wumpus

No, that is to get the rabbit astronaut. Like Bugs Bunny, only rabbits love bananas even more than carrots.

I have a lot of posts myself, but don't expect NTR engines to be fired in all but the highest parts of the atmosphere. Of course this has more to do with the low thrust they have, and that any time they can be even used as a last gasp to put the things in orbit would likely be well outside the atmosphere (I've let my kebal tugs claw their way into orbit, but don't recommend it). Isp (NTR with water mass) = 412 Isp (maximum water temperature + rich H2) = 450 (SSME) Seems a bit high for NTR water, although new materials *might* allow for higher nuclear temperatures (although I really doubt you want your nuclear core to melt...). https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/new-material-could-up-efficiency-of-concentrated-solar-power/

Looks like Avagadro's number will require measurement of that sphere and comparison to the Planck constant and not the other way around. Makes sense, the Planck constant is certainly seen as more fundamental, but I always liked the Avagdro number. In other news, we should be adding a few decimal places to Avagardo's number, even if it won't be exact.

I was assuming that there was a reasonably steady stream of probes (one every few years) while any human mission would be on "maximum Elon time". Wolf Vishniac created the "Wolf trap" for the Viking missions, and the idea was to provide "food" any Martians and wait to see if anything happened. Unfortunately Wolf Vishniac died in an accident in Antarctica, and any hope of including that experiment on Viking died with him. It was generally seen as the best way to discover life on Mars, and including a Mars bar as food (along with sponsorship by M&M/Mars) would be the best way to get it to Mars. I wonder if ISRO would accept such "sponsorship", if they followup MOM with a lander, it might help with the budget and PR.

If I was in M&M/Mars PR/marketing, I'd be seriously looking into what it takes to get a Mars bar on Mars. Between the news and the memes, that's more eyeball attention time than you can possibly buy with advertizing, and the memes are about as effective in getting your target audience (kids) than anything else. The catch is that I expect only NASA (and possibly Indian) research vessels are going to Mars, so any Mars bar would have to be absolutely sterile. Best guess to get one on board would be as "Martian food" inside a Wolf trap (obviously more basic food would help, but if you sponsor the project I'll bet they let you include a Mars bar).

"better performance" largely depends on the CPU in KSP, but often the GPU drivers are so bad in Linux that the GPU performance can suffer (or at least that was the case with my nvidia 560ti card). For a long time, KSP was 32 bit, so I'd expect it to fit in close to 2GB of space (you might even be able to download a 32 bit copy in steam), which makes memory less of an issue. When memory is an issue, it should be obvious and jarring as data goes to and from your SSD (hopefully not HDD). One thing that is surprising about Linux is just how little room it needs (until you put steam in and possible KSP: games designed for windows are just as big as on windows), so you can probably leave windows on your machine if it is there (unless it is one of those netbook-type machines). The biggest problem for notebooks and Linux is getting the wifi working. I'd look for reviews in seeing it work, and if it is possible to "try before you buy" consider some sort of knoppix boot device (assuming you can convince the thing to boot off of USB stick): traditionally "if it works on Linux it works on Knoppix", so if Knoppix can't autoconfigure the wifi I doubt you will get it to work (then again, camp probably doesn't have wifi).

Launch rendezvous: I found the "kerbal rescue missions" in career mode great practice at rendezvous. This is a much more simple problem than docking in that once you are sufficiently close, you can take control of the kerbal and RCS to the rescue ship. Normally this is mastered before docking, but if you already can dock then it is just a matter of getting close enough to dock. Launch windows: I go here. https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ Hitting the planet. Assuming you launched during the launch window, you will still need a very fine control to get an encounter with a planet. Expect to lay in a course, burn, and then a correction burn or two (NASA does this, but they can't throttle engines). Often the best method is to set the view to the target planet, then burn until a sufficiently close encounter is realized (typically using SAS to zoom to the needed orthogonal burn direction: no fancy "combined burns" here). And what "help" thread would be complete without a link to Scott Manley: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYu7z3I8tdEmqpOkQZCl5SZB5t0vXuxE0 Note that this is severely out of data (0.23), so any advice in getting to orbit is useless. It covers all the basics and puts them together in the last video (which should be the only one you need) for getting to another planet.

Note that this will only quickly destroy geostationary satellites and threaten other geosynchronous satellites (with 24 hour orbits). It also doesn't really follow the Kessler syndrome in that parts of one bird are unlikely to damage the next. The Kessler syndrome seems a bit far fetched in itself: things that are in congested space won't stay in space long without additional thrusts (and smaller pieces fall out of orbit faster) while things at much higher orbits are rare and operate in vast open areas. The real tragedy of such an attack would be that while the debris from each bird wouldn't put any other bird out of commission, it would also remain wherever the original satellite was effectively rendering that "zone" inhabitable.

