cantab

Quoted for truth. The law basically forces big companies to be *expletives* towards their fans.

Well...shoot. Not good for the community, and ultimately not good for Squad either. We've already had Mediafire banned and any of the other one-click hosters could get subject to a similar ban any time. Nobody likes Curse. From a user's point of view, downloading mod releases off Github seems to be a nuisance usually.

Which is what techbuyersguru did. Of course when it comes to making a buying choice there are other factors, but they are only going to strengthen the advantage of the i3 that has already been demonstrated on the grounds of the hyperthreading alone. (Making the reasonable assumption Intel don't make the i3's *worse* in those other factors than the corresponding Pentiums.)

More results on quad-core processors, more of the same. But I found someone who's benchmarked on a Core i3 as well as an i7, testing both with HT enabled and disabled. http://techbuyersguru.com/dual-core-quad-core-and-hyperthreading-benchmark-analysis The benefits of hyperthreading on the Core i3 are clearly measurable, and in some games closer to the 4-core CPU than the non-HT dual-core. This separates two questions that are conflated when we only looked at Core i7 results. Does hyperthreading help games? Yes, it can. In some, possibly most, games a Core i3 will be rather better than the corresponding Pentium. Does "8 threads" help games? Generally no. In most, possibly almost all, games a Core i5 will be just as good as the corresponding Core i7.

GTX 760 and everything at high or max settings - all that proves is that with a mid-range card like a 760 your games are GPU-limited. It doesn't prove that hyperthreading doesn't matter, it proves that CPU doesn't matter (within reason). Which wider tests show - it's not uncommon for everything from an 860K to a Core i7 to hit pretty much the same framerate. Preliminary indications on my Core i3 system in Cities: Skylines - a CPU-punisher if ever there was one - are that disabling hyperthreading results in less smooth gameplay. I still need to run actual frame time measurements though.

Possible, sure. But you give me an estimate of the cost to grade 40 kilometres (and whatever width you think is appropriate) here on Earth, never mind on the Moon. That's the distance you need to stop from lunar orbital speed with a deceleration of ten gees.

Well if six flights of Block 1 or 1B SLS are possible, currently there are only flights planned for two of them. Block 2 doesn't look like a priority.

I give you the Burj Kherbalifa. Burj Kherbalifa at KSC by cantab314, on Flickr Completely stock, 216 metres tall, with accommodation for over three thousand Kerbals. With some comparatively small boosters (30 Mammoths fed by three giant Kerbodyne tanks each) it only got suborbital legitimately though, I had to cheat to circularise. The lag was horrendous. Combine an old PC, 1.0.x having bad performance, and me not realise that 200 Kerbals on board spikes the lag, and launch to orbit took two hours. I wanted to land on Minmus (with fuelhack) but just couldn't handle the lagfest. Maybe come 1.1 I'll dust the Burj off and fly it again.

A normal lander can have multiple thrusters, indeed the only manned Moon lander to date did sort of (though an ascent engine failure would still have killed the astronauts). And it can be piloted manually. A sudden failure might affect the lander attitude, but there's space and time to bring it back under control. That's not so with the slide landing concept, which if it goes wrong is liable to go catastrophically wrong near-instantly. And a runway dozens of kilometres long that needs to be kept at a high degree of flatness and free of significant rocks, on the dusty, rocky, bumpy Moon with all the difficulties of working outside there. While every time something lands the very *design* means the lander trashes said runway. That's going to cost an absolute bomb to build and maintain, it probably makes disposable rockets look cheap.

It's still risky. What if a thruster fails? What if a skid hits a bump or rock? What if the computer control has a glitch?

Ike. Ike is friendly and dependable, whenever you visit Duna he'll always be there for you.

That's the Google Camera Car itself!

The pink one says 196, so unless it's the wrong road that's the place. Of course that's for the marketing agency side of things, it's quite possible the KSP developers have moved to different premises.

So quick calculation here. It's about 1.5 km/s to put a payload in low lunar orbit (plus a little rocket delta-V to circularise), and more to send it to further places. So that's about 1 GJ of energy per ton of mass. If you want a launch every 5 minutes you need a 4 Megawatt power station, and that's assuming near-perfect efficiency. Heh, that's actually not a whole lot. Even if it was to escape speed it still wouldn't be much. The railgun might draw higher peak power but it could easily be charged up by a small nuclear reactor or a few football pitches of solar panels. I was expecting much bigger requirements.

That's clearance sale or second-hand territory I think. You probably can't be too picky, but look out for bargains and try and find a reputable review before you buy.

