p1t1o

Hipster.

I think the scale of it is such that even just a "poke" would require nuclear charges...

+1 yes to charts. In fact, wouldnt it be fairly trivial to add a whole bunch of charts? I'd like to be able to, immediately after achieving orbit, see charts of height/speed/acceleration/mass etc. of the launch. Charts recording completed contracts w/profits+expenditures etc. Tables of my active vessels including how much each costs, how much dV each one as etc. etc. And more besides.

Honestly, Im of the opinion that the McDonals quarter pounder is one of the best burgers you can buy. Sure you can go to a fancy restaurant and get one made of grass fed aberdeen angus or somesuch, but whats this? Guacamole? what? Bread, meat, mustard, ketchup, onions, pickle. What more do you want?

...we tried...

Firstly, welcome to the forums! And to KSP! Secondly, it is VERY common, not just on this thread but on every science-discussion forum on the internet, for people with less experience to generate ideas based on faulty assumptions. It is also very common for these people - because it is not clear to them why their ideas are flawed - to GO TO THE MAT defending them, even in the face of more experienced ideas, and often, even in the face of facts from professionals who work in the field! This is not a personal dig at you, it is very common, I am sure I have done it before, since not a single one of us is born knowing everything we do today. So when people shoot your ideas down almost exclusively (and I dont think any of them are being rude about it) it is important that you dont fire back with things like your comments I quoted above. Who does that help? It doesnt help you, and it makes people far less inclined to give you constructive feedback. *** What makes you think this is not already done? Secondly, you cannot just place a bunch of sensors down and attach them to an expensive computer, write a quick program to digest it all and suddenly get 100% understanding of what is going on underground. Science is waaaaaay more complicated than that. And nature is waaaaay less cooperative. Sensors suffer from noise, failure, false positives. Software can only be based off our best models, which are approximations, what you are asking may not be possible with todays technology. The scale of the problem is very, very large indeed. You would be talking of a "hole" measuring kilometres (potentially tens or even hundreds) across and deep, and you want it to be underground. This is orders of magnitude larger than any engineering project ever attempted, and again, is probably not possible with todays technology. Whether it is made of metal or weighted down with "structures", to a volcano - let alone a supervolcano - it is nothing compared to the kilometres of crust that is already over it. This would be like trying to stop a bomb going off by wrapping it in tinfoil. Oh-me-oh-my. This might be the worst error of scale you have commited. We are not talking about a mobile phone app here. In terms of cutting edge research, developing highly advanced software, 20k will get you almost nothing. Here in my office we have a program that helps us to write official documents. It cost somewhere in the region of £2million, and it isnt highly experimental, intended to save the world, linked into thousands of advanced sensors etc. etc. *** It is clear that your ideas are flawed due to a lack of experience in many fields - this is not a fault. The main disconnect seems to be related to your sense of the scale of the problems. The energy contained in a supervolcano eruption is so far above that which could be contained with a "dome" of any size or material that it boggles the mind. And the cost and effort of executing these proposals is also so far off the charts that I cant even think of an appropriate metaphor. The fault is insisting that your ideas should not be shot down. This is a science forum, its ok to be wrong.

Excellent way of putting it.

"Urgh my leg..." "Its ok son, I have stabilised your leg, the paramedics have arrived Ill just go get them." ... "Hi, yes, I've stabilised the patient, given him 2cc's of morphine, he has remained concious and lucid with no head trauma. I have also splinted his leg and tied it into the shape of a giraffe." "Right. Wait..y-you did wh..what?" "Tied it into the shape of a giraffe obviously, look." "Oh m..*hurk*...oh my god...."

That did cross my mind, but too many mental images for certainty! Like maybe there was an off-duty clown who happened to be very skilled at improvised first aid? WHAT? IT COULD HAPPEN!

??? That a piece of medical equipment or some ingenious field-medicine?

Lets get one thing straight. Sending a child to space for a few days as an observer is one thing. Sending a child to the ISS for a full 100 day tour is another thing entirely. Would the child be expected to be a functioning crewmember, with all of the training requirements that would infer? It makes a ridiculous idea seem like actually a joke.

Motivation. If the AI could handle the cooking, programming and bookshelf whilst I chill on the beach, Id be much happier Perhaps that is the sign of intelligence - when given a task, an AI says "No I dont feel like it."

Negative Fifty Billion (the number of points that DeltaVerb loses for taking two turns)

So you're asking, if we had "Star Trek" technology, could we beat "The Federation-from-Star-Trek" in a military conflict? Something about the question bugs me..something about how we (humans) are the ones writing the Sci-Fi in the first place, so we (humans) would be fighting us (humans) with the same technology. So...it would always be a draw?

