tater

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.

Couldn't the atmospheric values be dropped to nil to prevent such exploits?

Nuclear war is certainly survivable, even if not for those in target areas. Many in the first world would not have the first clue how to survive minus the infrastructure they are used to, however. Rural people would do far better. The vast majority of casualties would be in the direct attack and firestorms. Fallout is generally overstated, and the bulk of problems likely manifest as increased incidence of cancers later. So for a while average life spans would likely decrease. Many critters survived mass extinction events in the past, it's not like flipping a light switch, and a huge nuke exchange is still less destructive than many plausible natural disasters.