K^2

If you want to have best possible ISP with an NTR while still using liquid fuel that's more or less consistent with KSP, your best bet is Hydrazine. It will decompose into Nitrogen and Hydrogen in the chamber, producing quite decent ISP. In fact, you might get close to numbers used in KSP.

Knock yourself out. Amount of thermal energy in 1 mole of gas is dRT/2, where d is maximum number of available degrees of freedom, and I've assumed all of it becomes kinetic energy for the above. Can't find where more energy could possibly be coming from.

I'm assuming he means combined with O2. And I absolutely CANNOT reproduce numbers above. Here are my, "Givin' 'er all she's got, Cap'n," numbers. CO2 H20 CH4 CO N2 Ar 1400K 157.322 259.194 325.018 173.915 173.903 95.3362 2800K 222.487 366.555 459.644 245.953 245.936 134.826 3000K 230.296 379.421 475.777 254.586 254.568 139.558 3200K 237.849 391.864 491.38 262.935 262.916 144.135 3500K 248.749 409.821 513.898 274.984 274.964 150.74 I can understand why some of these are a bit higher than the table. This is most optimistic. But I cannot see how ISP can possibly go above these, and some of the table entries are higher.

CO2 and H2O thermalize very quickly between DoF. I suspect, CO and N2 don't thermalize well within the engine's bell, which leads to a lot of the heat lost in rotational and vibrational DoF. This is consistent with higher losses at higher temperatures, since vibrational modes are likely to be partially frozen out on the low end of temperature spectrum. I'll crunch actual numbers a bit later to try and see what sort of ISP I'd expect with full and no thermalization.

Looks to me like some threads have been merged.

It didn't explode. Engines shut down, most likely because flight computer detected a deviation from course, but the investigation in the exact cause is ongoing.

Ayup. Which means higher up in the atmo is actually quite comfy. Hence the airship colonies proposals.

No, it's simple physics. If two objects move relative to each other at velocity greater than escape velocity, they are NOT orbiting each other. They cannot. And it's been explained a million times why Sirius is in the same part of the sky still. It only moves about half a degree per thousand years. And everything you've described goes back to no more than 5,000 years. There is barely over 2° difference between where Sirius was then, and where it is now. And guess what? So are all the other stars. What HAS changed, and what DOES NOT match Sirius calendars are the seasons. Earth axis precesses, and seasonality of Sirius follows the same changes as seasonality of the Zodiac.

It was insured by the Russians, so it's all good. Boeing can build them a new one.

I can think of at least three absolutely implausible scenarios under which it can. Also, your office papers hypothesis is intriguing. We might be able to explain low albedo of the rest of the surface if it's covered in toner. What if the entire thing is just a storage closet for some interstellar office supplies, which happened to drift out of its way? You can't prove it's wrong! But you can prove it to be very unlikely.

Both countries are going through some political turbulence, making it hard to predict what's going to happen. But the whole reason for building Vostochny is because Russia wasn't certain it could depend on that deal in the first place. Which, like I said, is a shame. But what's worse is that there is no reason to expect Kazakhstan to find a better use for it. Baikonur is pretty terrible place to launch from. USSR had to settle for it, because most of its territory is pretty far from the equator. Anybody else who's actually launching their own stuff has better places to launch from than Baikonur. Russia was basically the only country for which Baikonur made sense.

It's moving at less than 2,000 mas/year. That's half a degree per thousand years. To within precision everything was built at historical sites of 3k years past, it'd still match up, sure. But that still puts relative velocity at nearly 20km/s. W.r.t CoM, that puts it at nearly 5km/s. Whereas escape velocity of Sirius binary with respect to the same CoM is merely 100m/s. The difference is well over an order of magnitude. All of the current data absolutely disagrees with possibility of Sun and Sirius being gravitationally bound. But if you have measurement data that reduces velocity measurements by more than an order of magnitude, I'd like to see them. Edit: Ninja'd. Twice. I'm getting old.

Well, I hope it gets resolved. The guys deserve their money, and another space center wouldn't be a bad thing. Although, I find it a great shame that disputes over Baikonur could not be settled to everyone's satisfaction.

