Nikolai

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

I don't contest this. Rocket technology has thus far ridden largely on the coattails of war. This is not a new observation. It is, however, cause to seek to redeem it. (This is, I think, why things like Project Plowshare and Project Orion were proposed. Scientists, engineers, and technicians who understood nuclear power must have felt that technology borne of such destructive impulse must surely be usable for the benefit of mankind, somehow.) It has been the case thus far, but whether it continues to be the case is a matter of choice, and not necessarily inevitable.

It's hard to make legitimate and useful comparisons that show statements like these to be true, but let me suggest something anyway: Compare the scientific return per dollar on the unmanned lunar programs (Surveyor and Ranger) versus the manned lunar program (Apollo) of the same time period, as measured by the number of, say, scientific papers relying on and citing information derived from the programs. Which comes out ahead? I think you'll find Apollo the clear winner here. Not to mention that it gave us useful information for creating a permanent presence in space if the human race should ever want to do that, which unmanned programs can never completely do up to the point of final analysis. Yes, Apollo was wasteful; we were in a race, so it wasn't the smartest way to explore space or use a manned space program. But depending on what you think space exploration is for, I think it's relatively easy to show that even though it was vastly more expensive, Apollo was also vastly more cost-effective. EDIT: Oh, and Gordo. For much the same reason that everyone else who's voted for Cooper has done so. Since the question is about the best Mercury astronaut, and the job description is pretty narrow (fly a Mercury capsule in space), it's an easy call; anything they may or may not have done in other capacities under other job titles is, in my mind, a separate question.

Why? We were never promised a release date initially. All a message of "It's going to be delayed" would do is prompt some people in the community to complain, accurately or not, that they'd happily have played it even in its buggy state and they should have released it when they were originally planning to -- which puts them in a tough spot. Even if, to speak to your later point, they don't have to please everyone, it's in their best interest to avoid negative publicity whenever possible. Hinting that they could have released at a particular time, but didn't, puts them in a Catch-22 of negative publicity. Either they relent to the people who claim they would be happy with a buggy version, and get the grumblings of those who think this shows Squad to be unprofessional and uncaring about delivering the best-quality product that can to their customers, or they leave the hint and don't listen to the people who want the new things right away, causing some to grumble that Squad is being too persnickety and simply isn't letting its customers play with that which they paid money for. Note that this is publicity related to fixing their own errors, which is different in an important way from choosing a direction (e.g., less wobbly rockets) and implementing what they say they will implement. One speaks to the professionalism of the outfit and how people perceive the quality of the product; the other is simply catering (or not) to the tastes of the public, and whether or not the product matches the taste of particular consumers. There's not much they can do about people's individual tastes, but there is a certain amount they can do to limit the evidence available to support accusations that may arise of the company's lack of professionalism. (Not issuing official release dates, and not hinting that they could have released earlier but chose not to, are ways to limit that evidence.)

Thank you. This would seem to be out-of-step with Earth-keeping time as offered in the new ARM pack, but if you start to drill down into it, it gets hairy fast(*), so I don't care that much about that discrepancy. The six-hour period, then, is useful for maintaining a certain heading with respect to "fixed space"(**), not necessarily with respect to the sun's position as seen from the space center; that's what I wanted to know. (*) There are around 366.25 Earth sidereal days in an Earth year... whether you're talking about an Earth tropical year (which our calendars measure, summer solstice to summer solstice, but Kerbin wouldn't have anyway because its perfectly perpendicular axis doesn't precess) or an Earth sidereal year. If I really started to insist that the developers be consistent with their timekeeping, and they relented and told me exactly what they meant, everyone else would likely find it useless. I just find the length of the day useful for calculating angles and launch times, and that's it. (**) Yes, I know there isn't such a thing. But for mathematical purposes and setting coordinate axes, it can be useful to pretend there is.

Here's another interesting bug, perhaps: Apparently, it showed the velocity with respect to target continuing to increase even as the rocket and its target were at rest with respect to one another. This could be really frustrating for players trying to intercept asteroids. Ultimately, I sympathize with you -- I can't wait to play with the new toys, either. But I'd rather they work according to the way they should, rather than have the new version rushed out to us based on a few minutes' worth of apparently bug-free running.

