Green Baron

Shortly read a paper about high isp ketchUp propulsion (HIKUP), can't remember where that was, but i do remember it was enthusiastically funded by local laundry services. Seemed to be in an early state ...

New ideas come up when the time is right. Most people are entangled in everyday-problems, they do not care about giant leaps of the species. I would say that a persons with time and ressources to support himself without having to care about the every-day problems has the best chance to come upon a new idea. But that isn't necessarily a weirdo, that person must be aware of his exceptional situation. A pampered weirdo will likely just stay a lazybone. Maybe i'm writing just nonsense ...

I'm not sure whether innovations in the past can be compared to modern innovations. Mesoamerican civilisations are contemporary with old-wolrd post-roman / early to high mediaval / early islamic times. The principle of weight distribution is surely much older; plaeolithic i would say (tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of years) . Large animals where dissected on site, the chunks carried to the camp, so the technique was probably used automatically by hunters and gatherers, without much fuss :-) From the Antique on innovations were based on single persons (reportedly), not much knowledge about different fields of science is needed to invent a wheel or see the stars move. Wheel: see Hittites (not those from religious context, the real late bronze / early iron age ones :-)), but wheels are frequently used at least from early bronze age on. Hmm, i tend to follow you, but would you care to you give an example of what you mean ? Nice idea, if only we knew the future. The next giant leap ... i don't know whether a single person still can do a giant leap like the historic persons or whether teams of specialist of different fields are necessary to write down something new. But i do know that most weirdos are just weirdos. Encouraging them by pampering ... if i was a weirdo (yeah yeah !) i would love it ... :-) Having an idea is not enough, everyone has ideas, not necessarily weirdos :-) Problem is the realisation, especially of complex systems ...

*scratchhead* Yeah, it belongs in the lounge, like many others. I have the feeling this is the reason why this thread was started, of course i might be wrong. "Ketchup-Thrusters ready for suicide burn" :-)

For funding the Mars colony ? Pizza dough as heat shield ? Tomatoes against radiation ? Onions to fuel ... wait, that could work !

It's not only the lacking technology to run an autarky for an undefined period. Keeping people healthy and alive requires more than greenhouse and artificial food. That malnutrition is one of the reasons why costs of health care systems in the rich countries explode. Another problem is radiation. That field is almost without any data. Sending people into the center of the ship between the stored stuff sounds like "pull a leather-bag over your head" ... helpless. But i would expect that more research on radiation shielding can be done once it is better understood what kind of radiation does what kind of damage. Low g: very well trained atsronauts come down in a bad shape from months in weightlessness. Bones have lost calcium, muscles atrophied and arteries stiffened. They need a ground crew to get them out of the vessels, a g-suit in the first weeks to support blood pressure and a several months long rehabilitation training. It's not even understood what happens to human health after more than a few months, only very few people have been in space for a year or more. I mean, the colony-dreams are a nice playground but i think SpaceX is playing too fast forward. The transportation thing might be the easiest part ...

A noble goal :-) Make it so ! I think that data, technology and in a way moral is missing to judge whether it's feasible/possible to make the visions real. What comes to my mind is that your overlook spanned only the last 2-3 generations, for us westerners relatively peaceful. Let's hope it stays like this and development goes on without major setbacks. I personally mourn the fact that other rich countries like germany e.g. spend even less, not only on spaceflight but on education and science in general ... Edit: i would give my vote to the ones that promise to divert the most money into basic fundamental research and education ;-)

Hi, maybe, but we should be aware that it's just a fantasy&fiction or vision. Because of the visions of one single person people think that a colony will become reality in half a generation or so. But too many open questions still stand against that. As long as no crew has actually been there, spent some time and returned in a healthy condition the colony remains fiction. imho

@Northstar1989: Sir, this is science and spaceflight. With a remarkable resolution you keep throwing in claims. If you cannot give us a reliable source for a single one of your assertions (lets take this one: "99% of the loss is convection, not radiation") then you will become the first person on my ignore list. I give you a hint: the claim is a contradiction in itself. Pls., sit back, do a little research on your claims, and stop underestimating the people here. I do not mean any backseatmoderation, but i find it necessary to point out the fact that most of your writings are personal opinions and not backed up by science. Edit: *plonk*

RGGB, GRGB, GRBG, .... a pictures genetic code :-) @kurja, i owe you one, stupidity was on my side. So here is the colour version, still just stacked and unprocessed. Seems like i didn't hit the focus 100%ly ... still practicing :-)

Center of M31. This is my first (serious) try with an autoguider and a ccd cam. It took me a few days until i figure everything out. Unfortunately there was (and is) a problem with the camera (a used atik 420) i do not understand. It should take colour pics. It shows colour pics on screen but saves only black and white, only one channel it seems. That why it looks a little blurry me thinks.The capture program that comes with the camera is ... rudimentary ... and i am very friendly here :-/ This is the whole field of view due to the tiny chip the camera has. Have to get myself a focal reducer ... Apo 115/805mm (f/7), 5*16min light, 5*16min dark frames, 10*bias, stacked with dss. Guided with a no-name guiding cam and phd2 on a losmandy g11. This is just the stacked image, i didn't do any homework with it.

