-Velocity-

So your argument is that since there is only one explanation, then that one explanation must be the accepted explanation for how it works, irrelevant of how silly the explanation is?! HAHA. Ok. So, I propose that the EM drive works because there is an invisible pink unicorn hitched to the front of it that pulls it. The more electric current that flows, the stronger the unicorn is shocked and the harder it tries to get away. There. Now with this unicorn drive hypothesis, you have a strong contender to the virtual particle quantum plasma mumbo-jumbo, because according to your rules, being stupid does not disqualify a hypothesis from consideration.

No, that's an over-simplifcation; emotions aren't just for social animals. Emotions are exhibited in all higher animals, and they are critical in motivating a creature to take actions. While emotions aren't the whole driving force behind action, they are a big part, and so an advanced machine/synthetic intelligence would likely have them. At the very least, I think a machine/synthetic intelligence will need a sense of satisfaction when it is fulfilling its desires.

I like it. What's the underside look like?

Thanks for the ideas, at least those of you (all except one) who did so in a respectful manner. I didn't manage to get any time to play in the SPH last night, maybe tonight though.

Me too. If even someone who is not a spacecraft expert can recognize that Dawn's camera is abnormally small, the most logical assumption is that there is a good reason for it. Thanks! That sounds like it could be a reasonable explanation.

Just to contrast, they put 208 mm and 60 mm telescopes aboard New Horizons. Yes, I know, New Horizons flies by Pluto at long range, so large telescopes are absolutely required to get the kind of resolution we'll get with Dawn in low orbit. But look at some example Mars orbiter missions. According to Wikipedia, Dawn's lowest planned orbit over Ceres will be 375 km. According to Wikipedia, the MRO orbits Mars even lower, at an altitude of 250-316 km, and it packs a 500 mm telescope. Another example, the THEMIS camera on Mars Odyssey has an aperture of 120 mm. So yea, compared to all the example spacecraft I looked at so far, Dawn's 20 mm aperture seems pitifully small. It's baffling. - - - Updated - - - I don't think it's mass. The 208 mm telescope on New Horizons only masses 8.6 kg according to Wikipedia, and that sounds pretty reasonable. Compare that to Dawn's starting mass of 1240 kg, and the delta-V penalty of a larger camera doesn't seem prohibitive.

That's like asking why do you need a microscope if you can bring something right up to your eye. It's always better to see more detail, especially since this may be the ONLY space mission to visit Ceres in the next 50 years or more! It's our ONE look at Ceres in most people's lifetimes, and they send something with a camera that's barely better than the one on my cellphone. - - - Updated - - - It is the imaging camera... Dawn does not carry separate navigation and high res cameras. The imaging camera (which is also the navigation camera) is called the "Framing Camera". Dawn has two of them, and they are identical, with a 20 mm aperture. Dawn also carries a spectrometer, and it apparently can take images, but they are not very high res images either. Maybe a bit higher than the Framing Cameras, you be the judge. The image below is a composite image of the surface of Vesta from one of the 20 mm Framing Cameras and the spectrometer; the smaller strips were taken with the spectrometer. Anyway, I'm not criticizing, though some of you may think that I am. I am not that dumb to think that I know better than them. I just can't figure out why they would send such a small-aperture camera! You don't hire a photographer who takes pictures with his cell phone to take your wedding photos!

Thanks for the heads-up! I just checked yesterday on Dawn's NASA site, I figured new images HAD to be coming soon. I'm still baffled why the camera on Dawn has only a 20 mm aperture. It's only a few times sharper than the human eye. Surely, with all the money they spent, they could have put a camera with a bigger lens on the spacecraft. Anybody know why they chose such a small lens?

Well, it's based on personal experience for me, I can't get a plane to be able to rotate unless the landing gear is near the CoG. I'd be interested to see what you have. One thing that I HAVE wondered about doing is forcing rotation with nose-mounted rocket engines. Crude, but it should work and the nose engines would only be on for a very short period, so they shouldn't waste much fuel. But... it's so crude. Just give us bigger landing gear, Squad! It's pretty ridiculous we got such huge space plane parts, but not bigger gear to compensate. We're still stuck using RC plane wheels... - - - Updated - - - Thanks for the ideas... and that's definitely gotta be the ugliest space plane I've ever seen. I actually intend that as a complement It's a masterpiece demonstration of how bad the stock aerodynamics are. It's like you made an SSTO Wright Flyer.

