Seret

We're not quite there yet, I'm sure they've got a long list of these small tidy-up jobs that will get attention once the game is feature-complete.

Until quite recently I was running KSP on a Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM and an Nvidia 8500GT and it was fine. So if you're looking for a minimum spec you'll have to head somewhere south of that.

It's not really an issue. Damaging another spacecraft would usually generate lots of debris, even if you did it with a directed energy weapon. You can't smash up the other guy's toys without creating a mess. The fact that every ASAT weapon ever used or designed has been a kinetic energy weapon should give you a clue how seriously the military consider Kessler Syndrome to be a constraint on their activities. That's the last place it will come back, since by definition everything you fire will have substantial velocity relative to you. It might hit anybody and everybody else, but it definitely won't hit you unless you move to intercept it.

It's not, but I can see where you'd get that idea. Detonation has a supersonic wave, but not all supersonic waves are detonation. One of my more interesting previous jobs was as an armourer in the military. You're right that people who work with explosives every day do talk as if velocity of detonation is the be all and end all, but that's because it is important when you're considering two substances that are detonable. You can smack a non-detonable substance as fast as you like, it won't detonate. If I wrap a lump of gunpowder (are we talking nitrocellulose?) in all the det cord in the world it won't detonate. Same goes for petrol, cheese sandwiches, hamsters and other combustible but non-detonable materials. Let's back the truck up and take another look at your three-storey pile of gunpowder. What purpose is the large bulk of the pile serving? It's to provide a reaction force which counters the force of the expanding gas generated by combustion, yes? So what if we provide that reaction force by any other means, such as a hard steel case. So we have enough a propellant to generate very high pressures and velocities combusting inside a metal chamber. What device have we just described? A firearm, or an artillery piece. You're right that containing it does massively increase pressures, safety class explosives like small arms ammo are completely underwhelming when they combust in their packaging, but within the chamber things are different. IIRC chamber pressures in a 5.56mm rifle spike at about 40,000psi (275MPa). This doesn't result in detonation. I can't say I've studied the exact dynamics of bulk quantities of propellant in extreme reactions, I think it's quite possible you might be able to initiate multiple site of combustion via a supersonic shock wave if you set things up right, but the point is that the combustion reaction created would propagate by heat transfer, and is still a different reaction to detonation. It doesn't matter what the source of your high-VoD pulse is, it just won't create the effect you're looking for. I'll leave to to a chemist to explain the exact nitty gritty of why some molecules are detonable and some aren't, because that's getting a bit outside my field. When I look at the molecules for things like nitrocellulose (non-detonable) and nitroglycerine (detonable) I see similar nitro groups, so I won't try to pretend I could tell you the difference. I'm pretty sure this forum can cough up someone who's got the chemisty-fu and can vouch for me on this though.

Why is it that...some users post vague thread titles as blatant click bait?

I wasn't really trying to prove any point, except that any large explosion will generate an overpressure, which can be visible. Just look at Vietnam footage of the Daisy Cutter bombs and you'll see that HE doesn't hold the monopoly on pretty blast waves.

Correct, it won't detonate. Gunpowder (whether you mean black powder or modern nitrocellulose) won't detonate, it can't. Whether something can detonate is determined by it's molecular structure, not how much of it there is.

That'd only be necessary for an expeditionary ship visiting another planet. In Earth orbit you could just use existing infrastructure, which would be a mix of ground-based and orbital. The battle would likely be coordinated from the ground, integrating information from lots of sources. Air combat is already conducted this way, and it'd be air forces that would take on the role of managing any potential combat in space.

So where is this file currently? You said it's not on the same drive as Ubuntu? The problem might be more to do with the drive (ie: it's something mounted as read-only for some reason). Copy the file over to somewhere you know you can read and write to and try again?

This close enough for you? www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KuGizBjDXo Not strictly a rocket, but a factory making ammonium perchlorate for rocket motors, including SRBs.

They can certainly be strong enough to induce sympathetic detonation in explosives. That's typically what happens when explosives are in a fire, one of them will deflag and cuase adjacent ones to detonate. That's why the rules about how much stuff you can stack in one pile and distances between them are so strict. The principle difference is that deflagration is just a rapid oxidation, while detonation is a fundamental molecular breakdown. Different reaction, much more powerful. Nope, still just deflagration, it's just that you can get enough smash out of it that containing it is a bad idea. That stuff is designed to generate lots of gas in a confined space.

