wumpus

FOOF: So powerful the chemical formula alone will crash some Intel processors.

The printing press may be the first invention that was a complex system and not simply "one simple change" creates something new (well, for post-classical Europe. I'm sure some Roman and Chinese stuff qualifies, and I suspect the Korean inventor of the thing knew that). You didn't have a working printing press without: Moving type: This is the proper name for the thing (printing presses with non-movable type were old and not terribly good for anything but printing indulgences). That Guetenburg was a goldsmith and could presumably made these on his own is one of the few reasons he is still believed to have made it that quickly. Paper: Not sure if a printing press can print on sheepskin (probably can, see indulgences) but it costs more for the material than the scribe. ink: actually the ink is pretty close to the classical scribe ink recipe, but it did require a change The press itself. They weren't exactly common before moveable type and paper, I suspect that you needed to buy/build a grape press. And about 10 other things I've forgotten since college.

Ouch! I've only tried testing it once, and I thought I deployed it far too early (which might have been only and extra 1000m) and found it quite boring waiting for the kerbal to get low enough to start the landing sequence (I did get plenty of flare practice in before landing).

Oddly enough, anyone in such a position could simply request a transfer. Himler, after couldn't stomach being present for the killings. Of course, there was the catch: nearly all the transfers were going to the Eastern Front, and that was essentially a death sentence (with often a brief journey through Hell on Earth first).

"Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window". Steve Wozniak. And when you can download "iEvilOverlord" onto a iPhone, don't trust that either. Or perhaps trust the hardware (because you can kick it if it is bad), but not the software.

That would explain the later acceptance of the commission (which is well known), but not the alleged enlisting [which is why I posted it]. It also does little to mitigate the subsequent crimes against humanity he committed to simply manufacture those rockets (more slaves were worked to death than ever simply killed by them as weapons of war).

I'm pretty sure that plenty of people were shocked after watching 'Apollo 13' and then looking at an actual Apollo spacecraft* in a museum. Astronauts have said that the only way they were tolerable at all was the zero gravity. * Micheal Collins insists that capsules are ingested, spacecraft are flown, and that while that name was used for the Mercury program, it was a mistake.

A nuclear rocket can be designed to run on anything, but getting anywhere near 800s Isp will require hydrogen (or an extremely efficient (and hot enough about to meltdown) use of helium, nothing else comes close). Using water would net you a similar Isp to hydrolox and likely worse. Using CO2 would definitely be worse. The only saving grace is that these are likely better than any other ISRU chemical rocket. And I stand by my "essense of snacks". I can't see kerbals developing rocket power if snacks aren't involved some way.

That's what they used for the demo. Granted, the top of the line card is built for machine learning (which shouldn't add a lot of circuitry) and high performance numerical computing (which does), and is basically the same as the $15,000 Tesla V100 with some key features disabled (ECC being the most obvious) and it isn't all that much more impressive at graphics than the "consumer" 1080ti (which is currently selling at 50% over MSRP thanks to miners). It is a great card for all its functions except graphics (while it is the best at graphics, the price is extreme [and will probably be exceeded by the 1180 at far lower cost]). To be honest, I think that raytracing is an especially great fit for Unity-level developers: it gets great results without having to special case everything and shouldn't require all the "visual mods" that KSP has (maybe it still would. How do you raytrace a gas giant?). From what I've heard, AAAA-level games would still require hand crafting and outperform the ray-tracer, but require AAAA budgets (Industrial Light an Magic and WETA similarly use other methods).

Except that plenty of parts of BFR and SLS are well known, allowing a certain amount of comparison: We know the original flight characteristics of the SLS engines because they've flow before (mostly in the shuttle). Granted, after sufficient senatorial meddling the rocket already has changed significantly and will likely continue to mutate until (or if) it flies. The BFR's Raptor engine has undergone plenty of testing and has become a known thing. The lower stage of the BRF is largely a scaled up Falcon 9 lower stage and is known within "Kerbal levels". Unfortunately the upper stage (fairing, and any third stages) are completely unknown and would remain untested and malleable even if Elon Musk gave everyone access to the engineering data. So you can argue a lot about each rocket. Unfortunately the things you can't calculate accurate information about are things like "tonnage to orbit" and "cost of said tonnage", which makes most of the discussion here pointless (except to argue that Rocket labs can likely deliver raw payload cheaper to orbit cheaper (per kg) than SLS. Because that simply isn't a SLS design goal).