The problem is that the landing gear are short and must be near the CoG. Moving the CoG to the middle of the plane does not solve anything; it becomes impossible to take off without scraping your tail against the ground due to the short stubby landing gear. I've built vertically launched air breathing rockets that can land again vertically, but they're not really space planes. I'm interesting in seeing all other solutions people have come up with. Even if I don't want to USE them, they still might give me ideas. It looks like your space plane is beginning to go down towards the tail-dragger category, though it's still obviously a tricycle. I think tonight I might try building a space biplane.... the dumber looking, the better.

All my big space planes always evolve to the same basic design. Why? 1) There is only one stock landing gear, and it is ridiculously tiny and short. Everything stems from this... 2) Landing gear must be placed closed behind the center of gravity or you can't pitch up the nose during take-off. 3) The nose must pitch up during takeoff (duh), bringing the tail closer to the ground (double duh). The fulcrum for this movement is the aft landing gear (triple duh). 4) Therefore, because 1), the aft landing gear must be near the aft of the plane to provide enough freedom for angular motion for the nose to pitch up without the tail touching the ground and exploding. 5) Therefore, by 2), the center of gravity must be near the aft of the aircraft. 6) Therefore by 5) most of the wing area must be at the aft of the aircraft to keep the center of lift behind the center of gravity. A delta wing does this well. 7)Because the trailing edge of the delta wing is close to the center of gravity, ailerons placed there do not provide sufficient pitch authority during flight. Pitch authority is established by placing canards by the nose, far from the center of gravity, giving them sufficient authority to pitch up the nose. 8) horizontal stabilization is established by placing vertical stabilizers to the aft of the aircraft. And therefore, all large space planes end up looking vaugely like this- Have you guys thought of any ways to fight this "problem" with stock parts? I've got some ideas- 1) Place landing gear at the end of something the juts downwards from the fuselage. It looks ridiculous, is unrealistic, and unbalances the spacecraft when in space under rocket power 2) A variant of the above; place engines on the top and bottom of the fuselage, and attach the landing gear to the bottom engines. It will look pretty ridiculous, but I imagine it would work, and at least it would look different. Another problem though- the nosewheel must be extended downward too. 3) Make the space plane a TAIL-DRAGGER? It would be pretty ridiculous, but it might be kind of hilarious to fly a space plane into orbit that looks kinda like a Vought F4U or Sopwith Camel. Do you guys think a tail-dragger would actually be practical in KSP? Not that I have a problem with the Rafale in particular, I'm just sick of ALL my big space planes looking exactly the damn same. For once, I'd like to put the engines on the WINGS, which are located where wings are USUALLY located on aircraft. Wouldn't that be nice? ANYWAY, I'm curious what you guys might have thought up. Remember, stock only. I did my time on mods last year, right now, I'm just seeing what I can make wholly with stock.

I find the idea that we won't be able to communicate with superintelligences a little silly. They will be able to communicate with us any ideas that humans can understand. There may be some things it understands and thinks, however, that it simply cannot make us understand. That's OK. It's just that to us, some of its actions may seem indecipherable. Take dogs for example. We are vastly smarter than them, but we can still communicate at rudimentary levels. I can tell my dog to "go get a toy" and she'll return with something to throw (if she remembers where she left her current toy, that is). She'll also start barking and looking at her leash and at me sometimes, obviously telling me she wants to go for a walk on the leash. So we can "talk" to each other. But she doesn't understand why I do what I do. It would be easier for a superintelligence to communicate with us, I think. I believe there is a certain level of intelligence that you achieve, and communication becomes vastly easier. Humans are smart enough to have concepts of self, past, present, future, abstract non-physical things, a written and spoken language capable of encompassing all these aspects, etc. I don't think that the example of human:dog is exactly analogous to superintelligence:human. Not only do humans have a vastly better communication system, it's possible to imagine that a superintelligence could temporarily partition a bit of itself to mimic human thought patterns so that it could better communicate with us when it wanted to. I'm also not convinced that there isn't a limit to how complex ideas will tend to be. For example, you don't have to be infinitely smart to understand the ALL the laws of physics (even those we don’t know about) and how the universe came to be. The universe is not infinitely hard to understand. But are humans smart enough to understand it? In the end though, as far as the threat to humans goes, it's not really the intelligence that matters, it's what motivates the intelligence. At its very base, any system of ethics and purpose is logically indefensible and comes down to a set of "arbitrary" statements about right and wrong or likes and desires. Just as 1+1 = 2, murder is wrong. Same thing. Any intelligent entity has to have desires, a purpose, and a belief system or it wouldn't take any actions at all (because there would be no driving force to take actions). Even a superintelligence will have these logically indefensible desires and moral beliefs. There is no reason we can think that the same or a similar set of morals that humans use cannot be ingrained into a superintelligence.

