cubinator

Part clipping created tears in spacetime through which the Kraken can enter. Don't do it, kids.

1. Yes. Yes it would. I'm not criticizing them, I just found it amusing when he said that. 2. He says it a little after 15:40.

Gesundheit! I see a crucial flaw in his design; The dimensional radiation from the proton synthesizer will interfere with the magnetic stabilizer's hypersonic friction motor, thus inhibiting it's ability to track the atomic current of the quadruple radio lens at the heart of the ultragel coolant pressure cathode. The resulting instability will inevitably lead to a breakdown of the carbon static vacuum despinner, which would obviously lead to a rapid combustion of the nitrate trioxide vibration interference manipulator. Obviously, it would be much better, instead of having the quark diverter use neodymium plasma, to use a magnetosonic parabolic radiator to eliminate the signal dissolution of the negative gravioli capture filaments. Edit: *googles turboencabulator* *subscribes to thread*

They skipped the part of the speech where Kennedy said the spacecraft will encounter "temperatures almost half that at the surface of the sun, almost as hot as it is here today." Hehe.

From my experiences with Duna, you don't really need any heat shielding at all if you're coming in from low orbit.

Daily Kerbal has been very quiet since Thursday...The devs must be very busy squashing bugs. The Hype Train is slowly accelerating but we are moving pretty fast now...but never fast enough!

Of course, but as long as we acknowledge that the way we write numbers has no effect on anything that actually happens we can still have fun when cool numbers show up in our lives. Whenever I watch a sport game, I am constantly checking to see if a score is prime, because prime numbers are cool! It doesn't really matter, but it's still fun.

I know, and I've even tried to visualize what it would be like if I somehow was pulled into the fourth dimension and survived. At first I wouldn't be able to see anything, my vision is limited to a 3D space parallel to our universe. If I was tilted a little towards Earth, I would be able to see a planar field of view where Earth would look like a 2-dimensional planet: The planet is a disc, with the surface being the outer edge, and the molten interior visible on the inside. If I was tilted further so that I was looking at the center, I would be able to see the inner and outer core, the mantle, and the lithosphere--but only in a single 2-dimensional 'slice' at a time. I wouldn't be able to see the whole volume the way I can see a whole area. That said, this puzzle acts the same way mathematically you could expect it to work if you managed to build a real 4D tesseract. While it is technically a 3D projection of a 4D object shown on a 2D screen, it is effectively a 4D puzzle.

@Veeltch Yeah, that's the one from xkcd. A little off-topic but I'd like to see a real 2d game sometime, where your field of view is a line instead of a plane. Nothing 3d or anything, not a single object outside the 2-dimensional plane of reality.

Pol is a pollen grain, obviously. Dres is a lonely space potato. Minmus is made of mint ice cream, although the very surface is not so nice to eat because of radiation and other factors, but if one were to mine into it deep underground one would find very delicious minty treats. Realistically, I think Jool has it's color due to the presence of chlorine in it's atmosphere, but if we're going with snack theories then I've got nothing against your pea soup hypothesis, except that I question the density a bit.

TODAY IS PI DAY!!! WOOO! I bet I'll have to endure constant hype from my English teacher about Pi Patel (the kid with the tiger) while I sit and draw circles. And now for the mandatory recitation of memorized digits: 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781 yay!

What mod did they use to paint it? Also: Hey, it's called the "Eeloo Voyager"! Wait, that says "Echo." Never mind.

2/10 Your avatar is a very overused joke <should've called it George> Uranus gets it's bluish gray color due to the presence of methane... How did William Herschel not realize what he was doing when he named it?

Space Elevator Chopper (SEC): Think the space elevator mod is pointless and detracts from proper KSP gameplay? This mod is for you! It adds a giant pair of scissors that you can use to chop down that lazy-man's elevator to space once and for all! Real Kerbonauts take Big-S, Bad-S rockets to space!

Ok. On a scale, how flat would Earth be?

