Green Baron

All i can find is that the Soyus TMA usually does a 4 min to 4.5 min deorbit burns. And that it takes around 45min. from end of burn to landing, g-loads in between are 4-5g. Should be enough data to calculate the dV (if only we had a nice atmospheric model). But 30m/s dV are not enough for a direct reentry from about 400km altitude. But, yep, TWR of the Soyuz may well be in that regime ... :-)

I waited until it was over and then replayed the crucial parts, so i didn't even realize. The girl said she had something to do with the development of the gridfins ? They are probably no professional "talkers", can happen 'cause excitement :-) Has anyone any news on what happened during landing ? I'm not in the social networks ... and the spacex-site doesn't say much ...

I'm curious. Why did he refuse to teach that formula ? Did he miss relativistic considerations ? Or some supernatural power ? And: Of course error margins for reaction times, change in velocities, momentums, working pressures and i'm sure i forget something are much narrower at 8-9g than at 3g, at higher velocities than at lower velocities (and changes thereof). Plus the fact than one degree of freedom is nearly blocked when the system is already at 100%. A little fault can have a higher impact than. Edit: and i think firing up more engines won't help. First it takes a few seconds. Second all landings i watched had a little offset from the exact center. The whole process is a tradeoff between reaction time for corrections and braking power, though i don't know where the current limits are.

I'd rather put my bet on they calculated to the last drop of fuel + x. Or the high g-loads have an impact on the fuel system. Could someone do the math for me, pls: 3 Merlins, sealevel, 25(don't know were i have that from pls. verify ?) tons = many g's.

I must add: There is a high gradient today because of an ice age (continent at one of the poles, circumpolar current, north/south landmass distribution, conveyor belt, north atlantic deep water formation, etc.). Mammalian diversification (mostly) falls into the time of cooling that lead to the ice age and diversity of todays climatic zones. I'm pretty sure, had they looked 250my earlier, the result would have been totally different.

If you want to take a look at game engine source code: http://www.godotengine.org/ That's a high end game engine, MIT-licensed. Or: http://pioneerspacesim.net/ the latter a neat little open source space game. Cheers

Me again, 20 years ago it was a joke among PC users: "MS Windows ? It's an unstable mess, you have to shut it down every now and then or it'll crash sooner or later !". Today people got used to it and expect Windows to crash, like they expect a good vacuum cleaner to make a terrible noise or it's not a good vacuum cleaner. hehehe :-)

That was what i thought too. "Oh no, not again the Drake equation". The drake equation is based on assumptions of the 50s in a time of space fantasies and exorbitant space programs. It did its job by luring people into donations for a search program. It's not even an equation because the left value is a variable, so in most cases it is used by adjusting the right side in order to meet a desired "lvalue" ...

Err, .... well, nice, but that guy definitely talks too much. :-)

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Cheat_sheet Look for: Isp = ( F1 + F2 + ... ) / ( ( F1 / Isp1 ) + ( F2 / Isp2 ) + ... ) It's a long time since i last used the cheat sheet :-) Edit: just saw this has allreday been answered in your thread in Gameplay-Questions ... nevermind

Actually my pet peeve was not just the fact that they de-/e-/re- or whatelsenotvolved about, that's just nonsense, but the fact that they calculated the process of millions of years of evolution with some sort of algorithm. Still, it's funny :-)

This reminds me of another one, hope it hasn't been mentioned before: In one of the star trek series (vovager ?) they met a race of, well, dinosaurs living in space that evolved on earth and went into space (ok, total nonsense so far). When they wanted to know where exactly these saurians derived from they told the computer to extrapolate the genome/outfit/whatever back 65My and ... voilá ... stood a dinosaur from late cretacious times. This is beyond total nonsense, it implies somehow that evolution has a direction and can be calculated. These are the moments that i think: more education to the people ! :-)

Well, around 70-80km/s rel. speed is something coming the opposite way, "wrong-way-driver" so to say. Things from the solar system can't be much faster. "Normal" relative speed is around 8-12km/s (question the eager space corvette captain bombarding a planet: why ?). Example: Halley's comet perihel speed around sun 55km/s, earth around sun 30km/s. Happy bombardment

We are that far: Because of a few anti-social contemporaries german law concerning radio controlled hobby (and this has a long tradition !) is about being reworked and not towards more liberalism. To everyone who refuses to see: stick to your smartphones and computer games, keep your hands off things too complicated for your minds ! I'm aware of getting a rule reminder soon, but i just needed to vent.

I was laughing out loud when that one dropped a wing-wheel, like: "Bah, useless anyway !". That guy at the end made it right: "f...orget the wheel, belly landing's safer". Is the U2 that difficult to land ? They are in good company: Never mind the german voice, the guy talks like an "instructor" trying to explain the mishaps. But we all see what's going on.

I must say that find the idea "we are early" and the implications of large distances between potential civilizations intriguing. The earlier a civilization, the more it sees from the surrounding universe. In an expanding an cooling universe the later they come, the more heavy elements they will have but the less they will see from their surrounding and the greater the distances will be. Einstein would be very sad about that ...

