Drunken Hobo

Should sell ad space on the side of your rocket. I'm sure Squad would pay you €20 to have a giant picture of Jeb on the side of the rocket.

Liquid water on Mars isn't that crazy a concept. Gale Crater has sufficient pressure to maintain liquid water, as do numerous other impact basins. Near the equator the temperature regularly gets above freezing in summer, so why not? Can't get stable bodies of water because of the UV radiation, but transient water underneath sand doesn't have such trouble.

Why are people mentioning Moon hoaxers? They're already immune to evidence, I doubt this will change their mind. I also didn't realise Iran had sent another monkey into space, well done them. NASA can't even do that anymore.

Cheers, very helpful being able to hear it. Wasn't as difficult as I thought.

23 pages... anyone any idea yet how to pronounce the damaned thing?

A different way of looking at things. As others have mentioned, even the likes of the Native Americans formed completely different ideals in just a few thousand years of isolation from the rest of the world. Imagine what differences there'd be between completely different species from another star system. Or we could just be one giant reality TV show to them, like that episode of South Park.

When I was about 8 my friend bought me a book called "The Gobsmaking Galaxy" - of a similar theme to the Horrible Histories franchise. Was a very interesting book & I read it numerous times. One part in particular stood out was a more child-friendly version of Russell's Teapot, with the teapot replaced by a blob of jam that speaks French. That ignited the critical thinking in my brain, and as soon as you start to think critically, you'll be drawn towards science.

Can always get around the radiation problem by having life deep underwater. I think the most likely scenario for life would be an ocean planet/moon, although as others have pointed out, it'd be very difficult for one to form around a blue supergiant.

Regarding balance - should Squad now be focussing on balance for sandbox or career? For career, it'd be fine to have a highly-efficient & lightweight SABRE, if it was also very late in the tech tree & cost a tonne of cash. But for sandbox it would be overpowered, much like the aerospike was in older versions. Everything will be changed at some point I suppose.

5 posts in and nobody has made a Space Kraken joke yet? I am very disappointed in you. The last one looks like it belongs in a Metal Gear game. Perhaps a little less subtle than the Latin ones.

If there is any real doubt over global warming, why aren't the oil companies shouting it from the rooftops?

Replace them with the screams & wails of Kerbals...

I'd change the law of physical attraction between beautiful women & myself...

And nightmares up to 100%...

Tomb Raider is one of the 4 nominated for the "best story" catagory. I'm not sure I could comment politely on that. I do love the contrast in styles of the thumbnails used to represent the 4 sci-fi games. The 3 non-KSP ones could all be interchanged and you wouldn't be able to tell; moodily lit with reflective metallic surfaces and too much bloom for the human eye to handle. KSP on the other hand features 3 gimpy looking aliens in dayglo orange jumpsuits. Hooray for KSP!

Hooray, good to see some positive comments about this. Had the misfortunte of reading the BBC comments and it's full of "We give aid to India & now they're spending my tax money on rockets!!1". For some reason people think spending money on science is regressive behaviour... Hope the satellite arrives at Mars safe & well. It's a relatively inexpensive project, and often they don't go too well. Though if it and MAVEN succeed, we'll have 5 satellites around Mars. Starting to get crowded up there.

Ahem. Please give him his proper title. I really don't know why quack medicine is legal. If you were to sell a box of cereal claiming it contained 20% of your RDA of calcium but in reality it was only 15%, you'd get heavily fined, forced to give back refunds and in America, probably would be sued. But you can legally sell sugar pills claiming they can treat anything, even cancer or depression.

I wish I hadn't started watching this now. They even get basic maths wrong. If mass is infinitesimally small in the equation E=mc2, then you don't get E=c2, you get E=0. So there's no energy in the universe. Oh no.

