cubinator

Oh by the way

Hyping commenced, slowly ramping up power.

I don't really know what it was - but it definitely did not feel like it was a human speaking.

Hello from a much icier place! Enjoy your stay.

HAL 9000 was an incredible manifestation of a being which is conscious and incredibly intelligent, but absolutely emotionless. That voice was perfectly crafted, and really conveys an incredibly unnerving feeling through every line. This guy did an amazing job.

It was named by the engineers who designed it...

Well, moment's over now, time to head back to normalcy.

Launched my first high power rocket today! It was so cold my phone and tablet both died when I tried to record video with them outside the car. The rocket went over 1% of the way to space! The video I took with my laptop is corrupted somehow - basically there seems to be a .mp4 video saved, but the "stop" button didn't get pressed because the computer died of cold. I think there should be some way to recover it, but VLC won't play it and it's still broken when uploaded to Google Photos. I wonder if there's some sort of stop "codon" that I can paste on the end to tell it that the video has an end that would make it playable? If anyone could share any tips that might help me out I would greatly appreciate it.

*ahem*

Launched with a J-class motor today, the rocket flew up over 1 km! Here's a pic from the top:

Real life rockets go to orbit in one continuous burn, barring staging events. The most efficient trajectories are calculated beforehand, so the rocket knows exactly how to turn itself so that it reaches the desired orbit without having to coast beforehand. The main reason they don't have to do a circularization burn like we do in Kerbal Space Program is because Earth is much bigger than Kerbin. If you want to do a single burn to reach orbit around Kerbin, you have to turn very fast to get horizontal before reaching orbital speeds. Kerbin has an atmospheric height similar to that of Earth's, but it's orbital velocity is only about 2300 m/s whereas Earth's orbital velocity is over 6000 m/s. Additionally, Kerbin's radius is 600 km and Earth's radius is about 6000 km. That means when you're getting into orbit around Earth, you spend a lot more time burning horizontally when already in space to get enough velocity to clear the curve of the planet, which is very shallow. On Kerbin, the time spent in the atmosphere is a much bigger part of getting into orbit, and you end up much higher relative to Kerbin's curve before you've turned over completely. This usually puts you on a trajectory where you need to wait a while before you reach a place where you can circularize your orbit. When launching into Earth's orbit, you can spend a lot of time keeping horizontal during your initial burn and keeping your apoapsis close - allowing you to circularize your orbit without having to wait for a second burn. You can better understand this effect if you try launching a rocket in RSS or a 10x scale KSP system. You will notice that you spend much more time circularizing, and that you can do that during your initial burn much easier than on a small planet like Kerbin.

I've got a launch tomorrow, and everything is good to go on the rocket! Feels good!

Bees navigate by the sun, and can do so even when it's cloudy because they can see polarization, making the sun visible through clouds.

Ya boy testing out a vacuum chamber...

<X-Files theme blares>

I think I would like to make this game someday.

This one's from yesterday: And this one's from today:

/ \ _/___\_ |o.o | / \ _/___\_ | o.o| You *AHEM* WE still have no evidence worth freaking out over. It's an interesting conjecture, and of course not out of the question, but all we really know for sure is it's a big object with a peculiar shape. That's not much to go off of, aliens or not.

But maybe THIS time... Don't worry. If it was a solar sail, whoever sent it will surely get their data back and send something more to investigate that weird oxygenated wet rock in ten thousand years. I think we will surely see more of these interstellar interlopers in the future, and when that happens we will be able to learn more about them, and that will be very exciting, strange rocks or otherwise. This is a good idea. Imagine the stir it would cause if a sample was taken and found to be six or eight billion years old! Any amount of material from outside the solar system could teach us so much...

"What are you doing?" "Docking."

I've been away from my PC for a while, and quickly realized my mistake in not copying Minecraft onto my laptop. Today I came home and did that, and it was good. Just like old times...

indeed!

"This Way Perpendicular to Ecliptic at All Times"

It's got NTR propulsion and a gravity ring, and is a pretty big ship, but in space anything is small if you're far away from it. Gives a little bit of a sense of how big Neptune is.

Daylight Savings. It's dark at 5 PM, what the hell. It was going to be dark during part of the day anyway, moving it around didn't fix that.