Beamer

Provide a solid dental plan and hire more of them than your enemies.

November 9th 1967: First test flight of the Saturn V, launching Apollo 4 from KSC launch complex 39: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_4 November 9th 2005: ESA launches the Venus Express: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_Express

My Dres Station Expansion mission arrived and was connected to the tiny initial station I sent there some years ago. The expansion is just a central cross connector and a large fuel storage tank with docking ports. It was also carrying a fancy tourist lander for up to 21 people (a Mk-2 lander can and Mk-3 capsule hidden under the fairing). I flew my Koffer Ku-134 back from the desert to KSC, with another perfect landing without use of autopilot. I'm still surprised how such a large jet plane can feel like a tiny chopper bi-plane. Compared to this my fuel refinery plane flies a lot like a brick doesn't, I might have to try using this wing design on it, although it does take up a lot more parking space. A day after the Dres station expansion my NuKerBus Mk-2 arrived at Dres, I had the 8 tourists and 3 crew flying in the lander, but I need something to take them back to Kerbin too, so this interplanetary shuttle was sent along without crew. Then I spent some time watching empty capsules almost burn up in the atmosphere but just make it through to finally crash into the ground or water at terminal velocity. I push the vessels of the rescue contracts to an orbit with a 25-30K periapsis but they won't actually crash unless I watch them, sort of a Schrodinger orbit. I don't mind watching it but I wish they'd explode from overheating. Interestingly, an empty Mk-1 passenger cabin will actually survive a drop from low orbit into the water and can be recovered, but all the others go boom when they crash.

For the purpose of showing temperature differences since we started accurately measuring them. This is not really a popular press publication (although the absolutely horribly over-designed website might make you think different), it assumes that the people reading it have some prior knowledge and familiarity with conventions. The problem has been identified, it's getting a lot hotter fast. The solutions will have to be ignorant of the whodunnit, leave that to the historians (disclaimer: I am not). All data we have suggests that even if we go back to pre-industrial levels right now (which is of course impossible, and would in itself be a disaster even greater than the climate change) it will still keep getting worse for a long time. People need to be a little less concerned about avoidance, a lot less concerned about the guilt question, and a lot more concerned about battening down the hatches. Avoidance alone is not a solution, it is part of it for sure and just 'good common sense' but it's not going to be enough. Expressed in both economical and personal damage, climate change is already a disaster by all reasonable definitions of the word. It doesn't matter if it's getting hotter because we are coming out of an ice age or because our cows and cars and factories are gassy or how much exactly each contributes, what matters is that it's doing huge amounts of damage and we'll be getting more of that in the future. We know ways to reduce our own footprint, so let's do that for starters, that's the good common sense part. But aside from that we need to pump a lot more money into research focused on reducing the speed of change or even reversing it, and into preparing for the worst. Whether that's through CO2 reclamation or mirrors in space to reflect sunlight or just strengthening the dykes, or whatever people can come up with if we get serious about it doesn't really matter, as long as it works. TLDR: We've learned the planet is getting hotter, and that we are at least contributing to that. Now we need to learn how to live with a hotter climate, and learn how to make it colder.

The first graph is showing temperature differences from pre-industrial conditions, so it makes perfect sense to use a baseline before the industrial revolution. 1850 is a common choice as starting point because that's when thermometer based record keeping began. Data from before that time is generally less precise since it's indirectly inferred from tree rings, ice cores etc. For graphs not centered around a specific historic event or period the choice of baseline is pretty much arbitrary, what matters is the trend.

The WMO released their 2022 report last Sunday, their findings on sea level rise seem relevant to the discussion: https://public.wmo.int/en/our-mandate/climate/wmo-statement-state-of-global-climate

November 8th 1656: Edmond Halley (of Halley's Comet fame) is born. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmond_Halley November 8th 1950: during the Korean war, a USAF F-80 Shooting Star encounters 2 North Korean MiG-15s in the first jet aircraft to jet aircraft dogfight in history. Source: https://theaviationgeekclub.com/the-story-of-the-usaf-f-80-pilot-who-shot-down-a-north-korean-mig-15-in-the-worlds-first-jet-versus-jet-combat/

Launch of my Pol mining installation, discarding the boosters. It's still underway, I think about a year away from its destination.

