PB666

In my mind, if you can support the stress, I would go to my down engine velocity (800kmh, 222.22 m/s) speed as rapidly as possible, even if I gain 5 or 10 seconds, that is a savings of fuel I would otherwise spent fighting gravity, it also means I can down my engines more in anticipation of MaxQ, Of course it if was me Given the oversize payloads, I would have a wider shorter 1st and 2nd stage with a capacity for more fuel in both, and allowing for the increased capacity engines. I think there is probably a risk metric here, since they upgraded the Merlin 1 in rapid succession, I suspect they basically increasing stress until one engine fails, if they increased stress too quickly then the probability of a 2 engine failure increases. The other issue since this is a trial run for recycling, you kind of want the good publicity of a successful relaunch, and you don't want to risk that with a overstressed engine failure. If RP-1 is a fraction of the variable cost, and recycling or de-novo production are the primary costs, then you burn a little extra fuel, so what, you still save alot of money on the recycling. If I am right you probably would see a high tech pipeline and tank engineer out there with a cesium source looking for cracks and stress lines in the engines, asking the basic question how much stress did the last launch induce? Is it possible for us to get a stat page going for the Merlins, maybe even a Merlin 1D thread so that we can follow the launch stats, there seems to be no certainty of its rated launch capability or its ISP, the wiki's figure appear to be outdated.

We are talking about multicellular organism with embryogenesis and differentiation. C. elegans or above in complexity. Most complexity prior to this would have been commensal bacteria living in close proximity in substrates like mud. The cyanobacterium form massive stone colonies. While we can argue that some cyanobacteria are multicellular, the produce a N fixing structure, that particular structure is not obligatory for their growth, its essentially a stress response do to the lack on bio-available nitrogen. And most importantly that is a common characteristic of simple eucaryotes, they typical take up mating and reproduction when stressed, as a response to produce spores which are more resilient to drastic environmental change. Even in c. elegans, when a female is stressed for food, she simply stops laying eggs, the eggs hatch inside of her and the young eat their way out, if they still cannot find food they go dormant for a time and can extend their lives. They have found bacteria around deep oil formations that basically went into hibernation 100,000s of years ago when the oxygen donors disappeared that are still viable. This is the nature of simple life on a planet were predation is much less of a problem than productivity. Predation will be much less of a problem when there is no oxygen. For complex life to exist there is a somewhat essential requirement of consistency in a food supply at least stepping from reproductive cycle to the next (e.g. even in our arctic a fatty bear can hibernate and produce offspring until there is adequate food available to restock fat). But that is not were the core of complex life evolution is, this is in the tropic, because high levels of production support diversity and complex food webs. Most of the ediacara biota that are notable, quickly went extinct. To some paleontologist it might be difficult to consider these as complex, because some have proposed that these could have been single cells, or opportunistic arrangement of single cells. I don't think anyone is going to debate the point that a planet with water and a source of hot springs or deep ocean hydrothermal vents is going to produce life forms, this potentially could happen in deep space with a large enough rock. As I previously said around a hot brown dwarf or deep red star you could have life living around hot vents at the surface that also evolve to use photosynthesis and you could have the development of complexity as oxygen levels in the hot water (very low) accumulated, you could have life venturing between the pools and the atmosphere or grabbing bubbles that are released and float up. There should be millions of these type planets in our galaxy, for the most part most of these orbit so far from their host stars we will never see them, or they orbit massive giant planets or binaries with brown dwarves. But to go beyond this common thing to something more interesting, even something as high as the Cambrian explosion, that is considerably more difficult. As of yet we still have not found one planet with O2/N2 atmosphere. So the empirical evidence strongly suggests that the set of appropriate circumstances are relatively rare and probably cluster tightly around the paleogeology and climatology of our ancient Earth.

But they can't help but absorb infrared, since almost all organics have absorption bands in the IR spectrum effectively they saturate the IR spectrum with absorption. If the spectrum shifts from green to a center in IR, it means to get the equivilent dose of Orange/Red or Red light in chlorophyll a or B the planet would have to be 2 or 3 times as close as our earth is the its star, much closer with a brown dwarf since output markedly drops. For a plant or animal to absorb in the visible spectrum typically requires a photophore, the pigments are typically multiring systems in which the resonance stabilization of 4n+2 is spread across many atoms, there is many of these low energy orbitals with tiny shifts energy shifts from the lowest to the next to lowest state. For the smaller energy difference you want to capitalize upon, the larger the ring complex should typically be or the more exotic the metal in the complex. This is not an absolute rule but it is a general rule, The problem in the IR spectrum is that many things absorb, but nothing drops electrons or changes oxidation state (such as a chelated metal) So if you managed to have an agent that absorbs, it has to get to the IR before the all the mileau of it-just-got-hotter compounds absorb it. A deep red star or brown dwarf is going to have most of its energy produced in the IR spectrum. Cold brown dwarfs will produce no light they will look sort of purplish because of some UV/blue production and a trace of red, not going to support photosynthesis no matter how close the planet gets.