There are a few problems with this approach (plus I don't think you can get more than 115k on the side of a 5.25" Apple ][ floppy): Ouput to NTSC has hard limits (and the Woz used them to make color happen). Using any type of monitor from 1983-1987 won't make you happy (unless you score some type of SVGA beast, kludge up some scary interface, and decrease the speed until the electron beam is in danger of burning the screen). No idea if modern LCD monitors can accept a signal that takes minutes or hours to produce, but they *should* (but probably don't). You could easily (well somewhat easily) print to dot matrix at full 92dpi or whatever they produced (and get a 800-1200ish resolution, 4 bit monochome possibly increased or with color added by altering the ribbon (and I'd expect you would have to clean and dye your own ribbons. I don't think color was available). I'm pretty sure this was done a few times and the method mentioned in magazines (without any crazy ribbon replacement ideas). A better suggestion would be to rig up a flashlight (ideally three lasers if doing this after blue lasers were available) and slowly track it across a screen (like a CRT monitor, only with light instead of an electronic beam: use some sort of clockwork mechanism to move the light). Then have a camera [and it will probably need film if you do it now (or any time blue lasers were available) good luck finding any or developing it] with the lens open and capture the whole thing as a single image. I don't think simple ray tracers required that much memory, but the amount of data that you would have to calculate on a 6502 would be painful, and I'm sure there are tricks to store some of the more common calculations (where the Apple wouldn't have room). Mostly people thought of wire frame 3d when they thought of 3d at all, and you could draw that [at high resolution] with a dot matrix printer.

Basically it is whatever fuel is convenient. I *think* there was a normalization based on a rocket engine that used hypergolic fuels, but they've moved a bit beyond that. NTR uses only fuel: which pretty much has to be hydrogen (I suspect "oxidizer" would be better than any other fuel). Terrier screams RT-10 type hydrox [expander cycle] engine most of the bigger engines appear to be kerolox engines Monoprop could reasonably work as HTP, it doesn't appear to have multiple uses. Solid is presumably aluminum perchlorate. This being KSP, I'm going to go with an "essense of snacks [US edition]": fuel is partially hydrogenated soybean oil, oxidizer is high fructose corn syrup, monoprop is carbon dioxide (think fizzy drinks), and solid is solidified powdered cheese (preferably artificial). No comments that HFCS won't reduce PHSO (you can reverse them, but I don't think the problem will go away).

"Rendered in real time" on multiple $5000 Titan Vs. Don't expect it on your desktop anytime soon.

JPL must also charge some serious bucks to drive Curiosity and the other rovers all over Mars (even doing experiments and maintaining with stuck rovers isn't going to be much cheaper). In the 1970s NASA would build at least two copies of various probes (like Voyager 1 & 2). While building the first article was required a full-blown R&D budget, the cost of the second was a tiny percentage of the first. Obviously you needed two launchers (at full cost) and ground control couldn't have been much cheaper (although I'm certain it made finding backups easier). Eventually they decided that two launches was one too many (probably during the "everything launches from the Shuttle" era) and they stopped doing that (but somewhat revived the concept with the Mars rovers). Reducing the cost of the payload is generally not seen as sexy as launching rockets, but Bigelow appears to be bringing at least some private megabucks in "dry mass" spacecraft.

I'm not sure ULA is capable of "going big" or even taking an initiative at all. They were created to be the "military industrial complex's" contractor for any satellite launches. They design things when they are paid to design them, then expect to be paid to fix any mistakes. The mentality of a government contractor (and the unbelievable red tape involved) is not remotely conductive to grabbing the initiative and success in non-sweetheart deals. On the other hand, Spacex is discovering that these same customers demand more customer service than he can imagine and aren't remotely interested in his "low fares to space". I've seen attempts to break into the commercial world by smaller contractors (from the inside). It wasn't pretty.

This is one of my biggest problems with NTRs in regular use. Expect to keep dumping hydrogen on the reactor long after pulling the rods and "stopping" the reaction. Certainly, the immediate post-reacting cooling can likely give full thrust, but you still dump a lot of precious post-burn fuel with little thrust. I've pointed out that simply dumping the core after each use is a likely system, and suspect that was the idea in the 1970s as well.

PB666 posted his calculations on this forum. You can cut the fuel needed in half if you are willing to increase the time needed by two orders of magnitude, although the first 10% and 20% add far less time to the voyage (the spreadsheet claims that burning 270 degrees instead of 360 degrees is slightly faster, but thanks to the units this may be a copying error). In practice, I'm reasonably sure it makes more sense to bring the fuel and cut the thrust needed from the ion thrusters. It should be certainly easier to double the Isp (and thus use half the fuel) instead of increasing the thrust by two orders of magnitude (thus making the same trip with half the fuel in the same time by Pe-kicks).

I'm curious how long it takes the vegetation to grow like that. It certainly shows that it has been stable for some length of time, but only in that *exact* position.