You're not the only user. I use Ubuntu myself, and just because it doesn't have a root account by default doesn't mean it doesn't have other users. Linux was designed as a multi-user system right from the start. Your system has lots of "users", you're just one of them. You say you can't set the executable flag on the file, so it must be owned by someone other than yourself. What does it say when you right-click and check the permissions tab? Who is the owner? If it's a file you downloaded through your browser then it really should be owned by you and you should have no problem running it.

1000km isn't necessarily short range in orbit. At the lowest Earth orbits the horizon is only about 1400km away, so two objects in that orbit can only have a maximum line of sight of about 2800km. If you're using IR and have to take the atmosphere into account then that drops to a maximum range of a smidge under 2000km. Factor in time to identify and acquire the target (closing speed could be up to 15km s-1) and engagements inside 1000km start to look highly likely. Obviously this changes as your altitude increases, at the extreme end two objects in GEO could be up to 83,000km apart. This actually gives one major advantage to ballistic or guided weapons, they potentially have much longer range than a line-of sight weapon such as a laser. A missile could potentially hit a target on the opposite side of the planet, so arming your combat spacecraft solely with lasers would be a very bad idea. Your enemy would just sit back behind the horizon and pepper you.

Ah, my apologies. My work network strips out YouTube videos so I didn't see you'd attached one. I'll have to take a look at it.

Let's take a worst case scenario: a small (20m) ring spinning for 1g at the rim. In a 2m entry section the difference in speeds would be 1.4ms-1. That's about waking speed, and in reality you wouldn't have a ring that small spinning that fast.

Why are you guys thinking crew might have any trouble moving from a rotating to a non-rotating part of the station? Really can't see it as a problem, it'd be no harder than negotiating a merry-go-round/roundabout at a child's playground. As long as you weren't too drunk it should be fine.

I think that's what's at issue here. Concepts such as "particle" and "wave" are just models that can be used to communicate about the physical state of a system. They don't literally describe reality, there are no little balls flying around or wiggly things in the air, although for the purposes of instruction it's perfectly valid to teach that they are until the student is ready to move on to a more subtle interpretation. So it might not be strictly correct from an expert point of view to describe particles vanishing, it's correct enough for a neophyte.

I didn't think this was right, but didn't say anything at the time. However I just got a link to an interesting article about ExoMars where they explain how the sterilisation regime affects their design process: http://www.theengineer.co.uk/in-depth/interviews/qa-with-spacecraft-engineer-abbie-hutty/1018545.article?cmpid=tenews_278877

Ok, presumably the file is owned by someone other than yourself. You can see that on the permissions tab. Normally anything you download through your browser and dump in your home folder is owned by you, so you can do what you like with it. Simplest way to take ownership is to open the terminal (Ctrl-T) and run: sudo chown username /path/to/file Where username is your username, obviously. You can hit TAB to autocomplete the file location instead of typing it all in. Once you own the file you can set it executable either by a right click or the chmod command Voidi gave. Are you sure you actually need this installer script though? If you just download KSP straight from the official site it works fine on Ubuntu in English.

IIRC this is exactly what the Soviets planned to use for their killer satellites. It would maneuver to a close intercept with the target sat and blast it. The Americans were going for a kinetic kill vehicle that actually hit the target directly. EDIT: This is the one I was thinking of: http://www.russianspaceweb.com/is.html

If what you've got is an archive (can't remember if it's .zip or .tar.gz, but it doesn't really matter) just right click and "extract here". Go into the folder it just created and right click on the KSP and/or Launcher executable and make sure the check box for "allow executing file as a program" is checked. You should just be able to click on it and have it run.

As a test bed for technologies and knowledge required for long-duration manned trips. Researching that in orbit is a logical stepping stone.

In reality nobody's ever built one, which is why Google wasn't throwing up a lot of links for you. Still sci-fi at this point unfortunately. The ISS was planned to have a spinning module at one stage. Despite being fairly small rotation rates were quite low, so transition would have been pretty straightforward. Just stop at the entrance and grab a piece the rotating section. If you're at the center you won't really feel any forces until you move towards the outside. On a larger ring this would feel like climbing down into increasing gravity. The bigger the ring the slower it could spin, so transition becomes even easier (although a longer climb down!).

K^2, I think you're tilting at windmills here. The OP clearly doesn't operate at the level of physics knowledge that requires making that fine-grained level of distinction.

It's not really the planet that would be at risk, it's your spacecraft. The engines would generate a high neutron flux around them, even if you assume they'd be shielded well enough to stop them cooking the crew, it would embrittle and induce radiation in the structure.