SunlitZelkova

I had this same issue. Glad it got reported, hoping it is fixed soon!

What about the ISP of a stomp rocket?

@Ultimate Steve Considering SpaceX is the only organization with an intention to build a colony on Mars that is more substantial than anything before (albeit with few details at the time given focus on Starship itself), you might continue discussion in this thread. There’s also one called A City on Mars, but that was more about habitation and economic factors in a Mars colony. Also, you might find this article interesting: http://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2016/12/energy-from-space-department-of.html?m=1 Summarized DOE/NASA study of SBSP from the late 70s. They envisioned 60x 10x5 kilometer satellites and 60x receiver antenna spaced approximately 50 kilometers apart stretching across the US at the 35th parallel. 60x such satellite would have been capable of providing 300 gigawatts of power. That’s one quarter of what the entire present day US energy grid can produce, and thus far more than what a Mars colony probably needs, so fewer satellites would be needed at Mars. Dust storms might have deleterious effects on the transmission of the power if microwaves are used though; didn’t Opportunity lose communications because of one? I’m not sure how its communications system’s transmissions would compare with an SBSP satellite’s though.

Dumb theory, but maybe Bezos wants to see the launch and has other things going on during the day.

I’ve dreamed of that world and tried hard to make it happen, but I am still of the belief that that world was never a real possibility. It was just a fantasy. I’ve been going through Asif Siddiqi’s Challenge to Apollo trying to find a point of divergence where a counterfactual/alt history could reasonably start and make the Soviet space program of the 60s healthier, but there’s just none. Here’s some of the events that stood out to me: 1. Between 1962 and 1964, OKB-1 deputy chief designer Leonid Voskresensky argues with Korolyov over building a test stand for the N1’s first stage. He also tells him that the rocket cannot be built without annual funding ten times more than actually allotted (500 million rubles in 1964). Voskresensky eventually refuses to sign any document related to the N1 unless Korolyov concedes on the test stand issue but resigns in 1964. 2. 1964: Despite the N1 not being designed for a single launch LOR profile, instead having been conceived for EOR and direct ascent, someone (it wasn’t known at the time the book was written in the 2000s) proposes to change it to LOR. Korolyov received letters from many of his best (and most-well liked within the design bureau) engineers imploring him not to change the design but he ended up ramming it through government skepticism and criticism from other chief designers for approval. Consequently, many of these people were either dismissed, transferred to minor positions, or resign. 3. January 1965: Minister of Defense Rodion Malinovsky openly tells Air Force officials “We cannot afford to and will not build super powerful carriers to make flights to the Moon.” 4. In the rest of 1965, an ungodly amount of infighting over both the lunar landing and lunar flyby programs occurs. Korolyov finds himself writing his own “letters of imploring” begging various government, party, and military officials not to sign off on Chelomei’s UR-700 lest it divert funding from the N1, but meanwhile does his own jockeying and becomes responsible for the lunar flyby spacecraft, increasing his organization’s workload to the detriment of the N1. 5. Despite the objections of many of its members, including Mystislav Keldysh himself, who said “What kind of nerve must we have to disembark one man on the Moon? Imagine for a moment being alone on the Moon… that’s a straight path to the psychiatric ward,” a special commission headed by Keldysh signs off on N1 development in December 1965, giving it the complete go-ahead. A loosely similar series of unfortunate events occurred in 1974 that led to the N1 being cancelled despite being close to working. I wouldn’t say any of this was inevitable. If you look at what made the N1 and other big Soviet space projects fail in the 60s and 70s, there’s arguably so many contributing factors it’s a miracle they didn’t succeed in the first place. The failure of the programs are contingent on so many factors that if I was writing an alternate history where the Soviets did not land on the Moon first I would probably be mocked for writing a story akin to what happened in real life. But on the other hand, it’s contingent on so many things that to think of a world where they succeeded one would basically be writing complete fiction. In the 80s it’s actually a lot easier to get the dream vehicles going, because Energia was the main dream vehicle. With Energia literally complete by 1988, all that would remain would be to build lunar or Mars spacecraft. To get that to happen though, the USSR needs to survive, and that is equally contingent on so many factors such a counterfactual is pure fiction (there is no one point of divergence that can make that happen). Considering Energia was complete, it may not be too hard to imagine a 90s or 00s Soviet government funding the building of a lunar lander and capsule, but on the other side of the isle it’s about as difficult as imagining N1 getting proper funding as it is to imagine SEI getting the funding to do anything at all.

