Gargamel

In the New Member Guide Thread: I point to the "How to use the forums": In which you will find the very first question asked is this one. TLDR: Just paste the direct link where you want the pic.

It's not relaxing at all. At least the act of moderating itself isn't. When we're called in, there's something happening and we usually have to be the big meanies. That's never fun. Sure you get a little satisfaction out of banning a dirty dirty spammer, but it doesn't make up for being the referee. Yes, it does take a toll after a while. But that's why we do things like the Threads of the Month, etc. They allow us to find the greatness in the forums and to highlight it. Our previously mentioned mod chat really helps out. Not only does it help discuss forum matters, the majority of the talk is non-forum. These folks are my friends. We enjoy playing other games together, vent life issues, talk about sportsball, etc. But sometimes you just get burned out and need to step away for awhile. That's why we have a team. But for the most part, the moderation of the KSP forums is mainly housekeeping. Moving threads into their proper place, approving new posts, etc. Having to make a stressful decision doesn't happen that often.

Moved to Add-on Discussion

Not necessarily. I was one that was chosen when the asked for anybody interested.

Mathew Lillard’s Shaggy was better than Heath Ledger’s Joker.

Well, my robot warned me it had detected a singularity tonight. Yes, I panicked for a second.

Thought I had the other day

I'm coming back from sabbatical... I didn't want to overstate things.

Oh.... so we do.

I can agree wholeheartedly. They may be CWIP's (Completely Worthless Internet Points), but they're my CWIP's.

Moved to tech support

Moved to suggestions.

There was an update earlier, and it has been noted that things are currently somewhat borked.

Not unless we change the software settings, which we really don't have any plans to do so, since the dot's really don't mean anything in the grand scale of things.

Ahhh The devil is in the details as they say. No, you're not going to print a carbon fiber tube. What you are going to print is with a carbon fiber infused filament. IIRC these materials have shown increased strength along all axes, even between layers, as some of the fiber does tend to span layers somewhat. If you need a CF tube or spar or sheet, you're better off just buying said material from a place like McMaster-Carr and cutting it to your need. But if you have a custom shape that needs to be in CF.... well.... they make CF molding kits, you just have to provide the mold..... which 3d printing excels at. Make a mold of the item you want in CF, print it in PLA, finish the mold to perfection, and then mold the CF to that mold. Boom. And that's repeatable, relatively cheap, and fast compared to what you'd get from FDM printing. You shouldn't treat 3d printing as the end-all of home manufacturing, but merely a cog in the bigger picture. Yeah, for the average person, a FDM 3d printer will cover 98% of their needs, but if you're looking to move into a finished commercial product, you might have to consider other methods used along with a 3d printer to make your product repeatable, consistent and of a high enough quality while keeping costs down. There are many many many different materials available for 3d printing, each with their own properties. You Tuber CNC Kitchen did some really good research into the various properties of common printing materials, doing actual practical experiments to compare them. 3D Printing Nerd has a really good episode where he walks through all the "common" 3d printing filaments (Common as in you probably don't need specialized purchase orders to obtain them, but some might be harder to find) and their advertised properties. If you're looking at really high temp, or even moderately high, SLA 3d printers (where the object is printed using a liquid resin rather than melted filament) might be what you should be investigating. They are cheap enough now that they are comparable to FDM printers, but the resins do tend to run somewhat expensive. YouTuber Integza (who is an absolute genius nutcase, he makes Colin Furze look like an OSHA safety officer) has been working on making pulse jet and turbo jet engines from 3d printed ceramics, all done with desktop printers and not much of a budget. I'd recommend looking at those channels, plus other resources, before deciding on anything.

It’s glass transition point is 50-60c though. That’s where it gets soft and can deform, by not melt. So no, PLA is really not suitable for any temperature you couldn’t tolerate yourself.

There were only 3 originally. Actually I think there was only one way back, but the game entered alpha with 3 IIRC. Val was added at a later date.

