Fuzzy Dunlop

Two main reasons: Firstly in real life the dry weight of stages is much less than in KSP, this means that asparagus simply doesn't help as much. Secondly, it introduces much more complexity into the design. You need additional fuel lines and very reliable valves (but probably not pumps), you need more staging events (which can go horribly wrong) and you need more parallel stages - which can cuase aerodynamic headaches. Thats said, the Falcon Heavy will use propellent crossfeed (simplified asparagus), and this was also examined for the Delta IV heavy (but they thought it wasn't worth it).

I like this idea!

I've got to find this plugin! and great news that the trailer will be back on youtube. Also interesting how many people haven't heard of M83 - you may not of heard of them, but I refuse to believe anyone in the western world hasn't heard "Midnight City"

I'm pretty sure it wasn't specifically insipired by those. I think it's far more related to the 1st long trailer for last years "Cloud Atlas" (which is a pretty good movie by the way). Takes couple of minutes for "outro" to start up but you can see the style of editing is similar, flashing fullscreen writing and rapid cross-cutting timed to music (actually I think "Build Fly Dream" uses the music better). I was also impressed by some of the camera work, given how limited the tools that KSP gives you are in this regard.

Yeah, I'm really loving this, I can now have a proper family of rockets for arbitery payloads

It's quite hard to do flat screens until they acctually exist in real life, 2001 used a really cool, but very fiddley, projection technique. But most films don't have 2001's effects unit...

I always thought Star Treck (both the original and the next generation) was wierdly good at predicting the future. Automatic doors, mobile phones (especially flip phones), touchscreens, tablets etc.

Well it's classified, so it's somewhat pointless speculating. That said, the first two missions do seem to have an observation role, repeatedly changing into different orbits, all of which had reguarly repeating ground tracks. Polar-orbiting sats have the fairly major disadvantage that once you spot them you can have several days warning before they overfly a specific area. Makes it hard to catch someone with their pants down. That's probably why the Soviet's supplimented their polar spy satellites with several hundred Zenits.

Well there aren't any reusable SSTO's in existence at the moment, so any debate on their benefits must involve an as yet unrealised proposal, SKYLON seems as good (much better really) as any. In fact the only reusable spacecraft currently operational is the X-37, which is presumably a reusable spy satellite, "SPYLON" is merely the logical extension of this concept. Incidently the most reused space equipment is likely to be the telescopes from the Soviet Zenit spy satellite programme, which they were launching twice a month more or less untill their economy collapsed (well after they became able to download images from space). There is clearly great value in being able to put a bird into any desired position at very short notice and at low cost. Also, that isn't exactly a strawman. A strawman is where you falsely represent a position such that it is easier to attack.

Yeah, obviously it isn't going to be suitable for all situations, but while GSO commsats are a juicy target they don't make up all, or even a majority, of the satellitemarket (of June's 7 launches only 1 will be to GSO). That said, I think you're under-estimating how much reducing launch costs by an order of magnitude could change the game. For example, GSO launches might move to an on-orbit spare model (like some MEO communication constellations already do). The minimum life expectancy of each satellite could be reduced. Still launch cost reductions probably have the biggest effect on things in LEO, because they mean there is a great pressure to start making things reusable. For the most extreme example imagine SKYLON with a 10 tonne telescope in it's belly. What you have there is a spy satellite that can be in a completely different orbit every week.

If you can launch more cheaply and reguarly then you can get away with a cheap, shoddy satellite. These will fail more often and create greater demand for launches, and satelites (thus decreasing the cost of busses etc.). I suspect if you get the cost of the launch vehicle down, the prices of other elements of the system will follow suite. Edit: This certainly works the other way round; Delta IV and Atlas V can't compete in the commercial satellite market. This is largely due to them being designed to practically guarentee a succesful launch, this makes for a very expensive rocket but when you're dealing with a $2 billion DOD payload an extra $100 million seems reasonable.

I'm not sure, the Soviets were launching R7 rockets to orbit 60+ times a year for most of the late 70s, and that's just one rocket family. If you could canabalise the entire global launch market (there are 7 launches sheduled for June, and another 9 in July, to give you some idea of the frequency we're talking about) that would probably provide sufficient demand. More importantly your overlooking the fact that lower costs should increase demand. At the moment a private seat to the ISS will cost you $50m, and so the potential market is tiny. Knock a zero off that figure and you suddenly are affordable to up to a million playboys across the globe, that will support a pretty decent flight rate (of course you'd also need your own space station).

