KSK

No - because when the term was coined it wasn't misleading. It didn't correspond to any protein coding DNA, most of it didn't correspond to any regulatory sequences or other functional sequences that were known at the time. Much of it looked like evolutionary debris - thousands of copies of transposons, old DNA that might have been a gene at one point but is now mutated beyond repair. In a word - junk. If you prefer, you could use the more formal sounding (but equally uninformative) term, non-coding DNA. If we had known what it was for, it wouldn't have been labelled as junk. If we were labelling it now, we wouldn't label it as junk either. It's a classic example of science in action - the more we study something, the more we realise that our original picture of how it all works was woefully simplistic. That doesn't stop the original picture from still being useful - and its only until you do all that extra studying and research that you realise how simple it was.

I sympathise with the sentiment behind this post but I also see a couple of problems with it. A slight factual inaccuracy first - not all scientists draw a government salary. Quite a few of them are employed in the private sector. And yes - it is quite possible for private companies to do good, cutting edge science, even relatively blue skies science. Next. Any profession at all has its own set of jargon. It might not mean much to people not in the profession but in context it makes perfect sense and conveys the necessary information in an accurate and concise way. So too with science. Scientific papers are written by scientists for other scientists. Also, to be frank, most scientific papers deal with the fine details - the stuff that isn't going to be that interesting to other scientists outside of their immediate field, let alone the general public. Trying to describe those fine details in layman terms, even informed layman terms - well you end up with something like this. But lastly - as other folks have already pointed out - by asking for clear terms from the outset, you're assuming that everything is known about the thing you're describing, or at least that what is known now will always and forever be correct. Which is simply not how science works. Getting back on topic, you see this a lot in molecular biology. A new protein will quite often be given a name that reflects the details of how it was discovered. That name may not reflect its true function, it almost certainly won't reflect all its functions - because those functions aren't known and may take a long time - and multiple research grants to figure out. And unfortunately - 'I'll write this up in 10 years time once we've figured everything out and I can give this thing a more accurate name' simply isn't an option for most working scientists. Not that you would want them too either - much better to get those preliminary results out in the public domain where they can be checked, replicated and built upon by other scientists. Postscript - scientists are also human. With all the quirks, foibles and occasionally misplaced senses of humour that that implies. Again, molecular biology is an excellent example - see, for example, the sonic hedgehog gene, or the RING (short for Really Interesting New Gene) ubiquitin ligases.

Some city names from my own headcanon: Barkton (old name, Bar-katon) Foxham (named after a prominent geographer of these forums) Balcabar (old name, Bal-cabara) Iskenar Bolanerbat Boladakhat Cabaralb Toralba I don't think any of them map onto your city locations very well, so feel free to give them any number you wish, or no number at all.

@LordFerret I commend ‘Blood Music’ by Greg Bear to you. @Green Baron - I believe there are ‘safe harbour’ loci which can accept transgenes without risk of creating an oncogene in the process. Whether they can safely accommodate a big enough segment of DNA to be useful for data storage, is another matter.

A rocket ship that only Jeb could love. I dunno - I wouldn't place any bets against SpaceX at this point (and I think most folks reading this will know my favourable trending towards fanboy opinion of SpaceX) but this seems an awful long way away from Falcon 9 manufacture. I guess you don't need such fancy fabrication techniques when you're working in stainless steel? Still - it's hard to imagine that thing flying to orbit.

Continued... Producing a square metre of graphene is one thing - producing a square metre of graphene monolayer is another. At that sort of area I think you’re probably going be using some kind of vapour deposition technique and using that to grow monolayers strikes me as being a bit hit or miss. There will likely be patches of multilayer graphene, maybe even specks of graphite or amorphous carbon, on your monolayer. But that’s an an engineering problem and one that I can imagine being solved given the current interest in graphene. I’m less sure about your read/write mechanism. I would have thought that the smaller the area of graphene you’re using to represent a bit, the more complicated and error prone your read/write optical system is going to be and I’d wonder if you could make it robust enough for consumer (edit, or routine use outside of an optics lab) Also, the smaller your bits, the more at risk they’ll be from reactions with stray oxygen molecules in your system. Making a sufficiently high quality vacuum to avoid that might not be an easy or routine task. TL: DR - both systems have challenges to overcome. I don’t think the graphene based system would be so much more straightforward than the DNA system as to make it the obvious winner. On the other hand I’m almost certainly biased due to greater familiarity (conceptually if not practically) with the technologies that a DNA system would or could be based on.

