Starman4308

I'm not quite so sure you would actually favor water over hydrogen/helium for such an endeavor, though. 1 kilogram of He4 delivered to a CO2 atmosphere would displace 11 kg of atmosphere, letting you lift 10 kg of useful payload. 1 kilogram of H2O delivered to a CO2 atmosphere would displace about 2.44 kg of atmosphere, letting you lift 1.44 kg of useful payload. While you wouldn't need a much larger balloon volumetrically, you'd need to carry a heck of a lot more mass of lifting gas if you chose water. Now, specifically when it comes to Venus, I might propose a relatively unorthodox method of filling the balloon: a hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell powering a CO2 condenser. What's left of the Venus atmosphere is mostly nitrogen; mix that with the water from the fuel cell, and you have yourself a lifting gas. Granted, you might want parachutes so you don't fall too far before the mission becomes buoyant.

EDIT: Nevermind, I think I might've been straying too far off SpaceX and onto politics. In other news, did I miss the announcement where they delayed one of the launches scheduled for late this month? It seems reasonable, otherwise they would've had three launches inside two days, which would've been pretty exhausting for the SpaceX crew. Of course, I suspect Elon Musk would jump for joy if the market got to the point where he had to hire enough staff to keep up with a daily launch schedule. I know I would.

The most interesting method in my opinion? A stock helicopter bursting out from the surface of Eve's ocean, later shedding its wings upon a pillar of fire, finishing with a surprise ion thruster hidden in a service bay (idea shamelessly poached and slightly adapted from Stratenblitz's video). Otherwise, I'd certainly call a non-ISRU mission generally more technically challenging thanks to needing to haul ginormous amounts of fuel to Eve, but ISRU can demonstrate a bit more finesse and precision targeting.

Let me put it this way. SpaceX's part of it worked. The people behind Zuma either failed, or succeeded brilliantly, and we're not going to know for sure either until someone spots Zuma, or the documents are declassified.

The updates will not magically find your other installations and update them too. They would all need to be individually updated (if you want the update).

So: The Falcon 9 worked. The custom payload adapter and Zuma may or may not have worked. We don't really know anything else for sure. As to launching an NTR to orbit, I doubt it. If a nuclear reactor reenters Earth on a failed launch, it won't take long for people to figure that out due to the whole "radioactive material dumped all over some ocean" thing. On top of that, IIRC, Atlas V is the US's only nuclear-rated launch vehicle, so a nuclear/radioactive element almost certainly would've gone up on one of those, not a Falcon 9. All we know is this: the Falcon 9 worked, and if Zuma actually failed, it was not SpaceX's fault... though this sort of launch would be the perfect opportunity to spread rumors that it did fail.

Wow. That's some serious kOSing there. Excellent job. I came back after a few months of hardcore Elite: Dangerous, and having completely forgotten what I was doing in KSP, restarted. Again. Sigh. A little Sputnik probe: I have discovered the joy of strap-on liquid (as opposed to solid) boosters: Somehow, most of this GEO commsat survived: By now, I've gotten one crew back from Iota and Ceti, put a probe in eccentric orbit around Tellumo, and am working on a backlog of lunar tourism missions, plus preparing a probe for Niven and a set of commsats for Tellumo.

Low gravity doesn't help you, because now your vessel displaces less weight of air. High density would help, but you're still looking at either a substantial rigid balloon to resist exterior pressure, or an inflatable with a low molecular weight lifting gas.

My best guess is that rings would either have to be cosmetic, or modeled as rings of instant death. While there's not many large "asteroids", there's plenty of dust particles to make life interesting. Beyond that, I could definitely go for having another planet added to the stock system.

And successful landing! Secondary mission complete, and primary mission is "aaaaaargh still not telling anybody anything".

Maybe an RTLS? Maybe they are trying to test something? Also, I suppose I should not be so disappointed that we never got footage of the Zuma payload.

You're welcome for that, by the way. In a less meta note, IIRC, Grumman's LEM was the only Apollo component to never suffer a significant mission failure, and notable performed brilliantly on Apollo 13. Wasn't aware they'd stayed in the space business; I might look into them a bit.

It is also a series of Powerpoint slides. I'm not super-confident in the BFR; it needs to run basically accident-free for hundreds of flights, with only occasional refurbishment, to be economically viable. Were I in Musk's shoes right now, I'd probably go for a less ambitious MFR (Medium Falcon Rocket) with a payload closer to FH levels, to test the concepts that will be necessary for BFR to be viable without risking quite as much expensive hardware at a time. Right now, even if a Falcon 9 fails every 1/5 launches, he's still ahead of the market by a wide margin. If a BFR fails every 1/50 launches, its economic future is in question because they cost so much to build, and they will be launching with much less than the full 150 tons-to-LEO capacity. Remember, he's banking on re-using the hardware so many times that the relatively trivial cost of fuel becomes one of the limiting factors... and if he can't re-use it enough times, he falls behind people who manufacture much less hardware per launch. EDIT: And yet it's still a better idea than a super-Falcon.

