Nibb31

It's fiction, so you can just summon up a technobabble barrier to prevent exchange of atmosphere.

The interior of the ISS is mostly covered with lockers and ISPR racks, plus various experiment equipment, not padding. Padding is used inside Soyuz: But Apollo or the Shuttle didn't have any interior padding.

And yet another advantage is that they work through a whole lot of flight regimes, including hypersonic regions. In this video, below a certain speed, they pivot clockwise and anti-clockwise to induce roll or yaw and pitch. It looks like at higher speeds, they seem to pivot up and down to act as flaps and/or airbrakes, which makes sense because the grids are less effective at those speeds. The computer probably chooses either mode depending on the airspeed.

Seems like a great way to fix the roll problem that killed the CRS 2 booster.

Burn residuals are a real problem that are taken into account in space operations. The ISS for example is actually enveloped in a "cloud" of burnt residual fuel from its own thrusters and those of visiting vehicles. These residuals are corrosive and can damage or interfere with instruments and equipment that is located outside. Visiting vehicles must follow strict rules for using thrusters in close vicinity of the station.

The 200 year figure wasn't meant to be taken literally. They might have disappeared only half a billion years ago and the last trace of them could only be seen from Earth 200 years ago when we weren't looking... My point was that not only are interstellar distances huge, but the timeline of the universe is also huge. A civilization than exists for even 10000 years is still just a blip in the ~13 billion years that the universe has existed. And we have only been watching the skies for a few hundred years. For an encounter to take place, you need a 4-dimensional proximity situation, not just 3-dimensional. The chance of two several-thousand year old civilizations meeting each other in the same place and at the same time are infinitesimal. My personal hunch is that life exists out there, but that relativity prevails and FTL travel is indeed impossible, which makes interstellar travel impractical regardless of any technological advancement.

There are many possible reasons we are not seeing any evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Maybe alien intelligent species are hostile. As soon as a new one emerges, it gets preemptively destroyed by the dominating species that doesn't want a challenging species to dominate them. This would be particularly easy for a species that has advanced enough to master FTL and time travel. Or maybe the vast expanses of interstellar space are simply uncrossable because the laws of physics are the same for everybody. Or maybe we are late to the party and a thriving interstellar federation that ruled the galaxy for thousands of years destroyed itself 200 years ago just before we invented radio. The thing is, our space and time of existence is insignificantly small on the space and time scale of the universe. The chances of receiving a signal from another intelligent species are infinitesimal.

Yes, that's another way to do it. Again, does the benefit outweigh the drawbacks in risk and complexity? What happens if the tether breaks? How do you perform correction burns with a bola arrangement?

Except that he would have an exact copy of your consciousness, plus the knowledge that he's going to be wasted. How would you feel if you were summoned into existence with a lifetime full of memories, experiences, and accumulated knowledge and the sole purpose of being expended in a few hours?

But we don't really have any extensive weather records other than our experience with the MERs in two very specific areas and orbital observations. It's like extrapolating Earth's climatology model from a weather station in Venezuela and another in Germany.

Another topic that has been beaten to death already. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/73282-Let-s-talk-about-centrifuges?highlight=centrifuge http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/72851-Does-artificial-gravity-improve-the-reliability-of-life-support-systems?highlight=centrifuge http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/76877-Could-centrifugal-force-solve-some-long-term-spaceflight-problems?highlight=centrifuge http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/81317-What-is-the-best-axis-of-rotation-for-an-Earth-orbiting-rotating-space-station?highlight=centrifuge http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/77614-Fitting-rotational-gravity-segments-on-rockets?highlight=centrifuge The thing is, we don't know if a centrifuge is even necessary. People have survived in space for long periods without one. If artificial gravity is actually proven to be more beneficial than other methods of reducing bone-loss (including exercice, diet, medication, etc...) then it would be much easier to simply spin the entire ship. Having a rotating section attached to a non rotating ship just adds unnecessary complexity and critical failure points for no good reason.

Get older. Also, iPod touch sucks. You can get Android tablets with much higher specs for much cheaper.

Get older.

A phasing orbit can be above or below the rendez-vous orbit. You phase lower to catch up with your target (you go faster) and you phase higher to get caught up by it. So to reach EML5 from the Moon, you would just boost higher and wait for the EML5 to catch up with you, and then do a classic orbital transfer back down to lunar orbit for the RV. You could probably optimize it with a single parabolic burn that takes you outward and brings you back down where the EML5 station will be. Generally speaking, EML5 is a poor place to put a colony space station. It's both hard to reach from Earth and hard to reach from the Moon. You would be better off locating your colony at EML1 or 2.

