Terwin

NASA was not keen on falcon 9 testing at KSC, which is why they built boca chica in the first place. I would be surprised if spaceX did not ask about testing at KSC just for the sake of less red tape, but I doubt they were keen on risking their historic launch pads for that purpose. No one is saying they need to rush the job, they are saying 'why has this not even started yet?!?'

Would you like to point out a better site they could have used? Remember: * on the Gulf Coast as far south as possible * little or no near-by housing/businesses * available for sale with enough space Note: that first point is by far the most important

Non-particulate radiation is usually more of a lightbulb/flashlight type of dispersal as opposed to toxic fumes which only need a small leak to be dangerous. (X-rays and Gamma rays are just specific wavelengths of light after all), and the steel shell should be pretty effective at stopping particulate radiation(neutrons and fall-out) So small holes may cause certain parts of the cabin to be more dangerous, but still far less dangerous than an unprotected cabin.

Just because leather is a preferred material for slings does not make it the only possible option. Then again, a small plum would be a good compromise between large enough to throw easily and small enough to carry spares, so it seams feasible that they could even just be manually thrown stones. Or they could be thrown using a wooden atlatl-like arm extension. Humans are endlessly inventive when it comes to ways to kill things after all. Unless this is just a case of trying to figure out how to manage wheels(round stones fed into the front and scooped up from the rear could last longer than wooden rollers.

Static fires also need warnings/permissions, so why bother if you do not expect any useful data?

If you already had an answer you wanted, why bother to ask other people? And if you want realistic answers, why respond with your own hope-based answer?

The oceans already have 500 times the known land-based uranium reserves, and water is a great buffer for radiation(roughly 1/10 the effectiveness of a similar depth of lead, but ionizing radiation just converts H2O into h2o2 which rapidly breaks back down to water, making it much safer long-term) 'cooling pools' where they have used radioactive fuel rods filling the bottom 1/3 of a 12m deep pool, are lower radiation environments for the first third of their depth than the normal background radiation. Deep parts of the ocean would actually be good places to dump radioactive waste in slow-release containers if not for the risk of rogue actors collecting them for use in dirty-bombs, and legal issues with guarding a patch of international waters.

Computers already have heat dissipation issues, not keen on my internal organs getting cooked any time I try to use my internal vr system. Think I'll just stick with wearables and stationary systems.

Competition gave us Apollo, cooperation gave us the ISS. I expect that 'fear of falling behind ' is a much more effective motivatior than thirst for discovery, at least when it comes to national budgets.

Aborting a solid rocket motor is difficult to impossible. As such, at a minimum, your LES must be able to pull your capsule away from your launch system at the same time the launch system just got lighter and faster because it lost it's payload. Solid rockets are not adjustable or restartable, and I am not aware of any way to light one after leaving the launch mount. Even gimbaling a solid rocket is very difficult, so a pure solid launch system would offer little to no ability to correct for atmospheric changes or anything else that is not 100% known before launch, including the solid fuel not burning 100% evenly. As such, I do not see anything akin to our current solid boosters being able to get human rated without a liquid stage burning at the same time to provide those adjustments.

Cost-effective containment is an issue for fusion due to neutron activation, but a much bigger issue for fusion is a cost-effective means of triggering the fusion itself. I think it was only a few years ago that they finally got a fusion reaction that produced more energy than it absorbed to initiate. And this ignores all of the inefficiencies of getting that energy converted and concentrated to where it needed to be(something on the order of a few percent efficient) or the difficulties in extracting that energy in a useful form(possibly as high as 40-50% efficient if we are lucky) So just getting fusion to the point where it can power itself is still multiple orders of magnitude of efficiency away at least. The cost of repairing/replacing shielding is still so far in the future that we do not even know for certain it will be an issue.

You do realize that the height of that boca chica launch pad is the same as greater than the depth of the flame trenches at the NASA launch pads, correct? Now that there is a deluge system, the only real difference is the flame diverter, which may or may not be counter-productive as it would need to interfere with the exhaust closer to the rocket than the current setup

It seem to me that so long as the only cargo being launched is telemetry equipment, it is clear that any launches are just further testing, and things like engine failures are to be expected. A test-launch seems like it would help examine and validate better than test-fires, and considering how hardware-rich the starship program is, it is probably cheaper to dispose of some older engines and an old airframe in a test-launch than to perform the testing needed to get the same data on the ground, especially when one of the bottle-necks is launch-pad repairs. With 33 engines, you could even have batches of engines with different optimizations all lunched together to see how well they work. It might be very dangerous to do this without the engine separation hardware or a large throttle capacity, but both of those are present on SH. I would not be surprised to learn that the failed engines all had similar optimizations that have since been adjusted or discarded.

