cantab

Plenty. Been playing Europa Universalis IV lately, just finished my first save though so will give it a rest. Loads of hours in Cities: Skylines. And lots on my 3DS, nearly finished Super Mystery Dungeon and got a Mario & Luigi game waiting to be started.

For a typical 8-inch Dobsonian a good eyepiece lineup would be something like so. Low magnification. About 30mm, giving about 40x. Use for finding all things, and viewing larger deep-sky objects. The scope you linked has this covered well with both its eyepieces. High magnification. About 200x, which means a 6mm eyepiece. Use for viewing planets in good conditions. This is one I think you should buy, at least if you want to look at planets, and I suggest a wide angle eyepiece with good eye relief. Wide angle means less needing to nudge the scope, while eye relief is how close your eye needs to be to the lens - too short and it's uncomfortable to use. If your eyes have significant astigmatism and you want to wear glasses while observing then eye relief is especially important because you need space for your glasses between eyepiece and eye. Then some in-between magnifications. The Barlow lens included with the scope you linked will double the magnification of any eyepiece and that will give you 70x and 100x which are good for most deep-sky objects and for seeing the whole Moon at once. Barlow lenses give mixed results though, sometimes they work well but often they give poor quality views. 100x to 200x is a bit of a gap, and depending on what you observe you might want to fill it in future. Then again, you might be fine.

They're not airbrakes, they're grid fins. And they're not used during re-entry, the Falcon 9 first stage doesn't get anywhere near orbit to begin with.

Not really. But all good telescopes take standard interchangeable eyepieces, so you can buy additional ones, and most amateur astronomers acquire a collection to cover various magnifications and tasks. With an 8-inch Dobsonian 200x shouldn't be a problem. More is possible, but it can get tricky to keep nudging the scope. Mars is in any event one of the most difficult targets, bear that in mind. Sketches like this one give you an idea of what you might get:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake That, basically.

Meanwhile, in 1.0.5 on Linux I was able to run 64-bit KSP with multiple planet packs and some other mods on my old PC with 4 GB of RAM. I think the DX9 texture duplication bug is a big part of the RAM-hogging ways on Windows.

Until, of course, you find your codebase is a total spaghetti mess that's nigh-impossible to maintain. Which I feel confident guessing is the norm in the games industry, and based on some of the bizarre bugs reported KSP is probably included.

In my current "main" sandbox save, no quickloads. Reverts only during un-Kerballed launches, to save time waiting for the debris to hit the ground. What happens happens. If it's really a game bug I can go back to my last hourly automatic backup.

On alien biology, there's one thing I feel reasonably confident in predicting. If the general group of alien life has n recognisable legs, the technologically advanced species in that group will have at most n-1 legs - because at least one will have been repurposed evolutionarily as an arm. If the group has bilateral symmetry, expect n-2 legs and 2 arms. There can be exceptions, if some other part of the body evolved to be a dextrous manipulator, something I consider essential for a species to develop technology and intelligence. But the limbs seem like an obvious choice.

Yup, mica. Muscovite, in particular, but they all have similar structues.

Well hexene would be a chain molecule. Benzene is the 6-carbons in a ring. Anyway, here's one:

Ah, yes, an A4 sheet would be enough for full aperture on an 8 inch scope. I forgot the Imperial dimensions of A4 paper, d'oh.

I did an asteroid ship long before mining was a (stock) thing. https://flic.kr/p/nTmzTU I grant it's not the biggest rock, but a pusher seemed to work fine for me. Two key aspects I feel make it work. An engine cluster means I only need to align the drive section more-or-less, and can fine tune by setting thrust limiters. And steering is handled by the separate "control sections", they act to turn the asteroid which in turn turns the drive section with it. This avoids the problem with a single pusher ship where trying to turning left bends the claw such that the thrust actually acts to turn right.

Maybe we need a one-at-a-time rule, like the riddles thread had? Anyway, C6H6 is benzene I think.

So you know the arms of the "spider" that hold the secondary mirror? Make an off-centre circular aperture that fits between those arms, that's usually a good approach.