Not entirely true. Zenit, based on the boosters of Energia, worked just fine. It was supposed to replace Soyuz the booster, but… ya know.

I’m honestly surprised, my money was on something Soviet.

Well of course, why make designs of camels when you can make art about cats. https://egypt-museum.com/cat-eating-fish-under-a-chair/

Unmanned in some cases and manned in some cases, IMO. Equally important but not often mentioned is how well one side’s electronic warfare forces happened to be performing against another’s drones. That affects the other guy’s too (or so I understand) so they wind up needing to send in guys to do the gritty stuff. There’s also probably a reason we see both sides using manned fighter aircraft to launch glide bombs and cruise missiles and not the Bayraktars or equivalents that were oh so ubiquitous two years ago. A little like how missiles could not fully replace guns on fighter aircraft, I would bet that both manned and unmanned systems will always complement each other.

I was once very lucky to see a satellite transit across the Moon while observing it through my own telescope. The night I saw the ISS, I was also using my telescope. I desperately tried to track it but it was just a little too much, the thing moves fast and my telescope doesn’t seem designed to rotate smoothly like that.

So there’s this Japanese fusion band called Casiopea, and I was listening to it while walking back from the store during sunset. Lo and behold, it gets dark enough and clear enough for the constellation Cassiopeia to appear in the sky above me. So I pull out my phone to take a picture. My vision is good and the trail runs right on the edge of farmland and forest, so it’s really easy to see satellites. There is a satellite passing across Cassiopeia as I take the picture. I thought “that’s cool, too bad it will just look like a star on camera.” But I didn’t realize the iPhone takes a long exposure photo on night mode! So when I look at the picture hours later, not only was the satellite captured as a streak across the sky, but there was another satellite above it that I myself didn’t even notice! I even saw what was probably two members of the NOAA constellation. It was two sats following each other along the same azimuth, some NOAA sats are deployed like that. The behavior resembled when I managed to catch a Cargo Dragon trailing behind the ISS three years ago, but the brightness of today’s objects was much too low to have been either the ISS or Tiangong.

I haven’t seen it mentioned here. China has begun launches for not one, but two mega constellations. https://spacenews.com/china-kicks-off-guowang-megaconstellation-with-long-march-5b-launch/ I saw a post on X the other day where the poster thought China was overdeveloping launch capability, a little similar to its overcapacity in renewable energy production. While certainly a few of the new commercial space upstarts can be expected to fail, just as some have in the US, this is what all of that capacity is for. Some have speculated the second constellation, Guowang, may end up having military applications. Not much info is available about it compared to the other one (Qianfan, which actually has already signed agreements to provide service in Brazil), and satellites with “guo” (nation, national) in the name tend to have military purposes. According to government regulations on satellite services, Guowang must have 6,500 of its 13,000 sats in orbit by 2032. Obviously the Long March series isn’t going to cut it for such a task. Especially if this is a government-backed project, it may provide the commercial space developers incentive to speed development of their reusable rockets. At the moment most of these superficially resemble F9, but use different fuels and engine configurations.

Is there like a master list of possible (or proposed) applications for Earth satellites somewhere? There’s all this talk about a space economy in the near future as Starship allows for satellites to come down in cost, but I’m interested in what types of businesses are expected to profit from this. New competitors in existing applications, or is it expected new businesses will arise out of this?

“What kind of nerve must we have to disembark one man on the Moon?!… That’s a straight road to the psychiatric hospital.” -Soviet academician Mystislav Keldysh, February 1965 EDIT- He says “Imagine being alone on the Moon!” before saying “That’s a straight road…”

Apocalyptic fiction and prophesying/theorizing, specifically in relation to human extinction, are many things, but I think one of them is a sort of fantasy thinking on the part of humans. If human extinction has causes that can be identified and alleviated, it can be prevented. But realistically, what causes humans to go extinct will be factors that are multigenerational, spanning large enough time scales that no one can identify them and alleviate them. It’s nice to think that real threats to humanity will conform to how we perceive threats and formulate action though.

Apollo had Jerome Wiesner vs James Webb on whether to do direct ascent or lunar orbit rendezvous, Artemis has Bob vs basically everyone in this part of the forum on whether to do single launch or distributed launch w/ in-orbit refueling. Never change, KSP forum.

