wumpus

Unfortunately, I only had "Packing for Mars" as a library book. I'll have to look up where she got her space sickness data from. I'm pretty sure plenty of it was from astronaut interviews, but I might be misinterpreting it. I distinctly remember realizing that the famous "the gate is down" quote might be problematic for plenty of cadets (especially since I'm pretty sure they mostly lived in gravity).

I'm at least somewhat surprised that windows 7 supports 32 bit machines, but I think Intel made a few mobile/laptop parts that were 32 bit specific. I think the last 32 bit desktop chips were the [early] Pentium 4s. But plenty of machines past that worked a lot better in 32 bit mode, at least in windows.

The "bounced" was from memory of an exhibit at the Smithsonain, which I thought was using quotes from Ensign Gay. Being picked up by the US seemed vastly improbably considering he must have gone down close to the Japanese fleet, but that would explain his survival. Had the British used dive bombing attacks, I'd expect the Germans to provide a counter as soon as possible. I don't see any mention of bombers in the sinking of the Graff Spree (an early British navy victory), and it doesn't appear to be something they thought important (like US admirals, only worse. See the "rum, sodomy, and the lash" quote from Churchill).

Presumably on an old system with <=4GB of RAM. I'll admit that I don't think I have any working non-64 bit CPUs, but the RAM issue is another story (64 bit pointers use up twice as much RAM, and it also leads programmers to think that RAM is infinite on 64 bit systems).

Note that the astronauts in the control seats are facing completely different ways from the astronaut in "engineering". According to "Packing for Mars" by Mary Roach, translating coordinates to change 'up and down' in space is one of the more effective ways of inducing space sickness ("sorry Ender. You may think 'the gate is down' but it doesn't help when half your team is puking their guts out").

Yet another reason why Take Two/Steam need to make old versions available in Steam (do they at least have 1.3.1?).

Don't worry. It isn't true until he tells you three times.

Sure. But by that point the British had sunk the Graf Spree and little else. While the Bismark might have registered zero hits after the biplane attack, it still appeared a heavily armored mass of guns. Launching a torpedo from up to 3km (ok, that's way too far. But easily 1km (which only needs 7 degree accuracy. 2km needs about 3.5 degrees) [which allows an additional 10% faster torpedo] away that you only need to be accurate in a single dimension (which could be the whole 240m length) sounds a better tactical chance of getting a chance to launch another torpedo. I suspect that the "had it easier" involved carrier supplied air cover. In Midway, the Japanese zeros swooped down and massacred the initial wave of torpedo bombers (there was a single US survivor who bounced off a carrier deck and was taken prisoner). When the next wave of US dive bombers came in high, the zeros were far to low to do anything about it and US pilots pretty much attacked Japanese capital ships at will. I really don't think that swooping down on a battleship is going to be safer from the AA than firing from a km away (but going low and slow makes you a sitting duck against enemy fighters). (far more detailed claims are made here, referencing a work I've heard is good [it points out that my story is part myth and part oversimplification] : http://ww2f.com/threads/battle-of-midway-torpedo-bombers-faulty-torpedoes.39656/ Note that the claim (from my link) "it is very difficult to stop a dive bomber after it begins its dive". First, the USN was not using biplanes at the time and second that doesn't mean it is any easier to get close enough to begin to dive or safe to get away after you completed your bombing run.

From: https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=210236 "When using an impact pistol, 2-3m (6-9 feet) would be a normal/typical depthsetting." So it should have hit below the belt. I'm assuming a mark XII torpedo (thanks to this link: http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WTBR_WWII.php ). But I doubt the armor belt mattered at all in taking out the rudder. And I'm not sure anyone wanted to dive bomb the Bismark with a biplane. Staying far away and dropping a torpedo sounds much better.

Considering the date, it seemed appropriate. I also had no idea that the "main engineering lecture hall at Maryland" was named after her (must have been after I graduated: I don't think we had a "main lecture hall" in any engineering building when I was there, but there is a new engineering building now). The rudder was destroyed by a biplane carrying a torpedo. The armor was in the right place for the aircraft used against it (of course, had it lasted longer it would have been obsolete soon enough), but I'd expect any sort of anti-aircraft to be able to take out a biplane (although riddling cloth with bullets isn't all that effective). No idea if the brits could have mounted proper bombs to the Swordfish or knew enough about the Bismark's construction (how do you hide the construction of a battleship?) to mount bombs. Sometimes its better to be lucky.

