RedDwarfIV

Its called \'perceived risk\'. Such as someone seeing a rail crash on TV, thinking how horrendous this incident is, and so deciding to take the car. When the car is, statistically, massively more dangerous. Where people hear of incidents like Fukushima Dachai [A plant which, lets face it, was as unequipped to deal with a tsunami as India was during the Boxing Day Earthquake a few years back, because it was deemed too expensive against the unlikelyhood of there being a tsunami large enough to damage the plant. Beuraucrats don\'t operate on \'well, in hindsight...\'] or Three Mile Island, they get a skewed idea of the kind of effort and planning that goes into ensuring nuclear plants are the safest they can possibly be. And then they decide the feeble wind turbine is a far better option because it cannot conceivably explode. Unless, of course, you don\'t lubricate it, in which case it can lose its brakes in high wind, rip itself to pieces, and perhaps throw shrapnel all over a nearby villiage. And don\'t forget, one damaged turbine can damage others. You could quickly end up with a field full of dead turbines.

There is no discussion. The bird is the word. There\'s a song about it. Of course its true. Music doesn\'t lie.

This is KSP Commander Tom Kerbal. I\'m floating round a tin can. You really didn\'t spend much on the control capsule, did you Space Centre?

Ninja\'d. Harriers can Vector In Forward Flight [that is, slam engines into reverse, and lose the enemy extremely quickly.] They can hover at a fixed position and altitude. They are, its fair to say, a brilliant design. A French one, but developed by the British after the French inventor couldn\'t build it.

The only part you can see in the entire image is a mod.

What you meant was \'Oh, here\'s a windy bit of sea just off our coastline, no boats go there, and there\'s no active seal population. Let\'s build an offshore windfarm.' Which would be fine.

The VA Spacehawk is a new spin on an old design - the awesome looking but sadly short ranged single-stage-to-orbit Storm Petrel. Using similar RCS VTOL technology to our successful Kestrel and Ibis Munar return spaceplanes [the Ibis the more successfully successful of the two,] the Spacehawk is capable of ferrying small packages to the Mun in [partly] reusable style! //Consumers are warned that the Kerbin descent stage is currently unpowered, and as such will not function as a Munar return vessel alone. It does have its own RCS supply, however, allowing it to land on the Mun even if the descent stage is damaged. //Consumers are warned that the Munar return stage is too unstable for atmospheric flight. Its wings are fitted solely to hold its engines.

More than two thirds of the planet\'s surface is ocean, in some places reaching many miles deep. No matter how much hydrogen we find is needed for our vehicles, there aren\'t enough vehicles to make a difference. Compared to that, the fuel taken would be insignificant. Your point, whilst true, is practically invalid. And if it was significant, wouldn\'t that help combat rising sea levels? With the ice caps melting, water will be getting less salty. Your previous reply had many a sharp barb in it. All I said was that you were not providing solutions, and you were giving less than adequate responses to offered solutions, which gave a naive impression. I do not intend to start a mudslinging session - I intend to point out that like myself, you do not have perfect knowledge, and in many cases your arguments were flawed. I used the same/similar level of criticism that you used for me. Population limiting is difficult. In countries where it is a problem, it is very difficult to police. What lead to the Chernobyl disaster was poor reactor design on the part of the Soviets. No one assumed that it was entirely safe. It was not a result of a stupid viewpoint, it was the result of a city needing a lot of power and a nuclear plant being the most efficient was of providing it. The Soviets just didn\'t put enough research into it. Also, failures such as Chernobyl have lead to the exemplary safety of nuclear plants today. Natural disasters are difficult, but the Fukushima plant is on the side of Japan that has the least tsunamis. it should also be noted that gas-cooled reactors such as widely used by Britain are less susceptable to flooding than water cooled reactors. Fukushima\'s containment building was damaged by hydrogen explosions. The reactor\'s primary containment was undamaged and there were no large radiation leaks. Explosions in a nuclear power plant are never caused by the fuel having a nuclear detonation such as a nuclear warhead could have, they are usually hydrogen explosions or sudden increases in pressure. Radioactive material is more likely to melt its way out of a reactor than make it explode, and it is usually the coolant that causes explosions. Under standard running operation of a nuclear power plant, a containment building will contain fallout during a meltdown. That Fukushima\'s containment building was damaged was unusual, but it was handled, and less than a tenth of the radiation of the Chernobyl disaster escaped Fukushima. No more than 100 people around Fukushima are said to have increased cancer risk. Radioactive waste is not an 'I\'ll deal with it later' problem. We have dedicated treatment facilities, such as Sellafield [ironically, a renamed Windscale] which process nuclear waste, and store it in a way safe for the environment. True, its still there, but if well maintained the site could keep the radioactive waste contained indefinitely. I\'m 16, and my sources are varied, though they include UKTV History, Wikipedia, Bang Goes The Theory, TVTropes, BBC documentaries and numerous Internet sites. You say my problem is blindly following people who say nuclear power is safe. I know the risks, I know the problems, and I know the scale of the problems. What I say is that your problem is that you are one of the majority who believe the ideas formulated by ecowarriors, politicians, oil companies, and Hollywood, who all for their own reasons are biased against nuclear power. Because these beliefs have majority, believers can use that as evidence. There is so much propaganda against nuclear power, and so few sources to defend it because the majority believe it to be dangerous. Germany had the highest nuclear safety rating in the world, and yet Angela Merkhel had them shut down so that they could build wind farms. wind farms. A turbine spends 90% of its time taking power from the grid just to keep itself turning. I\'m not talking carelessly, and nuclear power does not endanger millions. More people have died from teacosy related incidents than problems with nuclear power. And thorium isn\'t too good to be true. It was just research that was abandoned in favour of uranium plants so that the US could discover more about it for its nuclear bombs. Thorium has the added bonus that most of its waste becomes fuel, and what waste doesn\'t become fuel has such a fast half-life that it would be Low Level Radioactive in just 100 years time as opposed to 200,000 years for uranium waste.

