RedDwarfIV

My three year old Toshiba Satellite L300 just says 'nope' at the prospect of anything larger than an orbiter.

Ahem. You may be forgetting the simplest option. A vacuum balloon has around 15% greater bouyancy than a hydrogen balloon. Normally, it would be difficult to build one of these in Earth atmosphere because it's simply too difficult to remmove that much air from a space. However, if you are already in space, you need only keep atmosphere out, provided you can, of course, slow your ship enough not to get destroyed by atmospheric entry.

I was amused by the guy who said it was strange how people are too eager to go into pro and anti camps. And how he said '...a few major incedents show...' when the only major incedents I can think of [Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island, Windscale] were all results of gross incompetence, human error, and bad design - which are three things we no longer have problems with because of those incedents. if anyone can be trusted not to let incompetence, human error and bad design get in the way of a mission, it's space agencies.

Heck of a good model, and the texture is awesome. Just one thing. 'Weyland-Yutani Corp'. It's only 'Weyland' in AVP and Prometheus.

The project has now been reclassified as a space station, since the main engine has failed. It is currently in an elliptical orbit. A new Dragonfly Command Module will be launching for the RTV and Transit Small Object Lander Craft to dock to.

Veto Aerospace released a statement earlier today regarding the Dragonfly's repurposeing from exploration of Eve's satellite Gilly to that of Minmus, and how it had nothing whatsoever at all to do with the explosion in space in which one Accelleron Fuel Transfer Vehicle was flung away and one Kerbonaut was lost attempting to retrieve it.

Is the current IVA prop for the Mk3 cockpit a placeholder? Because I'd like to be able to fly it as if I were in the cockpit of a massive plane, but there are no instruments or windows.

2090? Forget all oil, for starters - that's predicted to run out in 2045. Unless of course those guys in Arizona perfect their thing that takes carbon dioxide and water vapour from air and turns it into petrol, we'll either be using electrric or hydrogen fuelled cars - most likely a combination of both with hydrogen being prevalent. Because of lack of fossil fuels, most non-renewable resource fired power stations will have been shut down and replaced with either nuclear or green energy generation facilities. Nuclear could refer to fusion too - the biggest problem with fusion in 2012 is getting funding for a reactor large enough to sustain fusion reactions. By this time, the concept will have been proven and several nations rich enough to do so will have constructed fusion sites. For fission, it will be divided between conventional reactor types and Molten Salt Reactors - those are currently in development, but have a lot of advantages over uranium fuelled plants. Global warming would be making life difficult across the globe - despite efforts to reduce carbon emissions [mostly successful now that oil and gas have been exhausted] CO2 will continue to affect climate until it can be brought back to safe levels. Since by this point the Amazon would have been mostly destroyed, forests would have been put up elsewhere. Earth's population will have greatly increased, leading to spread of poverty further through third world countries. Private sector space companies would probably have gained a strong foothold. Alongside rockets, SSTO vehicles such as Skylon will have been brought into service. There may even be sub-orbital spaceplanes intended for high-speed travel between places which carry passengers and cargo commercially, acting like a more expensive version of an airline. Such spaceplanes would probably take advantage of the atmospheric bounce effect. That's my 2p for you.

I've got one that takes off easily, flies very well, and has a crewtank for 5 Kerbals. It's a little tail-heavy, but at high thrust that doesn't matter. The landing gear kept playing up but I eventually fixed that. Going to test it this evening.

"My God. It's full of Mars!"

"I hereby rename this planet 'Tosev 4'."

My first successful landing on the runway with an orbital spaceplane. The Kittyhawk is a handful in space, and even more of a handful in the air - I had to put it into a nosedive to stop it spinning. And then I had less than a tank's worth of fuel to use to get it to land. I had thought about not bothering to put it down on the runway - but the Kittyhawk is designed for Eve landings, and so has an awful lot of wing parts to take advantage of that. If it can be held on course, its glide characteristics are pretty good.

