Beowolf

It's just economics, and the nature of software development. Professional devs have a list of tasks that have to be completed in a specific order on a specific schedule, because your work has to be synchronized with the rest of the team. Screw it up and other team members can't do their jobs and everything spirals into an avalanche of suck. They started work with $X amount of money. If they use it all up before the product ships, they all get fired. (it's more complex this late in the development process, but that's not relevant here) It's a job, man. Devs work on what management says needs doing next, to keep the team working like a big assembly line. Modders, on the other hand, do exactly what they want, which should answer your question. These days, Squad is in "crunch mode". People are likely working 80-hour weeks trying to get the product out the door. Ever spend two or three months working 80-hour weeks at a desk? The only definition of "care" that matters right now is, "How many people will refuse to buy the product if we don't fix this item?" In this case, that number's pretty close to zero. Which puts fixing this bug near the bottom of the pile, like those typos in the tutorial texts. Please note that I'm explaining, not defending. I've been both dev and manager, and emotionally I'd prefer to deliver the perfection. But I've seen companies that tried and they're all bankrupt now. Even Rolls Royce and Bentley had to make quality compromises to survive in the modern economy. Perfect costs at least two or three times as much as "good enough", but most of the public won't even pay an extra 25% if a "good enough" product is available. Would you pay $150 for a "perfect" KSP rather than the v1.0 we're going to get? Not me. KSP's "good enough". Happy flying!

A long time ago, my first trip to Jool. I forgot to quicksave before I started blind experimentation with aerobraking. My first attempt took them too deep...and goodbye, crew! Quickload took me all the way back to Kerbin, just before my transfer burn.

Sure would, on any of my "production" sandbox flights. Those designs have been so thoroughly tested, I'd let my wife and son ride along, too. I can't even remember the last time I lost a Kerbal in production. Honestly, it's gotten kinda boring. Test flights are a different story. I used to be a software testing pro, and tend to test my rockets the same way. When I test, I'm not tuning until the rocket flies right one time. I'm out there aggressively breaking things to see if I can come up with a scenario my Kerbals can't survive. A good launch escape system and a backup parachute makes them hard to kill, though. And I wouldn't let my family within a mile of my current BTSM career game.

I was happy to see the dog-scientist wearing safety goggles, but he/she also needs to pull that tongue in when mixing chemicals!

I saw a recent update on that old story. In 1969 there was no good household comparison, so they talked about "layers of aluminum foil", which gave people the wrong impression. But we have a great visualization today. If you look at a picture of the LEM, the pressure hull looks like a can lying on one side, with the cockpit windows in one end. That hull was about triple the thickness of an aluminum can's skin, and holding only about one-third the pressure of a shaken soda can (4.8 psi vs. 15 psi). So they landed on the moon in a soda can. An astronaut could have punctured it if careless with a screwdriver or other tool, but not easily by-hand. Without the pressure and shape adding stability though, I bet you could crumple the hull metal in the palm of your hand. Viewed from that perspective, it almost seems like a conservative design. Triple thickness and one-third pressure? Really, NASA?

Mr. Wumpus, I truly don't mean any offense, but please think about what you're doing here for a minute. I was college-age during the Carter era. You weren't in kindergarten yet. And you're explaining the state of 1980 men's magazines to me. Let me assure you, sir; I was intimately familiar with this subject! Yeah, the story was in Hustler. This was during the Cincinnati obscenity trials, and during that period Hustler was trying to prove their First Amendment relevance by throwing in some serious commentary. And Playboy was still quite the big deal in 1980. But the 80s were the decade they faded, so you're presumably thinking of their state when you hit puberty several years later.

Huh? Hey, I get that our current "global climate change" is man-made. No argument from me there. But where do you possibly get extinction of humanity from it? I see a few trillion dollars of economic disruption, spread over a century. I see mass migration of around a billion people, with numerous regional wars resulting. That's an ugly century, but it's a long, long way from extinction! Sh*t happens, and then people fight over whatever's left. It's the sad story of our species. As I see it, very little can be done to stop it without having a world government. As long as nation-states each get to pollute internally as much as they like, and global economics is played like a zero-sum game, this is an inevitable outcome of the industrial revolution. We'll do what we always do: Put off any action until the last second, fight some wars over resources, then adapt to the new conditions. My hippie family does what we can. We buy carbon credits for the car (blame us for the ocean algae-bloom experiments if you want), and pay extra to get all our electricity from wind and nuclear. And vote liberal, naturally. But China and India, and soon Brazil, intend to become first-world economies, and I don't think I can stop them, and am unsure I even have the right to try. They aren't doing anything the US didn't do first. By the way, what's Canada's plan for when the US Midwest dries up and we come take your newly productive land? We will, you know. Nuclear superpowers don't starve peacefully. Not saying I approve of that, just that it's the way humanity works. edit: fixed censored words.

