ARS

Avatar. Ah, such an eye-candy-filled movie that astonished us with mind-boggling scenery porn. Unfortunately, when it comes to physics, well... To list some: 1. The movie takes place in 2154 on Pandora moon orbiting a gas giant Polyphemus, which orbits Alpha Centauri, 4.37 light years away from Earth. Currently, there's no evidence of gas giant orbiting Alpha Centauri, let alone habitable moon. 2. Would someone please explain how the hell The Pandora, being literally covered by jungle, rainforest, full of green vegetation has so little oxygen in the atmosphere that it's mandatory for humans to wear a mask to breathe? 3. The movie indicates that the trip from Earth to Pandora takes 6 years. To keep the acceleration of the craft within tolerable limit, we assume it requires 6 months to accelerate, and 6 months to decelerate in order to maintain a manageable acceleration of 1.5G (1.5 times acceleration due to Earth's gravity), and the cruising speed would be approximately 80% speed of light. Mass increases as velocity approaches speed of light, a 1 kg mass would become 1.6 kg at 80% speed of light. This means a significant increase in energy requirement to travel to Pandora. At 6 years travel time, the significant increase in energy becomes unavoidable. Normal chemical propellant won't do the job. According to the film material, the spacecraft uses antimatter/ fusion reactor hybrid for propulsion. Antimatter has already present today, albeit in very small amount, and we already created a fusion reaction in hydrogen bomb. However, antimatter is very difficult to make, has short shelf life and incredibly expensive with a price tag of $60 billion/ microgram, not to mention the difficulty in storing it. With the depiction of spaceship in the movie around a mile long, the required antimatter would be on the order of thousands of tons. Even if antimatter becomes cheap enough to beat the cost of fossil fuel by the factor of 1000, it still cost millions of dollars to transport a single kilogram of stuff into Pandora. 4. What's the reason humans go to Pandora? To mining Unobtainium! The same term (but not the same stuff) used in The Core! The film material stated that Unobtainium is a room-temperature superconductor, and it sells for $20 million per kilogram. Sounds profitable, but the economic principle teached us that high price means tiny market, making the profitability of mining it seems rather iffy. If it was indeed a lucrative bussiness, then sooner or later, someone would figure out how to synthesize it, because come on, a culture that can go to moon on the another planet on another star system surely could figure out how to sythesize it. 5. As explained above, the energy requirements of transporting stuff from Earth to Pandora is immense, and the cost is very expensive. Shipping heavy equipment, such as mining excavator, trucks, aircraft, ect. directly from earth is not cost effective. A single truck could cost billions to send to Pandora, so they had to be manufactured on site, and they need to build a lot of infrastructures. Weapons and ammunition must be locally produced, otherwise, the quote of "...It costs four hundred thousand dollars to fire this weapon for twelve seconds." becomes literal. Also, why sending workers from earth? It would be cheaper to just send some colonist there, grow population and treat pandora as their home instead of having to spend money for regularly transporting workers to and from Pandora. 6. It's hard to believe that human militia seems awfully under-equipped compared by today's conventional military. No drones, no automated robots, no super-abnormal ammo like incendiary or guided bullets. In the future, the kill rate of individual bullets will likely be much higher than today's so it's not necessary to literally spraying forest with lead to kill a single Navi. 7. The heavy robotic suit (AMP suit) in the movie shares the same problem of structural integrity and energy requirement as in most giant monsters/ robots movie, thanks to the square/cube law. 8. What's the point of linking a human into a body of Navi? The movie claimed they created that to learn/ observe/ communicate with Navi in order to gain information or negotiate. Why would you communicate with them if you gonna get rid of them entirely anyway? Using drones to spy on them is much more cheaper and cost-effective than creating a Navi body and controlling it wirelessly from afar. 9. Although they were visually stunning the floating mountains were arguably the most ridiculous features in the entire movie. They were gigantic chunks of real-estate floating in the sky apparently suspended by some form of magnetic field. We surmised this from the fact that electronic instruments on all aircraft in the vicinity are driven crazy by the area's "high flux level", presumably a high magnetic flux level. Magnetic fields are also about the only available explanation. Other possibilities such as buoyancy, wind, and electrostatic forces are even more easily ruled out. Unfortunately, the magnetic field strength needed to levitate mountains would have numerous disastrous side effects on the movie's story line, that is if the movie stuck to real physics. First such a field would rip magnetic materials out of aircraft if they flew into it, but that's just the beginning. Even if the aircraft had no magnetic materials in them, moving a conductive material of any type--magnetic or otherwise--through the field would create a large voltage difference across it. All electronic systems or controls, not just the navigation systems would be seriously disrupted. It's doubtful that an aircraft could fly in such conditions. Since both the human brain and heart are conductive, both would have voltage differences generated across them by the motion of riding in an aircraft. Any variation in direction or magnitude of the magnetic field, even subtle changes from vibrations or body movements would induce random currents in the brain with an endless list of possible results including memory loss, hallucinations, psychotic events, and seizures. Randomly induced currents in the heart could result in fibrillation and death. 10. The movie claims that Pandora's gravity is slightly lower than Earth, which helps justify the tall figure of the Navi, and their ability to jump higher. But apparently, that reduced gravity doesn't apply to humans since we don't see them gaining any increased mobility. 11. For some reason, while preparing to blow up the tree of life, Humans also to decides mount a land assault. The Navi meet the ground force head-on with a cavalry charge, a well known form of suicide since at least 1914. And guess what? They get butchered. Meanwhile other blue guys mounted atop flying critters swoop down on the aircraft from above. Aircraft designed for ground assaults could indeed be vulnerable from above. These aircraft used high speed counter-rotating propellers contained in large circular shaped pods. Shooting one of the Navi's spear-like arrows or dropping big rocks into the rotor blades should have been more than enough to severely damaged them and disabled the aircraft, they don't have to jump on the aircraft and throw grenades into the propellers. In addition to performing such attacks from the flying critters, in at least some places, the Navi could have hidden archers atop the floating mountains and rained arrows down on the aircraft attempting to pass between them. Avatar is a sci-fi movie that while it's beautiful and has little to no technobabble about the technology, still bears the implausibility and impracticality in terms of technology, practical appliation and physics if viewed thoroughly and carefully examining every detail it provides from dialogue and background materials.

