DerekL1963

Except, of course, for all the humans who designed, built, and serviced the vehicle. (And a note to Seret, while your soundbites sound impressive, they fail to support your contention that automation has prevented more crashes than it has caused. Especially in light of the dramatic rate of UAV crashes.)

Any real world piece of hardware, from your coffee cup to the Space Shuttle, is a mess of compromises. It's only in imaginary worlds and cloud cuckoo land that there are no compromises. But as a former submariner, these discussions of Shuttle escape and abort systems and the probability (or lack thereof) of their success alternately makes want to laugh and cry. Thousands of my brothers (and now a welcome handful of sisters) are at se and at risk even as I type... and nobody cares that our systems only cover a fraction of our operating envelope or require an unlikely chain of events to succeed. And we've done this daily, in peace and in war, for decades. But we're not pseudo celebrities or any other kind of famous. We're nameless and faceless other than to our friends or family. Your focus on the life of the astronauts is misplaced anyhow. Astronauts are cheap and expendable - for every one who ever rode a Shuttle, there's a dozen or more equally qualified candidates who'll never even be an astronaut. It's the Shuttle that's the problem - it's an expensive and difficult-to-impossible to replace national asset. The hardware is the scarce part, and while not nearly as damaging from a public relations point of view, the loss of the hardware has the most actual impact on the program.

Seriously, you have to ask if a mod has been updated since a version that came out six months ago? Yes, it's been updated, multiple times. Nowadays, if you use excessive monopropellant you either have a bad design (RCS Build Aid helps there) or a bad approach technique (forgetting to use Smart A.S.S. to make the docking axes parallel). Of course, the are situations where you can't have a decent design or an optimum approach path, but that's hardly MJ's fault. MJ does sometimes like to approach at too steep an angle, but I use Navyfish's docking aid to monitor the situation, and if it feels out of hand I disable the docking autopilot and null the closing velocity while still moving laterally. When the angle looks better, I re-enable the autopilot. (MJ isn't an easy button.)

First you have to know where the sensor you're trying to jam is, so you can aim at it. (And it's trivial to deploy a *LOT* of sensors. Second, they only care where you are, not what you're doing. Yes, it's crazy. No, it won't work.

Using FLSC (Flexible Linear Chaped Charges), you could remove the shell of the crew compartment and fuselage skin with less than a pound of explosives per seat. (It's not like the skin is all that thick.)

Not at all. In fact for most vehicles I have a hard time getting tanks that are *small* enough.

Citation needed.

Hmm... you may have a point there, that's the point where my games went all pear shaped - when I separated a lander from it's carrier.

It's actually quite amusing - the original charge I replied to was "humans suck at exploring". But after showing the fallacy of that.... the replies are not ways in which humans suck and robots are better but mostly "mooommmmy! ROBOTS ARE CHEAPER". Something I never debated. "Sucks at something" is not the same as "is more expensive than something", so please stay with the program. I didn't mention efficiency at all - I addressed capabilities, of which some nebulous measure of 'efficiency' (which is often handwaved around but never defined) is only a small part. Humans can do more, faster than robots can. That's a stone cold "the sun rises in the East and sets in the West" level fact. Yes, they're more costly but as with anything else you get what you pay for. (And the 'advanced robotics' and 'AI" someone was handwaving about... years to decades away. Let's stick to reality rather than hopeful handwaving of what might happen in the misty future.) A dinghy is cheaper but less capable than a powerboat, a subcompact is cheaper but less capable than a pickup truck - and nobody ever confuses them. It's only in discussions of space exploration that people absolutely insist on confusing them and acting as though they were interchangeable solely on the basis of cost. And when something breaks, it's easily game over. And they can't adapt to changing situations. And they sit at the end of many minutes of time delay. And they have a very limited field of vision. And... Everyone always remembers the drawbacks of humans, and the advantages of probes... but somehow they can't possibly bring themselves to imagine any of the advantages of humans and the disadvantages of probes. No, that's not certain conclusion at all when you look at the whole picture. Doubly so when you consider the technology of the 1960's. Triply so when you consider the number of discoveries made by the astronauts curiosity causing them to look around and investigate deeper. (Something they could do because they could take two minutes and look on the other side of that rock or underneath that other rock.) Quadruply so when you consider how many missions had failures that were over come by humans on the scene (12's electrical fault and 14's landing radar fault come to mind.) Etc... etc...

