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tater

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Everything posted by tater

  1. tater
    I don't think a delay in posting video is about ego, or sales, I think it's just managing press rationally. They release video of their rockets exploding on impact all the time, it's not about that, it's about the idiot press pushing the failure of an (optional) landing attempt vs the success of delivering the payload. People here have posted funny news stories about space stuff that gets the facts very wrong. They're reporters, if they could do anything else, they'd not be stuck writing about what other people do. Anyway, that seems sensible to me, if I were running their press office, I'd post all that stuff, just wait a couple days.
  2. tater
    It's not taste, it's to see what the rock look like wet.
  3. tater
    Usually the meteoritics guys are in geology. Not many rock-lickers in astrophysics (not a slight, every geologist I have ever known licks a rock within seconds of picking it up).
  4. tater
    They'd be smart to delay crash video so the news reports a successful launch as the headline, instead of "spacex rocket crashes at sea" then having the fact a satellite made it to GEO buried below the fold.
  5. tater
    I didn't see any fancy animations, but I watched the technical cast, as I can't stand the hosted one.
  6. tater
    Agreed. Looked off the barge.
  7. tater
    Maybe some neighbor has been playing with a trebuchet?
  8. tater
    Fund per unit time spent, per launch, whatever is the very definition of grind to me. I'd prefer career to be about exploration with semi-realistic feeling constraints.
  9. tater
    It would help a great deal, I think. In addition, it would be nice to add a new symmetry type specifically for wheels. Mirror is obviously the way to go, but it would be nice to have a new "wheel mirror" mode which would but things on the corners if you selected 4X, but aligned them, well, like wheels.
  10. tater
    Looks sort of slaggish to me... http://meteorite.unm.edu/meteorites/meteorite-museum/how-id-meteorite/
  11. tater
    Knock a chunk off and see if it is lighter inside.
  12. tater
    Wow, that is just awesome.
  13. tater
    This would be particularly useful with KIS installed...
  14. tater
    I'm unsure on the RAM, I haven't tested, but it runs just fine for me with several other mods installed, and I need to keep my mod count low on my Mac (hoping 1.1 will improve things).
  15. tater
    ^^^ Exactly. On top of that, there is the problem of stuff sitting in orbit. Even if there is not a catastrophic failure on any of the launches, there could be weather delays that force a 24+ hour wait with the spacecraft parts (assembled or not) sitting there in orbit. They were worried about engine restarts enough as it was, without having to also worry about them possibly sitting around for many days first. That's not to mention coming up with refueling in flight. The Soviets were sort of headed that way, and the Russian are still talking about a cislunar use of Soyuz, aren't they (all this time, and those kinks are not all ironed out)?
  16. tater
    Exactly, it took some selling. I seem to recall that the Soviets came up with automated docking (Progress) as a possible lunar mission profile using smaller rockets (Soyuz stuff, so R7 I guess), and Earth Orbit Rendezvous. Not sure if it included the lander, or if it was an orbital flight concept. I'd look it up, but I have to make my kid a lunch to take to school, then leave, lol.
  17. tater
    Seeing is psychological as much as physics. Heck, there are people who see sounds, and hear colors (not that that's typical). I think that astronauts have not described earth as washed out, though. Next time I see one, I'll ask (I see Sid Gutierrez and Mike Mullane in town very occasionally (the latter lives a few doors down from a friend of mine)). Of course a large issue would be ambient light. In the daytime, you don't see stars at all in space, it's too bright. At night, you cannot see the earth well... because it's dark (minus the city lights), but can see stars. I imagine the principal issue with seeing in space is brightness (and stopping down your iris, as a result).
  18. tater
    A cool feature for mission control to make coming home properly more important would be to have a real mission control able to set a few places on the globe for recovery. KSC, all the time obviously (a radius of 50km, or something), then perhaps a number of places scaled to how many times it's been upgraded. You start with KSC, and one 50km radius circle you can place on the globe (if you move a recovery area, you click the new spot, and it moves to the new spot at 15 km/h (so you can't move the recovery area at the last second). Each upgrade adds another recovery circle you can move. Failure to land in the recovery zone would give you some hits on rep, funds recovery, etc. Also, perhaps recovery only happens when your zone is there. So you land on the other side of the planet from your recovery zone, and it's gonna take distance/15 hours for you to have access to your crew, craft, science recovery, etc.
  19. tater
    I use KER, so I have a pretty good idea, but I don't use the stock sized kerbol system, and even with a dv map, I need some slop. I'd design in contingency anyway.
  20. tater
    Dunno if you've addressed this before, but the CRG parts have just Ore as a supply. Seems like they might as well have variant tank types, from fuel, to Life Support, KIS storage, etc.
  21. tater
    I frequently use crasher stages in KSP since there is no real ability to plan missions except to fly them (even with a dv map, you need some slop), and if the transfer stage gets you there with propellant remaining... I'm gonna use it.
  22. tater
    Yeah, but they could have used "mission control" for the tracking station, and it would actually be... Mission Control.
  23. tater
    Wow, I agree with you, and that's the response? There is no false comparison, the left image (naked eye) is incredibly washed out. That's what it actually looks like, and would look like if, like in KSP, you were zipping around it in a spacecraft, NOT the way it looks on the right, with fake color added (closer to normal video games). I've looked at rather a lot of things through telescopes, BTW, but never without an atmosphere , which is has a huge impact on seeing. I see color in stars naked eye, and planets, actually. The overall tone of Jupiter in my telescope (eyepiece, not camera) is actually very close to the cassini image on the left, though obviously just as a slightly stripped blur. Here's Hubble's take from 1991 (natural color):
  24. tater
  25. tater
    Cassini image of Jupiter. The left is as the naked eye would see it, the right has false color/saturation.
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