Weren't the last 2 unintentional booster losses due to rough seas causing it to fall over before it got back to shore? I have not been paying close attention, but those are the last two that I remember.

Lots of people wanted war, even lots of people in power wanted war. They may not have admitted it as such, but they clearly did. Lots of powerful people make lots of money off of weapons, and war is a great way to encourage large weapons purchases. As such, a world without war would necessitate a world without greed. If it was a world without greed, I do not see how you could even classify them as humans any more. Without a propensity to expand, the proto-humans stay in a small community and get wiped out by a single adverse event. As such, a propensity to expand is needed for humanity to even come into existence, so positing a world without the human desire to expand necessarily means a world without humans at all. Don't forget hat the proto-Neanderthals migrated up north to experience differential evolution so that when re-combined with the expanding proto-homo sapiens we got the super-intelligent cross-breeds(by comparison to their parents) that eventually became modern humans. So even if proto-humans never had a species ending event, they would still be small animalistic tribes without engaging in both migration and expansion. Sure there is logic to the prevention of murder. Murder harms the community by reducing the available manpower as well as usually engendering a strong emotional reaction in those who know the murdered and thus encouraging more wastage of community resources. There is more to it than that, but that is sufficient. (if you look at them, every one of the 10 commandments is geared towards creating and perpetuating a strong and growing community, I consider that to be one of the reasons that the Judeo-Christian value systems have been so successful) Animals are capable of active cognition, but they generally rely on previous analysis and generalization(Oh, an apple, I eat those, oh, a predator, I run from those, etc). Humans are capable of prolonged active cognition(and also meta-cognition, which I think is unique to humans), but we are also capable of falling back on trained reflex as well(if you ever drove somewhere and after getting there you cannot remember the drive, then you were on 'autopilot', also called inattention blindness and is similar to how animals behave most of the time). I hope 'false reality of hard observation' is more akin to evaluating the news with skepticism and an eye to likely causes of bias(aka, do these allegations against $POLITCAL_FIGURE make sense, or are they more likely to be hyperbole/propaganda?), as opposed to flat out refusal of demonstrated fact(aka 'the earth is flat' and 'the moon landings were faked'). Although I will admit that the barrier between the two got a lot fuzzier post-Snowden.

Citation needed. Outside of the family unit, which has a biological drive to care for one's offspring, I do not see it. Possibly because of of the biological drive to compete for resources to perpetuate your genes. If humans have been capable of choosing peace for > 4000 years and they never have(or at least any group that has, has been so thourghly destroyed as to leave little trace), then I do not see that changing. Oh, so that is how you intend to define world peace. Sure, we have never had Interplanetary conflict, so we have always had world peace. Brother killing brother and nation killing nation is just internal conflict after all. Lynchings, riots, armed voter suppression, and repeated deployment of the national guard notwithstanding. Innovation builds on innovation. If you look closely, there is an exponential curve starting with the development of agriculture. Sure there are bumps(wars) and dips(fall of roman empire, dark ages, etc) but the curve is there. I see no issue with a trend that has been in place for thousands of years continuing apace, but I also do not see something that has not had any prelude in thousands of years coming about. (Even rockets at least have an astronaut (myth?) from 4000 years ago, search on Chinese rocket chair)

China has several minority populations that they are still repressing and trying to eliminate. Anyone who is not Han is a second-class citizen. Japan is much smaller and is already more or less 100% ethnically the same. I think the last Japanese internal war was an attempted revolution(the 'Meji restoration') in 1868, when the often-warring shogunate was eliminated. Generally speaking, anyone with multiple cultures or ethnicities has internal strife, Japan removed their competing culture, and China is repressing theirs(with an eye to eliminating them over time). I would like some evidence of that, as I can think of many many counter-examples on both an individual and national levels, but most or all of them would count as political and thus not suitable for this forum. (I think Germany shutting down their nuclear reactors only to start buying nuclear power from France might not be too political?) Nuclear weapons were developed because 1) it was shown to be possible, 2) hear-say that someone else might be working on it too. Some countries did it only with reason 1, but no one had more than hear-say or logical assumptions that others were working on them.