While you may be right on the CFCs, you have a skewed idea of atom economy. The good things about hydrogen fuel and the CO2 conversion machines being tested are that they take the molecules out of the environment - then put them straight back again after we\'re done using them. Hydrogen, when combusted, mixes with oxygen to make... water, which comes out of the car exhaust as water vapour. Which goes into clouds, which becomes rain, which goes through the river, and back to the sea. I don\'t see where you\'re getting the idea that we might use so much water at the same time that we salinate all sea life to death. And with the CO2 converter, it takes CO2 out of the air, and the car puts it back. Its like growing a tree so you can use it for firewood. A lot of the CO2 trees process in photosynthesis goes into building the tree - when you burn the tree, the CO2 is released. If you don\'t burn the tree, it decomposes, and the CO2 is released anyway. Complaining that humans are naive will not solve any problems, and it kind of makes people think that about you. Either that or it depresses the people with the good ideas when they are told it doesn\'t work because of \'common sense\'. Your suggestion that there are too many people on the planet, whilst probably true, does not put forward a solution, unless you intended that there be some sort of mass cull. So what that we wouldn\'t have the problems if there were less people. The fact is, there are 7 billion people on Earth and that\'s what we\'ve got to work our solutions around. Hydrogen isn\'t \'too slow\' to be useful. If it helps the environment, that makes it a better fuel. Nuclear power - I love debates on this. So many misconceptions. In total, just over 100 people have died directly as a result of the failure of nuclear power stations. When compared to the number of people who have died as a direct result of failure at fired power stations... well, that number is significantly higher. You see, in the event of a \'meltdown\', a nuclear power plant does not explode in a mushroom cloud. The reactor vessel fails, and radioactive materials are released... only to be trapped in the containment building. Three Mile Island had one of these - no fallout. The Windscale incident was prolonged because the safety people thought it would be a good idea to try and put out the blaze with fans - thus blowing radioactive material out of a stack that wasn\'t designed to filter so much waste. Human error played its part in both of these cases. Chernobyl was caused by a pathetic Soviet reactor design without a containment building, having a new safety feature tested - by \'scientists\' who barely knew more than the manual told them. When the reactor overheated, they engaged the SCRAM - but because the reactor used water coolant, and the SCRAM moderator was graphite, the SCRAM rods exploded, the coolant evaporated into steam and blew the bloody roof off. Then there was a nuclear fire and Chernobyl was abandoned. Even so, only a few decades afterward, there is wildlife living in and around Chernobyl, thriving despite the radiation which, I might add, would only give you radiation poisoning now if you were to sit down and have a picnic. Nuclear power is not inherently unsafe. It produces power very efficiently, and aside from the problem of waste storage it is the best eco-friendly source of electricity that we have. Not to mention, Thorium reactors would be even safer, be self regulating, and be even more efficient whilst being smaller, can use waste from other powerplants and do not produce waste that politicians believe might be used by terrorists. Also of note - reactor waste grade plutonium is not suitable for use in a nuclear warhead. Dirty bombs are a worry but they a comparitively small scale, and its not like governments just leave plutonium lying around for terrorists to pick up and walk away with. I hope I\'ve brought some education to the masses.

Cease your speculations, or face the wrath of NovaSilisko the Infuriated By Overuse Of Kerbalisation Of Words. I tend to leave junk up there to see if I can get close to it occasionally.

No, we can\'t build factories. As I said, that technology is years off. Its still being tested with little machines fitted to parabolic mirrors that couldn\'t produce more petrol than would allow you to drive your own car. If you lived in a desert, because it needs a lot of sunlight. And what you\'re suggesting would work just as well with hydrogen production.