Well, you seem to think like me when I saw Armageddon. While Armageddon is nice sci-fi movie and exciting enough for space enthusiast like me, the amount of bad science it delivers really cracked me up. To list some: 1. The first scene is already a bad science on it's own: An asteroid that kills dinosaurs by impacting earth 65 million years ago. The narrator said "... With the force of 10 thousand nuclear weapons". Excuse me? I think that statement was really an underestimation. The asteroid that kills dinosaurs has the force around 100 terraton (terraton: 10^12). The most powerful nuclear bomb ever built, the tsar bomba, has a force of 50 megaton, which means, 10 thousand tsar bomba is still ridiculously puny compared to the asteroid that killed dinosaurs. Never mind the fact that the footage has a mistake when it shows that meteor impacted earth... With current-day continent and landmasses. 2. The movie claims that the asteroid is roughly the size of Texas. Do you know other object the size of Texas? CERES, the dwarf planet, discovered back then during 1801 using binoculars! They said they cannot detect it since there's only 15 telecopes that watches the sky, but you know what? How about millions of amateur astronomers around the world? (bless them!) They regularly watches the night sky, and with an object that big, it would be an unmissable target for those familiar with night sky. Even cheap home telescope is enough to see it if it was the size of Texas, far before it's imminent impact. Hell, NASA has tracked even smaller and farther object than that. 3. An asteroid with the size of Texas wouldn't simply slam on the Pacific ocean bedrock and create "tidal wave three miles high...", as the NASA scientist in the movie projected. Mind you, the earth crust is only few km thick on the ocean bedrock, and beneath it is a molten mantle, so the actual impact is much more devastating than what the movie projected 4. At one point a character reminded the main character to not whack the bomb or risk setting it off. If the nuclear bomb you bring could be set off by whacking it, then that's a VERY badly designed bomb. Real life nuclear bomb requires an extremely precise detonation to set it off. In fact, in real life, nuclear bombs are tested to ensure that they'll only explode when triggered to explode. Among the tests and abuse conducted, that involves dropping them from high place, burning it, and yes, whacking it. 5. A classic error in many space sci-fi, where the thruster of the shuttle is shown continuously burning while they maneuver in space as if they're flying like jet on earth atmosphere 6. The movie claims that the asteroid is so massive that it has it's own gravity, albeit very weak, so the main cast had to wear a space suit with RCS thrusters to keep them pressed towards the ground. No explanation given why the hell the female lead, who's always inside the shuttle and never wear a space suit is unaffected by such a low gravity while inside the shuttle (where the gravity (somehow) act normally) 7. Drilling a hole on the asteroid before shoving a nuclear bomb to detonate it so the asteroid split in half is pretty much implausible. The asteroid has a momentum, and detonating a nuclear bomb inside would only make things worse since the problem goes from "I shoot a watermelon with shotgun loaded with slug shell" into "I shoot a watermelon with shotgun loaded with buckshot shell". To split the asteroid cleanly in half, the bomb must be placed along the line that encirle the asteroid in half and detonated simultaneously 8. The Russian space station spins to create an artificial gravity before docking with 2 shuttles... Where to even begin? Docking is a delicate procedure and no docking operation is "routine occurence" (except for KSP players ). Spinning the station while 2 shuttles attempting to dock only make the docking procedure much more harder. Only masochist could handle such a thing (or jeb). Also, the artificial gravity created by spinning the space station would weaken as the distance from the point of rotation decreased, yet in the movie the gravity seems to work normally as the plot demands. If they are on the center of the station (it looks like they are on the station hub), then there should be little to no gravity! 9. The asteroid is shown being craggy and jagged. This kinda wrong. When an object has sufficient mass and size, it'll be formed into sphere under it's own gravity. Ceres alone has a diameter of 900 km, slightly smaller than Texas, yet it's already rounded by it's own gravity. 10. The movie said that the asteroid is knocked by comet out of asteroid belt and now headed to earth. First off, assuming it's around 900 km in diameter and made of iron (like what they claimed many times in the movie), it would have the total mass roughly 9 x 10^24 grams. That's a lot, you can ram it with comet for years and not move it much, never mind that the probability of a comet hitting an asteroid is incredibly low. 11. The plan is to split the asteroid in half, and they only have 4 hours to do it. Okay, assuming the asteroid has the diameter of 900 km, and it must be split in half, each halves must travel fast enough to cover 6400 km (earth's radius) over 4 hours, which means, 6400 km / 4 hour = 1600 km/h of acceleration is needed, and as explained above, if the asteroid really made of iron, with all that mass to move, it's clear that one bomb won't even do the job 12. The idea to bury the bomb makes sense when it comes to maximizing effect of bomb's explosion. However, on the asteroid with 900 km diameter, why the heck you only drill 800 feet!? That's around 1/5000th of half the diameter of the asteroid! Also, if they only have limited time to do it, then why they drill on 45 degree angle!? It adds an extra 300 feet to their drilling. 13. A bit of fact: tying someone on the chair with duct tape is a real life protocol of NASA spaceflight when dealing with someone with mental problem in space. 14. Someone complained "what are you doing with a gun in space?". Tell me a reason why nobody complained about having a freakin' chaingun on your rover (hell, there's no reason for it to be there in the first place) The movie is filled with so many mistakes (in some shots, if you pay enough attention, you can see "grass" on the asteroid) and bad science that NASA used it to train their new recruit in management department by asking them to spot all the inaccuracies in it. So far, there's 160 inaccuracies found, and with the movie's duration of 2 1/2 hour, that roughly 1 inaccuracy per minute

