p1t1o

This is true of course, but one has to be careful putting questions together that include impossible assumptions like indestructible materials or other outside-physical-law attributes, because the answer could be A) almost anything you can imagine, and/or B) completely meaningless in the real world, and/or C) impossible to answer without a framework set in reality. If you are deciding the rules for the question, beyond a certain point you may as well decide the answer at the same time. Your questions aren't so bad though

If its a negative charge above a certain level, I'd imagine that in a vacuum you'd shed an electron or several, reducing the charge held. Im not sure, anyone disagree?

Noice! Perhaps you could walk out onto those gantries and walkways that line the VAB too!

All of the 3D parts would work perfectly. That is to say, the entire game. VR goggles are a full stereoscopic 3D screen. Sure, padlocking the view to your head orientation is a very immersive feature that is not suited to all uses, but as far as I am concerned, the head-tracking is secondary by far. Plus, there are plenty of ways that you can intuitively use the orientation of your head to manipulate a camera PoV without it necessarily being a true First-Person perspective. VR goggles can be used for so much more than just "head simulation". Cool idea, but its not for me I feel like I'd find the perceived change of scale a bit jarring. I imagine one major roadblock to VR integration, for any piece of software, is that there are just so many different ways to implement it.

Honestly, if a piece of music can be listened to for hundreds and hundreds of hours without driving you completely insane, its a freaking masterpiece.

'Nam

Loan - one student's lifelong journey to solvency

I hate it when "Science and spaceflight" and "lounge" comments dry up in the mid/late afternoon.

From the "hydrostatic equilibrium" wiki page: "According to the definition of planet adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 2006, one defining characteristic of planets and dwarf planets is that they are objects that have sufficient gravity to overcome their own rigidity and assume hydrostatic equilibrium." "assume hydrostatic equilibrium" = "become a sphere"

There are many candidates, but you'd need a table of exact figures to get the one-right-answer. One thing to note, that in the grand scheme of things, chemical energy density is not particularly high. Pretty much any nuclear reaction beats them by an order of magnitude or few. Things at the top of the list tend to be advanced explosives and dont necessarily make great rocket fuels, if that is what you getting at. There are some figures here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density_Extended_Reference_Table Note the difference between metallic hydrogen (as used as a rocket fuel) and that which we can get from natural uranium in conventional reactors!

lol, most of the links when you google "reentry calculator" are for KSP mods! You get a much better selection (for your purposes) if you include the term "-KSP" (without quotes) in your search. Some choice picks: https://what-if.xkcd.com/28/ (Theres an XKCD for everything) http://personal.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/A.Pechev/lnlvp/AP-lec4.pdf http://www.theknowledgeworld.com/world-of-aerospace/Calculate-Aerodynamic-Heating-Rate.htm NB: turns out reentry dynamics can be quite complex, so the further you look into it, the harder making a simple approximation is. But there is a lot of good info out there. A not-completely-useless-but-VERY-simple approximation is just comparing total kinetic energy of your lump, with the heat capacity of the mass. If there isn't enough energy in the system to completely melt your lump, then you know part of it will probably reach the ground. Calculating just how much metal melts off quickly gets complex again, for example: the more metal that boils/melts off, the greater the insulating sheath of gas that surrounds your lump, lowering heating rates. My gut says that "foaming" the metal is your best bet, all those little bubbles would make great insulation, and the low density means more slowdown in the thin upper atmosphere, decreasing peak heat flux.

At first, when I saw the thread title I was like "Oh god, they are going to make a disaster movie about an eclipse now? This is a new low." This after reading about Gerard Butler's new..."film": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1981128/ “As a man heads into space to prevent climate-controlling satellites from creating a storm of epic proportions, his brother discovers a plot to assassinate the president.”

I think this might be more in the hands of the people handling the ports, which is not Squad. As for paying full price, you're not paying for mods, mods are free and developed by people in their own time for their own amusement, it sucks you cant use them, but its not down to an oversight on the dev's part. I dont think. Oh, and welcome to the forums!

This is the messy part, I want perfect understanding NOW!

Stupid biological nature...

Ugh, I hate reading about how messy and made up our lovely system of units really is...