PCR itself is absolutely almost trivial. It’s a standard technique and all the kit and reagents needed to do it are commercially available. PCR for backing up DNA data storage - probably not done because I doubt development is at the stage where they’re worrying much about backup solutions. DNA needing resources for replication? Depends how you do it. With PCR you’d need to supply the nucleotides, if you’re replicating in a cell, you’d need a suitable nutrient source (broth or agar). UV radiation - keep it in a box. Mutations - this is purely guess work but I’m thinking you could get around this by having multiple copies of your data (which you’d likely have anyway by the nature of the system) so that your data is represented by the consensus sequence of those multiple copies and by having each bit represented by a long enough piece of DNA that you need a lot of point mutations to cause bitrot. As for needing a clean room - my reading of the article was that it was all about producing an automated system that didn’t need a lab? You’re right though, as long as this remains a lab-based technique it’ll just be an interesting curiosity rather than a practical technique. As for getting in contact with the DNA of the virus or bacteria? The data store DNA isn’t going to code for anything biological (at least I assume not - that would seem to be a basic safety precaution) so that’s not going to do anything to me. The actual virus or bacteria - I’m probably at greater risk every time I use the bathroom. Besides, I’m thinking this will be some kind of lab on a chip arrangement (typing this on my phone so linking is awkward - go check it out on Wikipedia if you’re curious) so it’s likely to be quite robust. We’re not talking about a box of test tubes on your desk here.

I don’t know anything about that graphene technology, so this is a bit speculative but: Fabrication. We already have a lot of experience with microfluidics, DNA synthesis, DNA sequencing, plus a bunch of other molecular biology techniques that might be handy for storing and indexing large amounts of DNA encoded data. My understanding is that producing significant areas of good quality (as in defect free or defect-managed if you want to use them to locally tweak the conductivity of your graphene) graphene is still challenging. Backup. Almost trivial with DNA. Take your DNA stored data, run it through a polymerase chain reaction and presto - more copies than you’ll ever need. Or, for long term storage, splice your data into a standard E. coli strain and stick a couple of vials worth into a standard lab freezer. Added bonus - your backup is self replicating although you’d want to re-sequence it every so often to check for mutations in your data. If you get those, it’s nothing that a bit of CRISPR can’t fix. Data compression. Viruses do some really funky data-compression tricks with their genomes. We could learn from that. All told though, I think my first point is probably most important. Graphene might be technically better but DNA technology works (to proof of concept level) now and we have the tools to quickly iterate with it. That’s a big hurdle for graphene to get over. It’s kind of similar to the way that we have better semiconductors than silicon available.... but we use silicon anyway because it’s what we know and what our infrastructure is set up for.

It’s the Pegasus 1 mobility enhancers attached to the side of the dome that I like. Presumably so that the SpaceX engineers can scamper over their creation like caffeinated rodents. Or something,

I’d say Squad do need to bring back the Barn - but for the Tier 4 space centre buildings. Because realism. I’m going to Heck for this aren’t I? Where all the good trolls hang out.

So very many excellent Culture names to borrow. I’m holding out for the good ship Lightly Seared on the Reality Grill.

Can confirm. Main components of a cauliflower (at an atomic level): carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen. Main components of me (at an atomic level): carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen. I flatter myself that I am not a cauliflower although discerning observers may spot some behavioural similarities, especially on a Friday afternoon.

Current ear worm is Pink Floyd’s ‘Brain Damage’, from their Dark Side of the Moon album. I blame the current political situation in my country but, out of respect to forum rules, shall refrain from ranting elaborating.

And what if you all you want to do is build replica sci-fi craft and implausible battleships? What if you don’t care about learning about real rockets - you just want to fire up the game and have some fun, according to your own definition of fun. I agree that the game points you in the direction of putting simple rockets into orbit but that’s only a part of the game and not the whole of it. As soon as you start telling people what a single player game is supposed to be about and then getting judgemental and calling them out for being ‘bad’ if they don’t play the way you think they should be playing, then you’re on a slippery slope in my opinion. One which leads to pretty much everything I detest about modern gaming and how that’s influenced modern game design.

Yes. Using the cheat menu is utterly unforgivable. As penance, I command any person vile enough to use it to live in a cave for the rest of their lives, subsisting on bark and bugs and only wearing clothing knitted from their own toenail clippings. To prove that I am not completely unreasonable, I will graciously permit them to sleep under the flat rocks and not the pointy ones. Unless they want to of course.

Seems like a reasonable assumption seeing as it’s how most of the other Station resupply ships are disposed of. I can’t imagine the trunk being any more sturdy than a Progress for example.

According to the BBC, Dragon sports a fetchingly bushy orange moustache during reentry. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47477617 Not long to go now. Hopefully Elon’s fretting over roll control will come to naught. *touches wood*

Ohh. Sincere condolences, to yourself and to the sender of that bad news. Will be thinking of you.

