Tarrow

Yes, and in much higher fidelity than you'd get from a 100lb minisat. I may be getting old and cynical - but my first thought was "That's a great way of funding ASAT weaponry without calling it a missile". 100lb of ball bearings launched in an opposing orbit to your target is gonna pack a tremendous amount of kinetic energy. edit: broke out the notepad for random laughs - 100lb of ball bearings launched in a westward equatorial orbit would hit something coming the other way with just under 5.2 gigajoules of energy. Slightly more than strapping a tonne of TNT to your target, lighting the fuse and running away giggling.

Here's the link (with replies) from last time you posted a "downgrade KSP" thread. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/100289-Downgrade-KSP You can't downgrade to 0.18 unless you've a zip tucked away somewhere from a store download. And even then it'd be so far out of date it'd be almost unusuable with mods etc.

As is very well documented in many places in the support forums you've got two things working against you - KSP is generally a single threaded application and it doesn't support GPU offloading for much, if any, of the graphics. GPU selection is largely meaningless. What matters most is single-threaded CPU performance and from experience that's something the athlon II series processors weren't that good at - remember they were low-budget when they were released, and that was more than 5 years ago.

One of my little ongoing projects has been to attempt to copy the Zero-X spacecraft from one of the original thunderbirds movies. All attempts so far have ended in destruction. Of everything One day... one day...

Don't suppose you've still got a baby tooth kicking around from when you were a kid? When I was a lab monkey teeth used to be our number one source of DNA when there was no soft tissue left to work with. Even untreated a tooth would probably survive anything up to and including the destruction of the facility it was stored in. Seal it in epoxy and it'll last nearly forever. Another option would be a small ampoule of dried out blood, stored in an inert gas atmosphere. Again, barring any sort of major contamination, you'd easily be able to pull DNA out of it after a century.

Both cleartype and colour calibration settings are accessible through the windows control panels "appearance and personalisation" -> "display" section. No issues reading the text on either of your linked images from here.

Novapunch and KW rocketry plus a handfull of other small addons used to be enough to cause me to hit the 32-bit memory limit, at least without texture reduction packs (and later the active texture management plugin). ATW is deffo worth the download. Also you're a version behind on Kerbal Attachment System. Kospy (the original developer) released 0.4.8 a few days back, specifically for 0.24.2. I personally couldn't get 0.4.7 working on KSP 0.24.2, even with the various workarounds mentioned in Majiir's 0.4.7 thread. Thread link is below if it's of any use http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/92514-0-24-2-Kerbal-Attachment-System-%28KAS%29-0-4-8-Fixed-for-0-24-2-x86-x64-%29

Honest answer? I would. If I could swap my lesser-used right hand and arm for one that was geniunely stronger and more flexible whilst maintaining the same sensory input as a biological arm I'd do it in a heartbeat. Why? It'd have a massive effect on my work productivity. I get paid by the job and work fairly long hours so being able to reduce those hours without reducing my income would make me very happy. And that's before getting into things like the possibility of modular job optimised hands. Or the entertainment value of "hey, I remapped my arm connections to the throttle, steering and brakes of my car - I can drive with my brain."

Coal-water slurry density is less than that of water. Coal itself is less dense than water (the densest form of pure anthracite coal reaches 929kg/m3), and as it's a suspension not a solution the volume of the coal is still a factor. Mixes of CWS go up to 70% coal and 30% water, which'd give you 650kg of coal and 300kg of water per m3 of slurry - overall density 950kg/m3 A 1m3 tank of coal slurry contains 950 x 4,700 = 4,465,000 kcal A 1m3 tank of hydrogen contains 70.8 x 33,900 = 2,400,120 kcal In terms of energy per unit volume the numbers are in favour of CWS, by a factor of 1.86. I won't argue with that. But in real world terms the fuel mass for a given energy output is very important,. I'll give you a practical example of why it's important. We know the space shuttle external fuel tank (I've got the SLWT specs, so will use those those) contains a mass of 106,261kg of H2. That's a net energy content of 106,261 x 33,900 = 3,602,247,900 kcal. The mass of CWS to reach the same overall energy content is 3,602,247,900 / 4900 = 735,152kg. The total empty mass of the the SLWT tank is a near-insignificant 26,500kg. You may be able to halve the empty mass of the tank due to the increased fuel density, saving 13 tonnes or so, but you do so at a cost of adding more than 600 tonnes to the takeoff weight of the shuttle. The same applies to pretty much any other fuel in comparison to CWS - there're some where there'd be a volume saving, but the mass difference is an absolute killer.

Hmmm - possible solution to that being a set of mechanical counterpressure trousers? Works for fighter pilots

Possible? Yes. Efficient? No. Grade I coal / water slurry (the highest energy content by mass of the slurry variants) releases about 4,700kcal/kg. Hydrogen releases 33,900 kcal/kg. You'd need to carry 7 times the mass of fuel in comparison to a hydrogen fuelled rocket.

Is there a reason we couldn't base the system off SCUBA gear & deep diving techniques. Liquid environment would provide buoyancy (offsetting gravity) plus cooling, whilst as long as the pressure is raised slowly as in a compression chamber for deep diving there's no reason that they couldn't function at 1 atmosphere ambient pressure. Humans can push past 30 atmospheres before needing to look in the direction of a hardsuit. Though I'd suggest that if something is killed by 1g of acceleration then it's not going to survive reentry to be on Earth in the first place

In terms of sheer numbers I cant think of a larger bomber engagement than the bombing of the German city of Dresden during WW2 (13th to 15th of February 1945). 722 British heavy bombers & 527 USAF bombers (1249 bombers in total), dropping nearly 4000 tonnes of explosives and incendiaries. edit: darnit, sniped whilst checking figures

If he's handwaving a figure of 4N/Kw (the actual number is nearer 0.1N/Kw) then you'd need more than 4Mw of electrical generation capacity on hand. Packing that much generation into 90 tonnes is gonna be problematic, doing it for 30 years without refueling even moreso...