Of course! Sometimes the art style of a game can be enough of a draw just on its own, and a game that on paper sounds really good can be awfully let down by poor choices in the art department. Conversely though, there are some games that do such a good job of utilising your imagination, that artistic beauty is not even relevant, obvious example would be text-based games, but I was thinking more in terms of hardcore strategy. It all adds to the same gestalt though, to be immersed, you have to want to be immersed, this might mean it needs to be beautiful, or it may not, but the skill of the developers is involved either way. If a game is gritty and ugly, like a post-apocalyptic world, does this make the game poor in art? No. Do I want to live in squalour and fight for survival? No. But I do want to immerse myself in a well-described and detailed environment. In games, as I suspect is the same in a lot of forms of art, ugly can be beautiful. And beautiful can be ugly (ie: we've all played games which are all graphics but are just crappy games)

In real life, yes. In game? Im not against it. Theres precious little reason to level up your kerbals, its supposed to be Kerbal Space Program, I'd love to see even a little token more put into crew stuff.

"Welp, we convinced them space was real Stan, you owe me a dollar."

Escapism, naturally. Replace this world/sensorium with another of my choosing, to gain sensory satisfaction and some relief from the horrors of normal life. But now it is so ingrained in my character that its as ubiquitous as sitting down with a cup of tea. Doing anything else in the waking space between one work day and another makes no sense. Just like it makes no sense to de-ice your car windscreen at 4am in the summer. "What do you do at night?" Sleep, obviously. "What do you do before that?" Game, obviously. Both are the same sort of question for me apparently. Its probably not a healthy state of mind.

There was also a lack of/poor documentation around the processes and the fact that in the intervening time the business disappeared with the employees scattered to the four winds. And then, presumably amongst other difficulties, there was a little matter that when they were trying to work out the manufacturing process, one of the raw materials was being produced with a more modern, more efficient process. This removed an impurity in the material which turns out was key to getting the right properties in the final product.

I think that there is plenty of room in the grey area between those two extremes! An ISRU boost is a perfectly reasonable alternative, but about the ability of pilots to effect change - If you are driving a car around a corner, you can drive it poorly around the corner, or you can drive it efficiently around the corner. The trajectory could be almost indistinguishable from an outside observer, but one driver could use slightly less fuel than another, simply by how he manipulates the clutch, which exact line he takes around the corner, how smoothly he operates the steering, it all adds up. Different mechanisms in flying a rocket of course, but the idea is the same - tiny adjustments in angle or thrust curve, taking into account quirks such as pogo resonance frequency or other esoteric things to get a minute percentage advantage, just like how a driver who "knows" his vehicle could get a minor but discrete increase in efficiency. It seems plausible to me IRL, without any fantasy caveats. Ok, maybe 5% is way more than you could realistically achieve IRL, and IRL autopilots are probably far better than humans....so thats the only caveat, you exaggerate the effect for gameplay.

We have gyroscopes with several orders of magnitude more force than is possible and no saturation, solar panels of ridiculous efficiency, a planet made of degenerate matter (in an impossibly compact system) and ion engines that make real world technology look like wooden torches and clubs. The "realism" argument is moot, I think. For everything. "How would an engineer increase efficiency?" By using his special key awarded at 5 stars which unlocks the "extra efficiency module" that is installed in all capsules of course. Perfectly reasonable. Boring answer: There are many compromises made to enhance gameplay, and many real-world factors that if included, would destroy gameplay. Having a bonus for your max-level kerbals is totally within scope and OP has a point about probe cores - at somepoint its like, why take a kerbal at all? And I like having a reason to bring those guys along .........impossibly accurate positioning systems, impossibly good sensor coverage of the system, Kerbals that are impervious to radiation, and require no resources to survive indefinitely, we've got jet engines with ridiculously wide operating envelopes, superluminal communications (theres a biggie!), fuel refineries the size of a small hatchback that can extract rocket fuel from rock in seconds, no lagrange points or other n-body phenomena...........

Personal jets? Heh? Why would an unmanned cargo ferry, or its engines, require man-rating? Skylon might be a marketing exercise or a demented pipe-dream, but if you cant see any market for a Mach 5+, 90k+ft alt. airbreathing engine... At the very least, I'll eat my hat if the military isnt watching with some interest.

The A350/787 however has to be man-rated for thousands of flights, multiple flights per day, not so with a hypothetical Skylon, would that not significantly reduce costs? Not that Im arguing the case that Skylon in its current guise is economically viable at this time - though it is clearly geared towards a world with much increased launch demand, I think that is the point of the whole thing. But I think we are all agreed that "Skylon" as a concept is more of a detailed marketing proposal for the engine than anything else. Its a significant step in propulsion technology, I for one am excited just by the engine.