Isn't it weird if the debris has the orbital trajectory to intersect all of them (Shuttle, Hubble, ISS), has roughly the same orbit trajectory but moves much faster than all of them? (I'm just assuming what the film said since they said the debris has an orbital period of 90 minutes, but considering what happened in the movie, it looks like the debris' orbital period is much more faster. This assumes the 2 main objects (ISS and Hubble) orbit is intersecting with debris' orbit, but even then it's an extremely low probability that those 2 objects (with each having different orbital trajectory being intersected by 1 orbit all at once while that orbit moves much faster than all of those 2 objects to cause enough damage to destroy it) imagine like this: 2 satellites on low kerbin orbit. They are on the same orbital trajectory and orbital plane. Seen from above kerbin, Satellite A is on 12 o'clock position, while satellite B is on 6 o'clock position. Now, satellite A moves much faster than B, so eventually, their collision is inevitable, yet satellite A has same orbital path and trajectory like B. This is pretty much implausible

Your craft is still inside detonation range. It might look like your craft is outside the blast radius, but actually it isn't. I've played with north kerbin dynamic nukes in the past and I can say that there's an "invisible" shockwave effect that can destroy the craft even if it looks like flying outside it's detonation radius. For what I can tell, some weapons behaves slightly different in space. I can use regular machine gun as a literal jetpack (they provide around 5/s Dv per shot), while missiles, bombs and other ordnance have a slightly different trajectory or behavior, such as cluster bomb having a much larger spread or missiles have worse maneuverability. I don't know if mun environment affect the nukes, but one thing that I can say, B83 from north kerbin dynamic has a quite massive blast radius. Just because you didn't touch the mushroom cloud doesn't mean you are safe from blast shockwave

On a side of a note, in gravity, according to a calculation, if the debris circling earth at 90 minutes interval, that would put it roughly at escape velocity, which means at that speed, the debris would accelerate away from earth into deep space, escaping earth sphere of influence

http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/core.html http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/TheDayTheEarth.htm http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/ This will make you laugh (Also contains several bad movie physics such as Avatar, The day the earth stood still, etc. and explains common physics mistakes in the hollywood movie)