Bigelow Aerospace has an inflatable "hab" on the ISS. Actually I think it is a minor closet, but testing appears to be going well. This should work well for the hohmann transfer (SpaceX plans to shave some months off of it, but it is basically a hohmann transfer) but don't expect much in the way of shielding (I'm guessing you can put the fuel tanks between the Sun and all habitation, but you are on your own for any other radiation).

Presumably the Imperial Homeland Planet has a primary moon with a ~7 minute orbit. It can't possibly have an atmosphere. It is probably also inside the Roche limit. This may qualify as "bad science fiction", but presumably requires pretty specialized knowledge before someone can work out the Roche limit just from the orbital period (Hollywood gets things so wrong children can point out the flaws).

That's because they are deposited more or less directly there (instead of starting at LEO and taking months to get to GSO). Although in this case I think it is more about getting an expensive satellite up and working and not spending months slowly getting into position (let alone being damaged by the belts). For mass efficiency you would start at LEO and slowly work your way up, but very occasionally in this business mass efficiency != cost efficiency.

Hubble is equipped with the means of attaching a "tugboat" to deorbit the thing. One option would be to make a sufficiently strong "tugboat" to move the thing the required 3km/s to ISS's orbit. The resultant "tugboat" would be roughly 10 times the power (or at least energy) of Dawn (Dawn was 1 ton with 4km/s delta-v, Hubble is 10 tons and needs 3km/s). On the other hand: if you have a "tug" attached, I'd expect it to be able to include a suite of gyros and adjust the position of Hubble (in at least 2 dimensions).

That's hours in the belts, not months. The few craft that have flown out of LEO on ions haven't lead to many more. I'm fairly sure it was seriously expensive to send Dawn into an escape trajectory when she had plenty of km/s delta-v on board.

Solid boosters have a bad reputation, and man-ratings are expensive. Also Northrup is a government contractor first and foremost: they won't do *any* R&D that isn't paid for by Uncle Sam. If they want to get it man-rated, they need an entirely different handout from NASA to do it (Air Force hasn't launched astronauts since the X-15). This would likely require ripping up the designs the Air Force paid for and replacing with new "man rated' work. I can't see it happening thanks to either reason (SRBs or contracting issues) and both together make it worse.

NASA has basically no abilities to do *anything* "in house" like SpaceX. Look closely at the people who "work for NASA" (and actually do work, as opposed to go to meetings and hand out funding) and you will notice an intermediary employer on their contractors' badges. Not only are they more or less incapable of directly producing anything (this hasn't changed since Mercury), but they don't really have any "GS-nn" employees who can do the work. Note that in practice all those contractors effectively work for NASA: every few years the contracts change and the joke is somebody takes the old badge with the old company off of you and somebody else puts the new badge and new company on you. Technically, this is supposed to change how management happens, but such is only likely to come up in the worst of situations. But even Apollo had lots of contractors each trying to get the biggest piece of the pie, witness the famous "towing bill" changed by Grumman to Rockwell (Grumman was upset at not getting the fancy "command module" and had to make due building the LM lander). Realistically, the US Congress isn't happy handing out billions to Bezos and Musk (both have much more powerful enemies than friends) and love to throw money at Boeing, Lockheed, and to a lesser extent Northrup (i.e. Orbital). In these situations I tend to describe ULA as "the space wing of the Military Industrial Complex" (although Northrup has charged into the feed trough as well). While they have been successful at launching rockets, their main competency is making sure the pork flows from Congress into their budget, and have the appropriate lobbyists, cushy jobs for former staffers, military, and ex-NASA employees, and diversified structure (an office and/or factory in every Congressional district).

Planes that fly by wire may just do that, depending on what the actuators did when hit by the EMP (and we'll just assume they froze in that position). Having the control surfaces at various extreme positions, and no power is a great way to stall. Once they stall they pretty much fall like a brick. Of course, that takes a bit of time and doesn't look as good on a movie screen. Do many jetliners fly by wire? I even semi-recent Airbus planes do, but I'd only expect Boeing 777 and later (basically anything they completely subcontracted out; it seems an "unBoeing" way to do things).

One thing that SSTO plans help show is how spectacularly useless the Lunar Gateway orbit is. I thought there might be some excuse to not stage descent stages, but the Lunar Gateway orbit pretty much kills any chances they might have. delta-v KSC to Lunar Gateway: 12660 m/s delta-v Lunar Gateway to Lunar surface and back: 4820 m/s Is that orbit supposed to help for Mars (or just be absolutely useless for anything not the SLS)? L2 would be where you put a general purpose "gateway" (I suspect the delta-v from L2 to the Moon might not be too bad, but I'd be impressed if you could convince NASA heads of this; don't even look at who heads Congressional science committees).

