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p1t1o

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Everything posted by p1t1o

  1. Reinforced Carbon-Carbon? Its quite a mature technology as it happens, invented for the Space Shuttle. Sure, it will be used in a different form factor under different conditions - actually less stressful conditions than the Shuttle - but research into carbon composites is fairly advanced. Thats why we are getting all these fancy new plastic airliners
  2. There is a rather interesting story related to old technology that goes around circles interested in nuclear weapons, obviously there are issues corroborating a lot of stories due to their classified nature, but there is much that is declassified and this piece of information is supported by various unclassified statements. Code-named "Fogbank" it is supposedly an aerogel of particular makeup used in certain warheads as the "filler" material in between primary and secondary components. It is assumed that it gives physical support to components when inert, and during detonation, must form a plasma that is transparent to certain types of radiation, and opaque to others. Whatever it does, however it does it, it is/was obviously a very specifically formulated material. Only thing is, it was produced only in small batches by a small facility, so when it came to look into refurbishment and modernisation of these warheads - years after manufacture - it was found that nobody could remember how to make it. Likely developed using data from live detonations, computer simulations at the time were not sophisticated enough to reproduce the required data. The whole process had to be reverse engineered from remaining samples - 15 years and $100million later, they finally (re)cracked how to manufacture something that was invented decades ago.
  3. Nobody wants to lift a pair of wings all the way to the moon, but I've always daydreamed about - What would it take to allow me to fly the shuttle around [conventionally, within the Earth's atmosphere] on rocket power? How long would a payload bay worth of LOx/H2 burn for at the required thrust? It might not fly for long, but for those few minutes, gawdDANG you'd be the hottest bird in the sky that day!
  4. i honestly dont know what could be coming. 1.3 seems like it would be a bit off to call it a "Important Announcement" since we're all on tenterhooks for 1.3 already. Bugfixes seems like they wouldn't need an announcement either. Porkjet parts were kinda discarded by squad werent they? I guess it would be something that they have kept secret, that we dont know a word about yet. So new NEW parts? It seems to be related(ish) to Yuri Gagarins aniversary, so stock Soyuz parts?
  5. PPM is just like percentage, just in millions instead of hundreds: ( 4.2billion / 1million ) * 400 = km^3 of said gas
  6. Its not clear if you mean re-vamping old X-15 airframes to make cut-price SSTOs or designing a bona-fide SSTO merely based on the X-15 (which wouldn't exactly be "cut price"). Because if re-vamping old airframes, the fist huge problem is that it is a half-century-old design which if used, would be ignoring a vast amount of improved aerospace knowledge in propulsion, hypersonics, *safety* etc etc. Not to mention that its payload capacity was pilot+zero. The X-15 was experimental and thus by definition, designed with a lack of knowledge. I dont want to say that nostalgia is anathema to aerospace, because we all cherish our nostalgia for our favorite craft, but I'd say that it has very little place in the field of aerospace design.
  7. Ooh! You could call it "The Thunderdome"! But also plz no
  8. Honestly, it wouldn't take *full* advantage of what VR can offer, but any 3D application is "suited" to VR. VR's unique seling point is not "A view that rotates with your head". We've had that for ages. VR's unique selling point is TRUE 3D and 6 degrees of freedom. You make it so the normal 3rd person view is what you get when you "look forwards". If you look left or right or up or down, you see what is in that direction - usually nothing but space. When you are not looking at empty space you are looking at a FULLY 3D KSP!! With depth-perception!! Add in 6 degrees of freedom and you can get really good control over your view, useful in VAB for designing those tricky intricate bits, or just viewing your creation. Plus also looking around could have some utility on planetary surfaces and a little bonus could be a 1st-person EVA view. I'm 100% for VR. Are people really that against it because KSP is 3rd person? (I havnt been a part of any other VR threads) *** TL;DR - VR would be fully worth it just for the stereoscopic 3D. *** inb4 - "This isnt important they should work on other stuff" Yeahyeahyeah, move along now.
  9. http://www.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf (Its a legit download, link working as of today) A must-read, and exceptionally good as a "KSP primer". *** A bit on the fictiony end but "realisticish", both excellent: Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson Seveneaves by Neal Stevenson
  10. I think its a "don't know", but if it makes you feel any better, I think thats where we were from the get-go.
  11. OhGodOhGodOhGodOhGodOhGodOhGod PLZ NO Sure its "an" idea...
  12. The N1 was a failure. The F14 is never coming back. The Sr-71 cannot be turned into a cut-price SSTO. But rest assured, if Russia, or anyone else wanted to go to the moon, it could be done. Its not that we dont go back to the Moon because we dont have a vehicle - we dont have a vehicle because there isn't enough reason to go back. "Because its hard" doesn't cut it anymore.