Sounds like this technique would reliably produce heat and eventually fire in certain types of batteries. How predictable would the time-to-fire be? Was talking about this thread just now with a writer friend, and he immediately thought about using it in a story as a "time delay fuse" to start an arsonist's fire. A great example of our personality differences, as I'd thought of a Star Trek phaser on overload. My idea was for lithium batteries to come with a built-in teakettle whistle, so they'd make that whine that slowly rises in pitch as the battery got hotter, just like a phaser. And he thought of a slum-lord committing insurance fraud. I don't generally watch "CSI" type shows. Anybody know if this has already been used in recent fiction? There have already been several news cycles about lithium-ion battery fires, so maybe someone's already used it.

I have what's probably the previous model of this device and have been happy with it.

I disagree. What you call pointless I call "learning something new".

Never noticed that STS-51L was only the 25th flight. Mea culpa! I distinctly remember one of the late 70s magazine articles mentioned the failure rate of SRBs. I agree that was also in the Rogers Commission Report. When I originally saw Feynman's statement, I also remember going "If he read Hustler he'd have known that a decade ago". But since I don't have the sources available, I'll grant the 1% thing could be a false memory. Those happen more and more as I get older. Still I'm certain the SRBs were being criticized as a desperate design decision. Other details I (think I) remember involved NASA repeatedly rejecting SRBs as too dangerous to be man-rateable during the 60s, yet when their backs were against the wall in the 70s with STS design, abruptly changed their minds about that without any evidence the new SRBs were any safer. Anyone have confirmation or debunking of that statement? Googling wasn't of any help, so I can't be sure. The first flight of a GEM-40 occurred in 1990 (Wikipedia). I'm glad to hear they've improved them so much, but it's not relevant to an STS design conversation.

No prob. I'm happy to belittle them for you! Hindsight, hell. You say "at the time, it did seem like a good idea", yet what I remember from when they were building the STS are many, many articles criticizing the design, and correctly predicting exactly how it would end up killing astronauts. Popular Science, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Washington Monthly , The Wall Street Journal, Forbes... all these and many more had articles with deadly criticism of the compromises STS made. I was only 21 when Columbia first flew and a complete space junkie, but even back then, I thought the shuttle was a lemon. Hell, even Hustler magazine ran an article about the shuttle's design problems! We knew the historical reliability of solid fuel boosters, with the very best ones exploding 1% of the time. There wasn't a single reliability improvement in the shuttle SRBs that would change that. The articles predicted an SRB explosion every 50 shuttle flights. Challenger was flight 51. Gee, too bad there was no way to see that coming. We even had a Morton Thiokol engineer literally begging for the Challenger flight to be delayed until warmer weather, and he was overruled for political reasons by his management, because a cancellation now would make the whole program look bad. Hey, great call guys! You sure avoided that bullet. And we fully knew in-advance those thermal tiles were too fragile to withstand routine minor debris collisions, like falling ice, during launch. You know, the kind of minor debris that's fallen off practically every cryogenic-fueled rocket ever? Plus we gained new routine debris, as the main tank insulation wasn't supposed to fall off but did. And NASA literally just decided to close their eyes and ignore that issue, despite internal complaints. What killed Columbia's astronauts again? They predicted, with amazing accuracy, just how poorly "reusable" STS truly would be, how this design would raise rather than lower the cost/kg to orbit. It wasn't so much reusable as "rebuildable". Remember the part where NASA said they'd be able to launch shuttles weekly? Those extraordinary people knew they were building the most expensive deathtrap in human history. Those extraordinary people removed the crew's ejection seats to save weight. Even better, that change was made in an attempt to meet the Air Force's needs for placing heavy spy satellites into polar orbits. The shuttle never did shave enough weight to do that job, but THEY NEVER PUT THE EJECTION SEATS BACK! As far as I'm concerned, whoever signed off on that change should have the names of the Challenger astronauts carved into his forehead, like the swastika in Inglorious Bastards. Read through some of the internal NASA and contractor memos that were released from the Challenger investigation. It was common knowledge that what Congress funded (combining the NASA and Air Force requirements into one vehicle) was simply impossible. But NASA took the money and tried to do it anyway, with the math staring them right in the face saying people will die. How you divide up the blame between Congress, NASA administration, contractor management, and engineers is a personal decision. Personally, I see plenty to condemn everyone. Engineers were worried enough that they supposedly talked about mass walkouts, but they never followed through. Don't ever think they didn't know. Yet they went along with it, because it was apparently more important to be team players and keep their awesome jobs than to keep the astronauts alive. So I get angry when people give the engineers a pass, like they were innocent in those deaths. They knew. They still did it, so they share responsibility. If it was the first time we'd been through this crap, maybe I could be more forgiving. But the 1965 Apollo 1 fire was caused by the exact same kind of "just cross your fingers and it'll be okay" screwups and was only a decade before. NASA promised us they'd fixed the poor practices that caused the fire, and they lied. Their fix turned out to be a temporary patch that only lasted until the end of Apollo. /end rant

