tater

The end of 2001 was awful. Yes, absolutely, a movie should be 100% self contained. Make a bizarre movie about the beginning of ww1 that makes no internal sense, then tell people, "it's much better if you've read The guns of August. It also depends on the book actually answering the obvious plot holes and science. What's the hand waving for them returning via the black hole without experiencing time dilation that has the Sun burn out long before they return? (Forget 140 years, lol). Every single thing about Miller's planet (that's the water one, right?) is stupid. You can make a BH big enough to get whatever dilation you need, but there is no difference between orbit and the surface at all. It's distance from the SMBH (forget the 50% c orbital speed, and just consider gravity for simplicity). Yeah, they could use slingshots to get there (which necessarily involve near passes of earth-sized BHs, also with possible time dilation), but they then have to leave... A gravity well so deep just being there substantially dilates time. Their ssto shuttlecraft can manage this, but needs SLS to get to LEO, lol. Aside form the physics here, you'd want a JPL guy, not a "pilot" to calculate the required geometry. The science of this is absurd, and they could have the same plot without the stupid BH stuff. Here is how: Wormhole is a created object, no time dilation, or some fixed amount for each round trip because "science fiction." Other end is in a binary system. If they wanted a BH, just because, make it a trinary system with 2 normal stars, and a close BH companion to one of them (would look cool, too). 2 of the worlds are around 1 star, 1 is around the other, along with the wormhole. Simple dv and orbital parameters drive their possible choices of 2 worlds to visit, and travel time is the time involved. Millers at opposition from wormhole, and ideal window for transfer to 2d star orbits... Complex orbit to hi nearest world, then one of the other 2. Transit to companion star could easily take 20 years each way based on 2 year time to Saturn at 10 AU. So same story, no BS. All the bookshelf nonsense could be a wormhole artifact , since that is the only physics we are breaking.

The time dilation was general, not special relativity. Any my word close enough to experience substantial dilation would likely be shredded to atoms and added to the accretion disk by tidal forces. Even if towed just outside the Roche limit by unicorns, it would be utterly unlivable due to x ray flux. They should have popped out, seen where that world was, and wrote it off as uninhabital. Now they are left with 2 worlds, neither near the BH. ps 140 years is nothing, he shouldn't have worried about a dead daughter, more like the heat death of the universe.

The physics might be worse, actually, since someone might watch it and think it was realistic at some level, whereas no one thinks SW is anything but fantasy. The GR aspects are bizarre as a plot device since they go through a black hole... Which gives them more relativistic effects than the stupid water planet ever would. They should have written off the water planet anyway since it is bathed in insane amounts of high-energy radiation.

I saw it recently (was on sale and I made the mistake of buying it). I find it hard to believe anyone here (interested enough in space to play KSP) could like this film at all.

As I recall, the book doesn't describe anything like a z 3 suit with a dock on the back.

The source doesn't matter in the long run. I find the Gell-Mann amnesia effect to hold true for most people. Reporters know how to write (sometimes), and that is the extent of their expertise/understanding. As a result, the typically low quality of their output is unsurprising. Albert, a "man on the street" interview would result in blank stares to both LHC and even "Large Hadron Collider" for the vast majority of people you interviewed. If you started asking them basic physics questions you'd want to bang your head into a wall.

Might it be exactly 4 parts?

No, it's that most people are indeed, idiots. The media both responds to this by what they know will grab eyeballs, and provides bad content because they are not terribly smart, either. (caveat: I consider anyone not above average an idiot)

News flash... Most people are idiots.

Give ions a thrust curve as a function of gravity such that at some local value of gravitational acceleration, the thrust is realistic (meaning too low to be useful for anything but constant thrust trajectories). So when GM/r^2>0.05 or something, the ions thrust is what it should be realistically. It is arbitrary, so can be tweaked.

This, I don't watch them.

It's kind of amazing to me that anyone is unaware of the stories (vs the movie). News flash, the bad Peter Jackson movies are also based on books

AMS is on station for one reason I can think of, power usage. ISS has large solar panels. That's why we're looking at cosmic rays from ISS.

This makes no sense. GEO stuff is coorbital by definition. Any debris sent prograde ends up out of GEO. Any sent retrograde lowers out of GEO, radial shifts PE/AP, etc, etc. Any nearby stuff is only hit at the velocity the initial shrapnel has. It is principally a concern with crossing orbits (near the poles) due to the high crossing velocities (where such an impact can deposit large amounts of energy in the Gary.

Cool, a way to make SLS even more expensive/wasteful.

Cool vid from SpaceX from a fairing-mounted camera.

I'd not say this reaches the level of argument, past the "over beers" variety (if it wasn't late Sunday I think I'd make a cocktail).

"Only" a manned lander or rover. The game allows it because it had to be buffed (the thrust value), because it cannot be realistic. If you use the Isp for a deep space probe (even though you'll be doing transfers, not constant thrust spirals) then we can ignore the way it has to be. If you use the thrust for anything else it might be fun, but so presumably are those "rockets" I've seen posted here that consist of a kerbal and a ladder.

This is really fun, love it. Seems like the reaction wheels should be in the comm unit so that you can get them closer to the CM. If you did that, the current unit could be more of a service module, perhaps. Imagine if this was even full scale for kerbals, lol. Course it's hard enough to deal with now, I'm not sure I'd actually want that

Using them on landers is an exploit. I use them on probes, because that's what probes would actually use, and the game cannot have them run for months on end with time compression past 4x. "Creatively" making landers out of them is like kraken drives, infinigliders, etc. Knock yourself out.

No one operating spacecraft uses Fahrenheit. If NASA mentions it, it's for the rubes.

I understand the rationale for grossly buffing the ion, but the undesirable consequence of them being used for anything other than deep space craft should then also be (even if arbitrary/unrealistic) addressed.

The blob at the right was where the film was crappy, it's nothing in space It's the Great Nebula in Orion (I refuse to call it the Orion Nebula ).

I took this rather a long time ago. On a slightly moldy piece of plate film (we found an old plate camera, and some film in the fridge, so we took the CCD off the telescope and tried our hand at old-school astrophotography and development. Manually guided the scope.

True, but at least that kills any use in atmosphere. Given that they are forced to be grossly OP due to the inability to model constant thrust trajectories on rails, perhaps they could be given a spool up and spool down time, and not throttling. An ion thruster set could be added for attitude control, and fine orbit changes.