Bill Phil

Depends on how much you're willing to spend and if you can actually afford the time to play. A decent measure of how much it's worth is entertainment hours per dollar. For games this might not be a lot (though that depends... some people have played KSP for thousands of hours...). But if you added up all of your in game time and divided by the cost of the gaming PC you might find out whether or not it's worth it. If we gave your PC a lifespan of 5 years before replacement, then it's just a matter of how many hours you play in a year. For a 2000 USD gaming setup anything over 2000 hours gets you less than a dollar per hour of entertainment, taking up 4.6% of your time in that 5 year period. For a cheaper rig the cutoff would be lower, of course. Do you play games that often?

Not today but recently. An episode of NCIS featured a nine year old gamer whose help they needed to solve the case. A literal nine year old, at least in universe. That’s too perfect.

Yikes. Good thing you noticed.

Kareener, as a parody of Mariner. Combining “careen” with Mariner and adding the “k”.

Not recently, but soon. Very soon... Halo: Combat Evolved Halo 2 Halo 3 And some more.

Don't even get me started on the 412s isp engine from Making History... as a core engine you can get some serious payload up there, just don't throttle it up too high until you're at a decent altitude and strap on some solids to get you there. Crazy.

Oh yes. But it isn't necessary. I've flown missions to Duna and Vall and back to Kerbin with single rockets. Admittedly I used docking Apollo-style in orbit, but it wasn't necessary at all for the Duna mission. I just wanted to.

Docking is not necessary for interplanetary flight - patience is. Every time I thought of making a cool ship in LKO I ended up abandoning it - I've found it much easier and more practical to just launch everything I need in one go. Of course that can be tough to do by itself, but it's an extension of something you can already do. That said, docking isn't too bad. Though I do recall frustration back in like 0.19 when I first tried it out. It's tricky alright. But the hard part is the initial rendezvous, which is actually not too bad. Generally I treat it like a planetary transfer and try to go from one circular orbit to another. Setting this up makes it easier on you. A lot. Then I plot maneuvers and see what gets me close. Once you're a few km in you can cancel target relative velocity and then burn towards it, correcting as you go. Cancel relative velocity again once you're in close. Then I recommend pointing one ship "north" and the other "south" (well, the ports really, but you can use "control from here" to get that done). Then you can pretty easily dock the two even without RCS. Once you're close enough you can just tell the two ports to point at each other and then you can go in for a final approach and docking. Of course that may not have helped at all...

Cool. Could make for some interesting mass stream propulsion concepts...

Oh, I'm aware. I say the same thing about short bed pickups. A bit of an exaggeration, sure, but I just don't see the point of short bed pickups, besides maybe towing. The bed is too small to really be useful and there are better options for passenger transport. Heck, I've transported things in my minivan that are too big for a short bed truck, and I can reconfigure it to transport people as well. Actually I think some minivans can also tow small trailers as well. (Yeah I'm a bit biased towards minivans... though actual vans have even larger towing capacities rivalling trucks) If Cybertruck had a longer bed and didn't have that weird slope-down it'd look much better imo.

Looks weird. Also the bed looks microscopic...

Like a thermal turbojet? Sure, that was the idea behind some nuclear jets. But it has its own problems.

To me something about it just feels off...

A quick and dirty way of doing it is to take the required velocity for orbit and do 2d vector math to find how the initial rotation of the planet changes the target deltaV, add in gravity losses, and then use that as the target delta-v. Then you will need the mass ratio of each individual stage and the specific impulse, then go into an iterative process. I’ve done some basic vehicle analysis this way. You then split the delta v into stages and then run the numbers. I recommend using the rocket equation but with one modification: DeltaV = ISP * ln|(w+p)/(d+p)| Where ISP is specific impulse (in m/s or Nm/kg), w is stage wet mass, d is stage dry mass, and p is payload mass. Solve for p: First let’s divide both sides by ISP, then raise e to both sides. (w+p)/(d+p) = e^(DeltaV/ISP) Let’s set e^(DeltaV/ISP) equal to R to simplify things. I got: p = (w-d*R)/(R-1) Running with an S-IVB TLI gives about 51 tonnes, which is in the ballpark. Use p as the total stage mass plus the payload mass for the first stage.

There will be multiple separate clusters across the planet, mainly in Australia and South Africa. Resolution can be increased with interferometry but the "brightness" requires either a lot of time or a lot of area. That is, if you want to see a dimmer object, you need more collecting area. If you want to see a smaller object, you need more resolution. A combination of large area and high resolution will greatly expand possible observations. And that's exactly what this array is all about. That is, it will be able to detect both small objects (resolution) and dim objects (collecting area).

Wolf 359 is a good fiction podcast. Beyond that I haven't actually delved into podcasts much.

The Square Kilometer Array is not a clustering of units. It will be spread across thousands of kilometers with thousands of units. Essentially doing what we can already do but with more collecting area, which should improve performance.

This is getting outrageous. I bet it wasn’t even a person but some kind of bot that found a little bit of similarity (something like 80%) but it was enough to trip the bot.

The advantage, I think, is that the hydrogen can sent off monatomically. This improves ISP quite a bit since it’s a function of temperature and molar mass, the lower the molar mass the better the ISP. That said it might be for a completely different reason.

What about First Encounters? Or do we not speak of it?

Don’t forget laser ignition instead of spark plugs. OP: I’d say rocket engines. They’re not going to get better without a lot of effort, and by the time thet are they may be outclassed by non rocket based propulsion. Keep in mind that wafers are two dimensional - indeed there is a school of thought that making 3d chips may be the way to go in the future. They come with disadvantages but adding the third dimension can increase performance density quite a lot.

That is a concern however it is mostly a problem for electron/positron colliders due to the low mass of the particles. This is part of why a muon collider would be of great interest. The bigger issue for proton colliders is beam rigidity at higher energies - you need really strong magnets to turn the beam at higher energies or a huge radius. Maybe even both.

So I was wondering how to find the size of a circular particle collider with a given energy and magnetic field strength. Of course the main obstacle I've run into is the relativistic aspect of it. But nonetheless I would like to get a rough estimate for the necessary size of a collider for a given energy. Any help?

You could download GMAT and try to configure it to have the Kerbal solar system... I don’t recommend it though. Then again it might be a big pain. Plus you’d be planning a mission with n-body simulation...