UmbralRaptor

It's readable, which is all that I ask. For some reason, printing is ~50% faster than cursive, though.

Heh. From a mass standpoint it looks like Vostok was comparable to Galileo and Cassini.

Robots. A longer version of this reply would discuss how radiation exposure is not like using hitpoints, it seems a bit odd to refer to Ganymede as an inner moon (wikiality seems to treat the Galilean moons as a middle distance group), shielding against high energy photons basically requires lots of high-Z material (traditionally lead, though one can find examples of regolith, bismuth, and even depleted uranium!) even though that causes secondary radiation when whacked by charged particles, shielding against protons may be best done by lots of a low-Z material (water is a classic example, though NASA has looked into various hydrogen-rich plastics), magnetic shielding may limit equipment options in the crew areas, crew require lots of additional life support resources blowing the mass up enormously even without the harsh radiation environment, and the high ÃŽâ€V of Jupiter orbit and especially landing on those moons. There are probably additional factors, but still... robots.

I'm not sure such a flyby is possible. Most assists would kick you out into a solar orbit after moving away from the Moon. May I suggest an NTR, aerocapture, or especially ISRU. It's the payloads (and timescales) that make humans on Mars so intractable. (My back of the envelope guess is that this bit of gravity fanciness saves up to 1 km/s.)

Almost certainly. But if you're throwing humans around, you're dealing with time-sensitive cargo and giant rockets anyway...

The table was* out of date. The high Kerbol orbit science multiplier was decreased from 6.5 to 2 around 0.90. You are correct about the research limit being the most expensive (in terms of science points) technology you can buy. *not is -- I just fixed that bit in response to your question.

If it has lots of sugars, alcohols, long hydrocarbon chains, etc, it'll burn. Stable combustion may be difficult in some cases, though.

Any update? Image uploading/thumbnail generation is still broken, and the current captcha system may need a review. edit: okay it looks like recent maintenance didn't go through. I'll have to bug people again later.

Partially wrong. High mass (≥8 M☉) blue/red giants do go supernova, but they don't live very long anyway. You'll tend to find them in or near regions of high star formation. There are also Type Ia supernovae, which have a different mechanism involving white dwarf stars. Those ones can happen most-anywhere in a galaxy. But the aforementioned 1 supernova per milky way per 50 years is for the galaxy as a whole! (And again I would expect it to be an overestimate and/or to fail to account for extinction from dust/gas) Just to clarify, I mean galaxy cluster, not star cluster. Supernova rate even in something like the Tarantula Nebula is way too low unless you can keep a scope on it for a few million years. In that they'll generally stand out nicely from their host galaxy and brighten and fade in a few weeks, yes. But they're quite rare in any one galaxy, so with an insufficient sample one could be waiting for centuries...

Use whichever scope has greatest étendue, and hit every nearby cluster visible from Siding Springs. (Practically speaking, one supernova per milky way like galaxy per 50 years is grossly optimistic.) If archival data is allowed, it might be worth poking around with WISE or SDSS.

Some sort of thermometer comes to mind. If you're willing to throw $100-200 at it, you could make a smartphone be the payload (camera, loads of sensors, onboard computer that is admittedly more locked down than a RasPI)

If you're on normal or lower difficulty (or have chosen forgiving custom settings), just wait a bit and do other things. Crews respawn after a bit. Uh, and you probably want to make backups in the future.

Almost certainly the Plesetsk or Baikonur Cosmodromes circa Andropov or late Brezhnev. (Total R-7 family launch rates broke 60/year around 1979-81)

I'm reasonably certain that most heavily inhabited areas are cloudy >50% of the time, hence the sky hating you during astronomical events. @KerbMav: Try an amateur astronomy website or check wikipedia for eclipses and transits for the next few decades?

Zaps per second. With the current electrical system, trying to come up with values is a path to madness.

This sounds like a laser broom which as best I'm aware could work.

I would like to point out that some early prototype ion engines used mercury as a propellant. Though the description of the drive (vaporizing solid fuel with bursts of electricity) makes it sound sort of like a pulsed plasma thruster. As for the drive itself, the creator appears to have a blog: http://www.neumannspace.com/ Hopefully the conference will publish abstracts?

Onboard ÃŽâ€V for a stage is always 9.80665*Isp*ln(M_initial/M_final). The amount needed for a given burn will vary somewhat if you can't usefully use impulsive approximations. I think that kicks you out into numeric solution territory, but one might be able to simply throw a correction factor at it and get good enough values.

Could we see the vehicle? Notably fuel state before/after the burn would be helpful for checking on how much ÃŽâ€V was actually expended. Keep in mind that given the long burn (8 minutes is a quarter of an orbit at 100 km), the craft will drift upwards significantly (trading kinetic for potential energy). The 2822 m/s you mention is escape speed at 287 km altitude, so was that where you were upon switching off the engines?

Kaelus. Because there's a relevant Roman god and one can easily enough apply k-syndrome...

Where's the option for "meh?" It had a really terrible design flaw back in the 1970s, sure. But as best I'm aware it's overall safety record is neither here nor there?

The entire article is available in the arXiv link (click pdf). And it was published in ApJL. https://iopscience.iop.org/2041-8205

Looks like it's supposed to be 11776 â„«, so a near-IR detection of rest-frame mid-UV!

Found the actual paper! Er...? Recombination happened clear back at z~1100. The only absorption by low density neutral hydrogen clouds would be at specific wavelengths (eg: lyman alpha), messing with spectroscopic (though not photometric) distance measurements. This particular galaxy is in the middle of reionization, so finding galaxies somewhat farther out (especially if they're lensed) is to be expected.As best I can tell from the paper, this is the most distant spectroscopically-confirmed galaxy. (Hence why it's now in a bunch of Wikipedia lists). They appear to have found a luminosity and color cut that shows high redshift galaxies (if not clusters) that have substantially ionized their surroundings.

The fun biome names postdate the initial run of this (since resurrected) thread.