While Gravity feels realistic enough, as a space enthusiast and a scientific nerd, some things feels... jarring for me: 1. The Tiangong space station is stably upright as it enters the atmosphere, though it would have begun to tumble due to the increased drag of the atmosphere on such a not-aerodynamic object. 2. Kowalski telling Stone to detach from the manipulator arm, which has been hit by debris and is rapidly spinning away from the shuttle. He tells her she needs to detach before the arm carries her too far and he will not be able to reach her, so she detaches. The problem is she would have still had all the angular momentum of the arm itself, so detaching may have flung her away from the arm, but like a baseball pitcher releasing a baseball, she would have still kept moving, and not just stopped dead in space while the arm kept going. It may have been possible for her to release at the exact moment in the arc where she would have been flung back towards the shuttle, but that's an extremely iffy, one-in-a-billion chance that she clearly isn't trying for, as she releases when Kowalski tells her she has to hurry up and do it. 3. Even if we assume this film takes place in an alternate universe where the Tiangong and the ISS are in the same orbit 100 miles (or even just 100 kilometers) apart, thrusting directly toward the Tiangong wouldn't actually get her there. At 100 miles distant, she'd need to do an orbital rendezvous. She would have to thrust away from Tiangong by just the right amount, which would lower her altitude on the opposite side of her orbit, then wait for their orbits to re-intersect and thrust in the opposite direction to re-circularize her orbit. If she'd thrusted toward Tiangong, as shown in the movie, she'd actually end up pulling farther away from it. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ One of the most absurdly bad science that I've ever seen is undoubtedly on The Core, the story about journey to the center of the earth to restart the earth core with nuclear bombs because it apparently stops moving for... Reasons. To list some of them: 1. Let's start with the fact that in real life, the Earth's core rotates once every 23 hours 56 minutes 4 seconds, just like the rest of the Earth does. Relative to somebody standing on the Earth's surface, the core doesn't appear to move at all. If the core "stopped spinning", it would appear to spin in the opposite direction relative to the Earth's surface. (And where would all that angular momentum go? At the very least, the rest of the Earth would have to speed up.) 2. The Earth's outer core weighs in at 1.8 sextillion metric tons. You'd have to throw one hell of a monkey wrench into the path of that spinning freight train to brake it from one-rotation-every-24-hours to a dead stop. Not to mention we haven't developed a single nuclear warhead powerful enough to even break 6.0 on the Moment Magnitude scale. Krakatoa laughs at our most powerful nuke. So how can you expect a nuke to even give so much as a nudge to all that molten iron? 3. On the subject of the core's weight (and thus, density), at some point they get the surprise that the core is supposedly of a different density than they thought (emphasis added) it had. The movie handwaves it with a variant of "hey, nobody has ever been down there to measure the core's density" (again, emphasis added). Never mind that said density has been accurately measured by how it affects the propagation seismic waves (from earthquakes of known origin), a measurement that has been verified by how it's used to accurately calculate back the position of new quakes by their seismic waves' propagation through the core. 4. The Virgil encounters an underground equivalent of an asteroid belt composed of gigantic diamonds. Diamonds cannot form as deep at the ship's level, since carbon could not possibly crystallize in those kinds of temperatures; the crystals would be constantly breaking down before they could fully form. Plus, carbon is far too light to remain below the mantle for very long; it would be like popping a balloon at ground level and expecting the helium to remain where it was. 5. When the Virgil descends through the Earth's crust and into the mantle (and, later, when it has to travel upward through the mantle to escape), the mantle shown is clearly supposed to be a liquid, thereby not requiring the use of their drilling laser. In real life, the lower and middle mantles are semi-liquid goop that flow like pitch (at best), and the upper mantle is most decidedly solid. 6. A cavernous gas-filled geode, surrounded by 800,000 pounds per square inch of pressure at several thousand degrees, would never be able to form in the first place, much less endure for the years or millennia before the Virgil encountered it. This one gets some babbling in the movie, with two of the scientists discussing how it should be impossible. It eventually gets a justification that boils down to "look, it must be possible, as it's right here." 7. When the impeller is jammed by a fallen amethyst crystal and the geode starts leaking magma from above, the team keep right on cutting through the crystal at the cost of one member's life, even as the pooled magma gets closer and closer. But amethyst melts at the kind of temperatures which liquefy magma; it's only compression that keeps such crystals intact, and the geode's open interior should give heated minerals enough space to deform freely. By all rights, the crew should have just gone back inside and waited for the magma (which their vessel is designed to withstand) to engulf the Virgil and melt the thing loose. 