Nikolai

For the same reason we want our own planet to be amenable to human life. So that we have a place to live. And, more particularly, so that all of our eggs won't be in one metaphorical basket. That's the key "if". I think it would be foolish to try to terraform Mars with the goal of keeping it forever dependent on resources from Earth. The idea would be to make it an independent home for humanity eventually, with a population able to cope on its own with threats on a multi-century timescale and maintain its own planetary engineering. Why does these have to be mutually exclusive?

Only if you stop and never interfere with it again. Why wouldn't you try to maintain the terraformed planet once you had it?

Point taken. What I meant to point out, though, is that this conclusion is reasonable even without an explanatory framework (since the argument was directed at someone who did not accept the explanatory framework). Science can establish that A leads to B with a fair degree of confidence, even if it can't yet explain how. (Note that evolution itself, for example, was well-understood before the science of genetics even existed.) Of course, as you point out, evolution currently has this explanatory framework, and the framework itself has withstood robust testing, so we really have confidence that we're on the right track.

Let's say you're in a field with one million boxes in it. Every time you open a box -- and you open thousands of them -- there is a kitten inside. Now, if you're intellectually honest, you'll continue to open boxes, because you don't know for sure that there isn't a box containing only a purple Post-It note with the number "10" written on it in black Sharpie. But until you get to that point, doesn't it seem logical to assume that all the boxes contain kittens unless proven otherwise?

Man, every time I see this thing, it gets more awesome. Thank you so, so much for your dedication and effort.

I've always had this weird, fun idea in the back of my head as I play KSP that the player is a human kidnapped by Kerbals with a one-use there-and-back dimensional portal. They really want to explore space, and use their portal to kidnap a human, figuring that surely, every member of a species that has a space program must be so proud of the accomplishment that they try to learn everything they can about how rockets work. Turns out the guy they get speaks no Kerbian, and only has a passing familiarity with how rockets work -- which doesn't diminish the Kerbals' enthusiasm one iota. Hilarity ensues. The Contract mode seems to place the faith of those poor Kerbals even more into the hapless human they commandeered for their space efforts. So yeah, I'll be playing the heck out of that. But I'll probably still use Sandbox quite a lot.

I tend to prefer to play vanilla. No, it isn't. Even though longitude is arbitrary (i.e., not related to an inherent property of the body like rotation), longitudinal coordinates exist for other bodies in the Solar System besides Earth. Longitudinal coordinates also exist for every body in the Kerbal system. If you look at the location data for any object on the surface of any body (or in orbit, for that matter) in the persistent file, the location above the body is given in terms of latitude, longitude, and altitude. Even if you look at something landed on the surface in the Map View or the Tracking Station and hover your cursor over it, you will get latitude and longitude for that object. Trivially false. While the location of the prime meridian is arbitrary, it was placed well after people knew the Earth was round; and Kerbin's longitudinal coordinates are defined in the game. That's a matter of rotational direction. The eastern hemisphere lies to the east of the prime meridian; the western hemisphere lies to its west. But the KSC does not lie on either the prime meridian or the equator. Its coordinates are 00d06m09s S, 74d34m31s W. The wiki: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Kerbal_Space_Center

It would be nice if there were some way to determine latitude and longitude from the Map View prior to landing or the Tracking Station (or, ideally, both) -- just in case you want to build equidistant bases on Minmus, say, and you don't want to have to drive stuff around. In the same vein, it would be nice to know what the inclination of your orbit is to the equator of the body whose SOI you are currently within. (Do any of the bodies in the Kerbol system have an axial tilt?)

It can't happen because the definitions of the two objects are mutually exclusive. Keep in mind that the adjectives of these things are making logically necessary claims about the rest of their domain -- and their (implied) domain is all of reality. If there is such a thing as an irresistible force, that means, by definition, that there is no such thing as an immovable object, anywhere in reality. If there is such a thing as an immovable object, that means, by definition, that there is no such thing as an irresistible force, anywhere in reality. In other words, it's a semantics game that hopes you won't notice the logical consequences of the definitions it employs. Even if an irresistible force or an immovable object can exist, they can't exist simultaneously, any more than a shape can be perfectly round and perfectly square at the same time.

