Newt

I also have always liked this one. A bit older still.

That was very nearly identical to what I was thinking, especially looking over some of the material from Mr. Pegg. That, really, is not what Star Trek is, or not what it should be. The newer director seemed to indicate that he liked the original Star Trek. Promising, but not very comforting in view of his directing history. I hope this turns out, decent, but my hopes are currently very low. Also, should not the title here be 'Star Trek 13"?

At least some of the lines that I beleive you all are reffering to, appear perhaps to radiate from a large basin. These would be, from my understanding, either cracks of some sort (as on Vesta), or strings of secondary craters (as occur on the Moon).

Orbiter. If you have not tried it, I highly recomend it. Its graphics are not the best, which limits the computer load, and it is free to download and use. The physics are quite good.

Have you forgotten about vanes and gimbals, not to mention the ability to shift centre of mass? Single engine craft are steerable. I agree with this. Frankly, Star Wars style fighters seem, silly. By sticking a human in the craft, you limit acceleration (or add some sort of science fiction accelaration compensation system, which equals mass and power drain), add life support, and quite importantly make the vehicle less a candidate for suicide attacks. By using smart missile/drone auxilary craft, it seems that there are many more options. And often, the entire point might be to ram as fast as you can into the target capital ship's reactor, radiator, or what have you, not to shoot at the little things gaurding it. And the Star Trek The Next Generation Technical Manual does indeed comment about vectoring the main impulse engine, though only really during seperated flight (when the saucer is freeflying). the saucer engines are seldom used during joined flight, as suggested by the representation as being generally dark.

Indeed. The value of the SRB is derived in large part from the fact that, basically, you can get it ready, and leave it with minimal maintainance (for a massive explosive) for long durations. Trying carefully to land it would be a challenge, and would certainly add many parts that need to be maintained (in the STS scenario, adding complexity to an already exceedingly complex vehicle). But I agree with Camcha. Difficult? Yes, it would be a huge challenge, but certainly possible. @Requia, we landed on the Moon very well, indeed. But that is very different. There is no wind, so courses can be plotted very accuratley, and there is a throttle and an engine. The SRB will be falling unpowered, perhaps a few motors holding fins and chutes, or jets to direct itself. The bulk of the energy from falling will be absorbed not by directly controlled rockets, but by not always that predictable wind. Launch days are good weather days, but that does not mean things will be at all comprable.

You really do not. You can guess about the centre of volume, but of mass, really who knows. On some of these large vehicles, it probably can shift dramatically, further complicating the issue. Additionally, especially earlier on (i.e. ST:TOS) you really do not see the vehicle thrusting in the presence of objects to determine the direction it is heading in. You do not see matter comming from the engines. It is entierly possible that the centre of mass could match the centre of volume, and the impulse engines are simply vectored to go 'forward' through those centers. The TNG technical manual discusses some of this, their engines are certainly vectorable, I will have to check up on their descriptions in greater detail.

==To the first bit, Iran is able to track TOR with DPI, China may do a similar thing with the Great Firewall. It comes at great expense of speed, however. For a breif period, (less than a day) TOR was blocked in Iran, but this was quickly fixed. As far as compromised nodes, that is one means. More easily, though, you can track people by accessing their computer directly, and monitoring activity there. TOR does not help if you are being tracked by a keylogger. Or if your user agent gives a unique enough fingerprint. ==But, yeah, ultimatley it is a lot more effort than most organizations will be able, willing, and determined to put out. You probably do not even need to use TOR to get past most school blocks, Google Translate probably can often do the trick perfectly well. ==But, to link this post more directly to what is at hand, at my highschool, things were pretty, disorganized as far as computer networks; we were able to create wifi networks from desktop computers, bypassing all the blocks and getting faster speeds. All the computers were pretty unlocked bootable from USB media. Of course, there was not much to steal or destroy (apart from on teachers laptops, I suppose. There were never any problems with this, but I probably could have caused havoc in minutes with a fast booting OS on a USB). ==This did give some interesting opportunities, too, though. I ended up helping fix a very (very) broken laptop that had been donated. IT was somewhat given to a couple of students, myself included, to try to figure out the issues and get it running. It turned out the hard drive, was no longer able to work, and we ended up getting Windows 7 up on it again (I am pretty young).

I live in an area with nice (that is to say, very little) light pollution. Outside of a small town with three observatories. I can see satellites just by looking at the sky in the eveneings, sometimes I have seen more than thirty in a night. Plus the planets, of course. Moons of Jupiter are fun to watch zipping around, and I have had some interesting times looking for specific features on the Moon as well. The ISS is always very neat to see. Incredibly bright, fast, and big. I probably have seen it more often than I realize, as often when I do see it, it is by thinking that the path, size and speed were consistent and then checking. I do not always check. One site that I have found useful in checking the times that the ISS will fly over is here. Also, this peice of software can be quite helpful for general satelite tracking, if anyone is interested.

To the main question, very seldom either. I have had some soda variations in the past, and am happy generally avoiding them in the present. I like water, and have additionally tea, fruit juices, cocoa, and assorted other, things, but not soda.