  13. Well to be fair, there are lots of open questions about BHs! Im not a professional astrophysicist, but hypotheses like "arbitrarily hot barriers" tend not to resolve if you ask me. Thats just my gut though, very unscientific. When science starts talking about information as a physical quantity, my mind starts to swim.
  14. Well thats me wrong again that'll teach me to skip reading a paper... Though that equates to a coating of a glass, which I presume is nice and see-through, compared to aluminium metal. From a quick google around hte process it looks to be an abrasion protection layer. Weird since its diamond, perhaps its less permeable to hydrogen. *edit** You know, I really need to spend the half hour or so to digest these things before shooting my mouth off... "First, there are questions about the experimental arrangement. The author should prove that the observed reflection is from the hydrogen sample and experimentally exclude a possibility of reflection from the layer of alumina at the surface of diamond anvil. Amorphous alumina has a band of 3 eV (Århammar, et al. 2011) and it might be closed at very high pressures. Other materials for coating should be used to exclude a possibility of reflection from alumina which might react with hydrogen at very high pressures. Reaction of hydrogen with the surface of diamond at megabar pressures is also possible (Liu, Naumov et al. 2016) and should be taken into consideration." So looks like you were right @Steel, reflection from the deposited alumina is a possibility, even if they havn't resolved it yet.
  15. Its not that. The diamonds were not coated - it would make it hard to see what they were trying to study. It would also be a contaminant, if you are trying to observe hydrogen in a unique environment, you dont want another substance in there that might also undergo a weird change, you wouldn't know what you were seeing - its hard enough with a single known substance. When they compressed their sample of hydrogen, first they observed it going from clear to black as one transition was reached (I forget the specifics) and as pressure was increased, it turned reflective. This is/was thought to signal the creation of a metallic phase. I think the hoo-haa now is because another team has come along and said that there are phases of hydrogen that are reflective that are not metallic, thus throwing doubt on the initial conclusion. I think. lol are you suggesting its lying around somewhere still in the lab with folks in white coats on their hands+knees looking really hard at the floor You know, I cant refute that, that could be happening.
  16. Nonono. We dont need 1980's conspiracy theories, we have our own (You cant *hide* hypersonic aircraft, their skin will be hundreds of degrees C in places and you can even detect them acoustically) SAMs were the reason, but the replacement was recon satellites, low level was for armed penetration. Nowadays with hypersonics on the horizon ("horizon" - the proposed "SR-72" still does not have an engine) the idea of putting eyes over any location on the globe within 24 hours - something not always possible with satellites - is attracting attention again. Although if it actually comes to pass and isnt just an aerospace firm keeping up appearances is anybody's guess (The SR-72 for example, is a conceptual aircraft only at this point and has been thought up off Lockheed's own back. The US air force has "expressed interest" but they didn't ask for it or provide an operational requirement). High-speed missiles are, of course, all the rage.
  17. So apparently the diamond vice cracked and the sample disappeared - so much for remaining stable. And whether or not they had actually succeeded in creating a metallic phase is also now in question. http://www.sciencealert.com/the-world-s-only-metallic-hydrogen-sample-has-disappeared https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1702/1702.04246.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1702/1702.05125.pdf
  18. Just out of curiosity, will any of these so-called "highways" lead to a volume of increased risk, a "dangerzone" if you will?
  19. Like blueprints, Apollo is cool , but that is a hideous dress
  20. So neither are the map, manouvre nodes, colour, 3d graphics etc. KSP could entirely be played by watching numbers change on a spreadsheet. None of this is *necessary* This isn't the "Suggest only the absolute necessities" thread! *** It would take time and many, many clicks to first leave your career save, load up another save (sandbox, unlimited resources, cheat mods/modes enabled) build your craft, cheat it over to your target, design/re-design your craft, exit sandbox save, load career save, import the craft file you just finished, and then fly the mission only to fail and require another round of all of that. Far better (quicker, more intuitively useful to the design process, more immersive, and potentially more educational) to be able to click a button in the editor to load your current craft into some sim environment that will show you what will happen when you do different stuff. At the very least, it will simulate a real part of an aerospace design process. Plus, as we all know, there is already a wind tunnel at the KSC...
  21. Lots of interesting comments so I will not quote everything, but some relevant points: Quantum entanglement - It has not so far been shown that quantum entanglement can be used to transmit any kind of information. The concept is more akin to an encryption key, than a transmitted message. Event horizons - The event horizon is only a virtual boundary where escape velocity = 1.0c, nothing in particular special necessarily occurs there. With large black holes (like the super-heavy ones you find in galactic centres) the gravity gradient at the event horizon can be very, very mild - in that you would not actually notice *anything* as you crossed it. Oh, I mean you'd definitley notice that you were falling towards a giant black hole, but nothing would happen to you as you crossed the horizon. With smaller holes, the horizon is closer to where the extreme gradients start. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox
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