PB666

MS Dos 7.0 If we are going to do clay tablets might I recommend knapping it into a stone axe blade. Then we can share it with all sentient aliens we might find, including those occasionally encountered in Lost in Space and Star Trek. Think how much happier the swamp monster would be if he could play KSP in his cave, far less need to endanger poor William.

Like a C5a cockpit? Are there any RL examples of a MK3 supersonic cockpit. Wouldn't the Concorde fall into the size2 catagory.

Catchy title eh? http://www.sciencealert.com/the-lhc-finds-evidence-of-particle-activity-beyond-the-standard-model Apparently scientist have found a force that is acting on certain leptons and not others, this force iis, of yet, to be defined by the Standard Model. I wonder how this new force will affect symmetry?

This may be one way to solve the inevitable failure of private space to get martian wannabees to thier future home. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34092770

If hubble was mountain based scope we would be talking about a 100 or 200 year lifespan. There is something to be said for sticking with what works. Webb is not going to be a general use telescope like Hubble, and correct me If I am worng but it has a fluid cooling system which will require refueling. Webb is going to be more expensive to operate. 5 years after Hubble goes dark I predict that thier will be lots of regrets in the astronomy community. I don't think there is any other telescope in the history of astronomy going back 500 years that has produced so much public fascination as the Hubble, and I think the public takes it for granted that it will always produce or that ther will be a cheaper better replacement. One day they will wake up and find out that niether were true.

This is true in many languages, or a bow of the head, or in Japanese a male can low barely audible grunt with the same meaning. The algorythm is experience, in certain circumstances words are less desired. Not always true, but often true that in Japanes culture, compared to other Asain cultures talking in certain circumstances is shameful. Its part of the bushido to avoid conflict. If a machine knows the rules about conflict avoidance then it can impathize with the speaker and respond accordingly. Somewhere in the childs life there has to be a guardian that reinforces the ethic, so that somewhere in the computers programming or learning it also has to be shown, IOW, if you want to match computer with human, at least once you have to raise it as a child, which means the computer needs to test its parents for social boundaries. As for babies minds, the human cerebral cortex is largely demylienated neurons, they are not preprogrammed. Traumatic injury or ablative surgury to an infants brain has far less impact than on an adult, the infant mind is very plastic. If you are arguing that taking 2 identical twins and raising them in exactly the same invironment will priduce nearly identical personalities, this is true, but in two remarkably different environments there will be some similarities and alot of dissimilarities. One of the major observed differences between identical twins raised apart are epigentic changes that occur as a result of food and lifestyle. think of the human brain as having alot of facilities, capabilities that make certain tasks easier. 20 years ago you would not think that humans could talk will holding a 3 x 5 thin solid and input 80 WPM and walking at the same time, but they can. At the same time see a decline in maintaining long term mating relationships has been starkly challenged across all cultures.

No wonder they are talking about high dV. The hohmann transfer in those diagram would be suitable for intercepting kuiper belt objects. If You were less concerned about time or you had a better electric based drive you could markedly slow the craft down. Uranus does not have a high orbital velocity, so the dV you need is largely the radial velocity given in the transfer. This is wasteful in the beginning part of the transfer also. I know of this great desire to explore these 2 planets, but with several high ISP deep space engines in the planning wouln't it be smarter to wait a decade a see what new technologies develope. A 16 year transit time is a long time to get to you target to find out you atm breaking scheme underestimated the scale height of the atm by 100 km. - - - Updated - - - Uranus. Closer, less energy in the transfer, less time, more insolence, your RTGs will be younger on arrival and will be able to survey with more spectrographic channels longer. NASA is under funded by 3 fold, we should not have to chose. Come 2017 there may not be a budget for one. The problem is not the difficulty of the missions or output, the problem is the mindset of the disfunctional and mindlessly conservative government we have. Imagine Ted Cruz as your next president and adjust.

