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DDE

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Everything posted by DDE

  1. DDE
    At this point it's largely accepted that capacity for Force use is inherited; non-sensitive kids of even one Jedi parent are an exclusion rather than the norm, and Leia's affinity was accepted by default. Hell, didn't Luke talk about in the Ep VII trailer? Caveat: most of JJ Abram's plot hooks for Ep VIII have been dumped; ya, really. Which is why Rey is such a huge anomaly; ultimately, they did what I expected - turned her into a Force avatar. Which opens up the can of worms that is the Force becoming an agent rather than merely a natural phenomenon, and removes any ceiling on her power - she'd always at least instantly match Kylo. A certain Force-tinkering Sith lord (and r/prequelmemes) would like a word with you!
  2. DDE
    I'm afraid there's more to that. The new director is an edgelord. JJ Abrams was at least sorta trying to make a Star Wars movie; TLJ gleefully rips the franchise apart, leaving giant skidmarks in the process. Rey not being a Skywalker guts Lucas's basic narrative of a virtuous aristocracy, for example.
  3. DDE
    Hard sci-fi fans collide with SW. This was rather inevitable. Search your feelings, you know it to be true.
  4. DDE
    Did you just throw the gauntlet?
  5. DDE
  6. DDE
    At least partially due to irrational reasons. The USN reportedly sabotaged their own carrier-based attack drone program, which provides them with a stealthier, longer-ranged strike platform than the manned Hornets, and restricted their UAVs to surveillance duties. As to dogfighting... http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36650848 Roger-roger!
  7. DDE
  8. DDE
    This isn't even a result of decision fatigue. Extraordinary events crave extraordinary explanations.
  9. DDE
    Reminds me of something I skimmed over yesterday. Maximum acceleration per The New Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels: BTL Y-Wing - 2700 g T-65 X-Wing - 3700 g A/SF-01 B-Wing - 2390 g RZ-1 A-Wing - 5100 g The jumping-off point was that scene in A New Hope, but this is Legends canon. And considering that they use various iterations of "fusial" or "ion" engines, both of which use no dedicated reaction mass beyond fusion products, they probably don't have that much boost capability and we're looking at close-to-sustained performance. Even if they can pull 250 g for a few minutes - rather than a few seconds - they can ram planets into oblivion.
  10. DDE
    To further complicate things, the "wrong cosmodrome" theory has already achieved meme status and it's difficult and possibly career-threatening to say anything against it.
  11. DDE
    Nope, stage sep went nominal at 6:54 MSK, the failure happened during solar panel deployment hours later. The past incident involved a canister of nanosats mounted precariously close to the business side of Fregat and thus its RCS.
  12. DDE
    Unfortunately, I don't mean conspiracy theorists. I mean the average Joe.
  13. DDE
    I'm afraid that for most people it is a much, much easier and obvious explanation.
  14. DDE
    Still doesn't keep some people in their Twitter feed from demanding live footage from every launch.
  15. DDE
    Still better than “secret aliens”. Also, that’s clearly a missile launch. The ride down is much more subtle.
  16. DDE
    Try to tag the people behind RCS Build Aid, MechJeb and Throttle Control Avionics among others.
  17. DDE
    Only if you couple the laser with a very powerful magnetic field that can then somehow suck up what little of the matter is vapourized. Those sci-fi lasers either use a magic gravity field, or aren't actually bothering with collection.
  18. DDE
    Might as well use a helicopter at this point.
  19. DDE
    And the Russian Oka, which had an ultrapure vacuum facility for good measure, is dead in the water.
  20. DDE
    Apollo disagrees.
  21. DDE
    That’s what I get for beating a dead horse.
  22. DDE
    Zenit’s primary plant is in Ukraine, but it uses Russian electronics and engines. Once the geopolitical brouhaha began, Yuzhmash basically went out of business while Russia ended up with half a dozen flight-ready Zenits at Baikonur’s Site 42 HIF. This one required a warranty extentsion, and it’s a bloody miracle that Ukranian authorities allowed their rocket scientists to travel to the country they like to refer to as Mordor. Currently Yuzhmash has orders for another 12 Zenits from S7/Sea Launch, but they would be assembled in America because of all that turbulence. They are trying to diversify by starting a spaceport project in Canada (a country with a notoriously militant Ukrainian diaspora, by pure coincidence I’m sure), because by 2021 Russia is to create the fat Zenit that is Soyuz-5 for use at Baikonur, at which point Sea Launch would switch over to it as well.
  23. DDE
    https://geektimes.ru/post/295911/ As we know, Mayak wasn’t the only craft to siffer a goof-up. During the cubesat drop in 600 km orbit, a total of 10 payloads ended up suffering complete or gradual loss of power. None of the other oaylods were affected. The Mayak team has upgraded its official mock-up with flight-grade electronics and ran it through a full set of vibration tests with no issues. They’ve slowly excluded all other internal issues - although they’re desperately trying to not claim that, since it implicates Roscosmos. The observed electrical faults match the description of damage by a cloud of photodissociating hydrazine, which could be produced if there was a valve or catalyst bed problem - which would not have crippled the Fregat tug, since it performed several burns afterwards. ...which prompted Lenta.ru to accuse Roscosmos of launching Cubesats on an inherently unfit platform.
  24. DDE
    Several guys from JPL, not NASA. Ran a small presentation at a professional conference. Readily admit they have next to none of the tech, got some funding for a study. Launch date set to 1969, hopefully the SLS will be ready by then.
  25. DDE
    Gib roubles plox, Luna-25 also wants that Aitken ice.
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