Yes but there is the heat/usable wavelength ratio, most briwn dwarfs are the size of jupiter with much higher masses, that means the light disk is pretty small, the planet need to be close, its orbit would be tidally locked, one surface would have to be very hot most of the incoming radiation is IR, heat. Too hot for life. Seriously how much science do you thing is looking for life around monostellar brown dwarf systems. Our earth ran 3 billion years to produce complex organisms, a brown dwarfs red phase last long enough to burn through lithium, after that it slowly dims down into the infrared. If you wanted to create a system that was pretty much secure from stellar death and you had a away of fusing hydrogen into deuterium to make an intenal star like the genesis moon, then a brown dwarf a safe distant would be the place, you are virtually invisible, and the heat signature would be invisible in the absorbtion emmision spectrum of radiation fromnthe brown dwarf.

Yes but there has to be enough of that life to allow growth via terribly inefficient chloropylls in plants

I don't have an ignore list either, unfortunately though over time I just avoid threads that certain folks make a topics that go on. The alien megastructure thread is an example, and now we have two. The lead scientist basically said she does not thinks its aliens, and yet both titles create the alien perjorative. I mean many of the threads mirror science fantasy, some do so by the very nature of the topic, for example the alcubierre warp drive s ience basically stems from an attempt to mak ST warp Drive workable. But the basic problem is that the tachyonic particles need do not exist,and if we created particles of them, as i learned yesterday, by definition could never exist much outside of quantum space. The science of many of these types threads follows the humor of the actual fantasy, the infinite improbability drive. If this, that, the other thing could exist then we can do this. Having said that they do encourage further study, its just that some folks idealize function before theory can synthesize an actual credible functional model. I think the threads on fusion are particularly good for showing how difficult physics problems are solved.

You can collect particles thrown out from the poles, not from the black hole itself but from kinetic decay of gasses and space dust near tge event horizon.

I don't know how much it burns to land itself, it certainly burns more than 2km to grt to1856. For 100 seconds is loosing more than half its thrust to g, if the TWR is on average 1.5 then rougly 1000 dV right there. myguews is 3200 to MECO. Also we don't know how much RP-1 is left when it lands, could be more than zero.

I dont think any questions are stupid per say its the repetition of some questions that get rehashed over and over again. There are the ....What's the best weapons in space (and why aren't we ignoring the outerspace treaty), caveots included best weapons systems for the moon, and best stealth design for space war? I get the feeling that some folks keep bringing this up again and again just to be annoying. Then there are the repetitous SSTO threads that pop up every couple of months and folks have to explain over and over again basic problems like ISP, dV to orbit and that wings and landing gear are premium features in space. Many go along the line my SSTO in KSP broke after the last patch, is there not a great SSTO design to show i deserve SSTO in the game? The simple answer is mod your parts with high ISP and you can SSto agian, cause there is not a realistic SSTO spaceplane that can travel to another planet and land. The there are the dicussion like sure jet power equivilent of ISP is very high, but you only get a few 1000 m/s max and 20,000 meters up but you need 7800 and 150,000 meters, and wings and jet engines are just weight you have to carry to orbit. Then there are the space shuttle was most evil program ever, lets spend 6 weeks describing all the ways the SLS ruined NASA. Not really questions, or science but grudges. This falls along the line of this agency did this new thing, why aren't they ruined yet, or Poll : SpaceX is going to wipe the floor with ULA, etc. These are more or less measuring contests. Threads like what do you think of SpaceX sort of fall into this category. I think questions about gravity, dark matter and dark energy are perfectly valid, the problem is that there are no great answers other than specifying a confidence range. It is useful to remind people to search, and see that the tags have a function other than politicing, and search because, in the case of dark energy, the answer this month is going to be the same as last year. For dark gravity there is a slow trickle of science, if i see new data i will link it to a recent thread. I placed a omnibus dark energy and dark gravity thread which from time to time i add new science to. But not every dark topic belongs in these threads. I think folks should strive for correct answers wherever possible, sometimes there are no unique answers to questions. And in the literature there are often contradictory answers, science is often not black and white, so it is good to have different perspectives.