So after playing hard mode for awhile I have come to the following realization. KSP for the most part has a pretty good parts selection. And a hefty number of adapters. I added parts I made to my latest install and parts I desperately thought I needed. 1. Size1 to 1/2 transition fuel tank, very useful 2. Size2 to 3 Aerodynamic tanks, 3 different sizes. 3. Satellite core with a better reaction wheels and built in battery and solar panels. 4. Long size2 tank that transitioned to size1 I modded these 1. Poodle to size1, and increased ISP to 470 (Centaur FL10-B-X), Atm curve adjusted accordingly, reduced thrust in accordance to size. 2. Basic rover wheel, reduced size and moved to early game. These are some of the things I think are fair game but haven't made yet: 1. Satellite core described above, but with MechJeb built in. (one reason I haven't done this yet is I frequently use to controllers, one pointing up and the other pointing down in the final stage because of design limitations) 2. The current thermonuclear engine has a rather feeble ISP, its hardly worth swapping a ISP 470 for the nuke. Need a bigger engine with ISP above 1000. 3. The ION drive is feeble. 4. Needs a better solar extensions, seriously the current solar panels are nothing but frame-rate theives, better to mod a small panel, increase its mass and output than use those kraken fodder. Im thinking here a solid plate on top of a truss much like the MGS. OK so here are my ideas: VASMIR like ion drive basically a tank, two circum-axial RF generators, the acceleration unit and a nozzle, 8000 ISP. Since Xenon is expensive and Argon is actually used I was thinking about using LF as Propellant. Centaur like 3 engine upper stage tank-engine combo with a payload mounting system (including the fairing). Centaur like 9 engine upper stage combo for size2 loads. Science core- A science facility built to be operated by the pilot. It would be a cockpit and science lab in one. complete with a basic set of solar panels, reaction wheels. Designed to be coupled to VASMIR. The core would run for 6 months but would need to be resupplies every 6 months with whatever to keep running. All data transmissible to earth. Single component telescope - Not a pitch together something, but a Hubble variant. Ungrade telescope variants. What ever you want, high frequency, low frequency, polarization, cosmic radiation, exotic particle, dark matter interacter (lol). Telescope Packager. This would be a mounting platform for serviceable telescopes, complete with parallel facing docking ports of various sizes to mount experiments such as Gamma-ray observatory or Cosmic ray detector. Asteroid Intercept tool. The current tool is basically a free flux device. This device would intercept an asteroid and attach itself by drilling a hole to its center of gravity and then orient the asteroid to its center of gravity down the central axis of the tool. Lander Science Core. The problem with the current mobile processing lab is that it is passive science unit. We need a lander unit that is capable of drilling and processing samples and only once the samples are processed then are the processes samples and data returned to earth. This unit could be manned or unmanned. There could be a layers function, for instant drilling for 1 minute yields 1 layer, 1 hour 2 layers, 1 day 3 layers, 1 week 4 layers, 1 month 5 layers, Each layer adds the same amount of science as 1 surface sample. offkerbal telescope core. This seems to give the mun a purpose to stay, a core telescope part that can be appended to build more and more massive scopes capable of a small amount of rotation but very much higher degree of resolution than a space telescope. Not on my fair game list- Resonance drive - not proven Warp drive - not possible Solar sails - speculative. Fusion reactors - too preliminary Lithium-chlorine-hydrogen tri-fuel engines or any engine that produces more than 500 ISP. In space fuel extractor - nope. EM drive - not efficient enough. Im trying to come up with ideas of parts to make. What do you think that the game is missing in terms of space parts.