If that belongs to the category "pilot input errors" then you are right :-)

The ITS does not exist, not even a full scale engine (i think ?). The plans for a colony is in a an early state of marketing, which these days means something like "Let's see how the impact will be". I have the feeling that it's less sophisticated as it was in the 60s and 70s of the last century. Send robots, build submarsian plants, live in flexible habitats, ... for now this is just stuff for a comic strip or yet another movie. Many (all ?) vital factors to run an autarkic society in the size of a medium city in a place where everything except the ground it stands on has to be crafted artificial are completely left out or even ignored. Musk is a visionary like many others. The difference is he is a billionaire and has decided to devote his time and money to the mars project. I appreciate that. We need these type of people. In the long run they bring us forward. But they usually don't have a tight connection to reality and leave this to the engineers. It takes some time until the rest of the world is able to follow, that can in the case of Galileo be hundreds of years. Followers of visionaries sometimes tend to stop thinking on their own ;-), a common habit in us post-modern humans :-) Until there is no reliable version of a ship the caliber of an ITS (even the "small scale prototype" F9 is still grounded and far from being rated for human transport) all of the discussion is just temperate air. Based on the experience with the development of such systems in the past i am pretty sure that an ITS ready to transport 100 women&men will not grow from the soil of a launch pad in the next 5-10 years, so i suppose we all can be pretty relaxed about a marsian colony. I personally won't be the first one on board anyway ...

@Northstar1989, you probably think that because people can inhabit barren areas on earth they can as well do so on other planets. But this is not possible. On earth it works because at any time they can go back buy spare parts or get new stuff to support their efforts. This is only because a worldwide industry digs out ressources, refines them, build production chains and infratsructure. Once support is cut off or conditions get worse people have to retreat from these areas even on earth. This happened more than once in the past and will happen again. It is - sorry - extremely naive (this goes to Musk more than to you) to think that a place like Mars could easily be colonized. "You can go" he said in the presentation but that is simply not true, even if there was that fantastic rocket he envisioned to us. Well you would go, but not to colonize but to die. Even earths barren areas are still paradises compared to a remote planet. Once you are there you cannot retreat if something doesn't work as planned. There is nothing to eat, drink or breathe. There is no shop, no ressource acquisition, no production of spare parts, no hospitals to treat radiation sicknesses or malnutrition from too much greenhouse stuff. Even people on earth cannot feed to long on artificial stuff, they get sick and die and relatively young age (which is a big problem in the developed countries). Colonists who go will surely die after a short time, i fear that is the truth (right now and in the next decades).

@Northstar1989 said: Nobody lives in Earth's deserts? The Israelis wouls beg to disagree. Through massive desalinization programs at the coast, diversion of river water, and pumping from aquifers they've managed to not only inhabot but farm some of their deserts with greenhouse agriculture. The reason most deserts are mostly unihabited is because the nearby populations are backwards and poor. Rich, technologically-advanced nations like Israel can and do inhabit deserts and farm them. Other desert-dwelling nations have existed in the past as well, but collapsed due to military pressure from wealthier neighbors inhabiting richer lands... Pointing to one desert and saying nobody lives there is proof that nobody lives in any desert on the planet is ridiculous. I say: I wrote nobody lives in a place like the Rub al Khali (without support from outside). Sorry, but you are talking nonsense. There is no desert near Israel, not even a steppe, Israel is subtropical. To the rest i ... better shut up. Have a nice one :-) Edit: sorry, that was a little sharp from my side. But your comparison of a country like Israel and a desert like Ghobi, Sahara or Rub al Khali is a little short sighted. Just compare annual precipitation or ground water level and you'll see. And still there is fossil water under some dry areas in Arabia and the Sahara that can be used until a certain depth and with great pumping efforts and energy (but will eventually run out soon). The stuff needed for that is a little heavy to transport to Mars ... ;-)

It needs less energy, but it's more difficult to hold the helicopter on the spot near the ground. The compressed air cushion is like a capsized bowl and the helicopter on top. Once it starts to drift it will continue until counteracted. And since the system has some inertia when using cyclic the pilot must anticipate the movements in order to keep it stable on the spot. Once it starts to flip it can't be stopped, torque forces are by far stronger than ground effects. See accident reports by usa-en ntsb or german lba (bfu), very thrilling reading :-) But again, i never flew helicopters myself. I would think that the engineers weighed all possible consequences of tail rotor positions and did it right, complying with physics and construction demands, environment (sand that abrades the surface, cold that influences gears etc.), safety and whatever applies. As far as i know the main rotor of any single rotor helicopter cannot hit the tail rotor, construction has to insure this (needs verification). What it can hit is the boom, in extreme conditions. And, btw. tail strikes are among the most frequent helicopter accident causes ... (no 5 in this list, i'm sure the ntsb has similar info on this).