Jet fuel can't melt green beans! Seriously: -Do the new aerodynamics still allow for infiniglider-type propulsion? -I noticed a while back during a failed reentry of something that a single 2.5 m reaction wheel stayed intact and hit the ground at ~1.3 km/s in the desert, fairly close to sea level. If a single 2.5 m reaction wheel was dropped to low altitude in an elliptical trans-Munar deorbital trajectory, would it retain it's velocity unaffected by the atmosphere?

I figured it would be something like that. Just making sure, though!

SQUAD is using ion testing. It's much slower but far more efficient than traditional chemical testing. Edit: Hey, check it out, 1111 likes! I don't think my post count will ever be able to catch up!

What kind of notification will we get when the open prerelease is up and running? I know it will be up Soontm but I'd like to know where exactly to look.

Everyone needs a hill! I build a hill out of Legos. My Lego hill.

Banned for not acknowledging all the other awesome galaxies like Segue 2.

I suppose it would depend on how high up the 'continents' are, and how far apart they are. Let's say the floating colonies (I will not go into how hard it is to get something to float on a gas giant, I'll leave it at 'magic' for the purpose of staying on topic) are at the same level as the clouds. My guess is the bands would go around the continents in similar ways to how global air currents move around the continents here on Earth. They might mix together a lot more than they would normally, and turn into big random-looking swirls that would look like Earth's clouds. The continents would get pushed around a lot faster than they do on Earth, so these air currents would rapidly change and be even less predictable than what we have here.

For a planet, this is not possible. Since the rotation at the surface exceeds the force of gravity, objects there would fall upwards from centrifugal force and the planet would be torn apart. There would have to be some other force acting on it, such as rigidity. This is pretty much out of the question for a large planet, but on a small asteroid it might be possible. Phobos, for instance (not quite the same situation but similar effect) orbits closer to Mars than synchronous orbit. It is thought that Phobos is a mere lump of rubble held together by a thin crust. If Phobos didn't have that (relatively) rigid crust holding it together, it would most likely dissolve into a planetary ring around Mars (which it will probably do anyway, since it's orbit is decaying). If we had, say a very tiny asteroid with a very rigid crust and a very low gravitational pull, it could potentially be spun up (it's very unlikely it would form with >1 rotational velocity/orbital velocity ratio, as objects like these form due to gravity) so that it rotates slightly faster than it's orbital velocity. The lower the gravity, the better this works (you can easily spin a beach ball or other such object much faster than it's orbital velocity, but it doesn't work so well with Earth or the Moon or Phobos). Another thing that could cause this (still only in very small objects) is magnetism. If the hypothetical asteroid is made of highly magnetic material, it could spin 'very' (potentially faster than orbital velocity, but not ridiculously fast) quickly and still be held together by magnetic forces. This is probably a more likely way this would happen, because a lot of space rocks are magnetic and not a lot of space rocks have an accelerating rotation. Edit: Just watched the attached video, and the narrator just references that a simulation shows it to be possible, then proceeds to assume that it is perfectly possible for a stable toroidal planet to exist and tells what it would be like if this planet was perfectly habitable to humans. She does not go into detail about the actual mechanics of this planet, which I find very unlikely to form under natural circumstances. Now, to read the referenced papers. Edit 2: So it seems that this theory predicts that the mass of the ring would counteract the centrifugal force, which makes sense. I still think that such a body would not form easily under natural circumstances, but it may just be possible. However, the OP is about planets spinning faster than their orbital velocity, not about toroidal planets. A toroidal planet would still be held together by gravity, and if it were spinning faster than it's orbital velocity it would still fall apart as described above. A regular (spherical) planet would be able to spin very close to, although not quite faster than it's orbital velocity, and if it did this it would become a very oblate spheroid. Earth does this a little bit, it is about 42 km wider at the equator than at the poles, and Jupiter does this a lot, it is about 9275 km wider at the equator than at the poles.

Push harder on the button. When the sun explodes, will there be confetti?

You know you're a nerd when, in boredom, you write out a complete list of the first 622 palindrome numbers, from 11 to 62226. The patterns that appear are rather interesting.