Not currently. But when the Saturn V was in production, we had the means to send people away from Earth for good -- where they would only come back if they wanted to. Since then, we've had the ability to strand people in orbit for a long, long time, but not the ability to fling them away from the planet entirely.

Absolutely agreed. I've not found its equal. I'll admit that I had fun watching Rocket Girls; even though it's not nearly as rigorous, the twist on the standard "high school girls get unusual jobs" anime was entertaining, I liked the growth of the main character (Yukari), and they do manage to get a little bit good science in there as well (as well as explaining why, in rocket science, "the better is often the enemy of the good").

Indeed. And the equation completely ignores the possibility of colonization of more worlds than one. As a conversation-starter, the Drake Equation is as good as any for outlining some things we need to discuss as we attempt to discern the probability of intelligent life beyond Earth. But, as jwenting points out, it's not exactly rigorous, so "solving" it has limited utility.

Bill McCool, from STS-107. Dave Wolf, from STS-58, NASA-MIR 6, STS-112, and STS-127. Story Musgrave, from STS-6, STS-51F, STS-33, STS-44, STS-61, and STS-80. Paul Lockhart, from STS-111 and STS-113. Brent Jett, from STS-72, STS-81, STS-97, and STS-115. Neil Armstrong, from Gemini 8 and Apollo 11. And even though it makes no sense, I always liked Ken Bowersox's name. EDIT: Forgot a period.

We can ablate the small pieces -- bits of paint and insulation and such -- with high-powered lasers. I volunteer to go man the orbital platform so equipped.

Thank you all, gentlemen.

Is there a convenient way to find a rocket's, plane's, or subassembly's mass in the VAB or SPH without adding up the masses of the individual parts? It's not a big deal... just looking to streamline TWR calculations for a Duna lander with about a dozen variations.

Careful review of the footage shows that they did. Or something functionally identical, anyway -- the astronauts were rotating at the end of a parachute lanyard. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/28361-Gravity-%28Movie%29?p=995863&viewfull=1#post995863 Unfortunately, a lot of high-profile science folks have weighed in before reviewing this carefully. If you watch the scene, and even check out the close-ups of the actors during the "I have to leave!"/"No, don't leave!" conversation, you can see stars moving in the background as they rotate.

We just shouldn't. It's not in our destiny. The fact that there is no life on a lot of these rocks means that there shouldn't be. (He didn't care for my reply that maybe it was humanity's destiny to bring life to places it almost certainly otherwise never have been.)

You might find this useful: http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2000/2000_Allison_McEwen_1.pdf I used it to create a Mars clock in Windows way back in oh-two, where you could click on a map and it would show you the "time of day" (or, more correctly, the "time of sol") at the location you clicked on. There's no concept of time zone -- noon is based on when, on average(*), the Sun is directly overhead at your particular longitude -- but it's a really good algorithm. I'm an electrical engineer by education, so I'd love to help you out if you want. (*) Since Mars' orbit is elliptical, it might or might not correspond to when the Sun is actually directly overhead, depending on the time of year. This happens on Earth, too, but somewhat less.

In addition to the strengths already mentioned here, a three-person crew ensures that the smallest possible clique is also a majority.

Precisely because perpetual motion violates physics.

Obviously, you've never had a cat. They straight-up don't obey the laws of physics. And I strongly suspect that anything in their vicinity would be similarly exempt.

The orbital calculation does that, since the period and semimajor axis of the orbit are dictated by the mutual attraction of the objects.

Yup. A lot. And it's free now at http://sourceforge.net/projects/raceintospace/. It's much more management sim than spaceflight sim -- and, since it was based on a board game where too much of that management would become onerous, the options are kind of limited. For example, if you want a one-person space capsule, you only have one option. And astronaut training seemed a somewhat bungled, tacked-on "feature", though they've streamlined it somewhat since the project became open-source. A word of warning: The learning curve is somewhat fierce. But if you like KSP, you should be used to learning curves like that.

Meet (4179) Toutatis. It has a principal axis of rotation, but that axis is precessing so fiercely that the effect is that even if you want to argue that it has only one axis of rotation, that axis is not fixed. http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroids/4179_Toutatis/toutatis.html