Yup. The beef industry has used "chicken litter" as a protein supplement for herds for many years. Chicken litter being the mix of excrement, feathers, dropped feed pellets and bedding material that's swept from the floor of chicken coops. It's sterilised by heat before use. From a food-chain perspective it's more efficient than using that same chicken waste as fertiliser to grow crops to feed the cattle.

Hmm, I worded my reply fairly poorly that's for sure. My issue isn't that I can't differentiate between a gameplay mechanic and real-world politics, though it's been my experience that whenever politics is a factor in a game it always results in what would be most politely termed as "issues". My objections to the idea would probably be better summed as follows. As written in the original post the proposed politics mechanic only provides for penalties, penalties that by their nature (i.e. unexpected bills resulting from not landing near enough to the KSC) would be applied more frequently to inexperienced players. I remember my first 20-30 launches I was just happy to see the ground again, would have slowed things down a lot if I'd been paying penalties for badly chosen landing spaces in addition to the replacement costs of several rockets

No. The old adage about not discussing politics (or religion) in unfamiliar company should be held to here I think. There's a good reason that those subjects are generally banned topics on most public forums. Nothing good or productive ever arises from it.

No, they've not reworked the bandwidth tiers - Nexus is capped at a megabyte a second download rate for non-premium users, it's been that way for as long as I can remember. I download a lot of Skyrim mods and never went premium simply because even their 1 megabyte cap exceeds my net connection speed. edit: I've just kicked off a fresh download on Nexus to check - cap is still 1 megabyte per second according to the nexus mod manager and I'm transferring at just below half meg a second, about normal for my connection (around 4 1/2 megabit)

As I understand it there's no actual binding requirement to notify the UN, at least in the majority of UN counties. The UN Office of Outer Space Affairs requests that they be updated with regards to launches and some basic orbital information as soon as is practicable. Only 4 of the 50+ members states of the UN have actually formally signed on with that, the rest provide data purely on a voluntary basis. edit actually just found the link on the UN website - its a purely voluntary requirement. You don't have to tell them anything. http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/FAQ/splawfaq.html#Q12

I've always been a fan of the nuclear option but with a twist. Rather than load-balancing stations as are currently used, dump excess generation into water hydrolysis plants to generate hydrogen during off-peak times. When everyone turns the kettle on during the breaks in the football, dump some capacity back into the grid (rather than bringing whole stations on and offline). The match kicks off again, no-one's making a cuppa, fire up the electrolysis rig again. Why generate hydrogen you may ask? Because most current petrol combustion engines wouldn't need a huge amount of modification to run on hydrogen. And hydrogen combustion is somewhat more emission-free than hydrocarbon combustion - the only combustion product being water. So not only are you generating power without recourse to fossil fuels you also in one fell swoop render a large proportion of the vehicles on the road emission-free. With a fuel supply made from water. No new technology needed at any stage. A valid question (if it's as simple as I think it is) is why this hasn't happened yet. The answer I suspect lies in how much money the oil industry would be willing to throw around if their survival depended on it. There're entire nations that would financially collapse overnight if a setup like this was proven to work. edit: and why nuclear to do this, not solar panels etc? I'd rather lose a handfull of green fields to nuclear power stations, than lose a vast amount more land to the silicon of solar panelling. Though it's not to everyone's taste nuclear does have power density on it's side in comparison to most other methods of generation.

Pretty much any aircraft with wings can glide, it's a trick of minimising the altitude drop whilst not shedding enough velocity to drop into the region where the aircraft will stall. Stalling (and the resulting nose drop) is not going to be fun if your control surfaces (or rather the engines that're powering the hydraulics that move them) are having issues. There's at least one case where a 767 pilot has managed a glide ratio only 20% less efficient than a hang glider. Check out a flight referred to as "The Gimli Glider" - a 767 with both engines & most electronics out due to a fuel miscalculation - ended up landing on a runway in the middle of a drag race event.

Hmm, thought I'd narrowed it down some but can't pin exactly which part is causing it. I've just caused deltav display failure on staging again somehow, stock parts & fresh installs of both KSP and Mechjeb 198. Do have some other mods installed (Kethane, KW, Scansat, KAS and toolbar) but none of the parts used in the very simple test ship. Where's the best place to upload a craft file? edit Hmm, this should work https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B10g9qvGfd9tMW41MFJPYzFIY1E

Same here (on both the quick release last night and also on the 198 release). A quicksave / quickload seems to resolve issue until the next staging event. Still managed to get myself a new pet rock with Jeb's help edit: also no deltav displaying for ion engines. I'm working on an estimate of "lots of deltav".

The game FoldIt is fairly fascinating (or at least it's reasons for existing are). It's a spinoff of the Rosetta@Home distributed protein folding research projects (on the BOINC platform, the same as is currently used for Seti data processing), used largely for medical research. The game exists because people can come up with protein folding solutions that computers can't. So not only is it based on real science, the output is used for actual real science

Sounds daft, but I wonder if there's an issue with asymmetric drag. Does the game model drag accurately enough for 40+ solar panels all on one side of the vessel (each with a drag of 0.2) to cause an imbalance?