LN400

One thing I noticed when I got my first rovers to Mun in 0.1-something (I forgot), both ultra lights (first and not a bright idea) and heavier ones was how easy it was to lose traction if I went much faster than 2-3 m/s. Came up with some ideas, some were ok, others were ludicrous. An ok idea was to keep the speed down and enabling brakes on the rear (uphill) wheels and disabling the brakes on the front (downhill) wheels. One of the more ludicrous ideas was to use the SAS to stabilize, raise the front and ride like a madman on the rear wheels hammering down the B key until I either 1) reached the bottom of the slope or 2) the wheels tore themselves up except when I totally didn't see this fairly large crater further down the canyon. That didn't end well when I returned to ground level. Exploding steel plates are fascinating. Then again, this is KSP and in KSP I demand explosions! The icy surface is one that did perplex me though. Even on relatively flat ground, the rovers would slide off too easily. Haven't got around to try the v1.0.2 yet but I'm gonna keep an eye on this buggy brake/sliding business.

Both delivered. Congrats to the team on a successful launch and delivery.

Tuning in. Thanks for the heads up.

True, but one, we can't say we understand all those carvings and two, when Earth is gone, so are the carvings.

Not sure about this one. Right up until the last couple of centuries, the idea that we all had one origin would be met with a barrage of laughter, and anger. It was much thanks to archaeology (alongside other sciences) that we now have a better clue. Now there is no doubt the generation that left their homeland knew they were moving out. Generations later, recorded history tells us we no longer had any idea we once had moved out. Now imagine human descendents on another planet 9,000,000,000 years from now. Any reason to think they will still remember the same way our ancestors forgot, to put it slightly Douglas Adams-y? Archaeology they can outright forget about seeing Earth ceased to exist almost 1000,000,000 years before when this one average star snuffed it, grew and evaporated Earth. What evidence will be left? Written evidence? Like Linear A, a written language noone can read anymore? There is also a growing concern that our recorded data at one point into the future will be lost forever or at least be completely indechipherable. And we're not talking that much into the future. Then again, it is perfectly plausible to think that someone, somewhere into the future, discovers a way to keep recorded history available and comprehensible forall future generations. It's just that we have no indication what that method will be or if it is even possible so we can't really conclude anything.

Much of the debate over what's cheating, I feel, ultimately boils down to For whatever my opinion's worth: Cheating is only when you play the game in a way that gives you the feeling you are cheating in your own gaming session. If KSP was a MMO game then things would have been different but since it's not and your way of playing has zero influence on the outcome of my game, calling someone else's way of playing 'cheating' is just silly. As for the original topic: I wouldn't mind playing stock at all and in fact I did for a long time before I got tired of doing the same calculations over and over again and got KER. Saved me tons of paper too. Another thing is, to get to know the game, I don't think there are any better ways than to start stock. You get to know the mechanics and whatever peculiarities or bugs you find. It makes zero sense getting the game, first thing then download a containerload of mods then complain the game is acting funny. This can take a good while. Then, after playing stock-ish, I wanted a different experience and got more mods. Parts mods mostly. I also got mods like KOS which I managed to incorperate in my real life studies. KOS gave me a good platform to toy around with PID controller theory.

Religion as such is definitely not the enemy of reason. It's how religion is interpreted and used. It goes for all religions. Baghdad was once one of the most scholared places on Earth, until the old caliph Harun ar-Rashid died and they got fights for power instead of the strife for more knowledge. Copernicus was religious. He still, albeit nervously, said the sun was really the one standing still. Newton was religious. Didn't stop him from being one of the most important figures in more modern physics and cosmology. Kepler too and that bloke was even into astrology. It's how it's all being used, misused and abused by some people. Either out of their own sheer, monumental ignorance combined with an urge to command other people around, or they somehow figured out there's a gain in there somewhere, for themselves, to preach something they honestly couldn't care less about was true or wrong, combined with an urge to command other people around.

One reason why education in science is so important, why science literacy is so important and why it is so important to not be quiet whenever someone comes trundling along saying "ok that's it, science class closed" which seems to be the wet dream of quite a few.

He was very much noticed in Arab media and they didn't go easier on him than anyone else who realize that to eyeball the curvature you would need something bigger than a kitchen sink. Here's one neutral news story on that vid http://english.alarabiya.net/en/variety/2015/02/16/Saudi-cleric-Sun-revolves-around-stationary-Earth.html

They don't all believe this. You will find nutjobs everywhere who will claim their favourite piece of litterature proves the Earth is [insert your favourite shape here] shaped. Also, http://www.space.gov.ae/

Fair enough. I suppose it doesn't harm the forum much as long as the forum isn't flooded and luckily that isn't the case here.

Lezzie... NWO, Illuminati, the Government, the Aliens, shapeshifting geckos, political extremist alien geckos living in volcanos on the south pole which isn't really a pole because the earth is flat because it's hollow and the mid east is all fake and totally not real and up is down and blue is a giraffe and and.... yes, there is a bunch of followers for each insane conspiracy theory and yes the theories really are insane. I'm still wondering about these topics though. One, I can go for one for a laugh. A series, not sure what the point is there.

We're fresh out of stagnant water. Would you like the vintage cream instead? It is a bit odd. I can cook a pasta sauce but don't ask me to make a straight forward gravy.