I agree about radiation in general, there is a high amount of evidence to support what you are saying and I have read material that supports it. My concern is cosmic background radiation, which is in some ways similar to the radiation you seem to be talking about, but is in many ways very different. It is very difficult to block, such that Apollo hardly tried; the stay outside of the magnetic feild was breif, and the danger limited. The ISS likewise does not care too much about this threat, as it resides in the secure environment of LEO. But 'Deep Space', is different. Past the magnetic feild of the Earth, this is a pervasive and perpetual threat. Sheilding is difficult, the high energy of the particles makes them often create lower energy particles when efforts are made to block from cosmic rays. On Mars, the atmosphere, especially the bloated one of a terraformed planet, would sheild some from these, but I am concerned that it would be sufficient to prevent damage. There are studies that suggest this may pose threats of high increases of conditions such as Alzheimers on long duration spaceflights, and that is only assuming a trip to Mars and back, not a colony. Of course, the flight is more dangerous than the surface stay, but we should not loose site of the latter, especially if a colony is the proposition.

Indeed. And at this stage we have not really been able to place people in such an environment to do any experiments at all. There are many questions to be asked about what the gravity will do, and even in most of the best outlooks, it will be difficult to raise children fully on Mars and allow them to travel to Earth unaided, they simply will be exhausted by lifting the weight of their body. To all of you maintaining this refrain, I request citations. The radiation from the Sun, okay, perhaps is safe at Mars' distance. But the main issue here is not solar radiation, as Jonboy noted, it is cosmic radiation. This is far more high-energy, far more difficult to block conventionally, and remains a threat to astronauts. On the trips to the Moon, the impact was minimal, while outside of the magnetic feild, crew noted flashes of light. But over a short part of their lives, the impact was probably not really changing their cancer, or other disease proclivities beyond normal. Under the multi-year mission outline, or especially under the foetus-grave on Mars outline, the threat will not be negligable, the effect will be massive. Studies to look at this are, from my findings, difficult. The number of people who have been exposed to interplanetary space level cosmic radiation is tiny, but what we do understand is somewhat alarming. On a relativley short mission, there have been suggestions that possibly 5% of a persons cells could be killed by this radiation alone, and more in the brain. Being not particularly well versed in space medecine, or medecine generally, this may alarm me unduly, but I doubt it. Building a small atmosphere for Mars would help some, but this radiation, is a constant that happens all over the Universe. You cannot move away from it, you have to block it. On Earth, we are safe, on Mars, we are not.

I am skeptical if you are suggesting it might change to a Europa Orbiter, LordFerret. Probably such a mission will be nuclear powered, and crashing such a vehicle on Europa, would be rather a difficult thing to allow. That is why they are doing flybys, though an orbiter would be preferable in almost every way.

You might not need to get it to 0C and melt, if we assume that the water may have been mixed with some 'anti-freeze' materials. If the water has enough salt, or ammonia, or any of a host of other materials not implausibly present, there could probably be sufficient heat from pressure and radioactive decay to creat slush in the mantle. Perhaps what we see in the spots is just a stain from some of these minerals falling back after an eruption of water. In this assumption, the water escaped, and it snowed salt, creating the spots.

The odds of some water eruption having hapened within about a year and a half are, about 100%. We actually saw this happen in multiple places on the surface in January 2014. (Link to ESA article)

This is an opinion (the salt) that I have heard in some conversations with astrogeologists. That was a few weeks ago, but their idea was basically something erupts out of the surface, and, as the water/ice sublimate and escape, salt and other minerals could fall back to the surface. This would have happened exremely recently. Dawn has spectrometers, that will be able to differentiate the two. Resolution, is, at the moment, too low, pending getting closer. Additionally, calibration is somewhat slow from my understanding, and they need to get that right before they can make any accurate measurments. Previous infared images did not show the spots at all (which to one geologist suggested it was not ice), but, again, resolution makes such conclusions difficult at this time. There was a visible eruption on Ceres some time ago, exactly at the exciting white spots. That occured as a result of Jupiter's fantastic mass and gravity. I am skeptical that Ceres could have the same effect, being so much smaller. Perhaps with the right comet? That seems strange. What about the water plume we saw comming from the same spot? Though that could be from a comet impact, it seems like the composition would have been different.

No, I have been typing directly into the post box (or whatever it should be called).New line test.

