problemecium

Sure! Practical? Obviously not of course. Presumably if the Empire can create artificial gravity, they can also cancel natural gravity. So despite the Death Star's mass, they can make gravity go any direction they want. As to why they decided to make parallel decks, it's a mystery. Also, even at 160 km across, since the Death Star's interior is mainly empty space or air (since the rooms themselves are obviously hollow): ... ...its density is much lower than that of a typical asteroid, and even 160 km asteroids made of solid rock have really pathetic gravity. If you stuck a marble on the floor, you might notice a slight tendency to move toward the center of the station, akin to a slightly non-level floor, but it wouldn't be anywhere near enough to cause disorientation. Regarding structural issues, Star Wars seems to feature a lot of materials much stronger than modern-day metals and alloys. Take for example the star destroyer wreckage seen in the trailers for The Force Awakens - it's basically whole. Even airplanes, at their comparatively low speeds and altitudes, tend to splatter everywhere when they crash, so I'm pretty confident a mile-long spacecraft made out of today's materials would not only explode and scatter across several dozen miles on impact, but break up during reentry and spew debris for hundreds of miles. So if the Death Star is made out of unobtanium, it could easily support its own weight. Honestly, it's the superlaser that's the hard part. Blasting out enough thermal energy to overcome a planet's immense gravitational binding energy, not to mention making a big dramatic explosion like in the film, is a Herculean task even for an interstellar civilization. Much more practical and equally effective would simply be to burn the surface with the laser or use a kinetic-kill weapon (asteroid launcher anyone?).

Amen to the OP. Jets are one of many examples of things in KSP that actually greatly outperform their real-life equivalents despite popular opinion. For example, as I mentioned in another thread, the fuel tanks are actually very durable. 6 m/s is actually a pretty high speed for an abrupt sidelong impact, and the vast majority of human rockets couldn't withstand that.

I've always jut been of the opinion that their priorities are markedly different from ours. For instance: - They obviously care a LOT more about space exploration than we do, to the degree that the plurality of their architecture on Kerbin's surface is devoted to the space industry. Then again, if their civilization is mainly underwater of underground this may be a biased sample. - They invested in huge, powerful reaction wheels far beyond what we humans actually put on our spacecraft. - They aren't big on efficiency or cost-effectiveness nearly as much as they are concerned with structural overengineering. The fuel tanks, notably, have terrible mass ratios thanks to thick walls able to survive impacts of anywhere from 6 m/s to 50 m/s against solid concrete (that's 21-180 km/h or 13-112 mph). 6 m/s seems slow to us as players, but the vast majority of human rockets couldn't handle a sidelong impact of that magnitude. So they're not really stupid or insane. They're just extraterrestrials who developed their culture on a different planet and thus think very differently from the way we do.

I have every version, including hotfixes, dating back to 0.20.2 when I bought KSP, as well as the 0.18.3 demo, the old 0.13.3 demo, and the very old 0.7 release. 'Course as Vanamonde has pointed out I'm not allowed to share xP

Dark matter's properties have indeed not been clearly defined (nor really whether it exists), but matter and anti-matter are another, uh, matter. It is already well known what comprises them and what happens when they interact. Matter and antimatter are simply different types of stuff that can be formed from the various elementary particles. I'd call them forms of matter, but uh... naming problems. Both consist of quarks, antiquarks, electrons, positrons, etc. which have all been observed and studied, and when matter interacts with antimatter it produces a flurry of photons and other bosons, plus sometimes some leftover matter and antimatter debris. On the other hand, no mechanism has been observed by which (anti)matter can be converted into dark matter or back. On the topic of white holes, not only is there no observational evidence, but the laws of physics that govern black holes only produce their opposite - white holes - as a mathematical artifact, which the same laws of physics also prohibit. To start with, any large collection of mass (which both matter and antimatter have) in a tiny space will have positive gravity that causes it to draw things in. In order to blast out cosmic quantities of matter, the object would have to either be so dense that its own gravity would make it a black hole (and thus fail to expel anything at all) or be some sort of entity that continuously converts dark matter into matter (which as detailed above is currently outside the realm of Science). Last, observational evidence of the universe on a large scale doesn't point to galaxies being spawned from localized white holes, but rather all originating at a single point. In fact the data point very strongly to the origin of the universe being a very, very small and dense region of space. Long story short your hypothesis is very imaginative and would make for a great sci-fi origin story or mythological creation legend, but it's unlikely to apply to this reality, even compared to many of the other esoteric ideas out there.

