wumpus

Anchoring bias. The first time people hear about it is the excited "breakthrough" reported from the researcher's PR agency. Anything failure to reproduce the effect is dismissed as "git gud". Not to mention that anyone seriously pushing any such nonsense has a significant chance of absolutely refusing to admit their (ok, typically "he's") wrong. My guess is metallic hydrogen will be in KSP if it fills a needed place in the tech tree and won't be included if not. There's always the chance than one of the devs really likes the idea of metallic hydrogen (hopefully knowing full well it won't work that way) and we're stuck with it. We can always push for the term "zip fuel" (what they called the hypothetical high-Isp fuel in Ignition!), but I suspect the devs would prefer a more well known (and googleable) term. If you want realism in KSP, you need RSS/RO. Otherwise you have to live with little green men.

I remember hearing one story that the Soviets (presumably Stalin personally) made a conscious decision to *not* upgrade tanks during the Great Patriotic War. Maybe it was just the T-34. But the overall point was that while it certainly made the tanks more vulnerable, it also made the logistics issues in churning out tanks and spare parts far easier. Did they bother with spare parts? Or did they just send mechanics to strip as many parts of destroyed tanks and send them back to the factories? My impression of the thing was that it was the perfect tank for the Eastern Front. MTBF rated in days, but considering the life expectancy of any tank in a WWII battle (much less the Eastern Front) was measured in hours once they got to the front (let alone the enemy). Tank fans love to ooh and ahh over German designs. The thing is that Germans could spend their time making the "perfect tank" because they only had enough diesel fuel for a relatively small amount of tanks. The USSR (and USA) could pretty much fuel every tank they could make (as long as they held Stalingrad and the oil fields), so slapping out as many (if not to German quality levels) tanks as possible made sense. "No improvements" may have played an important role in Soviet tank production. Maybe you could have a fancy new IS-3, or perhaps 10 or so T-34s (with spares). The choice (in the unlikely event that they gave field commanders choices) would presumably depend on the German anti-tank availability (and of course if they still had diesel for their tanks). This whole meandering post is that logistics win wars, and that ECOing something fielded is an unholy nightmare. But I will also agree that once weapons and moreso defenses get obsoleted in warfare, it is fast and permanent. At that point you will need some better, and you will need it now. But if you already have three marks of "like to have it" ECOs in the field of varying levels of upgrades, that very well could get in the way of bringing the right equipment to the warfighter.

The milky way is spinning, and presumably the Sun with it. Beyond that, I don't think there's a clear definition of 'interstellar medium'. About the only thing clear is that the effects of the universe's expansion are much larger than any velocity the Sun might have (by measuring redshifts of other suns/galaxys).

The US had plenty of unemployment during and before the Great Depression, and almost no regulation. I'm curious what other unregulated (and especially unsubsidized) economies went without unemployment for long. Recessions were nasty before the New Deal. Rest of this post pre-scrubbed.

When was that (or is it the latest and "greatest" version)? Once I realized that (typically smaller) SRBs often cost more than the coupler in KSP, I'd tie groups of SRBs together and just use two couplers (one group on each side). Pre-1.0 stability issues, I might want three SRBs in the first stage (save a coupler) then have an additional stage on top. With the new aero model the horizontal launch would have more drag, but be more stable.

I seem to recall from "the making of Star Wars" (this was before the rename to "a new hope") was that the biggest influence on Star Wars gunnery was the availability of battleship model kits (presumably WWII) during the 1970s and how useful bits and pieces from such were to glue on spaceship models for the greenscreen. All the fan theory had to be retrofitted around whatever was easy for the special effects crew to make something look good. And since the "making of" probably was released before Empire Strikes Back (probably just before, to drive up hype), I doubt the fan theory had even started (granted, I was still a kid so who knows what various fanbases were doing in fanzines).

Back when Shatner and Nimoy were first making a TV show called Star Trek, there was a surprise when Nimoy got most of the fan mail from the ladies. Presumably the pretty boy leader (Shatner) was supposed to get it. According to "I am not Spock" and/or "I am Spock" (both by Nimoy of course), the theory on the set was that it was due to the ears. Should Nimoy stray to far they'd threaten to take his ears away. I'd like to hear that this was revived on the set of the [movie] Lord of the Rings. I *think* that Lord of the Rings is less scientifically accurate than Star Wars, but this likely required a bit of effort on Tolkien's part to make it feel more like dark age/migration period myths.

Elves are extremely long lived and therefore have significantly less evolutionary pressure. They are also fantastically overadapted (they'd be a "Mary Sue" race if Tolkien hadn't identified with the hobbits) and all selection is likely sexual selection and warfare survival. Also note that elvish superiority extends Tolkien's Catholic view of marriage even further: elvish marriages don't "death do us part" (they don't remarry). So sexual selection presumably includes expected warfare selection. Which is why we see such impressive martial arts by the mostly peaceful elves in the movies, they need to impress the elfmaidens. Orcs canonically do not exist thanks to natural selection but by deliberate breeding by Morgoth and Sauron. Oddly enough, of all the races in Middle Earth, the only one whose origin is a mystery is the hobbit race.