8. The geomagnetic field protects the surface of the Earth from charged particles (like the solar wind and cosmic rays), but it has no effect on electromagnetic radiation such as microwaves. If the Earth was hit by an evil microwave death ray from the sun, like the one shown in the movie, we'd be fried whether the Earth's magnetic field was there or not. (And if space really was filled with that much microwave radiation, every one of our satellites would be fried instantly.) 9. When the Virgil begins its journey toward the core, it begins at the Marianas Trench, which rends itself apart to form a whirlpool that sucks the ship downward. The problem: the Marianas Trench is on a convergent plate boundary. 10. The 5 bombs in the movie have a yield of 200 megatons each. No real life nuclear weapon larger than 50 megatons (The Tsar Bomba) has ever been detonated, and no weapon larger than a theoretical 100 megatons has ever even been built. Even using the most compact bang-for-your-buck nuclear weapons technology available, a single 200 megaton device would be larger than a whole compartment on the Virgil (Which about the size of large freight train). 11. Our hero has to boost the warhead yield of the last bomb (the 5th bomb) by 30%. How does he do this? By taking 6 pounds of plutonium from the Virgil's nuclear reactor and placing it next to the bomb. It's doubtful the writers were aware that multimegaton nuclear devices use the nuclear fusion of heavy-hydrogen isotopes as their primary energy source, and only use the nuclear fission of plutonium-239 (which has to be weapons grade, not reactor grade) to set the fusion reaction off. Now, fission-fusion-fission bombs do employ a uranium-238 tamper around the outside, which absorbs the neutrons generated by the fusion reaction and undergoes spontaneous fission. This doubles or even quadruples the warhead yield. At the 200 megaton level, it's likely that all the bombs had to be fission-fusion-fission devices. However, the uranium tamper must surround the fusion core to do this. Having a chunk of uranium (or plutonium) sitting off to one side would only create some atomized uranium (or plutonium) shrapnel. In other words, placing anything "nuclear" or "radioactive" near the exploding nuclear bomb won't improve the bomb's yield, and a reactor-grade plutonium is not the same with the one with weapon-grade. 12. Sound waves do not change frequency when they pass from one medium to the next. (They do change wavelength, though, since the speed of propagation always equals the frequency times the wavelength.). 13. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, in particular, takes a mighty shellackin' in this movie. Even if unobtainium were a perfect insulator, so that no external heat could get in at all, the interior of the Virgil would still generate an enormous amount of its own waste heat from human bodies, life support systems, electronics, the motors running the impellers, and so on. Just look at how hot the nuclear reactor's core was. The only "heat sink" they brought along was some liquid nitrogen. Even if half the entire payload mass was liquid nitrogen, it would certainly have absorbed all the heat it could within the first hour. 14. Likewise, generating electric energy simply because it's hot outside won't work. You can only generate power if there's a temperature difference, and heat is allowed to flow along that temperature difference — unobtainium or no unobtainium. Any theoretically-possible scheme for using the hull to generate impeller power would have fried the contents within seconds. 15. Not only does the Space Shuttle not rely exclusively on a magnetic compass for navigation, a magnetic compass isn't even part of its navigation package. Earth's normal geomagnetic field changes not only with latitude and longitude, but also with altitude; and at the altitude for Low Earth Orbit, it's very different than it is down here on the surface. The shuttle determines its location partly by data fed to it from the ground — which also doesn't rely on magnetic compasses — and partly by extrapolating this data via its very limited onboard computers. (And nowadays, one would suppose, from GPS.) 16. The sun does not emit evil microwave death rays that can boil San Francisco Bay and melt the Golden Gate Bridge. (And if it did, a magnetic field wouldn't stop them.) __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ And in the side of plot, some of them just doesn't care at all about anything "scientific" part in "Sci-Fi". The 2014 film Asteroid vs Earth hinges on stupidity that may not even be quantifiable. Faced with an Earth destroying asteroid 1/4th the size and weight of the moon, one of the characters correctly informs the military that firing nukes at it won't work. He soon loses these "did his homework" points by raising another plan, that requires that nukes be set off in and around the Ring of Fire in the Pacific. By doing so, he hopes to create a magnitude 18 earthquake that will move the planet out of the way of the asteroid. That would be 18 on the Richter Scale. For reference: every step up on the scale releases 31 times more energy. A little math shows that an earthquake of magnitude 18 would release a force equivalent to 12 zettatons (zettaton = 10 ^ 21 tons) of TNT. The crater from the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs only released 100 teratons (teraton = 10 ^ 12 tons). At this point, the plot is a non issue: no matter what is done, everybody on Earth is going to die. Personally though, I do love sci-fi movies, even if some scientific accuracy had to be ignored for the sake of the plot. What I don't like is when the movie treats it's own "science" as if it was a real scientific fact. This can lead to a misunderstanding and I personally do not like that