The sidereal day is the time required to rotate once. The synodic day is the time required to go from noon to noon, which is slightly longer, since Kerbin has moved in its orbit in the meantime -- so it has to rotate a little more for the same spot to spin to "underneath" the sun. (On Earth, the synodic day is 24 hours long; the sidereal day is 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.1 seconds long, approximately.)

Does the six-hour day on Kerbin that we will be able to use in the ARM pack for timekeeping purposes refer to a sidereal day or a synodic day?

Did you see Kofeyh's stream? He ran into some stack-snapping bugs during launch that could have been much more frustrating for the majority of players to tolerate.

D'okay. Just wondering if someone with better observational skills than mine might have seen something displayed that hints at answers. If no one has answers yet, that's no big deal; I'll find out when I get to play with it.

Stupid questions no one may know the answers to: * Do asteroids in the coming ARM pack have an initial spin rate? If so, can they have more than one axis of rotation, and different rates around different axes? * Is there a way to force the software to recalculate burn time at a maneuver node when the indicator can't figure it out? * Do near-Kerbin asteroids continually spawn and disappear, or is it just a handful at the beginning and that's it?

This is only true if asteroids have to remain in RAM in order to be persistent. They don't. They could be procedurally generated, for example.

Prove it. What cancelled the "upward" direction of his momentum -- that is, the component of his momentum towards the top of the pictures provided? One could say the same about blind faith in physicists -- who, like anyone, could simply have missed something, or have misinterpreted what they saw. The pictures represent an easy way to pay attention to detail that might be more easily missed in a darkened theater.

Phil Plait and others have complained that there was no reason for Kowalski to drift off after unhitching from Stone. These pictures demonstrate that Kowalski was not at rest relative to Stone or the space station, so he should have drifted off after unhitching.

Fair points, all.

Technically, shell theorem only works within a symmetrical hollow sphere. That said, though, the amount of mass in a hollowed-out asteroid is going to be so small as to make any gravitational tug really, really, really small.

It might not be as hard as you think. Releasing the amount of energy needed to get to Mars is hard to hide. Even with our (relatively primitive) technology, the amount of energy released by launching a Shuttle into orbit could be detected across the Solar System.

We weren't at the Moon forty years ago, either. But your point is well-taken, with one caveat. Do you think it is common for races to go from pre-transistor technology to interstellar travel in a century and a half? We're talking about harnessing several orders of magnitude more energy. Unfortunately, we only have one data point, so it's ultimately speculative. ITYM "descendants". But when you're talking about the extermination of a race, the family tree is kind of irrelevant, isn't it? I don't know about "no clue". You can say fairly confidently, for example, that we won't have interstellar travel in twenty years' time, not least because the energy needed is prohibitive. Perhaps -- and I admit that this is pretty empty conjecture -- it's also possible to state developmental time limits about nearly any race that's just starting to figure out radio waves.

That's only because I switched who I was talking about without warning. As an alien race viewing (relatively) primitive humanity, unless you finish them off before they develop interstellar capability, they can hide in any number of places. If you simply let them develop interstellar travel and then whomp them, you can't be sure that you didn't get them all.

Where did you learn this? There are a handful of asteroids known to have moons (87 Sylvia has two), but I don't think Ceres is among them.

That's because no single power has yet been in a primitive state, but possessed the foreseeable capability to wipe out your entire species, if and when we simply let them develop the technology to do so. If you get to a point where you can command the energies required for interstellar travel, you can (a) wipe a planet clean with undetectable missiles, and ( hide in any of the innumerable nooks and crannies of the Universe. You're also likely to be rather aggressive; if predation is a common evolutionary trait, it's not very likely for a species to rise to dominance on a planet by being nice. And you know this about every new intelligent species you encounter. So you're not just talking about preserving your civilization, your way of life, your government, or your family; you're talking about preserving your entire race. There doesn't seem to be any evidence for the notion that becoming starfaring automatically makes a race peaceful. And if you don't finish the job while you can, you run the risk of someone escaping and holding a grudge. (And note that there doesn't even need to be any marching anywhere. Just launch the relativistic missiles and forget about it.) That's why. Now, I'd much prefer that everyone play nice. I loathe war and killing and all that stuff, and wish it would all just stop, now and forever. But I'm not so arrogant as to think that if these thoughts occur to me, they can't possibly occur to any other species. Heck, they've probably occurred to other members of my own species. Would you want to chance that it would never occur to the relatively primitive intelligent, somewhat aggressive species you've just learned about?