1ns switching = 1GHz. This has been consumer electronics (on chip) grade since 2000ish and behind the times recently. But you might say, that is only 1 bit! Your idea uses 32 bits. Except that 32 bits require 1.8 * 1015 dB signal to noise ratio, so that isn't happening. Sure, you might be able to multiplex this multiple devices with different frequencies (hopefully you can filter out all the overlap at optical frequencies), but remember that the 1GHz intra-chip transmitter is only a few transistors out of billions available on chip, each optical transmitter + combination mirros/lenses will be much bigger. As far as filtering goes, that is one of the first things GPUs were programmed to do (specifically FFTs, but filtering is probably the most important application of FFTs). Nowadays you can easily use all teraflops (yes, *teraflops*) to do filtering on your GPU, so I'm guessing the market is long since saturated, unless you can fit a small optical device on a SOC. Lucky for optical computing researchers, Moore's law seems to be slipping to barely a guideline, so it is possible that a breakthrough in optical computing won't be obsoleted by digital electronics before it even works in the lab. But the bar is still high. Intel was promising using optical communications on the motherboard something like a decade ago, but nothing came of it. Now they are promising (since at least 2016) to put multiple little chips on a cheaper large chip for communication. This would be especially helpful for optical chips as they are unlikely to work with the same fabrication process as standard CMOS.

The Ray Tracing (at least as used in the current line of nvidia Turing processors) is almost certainly limited to lighting/shadow effects and reflections. It is hardwired in, presumably for maximum efficiency of reflections. Furthermore, using such a system would affect the "ingame world", meaning that in multiplayer you'd almost certainly have to have it either on for everybody or off for everybody. With the possible exception of some future "Fallout 5" (and Bethesda corporate seems only interested in multiplayer and it's whales), I don't expect games written about single players, especially bothering to pioneer interactive virtual environments. On the other hand, next gen consoles will have a sufficiently large "leveling effect" such that next-gen consoles could play together and be assumed to have sufficiently similar ray tracing hardware. Once AMD (or Sony and/or Microsoft) spills the beans on how their ray tracing works (whether hard wired or using the shading/compute units to calculate the rays) we might get a better guess as whether this is possible or not. One thing that nvidia relies on to make ray tracing works is large neural nets interpolating the results from the ray casters. This was also shown separately as DLSS (deep learning super sampling) and really didn't work at all well. DLSS2 appears to work better, and I'm guessing they are feeding the "AI" at least the mathematical bits of edge detection (similar to nvidia's previous work with FXAA anti-aliasing). Assuming the player isn't using all the available neural net hardware to upscale the video, it might be useful to let these bits assist the NPC "AI" algorithms (hopefully not just making so-called "allies" even more annoying).

There's also the difference between one engine and nine. To a certain degree, I'd expect the "roughness" of each engine to cancel out to a degree. The overall effect might have more absolute "roughness", but with nine times the mass it doesn't matter. No idea if this makes a difference.

And the SLS presumably kept the factories going. But they already have ULA for traditional DoD pork, and leaving SpaceX out would make it much harder to explain why they were spending so much money on launches. My guess is that NG knew they couldn't compete with SpaceX on price/reliability so tried to compete with ULA for the "military industrial complex" position. But SRBs+LV909 (Jeb's RL-10 clone) is a critical part of my KSP playstyle. I have to wonder if it is just coincidence. If they bring this back with detachable propellant tanks above the payload (functional bamboo staging), you'll know they are copying KSP designs.

Somebody seriously thought that a rocket with 2 stages of solid rocket motors encased in carbon composite topped with *two* RL-10s would be a good idea? Granted, the Starliner uses two RL-10s, but only to increase the safety margin for the crew. Atlas V should be able to launch similar payloads with one RL-10 (confusingly, Atlas's Centaur stage seems to have nothing to do with Orbital systems). Some of my favorite rockets in KSP look very similar to this, especially early in the game (although I haven't played much since the addition of more SRBs). But KSP has dirt cheap SRBs and the RL-10 clone is similarly inexpensive. In real life, the RL-10s probably cost more than an entire Falcon 9. I have to wonder if any of the Northrup contingent was muttering the fatal words after the announcement "it works in KSP".

maneuvering TWR isn't completely unimportant in orbit. First, if your fuel is hydrogen you don't want it to boiloff before being burned. Second, unless you plan on taking your time and using pressure-fed hypergolics like Mangalyaan (the spacecraft that brought "pe kicking" to real life) you can easily lose out on the Oberth effect. Scott Manley points out that while the Shuttle maneuvering system may have been fine for the last bit of delta-v needed to circularize the shuttle's orbit, it would have been less effective for achieving escape velocity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mIRFxYYaC0 That said, the important thing is that this only means that thrust still has advantages in orbit, not that it is absolutely required as in early rocket stages. If your spacecraft can survive the Van Allan belts, ion engines are more than ready to take you anywhere in the solar system from orbit, even if it takes months to spiral away from Earth.