Hmm, my next system is going to be 10, software is sitting on the box on the floor, but I wanted to have a dual boot system. I still do stuff in windows that can't really port to Linux, like MS Excel, VB aps, etc. How is this going to be possible in a linux only system. Taking a full dive into C with all the RT-libraries you have to build to run it - may be to someone who has work related experience but for the untrained its a nightmare. I used a SunOS and XWindows back in the 1990s, its very much the kind of thing one wants to leave at work and go home and not work on computers. I very much tried to learn C, but since windows stopped the push and pokes that used to allow real power, every single application I could think up for C, was 10 times easier to program and 100 times more understandable in visual basic. I need a real impetus to drive me to learn C. - - - Updated - - - I don't have webcam and haven't had microphones since the days of Roger-wilco. Yeah, those things are invasive. Even my USB Wifi I unplug when I put the computer to sleep. Be glad for the blinking lights, you know they are on and if they keep you awake at night, a good reason to unplug them. The microphone you can buy an extender cable and just unplug it at your desk.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/08/25/science/space/nasa-next-mission.html?_r=2 This sounds very much like the discussions we had here a couple of months ago. I can see three category of responses 1. Dreamers. many of these readers seem to fall into the category of having resorts in LEO, on the moon or Mars. A second category of dreamers are under the impression that interstellar travel will be as difficult as New Horizon space plan would have been planning 80 years ago. 2. The counter are the practical missions, such as revisitng the old targets but with advanced technology and new goals. In cluding missions to land on the moons of gas giants, etc. Of course ice fishing on Europa, well lets just say Tyson has either benn hitting the bong or doing a little space politics. 3. The there is the Science minded types. you know the kind, ones who would study a pile of excrement in preferabce to a pile of pancakes. They want to know if we could seed Venuses atmosphere with CO2 sucking biotes or study the various differences of organic molecules or protoplanetary iron cores in asteroids. Their goals are less lofty than a mars mission they don't mind the short haul low dV pickup and return as long as it is appreciably bizarre and has a noxious or chemical smell to it when heated.

I hope NASA comes to their senses (by NASA I mean the US congress) and finds a way to fund a repair/upgrade missions. Even better at the end of its life replace it with a telescope with a properly curved primary mirror.

http://www.iflscience.com/space/gorgeous-new-hubble-image-cosmic-butterfly-wingscreated this thread, thought there should be a thread for shuutle images but could not find one. This image does not really deserve its own thread. If you have space telescope images add them here 1. Butterfly planetary nebula. http://www.iflscience.com/sites/www.iflscience.com/files/styles/ifls_large/public/blog/%5Bnid%5D/heic1518a.jpg?itok=EFxdpVx-

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2015/31/full/

What if there were no moon? Another factor as to why there may be fewer sentient species

Well it looks like entangled photons and electrons can communicate faster than the speed of light at least in the micro second time frame.

Its reddit bait. But then again this is a thread so instead of complaining we could look up the original article or we can find a better news story. Think of it like this there is RL and then there is Reddit, a largely inappropriate, randomized and chaotic NSFRL. We are grateful for the sprites to bring it to our attention, but we have to keep in mind that sprites are a nefarious sort.

The humans might be used as managers. While my KSP factory did not have a robotic assembly system I can imagine robots stationed on two sets of cables that travel in parallel so that the robot can move within the station and no have to use thrust. Kerbals are expendable and don't mind the occasional spacing, a suit breach for humans would be fatal within seconds and there is no way to get them to a vapor lock soon enough. The big problem of a space factory is one that no one considers, reforging, it would work will in a centrifugal smelter and for most metals in space is not a problem, but for some metals like steel, you would rapidly lose carbon pressure, and you don't really want to forge steel in a closed space because of the carbon monoxide hazard. Its not a problem for robots working in factories but the air would have to be purged before humans could reoccupy the space. Plastics are another problem, you cannot mine the raw materials for plastic, they have to be synthesized from things like acylates, cyclic compounds, and alkynes or alkenes. All most all of the starting materials would come from inefficient plant biosynthesis.

