JoeSchmuckatelli

I'm looking forward to the day when nations don't really get a say in whether the internet is on or off and anyone with a phone can tap into the web

So... We need two sample return missions. If the sample is as close to Mars chemistry as the moon is to Earth - impactor is correct. If the sample is not, then capture. Except - Olympis Mons sticks out of the atmosphere - and could have splattered the moons with Mars stuff - so we will need a follow up mission to DRILL BABY DRILL!

Dark "energy appears to be changing or weakening over time. If that is indeed the case, it would upend astronomers’ standard cosmological model. It could mean that dark energy is very different than what scientists thought — or that there may be something else altogether going on.* https://apnews.com/article/dark-energy-desi-cosmology-astronomy-7856ae96fab5cb42e6b4a6fd7c3555ec

If you recall the days of cheap dial up... would you go back to save money? FWIW - I see homeless people with cell phones. How that works, I don't know - but they do. So it's not just for the rich - it's practically required to have connection. I think if you can imagine someone getting on their phone and NEVER losing connection to the internet, never having to switch wifi - or even have wifi - and cell service - and cable... I'm serious; once ubiquitous, everyone will have it. And the cost will be the cost - borne by everyone, one way or another

I think they're looking at the direct to cell service - just another $100 per month!!! -- Which will then become so ubiquitous that we almost feel like it's a necessity rather than a nice to have. Honestly, if someone offered me a chance to buy into a company offering gigabit wired service to homes... I'd not really see that as much of a growth model as I once would have. Always on, wireless direct to satellite full time internet access? Once the cloud/snow/rain/indoors thing is figured out - there's likely to be a lot fewer linemen outside of power distribution.

The impressive thing for me is the buoy cam; tells everyone they hit their mark. Entirely possible. But as a "Get tons of stuff to space" platform - I'm guessing we can all agree that the capability is there (for expendable stage, if not yet routine reuse). Still, this is the 'farthest along' of any 'land massive stuff on Mars' program. Possible that SS won't be the final product. Imagine the excitement, however, once they start trying to land there. From a "gotta start somewhere" perspective - this is pretty much 'somewhere'.

... and we are fans. Kinda like Apollo or Shuttle. Can't keep interest for long when Dr Oz is in the newz

So... Comment. One of my kids who I got all excited about this in class looked it up in the news and asked 'why isn't anyone reporting on this - why isn't it front page news?'. Gave the usual reply. Politics. Celebrity gossip, etc. But I now perceive more. SX is succeeding in making it feel routine. Case in point - remember the sheer number and speed of posts for SN15?

Well played, sir

Booster is drifting. Wind. FTS might be triggered at some point

Noodled about the other day laying in a new train line to the NW NitroGas node, bringing over sulfur for future use and setting up blenders to produce cubes and cooling systems. Required a drone port b/c of how I set up my hubs and 2 drone ports to extract the products to send it to the next stage of manufacturing. Simple enough process... Except I kept running out of key ingredients - like concrete, steel plates, iron plates, copper, batteries radio control units, computers and etc and etc. Mind you... Not all at once. Sequentially. I'd run out of something - take the long train ride back to where I made stuff, another long train ride back to the site - run out of a different something, necessitating another long train ride... Rinse and repeat and repeat and repeat. Wondered why I kept making so many stupid mistakes. It was 3am Yeah. That's Satishfaktry

Tuesday? Poo. I will have to watch the replay. Maybe - just maybe - I can run it during class.

I see that on my horizon. Just unlocked the advanced aluminum. Will probably spend a bunch of time getting that and my current runs optimized first. Amazing to think that I'm actually considering this. Usually quit after getting to Aluminum. I credit my overbuilt rail network!

So I spent two days somewhat flabbergasted by the numbers you're suggesting. Aside from coal nodes for power - I've got 2 nodes mined for iron and 2 nodes mined for copper (uh, make that 3 since 1 is dedicated to the aluminum plant)... Aside from that all other production comes from single node sources. One caterium, one quartz, etc. I thought, 'there is just no way I'm gonna need all that stuff'. Until I got supercomputers and radio control units going. 1 manufacturer, each. Backwards planning how to increase the throughput to triple SC and RCU production? Yeah. I'm gonna need more trains.

War Monger. Everyone knows that eggsats are offensive weapons!

Can I ask one of you guys who follows all of this what changes we can expect between IFT-5 and IFT-6? I know they're playing with tiles, but not much more. Does 6 incorporate any structural changes since 4 or 5? Thanks! PS - bonus points if you know whether the ship intended for 7 is already showing structural changes - or whether they were so far ahead in their production that it will have to be an even later flight before they incorporate lessons learned from 5. Tango Yankee!

