Lexif

Hm, yeah, looking at the orbital configuration in the simulator in the first post, it seems the left border of the image should be about as far out as the radius of Mercury's orbit. Here is the instrument's web page: http://www.stereo.rl.ac.uk/about-hi.html I'm sure you will find its spectral window in the "documents" section. I found out that the videos posted here are showing the difference between two consecutive frames, so that's were the "shadows" come from. This will also improve the visibility of anything that moves.

NASA's astronomy picture of the day page says it's the solar wind. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap131123.html From what I found this clip was taken with the heliospheric imager (HI), which appears to be a visible-light device. I would guess it should be possible to see the solar wind as an extension of the sun's corona. (The corona is what you see in a total solar eclipse.) Isn't at least one component of the solar wind just the molecules of the coronal gas that are on the fast end of the velocity distribution so they reach escape velocity?

Luna and sol are the latin words for moon and sun. I don't know why everyone wants to call it Sol all the time, every single language should have a word for it. It's a bit like this nasty trend of forming the plural of some latin-derived proper english word with -i (or -ii). As in Airbus -> Airbii. I shudder every time I read that...

Try it again with FAR and Deadly Reentry. Say goodbye to pancake rockets. And it adds a lot of design challenges for athmospheric landers. On the positive side, FAR's realistic aerodynamics greatly reduce drag, so you only need about 3500 m/s Delta v to get to LKO.

There are newish systems like ADS-B that transmit position reports and data like speed, altitude and maybe autopilot settings and other stuff in the public. They work over VHF and you can get a receiver and see what's flying around you. Sites like Flightradar24.com use them. The goal is to give new tools to ATC in the future, and to allow the planes to coordinate better among themselve, as I understood it. For example, if the plane transmits the altitude set on the autopilot, ATC might get a warning if the plane has set it wrong and is about to bust through its assigned altitude. In the future, there might be a level of remote control where the clearance gets set to the autopilot automatically. I don't know the transmission interval, but six seconds might be similar.

But no general said "if you give us the money, we will build a moon base", it's just a strawman you keep pushing around. Also, every nuclear power would gleefully smile as your country wastes your money away for something that's strategically useless.

I meant this more in addition to the other two projects. A400M might be a better EADS example. The EuroHawk is a political failure. They had already sunk all the money (1.3E9€!) when they noticed they couldn't legally fly the damn thing in the European airspace. I generally would have welcomed the promised jump in capability. It would have replaced our Breguet Atlantics in the marine ELINT/SIGINT role.

It can be demotivating to first learn the tools, then the application. In my first year studying physics on a german university, I had to take the same algebra and calculus courses as the math students. I didn't understand why I'd need such a deep and very abstract understanding of math as our physics lectures hardly had a differential equation here and there. Then, in the second year, we got theoretical physics courses (mechanics, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics). It was very interesting, but I didn't have the background to keep up with the speed and depth of the courses, struggled hard and had to repeat a course. Don't know about engineering, but don't assume you know better what you'll need later on.

On the other hand, an unmanned military spaceplane (X-37) might be less usefull than the same money in NASA's hands. Or not. But we can't know because the mission is secret. You're paying, but you won't get to play with those toys, so to speak. Seriously, I think it's crazy how much the US is spending on its military considering all that bloat and feature creep that seems to be in every single project. Why is it that everyone is so critical of the costs of social programs and science, but when it comes to the military, it's totally normal when everything costs twice as much in the end and comes ten years later. Not specific to the US either. (See Eurofighter, Eurohawk, apparently every EADS defense project in general.)

Does anyone think this would get the conspiracy theorists to shut up in the case mentioned in the OP? Technology can't be a solution for a political probelm. I really don't see a need for this. It's pretty much a non-existent problem. How many crashes would be better understood by this, and what are you willing to pay for it? I can't think of more than two or three cases were the recorders were destroyed or lost at sea since the 80s. And you will want to locate and inspect the wreckage anyway. It might be nice to piggy back on existing technology to get some low quality data stream out for free, and that's already done in some way with automatic text messages via ACARS transmitting system failures to the maintenance base, as the recent Air France crash showed. But bandwidth on those sat links is expensive, so don't expect the full data set to be transmitted in real time. Also, consider that you want it to still work in case of an emergency. Got a problem in the electric system? Now you have to power your sat uplink via battery. Those are heavy. Also, don't forget those sat antennas are directional (I think). If I remember it right, in the Air France crash, the plane's final trajectory (high bank) blocked sat uplink for some periods, so system failure ACARS messages got out late and bunched up. Why pump lots of money into a system that might not work when you need it most? If you want to throw more money at the problem, why not use it to record more parameters in a better resolutuion on the existing recorders. They are already much more capable than the outdated minimum requirements. There's also talk of including video feed, but that's really controversial with pilots. I mean, if I mess up on the job, I don't want the chance that a video clip of me dying crying for my mother leaks out, it's understandable. Edit: After the search for AF447, I would also rather put the money into better locator beacons. As I said above, you need to find the wreckage anyway.

OK, I can really relate to that. :-) The original Lear Jet was designed as a jet trainer for the military and apparently quite snappy and fun to fly. So there was already a VLJ for people like you way back then. But people like you are a small minority. For most, the target is to waste less productive time. They want to either work on the plane, get some good sleep (saving a night in a hotel) or just get there faster. Without the money from those people (or rather, their companies), technical advances will be hard to get to mass production. I guess a nice market for a supersonic business jet might be centered on the middle east. If you'd fly to India often enough, you could make a lot of use of the speed out over the ocean and the distance is long enough to make it worthwile. There's also a lot of money in the area and the regulatory environment seems to be quite relaxed.

