KSK

Well in that case I suggest you present a coherent argument rather than a random mashup of cherry picked quotes, patronising asides, unsupported assertions and random factoids taken out of context. Bonus points if you manage to do that without starting yet another new thread to do it. For example: Link please? So far as I'm aware this is very much not part of mainstream physics.

It was definitely mentioned in the film - there was a line about one of his crewmates being particularly malodorous. It's at least hinted at in the book at the beginning of the entry for Sol 14.

Possibly both depending on his personal proclivities. But those - we do not speak of. Top notch double entendre's though. I laughed. A lot.

DÃâ€. But did not deserve to die in fire. Dun...dun...DUUNNN

Pretty good story and it looks a lot better now with the extra paragraph breaks. Putting lines of dialogue in their own paragraphs would help too: vs A couple of other thoughts. You might want to delete the part where you're talking directly to your readers: It breaks the immersion. More generally, most of your action sequences are good but you have a tendency to go a bit passive which then slows the pace down. For example: "The dropships coast into the atmosphere from above. Their hulls are lit by the fires of reentry, and the roaring of reentry fills the ears of the troops within." reads like a after-action summary of the battle rather than a description of the battle in progress. You could try re-wording it a little: "The dropships coast into the atmosphere from above, their hulls lit by the fires of reentry. The roar of superheated air against hull fills the ears of the troops within." Or something like that anyway - you'll have your own ideas about how best to reword it! Probably easiest to do this sort of editing once you've sorted your tenses out as 0111narwhalz suggests. In general, beware of surplus "it"s or "are"s - rather than telling your readers that something is happening, just describe the thing that's happening. Hope this helps! KSK

Hmm, I don't think Reaction Engines ever mentioned anything about a 'somewhat intact runway'. Quite the opposite in fact, from their website: "The vehicle takes off and lands using a relatively conventional retractable undercarriage. By special attention to the brake system it has proved possible to achieve an acceptably low undercarriage mass. A heavily reinforced runway will be needed to tolerate the high equivalent single wheel load." I'm not sure where I read it but I seem to recall that Skylon will also need a longer than normal runway because it's take off speed is pretty high.

A link would be cleaner in my opinion and would keep this thread free for feedback and discussion only.

Or you could use the nuclear fireball to light your cigarette: http://modernnotion.com/man-lit-a-cigarette-with-a-nuclear-bomb/

I would just give your AI a gender and hand-wave it away as 'something that makes the computer easier for kerbals to interact with.' I'm not a big fan of 'zhe' and similar agendered pronouns either - I was going to use them in First Flight (this was back when kerbals were 'officially' genderless) but gave them up as a bad job and just went for male/female kerbals. For the wall 'o text, proper use of paragraphs will solve most of your problems or you could use rows of dashes ------- to indicate a point of view change, which can also help break things up a bit.

Sudden exposure to cold and low atmospheric pressure killing them and more importantly the soil bacteria needed to turn poop+sand into something capable of supporting plants. If I recall correctly, the bacteria (or some of them) actually survived in the book but it was a case of too little, too late for the farm. That was one of the nice little touches in the film I thought - the frosty ground in the hab after the breach. I kinda disagree with Slashy and Vasco about Watney being too perfect. Sure you only see one instance of him screwing up directly, but it was a pretty serious one. I'm not sure if the film really needed more, especially since it covered 'Watney figuring things out' well enough that he clearly wasn't pulling out perfect solutions first time, every time.

They didn't mention the engines directly but it was pretty clear from one of the Hermes exterior shots. Camera pans down this enormous spacecraft and right at the end there's a (comparatively) diddy little engine glowing blue, that just screams 'ion drive' or VASIMR. - - - Updated - - -

Hmm, slice the beets coarsely and thread them on the sticks before cooking. Or maybe add some aspic to the cold soup and have a sort of borscht jelly onna stick. I'm sorry - I'm over thinking this yes? Great chapter as always and I guess the good comrade Political Officer really is bat.... crazy!

You could go for the homeopathic approach. Take some corn syrup, dilute in kerosene and keep on diluting until, statistically speaking, none of the syrup is left. You now have some supercharged 'syrup imprinted' kerosene, guaranteed to boost your ISP, TWR and general rocket health. On a serious note - as others have noted, corn syrup could be used as a fuel in principle but most likely not in practice. - - - Updated - - - Cool - a genuine pork powered rocket. Highly recommended for the SLS.

I'm maybe missing something here but what's stopping the electrons and positrons from annihilating? As far as I can tell, the author is treating them both as identical particles for the purposes of calculating degeneracy pressure. The article looks otherwise OK to my (admittedly superficial) understanding but I just don't get the assumptions its based on.

Even if you prefer the 'strap it on and go' approach to kerballed spaceflight, I highly recommend the basic readouts (apsides and time to reach them) that KER gives you. It's much nicer to actually fly your contraption all the way to a reliable orbit and enjoy watching the sky turn dark and Kerbin fall away behind you, without needing to swap out to the Map screen to adjust your course. Personally, I'm firmly in the 'did it once by hand, see no point in doing it by hand every time' camp. I got myself to Duna with pen, paper and a plastic protractor against the screen. I much prefer having a proper launch window calculator and a VAB crew that can save me the tedium of recalculating available delta-V after every design iteration. Edit - apses corrected to apsides after reading an unusually informative signature file!

ìï×ZHØíV! You know, I'm pretty sure that some of the minor Ussari apparatchiks have a saying: "Do that and I must speak to Igor. I do not like to speak to Igor..."

I like it. I really like it. My favourite parts were the Danger Rush gene and the Order of the Source (great way of explaining the Kerman naming) but the rest of it hung together really well! Kerbals as egg-layers was a nice twist too. I would definitely read any stories set in your version of Kerbin if you ever felt moved to write them.

Good update and some very nice world-building! To add to CommanderSpock's comment - not being quite sure who to cheer for is one of the things I really like about this story.

"Good sci-fi" - I'll definitely take that. Thanks! And yes - resolving, or at least pointing the way to resolution of, the Kerm crisis - is going to be a major plot line in part 4. Part 3 has about five chapters left to go, including the finale. Interesting you should mention Avatar because some of my earlier ideas for the Kerm ended up being a bit too close to Pandora's tree network and had to be re-thought a bit. Although Planet (as in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri) was a more direct inspiration.

Sure! On a tablet right now but will add it to the list when I get back in front of my desktop machine.

Yes but that was $9 billion to upgrade an existing accelerator - the Large Electron/Positron collider or LEP. Actually, calling it an upgrade isn't really fair - building the LHC was more like building a completely new accelerator in the LEP tunnel. I don't how much it cost to dig out the tunnel in the first place, especially compared to the cost of all the actual equipment that goes in there but I'm thinking it was still quite a cost saving for CERN. The Chinese accelerator will need to start from scratch, so even allowing for lower labour costs, I'd be surprised if the eventual costs are close to $10 billion. The tunnel is a pretty major piece of engineering in it's own right and has to be level to pretty high tolerances - not cheap.

What SpeedDaemon said. Although a 6-7 degree inclination change is about what you need to align with Minmus from an equatorial orbit and if I remember rightly that only requires about 250m/s of delta-V. Not too crazy. Although, if you want to try launching into the right orbit then go for it! I don't do it very often but I always feel BadS when I do.

Agreed that it would a major feat for China - or any other country for that matter. $10 billion sounds optimistic though, even allowing for different economic conditions in China.

Go, Bob! Don't worry about the delay - stuff happens, and besides - it was well worth it.

Well Saturn is clearly polygamous (count the rings ) so yeah, it probably won't care about one more spouse.