"Well, now we're here, we sh... what's that noise? Do Mars rovers carry loudspeakers? I swear I can hear some kind of SSTV signal." Five minutes laaaaaater. "Huh. Looks like four Kerbals and a pyramid."

And that's exactly what the Sanctuary has. Problem is, people still saying it should have escape pods simply because people want them.

That reminded me of something from Mock The Week. "And now we go live to Base 3 on Mount Everest to speak with this man, who recently climbed the world's five highest peaks." "Now do you love me daddy!? Now do you love me!?"

The re-runs were counting down to Series X, which is the new series. Episode 1 is already out - the Dwarfers come across a derelict called the Trojan, and Rimmer's brother Howard [now a hologram himself] visits.

"goood mooooorning maaars!" (Try to imagine that in capitals. It won't post it with them.)

Here's a good one off sci-fi book, Perigee. The science was pretty good, and it also made for an engaging story. It's one many Kerbonauts will be familiar with, I think - a spaceplane get's stuck in orbit. It got there because its MECO failed - but as the pilot mentions, engines don't just refuse to stop running. As Polaris Spacelines works to both bring the Austral Clipper down before it runs out of air, and figure out how it managed to get up there in the first place, they are hindered by the failure of a dedicated SSTO's reaction control system, the obnoxious buisnessman who chartered the Austral Clipper, and the work of a sabateur. I've read it several times. It's pretty good. It even describes the launch sequence of a NASA Orion rocket, and details it's failure quite graphically.

I got that. But it flew apart so violently that the RTV capsule's escape trajectory was in the exact opposite direction to the Dragonfly C&CV. I decided the effect was worthy of the name 'Space Leviathan', regardless of its cause.

Exactly how the Dragonfly 1 managed to attain speeds sufficient to eject it from Kerbin orbit into a sundive trajectory is unknown, although some theorists believe it may have something to do with spacetime disturbance from the docking assembly - the Dragonfly was the first vessel to successfully implement this system in the Veto Aerospace program. This discrepancy was noted upon the launch of the Accelleron 2 Fuel Transfer Vehicle which itself suffered the loss of its ascent/orbit engine on liquid booster cut off. The Accelleron 1 had already been docked to the Dragonfly 1 for some time. When approaching sundive perigee, both craft [Dragonfly 1 and Accelleron 1] broke up. Transmissions were recieved from Dragonfly, but Accelleron was only able to confirm that its pilot still lived by relaying that information through Dragonfly. Telemetry shows the Accelleron capsule was on a trajectory heading away from Dragonfly, and the Fuel Transfer Vehicle has not been heard from since. The Dragonfly theoretically had both the thrust and delta-V to obtain an orbit that would not damage the spacecraft, but the crew refused to initiate a burn on account of the weight imbalance the FTV would cause. An investigation is underway into why it was not suggested to simply jettison the FTV.

Thing is, you might as well stay on the craft while drones and the crew fix the problem.

I want a Ceres analogue. Large enough to have a sphere of influence, and yet small enough to be going slowly above it, with very little gravity. Kerbals who jump will end up like the football Wallace kicked in the first Wallace And Gromit film - they just never seem to come down.

Here, Kalanra is not wearing IMPACT armour, but HSD infantry gear. Renaza and Vasenra still will, but Kalanra needs more mobility than protection - it's all very well being able to withstand the crushing forces associated with a mine collapse, but ease of sprinting and the ability to crouch are more important to a soldier.

Scary to think about, yes - that was the point of the movie, according to the guy who advised the movie's director about Science. They knew the sun was too damn big to be affected by a nuclear blast even with all Earth's fissile material on board, and they knew that if it was fading now, it would have started dying many millions of years ago - the time it takes for a photon to pass from Solar core to photosphere. Since they knew the premise itself was rubbish, they focused on making the premise interesting enough to be forgiven. Hence, scientists going forth to battle Nature's most powerful forces. I do like it, I just read a lot about its production.

Of course, we'd really give the Martians what for nowadays.