Jwenting, it's true that that's the reason why Concorde got so few orders. But I think the lack of success of other premium-only services shows that there's also a flaw in the business plan. If a major airline draws the premium passengers out of their normal jets, those suddenly become less profitable. And while the passengers will pay more than for the slow ride, they are now on an aircraft with much larger operating costs. Their tiny engines are really amazing. But I would much rather buy a used Piaggio Avanti for that price, while turboprop, it has about the same performance and at least it has a toilet. And it looks amazing. I think there's a question of structural efficiency in there somewhere where there would be some kind of sweet spot in size, and I think VLJs are way below it.

Do you use Remote Tech 2 by any chance? I recently started using it and that's when I first got those explosions, too. I didn't get around to reproducing it. I remember this bug from earlier versions, wasn't RT involved there, too?

VLJs? I thought they were more in the market to replace old, old Citations, Lear Jets and turbocharged piston and turbo prop designs. I thought, like what they replace, they are flying lower and slower than commercial jets, are single pilot certified and therefore cheaper to operate if you don't fly yourself. (Most went to air taxi companies, I thought?) What made me hopefull is the market for large business jets. Lots of completly new aircraft designs (a rare event), and a bit of a speed competition going on. I have high hopes in Gulfstream. Though we are only talking about a certified M0.93, the testing regime has to involve going up to Mach 1, so they have to do increase their know how. They already talked about plans for a quiet supersonic jet last year, though I'm not sure what came of it. They have the money and are the only big manufacturer specialised on large business jets, so they have an incentive to stand out. But to be honest, most of the business jet market seems to be about the interiors, and the companies are notoriously shy of developing completely new airframes. Bombardier essentially milked all their jet aircraft out the original Challenger fuselage. Same with Gulfstream. I would hope for an outsider to shake up the market, but the clients are mostly very conservative, too. A lot of the volume is not personal jets but charter and company flight departments (and fractional ownership for smaller types), I think.

Faark, I fully appreciate the technology transfer between the military and the civilian aerospace world. If I look out of the window of an airliner, there's a high bypass turbofan hanging out there, first developed for the C-5 competition, I think. magnemoe expressed my point more eloquently. Maybe I shouldn't have been so sarcastic. The problem is not technology, but economy. The premium passengers that now fill the front of a conventional widebody are not even enough to make scheduled first-class-only longhaul or ultra longhaul flights profitable. Those that could pay the premium will rather take a private jet and depart when they want from where they want. That's often faster than catching a low frequency Concorde flight if you count the time spent at the airport etc. I guess private supersonic jets won't sell in high enough numbers to change the political environment and justify the huge development costs. But back to topic, please.

Ah, just like all the research and production of supersonic jet fighters made us all travel in supersonic civil planes like the Concorde. I think we've all greatly benefited from that. Not.

Was it maybe this? http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/18230-0-22-Kerbal-Engineer-Redux-v0-6-1-4?p=718773&viewfull=1#post718773

I don't think an inflatable heat shield should be able to magically repackage itsself, if that's what you mean.

In my experience the fairings get hot, not the payload.

Well done! What focal length is that, about 250 mm on a crop camera?

I tried 1.0 today and like it a lot so far! One small request from me would be that I would like to see the orbital inclination with a sign (+/-), because that would make it easier to match your orbital inclination to something you know the value for.

Over the weekend, we will be more or less fogged in here in central germany, at least in the morning. Friday morning, I couldn't even the the house across the street. It's a bad time of the year for astronomy here. I guess I have to wait until it's past the sun. Edit: About the stacking: I just tried it twice -- I don't do astro photography frequently. This is my result for Orion from a series of about 50 images with a 50/1.8 on a Canon 1000D at 5s/2.2 aperture/ISO 1600 with about 20 dark frames. Conditions were not good and it was just an experiment from my window in the city. http://imgur.com/a/zb3CQ The other picture is a raw light picture. Don't know if I could have done something to get the final result less blurry.

Maybe it was already weaponized, in a way... Read the story that Architeuthis posted if you have the time -- it's closely related.

I will post it here, of course. I plan to use a Canon EOS 1000D with the cheap EF 50/1.8. I once took a picture of Orion with it where the dimmest stars were around 13.5 mag, and that was from my window in the city. I had to stack 30 to 50 five second exposures and about a dozen darkframes. So I should be able to spot it using this technique. Maybe I will try my tele-zoom, too, but it doesn't have a good apperture. At 6:20, the beginning of nautical twilight, the comet will be about 20° above the horizon, while my local eastern horizon is about 10--15° high, so it should be possible if it's not foggy. But guess what's predicted for the morning?

That story is insane, especially the part about the murderous "improved" space shuttle idea. I also saw that Derek, the author of that blog, posted a clip of some french guys pouring Chlorine Trifluoride over stuff you'd normally consider protective equipment: His newest entry in this category of his blog is from august, but I still find that quote about mercury azides funny... stuff that explodes in solution must be really nasty, but at least it mixes the layers nicely: There is also an interesting entry on a compund that will explode when you try to take an infrared spectrum of it. It's some hellish molecule where you have replaced almost all the carbon atoms with nitrogen... C2N14.