My god, you guys are so ignorant. Don't you know homeopathy has been clinically proven and... Oh sod it, I couldn't keep that up for much more than a sentence. Homeopathy is one of those things that the further you dig into it, the crazier it gets. It has absolutely no scientific merit. If you ask 5 homeopaths the same question as to how homeopathy works, you'll get 5 different answers. I don't know how anyone can believe it, it astonishes me to think people have such an uncritical mindset. I almost wish I knew some of them, then I could sell them a bridge...

Indeed, just look at the Banqiao Dam disaster. A freak flood, not dissimilar to the freakish nature of the Japanese earthquake, caused the dam to burst and the resulting wall of water killed over 170,000 people. That's more than 40x the estimated death toll from Chernobyl. Hydroelecticity also devestates areas of natural beauty, requiring huge reservoirs to operate. So where's the worldwide condemnation of hydroelecticity? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for hydroelectricity and I think it's probably the best renewable energy resource we have at the moment (particularly as I live in a wet & hilly country), but again there is a downside to all power generation. No free lunch.

If you want realism, surely jet planes should come way, way before rocketry? Or even propeller planes, or hot air balloons... But planes are more complicated than rockets in KSP. So from a gameplay perspective, it makes sense for Kerbals to research rocketry before they fiddle around with winged aircraft. This isn't supposed to be "Human Space Exploration Simulator 2013". Sending a Kerbal into space is easier than sending a probe. It's fine the way it is, although certainly needs a few tweaks & balances. I'd like to see RCS before reaction wheels for example.

How many different ways could Fukushima have been prevented? If the sea wall was just a couple of metres higher (as had been recommended) it's likely the plant would have survived intact like the other nuclear plants on the Japanese East coast. If zirconium cladding had been replaced with something that doesn't react with high-temperature steam (good choice of metal there...) there would have been no hydrogen explosion and the reactors wouldn't have been damaged. If the emergency diesel generators had been placed above sea-level, they wouldn't have failed and the cooling would have probably prevented a meltdown. Are there any more? Chernobyl was also a comedy of errors. This timeline shows how many basic safety procedures were ignored, and how many opportunities the workers had to prevent the impending disaster. They actually disabled the emergency cooling system. It's like they wanted it to go wrong.

Bit of an old article, but it's still on their site and they've never corrected any of the (deliberate) mistakes. Don't read if easily annoyed: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/press/releases/ITERprojectFrance/ It's really funny to see Greenpeace argue for short-term gain over long-term sustainability.

No, I've often thought that a lot of people get all their information on nuclear power from watching "The Simpsons" - particularly Greenpeace. They're even against fusion... Whilst I understand some of the concerns about nuclear power, I think it's often unfairly treated compared to fossil fuels. Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but at least nuclear power plants do something about it. Most waste from fossil fuels is just vented into the atmosphere. How can carbon capture (burying CO2 under the ground) the answer to our energy problems, yet at the same time burying nuclear waste is seen as irresponsible? Many large cities are incredibly polluted thanks to fossil fuels and hundreds of thousands of people each year die because of it, but no-one seems to care. People's assesment of risk is also way off; it's heavily biased against new technology. Fukushima's radiation killed nobody. In the same year, 53 people died & nearly 4,000 were made ill as a direct result of the farming practices used in organic food production. Imagine the worldwide protests if that had been contamination due to radiation, or even scarier, GM food! Similarly, earlier this year a Canadian train carrying oil derailed & the resulting explosion killed 47 people. Imagine the reaction if that was a train carrying nuclear waste that had killed 47 people... Not an argument to make nuclear more dangerous, but we let fossil fuels away with a hell of a lot. I think the costs of fossil fuel would rocket if we made them play by the same rules as nuclear.

I was thinking about this earlier in the bath (as you do) but clean running water has got to be up there. To have this vital fluid pumped into almost every home in the developed world is a brilliant feat of engineering. And as I live in the sociallist utopia of Scotland, you can have as much as you want without worrying about fees. You pay nothing on top of the standard tax. Teckle!