The only chance Hitler ever had of winning WWII would have been to invade Britain after the debacle of Dunkirk. If they had defeated Britain before Pearl Harbour, then the US would have never declared war on Germany. However, they never gained the air supremacy that would have been required, especially after the Battle of Britain. Germany never had the coordination, the resources, the equipment, or even the will, to pull off Operation Sea Lion. Once the US had entered the war, and with Britain on its doorstep with air and naval superiority, it was only a matter of time before there was a western front. Also, if Germany hadn't invaded Russia, Stalin would have eventually ended the Non Agression Pact himself sooner or later. In those days, no single country had the capability of "Total War" against the rest of the world. So I don't think there was any possibility and alternate timeline of **** Germany actually winning WWII without adding a whole bunch of fantasy parameters and dozens of other hypothetical "what-ifs", which makes the discussion pointless.

It's just science fiction. Maybe the writer was ignorant or maybe the book was written before we had much detailed information about Martian atmospheric conditions. Bradbury's Martian Chronicles are particularly bad for this. Many folks, including science fiction writers, are influenced by pictures of Mars surface that, to the untrained eye, looks a lot like desert regions on Earth. Our brain functions by associating what we see with what we already know. That's where the dreams of living on Mars come from, although it is just as uninhabitable as the Moon. Mars is totally alien and sterile. The atmosphere, the chemical and radiation environment, and the temperatures, are nowhere near anything we can experience on Earth. We also don't know much about the weather, but judging from how erosion doesn't seem to have as much effect as on Earth and from the low atmospheric pressure, weather conditions don't seem too violent.

For CRS-3, Dragon V1 had red and green port/starboard lights as well as a sequential strobe light: The white strobe flashes in an irregular/random sequence so as not to confuse the flashing with a rotation.

What I was saying was that the actual parachute mounting point was on the hatch side, with the rip lines routed around the hatch, not the aft side as on your model. This is why the two aft legs are closer together, to absorb the impact together as they hit the ground first.

The parachutes work in the same way, but the arrangement is slightly different between V1 and V2. You can see the V2 parachute deployment sequence in this video at 1:11. The drogues are fired from two mortars above the chutes. The main chute is stored below the hatch with the rip lines running up each side of the hatch. http://www.space.com/24337-spacex-wet-drop-tests-human-rated-crew-capsule-at-sea-video.html This explains why the nose cap is slanted. The winglets are just passive stabilizers with no control surfaces. Their purpose is to simply to stabilize the capsule during an abort, like the grid fins on Soyuz. They also provide extra surface for the solar panels as a secondary purpose.

I think the new A350 XWB is probably the most elegant plane to come out of Airbus.

Wow! I didn't think they were serious about their spaceplane project. The video doesn't show the model gliding or splashing down. I wonder why? It's a competitor for the SpaceShip2 in the suborbital tourism business, but Airbus does not operate airlines and they usually don't go into developing an aircraft without having some firm orders. I wonder who will be buying this?

I think it's way beyond the scope of SLS. We are likely to have invented antigravity and teleportation before we have the energy make warp bubbles.

Do we really have to put up with the same threads getting posted every week or two? OP: please look up the forum before posting new topics. There have been half a dozen topics about space warfare, battle cruisers, space cannons and other such nonsense. Starting with this one: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/75141-Interplanetary-WAR!?p=1066000&viewfull=1#post1066000

This sort of PR really annoys me. Any sort of Alcubierre or Warp drive is nothing more than an theoretical construct at this time. It relies on this purely theoretical "exotic matter" that might or might not exist or even be possible. At any rate it is decades away, and more importantly, several scientific breakthroughs away. It's way too early to start thinking about designing a ship around it because if we do build warp ships in 100 years, chances are they'll look nothing like the IXS Enterprise. In 30 years, you'll be looking back at this and finding it just as laughable as this: I'm not sure how much of this pointless exercise is funded by NASA and how much is fan art, but I don't think NASA should be spending their tiny budget on artist impressions of science fiction space ships.

That's a poor reason. There's lots of unused space on rooftops, water, fields...