I wouldn't be so certain that we really know what goes on inside a black hole, or even at the event horizon. Astrophysicists certainly aren't certain. A mass that has the mass of the entire observable universe has a Schwarzchild radius about equal to, or even exceeding, the radius of the visible universe. If you include dark energy and dark matter, then the mass of the universe is about 2.5x10^54 kg, which has a Schwarzchild radius (392 billion light-years) which is much greater than the radius of the observable universe. Even if you cut out dark energy, the Schwazchild radius is still greater than the size of the observable universe, though I am not sure which number is the "proper" number to use for the radius of the observable universe in this particular case. In case you didn't know, the Schwarzchild radius is the minimum radius that a massive object can be compressed to before it collapses into a black hole; it's also the radius of the event horizon. An additional interesting thing to ponder- to escape the visible universe, you must travel faster than the speed of light. Sound familiar? Anyway, yea, we really don't know for certain what happens inside a black hole, or even so much at the event horizon. If an infalling clock supposedly stops at the event horizon, then is even really proper to talk about what happens inside a black hole? There is nothing happening from our point of view. Which does not seem possible to reconcile with our predictions that an infalling observer observes himself reaching the singularity in finite time, but that an external observer observes the infalling observer reach the singularity in infinite time while observing the black hole evaporate due to Hawking radiation in finite time!!! So I wouldn't be so sure of what really "happens" in there. We shouldn't dismiss ideas that "sound crazy", because black holes themselves are pretty crazy, and we simply don't understand black holes yet as our laws of physics are not complete. In that light, it's certainly possible that black holes could somehow birth new universes. The idea that we- and the entire universe- are inside a black hole has been seriously suggested by theorists. As I said earlier, there are certain eerie similarities...

Yes, but the orbital plane wouldn't have changed very much before an LM left in lunar orbit would have crashed into the surface. Why? Because it takes a massive change in velocity to significantly affect the orbital plane, but only a tiny change is required to switch a low orbit into an orbit that intersects the surface. Thus, you could narrow your search down to within a narrow strip centered on the last known orbital plane, ruling out almost all of the impacts since 1969. It's probably near-to-certain that there were no natural impacts as large as the LM would have been, within that narrow strip since 1969. ADDITIONALLY, you could rule at all impacts that appeared to have come in from a high angle. The impact the LM would have made would have been a grazing impact. BUT, of course, we don't have high enough resolution "before" images. The LRO might provide high enough resolution images to find some candidate, fresh-looking impact scars, but without before images or landing at each site, we'd never know for certain.

There ought to be a disk even if the black hole wasn't spinning due to conservation of angular momentum.

Good luck figuring out which impact crater or marking was due to the Eagle impact; you need before and after images and the "before" images taken from Earth are almost certainly not going to be high enough resolution- and that's assuming it impacted on the near side. The far side images from before 1969 are probably going to be even worse.

The Moon has a lot of irregularities in its near-field gravitational field. These are caused by concentrations of mass just under the lunar crust ("masscons") and I think they are all associated with the lunar mares (the lava-filled impact basins). We discovered these masscons when we first started lunar exploration and found that low orbits around the Moon are not stable. So if the Eagle was left in low orbit, then the masscons would have made it crash into the lunar surface at an unpredictable spot a long time ago.

That's correct because real-life lazors work exactly like they do in Star Wars. Actually, using lasers to slowly ablate the surface of an asteroid can in fact work... but like most deflection schemes, it just takes a long time.

