Nikolai

And he's saying that it was. Stellar occultations in 2002, observed and analysed by teams led by Bruno Sicardy of the Paris Observatory, James L. Elliot of MIT, and Jay Pasachoff of Williams College yielded an atmsopheric pressure of 0.3 Pascal. That density, combined with the estimated speed of New Horizons with respect to Pluto at closest encounter (roughly 11 km/s), yield a maximum dynamic pressure of approximately 18 megapascals. I'd have to calculate the cross-sectional area of the probe to find the total force precisely, but it's commonly compared to a grand piano, so you can multiply that by two or three to get the total force on a go-for-broke aerobrake. Let's say two for 36 meganewtons of force. Combine that with the probe mass (487 kg at launch) and you have a maximum acceleration of 74,000 m/s. That's enough to bring New Horizons -- or whatever survives of it -- to a dead stop in only about a millimeter. EDIT: I failed to account for the force correctly, since it would decrease as the probe slowed down; an accurate accounting would involve integration to account for this. But this BOTE calculation still seems to support the idea that New Horizons could potentially aerobrake to orbit if they really wanted it to and if the probe could withstand the mechanical stresses. Also, I forgot to divide by the final velocity squared when coming up with that distance.

A man once suffered from having a metal belly-button. No matter what he tried, or what doctor he went to, he couldn't get rid of the metal belly-button. It was driving him a little crazy. After years of ineffective therapies, he finally decided to throw his lot in with a fortune teller on the outskirts of town. "You're in luck," the fortune-teller said. "Metal belly-buttons are my specialty." She went into a back room and came back with a small cookie. "Eat this before going to sleep tonight." It was worth a try. That night, he ate the cookie before going to bed. And when he slept, he had the most amazing dream! There was a stool in the middle of a white room. On the stool was a purple screwdriver, with a card that read, "For use with metal belly-buttons." He worked the metal belly-button with the screwdriver, but before he could tell whether or not it was doing any good, he woke up. A quick glance at his abdomen revealed the happy truth. His metal belly-button was gone! He was so overjoyed and excited that he leaped out of bed... ... and his butt fell off.

If you honestly think they're open to being convinced by some kind of evidence-based argument, perhaps it's better to turn the question on its head. To wit: Are you open-minded enough to know exactly what kind of evidence it would take to convince you? If so, what is that evidence, and why is that level of evidence reasonable? Because the simple fact of the matter is that there is piles of evidence out there. Pictures. Videos. Minerals that would be difficult (if not impossible) to manufacture on Earth. Congratulations from political enemies with the technological wherewithal to verify for themselves whether the missions were real or faked. Meticulous documentation of every technical detail, so that those with the plausibility can be verified by those with the proper knowledge of such things. Public revelation of scientific findings, so that they can be compared with future discoveries and checked for consistency. Countless published memoirs. And so, so much more. This might be a little more difficult for you, since you might find yourself needing to do some homework. But if the goal is education, at least someone stands to benefit from the conversation, even if the conspiracist remains stubborn.

It's also the case that there's no capability to do anything but put a few tons at a time to GTO. Perhaps what we need to be doing is figuring out why it would be useful to do substantially more -- and create the market if we can.

Peaceful rebellion only works when your oppressor has a conscience. If you've tried peaceful means of changing things, and you learn that your oppressor will use deadly force and not be punished for it, it can be rather dispiriting. What other means would you have to right wrongs? It can make one feel trapped, or fearful; it might even lead to panic. Which does not mean that I condone the actions of the rioters. I think, however, that on some level, I can understand it.

I still have a Color Computer 2 from Radio Shack (16K RAM, expanded to 64K; nine colors; 0.89 MHz processor).

Can you provide a citation for this? I've been looking for reassurances that Philae is anchored.

Yes. In a very real way, the concepts of zero and infinity are linked. Also, arguably, zero can be used as the starting point of deriving everything in math. We start with zero as a concept. But what about the sets that zero represents? That is, how many sets have zero elements? Only one -- the null set. But now that you have zero and one as concepts, you can derive everything.