I can cook pretty much everything. If it's edible or non-lethal is another question entirely. I do know how to cook a pretty decent pasta sauce though.

My favourite is still the dreaded Government, as opposed to your regular government. Somehow, I get a feeling people talking about this capital G Government haven't looked around much. Blindly guessing which government it would be would offer somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1/190 in odds of getting it right.

First obstacle is noone understands fully the biological processes, the best scientists are still working on understanding more, to make claims we can produce equally successful tech. This whole idea that machines are superior, to me, sounds like the old dream of Dr Frankenstein meets modern technophilia, an untamed enthusiasm for what we can do (and quite often ignoring the failures along the way). In short, the notion that somehow we can be Creators, or even, should be Creators. I don't believe in any creator and looking at how technology has failed before and will fail over and over again, and seeing the surface of the vast depth of complexity of a single cell and how we have no tech that is in the same league, seeing human pride when perhaps a bit more modesty would fit better, I don't expect anyone to come up with a tech that will, on every level, evolutionary, psychologically, culturally, socially, match the human species. We are still baffled by the complexity of amoebas, single cell organisms. We can't even match that and as far as we know, they really are simpletons.

Not sure if something is read into what I wrote that I didn't write or intend to write but I agree, life itself couldn't care less about each species. As for difference between offspring taking over and machines taking over, that is fundamentally different. Our offspring is our own species, our machines are not so the arguement still stands, as a species, having machines replacing us, or any other species, will be a failure of the species. Mind you, arguements like "but machines have already replaced us, look at robots" is not a relevant arguement in this context. I'm not talking about machines doing our work for us, some machines even better, but a wholesale replacement of an entire species of living organisms of a complexity and richness in variations no machines are yet to come remotely close to.

Well, I also took a side step from the main discussion to comment on some of the visions you will find around, so these are my views in that context. As for failure as a species, well the sole purpose of being is well, to be, to have offspring and to adapt as a species. If we replace ourselves with our own machines then we are no more and we have failed the only purpose there ever was. Same for 'victory'. Some ideas of Utopia are very clear that it would be humankind's greatest achievment if we replace ourselves with our own machines. So yeah, victory seems like a fitting word here.

Very true. "prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future." - Niels Bohr On a flip note: Personally, I see any scenario where we are replaced as a species by our own technology as the Final Failure of ours as a species. There are visions around of a utopia where humans are all gone and replaced by machines. There are people who wish (really, wish) humans were machines in the most technological, physical sense. I see no gain for us in those scenarios and I would certainly not call it utopia, more a nightmare, as going extinct is not what one would call a victory.

Just a couple of thoughts. Biological evolution is not driven towards a goal. There is no planning in evolution. No design evaluation. As far as evolution goes there is now and what is physically/chemically/biologically possible right now but evolution has no concept of future. There are no reasons why one would think evolution gives us "the best". Evolution is full of examples of twists and turns that ended up in dead end alleys, or that worked but makes no sense whatsoever in terms of planning ahead. This however is not relevant to whether or not biology is more or less complex than the most complex technology humans have created. It's been said already in this topic but I'll repeat it. As far as complexity goes, the most complex technology we have created is barely worth mentioning compared to the complexity of biology. It's been repeated many times how technology is superior in any and every way but when one shows a giga- (let's go overboard with a peta-) pixel camera is superior to the eye, I don't think they understand the complexity involved at every level from light entering the eyeball, and every step, towards the brain processing the neural signals. This whole process is one where biology is superior. So, you have your petapixel camera. What will technology do with that camera other than press the shutter button? How will technology build up an awareness of the world around it to the same level we build up awareness of our surroundings? Yes we do need technology to say, go into environments that would kill us if we didn't have the tech but that is not an indication of technology's superiority to biology. Could just as well have been an indication of biology's command of technology.

Not sure if the mass has changed in the latest version (I haven't got around to try it yet) but the numbers I get are Pod 0.840 TR-18A 0.050 FL-T800 4.5 wet/0.5 dry T-45 1.5 Total 6.89 wet/2.89 dry 320*9.81*ln(6.89/2.89) = 2727.38 which is considerably less than 6424.70. 2727 sounnds about right for a mun landing w/o return ticket. EDIT: A bit late.

It's a fair point and I'm more than ready to stand corrected but do they say it's a heterogeneous mixture? EDIT: I stand corrected. A chemistry 101 paper is good enough for me. Heterogeneous it is.

Whoever say sea water is heterogeneous and that experts say it is, can we have a link to a site where the experts say such a thing? I have found various sites where they say sea water is indeed homogeneous. One such site http://cnx.org/contents/3253f5f7-4f85-4035-be8a-1a5a5bf3e861@2/Classification_of_matter:_Mixt I can't vouch for them as being experts but still it seems to me they have it covered.

I'm no expert on chemistry but it seems to me it comes down to the question of whether ideal sea water, not actual sea water, is one or the other. Ideal in the sense that all pollution, dust, plankton etc is left out of the equation and all they look at is the water-salt mixture. If you take 2 spoons of this ideal sea water you won't be able to tell the difference. Take 2 spoons of (ideal) muddy water (water and lumps of dirt) and there would be a difference in the mixture. So, sea water: Homogeneous. Mud: Heterogeneous.

Apollo 8 was originally not meant to go to the moon. That was until the mission planners got a call and a toddler at the other end said "Hullo, I'm Scott Manley...". The rest is history.