Correct. Also, tidal forces are not a fundamental physical limit, so they cannot be what prevents you from pulling back the rod. The question raised is a good one. Remember, NOTHING can escape the event horizon. So what even keeps the rod holding itself together? If it's a rod made out of the kind of matter we're familiar with, it's held together by electromagnetic forces, which exert themselves through the exchange of photons- virtual or real. So the very forces that hold the rod together couldn't communicate across the event horizon. Yet, we're told that an infalling observer notices nothing unusual as he crosses the event horizon, especially the event horizon of a supermassive black hole. He doesn't fly apart as he crosses the event horizon. He also supposedly doesn't cross the event horizon in finite time from the point of view of the external universe. At the SAME time, we're told that black holes can gain mass, which isn't possible if nothing ever crosses the event horizon!!! I once read that infalling material is added to a black hole in finite time because as it approaches the event horizon, the event horizon expands to meet it- because the added infalling mass has its own gravity that creates a new, slightly larger event horizon. This is at odds with the many statements I've read about how infalling matter never crosses the event horizon of a black hole. Yea, I don't get it.

On some of my rockets, I have exposed engine bells on the second stage. To get rid of them in a fairly realistic manner- if I'm not worried about part count, at least- I'll add decouplers below them and attach an inverted nose cone to give them a more realistic, aerodynamic shape... even though it actually hurts the performance of the rocket a tiny bit. I don't know if this helps you or not, since you didn't say what the application is you're intending these engine shrouds for.

I'm sure there are people who would do just fine on such a trip. The most important thing is not physical space it's keeping the mind busy with enrichment activities. It might be that most humans, with the proper enrichment activities, would make the trip just fine, and we simply need to find out what the problem psychological traits are that we need to avoid, if those traits are not already weeded out by the astronaut/cosmonaut/whatever selection process. Or, it could be much harder, in that we can only select certain kinds of individuals to make the trip. If those traits were strongly hereditary, and the voyage time was not reduced greatly in time, a distant society could end up being socially and governmentally extremely different than an Earthly society. Could be the start of a sci-fi novel

Best alternate history novel I read was Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card. I thought it was perhaps the best novel OSC has ever written, maybe even better than Ender's Game.

And there is no difference in my experience between two parts docked and two parts connected with a docking port that is "coupled".

Well, then you didn't understand it. Because "the check the money box" is quite expensive. You'd never apply the strictest quality control to a whole rocket- just the interplanetary part. Because launching rockets that never fail is not as fun and interesting. Because real rockets explode. Because a lot of people enjoy playing "rescue missions"- just look how many people make threads like "help, Jeb is stuck on the Moon"! The hardest difficulty doesn't allow you to revert, it's catering to people who try to role play the game. In short, this may be a novel concept to you, but not everyone plays the game the same way, and for the same things, that you do. It would not remove random failures, just mitigate them, and unless you spent exhorbitant sums, you'd still deal with random failures during launches. And since the lives of Kerbals cannot be replaced by insurance, then you are forced to design adequate launch escape systems. I understand this is utterly mystifying to you, but if you open your mind and accept that other people have other play styles, it might start to make sense

You didn't read my post at all, did you? As per my suggestion, you would be very unlikely to suffer failures on interplanetary missions if you spent money on good quality control. And your rocket you spent days designing? If you bought insurance, you'd be refunded, and could try again. And I suggested that this system be an optional system, too. Those who like it, play with it for added realism, those who don't just don't. It's a single player game, after all, and the players should have the freedom to choose. - - - Updated - - - No, I haven't seen the posts on random failures. I searched too, but the KSP forum search tool is really horrible, I can never find what I'm looking for. And I doubt any posts presented random failures like this- with insurance and quality control aspects mitigating them and adding new gameplay and tech tree options and value. Though this isn't like all that original of an idea, so someone could have easily thought of it and posted before. And there would be those who wouldn't want to save and reload, especially if random failures were not such a bad thing- if they were mitigated by insurance, for example. An additional suggestion- to actually reward players for random failures- perhaps if a rocket randomly fails, (not only can you be refunded if you purchased insurance) but Kerbals "learn" from the failure and parts associated with that rocket receive a quality control boost, reducing their chances of failing in the future. A lot like real life.