p1t1o

Wow, that is pretty dense... I just googled, and a modern spacesuit, with associated life support pack, masses around 300pounds (!) and thats without an astronaut in it, so you can double that 150kg figure I think, for a fully equipped space-walk-complete astronaut, though I think that is without a maneuvering pack.

Remember a Kerbal [probably?] masses a lot less than an Earth-human! If you put a Kerbal in one of our hydrogen peroxide Earth-rocketpacks, they would find it *highly* kerbal I think.

I got a new keyboard not too long ago, it had those "raised" keys so I thought cool! Easy to clean. Not a week after I bought it I spilled coke all over it. I may as well have just pooped directly into the keys.

Im a fan of the "Parallel hyperspace with compressed distance" mode - you shift your ship (either through a physical "portal" such as a wormhole or artificially induced "rent", or by "phasing" your ship via manipulation of energy and fields into the other realm) to a universe parallel to this one, where a unit of distance traveled equated to many units of distance traveled in our universe, sidestepping FTL by effectively raising the speed of light. Sortof.

Ooh ooh! this one! "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!" - Peter Sellers/Stanley Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove.

Especially considering you just learned that your universe can be *turned off*. To be fair though, the offer of ultimate(sortof) power does soften the blow somewhat.

They are here for me. They turn up in honour of my birthday you see. Its also why its known as "The Glorious 12th". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Twelfth What? Someone defaced my birthday page with some BS about grouse? Either way, I'm in London so won't be able to see anything

I have a 0.625m heatshield in my build, I assumed it came with deadly reentry? Also, if you have a bit of *.CFG experience, you can copy a 1.25m part and re-scale it 50%. IIRC, FASA included a nuclear RV part, not sure if FASA is still operative, but its a pretty simple part, should still "work".

It uses a probes that you have to stick into the food. The sensor will use some kind of ion-specific material (an ion-exchange resin, a special type of glass etc.) in the electrode to select for the ion of interest - nitrate in this case. The material chosen will have specific permeability for your ion, different materials having different properties and trade-offs. Different materials will have different specificities for different ranges of ions, and accuracy can be heavily affected by the environment in which it is being used. After the ion-specific electrode is your common-or-garden voltmeter which will be calibrated to give you an ion concentration. I am unable to tell the quality or reliability of the sensor, it may be a high-quality sensor or it may be a glorified "E-meter". Nitrates in food do have health effects, and can be of interest, it can be a contaminant in drinking water supplies, but is usually of interest when considering so-called "organic" foods. Nitrates are a factor when it comes to nutritional health, but as with all topics of food/diet, beware of misinformation and hype, especially around the advertisement of various "organic" foods/diets. For example there exist similar sensors advertised as being able to "detect if your food is organic", however nitrate content can be elevated/reduced by many factors other than fertiliser use.

Spacecamp, 2001/2010 and TopGun awww yeah

Yeah this concept has already done the rounds on here. It does paint a picture of the EmDrive being a weird way to build what is essentially a focused light (EM) source, however there were discrepancies in the power consumed and the thrust produced - pure photon rockets have huge (something like 300MW per newton) power requirements and the EmDrive appeared to be producing more thrust than it should from its power source - if it was a purely a photon reaction force. So in other words, yep the whole thing is still up in the air. Whether or not the dang things even produce thrust at all is still not hammered out to full confidence. This part of that article also weirds me out a bit: " Annila has been researching the basic principle of nature for the last decade, which states that any difference in energy (i.e. force) will level off in the least available amount of time." Ah, "the basic principle of nature", that well known law of physics we are always referring to! Which can apparently be applied not only to alternative models of the universe that dont include dark matter but also to evolution and...economics? It just sounds...off.

"A willing enemy, and sea-room!" - Old Royal Navy toast.

Wahahaha! I was expecting something like "Turned out to have exceptional high-angle-of-attack performance" or "Can pull 40gs". "Makes a great submarine" Classic KSP

There's a joke in here somewhere abut a pan-pacific garbage blaster, but I can't quite put my finger on it...

Agreed. Sadly, like a lot of our problems its damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-dont.

Nobody thinks its presence isn't harmful, but it is not a big pile of garbage a few hundred metres across. It is an area of increases garbage density several hundred or thousands of kilometres across. Any large scale way of scooping it up runs a risk of causing further harm IMO. As for 500-1000 years, or even 10,000years sometimes quoted is fairly old and usually based on landfill, an oxygen deficient and light-free environment with low bacterial load, even so-called "biodegradable" plastics can take decades to degrade under those conditions. The top few tens of metres of ocean (which is what we are talking about) is a much harsher environment where the material is exposed to UV, saltwater and algal and bacterial invasion, degradation can drop to tens or even single digit years, depending on the compounds. The key is to stop dumping in the oceans. If we can do that, the ocean will clean itself without any further effort, and we won't have to manufacture gigantic industrial machines and run them round the ocean for several decades.

Honestly? Leave it there. The "garbage patches" are huge and diffuse, collecting it all would create a lot of carbon dioxide, pollution and waste of its own (from production of a vast mass of new equipment and its long-term operation). As long as we *stop adding to it* the waste will eventually be broken down and slowly absorbed back into the ecosystem without too much disruption. The bacterial, chemical and electromagnetic (UV) environment should be sufficient to break down even the most durable plastics given sufficient time. It might be a long time, but when it comes to fixing gross ecosystems, there are no quick fixes. Of course, if we cant stop ourselves from dumping our trash in the ocean which sustains us, then some kind of removal will eventually become a necessity. Holy Heck @Scotius! Ninja'd! I cant believe it!

No but at least it was a token effort I wanted to do that thing from Johny Mnemonic but I left my powergloves at home

Does it count that I first googled the root of the links (http://goo.gl) to see if it was legit?

I dunno, but the new transport solution just arrived in China really floats my boat, we could super-use it in London, and I bet it would have more of an impact (reducing congestion in cities whilst improving public transport speeds significantly) than a hyperloop (reduced travel times from specific locations). http://gizmodo.com/china-actually-built-that-crazy-traffic-straddling-bus-1784724612

The study was listed as closed when I copied the link to a new tab, when I pressed the "please copy this link" button I got the "your response was recorded" message. Is this one of those things where the actual survey is which link you pick?

I suspect it might be impossible at shorter wavelengths, regardless of power. If the depth of rock/iron doesn't effectively block 100%, the cloud of plasma now surrounding you will... Of course, once most of the planet is an expanding cloud of plasma, it will rapidly move out of the way allowing you to send your signal...

This is actually already possible, it can be used to communicate with submarines, for example, although the data rate is staggeringly low. Essentially, the wavelength is so long that a substantial portion of the globe can be used as part of the antenna, if I understand correctly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_low_frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_low_frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_low_frequency Sorry if you were expecting the standard XKCD answer of "effects resemble a nuclear explosion"!

Whilst it may or may not make sense mathematically/physically to say that the escape velocity beneath the event horizon is "greater than c", things that are moving at the speed of light (ie:photons) still cannot escape, so it does make a sort of sense.

I know Gizmodo is a news site for ten-year olds, but I sometimes browse looking at the pictures and to see what hilarious scrapes the Rio Olympics have gotten into recently, and I just saw this which might have some relevant links in it: http://gizmodo.com/solar-capture-technique-turns-co2-into-burnable-fuel-1784522575 I take no responsibility for the quality of the article, but it seemed like legit science.