Dude, that was a very nice improvisation!

Single launch interplanetary mothership By Ars Sisters 1.3 broke our Stella-Rium mothership save, so we had to rebuild it again and revise the design (Which thankfully brought down the mothership's mass from around 100 tons to a much more manageable 70 tons) BTW, for those who doesn't know, this is our previous Stella-Rium. It's a self-sufficient mothership for interplanetary exploration with the ability to generate fuel using dust accumulator and ore condensor modules from Solaris Hypernautic mod. It was planned that Stella-Rium would explore the celestial body of Kerbol System, but before that happened, 1.3 broke the save file We don't have any heavy lifter, and SpaceY mod has been deleted to free up memory to keep KSP running. The launch vehicle you see above is our attempt to ramshackle and slap together something to get the mothership in orbit since the launch window is closing. Pray that the first attempt won't end with a fireball in atmosphere LAUNCH! WE HAVE A LIFTOFF! We had to throttle down the thrust from 6 SRBs to keep the acceleration to a manageable level since we have no fairing to keep our payload save. Stock fairing is far too small while SpaceY fairings are unavailable. If we didn't limit the thrust, there's a very high chance that the solar panels being destroyed by the extreme heat or atmospheric drag SRB separation, at this point, the rocket is passing through 30 Km altitude. No parts being destroyed and no heating effect being visible so far... Passing 70 Km altitude, circularizing orbit now. We have a very limited amount of fuel left on the launch vehicle Separation from launch vehicle stage, We're still in suborbital trajectory. Preparing to continue orbit circularization using main boosters of the mothership once we're approaching the apoapsis We have some dust available! let's compress it into ore, and refine it into fuel for a bit more Delta-V STABLE ORBIT REACHED! Extending all modules. Not bad for the first try of using that slap-together launch vehicle that's literally built in 5 minutes View from Valentina's console on the bridge Bill's console, behind Valentina. Jeb and bob are on the observation cupola For now, it's time to take a rest. Let the dust accumulator gather dust particles for ore condensor in order to provide ore for ISRU for fuel production. Recharge the fuel for the next orbital maneuver, which is gathering science from Kerbin orbit as well as Mun exploration. We'll update our mission report on the next orbital maneuver That's all for now

35. Build space station 36. Nuke kerbin 37. Mess around with game files 38. Alt+f12 39. Make tourists faint 40. Staging error 41. Losing probe's signal 42. Rapid unplanned disassembly 43. Lithobraking 44. Build mass relay 45. Summon the kraken @Danny2462 should have plenty of "activity" in his videos of "25 things to do with..."

1. Start the game with starter science at maximum (5000 I think?), along with science instrument mods (dmagic, probeplus, etc.) 2. Unlock all science instrument parts 3. Use KEI mod to gather all KSC science in one click (this is basically farming all science on KSC biomes without the "wandering around" parts) 4. Presto! More than 16K science! Not being cheaty, but I've been playing KSP since v1.0 era, and my first career has all tech node unlocked legitimately. But every time there's major update, it always broke my save file and I don't want to do all the chores to re-unlock the tech nodes. What I consider cheating is by using mobile processing lab to get science. Personally though, I've never used it, not because it's too easy, but simply I'm too lazy to do timewarp while sitting doing nothing while waiting the science to rack up

Most probes don't have enough Dv to leave the system, since probes usually carry a very limited fuel. Even without deorbiting, the orbital decay will still makes them plummet to the planet they orbited. That said, their last transmission of data provides a valuable science discovery about planet's characteristics

I already watched it, but what I meant is not about super high tech prototype drone where only 1 is made, what I mean is space fighter drones that's considered expendable, cheap, dumb drones with simple targeting and combat protocols that you throw away into enemy ship to kill it (and they die in droves)

Man, you make me remember my previous laptop. It was A vintage piece of technology, with bulky 5 cm thickness, 500MB hard drive, and still using small joystick for cursor aiming (no, there's no USB port on it). The price? When it was bought, the original price is around 200$, I got it from secondhand shop with a price of... 5$ (this is during crysis game era). Then I own it for 2 years before it was sold for... 2$. The game that I played on that laptop after all those years? Megaman X. The only thing that remains from it is the hard drive, which I removed because I knew that laptop won't last long anyway after it's sold again, so I keep it's main hard drive as a memento and well as the reminder of memories we held together

