Newt

Salutations new member!

They do have 15.5" ones, though. And they formerly had 17" ones, but that was several years ago, and they appear to have been discontinued.

I think that it seems usually helpful to start, not with the ideas of periapsis and apoapsis, ecentricity and inclination, but more with ideas of how actually it works in terms familiar to people-- maybe you could start with some anecdotal concept like Newton's Cannon, and use that to expand from someone hurling a ball and having it land on the ground, to a satellite orbiting the Earth. Then get into technical details, if that suits the essay. But, probably, a this sounds like you might just need the concepts of how it works, without all the jargon.

I was just starting to notice that myself. Many times it seems like the topics pass in and out with a bunch of threads on a similar theme (a few weeks ago it was who will land on Mars first, who will land on the Moon next, et cetera). I do not think we are starting a war, just being geeks talking about geeky computer things. If I wanted a war here, I could have titled a thread something like 'Why does Windows Really Suck, and Who Here is Still Wasting Their Time with It?'.

I am pretty sure that Blender still only supports Nvidia. But that is not a game.

I think that for the reasons of madness prevention, most Mars missions that have been proposed by NASA have on the order of six people. The Apollo CMP's generally enjoyed their time alone, but, that was only a few days. It would be risky, also sending one person who could have unforseen physical issues, and would have difficulty completing the mission. Several people can help eachother out, swap tasks, and make life interesting. Single man missions do not do that so well.

Hypothetical Mars Airplane Mission

When Magellan sailed around the world, (well, he died, but when his gaunt, starving former shipmates made it around the world), they missed one day in their logs. I think that this is what will happen here, too. As you go around the world, you will build up on day of error per circumnavigation. There is not some inherent rule that makes this be the case, just the way that our time zones work.

I have used livecd's fairly routinely and have not had any serious problems with them...what exactly are you referring to as a risk? As for Ubuntu vs Knoppix, I suppose probably Knoppix would be easier, unless, to the OP, do you have any livecd's on hand? You might could just use any of those.

Is your internet connection good? Are you uploading large files (pictures models et cetera)?

I know there are a lot of Linux users here -- I am one myself. You just have a fairly specific problem that might be more easily solved elsewhere. You may be able to do it using a Ubuntu live cd (or usb or whatever you like) following these instructions. I have not been able to find suggestions for Fedora specifically.

Could you try at the Fedora Fora? They may be snobby, but they probably know more than most of us here. You may be the only one on Fedora at this site, for all I know, and we can only learn so much from VM's. Hopefully, if you word you question right, give all the information that is needed, it will be far quicker, simpler, and less confusing than trying to find it here.

I have not walked around the KSC itself too much, although I did once walk to the other coast of the KSC continent. Corbus Kerman ran for several days almost without stopping, but the views from the central mountains were pretty neat.

I have found some good reviews of the Alien-ware 17, which is on the upper end of your price range, but seems to have good specs. They are made for gaming, but people in the Autocad forums seemed to like them, too. As far as adding the Linux OS, I am not really sure of whether this is a 'good' laptop for it, but I cannot see why it should not be.

I watched this a while ago. Certainly an interesting film. It reminded me a bit of The Twilight Zone, (I shan't give away the ending, but those who have seen it may see what I mean). And I thought that Mannfeldt (or some other scientist) had concluded the presence of the gold rather a bit earlier, to be laughed at by other astronomers. Some years later Helius was convinced to pursue launching a ship there. I also liked some of the special effects, though some of them (even considering the date of production) looked a tad silly. Mannfeldt also had what looked like a textured relief globe of the Moon.

I like that. Really, we can make a lot of guesses about life, but, at present we have a tiny understanding of life. You cannot really understand the politics, culture and history of a country by looking, however deeply, at a village, and we probably cannot understand the diversity of life by looking at a planet. We did not expect, really even conceive of a hot Jupiter, until we saw one. we did not expect gysers on Triton. When we first came to Mars, we were surprised by the great number of craters, ad when we came back, we were surprised by the duststorm, the volcanoes, the huge canyon system, we keep finding new things, and that is the essence of exploration. Life needs some resources, molecules and energy. Very likely a solvent, and some decently versatile atoms like carbon. But not necessarily carbon, and not by definition water, or methane, or helium. We can best understand what life is by finding it, and what we need now, is probably at best a working definition, something that can meet the needs of our current society, but acknowledge that those will change in the future. Because currently, we can only see one town in a potentially very large state, and it is foolish to suppose we understand the full complexity and diversity of life in the universe from looking at the example of one planet.

A thread was started a bit ago asking which operating system people used, and it was mentioned several times that a poll would be interesting to see. This is that poll. I personally have a dual boot laptop with Windows Vista Buisness and openSuse (a linux distro).

Incidentally, this appears to be the second longest individual introductory thread here, at least since April 2013. You are just after Copenhagen Suborbitals! Welcome again.

I was in an astronomy class, analyzing spectral photographs of stars, and especially one object-- a supernova. The pictures were not the best, because the object was pretty dim, and the telescope not the best, plus some of them were in colour and others were not. I was trying to remove the background galactic spectrum from the supernova's to better see what was there, and there was no clear way to do it with the software and raw material I had available. So I kept making test images, doing weird stacking/alignment/subtraction tricks. One attempt feature the cutting of an image into many slices, and trying to stack those. That image, a combination of 'new' and 'test', was called newt (made of newt1, newt 2 et cetera). Since then I have been using the name Newt in quite a few places. Alas, it was not till a later newt image that it actually worked.

The main issue I see with this is the huge amount of stock being placed on the SpaceX systems, which at this point are necessarily taken as large areas of uncertainty. This is not to say that Falcon Heavy/Dragon is pure fantasy, but simply that these are still a ways off, and who knows what can happen to their promises before launches become routine. As for the flyby comment, I see where you are coming from, but really the question is not about the astronauts (who probably would be really excited anyway, being the furthest humans away from Earth, ever, the first humans to see any planet past the Earth in any detail, et cetera), as much as it is about the science. This is more a question of why send humans to space in the first place, and there is an argument to be made that, on such a mission, the astronauts would be a bunch of dead weight. Such a mission will not fly. We should not send people on missions that robots could do better and more cheaply, and I think that this mission may qualify as one where humans are exceptional burdens rather than explorers.

You man now Rest in Peace.... I wish my flashdrive could hold 23gbytes more.

I am glad with my 46 rep points; Why would anyone want anything but Duct Tape? This is thoroughly befuddling.

Today I happened by accident to come across the cement hand print of Ed White (Apollo 1). I paused a moment, and just looked at that empty space where once there sat something, now long gone. I think that I will remember that moment for a while.

Are these levers and hardpoint connectors and solar panels wings, or are they wing like protrusions?

Long have I been considering making a model of this vehicle, as few of its depictions satisfy me. But I have no model so I present to you, the Albatross, of Robur the Conqueror. This is the first one, which was later replaced with a smaller variant capable of all sorts of nifty things.