tater

Preferably 1960s hiring standard stewardesses.

How? The other worlds can merely "throw rocks." It's always tricky to imagine constrained conflict, particularly when the parties don't have rational motivations (like any motivation based upon magic). The reality is that the kinds of colonies being suggested involve the ability to extract resources for various places, then build in-situ. Once a species can do that, it's a LONG time before they need to bump elbows at all. Space is big... reminds me of a B. Kliban cartoon. Over a few frames, space billboards... Space is big. Space is dark. It's hard to find, a place to park. Burma Shave

This, conversion religions pretty much always don't have care for apostates or pagans. It also beggars the imagination that people capable of colonizing Jupiter could be be dumb enough to be that irrational.

OK. What is the goal? Is genocide OK? Does one side need to invade and occupy? Same species (meaning they started on planet A, so this implies they have passed the point technologically of being able to completely colonize another world)? Assuming same species, given the above statement, and the fact that we cannot do this NOW, what future technologies are we allowed to extrapolate?

What OS are you on? Actually, anyone who has had this problem, what OS?

I'm not really arguing for manned craft, seems needlessly dangerous. I am merely suggesting that when someone in a SF context says "space ship" it implies a crew. Still, if we mean "orbital" warfare, in the very near future, we are talking about ASAT concepts, basically. For anyone to bother fighting anywhere past LEO, we need an entire context, with technological, and geopolitical to make any reasonable arguments, I think.

Seems like you should be able to extend an antenna and have it NOT retract. The high-gain, for example. It's absurd that it extends, then retracts every time, it should be extended ONCE, and if anything never retract again (like the unshielded solar panel arrays).

I play with LS, so I also play like this. Sometimes I also use KCT, but right now I'm cutting my mods a little to avoid issues.

You MUST make assumptions, otherwise we might as well just look at SDI info from the 1980s, and say, "that's space combat right there." The OP says "how would SHIPS be built/designed?" Ships implies manned spacecraft, not just satellites. We must then figure out what possible scenario would have manned spacecraft in a combat role in space. This requires assumptions, because if the space warfare is merely in LEO, then the problem is pretty simple, you overfly another country, and they shoot you down with ASAT weaponry launched from the ground. If the combat is in deep space, BEO, then you need a way to have the opposing craft get to BEO without ever overflying a hostile country in LEO, which means we MUST be talking about a foe based upon another world, or a space colony (O'Neil, etc), which would be incredibly vulnerable. None of these near future (distant near future) scenarios makes any sense.

Bomb-pumped x-ray lasers have already been worked on, and was successfully tested in the early 80s at the test site in Nevada. So you'd move them away from the parent ship, then fire them. They are basically a missile with a nuke warhead, and a mass of rods (tungsten?) pointing in the direction of aim. This is why initial assumptions matter so very much in such a discussion. In order to posit "warships" you require a complete context, else we might as well just say "we'll have small ASAT weapons." Done.

This. Plus what Red Iron Cloud added. My kids have a WiiU, so I'll likely buy this since I feel like the 20-something bucks I paid Squad was't nearly enough.

I might have dumped it before 1.04 at some point, now that I think about it. It would be interesting to see KSP version vs that mod, and rescues/VIP/tourist contracts (when I last had AD installed, all those were 100% female). But it might have been 1.03. It might also vary by platform build, perhaps? I'm playing on my Mac, not my PC.

Realistic would mean scaling up everything such that the g and atmospheric values for any given world at least make sense, then reentry would be meaningful. Making everything 10X smaller is fine---as long as their masses, etc are also 10X smaller, with properly scaled everything. Jool would be the only world with a decent atmosphere, basically, lol.

In traveller, the sand wasn't even heavy, like I said, 50kg a shot. The idea was a more "realistic feeling" defensive system for small, player ships than "shields." Ended up being just as silly. As I keep saying, though, the "universe" matters a lot. What kind of ship drives are available? Are their minimal size limits to some, or reasons why "fast" drives would not be put on small crafts/missiles (cost, for example). Are we talking Orion ships blasting around, or chemical rockets that are lucky to have enough dv to do a simple transfer to the next world over?

With the Asteroid Days mod, mine is not a normal possible outcome of all females. It is, with any new career, 100% female, always, no exceptions. I disabled the mod, in the careers with no males, then got... males, immediately. I tested this in multiple careers. Others have observed the same thing. So the question is, does everyone observing this have Asteroid Days installed?

I frequently run into a couple, but they are people I told to buy the game... actually, we went to visit friends in CO, and we walked into their house to find both their kids playing KSP, so maybe that counts

Agreed, but the sand density would be quite low, so we are talking a couple grains turning into a plasma in a 1 cm^2 cross section at best. I think CT has the sand "ammo" as 50kg. Assuming a cloud about the size of a traveler scout ship (20m radius sphere) that's ~1.5 grams of sand per cubic meter. Assuming grains around 5mg, that's about 300 grains per cubic meter. That's substantially less than a single grain per cc (0.003/cc), so with a 1cm beam, it will likely hit 1 grain if it goes through the thickest part of the cloud. The sand would need to be vastly finer to even have a shot at the beam hitting just 1 grain per cm of path length through the cloud. Pulse length would likely matter as well.