Good news, the MIRI Medium Resolution Spectroscopy mode has been fixed (or I think it's more correct to say they found a way to avoid the problem with the stuck filter mechanism). I guess they set damping to 0, angle to max and toggled the 'Locked' button a few times, like one does with failing robotic parts

My latest airplane design takes off for its inaugural flight. The Koffer Ku-134 (inspired by the designs of the Fokker 100 and Tupolev Tu-134, "koffer" is the Dutch word for "suitcase"). It has a total capacity of 100 kerbals and a max range of around 1800 km cruising at 4km and 200 m/s, enough to make the trip to the Desert Airstrip and back without the need for refueling. The main wing consists of the FAT wings with the Swept wings attached to the tip slightly rotated to form one whole. Some small wing segments are used for the inner back wing edge. The inner 2 elevons serve as flaps, the outer 2 as ailerons. It flies very well, responsive. I had no problem landing it at slow speeds and I managed to stop well before the taxi exit, or what passes for that on the Desert Airstrip. After they have visited the nearby pyramids I will fly back the assorted VIPs during daylight hours tomorrow (the ones that make it back anyway, the mountains can be harsh ). First I have the arrival of my Dres station expansion to deal with.

November 7th 1910: Phil O. Parmalee carries two bolts of silk on his Wright Model B from Dayton to Columbus, Ohio, generally considered the first commercial air flight and first freight shipment by airplane. Source: https://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/wright-brothers/online/age/1910/commercial.cfm November 7th 1996: NASA launches Mars Global Surveyor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Global_Surveyor

Seems about similar to the bigger 'Grand Tour' contracts in payout. You can combine multiple of those if you get a bit lucky (I think?) but they take ages to complete. If you get lucky with the 'roid orbits and have the hardware in place you can probably complete those contracts considerably faster, but you can't combine them. A Mk-3 passenger cabin full of 3 star tourist contracts will net you more but costs a lot more contract spots, and you need to get a bit lucky with the destinations to fill up your cabin... never an easy way, damn you game balance!

What's the payout on that? There's 2 params, AverageAvailableContracts = 10 default and FacilityProgressionFactor = 0.2 default, so I think at max upgrade level you get 1.6 * 10 'average' contracts. How exactly that 'average' is reached and what the standard deviation is I have no clue

I didn't realize he was involved but now that I know I'm sure we'll hear some claims that it's actively sending out signals soon I for one welcome our new black box building overlords!

It would be quite the find. Catching one as it passes through the solar system is nigh impossible, and returning a sample doubly so. If they can find pieces that actually crashed to earth it would be pretty huge indeed. I imagine they have some idea how to distinguish it from an earth rock, finding a needle in a haystack becomes easy if you have a big magnet. Or maybe they just trawl the area for rocks and sort through them after fishing them up, which might be a good method if they have fairly accurate coordinates of where it hit the water.

I wonder how they plan to find it, do they have GPS data from ships or sats? Considering how hard it can be to find an actively signalling black box, this seems a few orders of magnitude harder. It doesn't have a black box, right??

Centripetal force on a mass m is m times angular velocity (w) squared times radius (r). Gravity pull from earth on a mass m is the gravitational constant (G) times m times the mass of the earth (M) divided by the square of the radius. The absolute maximum is the point where centripetal force is bigger than the force of gravity, so m*w^2*r > G*m*M/r^2 or simplified w^2 > GM/r^3. For the earth if you work that out, it is at about 1.25 * 10^-3 radians per second, so 1.99 * 10^-4 full rotations per second, or 1 full rotation per 5027 seconds (84 minutes). At that point the centripetal force on the equator would balance with the force of gravity and stuff starts getting flung off. Now this is assuming the ideal situation of a perfect sphere, which it isn't of course, as mentioned the earth would bulge at the equator increasing the centripetal force there. But long before that point you would get tremendous earth quakes and volcanic activity and floods and what not (imagine the way the oceans would slosh around and the difference between high and low tide when the water is effectively only pulled down by 1/10th the force it is now). But in any case, that would be the absolute maximum rotation speed for the earth, any faster than that and there would definitely be no earth.

