RockoDyne

You just grab the connector on a wench during EVA.

Rope is the bane of video games. There is a reason why rope is usually left as some static, dangling thing to climb on. If you really feel like you have to roleplay, KAS will work well enough. Most people don't care though as EVA fuel isn't that hard to keep track of, and as long as you aren't having too much fun being an idiot, you won't be likely to run out.

And then you end up with idiots who don't follow normal precautions, because they were vaccinated and think they are immune. The US might as well just declare martial law every time someone in china keels over looking funny. Because there aren't about a thousand other variables to people's standards of living that have changed in that time. We've pretty well phased out the need to route smoke through houses in that time. Sucks to be them. We are still dealing with the lowest child mortality rate of anytime in human history. If we are talking about the elderly, most of the time it's just their time and something was bound to happen, otherwise it's typically a case where they ended up sick after a procedure and were too weak to fight it.

The last horrible outbreak in the west was what? Spanish flu a century ago? Unless I've been completely ignorant, I have yet to hear of a virus that desolated middle class america. Sorry, I don't buy the ........ that vaccinating is going to stop the next super virus from being created. I'm sure I'll feel real guilty about my contribution to that virus, although chances are that would probably make me immune to it.

And you would end up killing more people than would probably end up dying from the illness had no one been immunized. Brilliant. Why not just have people guard the border in full hazmat suits and chuck anyone who so much as coughs into an incinerator. There, problem solved at the source. Between sanitation and healthy diets, there is little reason why anyone older than four and younger than eighty should fear getting sick with anything actually dangerous.

The problem is we don't live in a world governed by the scientific method, but a world ruled by governmental and economic power. I like arguing fact before theory. It's why my stance on GMO's isn't that they are a wonder drug for all the worlds problems, but a scam to sell more round up. No, the shortages I'm talking about are actual shortages in the total supply made. And unless there is a congressional hearing, not one pharmaceutical will go to court in the US. Do you really want me to get into how a two thousand page bill, that completely overhauled the student loans program in this country, was actually about more than saying you need to find a health insurance provider or be fined?

And here's another topic that is about the wrong argument. Before I even worry about whether vaccines are good or bad, I worry about whether vaccine manufacturers are good or bad. So when I see mountain of corruption like how vaccine manufacturers can't be sued, how vaccines are pushed into the market with little testing, and how vaccines are paid for by the government (thanks Obama care), I tend to think they might not actually have my best interest at heart. And unless I've been misled, haven't the winters recently where there have actually been shortages of the flu vaccine been some of the mildest.

If they do upgrade, I would expect .26 to be a slow update. Chances are it will probably break more things than it fixes. Bare in mind, I don't expect 5.0 to have the smoothest launch. They have been digging around in the guts of the engine quite a bit, so I wouldn't be surprised if how things get repacked for launch don't end up exploding. They have been taking QA seriously enough though that it could also be pretty stable.

I think we can all agree that it would be a bit of a bummer day regardless of which planet you lived on... assuming kraken physics doesn't keep kerbin from deforming.

At 100,000x time warp, patched conics only has one set of calculations to perform on all vessels on rails. Now for n-body physics to be accurate, how many calculations need to be performed per vessel per frame at 100,000x warp? I'm going to guess and say it will be enough to qualify as a computationally expensive operation.

I was thinking of the previously mentioned meteor bombardment. We can probably find enough matter to get the gravity to 1g. Whether that will be enough on it's own to turn the core into a dynamo might be iffy.

Depends what we mean by terraforming. If by terraforming you mean give it a breathable atmosphere (even if it's bleeding off) at around 1 atm, I doubt any modern tech (even mass produced) would get us anywhere even in a millennium. Where resources come from would be the biggest catch. In theory, some forms of terraforming would require millions of years, as we wait for the planet to cool off after we beef it up with meteor bombardments. The problem with mars is it has a minuscule atmosphere, low gravity, little water, and it doesn't generate it's own magnetic field. Two of those four have fixes that currently only work on a cosmic timescale.

Well, if you owned any ps2 games, chances are several of them didn't have loading screens. All sony first party developers were mandated at the time to not have loading screens, or rather explicit loading screens. It meant most levels had seamless transitions, although there were also a lot of elevator rides like jak and daxter or in-game vignettes like the planet transitions in ratchet and clank. A load-less game basically requires nothing to load though. There isn't any way around that. Load mitigation and management has to be designed for, but the biggest issue with modern consoles is 8 gigs of pretty takes a long time to get from any drive.

was the first thing I thought of. I would have to think it's a thousand times more efficient. As far as naval passages go, the ocean is a big puddle and there aren't that many boats. Add in radar and radio with half a dozen protocols used to position and ID vessels, there's no real reason you can't reliably find a route.

Or settle in a valley/lowlands. Or build horizontally, not vertically. Unless you are worried about impactors leaving kilometer wide craters, it's not going to be any worse to have most facilities on one site.