NGTOne

So far as I'm aware, the only thing preventing a user from installing the full version on their mobile device is hardware limitations and know-how.

True enough. However, it is a matter of some debate in the astrophysical community as to why no intermediate-sized black holes have been discovered. We have ones that are a few dozen solar masses, and the big ones at the hearts of galaxies that are millions or billions, but nothing in between. This seems to lend credence to the theory that the black holes we see everywhere and the ones that hold together galaxies are two different (though possibly similar) phenomena.

Those objects appear to be orbiting normally, albeit extremely quickly (to be expected given the scales and forces involved). Such orbits could be caused not only by a black hole, but by ANY sufficiently massive object. Thing is, under the current understanding of our universe, a black hole is the only object that COULD BE massive enough to hold a galaxy together.

The thing I like about Win8 (I don't use it personally, but my dad and sister do) is that it's a fully-featured Windows environment on a tablet. It's not a locked-down mobile OS like iOS or even 'Droid. The power available there is, to me, a very good thing. The downside is that, yes, it is rather clumsy in a desktop setting. That can be countered to a certain extent with an alternate file browser (my dad found a good one long ago and never stopped using it) and a few other things, so that you don't even have to touch the "Metro" side of it (they had to drop that name - copyright issues, if memory serves). And, while we can hope that that is true, I doubt it's gonna happen. Even Ubuntu represents too large a paradigm shift for the average user to get comfortable with, and it's by far one of the friendliest Linux-based OSs out there. That's the issue when the market is 90% dominated by a single product - retraining everyone to use a different one just won't work, because they know how this one works, and, if nobody else is using the different one, why should they?

Because the distances are so unimaginably vast. Consider, for instance, that our sun is, in fact, ORBITING a body that is about 27,000 light years away. Even if the black hole at the center of the galaxy WERE operating for all that time, it likely wouldn't even have made a dent - if it is, in fact, a black hole, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that the brightness and energy that we observe are an unimaginably vast accretion disk (accretion sphere?), and the energy and gas is all the stuff that the hole is sucking in getting smashed together. And, naturally, as you get closer, the stuff gets packed in tighter and tighter (means more energy the closer you get). If it's not a black hole at the center, I would imagine that any object that massive would be putting out some pretty damn exotic forms of energy (and loads of it), both on its own and through its interaction with the stuff around it, which might account for the lightshow we see.

I'm not one to complain about part count lag, but I'm certainly a terrible repeat offender in terms of causing it. For me, 500 is nothing, 1000 is common, 2000 isn't unheard of (never flew - update borked it and I never picked it back up). I don't want to start an argument here, but sometimes a high part count is, in fact, necessary (for instance, to hold together a large and otherwise very fragile spacecraft that needs to land on Eve, which has almost double Kerbin's gravitational pull). When people complain about part count lag, 90% of the time it's the (necessary, see above) strut spam that's responsible. And even if you're not crazy like me, any stock ship that wants to make it to Moho is going to be half fuel tanks and half struts, with a Kerbal wedged in there someplace. As for why procedural parts haven't been implemented, it's like other people have said - the game's in alpha, so they're still working the core mechanics and whatnot out. Minor tweaks like that can come much later in the process.

So far as I'm aware, they're not so much PREDICTED by GR as one possible solution for a part of it. There are other possible mathematical solutions, which are also equally valid (mathematically - which ones are correct physically remain to be seen).

Right on all counts. However, there has to be SOMETHING that's large enough out there to cause the gravitational lensing that has been noted by some telescopes, and to create the enormous gravity well that generates galaxies (without it, there would be no discrete galaxies - stars and other large bodies would be far more evenly distributed across the universe than they are). After all, our sun is in orbit of SOMETHING rather large (putting it mildly) somewhere at the heart of the Milky Way.

You can combine this with something like the cargo bays from B9 - grapple the debris, pull it into your bay, and put it on deorbit trajectory. Then open your bay, release, and re-orbit. Rinse and repeat until you run out of gas.

I think we're basically operating under the assumption that our spacecraft (and its luckless pilot) are indestructible, for the purposes of a physics demonstration.

Not sure. While I don't see why not (assuming that spacetime and spacetime warping work the same way inside the event horizon as they do outside), I really have no idea. If it were possible, it would likely require a radically different warp field geometry than for ordinary Alcubierre-drive travel.

Ah yes, the famous monkey experiment. Basically, the way it worked was: There is a set of baby monkeys, and two (creepy as hell) mother monkey dolls. One is covered in a warm, fuzzy material and has a warm interior (like a real mother monkey). The other is made of wire mesh and has a nipple that provides milk. The goal of the experiment was to figure out which mother (and, thus, which need) the baby monkeys would gravitate to most. It turned out that they gravitated to the fuzzy doll, because it (based on the theories as to this behaviour) provided warmth and comfort like a real mother would. The implications of this on a robotic nursemaid are... profound, to say the least - apparently, in a baby's psychological makeup, emotional needs are far more important than physical ones to overall psychological growth and normal development (whereas, in adults, the paradigm is muted, if not somewhat reversed - depends on the individual). Not necessarily - ion engines and other electric propulsive technologies are subject to significant economies of scale. Problem is, REACHING those economies requires an engine big enough to need a nuclear reactor in the first place. However, once you cross that point, you can get more thrust per unit of electricity as you scale up. That doesn't change the fact that electric propulsive technologies don't have a high enough Isp to reach another solar system at even 0.005c. You would still need more fuel than spaceship at that point. Fission fragment rockets, though even slower, represent a far more realistic option (Isp of some proposed designs is on the order of 1 million).