This. The difficulty levels are not difficulty levels, they are grind settings. The best possible way to increase difficulty is to use some mods, IMHO. There is a 2X rescale, which makes the game feel fresh as tried and true designs won't always work and you can use stock parts, so you need not add anything else if that is an issue. I've been playing with the 365 mod, which is a 3.2X rescale on the various worlds, and a 6.4X rescale on all the distances between worlds. I've been playing it with part mods, but mods meant for stock. The HGR mod adds very useful 1.875m parts, and I have added in SpaceY, because I needed bigger parts for lofting larger stuff later in the career. In rescales, the normal settings work OK, though I always have dead is dead turned on (and I've been using USILS with death turned on there as well).

A few, isolated elements of Interstellar were clearly modeled correctly. Having a nice picture of a supermassive BH doesn't make the movie "realistic." They'd not bother with the first world, as it was dangerous./absurd as a choice. That and he entered a BH, but apparently was saved from infinite time dilation by "love." How realistic.

I don't think this is true. Without Asteroid Day, I get male and female rescues, pretty randomly. Sometimes many female in a row, sometimes many male, sometimes a mix. With AD installed, it is 100% female, never a single male generated, ever. Tried a few new careers just to check. Zero, ever, with that mod installed.

No, it would not work at all in traveller. For Kibble: in traveller, written in the late 70s, early 80s, they had a defensive system whereby you disperse specialized particulates that they called "sand," but varied based upon handwaving, that would absorb/scatter incoming laser fire. For WedgeAntilles:The reality is that traveller lasers are doing MJ/cm^2 levels of energy deposition on the target, and would pretty much just turn the tiny amount of sand in the way to plasma, and keep going. It is 100% indefensible, and "gearhead" traveller guys (myself included) dismissed it decades ago. Really.Later iterations of traveller tried to do some better handwaving by proposing that since traveller has gravity as a force they can manipulate at high enough TLs, then the sand is kept from dispersing via what amounts to a tractor beam. Nice try, but it still doesn't work at all. Now tossing out sand from a missile on an intercept course is another mater... that would scour any hull pretty well and a few hundred km/s closing rate (though there were never rules for that).

That moviefone clip requires giving them location information, then will not let you say no in safari. Works in firefox.

Tiny SSTOs are every bit as silly as SW. Having a couple thruster puffs doesn't correct this. Apparently you never studied astrophysics. I was appalled by it in real time as I watched. They treated the GR effects at the planet as if there was not a gradient, and approaching that world would not have continuously exposed them to dilation. They also entirely ignored the fact that as they approach the Schwarzschild of their black hole, this effect goes to infinity. So merely approaching the hole (let alone what they did, which is to go through it---twice) effectively makes them stop, while the universe races ahead to time=infinity. That's aside from the fact that, even assuming that Miller's planet wasn't just shredded by tidal forces by exactly placing in the right spot outside the Roche limit, it would be bathed in hard radiation. Not slightly elevated, like "instantly dead" levels. They should have never checked it out, and not bothered wasting time going there. Also, it's gotta be moving fast enough that the main ship having enough dv to transfer to it seems pretty dubious. It's really absurd. It would have been easy to get the same desired plot elements (time mattering) with nothing more than limited dv, and widespread planets (perhaps a binary system). Then make the FTL an artifact, not a black hole, so they can hand wave whatever they like. If you think Interstellar is realistic, you have a weak list. Gravity has plenty of issues as well. 2010 is arguably a better movie in many ways than 2001 (the ending of the latter was terrible for someone unfamiliar with the short story, or later book). It's all a matter of what you are willing to ignore. To like Interstellar, and particularly to think it is realistic in any way, you have to know basically nothing about spaceflight or black holes. To like Gravity, you need to not understand orbital mechanics (and possibly like Sandra Bullock in yoga shorts, which I'll admit is a mitigating factor ). I don't yet have an opinion on the Martian, but we'll all have to suspend belief on the storm (in the book and in the movie), and certainly on the choice of landing location in the movie. Past that I can't say yet, though I'm certainly going to see it.

One, for the thread title, it's Homo naledi, the species is never capitalized, just the genus. Two, "missing link" is not really a thing. Evolution is not that linear. A bette model might be more akin to electron density distributions. Think of branches as being sort of fuzzy, it's not like one individual looks like Homo erectus, and his offspring looks like archaic Homo sapiens. It's fuzzy (though a specific feature that makes the clade branch would obviously change for the different species attribution, and for paleo stuff, that means bone morphology). Cool stuff, though!

Interesting. I didn't know he had signed a deal at the same time. A friend lent it to me, and I read it the next night. I liked it, it was a quick, easy book, like watching a short TV show---pulp SF, basically. At the time (not knowing it would be a movie) I told him that this would be an easy book to pitch as a movie, as it's compact and straightforward to film. Regarding bad books, it varies a lot. I've read thousands of books. I have a pretty decent library in my house (I never get rid of books). I have friends that love The Silmarillion, for example. I can't stand it. My wife reads everything Pinchon writes, and I did not like Gravity's Rainbow at all, and haven't bothered with his others yet. A couple buddies of mine loved Anathem, I found it incredibly tedious.