Brotoro

As an American who actually has to pay U.S. income taxes, *I* want more money spent on space probes and less money spent on most of the other things the government spends my money on. But that's just me.

Holy Ginormous Launcher, Batman!! Congrats.

You are correct. It is intended to rhyme with Totoro (the forest spirit from the Hayao Miyazaki anime My Neighbor Totoro, for any of you who are mystified as to what we are talking about).

Yeah, I don't think it requires any special engineering... I get the same effect when I attach multiple simple parachutes to my model rockets. I think it's just that the angled chutes (since they have to angle automatically when bumped together...these aren't like KSP chutes that can clip together) spill air on their inner edges, and that forces the chutes apart.

The little critters can make calcium carbonate to remove oxygen along with the carbon. Maybe we can also convince them to manufacture calcium sulfate or whatever other compounds we need to remove the right mix of elements.

Big job. Once you have your sun shield in place to drop the planet's temperature, smash millions of comets into it. Then seed the resulting seas with engineered life forms to extract the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and deposit it out, plus some to add oxygen to the atmosphere.

Good job! I was worried there for a bit when your lander tipped over.

As an undergrad, I performed an experiment in which we fired beta particles (from a decaying radioactive element) into a magnetic field. By adjusting the field strength to get the electrons to hit the detector, we could determine the speed of the electrons. We did this for multiple beta sources that each ejected their electrons at different speeds. None of them were moving at the speed of light.

I continue to be amazed.

Photons do not have mass, despite having momentum. Two variables can equal each other. Earth's magnetic field will not render lasers ineffective weapons by changing the trajectories of their beams.

Melt through the ice!

Congratulations!

I also thought liquid fuel was kerosene...since the Mk-1 fuselage that contains liquid fuel says "kerosene" right on it.

Kashua is correct. Also, a ship that can end up standing upright on the ground can end up falling over and breaking in the water even if you do land it slow enough.

Little Boy was a gun-type weapon, so the Uranium 235 was brought together as a critical mass in an uncompressed state. Fat Man was an implosion design, so the Plutonium was compressed and held together longer by the spherical implosion wave and tamper. Much more efficient.

I am amazed.

I have not seen the show you mentioned. The supermassive black hole in the center of our Galaxy contains a relatively small fraction of the Galaxy's mass, so it's best not to think of the stars and other objects in our Galaxy being "locked in orbit" around it… the stars orbit the common center of mass of the Galaxy (which does happen to be located near that supermassive black hole, but the black hole is not the main contributor to the gravitational force that keeps the stars in orbit). When a supernova explosion produces a neutron star or black hole, the matter that gets ejected from that explosion can be blasted off asymmetrically, giving the neutron star or black hole a sizable motion in reaction, so it could end up moving relative to the stars near it. Perhaps that's what they were speaking of. Yes, it would still be in orbit around the center of mass of the Galaxy, but its orbit would be somewhat different from its neighbors (more so than it was before the supernova explosion).

Are you possibly confusing Laythe's apoapsis with the altitude reading above the surface of Jool? Because the apoapsis in the wiki is measured from the center of Jool, not its surface.

And the best trajectory to use will depend on the cost of the antimatter. It's a trade off of fuel vs. time.

The Moon has be hit many times over with impacts totaling much much more than our entire stockpile of nuclear weapons. That's what all the craters and nice round maria are from. You aren't going to destroy it with nukes.

Depends on how much antimatter costs.

When hoping to build super-heavy elements in a fusion reactor, you'll also run into the problem that at the very high temperatures required to get the nuclei moving fast enough (that's the 'thermo' in thermonuclear fusion) to overcome the Coulomb repulsion of these heavy nuclei you want to fuse, you are going to reach temperatures where the energies of the photons in your plasma are high enough to break apart the nuclei. This photodissociation is important in the interior of very high mass stars -- the silicon fusion stage, for instance, does not involve fusing silicon nuclei together, but instead involves the fusion of silicon nuclei with helium nuclei that result from the photodissociation of other silicon nuclei. And as the iron core resulting from silicon burning contracts and is heated even more, it is the photodissociation of the iron nuclei (which ABSORBS energy) that leads to the core collapse and type II supernova. The r-process of synthesizing very heavy nuclei during a supernova explosions does not run into this problem because the neutrons have no electric charge and are therefore not stopped by the Coulomb barrier. The methods recently used by researchers to make super-heavy nuclei (such as element 115, for example) use an accelerator to speed up Calcium nuclei to the point where, rarely, one of them in the beam can fuse together with an Americium nucleus in the target to make a nucleus of element 115.

Yes, and I pointed out that even in the most extreme natural cases we don't get those kinds of fusion reactions occurring. If it was theoretically possible to get those reactions to occur in an overpowered fusion reactor, we would expect to see them happen in supernovae. What we see is different…so I don't think it is theoretically something you'd get (let alone impractical).

I've never played career mode. I do wish they would turn on science reports and points for sandbox mode, however, just to add to the fun there.

We can't even get fusion reactors to work yet for the easy fusion reactions, so I don't expect we could get the them to operate at the conditions where such fusion reactions to produce super-heavy elements could occur. Even in supernova explosions, very heavy elements are not produced by such fusion reactions. Supernovae produce very heavy elements via the r-process, which rapidly (hence the "r") adds neutrons (released by other nuclear reactions going on) to existing heavy nuclei to produce neutron-rich, very heavy nuclei that then beta-decay back toward the line of stability. More recently, it has been proposed that the r-process can also occur in material thrown off during neutron star mergers, but I'm not aware of observational confirmation of this.