November 3rd 1957: USSR launches Sputnik 2, the dog Laika becomes the first animal in earth orbit. November 3rd 1973: NASA launches Mariner 10, the first space probe to (eventually) reach Mercury. Edit: sources... uhm, memory for Laika, caught Mariner 10 when I checked if my memory was correct Famous events, use duckduckgo or wiki for more info.

In KSP the ore weighs the same as the fuel you create from it, so it's never a good idea to refine ore on your ship. Just add the same weight in fuel tanks and you can leave the heavy ISRU behind. Of course if you're shipping a miner that has ore storage and refinery anyway you might as well fill up the ore tanks, but that's a special case. The most unrealistic part is the 100% mass conversion, I think the only way you could manage that in reality is if the 'ore' is pure H2O and your rockets run on hydrolox, and you somehow manage to do your conversion and storage of hydrogen without the 10% plus leakage losses common in such processes. In real life the situation is always going to be that your ore weighs more than the refined fuel you get from it, so although KSP turns the dial to the 'easy' side, they at least didn't turn it all the way to 11 where ore+refinery is actually lighter than the equivalent amount of fuel. Which is what would be required for refining your fuel en route to be efficient, i.e. the magical fuel crystals.

A full flow cycle generally leads to better efficiency when done well, and better durability which is important for re-use of course. It's more complex because it requires a twin shaft turbine design, which means more points of failure (but some fuel or oxygen rich preburners use twin shaft turbines too). The efficiency comes in large part from the fact that your combustion chamber is running on a (hot) gas-gas reaction. I would guess that means the efficiency gains might be a lot lower for hydrogen than for any other fuel. Making hydrogen react efficiently with oxygen is just a lot easier than for most other rocket fuels. This goes way beyond engineering though, it involves things like chemistry and other such magics It might mean a higher chamber pressure and/or temperature with different material requirements. It might simply be prohibitively expensive. I'm just an armchair rocket scientist, for these questions I think you need a real one

While true, this was a USAF/NASA collaboration, so the bigger part of the funding probably came from the defense budget, as it tends to go with such projects. Since it was a cancelled project there's not all that much information to be found about it, but I suspect the USAF's involvement might mean it was considered as an option for orbital cruise missiles or perhaps defensive rockets as part of... what was it called, the space shield thing that Reagan had in mind. It might simply have been cancelled because of shifting defense priorities or international treaties regarding the use of space for military operations. So in this case it wasn't necessarily a bad thing the project itself got cancelled. It's always nice if NASA can hitch a ride on the defense budget, but the risk is that priorities for that sort of funding are not necessarily in line with space exploration and science so might dry up quickly when the global political landscape changes. I'd rather see them give more money directly to NASA (and perhaps NASA spending it a bit more wisely, but yeah, that's not going to happen as long as pork gets involved).

The Rocketdyne Integrated Powerhead Demonstrator was meant to be further developed into a hydrolox engine AFAIK (1990s project). It never got to that stage since the govt cut funding but to the best of my knowledge there are no principle objections to it being possible, and they did complete and run the powerhead at full capacity. It's just a combination of 2 things that are 'hard' compared to their alternatives (hydrogen storage and a full flow cycle) so it probably requires a hefty R&D investment to make it work.

I've been using quiet computer cases for a long time (I have a 24/7 server running in the same room where I sleep), they really make a huge difference. Don't go too cheap though, quality really matters in this case - no pun intended. A cheap "silent" box will just be a normal box with some foam padding on the inside panels which really doesn't make much of a difference if the rest of the case hasn't been designed with sound dampening in mind. You'll want something heavy so it doesn't vibrate (thicker steel than the usual box, weight is a telling indicator for quiet computer cases) and with some well thought out airflow channels. I've used quiet cases from Corsair and CoolerMaster in the past and currently have a "BeQuiet! Pure Base 600", these were all in the 60-100 euro range IIRC (full tower size) and they all were quite good. So it doesn't have to be super expensive but if you see a case advertised as quiet and it's only 20-50 euro, be wary (especially if that price includes a PSU, in which case they didn't even use actual sound dampening foam but probably just grabbed some spare packaging material they had lying around and glued it to the inside of the case). Also pay attention to what you put in it of course, many brand PSUs come in a quiet version for just a few euros more which helps a lot since those are blowing their noise right out of the case. You'll also want low RPM case fans of course (often come included with the brand cases), and a quiet aircooler or watercooling for the CPU. If your computer is often on while you're not using it, run your OS and resident apps from a SSD so your spinning disks (if you still use those) can go to sleep mode.

