Shpaget

There's an Air Traffic Joke (may be a real thing, who knows) involving an SR-71 pilot and an inattentive ATC The pilot requests FL600. ATC: Buddy, if you can get up there, you can have it. Pilot: Roger that, descending to FL600. A little explanation for those who are not into aviation: For any change in altitude (among other things) inside controlled airspace, and to enter the controlled airspace, a pilot must be cleared by Air Traffic Control and be given permission before the change. Controlled airspace extends from about (may vary between countries) 1000 feet to usually about 60 000 feet (also called Flight Level 600, or FL600). Since the SR-71 was above FL600 he was not in controlled airspace and was not in contact with ATC beforehand. No one flies at FL600. Even the highest flying airliners top out at around FL420. SR-71 being a notable exception, though quite a rare sight. Of course, a proper request for FL600, like in this scenario, would necessarily include much more info, such as position and altitude. If no flight plan was filed, then also aircraft type and other data. Suffice to say, ATC would understand what is going on, so I classify this as a joke and not an anecdote. Also, military aircraft are controlled by military ATC (who may be sitting right next to civil ones, as is the case here where I live), who would surely know of any military activity.

Have you tried to run it in vacuum? If yes, is there a difference in thrust when running the engine in atmosphere and in vacuum? How hard was the vacuum? If no, how can you be sure the thrust doesn't come from the air being pushed around?

Neither exists. Also, what does it matter how is an electric engine powered? The maximum speed of an aircraft is usually limited by airframe, not the engine. Either the airframe is not designed for excessive speeds or it's not economical to fly faster then they do. The engines that propel that aircraft could go faster if they were mounted on a different body. Turbofans are not good for supersonic, but jet fighter engines (turbojets) could operate at higher speeds than the aircraft, if they were mounted on a more streamlined body. VASIMR (not VASMIR) is strictly a vacuum engine and as such will not operate in atmosphere. In vacuum it doesn't have a max speed. Same goes for Arcjet. Why do you keep on mixing speed, thrust, air breathing and rocket engines? What do you want with this topic?

Each engine has its limit, but it's not a strict line. As you go higher you start losing performance and need to go faster, but you can only go so fast before you lose performance due to supersonic/hypersonic air flow. There is optimal regime and suboptimal and engineers need to find a balance for each aircraft/engine/payload/flight plan combination. If you want to know specs of a specific engine, wikipedia usually is enough, but your question is too broad for a simple reply.

I haven't seen an episode of Samurai Jack in at least 10 years, but you mentioning "Aku" was enough to get me thinking "Hey, wasn't that the guy who screwed Jack over?"

No pinging. You would need stupidly powerful radars and would wait hours for data. Simple triangulation from probes is faster and more accurate.

That's not what you said in OP. Yes, Galileo knew where Jupiter was, but so woul you after about 15 seconds it would take you to scan the entire sky with a wide field IR camera.

Why would you need tens or hundreds of AUs separation? Significant gains in resolution can be had with just a few hundred meters separation, not that I think even that is needed for observation inside the solar system, especially when the mothership has warp capability. A single decent telescope with a 1 m mirror should be more than enough for detection of anything of interest in the system. Remember, Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter with a tiny refractor using the lenses he ground and polished at home, looking through the atmosphere. A good 1 m scope, placed in space, will produce substantially better results. Once you have the catalog of large objects in the system, the mothership can send a small probe to each planet for a closer look.

If you are after efficiency, then you should aim to get your intercept Pe to be as close as possible to your final orbit, so an early en route correction burn is optimal. If you already are at 150 km Pe then Mr. Hohman is your friend.

Randall didn't account for the reentry oven (RevenTM), he assumed the steak dropping was exposed to air stream. With careful design of the RevenTM, using thermal conductors, accumulators and radiators, we can assure the best and consistent heating with optimal heating profile and perfect serving temperature. Regarding the sauce and toppings, I don't see an issue. sauce jet sounds doable, but a simple squirt gun will suffice for the sauce. The toppings can be placed and stuck to the dough and sauce via a high velocity rail gun type delivery system that would shoot the toppings through various meshes and knives with geometries that will spread the toppings evenly. The sauce will provide the stickiness needed to keep them on the dough. What I'm worried is, if we can't assure accurate delivery on the premises of the individual who placed the order, that might lead to my neighbor getting my tasty space pizza, and I don't like my neighbor. Regarding the nuclear strike alerts being triggered by the pizza reentry, just imagine the fallout the Gov would get if the newspaper front pages screamed "A Family of 5 Goes Hungry as Government Wastes Multimillion Antiballistic Missile to Destroy a Pizza".

An infrared camera/telescope would easily and quickly detect all eight planets in our system, most of the moons too. It would need to spend some watching time to get the orbital characteristics, but detection is trivial. Once you have orbital characteristics, you can calculate mass, and from that make an educated guess about the composition. Some spectrometry later you cad detect if there is an atmosphere and what composition it is.

It would be useful if you stated what requirement is that.

You've removed the track that crosses from top left to bottom right that allows you to reverse the direction, something that I consider a nice feature. You did get rid of the requirement for reversing mechanisms, something I don't completely understand, working almost exclusively with Marklin, which is immune to those issues. You still have a lot of room for shunting and playing around.