No objection - the way you phrased it just sounded like you were implying that the object would be travelling faster than c under its own power/the power of gravity, as opposed to the power of spacetime warping. No, you're right - the light inside the spacetime warp will still be travelling at c, from the PoV of someone inside the warp bubble. To someone on the outside, it would be travelling at c + the speed of the warp bubble. I'm not sure of the visual implications of this (i.e. how it would look). It doesn't "fall in" - it distorts, just as it would with any other gravity well. A rotating black hole drags spacetime with it in a rotary fashion, but does NOT pull it in - basically, so far as I understand, there is a region of spacetime that becomes infinitely stretched surrounding the rotating black hole. You fall into a rotating black hole by gravity, just as you would with a non-rotating one (or any other massive body, really). Unless you've moving fast enough relative to local sideways (which is just another way of saying you're in orbit). And, yes, I believe it would be possible to orbit a rotating black hole inside the spacetime distortion zone - it might look funny to an outside observer, but to the spacecraft, the mechanics haven't changed in the slightest. The problem is REACHING the speed of light in the first place. If you're using classical physics, you CAN'T, end of story. You can get infinitely close, but the amount of energy you need to get closer increases asymptotically towards infinity as you approach it. Also, you CAN'T escape the event horizon - this is the "point of no return", where not even emitted light escapes (hence the "black" part of black hole). Unless you've got a warp drive handy, you're not getting away (and we don't really know how spacetime behaves on the other side, so that might not work either). Also, the reason the OP is wrong in his theory is that orbital paths just... well, in short, cease to work inside the event horizon. See this post: You can't "orbit out of" the event horizon, as classical mechanics starts to, for lack of a better term, break down below it.

I don't think that changes the overall mechanic, in the same way that a warp drive doesn't. As far as I understand, when you enter the ergosphere, yes, you are travelling faster than light to a sufficiently distant observer (i.e. someone outside the black hole's gravity well). However, within your own frame of reference, you are still travelling at less than c - it's spacetime around you that is moving faster, and dragging you with it. For example, if I teleported a stationary spaceship to within the ergosphere of a rotating black hole, it would appear to travel faster than light if I was standing (floating?) far enough away. However, relative to local spacetime, the spacecraft is still stationary. It's exactly the same principle as generating a warp field (see my last post for more on that one) - the only difference is that you're moving rotationally as opposed to forwards. I think, before we proceed much further into this discussion, we need an adequate explanation of spacetime (and spacetime warping). Basically, imagine spacetime as a flat rubber sheet with a 2D Cartesian grid printed on it. Now, let's say I place a bowling ball on the sheet (analogous to a planet or other massive body). The sheet (and the grid) distort, thus producing an indent in the sheet that any object leaving the surface of the bowling ball (such as a rocket) must climb out of in order to escape (this is the idea of escape velocity - the minimum dV required to reach the undistorted area of the sheet). An orbit is simply not having enough energy to reach the undistorted area, but rolling down the indent and back around, repeatedly (assuming, under our analogy, no rolling resistance or other such forces). A black hole creates an infinitely deep indentation in the sheet, as it has infinite mass (basically, imagine that the sheet curves nicely, albeit steeply, down to a circular hole cut deep below the undistorted plane of the sheet - this the event horizon). So, now, we get to the crux of it. Let's say I take our black hole, and make it rotate (and distort the grid to match - i.e. if a point on the grid matches a point on the perimeter of the event horizon, it will always match that point). I then take a pen, and make a mark on the grid near the rotating black hole (representing our rather unfortunate spacecraft). Because the grid is distorting, the co-ordinates of the space that the spacecraft occupies do not change (i.e. the spacecraft is not moving relative to absolute spacetime). However, because the grid is distorting, the spacecraft appears to move, because to someone standing on the flat part of the grid, the area of spacetime containing our spacecraft is moving, and carrying the spacecraft with it.

My best guess is that it would depend on the "perfectness" of the cloak - the closer it is to "perfect" (in the proper spectrum), the less effective the laser weapon (asymptotically approaching zero effectiveness). Purely conjecture though, I'm no physicist.

