p1t1o

I think many of us feel like this occasionally. My preferred "systems failure" is a Russian invasion (I tend to ignore the socio-politico-economic environment that this would require, it gets in the way of my saviour fantasies). Living in this way precludes playing KSP though so Im not in any hurry. Maybe after I have played out v1.2.

Further to what Nibbs said, aircraft which simulate freefall execute a "negative-G pushover". They dont just throttle down and coast and try and "fall", they execute a powered maneuver where the G-force produced cancels out gravity in the cabin. During the simulated freefall stage, your floating body in the cabin is following a ballistic trajectory, the plane is not, it is actively flying the exact shape of a drag-free ballistic trajectory. The plane, as you say, experiences drag, so it must use engine power and aerodynamic control to attain this curve. The whole time you are in "freefall" the plane is actively maintaining this trajectory, there is no "coast" phase. It is almost as if the plane "lofts" you into the sky (the 1.8g pullup), and then flies in precise formation with you as you arc through the air. The pilot could look back through the cabin and control your position relative to the walls via small control inputs, if he so desired.

I think there would also be the benefit that flight would actually be possible. I wasn't thinking, "ooh the price of oil is quite high!", i was thinking "In breaking news: Touring one of the last remaining oil refineries, Donald Trump and Bill Gates clubbed together to fully fuel this jet."

Scientific issues, sociological, physical or otherwise, aside - I figured in the event the wager was lost, I could make a paper hat and then blend it into a fruit smoothie without too much problem. My "gut" says that that would be survivable [heuheuheuheuhe]. A Lannister always makes bets they can pay. Or something.

What I was getting at was that the higher oil prices go, the better the hydrogen fuelled SABRE starts to look. Civil air travel and air-breathing space delivery are but two of many possibilities.

If a roadmap is not a possibility, I'd settle for simply knowing that KSP is being pushed toward some kind of pinnacle and not towards a sort of "Zeno's paradox" kind of perpetual development.

I know this too, but knowing doesn't change much. Just because the bugs aren't introduced by the in-house devs, it doesn't make them any more bearable. Who knows what new feature in the future will require a unity upgrade. *edit* My concern is not with the current bugs, we have been assured time and again that they are being examined, and this is fine by me. My concern is with the long-term roadmap.

For the feature list to be unbounded, people's patience for debilitating bugs must also be unbounded...and I know mine isn't - its high, but not unbounded. I do know about this, but I cannot bring myself to invest time in an old version whilst there is another with more up-to-date features, I don't think that that is unreasonable - relying on old releases must be treated as a last-resort. And its not like recent previous versions are bug-free. I *am* happy with KSP, happy with Squad and happy that progress is still being made. Im not in any particular hurry (although obvs, faster is better than slower), but I do want to be able to see light at the end of the tunnel, I don't just want the bigger bugs smashed, I want them smashed without the possibility of them being replaced in a new update. Before the coders chime in with "How can you expect no new bugs this is software, any alteration has the potential to introduce bugs!" I have plenty of patience for hotfixes and whatever minor bugs might not be caught by QA, its the things like *wheels* being borked for half a year that I fear. A new feature every 16 months is not worth a new borked thing. /rant

@PB666 perhaps not, though the allure of Concorde-like travel lingers still. But SABRE will power something eventually, like I said, the military will be interested. And once oil runs out...