It looks like a decent layout for shunting and playing around. Was it ever operational?

Well, anything will fly if you put a big enough engine on it. Even bricks. http://www.badumtss.net

The system we use is somewhat similar to Faller Car System - there is a steel wire in the road and the cars follow the wire. All the electronics (digital decoder and stuff) is in the car. Position sensors are embeded in the road and instructions are sent to cars via infra red LEDs mounted on the ceiling. At the moment we are working on an overhaul in an attempt to power the cars via induction coils under the road, since the batteries are the weak spot. They take too long to charge and don't last long enough. This way we would be able to run them as long as we please.

While I agree that tight curves look weird and often ugly, keep in mind that one of the largest model railroad manufacturers in the world (Marklin) offers r=360 mm as their tightest curve in one product line (C-track) and r=295 mm in another (K-track), and that the curved switches have r=360 mm as their inner radius (437 mm for standard switch). There are certain locos that will not run on those tight curves, but they are exceptions and clearly marked in the catalog. Pretty much every Marklin piece of rolling stock performs satisfactorily on properly placed track (properly connected track and gradual inclination change). Granted, most of Marklin passenger cars are not true 1:87 in length, they are shortened a bit, but even exact models ride well on those tight curves. They do look weird when the middle of the car cuts the corners, though. Which brings us to realism... there is none on the model layout. If you tried to make a layout with realistic curves, you would quickly run out of room, so we are forced to make concessions, even if we go down to N or Z scale. Not related to my previous ramblings, but just to add to the thread, this is a small Z scale oval I made for the counter in our little brick and mortar store. Kids who visit (and myself) can push a button and the train then goes around the layout for a few laps, then stops at the station, ready for the next button press. It's under glass, so it requires surprisingly little maintenance. I don't remember when was the last time I cleaned the track, but it was before last December, so almost a year now, without cleaning! At that time it got a new, better, locomotive and a few more cargo cars to pull around. The silver circle front and center is the button that initiates the layout.

Actually, anywhere in a uniformly massive shell (hollowed out planet) there is exactly zero g. While it is true that if you drift to one side you get closer to some part, there is more mass on the other side. The resulting force happens to be 0 for any point inside the shell.

Well, the infinite gravity can be sidestepped. if (SOI == L4 || SOI == L5) { if (forceOfGravity > bajillion) //perhaps consider overflow here { forceOfGravity = somethingSane; } }

Well, of course! What else should I call my comsats? I give them designations, sort of generations, according of the dishes they carry. The first ones around Kerbin are Comsat 1-1, Comsat 1-2, Comsat 1-3, followed by Comsat 2-1, 2-2 and 2-3, which I had to launch immediately after the first generation, which failed to provide the basic function I wanted them to provide - form a coms network. The dish-on-a-stick has too short range to be useful for a decent network, however, I decided to leave them in orbit. Can't have too many comsats, can you? Then there is the constellation in the making around Minmus. It has "Minmus" in its name, so it doesn't get confused with something else. It's the second generation which is currently the longest rang I have available. I have decided to include the contractor name in the future launches as described by @Streetwind. This was a decision I made because at the moment I have a contract to move one of my comsats to a different orbit, which I do not want to do, since it would mess up my network, but for future launches, the contractor gets to pick the orbit and change it whenever they please (as long as there's enough fuel to do it).

Yeah, I'm in no particular hurry to fulfill that contract, it's valid for 25 years, so I should be able to find a window, but I still need to keep an eye on the planetary alignments. KAC should be the answer. Or I may just brute force it. I still haven't even landed on the Mun, or even Minmus (which is usually my first stop). Like I said, I'm very early in career and visiting other planetary systems can wait, but if'm I'm going to stick to this save file, I might as well start the multimission approach with the alarm clock.

... or in this particular case, Ike. I'm in early career - two comsat constellations around Kerbin (the dishes on the first set were not adequate, so I launched a new one, plus a high polar one) and three more sats around Minmus, not in constelation, and I have been offered a contract to place a sat around Ike. However, the planets are not aligned for Hohmann transfer. It seems silly to just timewarp for several months. My space program can suffer the disappearance of its director for a couple of days or weeks during a Mun or Minmus transfer, but this seems irresponsible XD. How do you guys go ahead with this kind of contracts? The money is not bad, but there is also plenty to earn in LKO, so that's not a motive. I do like the idea of expanding my comsat network, though. So do I launch now with more boosters and just gun for Duna on a less than optimal trajectory? Or do I accept the contract and wait for the launch window? I'm at crossroads. I'm playing vanilla (possibly just until the stable KER is released), but I'm seriously considering KAC, something I've never used before. I don't know why. Ahh... help!

Same mass as the big one?

Model railroading is not my hobby. It's my day job (during the night, I'm Batman, but that's a different story). Seriously.... This is what I do: www.backo.hr (English version of the site may suck, pictures are multilingual, though)

Yes, it should be doable, but what would be the purpose if it? Engines, fuel tanks etc. in KSP are not accurate and realistic. Kerbin is a lot smaller than Earth, atmospheric physics are not top notch... So why would you use KSP for simulation of real missions, when you already have a better calculator (the one you linked)?