cantab

There's been loads of discussion on how to handle binary systems in another thread. Can't find it now, but IIRC the "invisible barycentre body" approach was found to be very bad, while approaches using non-spherical touching SOIs worked better.

I believe it would, but you might have it swinging around, I think it'd be rather underdamped. I can also see there being problems rotating the asteroid, and maintaining a precise heading on your burns. An advantage to pushers is you can make a more compact ship overall, because you don't need the engines on big outriggers or miles from the claw. Generally nothing more than an aesthetic issue in stock, but I can see it mattering in FAR.

Flying on Eve will I think be harder than on Kerbin because of the greater gravity. It's easy to see that at the same pressure you need more lift. Also a chemical rocket won't give you much endurance while an ion engine won't give you much speed.

Really it needs some idea of what the Lego version is going to be like. What's the overall scale, what bricks will it use, and so on. General ideas are ten a penny I'm afraid.

The heading indicator is the wide V-shaped thing in the middle. That actually stays still, while the navball moves underneath it, like the artificial horizons on most aircraft. When you start on the pad the compass directions on the navball are like this: S W E N (North is emphasised by a red line, by the way). You might be thinking "wait a moment, north and south are flipped!". The reason is that you're effectively looking straight up at the sky, not down on the ground like with maps of Earth. You get the same effect on star maps, if you put north at the top east and west appear reversed, for the same reason. With that in mind, A yaws to port, which is west in the default craft orientation. B yaws to starboard, which is east. W pitches down, which is north. And S pitches up, into an inverted attitude heading south.

"Everyone has one" certainly narrows things down a bit Anyway I don't feel like writing another right now, so I'll open the floor to whoever wants to post next.

Is it one's age?

Well darn, that didn't last long!A whole bunch of words all properly spelled, - Kinda obvious. I had planned to put the actual number of words but decided not to. New to the world - because I only just wrote it. I cannot be held, - it's on a computer screen. (And I forgot about smartphones and so on...) Well I could be, if you kill a tree, But don't waste your money on solving me. - If you printed it out, but that'd use paper and ink Know that gnu is not Unix, Lame can convert your musics, - As you mention, other examples of self-referential things What's that to do with this riddle you say? I'm sure you'll deduce the connection one day. - Just filler really The answer to this is plain in your face, - Literally so as you're reading it So who will succeed, on this forum of space? More filler

Well I'll be darned, seems like Epthelyn is right. I always assumed A was the case - that the "no axial tilt" meant relative to the body's orbit round its primary, not relative to Kerbin's orbit round the Sun.

The Macbeth missions in my albums are all asteroid tugs. But my basic design suggestion is as follows: Main section with a claw up front, a big fuel tank, and a cluster of engines. Using an engine cluster gives the advantage that you can set thrust limiters differently to counter minor imbalances. Don't put too many reaction wheels or RCS ports on this main section, its job is to provide the forward thrust. Capability to add extra fuel. Detachable "control sections", each with their own claw, some reaction wheels, and some RCS. Dot them about the asteroid and they'll really help keep it under control. I've had 500-ton D-classes be easy, if a little slow, to turn this way. Also, I'm a firm proponent of solar orbit intercept. It takes more delta-V to get there but that's "cheap" delta-V expended without an asteroid in tow. Once you meet the asteroid you need only make a small correction for aerocapture. Or since asteroids in LKO are ten-a-penny, why not set up the ante with a gravity assist on to Eve or Duna.

Lol. As for Dres, with any luck an art pass will improve it a bit. I move that Squad do this after the Dawn spacecraft reaches Ceres; at the moment Dres is in the unenviable position of being based on a real-world object we have no detailed images of! Though I think it'll still be kind of like the Mun, but much more hassle to get to. That may be a good thing, since the niche of hard-to-get-to and hardish to land on is filled by Moho.

Not entirely convinced I've done a great job of it, but here goes. A whole bunch of words all properly spelled, New to the world, I cannot be held, Well I could be, if you kill a tree, But don't waste your money on solving me. Know that gnu is not Unix, Lame can convert your musics, What's that to do with this riddle you say? I'm sure you'll deduce the connection one day. The answer to this is plain in your face, So who will succeed, on this forum of space?