It works (on paper) if you take it to either the L1 or L2 Lagrange points, the latter demanding a slightly longer elevator but both are doable with current materials. It's also possible to curve the elevator to reach points away from directly under the counterweight, at the cost of less payload or needing stronger material. In fact that's theoretically possible on Earth too, but considering no current material can handle even a vertical elevator, a curved one may be over-ambitious. http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/1032Pearson.pdf

If you're KSPing the FX-6300 is still the wrong processor, go for a Core i3 which will match or beat the 6300 in most other games anyway. For games that aren't KSP going from a 750 Ti to a 960 is a big improvement. You've done quite well to get it in the same budget, provided that SSD is decent. (But even a "bad" SSD is almost always faster than a mechanical drive.)

Using something like a launch loop or railgun for landing is possible, but to me it sounds incredibly demanding and risky. I think it would be better to do atmospheric re-entry or propulsive landing, taking advantage of the launch megastructure to maintain orbital infrastructure to support that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_Quickie Designed by Burt Rutan who somewhat specialises in unusual configurations and is the man behind SpaceShipOne. The tandem wing layout means both wings generate lift, in contrast to a conventional layout where the tailplane often generates downforce thus requiring excess lift from the main wing. And the wheels in the wings save the mass of separate landing gear. EDIT: Actually the picture is a two-seater variant, the QAC Quickie Q200 (see the side), with a much more powerful engine that the original Rutan design and some other minor tweaks.

A PC "optimised just for KSP" as it is now will still handle virtually all games well. The only difference compared to a general gaming PC build is that for KSP you want a modern fast-clocked Intel CPU. And to be honest once you are above the real low-budget rigs that's what people are putting in their gaming PCs anyway.

1) If the cable did break only the stretch below the break will fall, the stretch above will be retained. Also the likely design will be multiple cables with periodic cross-links, it will probably be flexible enough to take avoiding action with thrusters, and the lower reaches might be armoured. That said if the cable did break I can imagine it causing serious damage when it hits the ground. 2) The generally proposed construction method is to first build a "top station" in geostationary orbit, then extend cable down from there (and also up for a counterweight). It's right that once a working lightweight elevator is built it can be used to construct a heavier duty one. 3) Correct. Earth is annoyingly on the edge of a space elevator looking possible. Much larger or slower spinning and it would be clearly out of the question, much smaller and it would be simple. 4) What on Earth makes you think there wouldn't be a market for ultra-high-strength cable? And see the point about the cable being multi-stranded. 5a) Well rockets don't get much into orbit averaged out per day either. I don't think it will be that hard to work out cheaper than rockets, provided there's enough stuff to send up. 5b) Who says the cars don't maglev? OK, whatever they do there's going to be some wear, but I expect we'd seek to minimise it. 6) The economics may be an issue, yeah. It's plausible that a space elevator will only become useful once we have lunar and Martian colonies. (Extend the cable beyond GEO and you can fling payloads out on intercept trajectories or catch them on their return) 7) If I'm right about how it would respond to a break, then a low-altitude missile would only destroy a small part of the cable. A dangerous attack that would be costly and troublesome to repair from, sure, but not the end of the elevator. A high-altitude missile is basically an orbital launcher and easier to detect and intercept. In any case if a space elevator is so expensive, and becomes important enough to be economically viable, then chances are whoever owns it also has a strong military that can deter nation-state attacks. As for terrorism, well air travel doesn't seem to have been hurt much by the increasingly onerous 'security'. Don't get me wrong, the challenges of a space elevator are considerable, and it's probably the biggest and the most far-off of the launch megastructures. But I think that if humanity becomes an established spacefaring civilization then we will quite probably get to the task of building some. Likely the first will be on the Moon or Mars, and by the time one is built on Earth it's a case of scaling up the already-established engineering. Of course, it's the "if humanity becomes an established spacefaring civilization" rider that's the big issue for me. That doesn't seem likely to happen in our lifetimes.

Yeah, it's making me realise, it may not be long until nobody alive has been to the Moon. These people are in their eighties. They were born between the wars, into the Great Depression, and became part of one of the greatest human achievements.

Hey, 750 Ti is enough to play anything at 1080p. The old Phenom IIs were good chips and can still hold their own against today's budget chips in general, but if/when you do make the move to a modern Intel chip like I did you can expect double the fps in KSP when you aren't GPU-limited.

The simplest approach is probably that of tethering the hab space to a counterweight and tumbling them about each other. That has various benefits, in particular that the artificial gravity is in the same direction as the launch and re-entry forces, and that a light and compact hab space gets a large spin radius to avoid coriolis force problems. The big drawback would I think be complexity when making a manoeuvre, doing it while tumbling really isn't practical. But if you can nail your Earth ejection burn to get your Mars encounter without needing further corrections then the method works great.

The answer to this depends on how low you require the coverage to go. Unless you go to the extreme of giving the guns line-of-sight to each other (in which case the number needed depends on how tall the towers you put them on are), then there will be full coverage far out but blind spots close in.