Seret

Well obviously, yes. But do you think it makes sense to simply assume that such payloads will appear once the rocket is ready? What happens if they don't? What if NASA ends up using STS for ISS crews and not much else?

I disagree. I think KER and Mechjeb generally do a good job. The fact that there are a few corner cases doesn't preclude something from being good enough to be stock. There are plenty of stock parts and features that behave oddly in a small number of situations. Having something that gave a figure in the right ballpark for TWR and ÃŽâ€v in the VAB/SPH would be a huge improvement. I could live without ÃŽâ€v readings once in flight and docking things together, but getting it right for the first few stages of a launch vehicle isn't hard.

Low and medium level wastes aren't a problem for disposal, we do it routinely. The OPs question implies the currently unsolved problem of high level waste.

Well, use whatever you prefer, but we've had to switch to Chrome at work because too many of our web tools (which are built to the standards) don't work properly in IE. Ironic, as many businesses are stuck with the exact opposite problem.

Grab a copy of your browser profile from your most recent backup and restore it. You do regular backups, right?

There are branches of psychology that are science, and branches that definitely aren't.

History is not a science in my book. It's a perfectly valid and fascinating field of research, and I'm sure they're rigorous, but the science of the past is archeology. Granted there's some overlap, and one informs the other.

I'd be very surprised if there wasn't a chess set on the ISS already. Give me some black and white self adhesive Velcro and half an hour and I could make you a chess set that would work in micro g.

Ok, so are any of the social sciences actually science?

Lol, I managed to detect your little caveat just fine thanks. I don't think it really adds weight to your point though, does it? On the contrary, I think you realised you'd said something a bit ridiculous and tried to back away from it a bit. I get it, you like manned exploration. That's understandable, it's romantic and inspires all sorts of warm fuzzy feelings. But that's not how priorities in space exploration are set. Maximum science out to money in ratio is the hard-nosed reality of it. Which is why SLS will struggle, it costs a lot and doesn't have much to do. They either need to find some payloads for it or cancel it now before too much more money is spent.

Nonsense, the Mars rovers have been hugely successful, and there are extensive future plans for further probes, rovers and a sample return. Experiments in LEO are also very sensible, we still have quite a lot of new kit to test before it'll be really safe to send humans on interplanetary missions.

That's probably going to be a very small club. Way back in the days of yore there were no maneuver nodes. You used to fly totally by the seat of your pants. It wasn't better.

Easily. If you swap the LT-45 for an LV-909 on a 10 tonne lander it suddenly becomes a 9-tonne lander. It would have a TWR of 1.89 on Duna, so it would go like the clappers. You'd probably have to throttle back a bit to avoid too much atmospheric loss. Once you start cutting weight like that it becomes a virtuous circle. With a lighter, lower lander you can drop the 8 heavy legs and go for 4 of the medium ones. That's another 0.6t gone right there, and with the lower weight you can probably afford to drop a fuel tank or two, etc, etc.

So you go out to work and he stays home and plays KSP? Best. Wife. Ever. In other news: there's a multiplayer version of the game in the pipeline at some point. So you'll eventually be able to play together!

I'll quite happily admit to wanting my designs to succeed first time. I think that validates the (admittedly fairly minimal) effort I put into planning.

Or it might not, that's my point. As I said up at the top: "if you build it, they will come" is not a sensible way to do business. The only reason they should even be building a giant lifter is if they had some giant payloads they absolutely had to launch. That's why we built the Saturn V, because it was an integrated part of a programme that required it. I'm not quite sure what SLS is being built for.

There's actually considerable uncertainty about the interior of Jupiter. Hopefully the Juno mission will shed a bit more light on it, you can see the battery of instruments it's got on its wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_(spacecraft) I guess ultimately they build up a model of the composition and structure by combining multiple sources of information. You could get a fair bit just from spectroscopy and density I'd imagine.

Not a lot that's actually planned or budgeted though. It's does look in serious risk of becoming a white elephant.

Kerbal Engineer Redux and Kerbal Alarm Clock are must-haves. Doing anything complex or long-distance without them would be a nightmare. You could swap out KER for Mechjeb if you want, it gives a similar amount of instrumentation but also includes the autopilots and flying tools. No shame at all in using those IMO.

One of the Culture ships did exactly this in one of Iain M Banks' novels. They're immensely powerful though, shedding that kind of energy isn't a big deal for them. EDIT: Looks like it was in Consider Phlebas. The GCU "Nervous Energy" bounced an Idiran warship by hiding in the photosphere of a nearby star. Ouch.

You could either use a recoilless weapon such as a missile or rockets, or just compensate with RCS. RCS fuel is likely to be at less of a premium than ammo. Close-in defences also have the issue that you're still likely to get hit by fragments of the projectile. Defences would want to take a layered approach, with missiles further out and maybe guns in close as a last ditch effort. You'd be wanting to kill the missile as far out as possible. That's a similar approach to what naval vessels do. It's likely that only high-value targets like space stations would bother having that much defensive firepower, kill vehicles are likely to be small, expendable and have no active defences. They may not even have any weapons, since at orbital speeds your engine has more than enough smash to deliver a killing blow to an enemy vehicle or satellite. I suspect at most you'd need some kind of terminal fragmentation effect.

What about a mobile game where you play as a young Glados and have to design chambers that kill as many test subjects as possible? Sort of like reverse Lemmings.

Eh? No it doesn't. It's got political connotations for sure, but loads of people have written manifestos.

Solid maybe, but too soft to function as a pressure vessel. Even titanium will creep under those temperatures and pressures. It's not a practical idea.

"If you build it, they will come" is not a responsible way to spend public funds. The payload should always come first.