Telling story about the life of fighter drones is less appealing for audience than telling an elite pilot's combat record. Also, drones does not have decision making capabilities like humans do. Drones can also get jammed, fooled or hacked (if drones have a potential to kill carriers, and suddenly your drones are hacked to be hostile towards you, you are screwed). And as mentioned by @Terwin, space warfare is not cheap (mostly). A fighter that have a service life of 100 battles is much more economical than buying 100 missiles. Pilots can gain experience to fight and adapt to different combat situations better, but drones does not. About the computer in space, there's a bit of truth in real life, computers used in space is indeed worse than we have on earth. Many space probes, especially for exploration past Jupiter even has a transmission data rate of one bit per second (not byte, it's bit). When NASA is asked why they didn't use more powerful or better computer, they simply said that: "Back then during the early space age, we're evaluating several computers that'll be used for unmanned mission into another planet. Several of the candidates are amongst the best, fastest and most sophisticated computers ever designed during that era. But we choose the slowest and simplest one. Why? Faster and more powerful computer has higher clock speed as well as more power hungry, this creates an issue in power management and heat dissipation since unlike on earth, heat dissipation is a far more serious problem in space. Also, more complex system is more vulnerable to failure than simple system, and in space, there's no way we can repair them like here on earth, so we choose the simplest system that worked for space probes simply because, what they lack in performance and quality, they compensate it with durability and reliability"

Agreed, with the lack of space dedicated for guidance systems, it can pack much more explosive warhead. Fired straight like unguided rockets, it behaves just like dumb bombs, torpedoes or rockets in WW2 (as a bonus point, it's easier to build straightforward unguided rockets than guided missiles)

One of the sci-fi lore that I've seen is like this: "The shield system works by using a powerful force field projector to stop incoming projectiles. When the system detect an incoming object passing it's velocity threshold, the system project a force field on the projectile's path to deflect it. This drains a portion of system's power capacitor, which will be recharged shortly by the internal reactor unless another hit drains the capacitor further. A depleted capacitor will be unable to provide a shield protection. Unfortunately, the shield has no effect on fighters since they are moving slower than missiles or projectiles, and their interception has been handled by the point defense systems, which shoots any ordnance passing beyond the shield's minimum force field projection distance." Yes, the point of the fighter is to carry a missile through the shield. It's like a Trojan horse. Fighters are piloted since drones are prone to being hacked, jammed or fooled

It was a lieeeee!!!!????? The truth... My life has ruined forever....

Back then, post ww1, during and post ww2 there's no "common sense" when it comes to designing military hardware so any insane or impractical design can be excused since they make curved barrel rifles, flying tanks, rocket kamikaze fighter, land battleship, up to thinking sun powered killer satellite for experiments, curiosity or for the lolz Is there a much longer range? I'm curious

On the other hand... A pair of proton torpedoes to thermal exhaust port... Okay, first off, we know that sci-fi space opera ignores orbital mechanic, let's keep it that way in this discussion. The one that's more important here is what's the justification of several things we often see in the space opera setting? Probably the only reason that fighters are present in most sci-fi space opera is because most large warship is equipped with energy shields. In almost every space opera scene or setting, the shield always shields against bullets, lasers, projectiles, missiles, etc. but almost never seen stopping fighters like an instant death radius. The justification here seems like this: The shield is an active protection radius that stops any projectiles detected around the ship moving at certain velocity/kinetic energy threshold. The fighter acts as a carrier for missiles or other weapons and the main purpose is to go 'under' the shield effective protection distance so the missiles can be launched to directly hit the target. On the other hand, a fighters is also handy for intercepting opposing fighters, protecting their parent ship from fighter strike. In addition, missiles can be jammed or fooled, but human pilot does not If shields cannot stop fighters, why bother installing them? Well, first of all, this is a warship, full of high power weapons. Whenever they meet hostile warship, they'll fire this weapons against each other. A lot of scenes in sci-fi involves 'our shield cannot hold much longer!'. The justification here is that without a shield, a main gun of a warship is more than enough to wreck opposing warship (think about a duel between 2 cruise missile ships but without any anti missile defenses, where the one shoot first wins), their scene of shooting at each other with main gun is justified as an attempt to weaken opposing shield to the point of failure before they become totally exposed without means to stop any incoming ordnance (like the quote above). The fighter is also an attempt to weaken the enemy ship by bringing the weapons closer where it cannot be stopped with shield, or to defend parent craft from enemies fighter squadron What about point defenses? Point defenses have a justification for having a purpose of intercepting missiles and fighters that passed the shield. However, projectile-based point defenses takes space for ammo storage, which at one point they'll run dry. While they may stop fighters and missiles, they usually unable to stop energy weapons, in addition, not every space on a warship is filled with point defenses, which creates several blind spots which the fighters can exploit (and protected by enemy fighters). Even if they are very effective at destroying incoming missiles, fighters might have their own shields (which is weaker, but sufficient to prevent them being one-shotted), in addition, their automatic defense targeting might be vulnerable to being jammed In short, every stuff we see in sci-fi space opera is designed with justification, but also a necessary drawback to compensate. The only thing that I still cannot understand is distance and combat engagement range, since a tiny speck of warship in the distance in space means enemies are dangerously close, but I think the justification here is that it makes the story very boring when the ship is shooting at the target so far away that it feels it's shooting at nothing. Additionally, enemy ship might warp in close, or being closer means the enemy ship is less likely able to intercept and increasing weapon effectiveness By the way, I'm willing to help out, but for every things put in space opera warfare, there must be a justification why it was needed, otherwise it looks plain silly, it's like you put a main gun of a battleship on a paper-armored submarine, expecting them to emerge next to an actual enemy battleship before exchanging fire when a torpedo can cripple battleship from safer position. I'm open for discussion about why things are needed in space opera and why it's justified On the other hand, one of the longest combat engagement range in space opera that I ever seen is from Starship Troopers when the arachnid army launched an asteroid from their home planet into earth across AN ENTIRE GALAXY. Either the range is sufficiently realistic, excessively gigantic or hilariously LoLtastic