Baader solar film, and make your own holder for it. Cheap and gives high quality images, but be really sure your filter can't fall off your scope! An A4 sheet will suffice for most, considering that with a large scope there's a case for using a smaller filter.

"Breaks current physics models" is wide of the mark I'd say. Is not explained by current models would be more accurate. We don't have a good explanation for the behaviour of these particular stars, but that doesn't necessarily undermine our explanations for the behaviour of other stars.

Well it was the easiest way to program it. And as others mentioned, in a game like KSP the developers have very little control over what textures need loading it. There's some room for improvement - no need to have Eve surface loaded when the player is landing on Ike, for example. But when it comes to parts, consider that a player could have for example one ship with loads of different rocket parts, and then bring in another ship with loads of different spaceplane parts, and they could be closing at considerable speed, dynamic loading isn't so easy. Does the game freeze as it loads stuff in? Does it show potato-level textures until it loads the better ones and hope the player doesn't notice?

I've played KSP a lot, but it's not completely dominated my gaming. Indeed, it got me back into PC gaming in general. Lately I've been playing Europa Universalis IV, having good fun with that, today managed to fight off Spain from nicking my South African colony, I'm playing as Maldives, thanks to a strong African ally and a lucky chance to sue for peace.

Some of these are justifiable. Real mobile phones usually do have an option to make noises, or vibrate which makes a noise too, when you touch the screen or push a key. And I recently set up some EPOS system which by default made a LOUD beep every time you touched the touchscreen. (I turned that off because it was annoying as heck.) Using the PC keyboard a lot is justifiable in certain settings, in particular if the user might reasonably be using the command line a lot. And yes, the command line is still useful, on Linux I use it on a daily basis. Nowadays Google usually *does* give me the result I want on the first try, sometimes without even needing to click through to the website - the one sentence in the search results tells me what I need. Single-biome planets, judged by Earth's standards, may be justifiable. Most if not all bodies in our solar system qualify - true, Mars has climate and weather but it's still a total ice desert everywhere by our standards. Desert worlds like Dune and Tatooine where life barely holds on seem plausible. A geologically dead world that retains its atmosphere and oceans will flatten out its terrain, and if the amount of water is just right it could become a "swamp world". Etc.

Ball-and-stick molecular models in general are somewhat misleading, the space-filling type give a better idea of what the molecule is actually like. But ball-and-stick is easier to build and easier to see the arrangement of the atoms, which is why they persist.

When trying to see extended objects, what counts is surface brightness. Getting closer to something doesn't increase its surface brightness, because you see it spread over a larger angular size. That may seem counterintuitive, but it really shouldn't - an ordinary object here on Earth looks just as light when it's up close or far away. Looking at something through a telescope can't increase surface brightness either. What this means is that if you can't see an apparently-large nebula from dark skies on Earth, you can't see it with your eyes *anywhere*. So stuff like the California Nebula or Banard's Loop is not going to be visible. The Orion Nebula will be visible, but not especially colourful. As for candidates for what *would* look bright and spectacular, well a few spring to mind. Planetary nebulae for a start. They're very compact by nebula standards, and appear too small to see with the naked-eye from Earth but can have quite high surface brightness and through a telescope visible colours.

Another one that has reported real-world impact: Unrealistic depictions of forensics. See, every CSI show ever. It's actually giving real juries unrealistic expectations of forensic evidence. Quite likely criminals have been let free, and innocent people jailed, because of unrealistic films and TV.

Yeah, 5 parts is a real challenge. I'd like to add a tug but am struggling to see how I could do a usable. 3 RCS ports, a probe core, and a power source, and then I can't add a reaction wheel which it could really do with. Unless I use KIS to build in orbit, but I don't have it installed atm, and anyway I'm not sure if it would affect the save file.

Real cars don't usually explode or catch fire in a crash. Therefore, firstly put your darn seatbelt on! Too many people think they'll get trapped in a burning car wearing it, but if you don't wear it the crash will just throw you through the windscreen and you'll smash into whatever. Secondly, if you see somebody in a crashed car, don't be in a rush to get them out, you could make their injuries worse. Basically, this common movie science error literally gets people killed.