SaturnianBlue

Has there been any news or new information about the solar panels that will be used on the Starship? To my knowledge, aside from an appearance in the DearMoon video, there has been very little about them, not even estimates of power output.

For how long its been overland already, it's shocking that it hasn't weakened more—after 3 hours, winds are still at 125 mph, and the pressure has only increased to 932 millibars. Georgia is going to feel impacts from a major hurricane.

@ProtoJeb21 Major Hurricane Michael has continued to be a shock—while the storm seemed to have an open eyewall earlier, it has closed off with an impressive amount of convection. -80C cloud tops are usually only seen in the West Pacific, but Michael is the exception. Now that the storm's eye is beginning to clear out, the storm might have yet another round of strengthening...

I'm back! Hurricane Sergio might have weakened from its stint as a major hurricane, but at the same time, it has undergone a rather spectacular transition into an annular hurricane, doubling the size of its hurricane force wind field. The upcoming u-turn will also be quite interesting to watch, as it heads towards the Mexican coast. With the ACE of the EPAC/CPAC basin at 286, only one more unit has to be created before it surpasses 2015 in terms of ACE, placing it in a close 2nd behind 1992. Leslie, wherever it ends up going, will be a strange storm—either it will affect the Canary islands, Portugal, or even continental Africa, or it may have a high chance of becoming the longest lived tropical cyclone in the Atlantic. Tropical Storm Michael will be a threat of some kind, and the threat seems to continuously rise. Even the NHC predicts a Category 2 at landfall on the Gulf Coast, and with the possibility of rapid intensification, there is some chance Michael could reach even higher wind speeds, especially since the storm will have double the amount of time over the Gulf of Mexico that Nate had last year.

SECO 1, Icesat-2 is now in orbit! (Still one burn to go until it is released).

Why are Delta II first stages painted teal? I've always noticed how this color is pretty much unique for a rocket.

Mangkhut is an extremely powerful storm that still has the potential to strengthen, but I don't think it would strengthen like the HWRF predicts... Is 833 mb even physically possible under current circumstances? Edit: I should mention, this model run also had 307 mph winds at the 850 mb level...

Thank you! My limited understanding is that magnetic confinement wouldn't get used on a gas core engine—in the designs for such engines (Engine List from Atomic Rockets) , they are depicted with regular nozzles. The part is from KSP-Interstellar Extended. If I recall correctly, it is some sort of ISRU processing plant—presumably something that Duna would want to import in the early era of colonization, which is why this ship is depicted as carrying it.

10,000 O'Neill cylinder pairs? I can relocate the entire population of Earth to cylinders in every stable orbit in the solar system and beyond! If I ignore the issue of lifting that many people into space...

Space battles without mods like BDArmory are doable, they just wouldn't be particularly realistic without some unique in-game justification. Simulating the weapons are going to be the biggest problem—there isn't really a way for laser combat to happen, and combat with railguns or anything of that sort would probably be impractical—even if a projectile can get launched from a barrel, reloading would be a complicated process, and I'm not sure the accuracy would be good enough. Missile combat can certainly happen, the trouble would be with controlling multiple missiles at once, which would happen realistically, to increase the chance of a hit. However, there isn't exactly a way for countermeasures to be deployed in KSP, so even sending one missile at a time might result in a hit.

@ProtoJeb21 Great work! I don't think I can write in much detail, but I will try: PACIFIC CYCLONES Note the cold wake left by Super Typhoon Jebi. POST-TROPICAL CYCLONE NORMAN After an 11 day trek that involved three rounds of rapid intensification into a major hurricane followed by weakening, Norman has finally abated—under cooler SSTs and high wind shear, the storm's convection has been ripped away from the center of circulation, and the storm is down to winds of 50 mph. With the storm heading north and thus directly away from Hawaii, there is no threat to land. HURRICANE OLIVIA Hurricane Olivia is no longer the powerful annular hurricane it was a few days ago, but it is still a hurricane—albeit appearing quite like a blob—with 80 mph winds, though it will continue to weaken once it moves into an area of high wind shear. However, the storm 's threat to land is yet to come, approaching Hawaii relatively quickly (especially when compared to Lane) as a tropical storm from the ENE. The NHC/CPHC has been predicting this consistently, though the forecast models disagree on where the landfall will happen. For example, the GFS predicts the south of the Big Island, the HWRF the north, while the ECMWF predicts Maui. TROPICAL DEPRESSION EIGHTEEN-E Once again, a tropical cyclone has formed in the East Pacific, but this storm (to be named Paul) seems to be fairly mild compared to the storms that came before it. The storm is expected to move towards the northwest and then turn more westwards, encountering increasingly cooler temperatures along the way. For now, the NHC does not even predict the storm to reach hurricane intensity, though the EPAC has consistently shown off unexpected rapid intensification. The ECMWF and GFS predict it as being a relatively weak tropical storm, and the HWRF (generally seen as an intensity model) sees it as a minimal hurricane. TYPHOON MANGKHUT Last but certainly not least, Typhoon Mangkhut is still a very formidable threat to the Marianas and beyond. The rapidly strengthening storm is passing through an area of low wind shear and very high SSTs of 29 Celsius. Speeding along at 20 knots (23 mph), the storm track has shifted to place Rota at the center of the cone—a bit north from earlier, which had placed Guam at the center. The storm is expected to pass through as the equivalent of a category 4 hurricane, and subsequently intensify into a super typhoon. After that, the GFS forecasts an impact on the southern half of Taiwan as a sub-900 mb storm, which is probably far too much. Subsequently, the GFS forecast takes Mangkhut into China. The ECMWF takes the storm just north of the Philippines and makes landfall in China north of Hainan, approaching as a very powerful typhoon. Keep in mind that such model runs are over a week in the future and very much subject to change.

The launch of one Extremely Overwhelmingly Large Rocket (EOLR) was met with great excitement.

@ProtoJeb21 The apparent eyeball has collapsed for the time being.

Here is the view from the Key West NWS radar (as of 13:33 EDT). Tropical Storm Gordon appears to be forming an eyewall. While it isn't speeding along like Hurricane Nate, it is a good thing the storm is moving fairly quickly at 16 MPH—it would otherwise spend a disturbing amount of time over very warm water at a slower speed.