MBobrik

2-10 all wrong. 8 imho violates forum's anti-conspiracy rule and the rest total hogwash found only in the most scientifically illiterate conspiracies.

a 300 meter rock ? ignore/deny until a few days before impact. Some would welcome the apocalypse, some would be glad that the pink vermin finally gets what it deserved, and all in the areas where it were to hit would start panicking a few days/hours before impact negating any meaningful attempt at damage mitigation.

Mass enters warp bubble, warp bubble destabilizes, collapses and releases all its energy in the form of hawking radiation and gravity waves. Given that any practical Alcubierre drive will contain only microscopic amounts of (exotic) matter, the bang won't be any big - perhaps only in the ton or lower kiloton range. Enough to blast the ship into a cloud of plasma and fry any satellite nearby as the amounts of ordinary matter needed to destabilize a warp bubble will be minuscule too - it will most probably happen in the van allen belts or at LEO heights.

this challenge is too trivial because the big wheels have impact resistance 150 m/s yet the sealevel terminal velocity is cca 100 m/s thus anything landing on the big wheels can survive undamaged provided it is sturdy enough.

Well, obviously, a reactor used to provide heating and electricity for a martian colony would be small enough to be effectively cooled by dumping the waste heat into the colony as heating. So nothing would melt down.

. Interesting ... how much weight and dV got your lander ? . my lander looks far more ugly ...

we are all in space

. sentient AI or an uploaded copy of a person would be still a sentient being with all the moral implications.

we are just a bunch of workers made to keep this civilization alive too. it is just a little bigger bunch, that's all. and our ship goes around in circles instead of flying somewhere

People in a newly founded colony would surely have more career options than "worker". Including running off into the wilderness. And nobody said there won't be any parents there.

sure, you can have a highly flattened planet. but you cant' have a planet where the centrifugal force is bigger than the gravity because it would fly apart.

Intentions don't to anything on their own. You may intent that the person you've created should do this or that, to your heart's content, unless you actually force them to do so, you are not removing their freedom to ignore your intentions and go doing something else.

. it is slavery only when you are forced to follow orders. An astronaut on an interstellar mission will spend his entire life following orders from the mission command center, yet he is not a slave because he does it voluntarily.

If it rotates faster than its surface orbital velocity then the centrifugal force is stronger at the equator than the force of gravity. Of course a solid monolithic object can hold itself together by the tensile strength of the rock. However a planet has to be big enough to assume spherical shape by reaching hydrostatic equilibrium. Otherwise it does not count as a planet by definition. and something can not stay at hydrostatic equilibrium when the forces pulling it apart are higher than the forces pulling it together. . So you can have (small) asteroids spinning at rates high enough to negate the surface gravity, but you cant' have planets spinning like this by the very definition of the word "planet".

a) yes yes c) maybe ( depends of the purpose of those orders, it the same as a) and then yes ) EDIT: to avoid misunderstanding, I mean of course voluntarily following those orders, not some sort of slavery or forced labor.

landing at the highest point of Eve you will need only cca 85 % of the chutes needed at 0 elevation on Kerbin. If you want to land at the same speed. But you don't want to land a 100+ ton ship in 1.7 g gravity at the same speed. And to halve the speed you need to quadruple the number of parachutes. My 161 ton lander got 6.6 ton worth of parachutes, 18 x XL 2 drogues 8 radials, and still needed to make a powered landing because at 6.4 m unpowered descent speed it would break legs and fall apart. If I wanted to land safely on chutes only it would need the double amount.

. you just have to be more specific with the keywords you type into the search.

Voted for bop. never been there. Been to dres once, and forgot putting electricity sources on the rover.

Gilly is now an important source of cheap science points in the career mode. You can aerobrake directly into Gilly transfer orbit and effortlessly land there with the whole interplanetary stage without the need of any specialized lander, lift off, and go for second aerobrake to low eve orbit. hundreds of cheap science points at additional 500 or so dV cost.

you've forgotten the /snark tag

I am glad you've picked me as your target, because I can directly say that you are flat wrong and we won't end up arguing whether some obscure fragment of some other guy's post three years ago can yet be reasonably interpreted as implying something indirectly. No. Being (slightly?) more optimistic about something is not equal to being an extremist " who (completely) dismisses the risks" nor someone saying "there is no radiation danger whatsoever" or "radiation is generally harmless". not unless viewed through the eyes of an anti-nuclear fanatic to whom is anything nuclear equally absolute evil. There was no mentioning of "right and wrong" in my example. The point was, that the assumption that the right answer always lies in the middle will, in case of an asymmetrical debate between proponents of a compromise and extremists, always lead to victory of the extremists, and is thus an invalid assumption unless the extremists are always right irrespective of the issue. ( which is logically contradictory - consider two debates one between proponents of one extreme and compromise proponents, and compromise proponents vs proponents of the opposite extreme - both extremes will "win" their debate, but can't be both simultaneously right) The problem is, that there is a pesky thing called "reality" which is not subjective at all. And I sincerely hope you are not one of those who deny its existence.

. Show me one such proponent here.

Some people, and I believe you are one of them, believe that each controversy happens between two utter extremes, and the right answer is always in the middle between the two. Which might be good for certain situations like child squabbles, ethnic feuds, territorial disputes or handling conflicting resource claims,where the compromise may even be an good unto itself. It does not any good however, when they enter a discussion where for example the answers are binary complements like A vs. not A . exists vs. not exists. true/false. What would the compromise between truth and and utter falsehood ? half-truth ? When one side argues that 2+2=4 and the other that 2+2=5, the compromise value of 4.5 is from a certain point of view even more wrong. And it can also happen, that the debate is not between proponents of two extremes, but between proponents of the optimal solution vs one sided extremists. the universe got no duty to provide us always with nice symmetrical situations. Even more devious is, when someone like this gets the say in a debate between proponents od some compromise and extremists on the other side. He will argue for a point halfway between the previous compromise and the extreme, which then becomes the new compromise and the extremists launch debate 2 between this new compromise and their extreme, then debate 3 ... resulting into an exponential fall into the extreme. . A nice example of such an asymmetrical debate is the debate between nuclear energy proponents and nuclear energy opponents where the "opponent" side is an extreme ( all nuclear energy got to be rejected ) but the "proponent" side is not the indiscriminate "everything nuclear is always good and harmless" extreme, but proponents of some kind of optimal/compromise solution which acknowledges dangers and costs, but came to conclusion that certain applications have their merit. . Fence sitting and declaring that both sides are equally exaggerating/unreasonable (and thus feeling smarter than them both) is not right here and does no good.

. Not in the short term. And as our civilization nears its close, short term thinking is more and more the only game in the town down here.

that's right. I thought there has been another, but I checked, and it used conventional hydrazine thrusters. So not "probes" but "probe".