Some members of some species will be able to adapt. Those are the ones who'll survive to reproduce in free fall, so will determine the types of pets available. And they'll evolve like domestic animals always do; selective breeding under human control. Birds and smaller primates might be the ones I'd try first. But that's just a guess. We won't know until we try them. Much depends on whether you want a "companion pet" or "working pet". Dogs and cats make great companion pets on Earth, but their muscles would be way overpowered in free fall. My 15-kilo Border Collie would become a deadly missile, innocently killing astronauts and destroying equipment. Free fall-adapted cats would obviously use their claws to decelerate, leaving bleeding parallel lines across everyone they encounter. How about a pet rat, like in The Abyss? Or a gecko? Geckos with adhesive feet sound like they'd do great in free fall. Set up a basking lamp in a safe corner, and the gecko can wander all over without having the mass or strength to affect knobs, switches and such. OTOH space stations are filled with nice warm electrical equipment, so maybe he wouldn't return to his basking lamp after all. As for working pets, several types of service animal duties might be adaptable to, and useful in, free fall. Flying helper monkeys in that environment scare me, though. Can one be so reliably trained that you can trust her not to open both airlock doors while you're on the toilet? Curiosity killing the cat is one thing. Killing everyone in Sector B is another.

Before I had to retire, this was my favorite programming music... I don't know why, but this sort of modern didgeridoo music would pull my brain into a highly productive space.

Had a month's free trial of Hulu Plus, and used it but didn't bother subscribing. We have Antenna TV and Me TV available on cable, and those already meet my 60s sitcom needs. We've had Netflix for at least a decade. I'd probably drop it personally, but one of the housemates is really into older minor movies mostly just available on DVD. So he gets a lot of value from it. Their original streaming service was awesome, but now due to movie studio greed they're just another HBO-type service with changing movies every month.

Oh no! I should have been more careful testing out my new laser pointer. Sorry guys! --- Seriously though, just a boring hydrazine leak or battery short.

Replicators were intended to be insanely expensive to use. Roddenberry's vision got corrupted after he died and others took over. But his original plan for holodecks and replicators was for them to consume absurd amounts of energy, and only make sense on an isolated starship that already had a terrawatt-size power plant to run a warp drive. But then, like the earlier powered doors which also only make sense on a starship or space station, they became part of the Star Trek background, and started showing up everywhere. How Quark's can afford to burn a gigawatt-hour of energy to replicate a cocktail was ignored, and when they realized this broke their economic model, DS9's creators just made up that stupid "gold-pressed latinum" crap instead of fixing the real problem. Replicators also don't create the matter they produce, any more than a current 3D printer creates its plastic filament. In Roddenberry's plan, there was a stockpile of all different elements on board. Replicators used a transporter-like device to pull what they needed out of that stockpile, then reassembled it molecule-by-molecule into the desired form. So they didn't even need to make up the latinum thing. It was just lazy writing. If you wanted to replicate something made of latinum, the recipe would be latinum + lots of energy, so you aren't going to make a profit. Turning carbon + energy into diamond may have turned a profit if you had the very first replicator, but the price of diamonds would have quickly moved to that new price-point. /Star Trek pet peeves. If you think this was bad, you should hear me complain about how they screwed up Data's backstory.