Humans suck at exploration? Since when? What Spirit and Curiosity accomplished in years of roving around would have been the work of a couple of days by human geologists. It literally took the MER rovers years to beat the distance collectively covered by the Lunar Rovers in less than a week. (There's an anecdote in Steve Squyres book about photographing all sides of a rock formation the size of a baseball - it took a week. Even a spacesuited human could have done it in ten minutes.) I'll give and grant robots excel at the mindless stuff, like recording the value from a sensor every couple of seconds or taking picture after picture after picture... But the stuff that takes intelligence and/or decision making skills and/or dexterity? Robots aren't even close.

Instead, keeping the reactor the cool becomes a problem - because the same the same thin atmosphere that slows down convection from your water pipe *also* slows down convention from any radiator system for the reactor. It's a nice problem to have, but it is a problem.

Yes, they were considered a decade ago... and then tossed in the circular file. No guidance system exists with sufficient precision to get one 'in the basket', and once in the basket... no sensor exists that can see through the re-entry plasma in order to hit the small targets that they have the capability of taking out.

The astronauts are busy working, the billionaires are doing nothing but floating around. Apples and oranges to the nth degree.

No, you aren't.

It's the bent too far that's causing the problem... once it starts to bend, even a small amount of thrust tends to increase the bending (and thus the stress on the joint) in a vicious positive feedback loop until the joint breaks. You're ship is simply too heavy.

That's a known bug in the current release.

It's not at all clear that making something more complicated is better than not making it more complicated. Doubly so since what stresses out/makes a Kerbal insane and to what level veers so sharply into opinion as opposed to science & facts.

A crewed Mars landing would cost probably $1x10^5 or better more than any possible publicity value. The same goes for mining - after having spent hundreds of billions to develop even the tiniest mining operation... who are they going to sell to that can afford the resulting prices? Seriously, can I have some of whatever you're smoking?

There's not enough surface area on the Graf Zepplin to put enough advertising, let alone on the surface of a Mars bound spacecraft. Given how few people are interested in space, companies aren't going to pay very much considering the brief time the advertising will be visible in the media. (Not to mention the possibility of being associated with deaths if there is a problem on the mission.) You folks seriously overestimate the amount of money to be made from advertising.

True for me too. But they're a very distinct minority. They laughed at Columbus - but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown and Jeff Dunham too. When I hear laughter, I bet the odds and bet "comedian".

And with modern computers, that computational expense is all but meaningless. The Deep Space 1 and Deep Impact missions demonstrated autonavigation years ago. Deep Space 1 tracked asteroids as it's navigation reference, and automated stellar navigation is old technology. (As in "used operationally as far back as the 50's and 60's".) You seriously overestimate the difficulty and underestimate the state-of-the-art.

Because providing that gravity causes all sorts of problems, from the engineering issues of providing it, from the massive amount of parasitic weight it entails, from the operational constraints it places on your spacecraft, to the (currently unknown) medical effects...

Yes, regardless of the number of characters I use.

Liquids are perfectly safe unless they explode too. Techniques to render a solid fuel motor non propulsive are old hat. (AFAIK, first used operationally on the Polaris A-1 and SUBROC back in the 50's.) That NASA didn't use them on the Shuttle is the result of a deliberate design decision, not natural law.

So? Seriously, in the real world stuff generally lasts a long time and works just fine if built well in the first place. The consumerism driven "MUST UPGRAD3 NA0" mentality is irrelevant there.