Hi Richard, welcome. First things first, I will speak very plainly and as literally as possible, to avoid as much contention as possible. Of course, being an outsider, I do not have the advantage of knowing the literature intimately, nor do I have the time or inclination to become familiar with the particular body of maths involved. This is only a statement of practical necessity, it would literally take me a long time to do this, and if I spent that time on every internet discussion, I would not have time for anything else! So I can't mathematically attack your claims, nor give in-depth analyses with reference to the minutae of current theory. This is just an internet forum after all. But I am a professional scientist with some experience, and my objection to your hypothesis is based merely on a "gut feeling" - that the experiment of dropping a mass through another hollow mass would not result in anything other than what the classical theory currently predicts. I see no reason to assume otherwise, even in the absence of empirical data. That is the main focus of my scepticism. To put it another way, I challenge the claim that the results of the "Small Low-Energy Non-Collider experiment" cannot be predicted by current Newtonian/Einsteinian theory. Honestly, the fact that nobody has offered to run the experiment for you (I assume the only thing preventing you from running it yourself is the extreme sensitivity required from the instrumentation which would be hard to attain without the necessary infrastructure) is telling in-and-of itself. And please don't give me some excuse about "mainstream science". Haha! Perhaps he thought that if he turned out to be wrong it might harm his career, and I dont think anyone would risk their career even for a 100-to-1 bet! Myself, I would prefer to make a bet that would be less harmful to my health were I to be proved wrong, but other than that am not invested in the outcome either way, so am free to maintain my wager. I cannot guarantee the size of the hat. In conclusion then, as you are personally invested in this body of work that you have, I do not want to attack something that is possibly close to your heart, or livlihood, as I would only really be able to use opinion and personal judgement to challenge something which is possibly quite important to you, and honestly about which you are probably privy to much more detail. I would consider it highly inappropriate to risk such harm/offence to another when I myself am risking nothing [this is not meant to be an assumption that I am right], especially when my instruments would be so rudimentary and without solid evidentiary treatment. I merely register my scepticism, and hope that I have explained it sufficiently.

I wouldn't expect RR to suddenly be in the business of designing planes, but BAE have a huge history of such involvement. Plus they already own 20% of Reaction Engines. Its almost a certainty that BAE are at some point going to produce a design incorporating SABRE (or SABRE-derived) engines, whether it is an airliner, a missile, a military aircraft or indeed, an SSTO, with the latter being the furthest in the future, if at all.

100% agreed. But further to that, am I the only one that is against "continual development"? ie: a game that will *never* be "finished"? Its all well and good having a slow but constant stream of new features, but just simply knowing that a feature will be added in the future makes me not want to play until said new feature is added. I admit thaht might be a personal foible of mine, but that is my position. This is all of course ignoring bugs which must be stamped out. If you are against bugs, then you surely must be against continuous development, as in that model it is inevitable that new bugs will periodically be introduced. I assume the KSP devs have a list of feature that they want included in the game. This list must be of finite length. Do they plan to add more features once this list is completed? How long can that go on for? I would like to know more about the long-term KSP roadmap, as it may give me some insight into when I can get into KSP long-term, without game-changing updates occuring in the middle of a playthrough - which for me may take 6months to a year, hence I've not had many, in fact all major KSP "phases" of mine have been cut short by an update which shook things up so much as to either necessitate a brand new career or a period of playing something else whilst KSP "stabilises".

I think it is clear now that the "Skylon" spaceplane is/was a concept only, intended simply to give credence to the idea of their new engine - "We think we can build an engine that can do such-and-such. If we can, look at the type of aircraft we could build!". This is pretty normal IMO. If any spaceplane does emerge from REL it will likely have major similarities to Skylon (given the same general design goal) but will almost certainly be a fresh project from the ground up. It seems more likely that someone else (eg: BAE) will design a spaceplane/other hypersonic airbreather, and then source the engines from REL. Much like Rolls-Royce don't build airliners, but their engines power most of them. I fully expect the military to be the first people using these engines.

There are 3 meanings to the word "organic": In chemistry, as you say, it means involving carbon-containing compounds. In biology (or otherwise outside of chemistry) it refers to biological material. In food, it is used to refer to...actually its pretty hard to pin down as there are no regulated definitions of "organic", you are free to come up with your own. The only restriction if if you want a badge or logo saying "certified organic" or whatever, then your food has to meet the various specifications of that particular certificate or badge. Its generally perfectly legal to put the word "organic" on any food at all, the only time you need to fill certain criteria is if you want a specific badge or certificate to put on there as well. This is true at least in the UK, and if things havn't changed drastically in the last couple of years or so. So basically if someone is talking to you about "eating organic" you should tell them not to be such a slave to marketing and just eat healthy. There is limited evidence that certified organic food prevents any health issues or provides any benefit, and whilst there is also only limited evidence of increased microbial contamination, there have been outbreaks of E.Coli that have been attributed to organic foods (due to unwashed, untreated food, fertilised with manure). And if someone tries to push "biodynamic" food towards you, laugh in their face. Then tell them that the laughter was actually a spell to make them go away, then watch to see if it works.