Can I pick "neither"? Sure, the kids are cute. But Rei has this creepy, passive toy vibe. Asuka's so obnoxious she reminds me of myself as a teen. Misato, on the other hand, is a hard-drinking party girl who handles enormous responsibilities with class...and a penguin. Very much the "short skirt and long jacket" type, which I adore. /Wife is a research scientist/professor with "a mind like a diamond" and "fingernails that shine like justice".

I play both roughly evenly. I started as strictly a PC gamer, but when Bioshock came out I was going to have to upgrade my gaming PC again, tossing a 6 month old graphics card to buy one that supported the latest and greatest crap. An Xbox 360 was the same price, and I decided I was done with the PC hassles. So I switched to Xbox for several years. Now I'm also doing lots of early access gaming via Steam, so also bought a proper gaming laptop. But I don't do any AAA gaming on my laptop at all. It's all bought for Xbox so I can share with family. Nobody else gets to use my laptop.

Thanks for asking, Pawelk. Us old folk love to tell stories. I spent the 1980s doing systems programming on a university hospital's IBM mainframe. It wasn't connected to anything external. But I had a math professor friend who controlled a unix supermini that was on CSnet, with a gateway into the non-military parts of Arpanet. In late 1982, BITnet got connected in as well. BITnet was mostly for IBM mainframes and their users, so suddenly there was an influx of IBM mainframe-related Usenet forums and databases coming online. In early 1983, that friend gave me a VIP account on his system so I could access them. At work I used a 300-baud TI Silent 700... ...but soon had a 1200-baud connection from my 8-bit home computer. I'd look up a pic, but can't remember which computer I had that year. I only recall a couple of details from those early days: 1) I remember the changeover from "bang path addressing" to domain-name addressing. My original email address went !something!something!ucbvax!ukma!myaccount. Then changed to the much more sensible myaccount@ukma.edu. 2) I remember spending many hours getting Usenet adult pics to download overnight. A pic was usually in several parts which you had to download, assemble, then run uudecode on it to change it back from ASCII to binary. I automated that process so I could look over the Usenet headers, mark pics I wanted to check out, then macros in my terminal program did all the rest while I slept. edit: Just noticed the desk phone in that pic has the numbers going the wrong way! Anybody know what country that phone was from?

LOL, seriously that's the mods' objection to a UFO abductions thread in the Science Labs forum?

I don't know. The MIT version is called "Bio-Suit", and Googling got me a couple of recent hits. So at least it's still ongoing. Oh, and apparently there was a 2013 TED talk. I'll have to check that out. Edit: I can't watch it right now, but found this gem: A 1-hr presentation by the professor in-charge. Skipping through, it looked great!

I think interest will gradually increase as cost-per-kilogram gradually decreases. Lower costs from truly-reusable vehicles should make more space activities potentially profitable. How much will still be tied to government contracts and their cycles, I don't know. Historically, aviation and space investment have been so dominated by government that fairly small military cutbacks can put the whole industry into a recession. But if you plan for it you'll do fine. It's the poor schmucks who rush to buy a McMansion and a new Mercedes with their first big raise who end up bankrupt. Just don't be that guy.

I'd never been married before, but my wife had, and never wanted to do it again. We've been together, um, 32 years I think? Why do I call her "wife"? We actually did say (terribly unconventional) vows, but only to one another. No ceremony, license, witnesses or church involved. Therefore, I can't stick her with half my reckless debt, like her ex-husband did. Other than having to be careful with wills, power of attorney, and such, it's never been a problem.

Sure, but take it from an old dude: It's super valuable to plan for an intermediate fallback job. Many tech jobs like Aerospace Engineer have boom/bust cycles depending on changing government priorities. Many of my older friends finished grad school around 1970 with degrees in chemistry or engineering...just as the Apollo program ended and thousands of those specialists got fired. Those fields didn't recover for 20 years or so. Same thing happened to some types of programmers after all the Y2K work got finished. Overnight they went from "so in-demand I can write my own ticket" to "nearly unemployable". Getting a teaching certification is probably the most popular way to deal. I think the important thing is your backup has a certification requirement of some sort. That keeps unqualified people from flooding the market and driving salaries down. An A&P mechanic might end up in a tiny rural airport doing oil changes on cropdusters, but he'll never go hungry, or be reduced to driving a taxi. I like it as a backup idea, though before you choose it look into what it takes to get certified and particularly how hard it is to maintain certification or get it back after being inactive. That'll also tell you how much savings you need in case your real job goes away. Please don't let me discourage you from engineering. These boom/bust cycles are just a known part of every profession that's dominated by government spending. Just one more thing you plan for.