So the basic idea is that when you accelerate a charge from some sort of stable configuration, such as an electron field of an atom that the typical response is that the destabilized field will leak electromagnetism, the dyrac diagrams explain how this happens. But what happens when you destabilize a field and no EM leaks out, this seems to defy physics. What these authors are offering is a way around the problem, that if the charges enter a toroidal pattern the lost EM is fed back into the system conserving the energy. Anyway read it yourself and see if you can come up with a clearer understanding. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-08/anu-ntl082615.php The potential here is to have less loss in things like display devices, or say transmission in fiber optic cables, or all sorts of other devices. They claim that it also gives the possibility of creating tiny x-ray lasers, this might someday be useful in the treatment of cancer.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2581 This may help resolve some of the debate.

here's a neat link. http://www.gfycat.com/CrispFavorableDuckbillplatypus#

Hmm, if you are picking up junk from LEO and recycling it in space, then you could use the factory to do all kinds of things, for example to make replacement batteries, to make solar panels, you could even use it to make food from space poop. Anything that could be recycled on the earth could be recycled in space. The solar panels would simply be disassembled and reassembled in arrays made to order. Insulating material would need to be brought from earth, however in orbits about 2400 miles, you could actually use captured asteroids as a source of insulation, space-craft with a hefty cosmic ray shield on their surface. In terms of things we could dream about doing in space, and might actually accomplish the modern technology, a space factor is one of them. Much more useful and feasible than a martian colony.

I think we need to have a competition, instead of trying to launch a rocket into a SOT, we should have a competition to see who can come up with the most powerful violation of the laws of physics, and then a competition between groups to see if another group can create a set of equations to explain how its not a violation of the laws of physics. [well need something to do since the moderator locked then - cough - mass thread - jk]

