FleshJeb

Guys, read some critiques of the Gilded Age, or why a high Gini coefficient is bad for economies and societies. None of this is theoretical, there are observed effects. Or at least realize there’s a logical conflict between “Daddy billionaire will pay for it” and There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. In any case, here are some known stats: Without service, Hubble will die sometime between 2030 and 2040. That’s at least an additional 20 percent of its existing service life. I don’t think trying to do a high technical risk maintenance mission just to get private astronauts some training is worth getting it for free. Hubble can only serve 1/5 of its requests for scope time. We have much better instruments available than were originally installed or retrofitted onto Hubble. The Nancy Grace Roman telescope will be going up soon, and it’s built on a KH-11 spysat that NASA got for free. There’s a spare KH-11 just sitting in storage. The optics are great, it just needs different instruments. We can put an additional better quality, longer lifespan telescope up for comparatively little money. (Caveat: NGR is slightly worse at some things than Hubble) Wait for Hubble to be much closer to end of life before allowing private maintenance/training on it, and have replacement ready to go if they screw it up. It’s not worth the risk to a public resource, yet.

I’m in the same camp of, “Even KSP one is unacceptably buggy.” My two best arguments are: Do you still have to manually slow your timewarp before an SOI change so that your trajectory doesn’t go to hell? Do you still reflexively quicksave before doing almost anything? Not because you’re afraid you’ll screw up, but that KSP will. I tried playing pure vanilla about 5 years ago when mechjeb was in bad shape. Was doing a very simple, very standard mission to the mun. Did the transfer burn, set up my capture burn, punched the stock Warp To Node button, and the damn thing blew right through the SOI. I pretty much quit playing after that. That kind of thing should never have survived ten minutes of QA. Between that and my experiences with other games, I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the game dev industry has very little respect for player time and energy.

Look, I came here for an argument…

@Flush Foot my apologies then. I misinterpreted your intent. I’ll edit my initial response.

Absolutely correct. I was responding to the implication that Jim viewing this thread was somehow nefarious or a gotcha. I object to the notion that he’s in any way culpable for the state of things. now, back to reading emiko, because it was still in progress last time I caught up.

A dude who, as far as I know, works from home part time, and has probably never been in the same room as anyone else from intercept. Not someone who is involved in making decisions, privy to gossip, and may know even fewer details than the janitorial staff at the office. edit: the legend

Jim has been one of US for at least a decade. They just hired him to write some flavor text because he’s damn good at it. You’re being creepy and weird, knock it off. edit: my mistake. Ff was just making an observation.

Oh for sure. I just wanted to bring up that the effects of different/changing atmospheric composition are way more nuanced and complex than the usual discussions around them. As to the lower nitrogen concentration, I’d expect that it would require more metabolic energy to capture each unit. I think this would tend to favor the evolution of slower, more efficient organisms all up and down the chain. On Earth we have creatures that have fascinating adaptations to poor nutrition environments, such as Koalas, Pandas, and Elon Musk. But, they’re all slow, stupid, and require external help to mate.

Really pleased to see that you’ve taken this as far as you have. As noted, one of the major issues that keeps KAL computing from being really useful is the lack of sensors (other than KAL destruction). Well, I had an exceptionally stupid notion: The Making History Mission Editor has triggers for various flight events and parameters. It can also activate action groups and staging… That gets you 11 responses to “sensor” data. Now, if I understand the power of what you’ve got here, you could treat those action groups as a bit field, and activate 2^10 ish possible other KALs. (x sensor condition activates bits 2 and 5, bits 2 AND 5 activate KAL34) There’s some decent potential for fully automated, fully stock mission execution (with a boatload of hard work, caveats and exceptions). I checked the manual, just to see if I’d remembered the features correctly: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Mission_Builder_Manual

I’m a coward, I’d pick Argon. The major problem is that the nitrogen cycle is necessary for life as we know it. N is a fundamental building block of proteins. You’d probably want lower concentrations of CO2 as well, because high CO2 negatively affects the uptake of Nitrogen and other minerals, making the plants less nutritious per volume (offsetting the increased volume from the CO2). https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/effects-of-rising-atmospheric-concentrations-of-carbon-13254108/ Did I answer this just to dunk on one-dimensional climate change misinformation…? I would NEVER.

That was an exceptionally good interview.

One of the additional benefits of renewable energy is that it’s viable at multiple scales in ways that nuclear and fossil fuel power are not. (I’m still pro-nuclear, especially the small modular reactors.) A big topic in civil engineering is decentralization of necessary resources like electricity, water, and wastewater. Smaller, more local systems can be controlled by the people that actually use them. You don’t quite get the economies of scale of larger systems, but you get increased accountability and responsiveness. They’re also more resilient in the face of disasters, because fewer people are affected if a community-scale system goes offline, and this makes them easier to help. I have a lot of real-world examples showing the dangers of over-centralization, but the most stark one is from Dune. Paul is able to take control of the galaxy because he controls the single source of the Spice that enables interstellar travel. This is an example of what’s known historically as a Hydraulic Empire.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_solar#

I was on the team that construction-staked this: The panels are on a part of the quarry that’s been tapped out and remediated. The power generated offsets 100% of their electrical needs for the year (which are substantial). They had to dig their electrical trenches with Primacord (I was there, and the explosions were awesome.) It’s running just fine and has paid for itself and then some in the 12 years since it went online. So, quit the whining and crying, and keep your fantasies about how the world works to yourselves.