peewee69

Yeah, I'm also thinking Arcturus. Hopefully I'll get a good look at it again tonight. Dunno how I've never noticed it before, I don't get to see many stars due to light pollution over London, but last night it appeared so bright

Thanks for checking, I've no idea what I did see last night then. It moved with the background stars, so fairly sure it wasn't something in our atmosphere, but it clearly wasn't a normal star.

I could be wrong, but I think I saw the nova a few hours ago, about 10.30 BST. Initially thought maybe aircraft landing lights when I caught a passing glimpse, but later at home there was a bright and very twinkly star to the west. Stellarium points to the correct region. No news yet...

I'm excited to see how Jeb dies for the first time (again). I wonder if he'll think "oh no, not again!"

This is probably one of the safest bets to make given the nature of human behaviour

All of your comments are true about all the other absurdity from last man on earth, but despite it all it was the nose first reentry that I found just too stupid not to mention. How could the entire team of X number of people never have seen a capsule reentry? Surely someone at some point could have said "errr, guys, I think capsules enter bottom first". Any maths whizzes out there wanna calculate the odds of putting, say for example, 10 people in a room together and NONE of them are aware of such a basic fact? Surely you'd have better odds of winning the lotto?!

I know it's not sci-fi, but I have just watched an episode of The Last Man on Earth where a crew capsule re-enters nose first! Such a basic flaw, how did nobody on the production team not know?

In terms of financial returns from Starship development, surely space mining ops are more feasible now? How much mined material could SpaceX land back here on Earth?

I've been building lots of very specific function craft, which results in lots of rendezvous & docking manoeuvres. And lots of vehicles everywhere which is becoming a bit of a headache!

I cannot decide if the better strategy for a career game is to design missions for single-use, or to build infrastructure & re-use as much as possible? How do you play?

Really great story for you fans of autobrake; https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8012215/amp/Tesla-Model-X-automatic-brakes-stopped-two-families-crushed-tree-Storm-Dennis.html

In the new "Lost in Space" on Netflix, in the first episode during the scene with the ship crashing, the computers display a distance to impact in meters, but the computers voice reads out in feet, both of which have the same numerical value. Not exactly scientifically inaccurate, but an error which caused me to not bother watching it anymore...

Actually, this only applied to the distance between the first and second satellites due to a slight launch timing error of about 10 days. Given that your maths calculates the travel time around Kerbol of 0.57° per day, then this should lead to an error of about 5.7° degrees, which should make up the difference between your calculated value of 24° and the measured value of 30°. When the 3rd satellite arrived into it's designated orbit, it was indeed about 24° from the 2nd. Thanks so much for the reply, I can now sleep at night! This is what I usually do for local satellites. However, I didn't much like the thought of doing this for the deep space satellites as it would involve waiting for many years before the constellation was fully operable, and I have a contract which will need the deep space coms up and running in no more than 4 years.

I want to design a "one ship fits all" rescue craft that is capable of dragging the whole stranded crew capsule back down to Kerbal for a safe recovery. My question is this; what types of crew pods am I likely to encounter? Do all crew pods spawn, or is it just a select few? And if so, which ones?

I wanted a deep space relay network and so went through various calculations, working out that I would need a constellation of 5 relays in a circular 17.7 Gm Solar orbit. So I decided that the best way to get them to their appropriate orbit would be to launch them 1 at a time in intervals equal to 1/5 of Kerbin's orbital period. I calculated this to be aprox every 85 days (given that it take 426 days to orbit Kerbol). As long as I followed the same trajectories for each launch, they should all end up at aprox 72° apart from one another, right? WRONG! Instead, they have ended up at about half the intended distance to one another (around 30° or so). Why?