Life exists near undersea hydrothermal vents (the only ecosystem that doesn't require sunlight), but only up to ~130C. Venus is more like ~470C, something no Earth based life seems possible of being able to handle (although I wouldn't have expected >100C either).

Asteroid mining may be useful for extremely large amounts of materials that are rare on Earth (iridium, platinum). It also depends on just how concentrated you have to get the ore and all sorts of political considerations on being allowed to deorbit (and even for orbital insertion) the ore/pigs

I recently took a job for a defense contractor (no connection to Boeing at all), and one of the things I noticed on the intranet web page was some details about their new "consent decree". Sure enough, I had to take an ethics training class. Granted, it was better than the last time I went through similar, which was an Enron-era introduction to our (completely different company, and I think the relevant division has been shut down) new "ethics policy". If you examined it carefully enough, they made it absolutely clear that they were prepared to claim that the brass at VW during diesel-gate acted perfectly ethically, and that they were right to hang the "rogue engineer" out to dry (at the time, I couldn't think of a good example. But decades later one came by). Small wonder that they kinda-sorta wanted any leaving ex-employees to bring back laptops and any other expensive gear, but the one mandatory thing that *must* be returned was your ethics handbook. I can't imagine what nastier secrets lurked in there that a lawyer might discover. PS. I think you mean *caught* doing something unethical. I can't imagine what would happen if one of them acted ethically.

Per Randal Monroe (of course. His comics got me into KSP). https://what-if.xkcd.com/21/ A GAU-8 Avenger has a thrust of "nearly 5 tons [US] (44kN)". You'd need at least 3000 guns to launch, which would weigh an additional ~1250 tons of mass (so expect an additional hundred tons of mass to lift the additional guns...). His link mainly deals with building a jetpack with Kalashnikov rifles, but also deals with more "high thrust" armament towards the end.

What gets me is that as far as I know all energy/mass balances. Nobody has made dark matter...

Any antimatter physicists have experimented on was created from energy, typically almost immediately before observation (although I think positrons have been confined for measurable periods of time since the 1980s). Dirac's (and Schrödinger's) Nobel prize came shortly after observing the creation of positrons, so it has been done since at least 1933. Just don't expect to produce them at will (other than by having lots of chances for such things to occur) or with any kind of efficiency.

For satellites used for lower latency broadband, expect them to be in LEO. Satellites in that region will burn up in the atmosphere if not regularly given boosts and debris should fall much faster. Starlink has a small number of satellites that are far above the main constellation (presumably for inter-bird communication), but the emphasis is a small number compared to the full constellation. Presumably Blue Origin will do a similar thing (or else people will complain about the latency). Kessler syndrome is a bit overblown, as most satellites are in regions where it would be both difficult to achieve and would clear it self out in a few years anyway. Out beyond that, it would require far more satellites than we can possibly launch (although who knows if competition between Starship and New Armstrong heats up). Geosynchronous orbit is also a special case where some of the most valuable satellites parade in an almost exactly similar orbit, so boosting them into the graveyard orbit is critical. I wouldn't be too surprised if one of them fails and has to be captured and removed (the time requirements wouldn't be *that* bad. Geosync is a loooong way out there so collisions between satellites even in "the same" orbit would be unlikely).

Why in the world wouldn't the counterweight remain in at least geosync? They might have to cut the cable again (to as high above the atmosphere as they can. And probably again cut away Low Earth Orbit (presumably it would burn up on rentry). But outside of aerodynamic losses, I'd expect the thing to remain in orbit, although possibly a more eccentric one.

I'd expect the odd homework question in any science fora, and this might be one. Especially considering the easily googleable terms "escape velocity" weren't in the question.

It also only matters if you can accelerate at anything close to 1g or plan on just doing a flyby survey of another star system that happens to have its own Oort cloud. Although presumably .1g will get you going at significant speed through the Oort cloud. Also hitting even small rocks at relativistic speed will really ruin your day once past a certain (probably very small) size. Consider Randal Monroe's relativistic baseball: the description of a .9c baseball appears to deliver more energy than a large hydrogen bomb. https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/ Hitting dust will be a problem (and I'm assuming plenty of dust in the Oort cloud). And as mentioned, hitting hydrogen/helium atoms at relativistic speeds are identical to radiation. I'd expect much more hydrogen in the Oort cloud. Don't forget to expect a similar (possibly worse) cloud at your destination. This could be insolvable to flyby probes.

According to Vanamonde's wiki link, it is somewhere around ~500-600km/s (vs. ~11 for Ve Earth and ~16 for Ve Solar system). But I think that number might be for in the dead center of the Milky Way, the way it is worded is odd. Since the Milky Way isn't spherical, you'd have to do the calculations from original principles (following the footnotes in the wiki might be a good start).