Don't get so excited, let the scientist do their job, aside from that we think a dyson like sphere would be the best way of making lots of power, in a 100 years that could be a quaint silly idea.

There are a couplevof things withbthe merlin engines, they extnded the bell improving ISP and performance, the engines themselves from 1C has produced the 1D the 1D+ and the 1D vacuum in which the wiki states the engines as of yet are not at full capacity, possibly withbthe new engines they are gradually increasing output to see just how far they can push them. I look at the 1d vacuum in flight i would say it is already close tomits limit. This is what I think you want to read. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_full_thrust Note that the merlin 1D vacuum has an ISP of 348, the it can iperate from 39 % to a full,power of 934 kN. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(rocket_engine_family)#Merlin_1D_Vacuum The peak launch thrust at msl is between 723 and 730 KN per engine and can reach 825 kN at the end of its flight. This means that falcon 9 FT can achieve 6570 kN. However CRS-8 launched with an extraploated TWR of 1.22 and a stated weight. That is for the 282, howvever the stated thrust is 7204 kN indicating a higher ISP. Thus uncertainty in the wiki. The rockets weight is 543 KT and payload is 3.2 giving a total weight 546 kt gives a starting thrust of 13.55a and i calculated that equilibration to full thrust extrapolated back launch at 12.3 or 6715 kN. They appear to still not be using full thrust, they maybe holding back in case an engine fails in early flight they still have some capacity to compensate. If they lost an engine right after launch, with a TWR of 1.2 it would be devastating, they would not have enough fuel left to recover the launch, however at TWR of 1.35 they could lose one engine after 51 seconds and still have adequate thrust on 7 remaing, pairing down 1 additional engine to complete the flight. I don't know what the current ISP except for the 1D vacuum, it has an ISP of 348.

Only as long as they have lithium to burn, they quickly burn through this and brown down. Chlorophylls spectrum tapers down in the orange part of the spectrum, near infrared will not suffice. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorophyll_a#/media/File%3AChlorophyll_ab_spectra-en.svg Youll be hard pressed to find something that can feed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis#/media/File%3AZ-scheme.png even the second low energy part of the equation requires more hv than a brown dwarf can provide.

Note I saw that article didn't think this was that place, but in a place thatvruns huge chains of electromagnets its not a suprise the weasel goes pop.

Production is one of several ways, higgs can also be pulled out of the field in much the same way many waves colliding at on spot can produce a huge standing wave. I think the predominant model is that gluon spawn heavy quark formation, and the heavies iirc interact pulling out a higgs. Since the higgs is Tachyonic in nature, and such particles are only stable in a quantum context, it quickly either rejoins the field or interacts to form other guage bosons. I havent really studied all the neogenic paths of the higgs, just that the heavy quarks are decent with enough energy to tug it out of its resting state in the field, they themselves are two heavy to be generated, but virtual provision, a probabilistic quantum effect of gluon interaction, allows for the creation of the higgs with gluon decay. In this stategy, the higgs coupling to the virtual heavies is intense 173 GeV/c2 for top quark and 4.3 for the bottom quark, the rest mass of the higgs is 256 GeV/c2. As vector bosons go, even short lived ones, thats a heck of alot of local interaction for the higgs. The higgs is typically interacts with things of a few GeV. Presumambly at the end of inflation, higgs particles and al sorts of exotic shortlived particles poured into the universe, as it later expanded higgs entered the resting state imparting mass onto and thus stabilizing massive particles. The energies required to spontaneously create higgs would have been millions and billions times that of the LHC, so that the current field is the result of a different set of processes observed in the LHC. I ignire these theories mainly because there will be disconnects in the sytem, people like myself who do not buy into clouds, phones that run thier lives, facebook, twitter, people who control media instead of having media control them. An example is KSP, 1.1 is out, although i had a steam version of KSP i ditched it because steam wanted to much control, i bought an amazon copy, found that didn't work so migrated to direct purchase, maybe in a month or two months i will dowload the patched version of the program. I routinely wait for chips and software to be on the market for months/years before i purchase. Lol, still use XP and office 2007 at work, lol. I like to see how other folks get screwed before i stick my jewels into the wind. My main comp is hardwired, and i do pull the Rj45 out from time to time.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/right-place-right-tools-cassini-spacecraft-captures-interstellar-dust-grains/ Meh, close enough to titan ;^).

https://thespacereporter.com/2016/04/extraterrestrial-life-might-resemble-microbes-found-antarctic-lake/

http://www.technobyte.org/2015/06/large-hadron-collider-lhc-myths/ I particularly like the one about vacuum bubbles.

