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Can base contracts only satisfy with parts docked or connected via KAS? Is it possible to check for distance, instead? Seems like ground bases should care about proximity more than being "docked."

I've had KSP consistently crashing (modded) in 10.7.5, usually when changing scenes, even from KSC to the main menu. It happened with a slightly longer interval between crashes stock. I can watch the app in Activity Monitor and see when it's going to **** the bed, then I get some graphical glitches, then it beachballs. Master Tao, you apparently have no issues, and you're running Yosemite… what hardware? I'm just hoping my old mid-2010 i7 does OK with my forced OS "upgrade."

The drive on my i7 27" iMac (11,3) has SMART showing it as failing, so my project this weekend is to throw the 1TB SSD I just bought in where the old HD was. I've been running 10.7 since I have hated most all the recent updates to mac os (I hated 10.7, too, frankly). My attempt to dupe my HD failed a couple times, so I am likely to do a clean OS install on the new drive, which means Yosemite, unfortunately, as "Photos" looks to be yet another attempt by Apple to change UIs because updates have to change every single aspect of every UI, "because reasons," right? Sigh. If it kills KSP for me I won't be happy. My current plan is to build the SSD volume in an external drive case, test it, then pop the hood and install the drive if all is well.

They (the star as it collapses) don't move through that radius at all, it's not a physical thing. The star collapses first. The Schwarzchild radius isn't a physical thing, it's just the point in space where the escape velocity = c. Say the earth somehow retained the same mass, but the radius decreased, there would still be a radius where g=9.82m/s^2 at what was before sea level. g would be higher at the new, magically shrunk sea level. Take an earth mass of degenerate matter, then there is a sphere (imaginary) where g is what we expect (at the radius we expect (simplified)), and the earth mass would be a small ball in the center. Does that make sense? Inside? Who knows Black holes are weird.

Kerikbalm, no, I'm not a bio person. I was talking to my neighbor who is a biologist at a national lab about it last weekend over lunch, and it seems pretty cool, I'm a total layperson in that area

Yeah, I'd stipulate to the idea that getting people interested is valuable, regardless of the science (some people got interested by star trek, after all, lol). Any that move forward will someday see it again after they know more, and it won't hold up, though - - - Updated - - - Asymptotically near the event horizon, the time dilation goes to infinity (the difference between clocks in the 2 frames). It absolutely becomes infinite. T/t = sqrt(1-S®/r ) T is for the guy approaching the Schwarzchild radius (S®) of a black hole. r is his distance. When he reaches S®, that term becomes 1. Solve for t (outside observer's time). t= T/(sqrt(1-S®/r )) When S®/r = 1 (ie: at the Schwarzchild radius), the denominator is 0, and t = T/0 = infinity

So true. It's funny when people outside the US get upset because NASA gets slightly less than they ask for, and the difference itself is more then their own country likely spends itself. You'd think that the rest of the free world would pony up far more for space than the US does, since their own defense is externally subsidized.

Nukes are the way you'd power a vasimr, why would that possibly be unrealistic (not that vasimr itself is realistic so far)? Space nuclear power is fine. I used to hang with a bunch of guys at UNM-ISNPS (and some from LANL) that worked on SP-100, SAFE, etc. I remember when the russians flew in a topaz to test at Sandia, too. - - - Updated - - - It was pretty to look at, but pretty much all the orbital mechanics related stuff was wrong. It's still enjoyable, though largely because it is so pretty to look at.

But of course even within that plot, forget real science minutiae, it breaks everything. Miller's planet is near the BH, and that screws up him getting home in a timely way… actually going into the BH, which should result in division by 0 dilation? No effect. SSTO bricks are low tech? The 2d planet has a larger mass than earth, and both the rangers and cargo things are SSTOs. Easily SSTOs, they can land, then take off again. Designed for Mars? LOL. That'd be nice. The small craft might as well be explicitly powered by a sci-fi magic drive, since they certainly are, since I don't think 90% payload fractions are a thing. I'd suspend disbelief on the spacecraft, and just assume the drives were SF magic, but the GR stuff is just dumb. Really. Not just because it is wrong, because even within the movie universe, it breaks stuff. It's like Star Trek. They used their technobabble to invent new technologies almost every TNG episode. Next week, they'd forget that the _____-genic field they invented last week entirely deals with this week's plot in 5 minutes. In this movie, BHs cause dilation at an apparently very safe distance, but the ship happily goes far closer with no ill effects twice. So even not nitpicking the science, it's internally nonsensical.

They are not cut. Spending is 10% higher than last year, even in this Senate version. US government spending is almost never actually cut. - - - Updated - - - Space exploration is a "luxury item," frankly. With all the incentives driving a jobless recovery, it's hard to convince the masses to demand a jobs program for the highest-end workers---heck, it's not even that, it's really that the spending would be similar, but those high-education workers would have a more fulfilling work life, lol.

SLS/Orion is earmarked. NASA has not decided it is what they want, they are being told by lawyers (congress) that it is what they will get. If NASA was simply given money to spend as they wished, we'd have seen vastly different choices than we have seen since Apollo. Currently, we'd likely not be seeing SLS/Orion at all as it is incredibly expensive, with no concrete mission.