This isn't a time travel thread, but I have to say something here. That doesn't work. Your travel to the past can work in one of two ways: 1. You create or travel to a parallel universe in which the Borg don't exist - an "alternate timeline" if you like. Thus you have left our universe and gone gallivanting off into your own. I'm sure that universe is great, but all of us back here still have our Borg to deal with. Unless of course you "erased the old timeline," i.e. destroyed the universe... in which case you suck and are the biggest jerk ever ;P 2. You travel on a closed timelike curve into your own universe's past. But since the past, by its definition, happens before the present and future, whatever you're "going to do" in the past already happened, even before you set out. If the Borg exist now, no amount of traveling to the past will change the fact that they already do exist now. You can go ahead and try to kill your grandfather while you're at it, but nothing you do "will" result in anything changing the facts we've already established - that you and the Borg both exist. Yes, that does bode ill for your free will, but that's the price of time travel. Unless of course you're trying to make the point that Starkiller base is impossible, in which case... nah. Just very impractical. Building it exactly as depicted in the film would be ridiculously hard due to several intervening laws of physics, but you could build the basic concept - a planet-sized cannon - easily enough with the necessary resources. I do concur with your doubts as to why one would build it in that format though. Star Wars seems to have a predilection with giant balls with doomsday lasers on them, while, as mentioned by many others here, there are much more practical and equally scary ways to destroy your enemies (and their planets, if you simply must).

Regarding the Pillars of Creation and other famous objects, a lot of those popular images are not only long-exposure but false-color, showing colors based on spectra we humans can't see. Most nebulae would look either a slate gray or a ruddy brown, if I've heard correctly. Here's the Cat's Eye nebula for example: src: http://www.budgetastronomer.ca/index.php?page=what-can-you-see

Perhaps they are a Kardashev Level 3 civilization... Who knows? Perhaps a literal galactic empire (I mean on a much bigger scale than Star Wars. Billions of systems rather than thousands) has more than enough resources to slap a few of these things together.

The "screenshots" are just showing text, presumably the imgur URL code.

Just in case anyone actually does want to know: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Kessel_Run/Legends Long story short, when doing the Kessel Run, you encounter a dangerous nebula. It's safest to go around it, and more dangerous the more direct a route you take. So the Milennium Falcon being able to do it on a trajectory only 12 pc long is a testament to its maneuverability, durability, or both.

Yes, obviously that image was created by Nature. Problem? ;P

Yep! They all work fine now!

^ Now that's a veritable Death Star you've got there xD See what I did there?

The only thing I have taken away from this thread is EPISODE 2 IS OUT?!?!? I may return to edit this post after watching it xD

No spoilers meant, but The Force Awakens is going to blow it out of the water as far as science mistakes are concerned ;P

Interesting that they both came out as a little minus in a gray circle. That or your images are broken.

Reminds me of the old "Falling Sand Game" and its various spinoffs.

I agree it'd be nice, but given that so far SQUAD seems dead-set against anything interstellar, don't expect it to ever show up in the stock game. Here's hoping the mod people figure it out

^ Actually he IS talking about lithobraking, if you read all the way to the end. Anyway, parachutes are also reusable if you have a Kerbal aboard: it can EVA, go near the parachutes, and use the right-click menu to repack them. I think it needs to be an Engineer to do this. Also, air brakes can be deployed at any altitude, but not really at any speed. If you're going too fast and too low, they can easily overheat and blow off, as I've had occur on several occasions.

Bump! This game project didn't die. Rather I've been working on it off and on for the past year and made tons of progress. The game is now known as "StarBlast!" and features a full Campaign Mode and an all-new fleet of sample ships and weapons:

0/10 for not posting a new spaceship. I made this in Blender yesterday. Still a WIP.

Space Air System (SAS): Makes space filled with air, which only provides drag when the engines are off and enables Kerbals to EVA without helmets. Survival Horror Overhaul "Wing it!" (SHOW): Adds a simple function so that if a Kerbal ever drifts more than ten meters from a spacecraft or station it immediately dies just like in every space survival movie. Stellar No Neighborhood: Does the opposite of Stellar Neighborhood and several other star system expansions - rather than add a black hole for all the alternate Kerbols to orbit, it simply removes Kerbol and makes everything orbit Kerbin. Sure to please the Keocentrists and konsipracy theorists! 16 Bit Community Workaround: Tired of having all that extra RAM lying around because KSP doesn't use enough? Want to be able to run fewer mods? This forces KSP to only use 16 bits for memory addresses. Guaranteed to make KSP crash every time you run it! Classic Water Restorer: Restores the water to its (alleged) properties prior to KSP 1.0. Now when anything touches it at all it immediately explodes. Works great with Explosions Plus Plus! Explosions Plus Plus: Tired of that disappointing "poof" when a Kerbal hits the ground too hard? Now everything explodes on collision like a Jumbo-64 tank! KA-BOOOOOOM!!!1 Works great in conjunction with Classic Water Restorer. Kerbal Spice Program: Every time KSP is run, it connects to CKAN and installs one random mod. If desired, that mod can be saved for future sessions; otherwise it is uninstalled when KSP closes.

In general I agree with OP. The existing maneuver system is completely usable once you get used to it, but that doesn't mean it's intuitive or that getting used to it isn't needlessly hard. If nothing else, some of the PreciseNode functionality needs to be duplicated in the stock game, and maneuver nodes need to be editable in the Tracking Station.

Thanx. It's pretty funny xD