Ah, but no. What do we want a way to go to space cheap. Not me of course, Im perfectly happy letting other people live out my fantasy and sending me pics. When we ask NASA they sent a school teacher, well actually, no too soon on that anyway. NASA will send you to space if you give the russians 40 million. So launch guy over here is saying, look here now, im going to launch big brother, after that reland on the barge. Wee-hee. Big brother cant do that. My next trick is to send a manned -like capsule to mars, payed for by civilian and military contracts whereby i save money landing on barges. Everyone is going to flock onto my rockets cause i can do it cheaper, have my own base, soon, Im betting that the move in the demand curve is going to land me lots of contracts. So basically the smoke from the barge landing hasn't settled and hes announcing his Mars intention. Look at all the goggled-eyed dreamers here, they put their manned journey before the landing trial, before carefully reading the whole article. Of course its a publicity play, hes harry selfridge and we are the media. As a skeptic I have been waitng for the company to bomb, look at ULA, but while evolution disfavors new mutations 9/10ths of the time a tenth of the time it favors them. So you have to recognize a successful struggle and then predict based on emperical observation, not theory. Any new variation in a model creates black swans and so now the boundaries of plausibilty needed to be expanded in anticipation of new emperical data. The mars landing 2018 is plausible, building a manned capsule is plausible, he'll need help. We have to think also from the NASA/ESA/RSA perspective, what good is Orion if the govs cut funding a week before manned launch, if they broaden their umbrella then ultimate success has a better chance. right now, fraid to say, russia and eurozone is not making a heck of alot of great technology-wise decisions. The way im looking at it, the international team is like a jury, you need alternates cause this trial is going to last a long time. SpaceX is a company, notice the name Space, X is undefined. For Nasa and military they are a launch company, for the next customer they could be a joy ride, for space-programless country they could be a moon landing. Have rockets, will travel. Merlin 1D vacuum, it must have a better throttle capability, the lower stages only operate between 70 -100%. Im completely guessing, wiki gives no detailed difference beteween 1D+ and 1D vacuum. They are going to recover all, there is a salvage value. They might be able to recycle low stress parts. My logic here fir the lower stages is that you can cut all engines to 70%, cut the center engine for another 8%, or pairs of side engines for 16%. For the vacuum stage you can either pulse fire at 70% or have a better throttle capability.

See other thread, yes chemosynthetic might use a combination of short ir or deep red along with chemosynthetic in highly select circumstances, might generate O2 that would not accumilate because of the overall reducing potential, but I think life is a foregone conclusions in many systems, including large rocky planets close to red and ir stars, the thermodynamics do not favor Earth levels of complexity. This has basically blind to the life that does exist, just that the number of clearly distinguishable biotypes will be lower.

Donkey shaped maybe, donkeys have a high mass to surface area ratio. You could, theoretically, a nose cone with golf ball dimples. There are things that are absolute no-nos that will weigh up parts of the rocket. One have a payload that is much wider than a rocket and have the fairings diameter collapse rapdly as it goes down the rocket, this makes the boudary layer grip into the rocket like a claw, lots of side friction. If the width does retract quickly dont place a structure such as a tail fin or winglet, if you do this you need to add a volume that then slowly reduces the total crosssectional area. I have put up some pretty hideous structures in the game, the key is don't go above Mach until maximu possible unbound forward load is so low it wouldn't break your forward facing parts. Yes its wasteful of fuel and you turn slower you are hoovering long, not a problem though, if you spam stagger the sfbs parachute the little suckers and keep as much fuel in you main as possible.