I don't think that this goes back to beta, and I wish it would (I was lucky enough to save a copy, but don't ask: you can't have it from me). Beta was pretty much the final edition of clearly developing design of KSP, one with mad science and pancake-based designs. Most of which followed some really bad physics (and KSP has always been about rocket science: ignoring physics was simply the wrong path). But it was fun. Boy was it fun (not necessarily better than the released edition. Just that learning to create aerodynamically stable rockets after thinking we understood "rocket science" wasn't the most enjoyable process Squad has put us through). 1.2 might be less buggy, but is basically just an advanced edition of 1.0.4 (and 1.0.4 is just a series of bug fixes from 1.0.0). .90 was *different*. It had the souposphere, it computed air resistance by component (i.e. it didn't care about streamlining *at* *all*), and it didn't begin to require aerodynamic stability. Launch at TWR=2.0 and *maintian* that to about 10,000 meters, then turn 45 degrees and max your thrust. Not responsible for any bad habits gained in ancient code.

Both of these require you to remain near a star or planet, and you will exceed escape velocity .00001% of your way to relativistic speed. Drifting between stars under constant acceleration leaves you with fewer choices.

I'm assuming that tourists still can't EVA and are doomed.

While it is likely that the em-drive is bunk, that doesn't mean that massless (or asymptotically massless) thrusters are impossible. You can easily create momentum bearing objects from pure energy and fling them out your exhaust port: an LED does this very well. There are known to be hard limits on the thrust an em-drive can produce without breaking *more* physical laws (such as energy conservation). It is quite possible that this is the limit (although probably for perfectly efficient light sources of arbitrary low wavelength, not real LEDs). You can build an ion drive with arbitrary Isp out of a synchrotron. I'd assume that both the thrust and the efficiency aren't remotely serious for interplanetary use, but they might be reconsidered for interstellar uses. Just change the Ve in the rocket equation to p/mr and solve for the relativistic momentum (mr meaning rest mass). At this point I suspect the limiting factor is energy, not the tyrannical rocket equation, and I'm not sufficiently familiar with the energy problems of interstellar craft (the rocket equation essentially forbids them). One thing to remember: if your output is sufficiently inefficient you might wind up getting more thrust from intelligently designed cooling panels (that emit sufficiently high frequency EM in the right direction).

You might be looking at it from a KSP players point of view or perhaps how Spacex would do a similar thing. In such normal worlds, you spend money and expect to get things done. You spend money to go into a huge money pit and you have problems. NASA is a governement agency and deals with the entirely different world of convincing Congress to maintain funding. In such a world, a huge money pit is ideal (provided said money spills into the right congressional districts) as it would maintain funding above all else and have whatever make-work projects are needed to keep it going. In such a system, NASA could then go onto the Moon or Mars simply to keep the DSG gravy train going to the right congressional districts. There are many lessons from the Shuttle. From an engineering aspect, the shuttle did nearly everything wrong. Another lesson was that letting the various paymasters pile too many conflicting requirements clearly caused this disaster (I've seen may shuttle design 'improvements'. None of them would meet the requirements NASA received to build the shuttle). One *critical* lesson should be that Congress will react to the "sunk cost fallacy" by letting you make 134 launches, compared to Apollos 27 (and most of them were unmanned tests of parts of Saturn). NASA was created to respond to Sputnic in 1958 and altered in 1962 to put a man on the Moon. Since then it has been a jobs program with a public face of manned space and secondary turf of space science and aeronautics R&D (secondary missions tend to be underfunded but have less political meddling. This works well until you have a JWT-sized budget disaster). It also has the problem of a "long term mission" changing with every new president, so any mission to Mars would likely need to be done by Spacex (or possibly Blue Origin if something happens to Musk/Spacex/BFR). Spacex is unlikely to have the money, so presumably it would come from Congress, with NASA getting a cut. My overall point is that NASA may well see DSG as a "white elephant in space" (like plenty of others concerned with space). But they know they will be the ones getting the budget to feed the elephant, and Congress will have trouble shutting that flow down. Such "long term budget sources" are seen in a vastly different light inside NASA (especially the high level GS-types and similar contractors).

The B-52 also launched the Pegasus (although Orbital currently uses a L1011) into orbit. I'm not sure it is accurate to draw the shuttle fuel tank as a "launcher" without the orbiter and the engines that burned said fuel/oxidizer. Skylab was 75 tons, the Salyuts were 18 tons, Mir was 130 tons. You would never guess from those images.

In the US, yes. And in some very different ways. *There were enough stories in a row of cops confiscating cameras containing evidence of the cops' crimes that state laws were enacting prohibiting this. * Photographing a farm [from public property] may be illegal in certain states [or illegal while there for other reasons'] * Photographers have been hassled for photographing public buildings. I haven't heard this in a while, presumably anyone casing a crime uses a less obvious phone camera (google hits everything else but this). Mostly this about sufficiently powerful people (especially cops) not having their word questioned by pesky things like physical evidence. I have no idea why this would be an issue in space. Perhaps they want to make sure the "blurred out bits" stay blurred out (insert conspiracy theory about editing parts without blurring them).