nhnifong

The debate has been going on for a while. 76% of americans support doubling NASA's budget.

Ha! If engineers had to work at starbucks we'd be automating that place in a hurry.

Finally a photo worthy of being a flag

They might not respect the idea that information can be 'owned', much like the native americans didn't recognise land ownership. Hell I don't even respect the idea that information can be owned. If we make an offer like "you give us that fancy tachyon generator and we'll give you a record of everyone's phone calls." They might be offended and not accept the deal because we didn't offer them something substantial. On the other hand, they might accept information for information, like giving us the plans for that tachyon generator in exchange for our records. Actually upon reflection, we might have to give them billions of hours of telephone records just for them to figure out how to talk to us.

I think they meant to say that. They wan't the perilune on the light side after all.

My micro SSTO docked to a ground-based refueling station at Laythe. There's enough gas here for tens of hours of pleasure cruising around Laythe, and if I don't have the range to get to the place I need to go, I can go up to orbit and dock with my station.

It's better to run it on cloud services like Amazon EC2. You can run it on ubuntu with Wine. But if you insist on running it with windows on your home machine... 1. Download the server. http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/kmp-server/ 2. unzip it into a folder. 3. Copy these three files from from KSP install: Assembly-CSharp.dll, Assembly-CSharp-firstpass.dll, and UnityEngine.dll. I think they are in KSPData somewhere 3. Run the executable. (KMPServer.exe) 4. Open the port that the server is listening on in windows firewall. 2076 by default. (I can't help you with this, F*** windows firewall) 5. On your home router, forward that port to the computer you are running the server on, by name if possible 6. If you can't forward the port to the name of your computer, you must forward it to an ip address and configure your computer to use that ip address all the time instead of DHCP. Alternatively, I'll set the whole thing up for you and maintain it on EC2 (for three months) for a total cost of 0.25 BTC.

You're right! this is loads of fun! We'll buy 100,000 licenses In exchange we give you a 1 Petawatt galactic torque dynamo!

We may still be able to offer refining services that are not feasible on a spacecraft which is severely mass-limited. Also if their ship is just a flying computer, and they are wholly digital, they may wish to purchase upgrades if we can create them, or assembled light repair robotics. They would probably also like to purchase any kinds of sensors they don't already have. They're probably going to want to arrange a total transmission of our collected knowledge (couple of zettabytes) back to their home base, and may wish to engage in a research partnership in which we continue to share anything we learn. Also, if they are gullible enough, we could charge them for any power they collect from Sol.

I come to you seeking trade. What can you offer to an interstellar civilization which we would find valuable? What is unique about this world and your species?

Christianity. It tried to offer explanations for the way the world was, but the explanations are all inconsistent and full of holes. Naturally, I would ask my parents why things were the way they were and they would just say "You can ask God when you get to heaven.". Eventually I had a list of hundreds of technical questions for God, and most of them pertained to human anatomy. Every now and then I would show a copy of it to and old person and say something like "You look almost dead, would you deliver this message to God for me and make sure he replies in the manner specified at the end?" This was often met with laughs. Eventually, when I was around 8 I think, I realized that answering one's own questions with methodical experimentation is the way to go, and stopped paying attention to Christians.

It seems to be an unspoken assumption here that by space mission we're talking about a deep space mission, outside of the vicinity of earth. There are already plenty of profitable space missions in LEO. Besides returning material, I think the most valuable service would simply be tourism. Put zillionaires on the moon. Because you can.

The narrator of Veritasium is kindof a jerk.

When I get something working I'll put it in a high solar orbit so the shadows won't move so fast.

Ah rats. I'm wrong too

I've been working on creating binary logic gates in KSP This is a transistor. The medium dish can block solar panels, and it can only be extended by a probe core if the probe core has power. This way, the on state of one or more probes can be used to change the on state of another probe. In this image, the two sub-units have been disconnected from the thing they were sitting on. And this is a NOR gate, (the only component technically needed to build a computer) There are two input bits, both are set manually to zero by blocking their power supply. since neither input bit can extend it's dish to block the panel of the output bit, that bit is 1. I'm also demonstrating here that there is enough room to place the solar panels of two bits under the shade of one dish, thereby splitting the output signal into two bits, which could be further split again ad-infinitum. The logic is run by cycling through all the bits and pressing action group 1 to attempt to extend their dish, and whenever it is the case that a bit is running out of power, it's dish must be retracted. :/ (which is the most glaring problem with the design.

You're all wrong. It's a newly added feature. The command pod will execute a crew report when it is staged without popping the window up.

Awesome links, Thanks flymetothemun

This is a vanilla install. Judging from the fact that not very many other people have experienced these bugs, I decided to re-install from the zip and so far no problems. Maybe I just had a corrupted exe.

Unfortunately this only allows you to connect the subassembly from it's root part, some root parts are not allowed. If you want the root part to be turned at an odd angle you will lose the ability to use the symmetry mode of the building you are in properly. Additionally, root parts that are meant to be surface attached cannot be saved as subassemblies in such a way that the struts are preserved. These were usually station parts that had been in low kerbin orbit and had experienced a large amount of reorganization by docking, for example, the part that most recently disappeared on me was created in the following way. 1 was launched, 2 was launched and 1-2 was created by docking. 3 was launched and 1-2-3 was created by docking. 4 was launched and 4-1-2-3 was created. segment 3 was moved to create 3-4-1-2, 5 was launched. 3-4-1-2 was separated to create 3-4 and 1-2. 3-4-5 was created with docking. then 3-4-5-1-2 was created by docking. 3-4-5-1-2 was separated into 3-4-5 and 1-2. 3-4-5 was flown out of 1-2's loading distance, 3 was seperated, landed, and recovered. then, upon viewing the space center, 1-2 was gone. Complicated I know. But still, it would be nice is the program flow was thoroughly tested.

I've tried over and over to launch something to another planet in the past few days and every time I just run into a crazy bug and can't go on. Here are a few of the things that have happened. I've just rage quit .22 too many times to put up with this any longer. C'mon squad, get it together, .21 wasnt this bad. When loading a subassembly, the struts and fuel lines are lost unless the thing was made as a standalone ship. Lately, KSP has not been detecting vessels on the runway or the launchpad and it will just place your new vessel on top of the old one, exploding it. Sometimes after docking, the attitude of some parts of the ship will be locked. Any attempt to go on rails or reload the ship causes it to explode. Sometimes in the vab you can't grab parts without grabbing the whole ship, and then you cant let go. if you had not saved, you design is lost. Randomly ship that were in stable orbits are disappearing.

Hmm I guess so. I figured that since his speed was about 231 minus a few million that it had something to do with floating point math.

Whoa, your speed is approximately the positive upper limit of a 32-bit floating point number! It's almost like the universe is being simulated on a binary computer!

You don't really need an additional pump right? Every engine already has it's own turbopump. You just need to have the propellant supply from the center tank come through a closable valve, which you don't open until stage separation. You also have one-way valves that allow fuel in from the side tanks, and the turbopumps will suck it in.

I think that human life, or personhood, is not inherently valuable. It can be subjectively valuable to other people which is only reason it is ever protected (by others). We would protect the personhood of artificial beings only insofar as it is valuable to us, just as we only protect our own personhood insofar as it is valuable to us. For a vivid example of this discretion applied to the self, observe the behavior of anyone who is depressed.