Saying sulfide cant exist on a photosynthetic body is like saying strict anaerobes cant exist. Sulfides and anareobes MUST exist for photsynthetic world to be efficient. We can take a look at live rock as an example, while the growth of carbonates is dependent on photosynthesis, it sets the stage for the production of sulfide and a home for anaerobes. Why would a photosynthetic algae provide a home for anaerobes. The answer is quite simple, in an a completely aerobic world intractable matter degrades at a dependency of oxide in the water. The problem is that aerobic organisms hold the oxide potential just over 300 millivolts, in other words sea water tends to oxidize even at a pH around 8.0. Sea water rusts things, no surprise there, but the oxide content is actually much lower than the rate of release of dissolved organics and intractable reduced material, and this eventually spoils the system. These substrates are to difficult to degrade and too low of energy for aerobic life to use, so they accumulate, or not . . . . But there is a more serious problem because the rate of nitrogen fixation is much much lower than the rate of nitrogen accumulation in DOCs and intractable material, and as the material accumulate nitrogen and phosphate tend to flow into the deep ocean benthic layers. IOW something should release nitrogen, carbon and phosphate before these elements reach layers were photosynthesis cannot be conducted. You might say that cyanobacterium can fix nitrogen. Yes they can, but they require phosphate, they do this in a specialized cell, and the contents of that cell are toxic to photosynthesis, that process has to be partitioned from oxidative phosporylation and photosynthesis. If we fix all the nitrogen and dont clean up nitrogen in docs and intractable, eventually you have a environment only facultative anaerobes and strict anaerobes can live in. This is where the anaerobes come in, in the stills of the deep layers of live rock and bottom substrate, as organisms begin to utilize either of these they excrete catabolic chemicals, but at the same time oxygen rapidly drops, the only form of oxygen left is sulfate, cellulose, nitate and nitrite in that order. So basically bacteria start producing sulfide, but those bacteria are still not the most efficient, at even lower depths, the anaerobes can afford to produce even more of these catabolic compounds and they recover the material and produce ammonia, phosphorus compounds, these reduced compounds are dangerous also to the system, but as they are exiting the their local system where oxygen is increasing they are rapidly reintegrated into biota and become part of the nutrient procurement process. Thus anaerobes help to keep micronutrients in the photosphere and away from the lithosphere and they do this without overloading the system with nitrogen, in fact if biologically available nitrogen gets to high, there are bacteria that convert it to N2. Productivity of systems like the eastern pacific upwelling (ecuador chile) this is actually driven by turnover from the anaerobe/photosynthetic system, with some contribution by upwellings, but we also have to consider that over millions to billions of years that volcanism turnover photosynthetic compunds via upwellings and subduction/volcanism. Any imbalance of phophate and nitrogen can be corrected at the surface by cyanobacterium. When we talk about anaerobic living systems that we see on earth is largely driven by photosynthetic inputs, just as anaerobes are a MUST for efficient photosynthesic production, photosynthesic production is a MUST for optimal long term anaerobic activity. The problem for evolution is that we complex sentient things are the result of sustained diversity, such as diversity seen in rainforests and open savannahs. The rate of evolution in the arctic is fast, but diversity is limited by extinction potentials, thus selection drives equilibrium diversity down. Anaerobic life is inadequate to compensate for this, in the equatorial systems things evolve slowly but can sustain higher levels of diversity providing more raw materials for each subsequent speciation cycle. Over time things like birds, humans evolve. Its is the surface thermodynamic potentials created by light that drive competition and diversity. The other gain on anaerobic life is they themselves become food for the system. Being fed upon does not sound advantageous, but burrowing worms have worked out a way to feed on these without suffocating,, they provide ubiquitous bioturbulation that drafts sulfate, nitrate and DOCs into the anaerobic layers and prevent the accumulation of waste (micronutrients). In addition these organisms draft certain essential organic nutrients for animals. As a consequence the surface system composed of multitolerant biota stimulate nutrient turnover, bioturbulation, etc, that is just not possible at level without oxygen. Light, IOW, the type of hv energy that can bump electrons to that next higher orbital creates a magnitude more energy potential for living systems than black body radiation that degrades inorganic molecules at relatively high temperatures deep in the earth. You can think about it like this, the amount of useable energy available in 1/10th of a millimeter at earths square meter of surface is equivilent to thousands of cubic meters at precisely the right temperature and hydration levels deep in the earth (not too cold or heat chemistry stops, not to hot or DNA melts and pressurized water boils). Light drives expansion of the system upwards and downwards, and deep enough that it becomes an umbilical cord for anaerobes. If you want to find a planet in our system where anaerobes have done very well, look no further than Earth, but their well living is fractional to other complex life. This is because even though the flow of energy to anaerobic layers is higher than any other planet in our system, herbivores, scavengers and saprophites get the overwhelming share of post photosynthetic chemical energy. This flux is the basis of complex life, anaerobes are part of that flux, and are apart of the living diversity on earth that creates humans. The alternative to phtosynthesis is a lower flux, that is to say lower diversity, and a lower potential for complex life and sentients, and also lower biomass and diversity of anaerobes. There are other sources of flux, radioactivity can also provide ionizing energy, that when captured and placed in cascades can result in hv that can be used by life, the problem is that radioactive isotopes that reach high levels tend to undergo nuetron induced fission instead of simple neutron decay and if the mass is critical the radiation simply reacts, blows, and the isotopes disappear too quickly for life to use. So getting a world with a lot more radioactivity in its crust than earth, but not blow up, is a problem. Second problem for complex life is the random selection effects of radiation, particularly neutron radiation.