Sorry -- my bad, I guess, because that's exactly how I took "There is nothing to say that the Moon, a 4.x billion year object, wasn't placed in orbit around the Earth 100 million years ago." You can see how I was confused, can't you? On that, we agree, as long as by doing so you don't upset viewer expectations about the kind of show you're making.

Sorry, but you're dead wrong about that. Look up "rugose coral". "Nobody was around" is only an excuse if you're willing to forego Occam's Razor, logic, and all forensic science.

My mistake. Sorry about that. I'd advise you to look into manufacture and subsequent use of Soviet rocket hardware. Rockets take a lot of resources to put together, and it's hard to manufacture one and then use it in complete secret. It's impossible to state absolutely, obviously, but I think we can state with reasonable confidence that the Soviets didn't.

That's not the question we should be asking, though. If we want to get to the truth of the matter, we should be asking, "What evidence exists that compels me to accept that this happened in a manner consistent with the stories?" If you start looking into things like the pilot rotation, or the manufacture and subsequent use of Soviet rocket hardware, or even looking at how the claimed radio intercepts of the mission could have occurred with the sorts of orbits the Soviets were using for their Vostok spacecraft, the whole idea falls apart pretty quickly.

For a gas, it's close enough. A given volume of gas, at a given temperature and pressure, will have a mass pretty close to exactly proportional to its molecular weight.

My guess is because they enjoy it. After all, doing/saying nothing is the default state, which means that they've probably already considered it and rejected it. Other people don't enjoy it, but different people are different. =shrug= And there are a lot of things people enjoy that don't stop people from getting lost in the world.

The Solar System of the Space: 1889 RPG, with a few tweaks.

For the most part, as a GM, I agree. But it really depends on the motivation -- that is, whether or not the character is a character. Crazy for the sake of crazy gets old pretty fast. But if this is a character who has a glaring blind spot in his moral makeup, or who has come to justify taking extreme measures for whatever reason in certain circumstances to herself, then it could actually be interesting. A character like that has opportunity to encounter conflict, learn, grow, and/or evolve. If the character is just nuts for the sake of comic relief or troublemaking, then there's no depth. There's nothing to make the inclusion of the character compelling or interesting. But consider a pyromaniac on an alternate Earth who tends to light up large houses of worship, since she feels that the money the religions are "wasting" on these edifices is detracting them from the good they could otherwise be doing in the world. She could even borrow metaphors about "baptism by fire" to justify to herself that she's purifying the faith, saving them from eternal flames, or what-have-you. Moreover, when she does light fires like these, she does so methodically -- making sure the buildings are abandoned, attempting to send a message without anyone getting hurt. During one game, the party visits a city that hosts one of the largest temples anywhere on the outskirts of town. During a lull in the action, she watches the place for a couple of weeks, making sure she understands the traffic patterns in and out, before lighting the place up -- as usual, when no one is around. What she had failed to understand, however, was that when this temple was reduced to ash and rubble, a local pharmaceutical company decided that they didn't have to be quite as careful about where they disposed of their biological waste. In a few weeks, a lot of people in surrounding blocks end up sick. The government finds out, but the company manages to get away with a slap on the wrist. Whether or not this develops into an interesting conflict depends on the GM and the player and the pace of the game. I just mean to say that crazy doesn't have to be a game-killer.

I've got a few Space: 1889 campaigns and am looking for a group of players. In the meantime, I play a simple fantasy-based game with my very young kids (Hero Kids). That kind of depends on where the campaign will take place, and what kind of mission you're attempting. Have you tried talking to the GM about it? Assuming it's okay with her, I'd want to think a bit about what it is that makes your pyromaniac's flamethrower trigger finger itch. For example, does she associate fire with cleansing? (If so, what kind of cleansing? Religious? Cathartic? Personal? Societal?) Does she just like to watch things burn because it's pretty? In other words, what kinds of things does she like to burn, when, and why?