Using the Dr. Strangelove "How I learned to stop worrying and XYZ" trope deserves 1 rep in-and-of-itself, here you go

I hate that a good career game takes me about 6 months, and every time I start a new career after a major update, Im only halfway through before another update comes along and wrecks my mod build. I'm still waiting to see if I have to ditch my current playthrough after 1.1.3, most likely I will wait for 1.2, will probably have to start a new career, and will probably have to ditch that one too for 1.3 or 1.2.1 or whatever. *edit* o_0 Flipping heck! Never been a fan of Macs but dang thats fast! Is that for real? 14400 parts? Do you have resolution set to 640x480 lol!?

It makes me happy too, that my game doesn't self-destruct if left to its own devices. Im also happy that my computer doesn't catch fire if I leave the bedroom door open and that my curtains aren't made of spiders. I'm glad that progress is being made, but being out of the game for the moment, I don't really see myself getting back into KSP without 100% stable orbits, I don't think that that is unreasonable in a space game/simulation. Perhaps this problem was present before, but less detectable due to other problems. But now it *is* (and with the current fix, still is) detectable and its an issue. I asked a couple of times if the nature of the problem means that a 100% fix is impossible. Does anyone know if that is true/false?

Let me see if I get this right: All rocket engines are made less efficient by the presence of an atmosphere, the air pressure resists the expasion of the exhaust, reducing the attainable exhaust velocity and reducing efficiency. To make a rocket more efficient, the larger the nozzle the better to extract energy from the exhaust expansion, the more expansion of the exhaust that takes place within the nozzle, the more energy can be extracted from it (in practice this means: the more the exhaust can be accelerated). In an atmosphere there is an upper limit on how much benefit you can get from a larger nozzle. At some point the exhaust will "detach" from the nozzle (due to atmspheric pressure preventing further expansion) and any extra nozzle beyond this point is dead weight. In an atmosphere, the pressure of the exhaust gases at the nozzle exit ought to just about equal local atmospheric pressure - so any given nozzle has an altitude at which its performance is optimum. In vacuum, you can make your nozzle as large as you like, other practical matters place limits on it instead, and after a certain size the returns will be diminishing. So its not that sea-level-rated engines work better with a smaller nozzle, its that adding a larger one wouldn't do you any good. As for NTR's, as far as I understand it, there is nothing about NTRs which makes them operate differently than normal rockets with respect o the presence of an atmosphere, all of the above applies to them equally. Its their TWR which makes them less suitable for ascent (radiation concerns notwithstanding), very high thrust versions would need a very large reactor which would be extremely heavy. I've actually never seen a nuclear lightbulb that often in sci-fi, but they are just about the highest-performance concept in terms of NTRs so if any NTR is going to get you off the ground it will be one of those.

You should probably check out "Goat Simulator". It was a game initially released as an april fools gag (It was an unfinished game engine from some project or other that was full of bugs) but its become quite popular and has a fair following. You basically pilot a goat around a landscape with hilariously bugged-out physics and destroy stuff for points I think?

My practical ingenuity extends only about as far as using my piggy-bank and some string to stabilise a swishing window blind Im afraid. I did fashion a hook-on-a-stick to open/close out skylight too. Didn't make them myself, but I had a wallet made of ducktape that lasted longer than another one made literally out of steel.

Never seen one mate.

m2/s2 is J/kg, perhaps it was statement of kinetic energy, rather than delta-v?

Yeah, the shuttle. I assumed it extended to all NASA property, but I have no specific knowledge.

Elon: "I have invented...the Electric toothbrush, or HyperBrushTM!" World: "Erm...Elon? You got a sec real quick?"

Wouldn't it have been illegal for them to have it or something? I know bits of Columbia are illegal to own. If it was genuine - "Lost in the post" is a bit of a red flag in that regard. Wait did I read that correctly, a congressman was auctioning it off? Interesting story, keep it coming