Ok, let's start a religious war :-) Nobody around here has an alt/az.-mounting. Maybe because nobody has an out-of-the-box equipment. There are quite a few private observatories, when hiking one can see the "mushrooms" in the landscape. Sadly i can't afford that ... I put it on the terrace and level it with the built in water bubble (that*s the difficult part, it's not necessary to level it but i just do it), polar axis roughly aiming at polaris, look through the viewfinder and turn the declination axis until big dipper or cassiopeia is in the right position, that's a movement out of the wrist. Two screws until polaris is where it should be and that's it. I bet i'm faster than anyone with a goto and 2 stars (better 3). And far more accurate. Just looked at the f.. handbook: 6 pages for goto-setup, 0,5 pages for manual setup (... ok plus 1 page polar finder description). See :-) ? Edit: i'm by far not criticising any out-of-the-box equipment like celestron, meade, etc. Many people can share that hobby for an affordable price with these telescopes/mounts, which would otherwise not be possible. Hough.

Hi, an elaboration could fill pages, that's why. DDE wrote a summary. Flood basalt, global icing, an equatorial desert, gas release after icing, an already stressed environment (well, it's always stressed out, isn't it :-) ?) ... could have played a role in the extinction event at the end of the permian. A long and warm period with epicontinental seas, global subtropic/tropic conditions (someone get me a gintonic), huge connected landmasses were the world of the dinosaurs. E.g.: elephants will not multiply on an island and maintain their size, an island would not be able to support enough individuals to keep the gene pool intact. They would either die out or get much smaller (like the last mammoth populations on siberian islands). I'm probably telling you a common place here, sorry if i do. I saw a misunderstanding in my post: you as the op were talking about already specialized mammals at the end of the cretacious, and i came up with the base of mammal evolution. I think we all agree that mammals, though not the dominant families of species, had a varied family tree and filled many niches at the end of the cretacious. And were better able to adapt to the new, gradually cooling and much more climatically diverse world than the saurians, the latter spreading rapidly into the air. Pls. excuse me, i don't get your second sentence ...

Am of the exactly opposite opinion but everyone as he/she can and wants ... :-) btw.: yesterday where perfect conditions here on La Palma ! The 1 out of 100 day ...

You are right, i simplified terribly to avoid wall of text which i hate to read in a game forum. It is not sure what caused the extinction event at the end of the permian, probably a combination of factors. The forming of a continent isn't a sudden thing. And in the fossil records of a few million years look quite compressed. There are other factors, climate and geographic conditions. In the >200my there was one ice age as well as a huge desert, both limiting life bearing capacity. Let me suggest a decent book on vertebrate evolution, like f.e. Benton: Vertebrate evolution (2014). It's a dry matter but compresses most knowledge in a readable format and tells when there are diverging views between scientists. I distrust Wikipedia greatly on all things evolution.

I should have looked more thoroughly: your mount is not equatorial but altitude/azimuth, this means one axis is upright, the other parallel to the ground. This is not optimal for fotography, especially long term exposures, because 2 axis' have to be motorized / continuously adjusted. But it's perfectly ok for the first steps ;-) cs (clear skies)

Well, the huge dinosaurs were products of a supercontinent that could support such massive organisms, their number declined with the narrowing of their niche when the large continent broke up. The impact just gave them them the rest, roughly 30-40% of landliving species died out. Hadrosaurus lived in france in the early palaeogene and one group of dinosaurs (saurischia) evolved into the birds, well, today are the birds. But it's very difficult to correlate the stratigraphy between america and europe. There are several models that try to explain the extinction event 66my ago. It's not quite clear at what time the first mammals ran about (therapsides shed some light on that), but probably late triassic, first traces reaching until the upper permian (see: cynodontia evolution, but i don't know whether wikipedia is the right place to look that up ...). So, year, at the end of the cretacious there was probably a whole zoo of them, or, to put it less pejorative, they had their niches and that was more than eating dino eggs and hiding from big fearsome reptiles. And they were most likely as effected from the KT-event as the reptiles. If i was a small mammal from early cretacious i'd live at twilight ...

25* magnification is a funny thing indeed, it probably was part of a set, thus the facter instead of focal length. 25mm then is 1500/25 = 60* magnification. For Jupiter get a 10mm (not less, you'll have a very dark and narrow picture and only magnify turbulences). There are quite decent 100° apparent field of view 9mm eyepieces (silly name explore scientific, but not as pricey as f.e. televue) ;-), and 70° 36mm (e.g. hyperion) for moon, clusters and nebulae. You'll love it. (i assmume you have a 2" connection and 1,25" reducing piece ?). From an astroshop or over the internet get a solar protection foil, a sheet A5 is about 20,- and tinker a cardboard enforced cap for your tube. Since your tube is completely closed it will heat up a lot when observing the sun, might even be damaged. Sun is interesting when it has sun spots or an inner planet or the moon crosses it (hi flat earthers !). A good idea to reduce risk when observing the sun is a projection screen: any white cardboard and an arm with a clip will do. Since your mount is equatorial you need electricity when in the field: a cheap car-battery, charger and 12v connector. A Bahtinov mask helps focussing (cut one out from black paper and laminate it in a copy shop). Glad to help :-)

Thanx. Well, it's not a new idea that life elsewhere is most probably carbon-based, given that carbon is quite abundant and quite reactive. I will not speculate about silicate or sulfur based "life"-forms. Buuuut :-) ... the following evolution, change in atmospheric gases, keeping a planets surface temp around 15°C for 4 billion years (interruptions to the cold side neglected), oxygen, iron, highly reactive metabolism, control loops between different environmental reservoirs for carbon (temperature) and other elements, plate-tectonics to renew surface material, magnetic field to shield from radiation, relatively quiet cosmic neighborhood, that sort of things is (imo) what forms the basis for a "successful" evolution to, well, more or less intelligent beings :-)

... for all the aliens & fiction in science & spaceflight ? Just suggesting