The only thing I would say about this is that if the universe slowing its expansion at a rate consistent with its gravity, then the effect on galaxies is minimal, because different each galxies motion is more dependent on local clusters and superclusters, and even so these are minimal compared to internal structures and proximal intergalactic dark matter. So that the intergalactic expansion of space-time should not have that much effect on the internal structure. The problem is dark energy, if dark energy acts in the vacuum of deep space the stretch is being born by dark matter in intergalactic space and again what goes on in galaxies and the internal motion, given the contribution of dark matter to the motion of galaxies we would be hard pressed to see its effect. If dark energy acts ubiquitously, a concept in and of itself is difficult to reconcile in a relativistally smooth manner, it is counteracting the force of gravity, then the graviational constant would have problems. For example, if you had a very dense body, like say Mercury, its gravitation constant would be much higher than a massive less dense onject like neptune. In addition it would completely counteract the affect of dark matter. This is all I want to say given so little known about dark energy, the effects could be inverse scalar on energy load and could have miniscule effects in dense energy space and overwhelming effects in massless space, but even here we are unaware of the scale. Rather than predicting any effects on galaxies I suggest we wait until at least some science comes in and addresses descrepancies.

They would not, the conversion loses to much energy, it would have to dump two electrons into a sytem, one transferred at low energy and a second transferred at high energy. But, it doesn't, there are red photophores, the problem is that when we start talking about cool red stars and brown dwarves and infrared, you have two problems one is finding an electron dropping photophore, and second a system of transferring two low energy electrons and gaining one higher energy electron that can be used to make H:, NADH or NADPH.

The critical point about Dark Energy is that we know less about it than Dark Gravity. in fact the source and disposiotion is only visible at distance of 10 billion light years.

Yeah but they create a caveot in sears-haack shape, its sort of a moot point anyway, all of them are creating a boundary layer separation and are not very efficient. For most rockets the angle of attack is so low relative to the axis it don't make much of a difference. The stall effect is only for lift. at the Mach you have a build up of gas in front of the leading edge, its sort of a concretization if air, the boundary layer moves forward and the out the side of the vessel making the leading edge appear heavier that it is, but the weight limit is related to pressure, and at 10000 feet its only ~4 PSI and is dropping fast for every meter traveled by 20000 it will ~1.5. At just mach the rocket travels that distance in 20 seconds and thereafter is pretty much free of the effect. In addition the critical zone is only to about mach 1.3 and after this the CoD decreases. The goal of the sears haack shape is to keep the boundary layer annealled to the surface, structures that do this well minimize what the wind sees, as they travel up. As you see with CRS-8 there is quite a separation and exhaust is rolling up the sides of the launch. All that is scarey until you realize that at 30,000 meters and beyond there simply is not much gas to matter. When we think of Mach effect we think of it generally below 15000 m, if your rocket is traveling strait into the wind and going almost strait up above then there is prolly some other concern......the cone shape has some advantages on the rentry, you can tilt it more for aerobraking purposes inducing lift and keeping the craft high until the speed cools down, with the cone you can add more of the weight under the partial sphere that sits on the heat shield. The sphere shape is a better pressure hull, but alas soviets had a failure of the oxygen feed lines between the service module and the capsule at te interconnect on rentry, so pressure hull is not everything in that regard. If your craft luanches from a place that sees alot of upper level winds, then it might be best to have a ballistic nosecone, if not and it launches strait up the the added weight of a perfect sears haack has be balanced against the aerodynamic gain and lower max Q.