Easily. This type of application is what they excel at, no stress along any single axis. Sure, as long as the item is printed in the correct orientation. In an FDM (as opposed to SLA) printer, the layers of plastic are the usual weak point, as they tend to fail in delamination before they reach the plastic point. As long as the stresses are oriented so they aren't pulling the clip apart, then a clip should work fine. Yes, with the right design, material, and manufacturing considerations, 3d printed items can survive just fine. IIRC ABS is better for higher temps, there are plenty of other materials that are designed for higher temps.

Well luckily enough, we do have some analogous test beds here on earth we can use. Drop the proposed probe onto one of glaciers of Antarctica, have it delve down a bit, make a right turn at Albuquerque, and head over 40km or so through the glacier and have it surface somewhere else. That way we can recover the hazardous material and handle it properly, and the shifting ice should simulate conditions they'll encounter heading down. At the very least it'll give them a test bed to work the problem. And anything lost to the glacier can be recovered in a few centuries/millennia when it gets spit out the other end :). With heavy lift capacity coming back into practical consideration, a conventional drilling rig might also be feasible. It'll require a number of automated resupply missions to bring more drilling pipe to the rig.

Perhaps

As a machinist, it doesn't matter. Everything I do is in decimal [unit]. I do decimal inches or millimeters. If I'm making something 25.4mm or 1.000", the math is all the same either way. It's decimal. My base unit is either tenths of a mil or thousandths of an inch. So if I "take this part up 2", it's increasing it .2mm or .002", it just depends on where the customer is located. 99.9% of my work is in decimal inches though, just makes things uniform. But we only talk in the single unit, there's no conversions beyond that base unit. If our raw stock is 20ft long, we usually don't say 20ft, we say 240 inch, and I'll be able to cut 12 20 inch blanks from that raw bar. Never 1 foot 8 inch. 20 inch. Single decimal unit. As a woodworker, fractional imperial is by far superior. Wood moves. It changes dimensions with humidity and temperature. A fractional measurement implies that I understand that 1/32 of an inch is not going to be the same 1/32 of an inch in a few months. If I'm ordering 1/2" ply, I know there will be some variation to it. But 12.7mm ply just seems like it should be exactly 12.7mm thick... but it's not... there's quite a bit of variance. So for woodworking, a measurement system that has some fudge built into it is a superior system. As a 3d printer.... Well, it depends on what I'm designing and for what. If it's a truly original design that isn't rigidly constrained by any outside item, then I usually go with metric. But if a design is to interface with another object, I'll use the system that other object was designed around, or for the hardware I intend to use with it. 1/4"-20 vs 6mm-20 bolts? Really no difference in application, I'll just stick with that system. My battery pack I'm designing is 2"x6" with 1/2" radii corners? Then imperial it is. But as with being a machinist, I work with decimal, not fractional units. As an armchair scientist, metric is far preferred for all the arguments given above. But as a Human... especially with temperature... Fahrenheit is the superior system. Yes it makes absolutely no sense when compared to Centigrade and the properties of water.... but if you're talking about the properties of Humans.... The acceptable ranges for Humans to "comfortably" exist is 0f-100f. Anything above or below that, and you should consider taking extreme measures to survive safely. Of course, some will argue that 100f isn't that hot, and others will say that 0f isn't that cold, but on an average... it seems to fit human experience better than -20c - 40c. I could make an argument that imperial feet is better for human height... but that's probably just due to what I know. Under 5' is really short, mid 5' is average, under 6' is still short, and over 6' is tall (being 6'3", I might be biased a bit). But similar concepts could be applied to 10cm blocks, so honestly the argument is moot.

If you notice a lot of our acronyms on the Forums are underlined with the dotted lines, that means that if you hold your mouse over them, the full meaning will popup. In this case an RTG is a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator. It uses the heat generated by the slow decay of nuclear material to create a slow steady stream of electricity. Pretty much a long lived nuclear battery.

GAH!!! Heads back to google to search for the next number..... Ninja'd..... 4003.... GAH!.... ok