There are folks like you that are a whole different level of player than I am. I'm a 'thank God for Smart Splitters and Awesome Sinks" guy. Mind you... I try to be you. I break out a spreadsheet and everything. Then before I have it all figured out I just go build stuff. It's the same way with the anesthetics. I get a facade and a plan for the building - which looks good from exactly one angle. Case in point - I had an idea for a cool, offset stacked factory using the 8m angled walls. Got my proof of concept wall built and the rest of the thing is just floating in space. On the other hand - I still really like my rail network - which now takes 3.5 minutes of real time to get from the space elevator to the Gold Coast bauxite farm. Maybe someday I will optimize production... But damnit at least the trains run!

...oh I had one. ... Plotted a path to a good node of bauxite to get started on Alu-min-eyum. Had several pods along the path. Problem is - they're in the forest south of the Dune Desert. And ALL irradiated. Need aluminum to get Hazmat suit. Keep going: bauxite = aluminum; just get that up and running and get a hazmat suit and come back for the pods. BAUXITE site is irradiated. (there's ways around this, given the distance one can build). Decided to go back to base and build a rail track out to the site. Spider. Big one. Run. He has a friend. Irradiated, gas spitting spiders. Agroed 4 of them at once - and I'm still only using the long xeno-zapper. Lots of booshes. Cannot see spiders. Did not work out well. ... So... now I'm building a rail line allllll the way across the map to the easy access bauxite near all the oil on the Gold Coast. And maybe a gun. Or two.

My biggest problem is the alts. I hardly use them because I don't get really good ones. I just unlocked Heavy Flex Frames - best Alt in a while. I have no hydrocarbon alts that I didn’t buy from the Sulphur tree Might have to go on another drop pod adventure... Edit - I will say that when I get an Alt it's AFTER building out a whole factory doing it Vanilla. I have one iron FrankenFactory where later on I sent copper sheets and wire because of the production improvements for the Alts - but mostly it's wet concrete or water steel or pfft

It's a robotic pooper!

Zoop yep - DimenDepots? Too advanced for this game. Just unlocked Phase 4: Aluminum... but not touching that until after I build my TurboFuel Monstrosity. First effort at that. Made feasible by my overkill rail network. Going vertical: putting the 20 fuel generators above the 14 refineries. Should be a smoky mess when I get it powered up. Keep running out of materials tho - requiring long train rides back to get stuff. (Oil is far from base). That's actually been the most satisfying part of this; I like my train network for the first time. Two massive multi-train depots distant enough to not mess with frame rates. One for intermediate buildables (Electronics, Heavy Frames & Motors & who knows what, next) the other for Project Parts. Feeding it all is 11 or 12 other stations at raw materials processing (copper, Iron, Steel, hydrocarbons, crystal, caterium, etc. etc.) - all of which is set up so I can keep adding new train stations at raw material sources as I get deeper into the game and start depleting my ability to keep up with production. The train stations are cool - and I've a ton of trains running about the map - and they all play nice with each other. I have not made ANYTHING pretty... well except for a few 'fiddly' facades. I get those to where I like them, but the rest of the factory? Floating foundations and incomplete walls galore.

Thank you for the post I randomly found on Reddit - kept my hopes up!

I enjoyed our previous discussions on this. The key, IIRC, is the stages of how this goes. Initially, LEO is king - with likely the killer app being worldwide uncensored fast access to the internet; that will be destabilizing and wonderful and same-as-it-ever-was all at once. In other words - more of what we're already doing for less. Second, likely is a combo: national outposts/research projects of large scale & expenditure to proof concepts of just how to build something on the Moon/Mars/LEO given the new capabilities, with some billionaire tourism. Continues the current meta , just more of it. The speculators / entrepreneurs will likely jump in trying to wild-west some kind of new thing like early commercial mining; most will fail - some will get rich Third - we have places up in space that are stable: large stations with manufacturing / science that offer real-world applications down in the gravity well and the stations/outposts become something like self-sustaining either through tourism or something new we haven't figured out yet. We're a solar-system species living on multiple rocks and pray we don't Motie ourselves.

Much as I love the idea (and we've been over this ground before...) I don't see Asteroid Mining being profitable except for off-planet manufacturing. Even if you brought back solid gold / diamond the cost per ton won't really shift the needle much on utility.

True- ish. If the cost per kg drops precipitously, the market for "Stuff" goes up. The 'launch market' becomes like the trucking and shipping industries; making money off of volume of tons shipped. The remarkable thing is that we might be seeing a moment akin to the Erie Canal. Yep - the 'huh, wot, Erie Canal?!?' canal. In its time it dropped shipping costs per ton-mile to the Great Lakes and Midwest by 90%. It changed history; moving the most economically important city in the US from New Orleans to New York. It changed how emigrants and Americans populated the continent. It made the spread of industry to the interior financially feasible. It created the conditions that enabled the North's dominance in the Civil War. And today? We barely think about it. Musk wants SS to be as reliable and common as watching planes fly. If he succeeds, we're in a whole new ballgame. (...and if History is any guide, it could be decades before we realize the world has changed)