Knuckle couplers can be finicky. If the problem it fairly frequent and persists, you could look for different types of couplers online. Looks like yours are HO; with N scale there are a number of different knuckle coupler types available and they can be swapped at will. It’s possible that’s the same for HO too. Couplers are fairly easy to remove and replace, basically just requiring a screwdriver. There’s multiple parts, such as a spring inside the assembly, so be careful not to lose them. And also, because you have an electric locomotive, be VERY careful to not damage the pantographs. I recommend just Googling for how to remove couplers or do maintenance on a model locomotive with a pantograph. There might not be a video specifically on the GG1 but there might be something related to Japanese or European trains and the principle would be the same. It depends on if it is the max turn angle of the bogie or the spacing of the wheels on each bogie that is the problem. If the former, in theory you could modify the car so that the bogies can make tighter turns, but you’d probably have to take the body off the chassis to get a better look at how it’s assembled. This should be possible- most passenger cars can have their bodies removed pretty easily so as to install interior lighting- but depending on how the bogies are assembled they may be impossible to modify it without basically breaking them first. Also be careful to not damage or break the body. If the latter, there’s nothing that can be done with what you have on hand. The only solution would be to buy another circular loop’s worth of track with a smoother curve and replace the curves you have. Track makers tend to have guides to the radius of their curves on their websites, some modeling associations may have guides too. If you know the maker of that passenger car, look up a manual or any old sales information from websites and you should be able to find the minimum curve it can take. On the bright side: space-wise for your layout, you shouldn’t need too much of a bigger curve to handle the passenger car. The positioning of the bogies on each look barely longer than each other; I’m actually surprised the car would have issues at all when the GG1 doesn’t. Now that I’m thinking about it, depending on the speeds you’re running at, the passenger car might be too light. Some older N scale passenger car models required opening up the body and putting in weights, because none were installed in the factory and the cars would frequently derail. I recommend maybe observing how it derails more to make sure it’s a problem with the length of the car that’s causing the derailment. Just make sure to put towels or clothes or something along the tracks so when it falls the body isn’t scratched.

I’d argue because TV has been sidelined, YouTube is the new TV, and the costs associated with maintaining a platform billions use requires them to use methods of gaining revenue. I agree with this. Also, I don’t think ads should be placed on uploads of albums that just have the cover on the screen and no movement. People don’t watch those so it’s ridiculous to put visual ads on them. That said, I disagree with the library analogy. YouTube is not a library; in the two countries I’m familiar with (Japan & US) virtually all libraries (apart from private universities’) are publicly owned. YouTube is privately owned and is able to do whatever it wants, they have no obligation to listen to some users’ requests. It could be argued that YouTube is so ubiquitous and important as a source of information that it shouldn’t be treated like a normal private business, but existing beliefs about business practice don’t require YouTube to do anything.

Eh, it doesn’t upset me as much. It must cost a lot to maintain nearly 2 decades worth of videos. Plus YouTube is so popular it might as well be present day TV. And lots of people rely on it for their livelihoods (YouTube is their career). I was able to wait 1-2 minutes for commercials to end while watching TV as a kid and I am able to wait 1-2 minutes to skip ads on YouTube. What does upset me is people’s data being harvested to “personalize” the ad experience.

There is no race. China’s development would be proceeding along the same pace even if Artemis III landed on the Moon two months ago. It should be noted the two programs are also very different. The Chinese program is an initial exploration program more akin to Apollo, albeit with the intent to establish a base. Artemis is trying to a build a sustainable sustained presence there. China will not have a Starship-like capability until 2035 at the earliest, if not longer (the publicly shown designs and declared development plans of Long March 9 keep changing). Similar to their early crewed orbital flights, I would expect Chinese lunar missions to be fairly slow in pacing as well, with incremental improvements to the spacecraft and launch vehicle along the way. Due to the costs of Lanyue (which uses a crasher stage) China might not fly lunar missions with a cadence on par with the ones to Tiangong until the late 2030s or 2040s, after Long March 9 is in service.

Some tout science as a means of seeing beyond “biased” human concepts of the world; geocentrism etc. I’ve been building a world for a story and have been thinking about how perception might evolve in the far future. Toying with concepts like “could something replace science (by building off of it just as science built off of religion in some cases).” My thinking behind this is somewhat related to a question I asked here a few months ago, asking if time was a nonsensical concept.

I’ve been getting so many bad gateway messages I didn’t realize the forum had been up at all since late October.

If science studies concepts created by the superstitious hunter-gatherers, like time and space, can it be said to be scientific? Not to say it’s a worthless system, or is nonsensical, just that it doesn’t possess god-like objectivity.