Man... I remember my first computer. It uses Windows 98, back then it was the most sophisticated OS out there. And my first game? DOOM. It's kinda interesting to realize how far and fast technology has progressed

Like someone has quoted about KSP: "if you know how it works, with enough creativity, wits and improvisation, you can build it in KSP"

I'm doing a lot of testing about flying wing aircraft. I made several iterations to get the best flight performance. The first version, it's basically an SSTO that's being redesigned for flying wing design. Turns out, the first version did a pretty good job. It flies well, and has reasonably responsive control. However, there's a slight sudden 'Shake' whenever I'm full-throttling the engines. TIme for a redesign... The second version, now using jet engines instead of lf/ox engines. Six engines provides thrust to lift the whole thing. The second version flies well, no more shaking at full throttle and having an even better control responsiveness. However, another problem arise. Since jet engines isn't as powerful as lf/ox engines, it struggles to correct and stabilize my craft. Quite often, the second version spin out of control if I yaw/pitch/roll too much. This needs to be redesigned again... A bit of funny note, I tried to use Goliath engines to power it, replacing 6 jet engines. 4 Goliaths provides much better thrust and stability, but a particularly interesting ... incident ruined the whole thing. Basically when I'm taking off, it goes well. Pitching slowly at 5 degree upwards, the flying wing flies smoothly. climbing to 3000 meter, I start to pitch a bit more, the suddenly something explodes (Dunno what's it, whole wings still intact), the craft's velocity drops and gliding softly while 4 goliaths are torn off from main body and flying away in the distance. It's like my craft flies on the air, then suddenly something hold it in place causing the engine to torn off and flying away. I tried to keep it in place with struts but it doesn't work. I don't know what caused it, since apparently, it always happened whenever I pitched more than 5 degree, then there's a kaboom, engines flying away while the craft glides softly to the ground. Okay, this is the third (or fourth?) iteration. This time I tried to make it simple, only one engine. The last iteration was a surprise. It flies with amazing performance. I managed to pull several sharp turns, even at nearly 90 degree angle without any loss of stability (The flight only ends in a crash when my craft hit the ground since it was night and I cannot see the ground clearly).The single engine makes it weaker in terms of thrust, but it compensates this with much more maneuverable flight Things to learn? "Sometimes overengineering isn't always the answer" and "Success in KSP is preceded by several failures, design iteration and redesign"

Didn't recall about science boosting ability of scientist. So far, what I understand is pilot drives space craft better (obsolete by the time high end probe core becomes available, though they need constant electricity), engineer fix stuff and boost mining efficiency, and scientist for resetting experiment and manning lab module. Better bring them all in a mission just in case Personally though, I'd rather want to see pilot occupation having another ability that makes them stand out that no other occupation can replicate with flyby wire or probe cores, such as increasing the effect of reaction wheel or better fuel efficiency

Keep in mind that wheesley engine's performance decreases significantly as the altitude increases. It was meant for low altitude flight. At sea level, it produces 120 kn thrust, but at 15 km altitude, it only produces 13.7 kn of thrust, barely enough to provide any thrust to climb higher Long and narrow wing has less surface area to provide lift, and at higher altitude, the atmospher is so thin that the lift generated by long and narrow wings is insufficient for sustainable flight. Delta wings are able to work better since the lack of lift per square area is compensated by having larger area to provide lift