I'm not sure about more efficient. Rowing is powerful, largely because you can put your whole body into it, and it's mechanically simpler which was a factor in historic times when gears and bearings weren't as good as we can build them today. A cycling action though can be very efficient, and if you coupled it to a propeller rather than the traditional paddle wheels it would be even more so.

Absolutely. And indeed such a technique would revolutionise computing. Although it's probably better to input the equation first, otherwise you have no control over the solution it spits out.Time loop logic does have its limits mind. One is that if solving the problem would take too long, the scenario where the computer breaks trying becomes more likely. That can be countered to an extent if the problem can be broken up. To be honest, with fast sublight travel the timescales involved wouldn't be that different to the situation on Earth before the radio and the aeroplane. And that's a situation that nations built continent-spanning, even global empires in. It would seem like a step backwards compared to the hyper-connected late 20th/early 21st century, but humanity could spread to nearby star systems and still retain a broadly unified civilization.

If it's in a "decaying orbit" there's every chance the apogee is too low as well. A big burn at perigee would be needed to kick the apogee back up, then another burn at apogee - or indeed make the perigee burn so big that it puts the asteroid on an escape trajectory.

And we hear a collective groan from the rest of the thread I'll have one later, got work atm

That's one yeah. Hmmhmmhmm...a sundog? Edit: Since people have said Titanic, is it maybe the Flying Dutchman, mythical ship that's now reckoned to be a mirage?

Sounds kinda like the Brocken spectre - when the low Sun casts your shadow onto clouds.

Hmm...a comet?

There's no engine called the LV-454. Do you mean the LV-T45?

That remains plausible, indeed probable, of course. But general relativity does seem full of loopholes to get round it, and even though many of them require silly stuff like negative mass there's no general theoretical reason as yet to say they'll all be like that.However, what I'm arguing isn't so much that FTL communications are possible, but rather that time travel paradoxes do not make FTL communications impossible. There may still be something totally different standing in the way of FTL.

The last script I wrote worked fine on datasets of a few hundred records. Then I set it on the big 150,000 record task. 24 hours of 100% cpu later, it finished. And the output is riddled with faults.

Well, this is just the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle by the way. When you speak of a "magic mechanism", I suspect you're imagining a situation where events would be about to cause a paradox and suddenly something randomly goes kaput to stop it. I don't think that's very likely; rather, there wouldn't even be "near-misses", or they'd be extremely rare. Supporting this sort of idea is the study done of the following time paradox, discussed in more detail on the wiki article: Take a wormhole that has its two ends at different times. Send a ball in through the "future" end so it will come out the "past" end and knock its previous self away from the wormhole, meaning it never goes through so never knocks itself off course, meaning....etc etc etc. It seems a problem, but there's a self-consistent solution. The ball exits the wormhole not on the expected course, but a slightly different one, giving its previous self a glancing blow to put it on that slightly different course. Detailed study found that those self-consistent trajectories are "easy", there are loads of possibilities, while finding an initial trajectory that does not have a self-consistent solution defeated the students and may well be impossible. Now that's just one situation for one type of time machine, but the flavour of the argument is instructive. Perhaps it's not entirely satisfying, but I don't find the alternative argument that "some time travel situations are paradoxes therefore all time travel situations are impossible" satisfying either.

Jokes about butter are too widely spread, and cow jokes just get milked.

This is where I disagree. It's easy to contrive paradoxes based on FTL communication or time travel (which are two sides of the same coin). But just because our mind can contrive them doesn't mean they can be in the Universe.It's my belief that there aren't any paradoxes in the Universe, and indeed that's axiomatic: the Universe, considering its full extent in spacetime, is consistent. Crucial in understanding why the Universe could contain time travel without having paradoxes is that the contrived situations implicitly assume human free will in setting them. Free will is an extremely difficult idea that would warrant its own thread to debate, but by abandoning it it becomes much easier to just say "paradoxes don't occur". Nobody will ever successfully set up a self-destroying signal or a grandfather paradox, even if a naive view suggests they could, because they do not happen in a consistent Universe.