Seret

And what happens if conditions change so that the algae/plant goes extinct? Diversity is strength, monoculture is not the way mother nature rolls.

For aircraft propulsion you wouldn't need to bother converting the heat from the reactor into electricity.

Gravity only supplies the vertical component of the shell's downwars trajectory. Even weapons like howitzers will still have a considerable horizontal component. That's why the characteristic shape of shell impacts is like this: Incidentally, if you can spot it on the round you can use this shape to know what direction the fire was coming from. Handy if you want to know which side's artillery you should send a thank you note to. This is a bit of a stupid argument though, as most people commenting are at least partly right. Rail guns are KE weapons, and they would be expected to be effective in direct fire, where they would function very like tank guns firing sabots. Like sabots, they would be devastating against some targets, of questionable utility against soft ones, and almost entirely useless as anti-personnel weapons. Ever tank out there carries a flavour of high explosive round for use against troops, structures, softskins and light armoured vehicles. The sabots are only used on the tough nuts. Hitting lighter stuff with them tend to just increase their ventilation without necessarily doing a lot of damage. Even in indirect fire railguns would have enough muzzle velocity to use a pretty flat trajectory, which means they'd be able to throw considerable kinetic energy a long way down range. However, they'd be limited in their ability to damage soft targets, and their low trajectory would mean a lot of stuff would be behind terrain.

Exactly the same here.

Same stuff they use fission reactors for, mostly naval propulsion.

Most sci-fi has elements of magic in it. Whether it's psychics in Star Trek, Babylon 5 or Firefly, or The Force in Star Wars. You could argue that the label "hard sci-fi" is pretty much defined by the absence of that kind of thing.

You don't need a /boot partition. It's only necessary for unusual filesystems or disk setups. Running a standard Ext4 system it would be a bit of a pain, as your kernel updates could fill the partition. As for swap, I run with a swapfile instead of a partition. The installer will complain (it's default setting is to create one) but it's a perfectly workable option. Putting /home on its own partition used to be very popular, and TBH my disk is still set up this way. These days though you can reinstall and the installer (on Ubuntu at least) is smart enough to not wipe your existing data in /home, so a separate partition is less useful.

I'm a Linux user and while I totally think you should give it a go, I'd just like to make sure you're aware of the lay of the land: Windows is still a vastly superior gaming platform to Linux. The state of gaming on Linux has improved immensely over the last few years, but we're still a long way behind Windows. We've got Steam now, but there are only 341 Linux games, compared to many thousands on Windows. Linux doesn't get the big AAA games, we tend to only get supported by the indies. We also aren't very well supported by the graphics card manufacturers. Nvidia performance is good enough IMO, but continually slightly inferior to the Windows drivers, so if you're a FPS geek you're in trouble. Having said this, there are some great games on Linux (KSP, Minecraft, World of Goo) and some of the older Windows games run well using a compatibility layer called Wine (I'd recommend using the Wine helper app called Play on Linux). If the games that YOU want to play are well supported on Linux then it makes an excellent gaming platform. Just make sure you do your homework and definitely keep Windows around in a dual-boot setup. As for hardware, I agree with both sides of the discussion above. If you have well-supported hardware (eg: Intel chipsets, non-Optimus Nvidia graphics) then Linux is actually a lot easier than Windows. If you have oddball or unsupported hardware then it can be a bit of a nightmare, especially as the solution to obscure config problems is indeed to drop to the command line. Once your system is install however the command line is totally optional, it's certainly not required for everyday tasks. Go ahead, try Ubuntu on a LiveCD or LiveUSB. The best place for any questions or problems would be askubuntu or the Ubuntu Forums. The folks on both those sites are extremely helpful and friendly, they'll sort you out. Askubuntu is best for very techy questions, the forums are best for discussion. Good luck and have fun!

The hard part of docking isn't the end bit where you translate back and forth with your RCS, it's nailing the rendezvous. If you get your rendezvous right the actual docking is just a matter of watching your navball and little light tapping on the translate keys until you connect. Getting a really good rendezvous, that's another story...

Yep, bigger cranium, flatter face and a smaller mandible (why we get trouble with our wisdom teeth). We're also getting taller, and our knees and backs still aren't fully optimised for walking upright.

The main obstacles here aren't technical, they're economic. Could we build a suborbital airliner? Of course. Could we build one that made money? That's pretty dubious IMO. So efficiency and complexity are pretty key.

Just the UK as far as I'm aware. Most of the rest went metric before there were cars.

Definitely. There's certainly no genetic definition for the racial groups. To be honest geneticists were pretty wary of the idea anyway, as it smacks of eugenics. But it turns out the science actually supports this position.