I intentionally didn't read much about Interstellar before seeing it recently to avoid spoilers and have an open mind about it. I had heard some people like it enough that I was expecting to really like it. I had trouble getting past the gaping holes while watching it in real time. If I find myself saying "why aren't they dead?" when they clearly should be, or other errors, it pretty much wrecks suspension of disbelief. It is the same reason we rarely watch medical drama at my house, my wife rolls her eyes and instantly points out what is utterly stupid in real time (she's a surgeon). I have yet to have even a medical scene in something that she thinks isn't dumb, for example. The more I think back on the movie, the less I like it. Had they avoided any attempt at trying for "hard" SF, and added a warp drive or something, I'd have cut it far more slack, because my standard for suspension of disbelief would have been different. I don't expect movies to get things perfectly right, but as I pointed out above, you could have exactly the same broad plot (holes and all) without buggering physics so badly that anyone with some background can't enjoy it. Easily, too. A few lines of dialog, smaller but cool BH as a close companion to primary star, etc.

I'm happy if they get anything right at all. The mesa by the landing site is for looks. The backgrounds will be better with terrain. There are logistic reasons as well. It means they can shoot continuous shots without the trailers, etc (they hide those behind the hill---for all we know there is a highway on the other side of the hill, or a hotel). As for aerobraking, if they don;t do it in the movie, then the craft doesn't need that capability. I think this has a lot of promise to be pretty good, unlike Interstellar (which was visually appealing but otherwise I could not manage to enjoy much without second-guessing. I could say the same for Gravity---note that Squad is creating a group of people that notice as a gut reaction things wrong in Gravity that before only physics/astrophysics/areo-astro engineers would have likely noticed before (point directly at the chinese station that is retrograde 100km away, and just burn to get there, for example ).

This is a family forum

Reality check: 900 billion is more than they got last year (by ~10%). Look at what they got during previous congresses. They have enough money, the problem is they are forced to spend so much of stupid SLS/Orion.

Tantares has a fuji capsule I think.

If you think there were believable science bits that were used as major plot devices from watching the movie, I don't think you did. I've read excerpts of the book in question, and it is a pretty weak defense of the movie, actually. It is (appropriately for a scientist) very conditional. It's always couched as something like "in my rationalization of what is happening…" On top of that, it's special cases, not the big picture or connecting the dots. The craft MUST have the dv to escape a gravity well so deep that time dilation is a factor (~50% c orbital velocity has no macroscopic SR time dilation). That means that the astronauts don't experience dilation "on the surface," but continuously as a gradient as they even approach. That entire plot device is utter nonsense, and anyone who understands GR at all would know this. The x-ray flux of a world so close to a supermassive BH… should write that world off for that reason alone. That position also would seemingly place the world at great risk from the SMBH sweeping up the local neighborhood of debris… not where you want to move. The SSTO crafts that are not SSTO at earth (for reasons). Etc, etc, etc. I was annoyed with the science in real time watching the movie. I'm glad my kids didn't see it, frankly, I'd have to disabuse them of all the bad astrophysics---when they ask questions in the car, like how the sun works, I feel the need to start with the "when a proton and a proton love each other, very much" level, lol (my son was 4 at the time).

All government spending is by definition political, always has been, always will be. Expecting anything else is irrational.

Yeah, that was actually the post cold-war point of heavy Russian involvement in ISS.

Not massive cuts to sls/Orion. Those are pork to lockmart, et al. Oddly the sides in commercial crew vs pork are reversed from what anyone would expect based upon ideology. Privatizing should be lionized by the current congress, not the other way around. Strange bedfellows are in fact the norm. Look at supposedly "for the people" stuff like the ACA, which is actually a gift to insurance and hospitals at the expense of patients and providers.

Or just use CRISPR and splice them wherever you like.

Regarding the community, I do exactly the same thing for historical films. I even notice the livery on aircraft in Ww2 movies, for example (not just the types). Or weapons used (I was pleasently surprised in The Pacific to see Marines with Reising SMGs instead of just Tommy guns,motor example. I was one of those people who was really annoyed by the completely screwed up countdown in Apollo 13, I seriously thought about walking out right then, since it boded ill for accuracy.

The smoke is from the SRBs in your Delta launch. Watch Blue Origin taking off from Mars, erm, Texas . That's not smoke, it's mostly dirt. (same dirt that we have here right over the line in NM) So the smoke in the movie is wrong, period (as you said). Some dust, then nothing would be better, IMO. Regarding the video, bandwidth is not a problem from earth at all. They can broadcast with vastly more signal strength than a small space probe. A manned craft with a nuclear reactor should not have much of a problem, either, frankly. You are 100% correct about the idiotic landing site. The reason is cinematography, I would imagine. They filmed in Jordan, and wanted it "scenic." They could have put it a little farther from the hill, and made a line saying that the MAV ended up closer to terrain than planned due to a problem.

Yeah, the first thing I commented to myself about was "why the hell did they land next to a mesa?"

Sorry, my machine has some drive errors, and I'm stuck on my phone until my new SSD arrives today… autocorrect and a tiny screen. No idea how it turned "target" to "the Gary." It is likely the fact that iOS8 put a . next to the space bar just to screw up my typing. EDIT: computer update (venting). Amazon shipped my 1 TB SSD… in an envelope. Does an envelope warn someone in a vehicle in a warehouse, airport, or at UPS not to drive over it? Of course not, it's too tiny. If that happens, does it offer any protection? Nope. Does the metal case of the SSD crush under the weight of a vehicle? Apparently so. Now I will not have my machine fixed until Friday or Saturday. I've gotten things that are tiny, and indestructible in boxes vastly larger than the item from Amazon, and yet a small, fragile, electronic part comes in an envelope.