I decided my Desert Airfield was still missing something. Guess what. Well, it fits in one of these. After an uneventful flight and the world's most hairiest landing, the Kargo Karrier arrives at the Desert Airfield and starts unpacking, because its cargo has to get to work right away. After managing to unload it without breaking any of the many wheels (good thing too, I forgot to pack repair kits) I drove it to the front of the plane it just came out of. Guessed what it is yet? It's an Airplane Tug! Took me a looooot of test runs to figure out a coupling that worked. I tried various claw configurations, but they just end up launching the tug into the air when they lock on. In the end I went with 2 heavy hinges attached to a heavy piston, contact areas covered with grip pads, to grab on to the front wheel and make a physics based connection. Another 2 heavy hinges form an adjustable V stand to rest the nose on. The first 2 heavy hinges grab on to the wheel and the piston pulls the plane's nose onto the V stand so the front wheel is lifted off the ground. One of my requirements was it had to be able to tug a fully loaded and fueled Kargo Karrier, as well as light and low-nosed jets, so I tested with both of those. Here's a shot of the open coupling. And here a series of shots showing the coupling process. All 12 ruggedized wheels are powered, the front 2 axles steer, and in the back there are 6 additional landing gear wheels to support the weight. The front and back carriage are connected with 2 perpendicular hinges and a servo to ensure good wheel contact with the ground when going up or down a runway side or end or hitting a few bumps and to allow for making turns. The torque strength of all 3 components can be adjusted from 0 to 100% by moving a KAL controller's play position from 0 to 10.0. When empty a setting of 6 or 7% works well but with a heavy plane on the back a setting of 20% does a better job of keeping everything in line. The limits for the hinges and servo are set at sensible levels and they are powerful enough to pull the front carriage back in line. If it threatens to veer off all I need to do is pull the KAL controller to the 10.0 second mark and everything straightens out. Still, occasionally I have to switch back to the plane (remember these are not hard docked, they are 2 separate crafts) to hit the brakes. I found that leaving the brakes of the plane on and setting them to 5% strength still allowed me to tug it with a lower risk of a runaway situation. Once that plane goes it keeps going so managing speed is a must and tight turns are not a thing. I managed to make it all the way without breaking anything though. Did I say the landing at the Desert Airstrip was the hairiest landing ever? Well I managed to beat that record when I came back to the KSC. I completely forgot I had set the brakes to 5% :s So yeah, yay for reverse thrust engines, but with my landing skills I still needed a tiny bit of extra runway... Pfew, that was too close for comfort, 10 more meter and I'd have had wet tires... But hey, any landing that you can taxi back to the runway from without damage is a perfect landing in my book! I also ferried back the science team that was exploring the mountains near the Desert airstrip, leaving only a skeleton crew of a pilot to drive the tug and a high level engineer to crew the mining equipment. They were playing Happy Families until deep in the night.

Nuclear propulsion is not science fiction, it is science. The fact that we do not have a working system is an engineering problem (or political, or ethical, or financial, take your pick), not a scientific one. We know how to create thermal energy through fission and we know many, many ways to convert thermal energy into kinetic energy. The Impulse Warp Drive idea you are proposing is creating free energy out of nothing. That is not an engineering problem, it is a scientific impossibility. There is a difference between these two and it's kinda important to understand if you want to come up with scientifically plausible solutions for hard sci-fi problems. Sure you can go the magic crystal route, nothing wrong with that, but it's a bit pointless to try to explain that using actual science when actual science says it is impossible. Star Trek got away with it for a few shows by just throwing in some techno-babble and, most importantly, not trying to explain it. Star Wars barely even bothers with the techno-babble at all. I always enjoyed watching it (although the most recent one I have seen with their infinite improbability spore drive and yet another fascist alternate universe story-line is pushing the limits a bit IMHO), but whenever someone breaks out the tachyon beams or warps right into orbit of a planet we all know it's just a pretty fable, not science.