Right. Air accidents are rare, but the overwhelming proportion of them are caused by human error. But even knowing that, I'm still happier with a man-in-the-loop, go figure.

The more I think of it, the more the idea of "inspiring a generation" seems hollow. I mean, how cool is space, right? Did someone have to twist your arm to get interested? What is the stereotypical "example answer" to "What do you want to be when you grow up?" ? Its "Princess" or "Astronaut". Space is already awesome and most kids of the appropriate mind know it. Getting kids interested in space is the (very, very, very) easy part! The hard part is that there are far, far fewer positions available in the field than there are people interested in it. But that is another issue. Suffice to say, space exploration/budget, is NOT limited by the number of applicants! The whole question is a sham in the first place! And, oh look, the person who came up with the idea is selling a book. Colour me shocked.

I use a generator loaded with my favorite buzzwords: LaserBlade Dx-9000 Mark IX Exa-Module FireHawkBoosterFlame ZX-52alpha Just kidding, I just use things like: MunLander III DunaRover VI

Whether you call it "hard" or "easy", a fly-by-wire control system need: Access to multiple air data sensors for speed, angle of attack, dynamic and static pressures amongst others. Access to accurate data on the aircrafts attitude (wary, lazy etc. LOLJK) A fast computer to make all of the calculations in real-time. A large base of data generated by flight testing the airframe in all reasonably expected envelopes of flight. So compared to designing a nice, stable single-engined prop monoplane, yeah, building an FBW aircraft is a lot harder. Much easier to fly though. Its "easy" because of all of the work done in the mid-late 20th century and because we have the appropriate technology. Hopefully it is obvious why a fly-by-wire system operating in vacuum and freefall is "easier".

At this point, teaching your friend what a "mod" is would probably have been easier than attempting to distill a legal interpretation from all this. And it would probably take less time than copying an average gamedata folder to a stick. Liking KSP in the first place takes a braincell or two, they can manage.

Jeeze...Im not even sure I can do that...in one day? What about if its over a weekend?

Articles that have the term "AI" in the title are almost guaranteed to be making any achievement whatsoever sound like either the end of days or the singularity itself. They didnt just walk into a studio and announce "Computer? Make us some music!". There is a YUGE disconnect between what the general public thinks an "AI" is and what a computer scientist considers to be "AI".

In a perfect world, a well-executed gravity turn perfectly balances gravity losses against aerodynamic losses. You are flying at the point where any faster and you lose more to drag than you gain from spending less time in the gravity well. In KSP, you very quickly pass through the layers of atmosphere that are thick enough to illustrate this balance (as pressure drops away, so does drag, so the gravity term takes sole control) so it is more possible to do 15G launches from ground level without too much loss in terms of dV.

The question does not make sense. This is because you are trying to explain with scientific principles, an allegorical story that does not represent reality. If your position is that the material in the bible as literal truth, one must also discard scientific principles, and therefore all bets are off and (as it, in fact, says in the bible) you may as well say "God said it was so, and therefore it was so." Im not, at this point in time, saying either standpoint is more or less valid, but one cannot have both and remain logically consistent in either system. Attempting to do so is almost the definition of insanity. In other words, the concept of evolution / genetics is incompatible with the concept of adam+eve, you cannot believe in both and be sane. That is not a criticism, that just is. It is as true as 1=1. Also, not for nothing, but IIRC the bible explicitly specifies that Adam+Eve's children conceived their own children together. Yeah. *** In reality, there is no hard line between species (Even the definition of the word "species" is still debated by experts in the field). For example, there was a time when Homo Sapiens lived alongside and freely interbred with Homo Neanderthalensis. What does that make us? Fun Fact: Humans share something like 60-70% of their DNA with bananas. If you ignore the "species" dividing lines, then every living organism on earth is just an entry on a smoothly contiguous spectrum of "EARTH DNA", and the idea of "first human" is no longer meaningful. Its not like "And one day, a human was born!" Its more like "And one day, the creatures evolving intelligence on planet Earth decided to name themselves, and they called themselves "human"

I think it would result in one new aerospace engineer/advocate/enthusiast. When you were a child, were you inspired by other children, or the adults that actually did the cutting edge stuff? We're all interested in space because we've watched real astronauts do amazing things, not because we saw another child be toured around some space hardware. *** Basically, who is more inspiring, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, or Ensign Wesley Crusher? *drops mic* /thread

The B-52 in those pictures is operated by NASA, it doesnt mean that it is a military mission.