Could you please define 'true world peace'? Is it something that is compatible with humans? note: unless you make dramatic changes to humans(like removal of free-will) you will not get rid of ambition, envy, greed, or ingenuity. If you want you 'true world peace' to last, or even be possible, it needs to accommodate unlimited amounts of all three of those. All of the required theory for general computing was developed before the end of WW2 (including hardware that was developed as part of the work on Enigma). The discovery of semiconductors was supposedly done by someone using a crystal radio that investigated why his cracked quartz worked so much better than other quartz crystals, so no government funding needed. (and with the popularity of radio with garage tinkers after WW2, such a discovery was more or less inevitable) There may have been fewer big vacuum-tube computers without the ones funded by the military, but after transistors were discovered, private computing would have exploded just the same. (Unless you posit that no one would ever invent auto-calculating spread-sheets like VisiCalc, in spite of accounting departments being primarily staffed by human 'computers' who's only job was to manually populate spreadsheets. That is where the name came from after all, it became essential to businesses as a machine to replace the humans with that job title)

Perhaps, but nuclear fuel is much easier to handle than antimatter, and can be kept for extended periods in adequately spaced racks. Also, unless you find somewhere where we can mine antimatter, it only works as a storage medium(like hydrogen or batteries) not as a power source(like oil, coal or nuclear) So if we have the power to create antimatter, why not just use that power directly instead of making an antimatter reactor? (outside of a few edge cases like rocketry where doing things like manufacturing hydrogen, loading it on a rocket and then burning it actually makes sense)

During operations, a nuclear reactor must ride the fine line between inert(sub-critical) and bomb(super-critical). It is *much* easier to cross that line than to ride it for any length of time. This means that not only are nuclear bombs easier than nuclear reactors, it takes careful planning to make a nuclear reactor with a low chance of being a bomb instead. So the only way for humans to have nuclear reactors without nuclear bombs is to re-write the majority of human nature(in particular the competitive bits which are critical for both survival and procreation)

239 launches according to the video Wiki: 17.4 t (38,000 lb) when landing on ASDS So 4158.6 tons max if they were all F9 drone landings, but there were also some heavies and plenty of launches below max capacity, so no idea on the actual total, but that seems like a reasonable ball-park.

I think that Guidance(if any) is the most expensive part of any missile, followed by propulsion then payload and finally casing(except for nukes, as the payload is probably most expensive for those). The long/narrow profile helps minimize the target area for defensive fire, and a bit of armor that doubles as fragmentation or penetration material is also likely to be useful. I would not be surprised if the most practical space missile turned out to look like a finless normal missile, possibly with a more exposed motor to enable better gimble, and rcs ports.

Would not the solar wind cause a trivial amount of drag on planetary bodies casing them to be continuously slowing down by amounts too small to measure? That sounds like a long duration, but not perpetual scenario. Not sure how that balances with the loss of mass from the star due to both fusion and expelled mass(solar wind), but even if that keeps the system balanced, it is still not a 'perpetual' state, as it depends on the star converting mass to energy.

If you are referring to the contents of the files, I am pretty sure that they are in plaintext and do not have any font information present. They are also format sensitive, so if you are using a document editor(like Word) as opposed to a text editor(such as notepad), then you will be adding extraneous formatting information(like fonts) that will likely break the file. On the other hand, if you are referring to the in-game font, I expect that RD is just using the ksp default font, so you should not need to specify it anywhere. Finally, if you are referring to a file that you opened up with weird non-text information in it, then you probably opened a binary file, and those are not things you should be trying to edit directly, instead you should be editing the source code, then recompiling them from there. --- Ok, I just took a look at t42, and that is a binary file. you cannot edit that, and if you successfully save any changes to the file you might well break your entire KSP install. Everything you can edit shold be in .cfg files such as mks/parts/MKS_Processor125.cfg note: editing the config for the 1.25m processor(file listed above) should let you add a new process option for that part, same with the 2.5m and 3.75m configs --- If you really wan to know the 'font' it would be hexidecimal, and you would need to use a hexidecimal(or 'Hex') editor. I would strongly recommend against this however as a binary file is basically one giant number with nothing human readable or editable in the file.

The entire point of a perpetual motion machine is that it generates more energy than it consumes. Planetary orbits are in a state of dynamic equilibrium, which is something entirely different. From certain points of view a planetary body can seem to gain or lose energy, but that is usually an energy exchange with some other body in the system(usually Jupiter, if only because it has > 70% of the planetary mass in our solar system)