The idea that manned missions are much more effective has several flaws, the most glaring of which is this: 1000x the rocks does NOT mean 1000x the science. The first Kg of material returned from mars will advance our knowledge more than all the other material ever returned. You could pick over the entire moon in microscopic detail and still do less for our understanding of our solar system than a single high resolution photo of a comet. To put it simply, the best way to explore is to simultaneously go in as many directions as possible. With present levels of technology and funding that means robots, not people.

To try and get the thread back on track, surely (if the shuttle was still flying) the quickest upgrade would be the ability to fly autonomously. If you are going to use the shuttle for any purpose that does not explicity require humans, it doesn't make sense to carry them along.

The Shuttle's fundemental problem seems to be that it was, essentially, a space station which could land and be relaunched. While that is a brilliant technical achievement, it completely misses the point of a space station.

So, on a science per dollar basis, Luna blows Apollo out of the water? Seriously though, if you look on web of knowledge (one of the biggest research databases) and you search "moon" as a keyword the top 10 most cited papers aren't by any of these programmes... the're all from Cassini-Huygens and Gallileo

I think they should include a Soviet texture pack, featuring colours such as 70's beige, Not-so-shiny Grey and bread mould turquoise

I guess the devs didn't realise that people would be using so many gimballed engines, one on it's own wouldn't be able to roll anyway (cos its in the middle - can't generate any tourque)

Look at my plane, my plane is amazing WAIT WHAT? Well, schucks....

Na na na Na na na SHARKPLANE!!! Sharkplane!!!

I was in the same boat at school, I was very good at science, I loved physics and I wanted to be an engineer, but I just couldn't get into maths - I wasn't bad at it, I just found it really boring when it had no context. I applied to University to do Chemistry & Physics, and as I was registering for courses I discovered this would essentially be Chemistry, Maths and Physics (and the Physics would be pretty much pure maths at first). So at the last minute (literally) I took the second core Chemistry module instead of Physics and then I filled up the rest of my timetable with Biology modules - which I wasn't even qualified to take since I'd not done any Biology since I was 15. Then I made smalltalk with the director of undergraduate studies as he signed this off, and he didn't really check anything in detail (thank god). The university was slightly pissed off when it found out (UK colleges expect you to study what you apply for), but by then it was the beginning of my second year so fait accompli. Now I'm writing in this while procrastinating about my PhD application in Directed Protein Evolution...

Pendulum rocket fallacy only applies to rigid rockets, and if our rockets were rigid we wouldn't have an issue.

Tried this a while back, this was my first attempt. Acctually was very stable, kept airbourne with no manual control, flew around in huge circles. I once left in running when I went for night out, when I got back in over 4 hours later it still had almost half its fuel left, I took control but I was drunk and I crashed it.

Depends on design, most reactors were never designed to be throttled (because there's no economic sense in doing that). On the other hand some can be, Chicargo once got almost all it's power from nuclear plants - and so needed to reduce power in times of low demand. The boiling water reactors they used could go from 50% to 100% (electric output) in less than 5 minutes; that's much better than any coal plant could manage. The French also throttle their pressurised water reactors. In contrast the RMBK design used in Chernobyl wasn't built for rapid throttling and it certainly wasn't designed to perform an emergency shutdown and then restart to full ouput within a matter of hours - which is what they were doing when it exploded.

Obviously nuclear reactors can be powered up and down, think about nuclear submarines. They can accelerate from ultra low power to 50 mph in a matter of seconds. The reason this dosent happen in power plants is because the reactors are very expensive to build, but very cheap to run - so if you've invested in one it's sensible to run it at 100% 24/7. Also there is no real issue with Uranium prices, raw Uranium ore counts for 3-5% of the life time cost of a nuclear plant. So if the price of ore went up by 10x then the price of electricity would go up by 30-50%. Annoying but by no means a disaster. And Uranium packs a ubeliveable amount of energy in a very small volume. So if you were really paranoid you could stockpile enough Uranium to run a country for a decade in your back garden, making you completely immune to supply issues or price rises.