Nevertheless, its basically renewable. Petrol isn\'t. So hydrogen is better in that sense.

This is near Gabyalufix levels of skill except using only Stock parts.

I wasn\'t aware Freon was a CFC. I heard it was toxic - something CFCs aren\'t. It\'s nevertheless a better means of powering our cars over petrol. True, there are some people in a dry place in America working on a machine that would convert air into petrol, given that carbon dioxide and water vapour could be broken up and rearranged into a hydrocarbon if you had the means. However, that\'s a long time coming, and hydrogen is something we could move onto within years. I\'m not suggesting it all run off solar. If you had fully read it [and I hope you did] you would have found the word \'mains\' before \'power\' or \'water\' several times. This means the National Grid for electricity in Britain. Solar is a nice way of doing it cleanly, but if you want quantities of hydrogen for a highly active petrol station, then you\'ll need the power and water to come from offsite. In my example of a quiet villiage, solar should be fine. And then there\'s the petrol tankers being used to carry hydrogen from seperation plants. Its possible. The seperation plants don\'t exist yet, but they could be built whilst numbers of hydrogen cars increase. Also, its not a battery, and it is a fuel. If it combusts, which hydrogen does, then its a fuel. You can only use \'battery\' as an analogy. There\'s no reason energy storage can\'t be eco-friendly, if you do it right. And build lots of nuclear power stations.

I find it amusing that the development of Chloroflourocarbons [CFCs] as an alternative to Freon for fridge coolant stemmed from the belief that an inert gas, such as CFCs, would be better for the environment because it wouldn\'t do direct damage or be toxic. Years later, we discover that these CFCs are still hanging around in the atmosphere, taking up space where Ozone should be, because they are so unreactive. Sometimes we have good intentions and it goes wrong. A man who tried to make car engines rattle less by adding lead to petrol singlehandedly did more damage to the environment than any man before or since. On the plus side, he was successful in making less annoying sounding cars. We now have high enough technology to make not-annoying-sounding cars even using unleaded petrol. Technology comes along and we make use of it. If we hadn\'t made the car, allowing us to move long distances quickly and effectively, we would still be in a similar technological position to the Industrial Revoloution - workers would find it difficult to get into city centres unless they lived in overcrowded slum housing. No lorries means factories must move their wares by train, so they can\'t sell as much - which makes for worse working conditions. And let me remind you, we made more pollution in the Industrial Revoloution than we do now. Now, we have laws on pollution, because of the mistakes we made. To finish defending us, I\'ll move on to what we can do to fix some of our problems - starting with the eco-unfriendly car. Hydrogen fuel. Its not that difficult to make, you can do that with solar panels and a mains tapwater supply. Many would say the problem with hydrogen is that we don\'t have the infrastructure. Truth is, no one has bothered implementing and setting up everything. With some enlargement of mains power cables and mains water supplies to petrol stations, you could have hydrogen fuel produced on site. That won\'t last into when hydrogen cars become widespread, but it would last until dedicated hydrogen manufacturing plants can be constructed, at which point the existing petrol infrastructure - petrol tankers, fuel pumps - can be used to transport and supply hydrogen fuel from the manufacturing plants to a petrol station. While towns and cities could easily have petrol stations routed their own electricity and water, with their tanks topped up by tankers, you could send the tankers to villiages that have less access to such developments. If said villiages are near streams or rivers or canals, however, I see no reason why they couldn\'t have some water diverted from those, and utilise solar power to generate the hydrogen fuel themselves. And then Honda gets to sell lots of Claritys.

This one is technically a win, but what the heck.

That reminded me of Monty Python\'s Life Of Brian, where the Romans all go running away when they see the Judean People\'s Front arrive. The JPF leader yells \'Judean People\'s Front crack suicide squad, attack!' You can guess what that leads to. Fairly certain the Kerbals are likely to do more damage to themselves than Caesar. Also, very good orbiter.

You need more boosters.

I managed to successfully splash down an Ausplane. My first time doing so without it completely flipping out on the way down. I should mention it had C7 wings added, but again, that didn\'t make landing easier before.

Does it still work if left on a jettisoned stage?

Wait... asteroids?

'Jeb, put the scissors down. Right now.' 'Where did he get scissors from in space?' 'Quiet you two, I\'m doing science here.' (Quick explanation: Capsule made of paper, Jeb with scissors, unhappy ending.)

In 2001: A Space Oddesey they found TMA-1 because, as the name suggests, it is the \'Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 1\'. They didn\'t have to go searching around with a rover to find it, because they just followed the magnetic fields to its source. So as far as I can tell, there\'s no reason to assume a short ranged \'monolith RADAR\' is cheating.

What\'s it called when its between a hoof and a normal hand?

The North Koreans are lead by a slightly more... militant government. At least, that\'s the impression I got from BBC News.