Just to throw another monkey wrench into the discussion: Maybe not. Other works by Wells and his contemporary futurists predicted that mankind would eventually eradicate all disease and vermin. (See, for example, The Time Machine and the Eloi.) Since Mars was considered to be an older world than Earth (having cooled more quickly by dint of its smaller size and more remote location from the Sun), presumably life would have arisen sooner there. It's possible that the Martians reached the technological state of eradicating all pathogens before things started to fall apart from a lack of water. If that's the case, maybe they just forgot that sterilizing needles and/or blood was a thing they needed to do. It's happened to humans. Rome found out that wandering through cities in ankle-deep human excrement presented a public health hazard and created all manner of sanitation systems to alleviate the problem -- then the Western world forgot for a few centuries, and had to re-discover sewers and such all over again. Agreed, for the most part. This game, however, was based on the Command and Conquer engine, so it managed to be reasonably good without having to re-invent much. And it used genuine 3D modeling (rather than rotating sprites), which was more demanding for computers to handle but allowed one to use the landscape itself as part of the strategy for conquering an area. If anything, I'd like to see this re-done with more modern computational capabilities in mind, because the intense computational requirements meant that some landscapes were a bit sparse and/or small. I'd see it in a heartbeat, too, even though I agree about Jeff Wayne's tripods -- it's hard for me to reconcile his tripod design with the book's description of a technology that used no wheels, anywhere. (Those joints at the top of the stilts look pretty wheel-y to me.) They also don't look like the sort of thing that would cause the sense of inscrutable dread I get out of the novel. All that said, though, there's an opening cinematic in the game where a tripod blasts an oncoming locomotive that I really happen to like.

From Pendragon Studios, right? About three hours in length? If that's the one you're talking about, I was excited when I heard about it, then less and less so as I learned about Pendragon Studios' reputation concerning their production values. I have a copy myself for completeness' sake, but I can't bring myself to watch the whole thing in one sitting. An animated version has the potential to engage the imagination and allow period-accurate settings while keeping budgets low (by comparison). Besides which, I have a soft spot for animation.

I know this is somewhat off-topic, but have any of you guys ever played Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds for Windows? One can play as either the Martians or the Humans in a real-time strategic struggle for planetary dominance. It's phenomenally well-balanced. Modern computers are much better at handling the computational requirements of lots and lots of vehicles on the screen at once , but I haven't been able to get the music to play from the CD since WinXP. The novel remains one of my all-time favorites. None of the Hollywood versions have ever really lived up to it. I'd love to see a computer-animated movie (with period-accurate stuff, obviously), though.

Michael Collins' Carrying the Fire. A very down-to-Earth perspective on Apollo that still manages to excite and intrigue. Deke Slayton and Michael Cassutt's Deke!. A no-nonsense history of the space program from someone deep inside. It's not a quick read -- rather than a singular narrative, it's a bunch of quick things thrown together -- but it's highly informative. Roger Bilstein's Stages to Saturn. This scratches my technical-details itch, explaining how the major decisions in designing the United States' Moon rocket were made.

Counterpoint: We are the only species on Earth to have developed a space program. It is also readily apparent that there are a lot more dead rocks in the Solar System than rocks that can easily harbor life. It may be that it is humanity's destiny, then, to be the means whereby the Solar System blooms with life. Sure, lichen can survive in orbit for a while, and there were even some bacteria able to eke out a living on the Moon for a few years. But we might just be the way for life to thrive -- not just on Earth, but anywhere we go and stay for a while.

Solar wind is even worse than the LHB? Solar wind is even worse now than it was during the LHB? How much of the atmosphere was lost to creation of mineral compounds, how much to solar wind, and how much to the LHB itself? In other words, in all this, do we have statistical models for determining the stability of a Martian atmosphere now (especially ones that would help us put atmospheric collapse/reinflation cycles into context)?

I invent backstories for the crew members. Derski Kerman, for example, has a crush on one of the scientists in the R&D complex. When he was stranded on Vall for more than a year, it nearly broke his little Kerbal heart.

KSP offers no drag penalty based on cross-sectional area, so it was sometimes advantageous to build really wide rockets. The launch tower would sometimes get in the way. That's why we now have launch clamps. The tower didn't hold onto the rocket so much as stand there next to it while you prepared for launch.