Clean room? I thought the VAB had its own weather. Build a big building in Florida and you get strange effects. Although the payload/spacecraft often is built in a clean room.

The Bismark was doomed when a bomber destroyed her ability to steer (so the Royal Navy could "simply" go finish her off). I've always assumed the rudder was hit (I think that is often the explanation), but it could have been anywhere that didn't have the required redundancy.

Except there was also a trickle of developers one by one. I don't think anyone else left the same day as Harvester. And considering the state of KSP (probably hitting every wild goal Phillipe could imagine actually hitting), it didn't have to be a "sinking ship". It may well look like a project that was heading into what (developers from the .1x era at least would think of) maintenance mode. The other thing we will never know is the budget between Take Two and Squad to develop KSP. It may well have been that Take Two simply didn't want to pay that many. To be honest, I don't think I've ever heard of any game development studio in the whole industry that wasn't an ongoing personnel disaster: probably too much supply of people willing to work arbitrary hours for low pay.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if you could find the missing devs/former modders over at Floating Origin studios (Harvester's new company) or some other studio. It might have been a layoff, it might have been the old Squad (pre-KSP) guard deciding that everything would be conducted in Spanish from then on, or they might have decided to leave to a different company (and Floating Origin is the most obvious). As far as Squad acting all "PR", remember that's the company's original core function (they provided software and animation to marketing departments). They only became a game studio when Phillipe suggested building KSP. For all our worries about Take Two, the things that bother me the most come from Unity (and its data collection policies). Take Two seems to let KSP be KSP. I think the biggest reason for the "old guard" leaving is that the game (meaning the gameplay, localization is pretty critical as well) is more or less finished. There are always little details to add, but they are a lot of work for small additions when they got used to the rush of going from a single flat plane of a planet to an entire solar system in a few years.

Seven. Unless you are *really* on the ball and understood exactly what that foam hitting the tiles meant and fired the LES, a *Launch* Escape System wouldn't save the other seven (unless you are including cosmonauts who needed the Soyuz LES [and lived], but I thought there were only 5 or so). But that really doesn't change your argument at all. I know that at least one other time foam hit the tiles, so I don't know how many shuttles you would have to destroy to save the Columbia crew. But you still want that LES (especially considering how well it has worked for Soyuz).

This argument comes up a lot in manned vs. unmanned space exploration. The "moar science for cheaper" arguments of the unmanned contingent quietly ignore that you could probably get even more science done by paying a for a bunch of post-docs to do bench work somewhere involving science that doesn't need any rockets: studying frogs or whatnot.

But that's exactly why nearly all ICBMs are either solids or hypergolics. You can't afford to add any fueling time to the loop. Although now that I think about it, I'd be a lot happier if the Department of Defense had a ~30 minute chance to wrest the football from the president (not just the current or recent ones, but Reagan and his Alzheimer's was scary as well) between an order to arm the missiles and an order to fire them. I suspect the issue is how long a burn you need. The Shuttle SRBs burned for 2 minutes, and used multiple segments stuck together (I'm pretty sure that's why the infamous O-rings were needed). But back during the Apollo program, Aerojet was building the AJ-260 (for when you absolutely need 17,695.30 kN of thrust). It appears that in the 1960s the US was developing the tech, although the last test blew the nozzle off the rocket (compared to F-1 development, that must have been nothing, although with significant more force uncontrolled because of that "nothing"). I think the issue is connecting segments of the SRBs together (I think the shuttle uses 4 segments and the SLS wants to add a fifth). But there is also the issue that since the US has been building SRB-based ICBMs for decades, I also wouldn't be surprised if trying to quickly catch up is next to impossible. Scott Manley made a video on the AJ-260: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfMPgAQD420

Oddly enough, I had to defer Christmas as well. Made it to my parents' on January 7th. Early US ICBMs were LOX (I think Atlas was the last, and wiki claims it was in service through 1964. Peak had 129 rockets deployed, but I have no idea how long it took to launch them). I think the main fear was someone attacking your ICBMs with something fast enough (typically sub launch) to get to them before they launched. Solid fuels certainly have the fear of unintended ignition and having to deal with that (presumably if the silo isn't open, it is too late to open it and let the missile out). Explosion during flight is a more real failure mode, all too well known to shuttle astronauts. I still favor them over hypegolics. - I also *really* overdo them in KSP. If they cost anything like the in-game cost I'd be pushing them hard. Alas, while SRBs are presumably fairly simple to make, making them *safely* is sufficiently expensive to limit them to small boosters surrounding many rockets types.