I was just posting a reply, incorporating several quotes, when I hit post, and all of my paragraphs were squished into a single block of text. I attempted to edit and repair, without success, tried again and was succesful. --Mozilla Firefox 38.0.1, using some addons that may interfere (not sure why they would not have before, though). --Has anyone else had this happen? (It is happening here, too)

They are already in good, equatorial orbits. Moving something that big to a ploar orbit, then crashing it, would be absurd to do. It might be simpler to get a program to search for Near Mars Asteroids, and knock one slightly, currently we are more looking for ones near Earth, but Mars must have its own collection to, I imagine. Turning CO2 into O2, is possible, but at this scale, also is pretty out there. Trying to do that would not be a simple job, and falls out of your original criteria for terraforming. --Earth was going to be over run with people, leading to mass starvation, chaos, and the collapse of civilization at the start of the 20th century. It has also happened several times since then if I am not mistaken. Population growth happens, and expansion of infrastructure and farming happens, allowing growth to continue, as it has for the last more than seven billion people. --Now, there are environmental problems that are associated with population growth that we need to be concerned about, but they are somewhat more complex than simply overcrowding. Probably, with an efficient plan and well layed out growth, the Earth could support hundreds of billions of people at the very least, but not following current means of sustenance.We do not need to expand to Mars, as a consequence. Sure, it would be neat; but there is much that you are assuming about why we should go there. Many issues have been raised before, questions of how humans and other animals would develop at low g levels, the actual value simply of being on planets in the first place, et cetera. --Furthermore, terraforming of Mars (even if technically feasible) would be a difficult thing to convince people to do. Sure, many find the idea stimulating, and probably it would be possible at least on some levels, but we have tons left to figure out about the place. At the moment, Mars is the subject of incredible amounts of research, the focus of NASA's search for non-terrestrial life, an interesting analog for Earth's history and development, and in general a simply very interesting, and accessible planet. It will be a challenge to convince people to come in and start engineering the place, before we understand it properly. And perhaps, by that time, we will be past the stage of lusting after territory. (Apologies for the wall of text. I had it arranged into paragraphs, and these are being obliterated by something that I have yet to understand)

Well, the US government did build some things for the programme, but generally this is true. What is more, the infrastructure that built Apollo, is gone, and changed. Replication of that hardware, would be a massive challenge in itself, at this point more than forty years since the last Apollo flight. Overall, it is, as has been noted, probably technically possible, even with failures, for SpaceX to pull this off. Just as it was probably, technically possible for humans to have landed on Mars by the 1980's, just as it was possible for NASA to build a Mars airplane for the centennial of the Wright brother's first flight, just as it was probably possible for people to begin building large O'Neil colonies more than a decade ago. Incredible numbers of things are possible, but SpaceX is, very unlikley to do any of this, for several reasons. They need money. Musk, is rich, SpaceX is popular, but flying to the Moon is incredibly expensive, risky, and not necisarily profitable at this point. If NASA were to contract SpaceX to do it, odds might go up, but the chances of that happening are small. NASA still is considering that CCDev and the other privately run missions, are for minor tasks that NASA should not be bothered with, like easy access to LEO. Moon landings, are not in this class. They need time. As was noted, NASA made it to the Moon very quickly when it needed to, building very much infrastructure from scratch. SpaceX has technology, infrastructure, and experience, so hypothetically they should be able to do it faster today. This is a fair observation, but, it would be difficult for SpaceX to develop the sense of urgency that sorrounded the 1960's space program. There will be failures, delays, and though these will be possible to overcome, they will push things back. Again, it is not technically impossible for them to do it, but simply highly improbable. -- Overall, there does not seem to be much that is going to make SpaceX have a good chance of getting there. It is not impossible, but it is pretty unlikley that they are going to go anywhere without someone hiring them to go there. Few groups are going to do that unless they are simply contracted to do a part of a larger NASA or other coalition.

I have been more of a library person generally, but I too have gathered, many books, maps, et cetera. My town has some nice used book stores, including one (anyone here ever been to Bookman's in Arizona?), where it is very easy to sell back to the store. I have surprisingly little fiction, looking over it, mostly history books (some fairly historic themselves), language books, space and science books. As far as ebooks, I have read a bit on an ereader once, but never really got into it. I only realy use ebook services like Gutenberg to find very obscure titles that are not practical to find elsewhere, or at least not cheaply. Even then, I have gone to the trouble of carefully formatting and compressing texts so that I can print them out, rather than read them on a computer.

It was somewhat mentioned before, but essentially, the :hailprobe, thing, is a reference to a meme that came out of the Orbiter Forums (if you have not messed with Orbiter, I encourage you to try it). It began, from what I gather, sometime in 2002, among some people working on mods for the game (making Soviet space probes), spread to that forum from a developer IRC, and from there, to the Universe at large. . . . Harvestr, lead developer for KSP, is on that forum, and during the development of this game made some threads and questions there. If memory serves, KSP was also originally released on that forum. I hope that helps, and anyway, :hailprobe

Well, you can also view and post on the forums well with Tails on the 'TOR Browser' version of Firefox. Is there anything particularly interesting, good, or different, in your view, about Windows 10? Perhaps I should just try it myself.

Not sure about these particularly, I think some had it set up so there was essentially a small work area, chair, et cetera inside of the suit, where the astronaut could sit, eat, rest et cetera (the tripod suit defenitly was something on this line). Bigger, in this view, almost would be better.

You get anything you want, but immediatley afterward, you fall off the edge of a clif, and, as if that was not enough, are promptly hit by a bus. I wish for a space elevator.