There is one key issue with a hypothetical Falcon Super that doesn't apply to the BFR. There's no economically sensible reason to even try in the first place. From a risk/reward perspective, the BFR is questionable: it's a huge investment in time, capital, and research for something vastly over-specced for 95% of what it'll do. If it works, it expands SpaceX's envelope to super-heavy lift and fully reusable launch of virtually any commercial payload, dramatically reducing costs. If it fails, it's a flop. From a risk/reward perspective, a super-Falcon is, right out of the gate, a bad idea. The cost and risk, while less than that of the BFR, is still substantial, and the reward? A small increase in SpaceX's launch capabilities envelope. A small increase that covers precisely no realistic commercial payload, and does not substantially reduce cost/ton as did the original development of the Falcon 9. With the improvements to the Falcon 9 itself, even the FH has less of a mission than it used to have. For a rocket to be an economically viable prospect, it has to fly often enough to justify its development cost. If the BFR works as spectacularly well as Elon Musk hopes, it'll be flying quite possibly more than once a month. A Falcon Super would fly almost never, since very few payloads would fit in the narrow window between FH capacity and FS capacity. Telecom companies on hearing the improvement in payload capacity: "Oh joy. Now send up another 10-ton bird to GTO on a Falcon Heavy.". NASA on hearing the improvement: "This would be awesome for all these projects we will never have money for. Can we have a Falcon 9 for this heavily cut-down unmanned mission?" Politicians: "This rubbish isn't adding jobs to my district. NASA, cancel your Falcon 9 order and plan another SLS mission. Money? No, you can't have that; I need to cut taxes again."

Here's a partial list of what would be needed for a Falcon Super: An upgraded vehicle assembly building and procedures to handle vertical separation between the core and boosters. A further reinforced core. A heavier-duty payload attachment point. Probably a bigger fairing (entailing significantly different aerodynamics, requiring a whole new round of modeling). Potentially additional grid fins to reduce aerodynamic instability on the way up. In all likelihood, a bigger second stage. Probably an extra pair of barges and/or landing spots for boosters. You basically need to redesign everything except the radially attached booster F9 cores, for a marginal increase in capacity that almost nobody needs. Meanwhile, the BFR would represent a huge leap in capabilities: full reusability, super-heavy and large-volume payloads, etc. I'm a bit skeptical of it; I'm not convinced it can be reused often enough without major damage or loss-of-vehicle to make it more economical than F9/FH flights, but a super-heavy Falcon would represent a huge investment for a small increase in capabilities that there is no current market call for. It's not the engineering or the rocket science, it's the economics.

First: why is a low CoG preferable again? I'm under the impression a low CoG would make it less aerodynamically stable, not more stable. Second: what complex payloads? Maybe a handful for NASA/ESA, but hardly worth the cost of developing a Falcon Super for. It'd probably be cheaper to use a FH in expendable or partially-expendable mode than to once again go through the enormous cost of developing a new rocket for those very few payloads. While SpaceX has ambitious plans of its own... those ambitious plans are planned to go up on the vastly more capable BFR. Third: I'm pretty sure aerodynamics and structural integrity are more complicated than "moar booster and moar fairing". If it was simple, SpaceX would just build a bigger fairing. Sure, you can further develop the Falcon 9 platform, but... why? The conventional commercial payloads that are your bread and butter are already handled by the Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy. Almost all scientific payloads can be handled by the F9/FH. Occasional super-heavy payloads can be handled by an expendable-configuration FH, and there's no funded plan for a lot of super-heavy payloads. While Musk still has his grand plans for scaling up, the Falcon 9 isn't the right platform for that. You still use an expendable upper, you're talking an additional 18 first-stage engines (and thus points of vibration and catastrophic failure) per core, payloads are still limited in volume by a 5-meter fairing, and a lot of miscellaneous hardware is tuned to relatively small payloads in a 5-meter fairing. Payload adapters, the horizontal assembly building (where now you have to have one booster atop another), all that is geared to the current size of the Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy. By the time you finish reengineering the Falcon platform into a true SHLV, the final production process will probably not look a lot like the original F9/FH production pipeline... and you still don't have payloads for it. It'd be the private-enterprise version of the SLS boondoggle.