Personally, two things forced me to learn to dock well (I was absolute crap at it before). 1. The requirement for my latest project to dock supremely massive objects (the largest piece thus far was just upwards of 700 tons, docked to an object which weighed about 5 times that), which means you HAVE TO HAVE pinpoint accuracy along all axes and really fine control on the RCS. 2. Using Sr. docking ports, so that the connections I was making between these massive objects would be at least somewhat stable. RCS Build Aid is your friend. Lets you place your RCS ports so that you can translate perfectly straight (the #1 easiest way to dock, hands down), no questions asked. Ho hum, another docking, indeed.

Started in on phase 2 of my Stanford torus project. Here, I'm removing the construction frame (which houses all the RCS, command, and structural components, to keep the part count of the station down) from the arm segment it just delivered, prior to deorbiting it.

Using lasers to alter the course of orbital objects is actually already being proposed (from the ground, no less) by NASA, as a means of clearing space debris. Might be a decent way of redirecting kinetic projectiles around your orbital installation/warship. Effectively the same principle as a naval CIWS, except that the goal is less total destruction and more disabling of the threat object. As a response to the OP, though, as to the disabling of laser weapons: some fine-grained particulate (sand comes to mind because it's simple and cheap), released in a dense enough cloud into the laser's path (I'm talking about orbital combat, obviously), could effectively block the beam until the laser overheated/had to be shut down. Then you maneuver out from behind the cloud and fire back.

Thank you very much - I always knew this was ambitious, that's why I wanted to do it And, on that note, Phase 2 (extending the station arms to full length) has now officially begun. Images up top.

Alright, I'm posting this here and not in the support section because this ship is more mod parts than not. Basically, I just docked a large element onto my space station, and I've just removed the docking frame (which held all the RCS ports, structural elements, etc., to keep the part count of the station down). However, for some reason, the docking frame refuses to activate its RCS thrusters. Pressing T to activate SAS works fine. The kicker is, before I separated the docking frame, it all worked perfectly (I had to use RCS to bring the component in to dock, naturally). Any ideas? Also, the ship has both power and a control unit (a MechJeb radial-mount). Mods in use on the ship: B9 NovaPunch Gaby's Quick and Dirty Miscellania MechJeb 2.09 Plugins installed: Kethane RCS Build Aid MechJeb EDIT: Fixed with some savefile editing. Funny how often my big projects break the savefile.

That's why >90% of my missions are automated. Even when I'm conducting colonization OPs, I land the equipment first under computer control, and the colonists later. No stranded colonists, and at worst I lose some gear (which is replaceable). That's why I spent a good deal of time a few months ago developing a proper colony ship, so I could conduct OPs like that more effectively, especially when other solar systems start being discovered.

Best I can come up with is this. I'm building the upper structure (the actual torus), just with more arms (I can't build a circle in KSP, and this thing will be too big to make ring-docking viable, so I will approximate it with 16 differently-angled segments). If I recall, this is the original Stanford torus concept from the '70s. The lower structure is a large mirror to reflect natural light into the inside, which is something that I (as far as I am aware) have no means of duplicating in KSP. The inner ring is a set of smaller mirrors, to reflect the light from the big one into the insides of the ring (also omitted in my design).

Overlapping corners for curves might be problematic at high speeds - I kind of envisioned having several different kinds of track, from conventional to high-speed, with varying properties and train types. Even if that's not the case, your train might jump the tracks when it otherwise shouldn't, because it tried to physics-clip through a gap in the corner. Might be worth it to consider a spline-editor approach to tracklaying.

I know HOME includes some air intake/conversion modules, and they don't need oxygen (they work on Duna). So you could conceivably try this for reals

You're right - there's enough "at home" for us to explore for generations (even if we develop more-efficient propulsion systems that would decrease intrasystem travel times to weeks rather than months or years - hell, we don't even know what's at the bottom of our own oceans). Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to see what's on the other side of the pond. The technology may exist, but the scale most certainly does not. In order to achieve even reasonably efficient one-way travel to the nearest star (~5 LY away, if memory serves), you would need to scale up our current propulsion and power-generation technologies a thousandfold. You would need the equivalent of millennia of research into closed-cycle environmental systems, long-term habitation solutions, the psychological and physical effects of living in a small community over an extended time (I'm discounting the cryosleep option), and that's just the beginning of a list longer than my arm. In order to achieve the relativistic effects described in the Pandora ships, you would be looking at accelerating yourself to a very sizable fraction of c (far outside the range of chemical rockets or even ion propulsion - fission fragment rockets may be a possible way around this, at the cost of YEARS of nonstop acceleration), and then slowing back down again when you got there (and imagine if there was nothing there when you did?) On top of that, you would have to prepare for EVERY POSSIBLE situation when you got there - what if there's no atmosphere? Loads of radiation? Hell, no planets to live on at all? While all of this is certainly POSSIBLE, it would likely bankrupt the entire human race to DO IT, even once. In short: Is it possible? Yes. Is it practical? Barring a breakthrough in FTL research, not in the slightest. 'course, the scenario I always find both funny and depressing is that the generation ship arrives at its destination after decades or centuries - only to find that they've developed FTL travel back home in the meantime and beaten the ship there. More like, "the entire sum couldn't heat up your cup of morning coffee".