I've heard that liquid nitrogen "costs as much as milk", although I don't really know where to pick of a liter of the stuff. There's a reason people got excited about superconductors that worked above 80K (for some reason I have 40K as the boiling point of Nitrogen in my head, but wiki says 80K).

This implies that the SONAR operator is a critical link in the passive SONAR operation (I'll buy that). Otherwise any Nvidia Titan (put in a suitable rugged box for MIL-STD qualification) can pretty much compute every single direction effectively at once. There are only so many operations you can do on the limited numbers of audio samples you can get (no, it still doesn't matter how many microphones you have, you aren't going to get much beyond 1Mb/s out of any one microphone, and GPUs do TFLOPS). On second thought what you do is create an array of FFT data, each "aging out" after being repeated for some prime number (so everything doesn't change all at once). Add up all the numbers from each array and the "too random/too constant" problem goes away. Never mind how impossible it is to know his exact location, think about what it means to jam it (in such a way to create a false image). In peacetime you are effectively stating "I know exactly where your subs are (to within millimeters, and speed to millimeters per second)" (think how much damage the Walker family did when they told the USSR exactly this). In wartime you simply hit them with a torpedo, no jamming required. There's simply no reason to do this type of thing. I don't think the US Navy ships running aground have much to do with SONAR (or even GPS meddling, although that likely has been used by Iran to capture a drone). More likely Fat Leonard has screwed up the Pacific Naval officer corps far worse than publicly known. Exact SONAR fakes are basically impossible (RADAR probably works, especially for airborne RADARs. I'd expect ground based stuff often has more receiving antennas than you expect).

If you want to jam something, you basically need multiple white noise generator (because submarines tend to drag long lines with plenty of microphones in an array). To be honest, I'd strongly recommend the "white noise generators" run as close to a randomly generated FFT as possible, and change the FFTs relatively slowly. On the other hand, if you know the location and "sample" of what the jammers are producing, you now have active sonar, something typically only used by destroyers and never submarines. This might be more valuable than the effects of the jamming. But that "original signal" is still buried underneath all that noise. Too constant, and it becomes easier to subtract out the jamming noise as the jamming noise and target sound change relative position. Too (pseudo) random a jamming noise, and you can average the signal out over time and hear the target signal.

First: The AJ260 (solid rocket booster 21 feet in diameter and built for Apollo) *was* built like a submarine. Although that was to hold pressure in. Maybe you could build it lighter if you light it and then launched it through the water. Second: I'm fairly sure no sub-launched missile has positive buoyancy. Certainly somebody might have thought of that (I'll admit that "compactness" is a critical sub-launched missile virtue). Third: There exists a (now sadly in bureaucratic limbo as of 2015) amature rocket attempt (to orbit?) that is balloon based. https://www.theregister.co.uk/Tag/lohan Scott Manley link on the AJ260: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfMPgAQD420

Can I keep my old "Hammer" graphics as a drop down? Hammer based design was something I loved when I was a new kerbal player, and don't take my hammers away! More delta-v indicators? Is the engineer report going to include delta-v? Pretty silly to include how much delta-v each burn requires if the delta-v during design is a deep, dark secret. Although the blog implies that hitting the launch button (and reverting) may show you such things, although since you can't lay in a burn from the launch tower (one of my long standing gripes) you are unlikely to access that data. A whole launch, lay in a burn, read the delta-v, revert to construction seems way to silly to get delta-v in unmodded KSP). You want a hype train? Try Balsa Model Planes. To me, hype trains require an observable delta between old and new. KSP is just too established and polished for much of a hype train.

That's good, but I'm shocked it is needed to simply land a lander on the Mun. I rarely play KSP anymore, but on a whim over the weekend built a munar lander. The resonance thanks to the landing legs was so bad I was afraid to let my kerbal out and put up a flag, but instead returned home. I can't imagine new players having to fight broken defaults simply to exit a landing craft after they finally made it to the Mun.

1985: Carl Sagan writes a novel named Contact 1996: Carl Sagan dies 1997: Contact movie made I think this explains a lot about Contact the Movie. In 1985, there is no way the Chinese are making anything like a starship and I wouldn't expect one in 1997 either. I'd strongly doubt that the USSR (1985) or Russia (1997) would be up to building a 350 billion dollar starship, but some might expect them to try.

Best guess is that it is more effective at LEO (which rarely need to bother with station keeping, if they need to move they need to move much further/faster than EM means allow) and less effective at GTO/GSO where stationkeeping is critical. It makes a lot of sense for deorbiting: just using the magnetic field to produce current will begin deorbiting the satellite.