Hydrolox is used fuel-rich, so as to pack the exhaust with as much molecular hydrogen as possible. For hydrocarbons, those are also run fuel-rich so as to minimize the amount of heavy carbon dioxide in the exhaust. I'm not sure, for that matter, that it's the right direction for reusability. On first stage, specific impulse is often not as important as good thrust-to-weight ratio, so as to minimize the number of expensive* engines used. On the uppers, hydrolox has an issue with being very low-density; while not a large issue with expendable launch vehicles, a physically bulkier upper stage is going to be harder to recover, since you need to shield that much more surface area from reentry heat. I think SpaceX is going in a good direction with the Raptor methalox engines; methane is still reasonably dense, in much wider supply than specialty RP-1, and doesn't coke as much as RP-1. I'm still.. unconvinced about the BFR, but the Raptor is a good engine. *While reusability reduces the importance of how expensive and complicated the engines are, you still have to occasionally refurbish them, and replace any operational losses. I'm also uncertain what SpaceX could possibly accomplish with a Falcon Extra-Heavy. The entire reason for making the Falcon Heavy was not necessarily to extend the payload reach of the Falcon 9, but rather to let them extend the reusable payload reach to the heaviest commercial GTO payloads. There's also a serious limiting factor on how many first-stage cores you pack on: reusing them (which, again, is SpaceX's entire business model). There are two things you can do with a larger first stage: either deliver more delta-V to the same upper+payload, or deliver a heavier upper+payload. If you want to recover, there's strong diminishing returns on the first, since past a certain point, every m/sec of delta-V provided is another m/sec that the first stage has to cancel out when returning home to avoid getting too crispy on reentry. As such, a larger first stage has strongly diminishing returns on delta-V provided... because you have to cover that m/sec forwards and backwards. Much more productive would be increasing the upper+payload mass, but... Given a fixed amount of delta-V that the upper stage must cover, there's a fixed payload that you can put atop that upper stage. While a larger upper stage would help alleviate this... why would SpaceX make that upper stage? They can already cover almost any conceivable payload with the Falcon Heavy (nevermind the vastly improved Block 5 Falcon 9). There's no economically convincing reason to build an expanded upper stage, which would furthermore be a distraction from their BFR plans.

Technical point of order: that's 3 RS-68 engines, not 3 RS-25s. An RS-25 is an SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engine), AKA "so expensive nobody but Congress would envision using them on an expendable lift vehicle". I think the chances for the Falcon Heavy are reasonably good. With respect to other first-launches, the Falcon Heavy has an advantage in sharing so much hardware with proven boosters (to the point of literally, physically sharing two boosters!), with the primary disadvantage of using almost as many engines as the N-1, with possible vibration and other issues. In comparison to the N-1, of course, there are mitigating factors such as the engines being arranged in 3 clusters of 9, instead of 30 engines all driven from the same tanks, plus the fact that they can actually test the whole assembly in a static fire beforehand.

Not during active gameplay, but possibly when loading assets there might be an issue. I'm unsure, actually, on whether KSP's loading mechanic does do a lot of security context switches; if it loads each file separately, loading time will be worse than if it just stays in kernel space.

I know some mods have reasonably effective interstage adapter plates which have multiple engine nodes and a "floating" bottom node. NovaPunch SpaceY (and SpaceY extended) Also notable is Procedural Parts, which has a scalable thrust plate with a center and an adjustable number of additional points in a circle, and the procedural interstage fairing from Procedural Fairings. You can attach the procedural fairing's upper node to the center node of the thrust plate (or your center engine), and put engines on the outer points.

You will not observe a slowdown if you do not update. You will also be vulnerable to Meltdown and Spectre attacks, which are very difficult to detect by classic antivirus techniques, because they run quite like normal programs. And yes, they can basically read any bit of information on your system that they want, including password information. If you do update, there will be some hit to load times, possibly up to 30%, but once the game is loaded, there should be almost no issue, since the physics and rendering do not involve kernel calls.

Some good stuff in here, though it can be awfully hard to define a rocket. Solar and/or laser sails would count under this definition. A bomb would count under this definition. Granted, if you added the modifiers "sustained" and "directed", that closes that loophole. Nuclear thermal rockets! Also: https://www.rocketlabusa.com/electron/ ; even orbital launch vehicles don't have to be made out of metal (nevermind Estes rockets!). Stick a parachute on the bomb? Overall, the best I can think of (poaching heavily from @Cadet_BNSF ) is a device using sustained*, directed pressure differentials to propel onboard reaction mass in a consistent direction as means of propulsion. While some varieties such as air-augmented rockets can benefit from external reaction mass, the rocket must be capable of operating in vacuum, with purely onboard reaction mass. *Can be either fully sustained or pulsed. The second is a feature of Project "Let's go to space on nuclear bombs!" This definition should include: "Regular" rocket engines. Pulsed rocket engines (such as Project Orion). Various flavors of air-augmented rocket, so long as they are capable of vacuum operation. Nuclear thermal engines. Possibly ablative laser propulsion. Guns used as a means of propulsion. This definition should exclude: Strictly air-breathing engines such as jet and piston engines. Solar sails. Pure photon drives. Guns used as guns. Non-gas-based mass accelerators such as railguns and trebuchets. EDIT: And now I've realized the definition excludes ion engines, since for those, the method of acceleration is generally based on the electromagnetic force, not a pressure differential.

My instinctive reaction is "something with a combustion chamber and a nozzle". I suppose that excludes some things like cold-gas thrusters that are, arguably, rockets.

The CO2 might cause a little bit of slowdown thanks to Le Chatelier's principle, but combustion is such a favorable process that it'll happen anyways if the gases are well mixed.

In the context of Intel's statement about the bug, a single slightly errant half-sentence is enough for you to say "Intel is lying". While Intel's chips are generally more vulnerable... your $600 would still not have bought a secure CPU from AMD, because everybody was to some extent affected by speculative execution flaws.