A full battery helps, but you need one that can provide enough electricity through the lunar night and be fully charged with whatever isn't needed during the lunar day. With a month-long "day", that is a lot of battery capacity (mostly thanks to the heaters, but perhaps enough insulation will be enough).

Does it count as a necro if you are responding to an old post on a current thread? This was from the last page today and I missed it the first time... If you are developing a civilian rocket out of military parts, there are two main ways to build ICBMs (ok, most of India's threats are neighbors. Unless they get *really* upset at what global warming is doing to them): solids and hypergolics. Nobody wants to have to fill an ICBM with cryogenic oxidizer in order to launch. I find solids a much better solution for both (military and civilian). Note that I'm mainly against hypegolics for the first stage and not fond of them in the second. Trace bits might be difficult to work with, but they aren't going to be a massive disaster if the rocket hits the ground downrange. Kerosene really isn't wonderful either, but people are sufficiently familiar with hydrocarbons to make an effective response.

The great advantage the cell phone camera has is that it is usually with you. A bad camera in hand when you need to take the shot is better than the best SLR back on your desk.

I think I remember someone (Carl Sagan?) saying that he knew the orbital mechanics were garbage, but was intrigued by the linguistics side. Then he talked to a linguist who knew the linguistics bits were garbage but was intrigued by the orbital mechanics. Isn't that a "accept the Bible as an accurate record and attempt to provide a mechanism to make it work" book? I think that there's a reason that anything that tries to use that argument now tends to veer off into assuming things like a flat Earth...

Fusion nuclear explosions emit a lot of photons (possibly the majority of their energy. But certainly a lot of photons). I'm not sure that H/N-bombs have enough Isp/mass efficiency vs. classical atom bombs (they are supposedly less efficient, but scale up bigger) so I'm not sure which type were planned. I've always assumed that they would use H-bombs for cost reasons (or possibly neutron bombs for better control of what gets emitted). I'd also assume that the "oiled like a pan" is to ablate the oil. Finally, the whole point of the plunger appears to try to capture as much of the momentum as possible and transmit it to the spacecraft over a wider span of time. Supposedly it made a huge improvement on the momentum side of things (which is what the rocket equation is all about), but a solid plate had a better energy transmission. Since momentum is the key to space, the plunger plate won out (I haven't done the math and was always weak on the momentum side of things, but that's what I've heard).

Really? I'd assume that it is a direct result of that, and that the change in wavelength was exactly the same as the Lorentz contraction. But that's only because of the special nature of light, other doppler shifts vary directly with velocity with respect to the medium (light deals with Lorentz dilation because there really isn't a "medium"). The guys who did the measurement were Michelson and Morley. From the Maxwell equations (and before), it was assumed that since light was a wave it had to have an "aether" to move through. Michelson and Morley set up an apparatus to measure the speed the Earth traveled through this medium. They got absolutely zero. No matter how carefully they checked, it was always zero (hint: zero is easy to check with lasers, but they were invented long after this happened). Einstein claimed to be only peripherally aware of this issue (he must have known that was why Lorentz created his transforms), but I can't see anyone els accepting relativity without the Michealson-Morley results. There's one more footnote: the LIGO experiment is an even more sensitive experiment that measures something very similar to the Michealson-Morley experiment (it looks for a variation in the speed of light between two points over time instead of in different directions) and finally found valid data a year or two ago. So it isn't *quite* accurate to say it is "always zero". PS: Michelson and Morley are also famous for getting the Nobel Prize out of null data (their famous experiment). They were expecting a useful number. What they got shocked the world.

Can anyone confirm just how many H-bombs it would take to get an Orion up to .1c? That's the number that gets thrown around, but I can't imagine how a H-bomb is supposed to get an Isp in the millions or so. Note that H-bombs emit most of their energy as photons, so that's a lot of momentum that doesn't otherwise require mass, but photons are typically an inefficient means of accelerating spacecraft. Every time I plug the numbers into the rocket equation I suspect that Dyson was pulling a fast one.