Interesting - I didn’t know about TKS. Thanks for bringing that one up! And my apologies for missing out Buran - that one I did know about. I don’t think it makes a great deal of difference to my argument whether or not you count ‘flight tested but never with crew’ crewed spacecraft but that test should have at least been a flight to orbit.

Ah well. If the strain of excess squeeeing proves too much, I'll go out with a smile.

Ahh - I was thinking it was about time for my annual squeeee.

We've been driving cars for a whole lot longer than that but that doesn't stop enthusiasts from getting excited about new sportscar models. We've been flying jet fighters for longer than we've been flying spacecraft and there's no shortage of military aviation enthusiasts either - many of whom won't have been near a cockpit of any kind in their lives. Over those 50 years you mention, I can only think of a handful of other crewed, orbit-capable spacecraft that have been flown. By spacecraft, I mean a vehicle capable of taking crew from Earth to space orbit and back, so I'm not counting sub-orbital craft such as SpaceShipOne or X15, or space stations. That handful of craft is: Vostok, Voskhod, Soyuz, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, STS, Shenzhou. That's it I think. Eight models of spacecraft in 50 years. (If you don't mind, I'll ignore any nitpicking about how similar Voskhod was or wasn't to Vostok, or how similar Shenzhou allegedly was to Soyuz). The most recently developed one (Shenzhou) first flew with crew aboard in 2003. So, if you ask me, it's hardly surprising that folks are getting excited about a new crewed spacecraft, when the last and most recent one was developed over 15 years ago. Especially when that new spacecraft looks quite so modern and is a definite break (stylistically and technologically) from the 'a button for everything' tradition of crewed spacecraft. Also, just because something is a solved problem (which autonomous docking clearly is), that doesn't make it an easy or a routine problem to solve. As illustrated by the concerns over Dragon's computer systems and safety measures.

First of all, heartfelt congrats to @Just Jim on a very well deserved 'send off' TOTM - and I'm adding my voice to the chorus of well-wishers, hoping that there will be a Part II to the Saga some day! But, picking up on @Gargamel's comment, if you're looking for something to fill the gap left by the ending of an epic tale, the Fan Works forum has something to suit most tastes. The Mission Reports sub-forum tends to be the place to go for illustrated material, whereas the main forum tends to cover prose-only works. Of course, not all of them will have the sweeping scope, originality and sheer flights of fancy that we've come to know from Jim's work (so no more adventures of the Platypeople that I'm aware of ), - but do come and have a dig around anyway... you might just find a pleasant surprise or two.

It always used to bug me that the stock game had such a mismatch between spaceplane parts and everything else for getting more than three Kerbals at a time to orbit. On the one hand you’ve got three nicely matched sets of parts, each with differently sized passenger modules. On the other you’ve got some kind of lashed together contrivance of a three seater capsule, Hitchhiker modules and heat shields. A 3.75m capsule with seats for say, seven Kerbals (akin to Crew Dragon or Starliner) would have redressed that balance quite a bit. Re courage and stupidity. If they’re not doing anything (apart from the cosmetic effect of changing Kerbal expressions) and there’s no gameplay mechanism for improving them, then just get rid of them. They’re a throwback to an era of KSP that ended when the Barn got junked and even then I thought ’stupidity’ was an obnoxious stat to measure your Kerbals by - and I say this as someone who liked the Barn and all that it implied about Kerbal spaceflight.

Thanks @Madrias Next chapter is roughed out, two of the sections are about done and I've figured out how another one is going to work. There's one plot salient section which needs to be fitted in, which I'm still pondering. Mind you, it took me quite some time (and skimming previous chapters) just to figure out where all the relevant characters were and whether they could plausibly be involved in this one! And speaking of chapters: The Kolans first float the idea of establishing Groves on Humilisia way back in Chapter 34 (Uncharted) which, alarmingly, was written nearly five years ago. There's a brief glimpse of the Kolans covertly supplying their new outpost a couple of chapters later in Stormclouds. In Preemptive, we meet Val for the first time and see the Kolans gearing up for eventual war in a 'trust but cut the cards' kind of way. The midden hits the impeller in Lightning, which is the first battle for Humilisia. Val distinguishes herself in combat, torpedoing the Doreni flagship. We get a glimpse of the second (on-page) battle for Humilisia much, much later in Chapter 83 (Shattered), at which point the Kerm Crisis has escalated into full-blown war. There may be other snippets here and there. All told though, @superstrijder15 , I can quite understand why the last chapter was a bit confusing! @DualDesertEagle Politcally, yes, although the actual engagement was rather different. Relatively high speed naval warfare (kerbal warships don't stray into cruiser or battleship sizes) without much in the way of air cover. Most of that was participating in the other off-page battle alluded to at the beginning of the chapter.