sevenperforce

On the topic of zombies, one of the silliest things I've seen was the "cure" in Brad Pitt's World War Z. If you haven't seen it, it's a typical high-energy zombie flick, with SUPER fast (like, twice as fast as a human except when plot armor requires them to be only as fast as a human) zombies that turn within seconds. The protagonist travels the globe looking for a way to survive and fight back as the whole world basically gets infected. During his travels, he witnesses something strange -- occasionally, the racing zombie horde will completely ignore certain people. Over time, he realizes that the people they ignore are all terminally ill. The reason for this, the film reveals, is that the zombie virus can recognize that those people are terminally ill and thus are of no use in propagating the virus. The silliness is obvious. First of all, the idea that a virus could so thoroughly hijack a human's senses that it could recognize things like cancer in another person and thus ignore them? That's just ridiculously silly. Especially because this happens automatically. People who are terminally ill are essentially invisible; the zombies treat them like inanimate objects. It has an almost telepathic hive-mind quality. But, even sillier, zombies are dead people. All the zombies are already dead! Why would they turn down a terminally ill victim? The climax of goof occurs at the end of the movie, when Brad Pitt realizes that all he needs to do to walk among the zombies unharmed is to ingest a lethal-but-curable pathogen. He happens to be in some European CDC at the time and so he asks them if there are any diseases that are 100% lethal if untreated but 100% curable with a simple antidote, and they tell him which ones there are, and so he gulps a vial of some deadly virus and sure enough the zombies immediately ignore him.

Impulsion drive. That is...very very amusing.

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Yeah, that's my thought -- grouping it and so forth. Looking for forum suggestions on how to group it and what rockets to include.

Materials/inorganic chem?

EDIT: I've started doing these posters on request; just leave what you want on the last page! Donations optional. ----------- One of my kids is turning 4 in a couple of weeks, and they love rockets and watch every SpaceX launch (and landing) with me. We just moved to a new house and their room is pretty bare, so I was thinking about ordering a big poster for a birthday present showing a bunch of different launch vehicles. Something like this: or this: However, if I go overboard, I could literally just list every launch vehicle in existence. Which would get silly. Any suggestions on a theme or selection criteria? Should I pick "current or planned" vehicles? Should I include anything past SLS Block 1? Should I have Russian or Chinese LVs? What about the Shuttle or Energia-Buran? Former LVs? Figured the forum would enjoy weighing in.

Dude, you know WAY more than I did when I was sixteen. Take AP classes, try to get dual credit, and try to write whitepapers with professors. Don't give it up.

Unless it's too small for the ISS to spot.

I haven't seen any good data on attitude control for any of the stages, and different photos show different stage demarcations. Also, I've seen statements that the fourth stage is liquid.

Not flying this one. No one has any concrete idea about what LM11 is actually made of.

This makes all the sense. I wonder how small you could build a VTHL SSTO using an expander-cycle tripropellant linear aerospike. Whoa! That's not just seawater; it hit hard. Wonder if the parafoil lines got fouled. Which is why we need something brilliant like a tripropellant aerospike. The Zuma booster's turnaround will be the fastest yet, followed by this one. After that, the next reflight will probably be B5. "You're gonna need a bigger nother boat."

Probably maybe definitely heavier. Probably not a problem.

Celebrating that they have now officially announced that the PPE will fly commercially rather than trying to stuff it onto a nonexistent SLS flight. MLP is the mobile launch platform for vertical integration of SLS. Nothing to celebrate about there.

Indeed it does! And here you have them: The mission updated:

Yep, I did. @tater pointed out that it needs a launch tube so I added that. See above.

YESSSSSS!!!! If it masses under 6 tonnes, Falcon 9 Block 5 can throw it toward TLI with ASDS recovery. If it's under 7.5 tonnes, Falcon 9 expendable or Falcon Heavy will do. More than that, and Falcon Heavy, Atlas V, or DIVH are required. Of course, NG might be flying by then. Or, hell, BFR might do it.

Eh, it no longer launches from a tube. They went to the regular tower because a silo is too loud for the payload, right? Here's today's launch! Well, the build at least.

Not surprising as much as predictable.

OR COULD THERE

Sentinel 3B This is my first time with Eurockot, but I'd already built the Briz upper stage, so it went quickly.

Are those thermal blankets or what?

It's almost like we need a long-duration delivery stage with cold gas or hypergolic attitude thrusters. Well, the module needs enough attitude control that it can hold pointing while something grapples or docks to it. NASA should fund the development of a simple kick stage (solid or hypergolic) with solar panels, comms, batteries, and attitude thrusters. Who knows; maybe a COTS comsat bus can do the job if it has a place to mount a Star or something.

I cut it down to the smallest tanks I can (just the adapter on S1, the smallest 5-meter tank on S2, and the smallest 3.5m tank on S3), and my TWR is still < 1 with those tanks full: Liftoff mass is 149.64 tonnes. If I go back up to the realistically-sized tanks and clip two Mastodons into each of the adapter spaces, THEN I can get off the pad with a reasonable TWR. But that is a horrible, horrible kludge. EDIT: HOLY CRAP I just realized what the problem was. I was using Skiffs, not Mastodons. I KNEW I was missing something!

How are you getting ANY kind of TWR on your first stage? I built a clone as follows: Yet, even with almost all the tanks almost completely empty, I still have a TWR under 1: What am I missing? I've got to be missing something here.

But SLS can't manage it until EUS rolls around, which probably will never happen.