Only some races, and it's not a reliable indicator. After all, does someone stop being a sub-saharan African if they're relatively light-skinned? It's too subjective, and just looking at the genes themselves you can't tell. It can, and some haplogroups are quite strongly linked to certain parts of the globe, but you can't say for certain that someone would show the characteristics of a particular race just because they fell into a particular haplogroup. For example, being group A mitochondrial might mean you're Japanese, or it might mean you're a Native American. Besides, populations from all over the world that have historically not mixed have been doing so a fair bit for the last few centuries, so you'll get individuals who outwardly seem no different from others of their race but who carry substantial genetic material from a totally different race.

Yes, but if you just look at a genome, you can't tell with any certainty what race that person comes from. The variation between individuals of the same race is larger than the variation between the races. That's why the use of the term race has fallen from favour, from a genetic point of view it's a meaningless term.

Actually no. We've reduced some of the external selection pressure on ourselves for sure, but that's not the only mechanism that causes change in a genome. For example, sexual selection is still very much alive and well and that can result in huge changes. The long neck on a giraffe is thought to be down to sexual selection, for example.

I'm still not quite sure what the point you're trying to make is. So you're suggesting that we launch all the hardware for a Mars mission into Earth orbit and test it there? Ok, fine that's a nice conservative approach. You'd be able to do most of what you could do on a flyby, obviously you're not carrying out all the maneuvers you would be otherwise, and crew psychology would still be a big question mark. Would you then go straight from that to scaling up for a landing later, or are you suggesting they should do both the Earth orbit mission and the flyby later? Look, this kind of name calling does you more harm than good. If you want to be taken seriously keep your arguments rational. Not everybody who disagrees with your personal vision for space exploration does so because of some kind of character flaw. Yes, it's one of the big unanswered questions of interplanetary flight. There have been some experiments done, results have been a bit mixed. It's a genuine issue. Prospective astronauts would have to be picked carefully.

No. Binary sucks for use by humans. Even slightly less unwieldy systems like BCD are still less pragmatic than decimal. Humans and machines do handle numbers differently, I don't see any advantage to making the humans use a system that's optimal only for machines. They're supposed to work for us, after all!

Maybe I am. I'm not quite sure what argument you're trying to make here. You seemed to take issue with the idea that a Mars flyby would validate some of the hardware required for a Mars landing. You then go on to say that you could test life support systems in Earth orbit. Which is not wrong, but I'm not sure why you're making the point. Of course you could test a life support system for two years in Earth orbit, but to what end? If your goal is a manned Mars mission then doing a flyby before the big show makes sense (which is why they did it for Apollo). So what's your actual point? That we shouldn't be looking do the flyby at all? If so then click here to see why you're arguing with the wrong dude.

MEO can still be replenished. If possible you'd certainly want to test it in Earth orbit before chancing your hand at an interplanetary mission. But the stated goal is to develop and validate tech capable of making interplanetary journeys. Testing a subset of the systems required for a landing by doing a flyby would be a good way to simplify the problem (thereby reducing risk) while still fully validating some the most safety critical systems.

I'm thinking mainly of the life support system. We've never flown a system designed to keep people alive in deep space.

The amount of new science might be small, but the engineering value of the journey would be immense.

I don't understand all you folks questioning the usefulness of a Mars flyby. Some of the biggest problems facing a manned trip to Mars are life support, radiation levels and crew psychology. This mission could help tackle those and make a future landing much safer. Interplanetary flight is something we've never done before, it doesn't make sense to try and solve all the big risks at once. Personally I question the usefulness of any manned Mars missions if they're going to divert resources away from everything else. We've got most of the solar system left to explore, manned flag planting missions are an expensive distraction IMO.

Depends. You might want a bit more if you're on Windows, as it has higher background memory use. But I run KSP on a 4GB machine running Linux with no problems at all. If you want to optimise the machine for KSP then Linux would be a good choice of OS, as you'll be able to use the 64-bit version. At least go for a dual-boot anyway.

The wear levelling algorithms in modern SSDs ensure that this won't ever be a problem, even for quite heavy use in servers. For standard desktop use it's not something you have to worry about. It's worth bearing in mind that in practical terms magnetic hard drives have a very limited lifespan too. They're one of the least reliable components in a computer. To be honest, with the number of moving parts they have and the tolerances they have to achieve to work properly it's a minor miracle they work at all. There are ways to get the best of both worlds. You can fit a cache drive instead of a full SSD, this gives SSD-like performance and allows you to keep all your data on a big slow hard drive. Alternatively if you're using an OS where you can easily separate the OS from your data then putting the OS on an SSD and the data on a HDD is a good way to go. Personally I fit small SSDs to the individual machines and keep all my data on the network in a RAID array. Not really. Loads time for KSP doesn't seem to be strongly limited by disk access. I still have to sit and wait 30s or so for the game to launch. IMO it's worth getting an SSD anyway, any time you do need to thrash the disk they do make a big difference. Once you've got used to one you'll hate the system slowing to a crawl and listening to that drive grind on an HDD.