, and my reasoning is thus: It's best to not think of entanglement and its related phenomena as traveling through space in the conventional sense. Rather, when particles are entangled, they effectively create a tiny wormhole between themselves through which they can transmit information (ideally, anyway. IRL there are obstacles to this, but let's ignore them for now). Wormholes are structures made of space; from the reference frame of an outside observer, the particles are separated by a large distance in normal space, but from the reference frame of either particle, the distance between them, using the wormhole, is minuscule. Thus they can exert large forces on one another and communicate rapidly. However, this also means that any and all large forces they exert will be exerted through the wormhole (with or without Morgan Freeman) - not around it. Around it, those forces have to slog through regular space. Following? So applying this to the spaceships, they produce a gravitational attraction through a tiny wormhole, then move apart. The attraction continues to pull through the wormhole, causing both ships to "want" to squeeze themselves into the wormhole and meet each other. Effectively, the wormhole end on each ship is pulling the ship into it via gravity transmitted through from the other ship. It's gravitationally equivalent to a tiny black hole in the ship, pulling the ship into itself. While this does generate a significant force on the ship, this force isn't reactionless any more than anything else. If the wormhole end is a sphere, nothing happens; if the force is directed in a particular direction, then when the wormhole end pulls the ship in one direction, it will pull itself in the opposite direction, resulting in no net motion. The mass of the wormhole itself is insignificant; a heavy wormhole would move less, and a light one would move more, but the total force on the system remains zero, both for the pair of ships and for each ship and wormhole end individually.

For some time now, cosmologists have been attempting to answer this very question, along with several others, via measurements of the properties of the entire visible universe. If a group of flatlanders were living on a 3D sphere, they wouldn't be able to tell at first, but if they were to look very far into the distance (using 2D light that follows the sphere), they could see light that has traveled all the way around the sphere in a circle. There would also be cases where objects on the other side of the sphere would be visible in opposite directions. Accordingly, cosmologists have searched for galaxies that are visible on opposite sides of the sky, or for motion patterns that suggest galaxies on opposite ends of the sky are interacting with each other, gravitationally or otherwise. Alas, so far no such phenomena have been found. The flatlanders could also, with sensitive equipment, draw very long, straight, parallel lines and note that the distances between them decreased gradually, such that an infinitely long pair of lines should eventually converge. Models and tests show that this can happen in our universe with straight beams of light in the vicinity of massive objects, creating effects such as Einstein rings. Cosmologists have been looking for evidence that this occurs on the grand scale as well, but also to no avail - within the limits of our measurements, the fabric of spacetime appears perfectly flat with only miniscule possible deviation. These separate observations indicate that the universe is not a closed 4D surface, or if it is, it must be much, much bigger than the visible universe - as in several orders of magnitude, the way the Earth was to ancient Mesopotamians who only knew of the Tigris-Euphrates basin.

Not so shiny any more, are you?