Isn't that basically what Soyuz 2-1 was supposed to do? The one that launched Progress M-27M? Oh, and if Vostochny gets built at all, it's going to be a miracle. Last I've heard, workers were protesting again over not being payed.

There are forest fires in the area. Local authorities suggest that debris from Proton could have caused it, but EMERCOM denies any evidence of this. Treat it as speculation.

Nothing substantial in hardware. Just the people. By the way, Progress M-26M has also had a malfunction less than 24 hours prior, preventing ISS orbit correction. Hopefully just a glitch, though. These things happen, of course, but the recent string of problems is certainly starting to look like more than a coincidence.

UK is a member to ESA. Besides, Russia is leaning towards '60s in far more way than just the technology.

Unlikely. See Brotoro's remark. If anything, there is indication that Sun has drifted far from other stars that started out in the same group.

From what I've read out of Russian media, third stage engines shut down a minute early, resulting in the stage and payload crashing back to Earth. It fel in unpopulated area. No damage or casualties. Interestingly, it's a year, almost to the day, since the last Proton failure.

Absolutely. In the engines and pumps, primarily. And it'd be tricky, but there are materials that can be used for replacement if need arises.

You are going to light up somebody's early warning systems. Response to that can vary all the way up to a full out nuclear war, but I doubt it'd be anything that severe over a single launch. As far as shooting it down, nobody's going to touch it on the lift to orbit, since there is simply not enough response time, and nothing that could intercept a rocket during launch is on high alert most of the time. US, China, and probably Russia can shoot down a rocket once it's in orbit. But again, it's unlikely they would bother. If they are expecting a nuclear strike, they'll probably be hoping to intercept it on re-entry. If your rocket does re-enter, it's very likely that it will get shot down if it's not identified by then. Nobody's going to take a chance with something like that. (Edit: That's assuming you re-enter over a country with capabilities to do so. If you re-enter over ocean, again, nobody's going to bother intercepting that.) As for trouble, at a minimum, you'll be in a violation of some air regulations. In US, that means you'll get fined by FAA and might lose some licenses, if you hold any. Rest of the world, I don't really know. Besides that, pretty much anyone who feels like you've ended up costing them money with your launch, say for expenses of shooting it down, can sue you for damages. Finally, while I don't think there are any laws that would make it a crime, this is the sort of the situation where governments might not care. They can just throw you into a dark hole with no trial or lawyers involved. All in all, high risk, absolutely no benefit. And it's not like it'd take a lot of effort to notify everyone that needs to be notified. In contrast to effort of actually making a launch, at least.

This is correct algorithm. The only time you won't get correct result is if ISP changes during flight. Gravity in that equation is always 9.81. It's actually Earth's gravity, and comes from the fact that US Engineers were using pounds for both the weight and mass of the fuel. Because pounds of mass are always defined with respect to Earth's gravity, you always get that 9.81 factor in the ISP formula, rather than anything relating to local gravity. It's purely a units conversion factor and nothing more. Soviet engineers defined their specific impulse per mass of the fuel, so they don't have that 9.81 hanging around. Instead, if you read translations of any Soviet rocketry texts, you'll see ISP defined in m/s instead of s, and it is equal to effective exhaust velocity. It's a much less confusing formula, but Squad chose to go with US convention.

Black hole is as single particle from just about any perspective, yes. Neutron stars aren't just a bunch of neutrons, either. There is still some discussion on what exactly the core of the neutron star is like, but the models that treat it as continuous stuff work better than these that try to treat it entirely as neutron matter. It seems that there are several different phases of matter involved, with neutron matter being just the outer crust.

Yeah, that's about what I'd expect form it. The C# code for the game is obfuscated, but not too badly. In principle, it should be possible to use a mod to set up a bunch of hooks to override core functions. If somebody really wanted to do this right, I could provide pointers.

That's only if the engine shut down properly during staging. A lot of people in the know suggested that the engine might not have shut down immediately when staging happened. It is consistent with higher-than-expected apogee and lower-than-expected perigee.