And even the rockets are grounded right now due to unresolved problems. In 2,5 million years humans haven't even "colonized" deserts like the Rub al Khali (just for example). Nobody can live there without support from outside, yet it would be far easier than living on Mars, only surface water is lacking there, everything else is just like home. Yet nobody can live there, but on the rare occasions of a few drops of rain there are flowers everywhere, just for a few days, i've seen it (well, at the fringe). So the ability to bear life is "built in", the biosphere had enough time to be potentially able to colonize even these places. Not so on Mars. On Mars there is no surface water, no breathable atmosphere, no plant seeds or useful bacteria, only dust, radiation exposure and low gravity. To live there is just a vision and fantasy. Imagine a place that combines the ground of a desert like Rub al Khali, the temperature of the Southpole and the atmosphere on the top of Mount Everest. Without support your dead, dead, dead (questions ? :-)). And still, all the prerequisites for a living are there in these places, compared to Mars they are paradises.

I guess the same :-) I never flew helicopters, but from what i heard It's "difficult" to hover a helicopter stationary just above ground because it partly "floats" on compressed air. To illustrate this, imagine there is only one point on top where it is stable and the pilot has to counteract any tendencies to "slide off" from this point. Furthermore, no part must touch the ground when the helicopter floats. When the gear touches the ground and is held (e. g. by gras) while the helicopter floats (moves) the gyro forces will cause it to flip.

Earth has no SOI, SOI is a game concept to keep calculations easy. As K^2 said, for a Mach number you need a medium that transports sound at a certain speed. No medium (vacuum), no speed of sound. Mach number becomes a division by 0 sotosay. Calculating the Mach Number from speed of sound and true air speed is not as trivial as one might think. The earth atmosphere has no abrupt border, it just gets thinner until the breaking force can be neglected (which is pretty high, far beyond low earth orbit). So in principle nothing stays in orbit forever or it must be very high. Even the ISS in 400km has to be lifted every few weeks. The question how fast must i go (in a certain altitude) so that i get around once before atmospheric drag slows me too much to stay above a certain altitude then maybe Space Shuttle documentation could help, they had an abort modus "Abort once around". That should state the conditions somewhere. Cheers

Yes, i reported the error in SmokeScreen's thread.

Hello, i've sent a save via a forum message (i don't have dropbox etc.). I've read in the RealPlume thread that others encounter the same thing. I'm not pushing you, just catching your attention because tzhe forum tells me that my message hasn't been read yet .... gb

I have reported this one in the SmokeScreen thread. I too narrowed it down to RealPlume/SmokeScreen and sent a save file to @sarbian. Cheers

That guy is a nutcase. Liquid telescopes on the mun .... Presenting aliens as an explanation for a natural phenomenon disqualifies him as a natural scientist, if he ever was one. This is mainly an outcome of the new habit that everyone can publish everything in pre-print servers and social networks. Don't be fooled too easily, guys.

Of course there are consequences to the body under 0 or low g. There are short- and long term effects. People returning from 0g after months are in a bad shape and must be carried. The bones lost calcium, the muscles have atrophied and the cardiovascular system has lost a lot of it's capacity, and these people were well trained when they left. This can partly be countered by 0g-training, but only partly. On earth we move under 1g the whole day (those of us who do), bone strength, muscles, levers and mechanics in the body, the whole metabolism and chemistry is laid-out to maintain the body-functions under the conditions here and the body functions must be stipulated or they decay. So, yes there will be modifications to the body under 0.4g and these will have an impact on health, to "normal mortals" more than to astronauts who usually are well trained and in good health, like there are modifications to the body of a couch potato and a decathlete. And still the couch potato has to breathe, sleep and eat under 1g. People who stay in 0 or low g for a long period will certainly run into trouble sooner than the ones on earth.

Hello, i have the effect that a landed vessel, when switched or reloaded via f9, starts a few meters above the ground in a tilted attitude. I un- and reinstalled my mods and this effect seems to be connected with RealPlume/SmokeScreen, on the SmokeScreen-side. Can this be confirmed or rejected :-) ? Cheers GB