The latest study I linked here says the effect of dark energy is not observed between particles within galaxies, it appears to only occur between galaxies at great distances. So yeah it implies that space-time is restructuring itself between galaxies. I don't think that gravity is sufficiently powerful enough to explain the expansion, if you can show otherwise, I might believe it. Gravity shifts (lowering G) could result in a differential slow down, not an expansion, and expansion has to be an effect above and beyond gravity or reductions in gravity, or have you know a gravity to create and anti-gravity well? The alternative is that inflation of space-time was always there, but as the universe expanded the extent of gravitational attraction has faded over distance, that F = G M1M2/r2 or time. I don't think this is sufficiently powerful explanation either, but if substantial amount of energy has been lost in the universe due to conversion to energy that is no longer gravitational . . . . . key work being appears. This were my thoughts initially but I have been changing my mind, mainly because there is no strong evidence for this and the trend of evidence counters this, and there is no leverage for pressure effects (at least not in galaxies). Acceleration of space-time is also with its sets of problems, but then it is without precedence. So lets go through the pros and cons. Lets say something is interfering with action of gravity across great distances. 1. We start out with space-time expanding at a rate set forth by inflation 2. The particles in that sea are attracted to each other by gravity, as a consequence they begin slowing relative to each other and to space-time (assuming that particles add energy and thus would have more gravity than vacuumless space). Light on the other hand slows down much more slowly and its momentum would change less. 3. What we have is the opposite, that particles are accelerating relative to space time, but relative to each other (in close proximity) they behave as if gravity is a dominant force, so that only at great distances is this acceleration of any importance. Next lets argue its a pressure, what type of pressure might it be, hydrogen (that is matter) or dark matter? We know the temperature of hydrogen between galaxies, there is not enough hydrogen of high enough energy to amount to squat. Dark matter flux would be noticible (see below). That would have to have come from another inflation which would have inflated faster than the first, if it passed around galaxies the galaxies would have lensed its presence and you would see a peculiar gravitational lensing on one side, the same side of all galaxies that changed with the curvature of space time granted by the inflatron. Ok so if its electrostatic pressure, then the plasma ejected by GBHs would be deflected either one direction or the next. If it were neutrinos, we would all be dead. Can't really be pressure, can't really be gravity. Either its a new unknown field that pulses everthing with inflation, or space time itself is inflating, either way we can't tell the difference. So lets go into Poincare, 10 part group isometries, the full symmetry of special relativity. These include the special transformative relationships in space, including rotation and time effects. The light equation follows that speed of light is equal in all directions indifferent point in the direction of earth turning and direction of revolution or the receding directions. This means that there is no relative position or time better than any other position or time, a corner stone of relativity and which should not be doubted and taken as absolute but below planck's time interval. With a fixed velocity for C that never varies, and that we have never seen vary in a vacuum, C defines Planck's velocity and given Planck's time defines Plank's unit of length. Within the space of planck's time and length, C can vary. So basically if there was a spatial coordinate system in the universe, it could not be operating at the quantum level or any level above (relativistic or classic physics), which means it would have to be physics that operates so basally that even quantum mechanics is subservient to it. Transformations would have to occur inside the planck's scale. It could even be a fluctuation of the planck's scale in different parts of the Universe, ripples of QM. It could be anything that is two small for us to observe in any meaningful way. IOW the observed inflation could be a ripple through the universe that disturbed QM and may have cause a faster replication of a small amount of vacuum space. There is out there a theory that claims that if space gets empty enough of matter and light, that on response may be to inflate, of course in that theory a new universe would spring forth as big-bang post-singularity. So the problem basically is, if manifestation of dark-energy is in space time, then the increases in red-shifting due to acceleration has also to be manifested in the propogation of field through quantum time and space, the perturbations are then corrected and we cannot observe the inconsistency of the inflation event. For example, light from a more distant galaxy is traveling through an area as space-time has accelerated its expansion, so how should that effect the wavelength? Theoretically it should not affect the wavelength, and we should not see increased redshifting, but we do, so that this would have to be corrected in the manifestation of the basal level into quantum level. Or the time spent crossing the inflationary event is so small compared to time spent traveling across post-inflated space, that we don't detect that there was a meaningful blue shift. In this case the Universe could be substantially older than the estimates. Alternatively as it is traveling through an area, then space cannot inflate, the photon essentially blocks inflation and therefore it maintains a frequency consistent with its origin and shift of speed. There is not going to be many volumes of space where this condition would be valid, except the smallest units of space. Which then implies that space must have a unit. So what if its a new unknown field. Ok so what if it is, and what if that field propagates in a lower level of physics, a special level that interacts only with QM. Then we have a new set of metrics, probably of a statistic nature, that are then used to specifically explain how quantum mechanical phenomena are generated. Its not particularly an issue of contradicting relativity, it would remain intact for all intents and purposes, its more of an issue of trying to fit a very local specific energy pattern into the concept of dark energy. The other thing is that there is a basic assumption that its frame of reference would be material, but it could actually be expanding away from us at near the speed of light, and the third stipulation that it has to have been consistent, in other words once the field is turned on or up, its stays on or up. However it could be sporadic. The only thing that really fits is instability in space-time whose result is an apparent acceleration. pV = NRT. The pressure is created by the action of vibrational energy on atoms and molecules. The vibrational energy cannot interact at distances were dark energy is observed acting, and even fields could not operate since they would need to exceed the speed of light. The energy could be pouring into space-time itself, not into matter. We may be observing an increase in potential kinetic energy differences, but the things we are measuring kinetic energy differences with are traveling so far away, it would be a physical impossibility for the two objects ever to translate relative to each other. At 5 billion light years in light age and accelerating away from each other, light from these places leaving now may never reach us, thus it may be consistent that no pressure need be involved. This all could be a sign that the universe is beginning to fracture, possibly into a multiverse, with the specific arrival of domains that have not inflated recently and others that have inflated moreso, and will inflate even more as they spread apart.

Like I said, simple. But the article goes into detail, it basically argues that Mimus is a 3 focal point elliptical because of the tidal locking to Saturn.