Diche Bach

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That is what was always assumed until they started tabulating how much mass they could see and realized there is not enough.

"You're not getting more out than what you put in, and it's impossible to eliminate waste:" well . . . then why don't galaxies fly apart? And why is the universe continuing to expand, indeed accelerating in doing so. My feeble grasp of these matters suggests to me that the universe breaks the laws in very major ways and we do not yet comprehend what the loving poodle it is doing.

My point being: we do not comprehend the universe yet. The need to invoke dark matter and dark energy demonstrate that.

No foolin' . . . well I might have to try that. Any recollection of a thread describing the technique or what I might search "Get Out and Push" maybe? My EVA skills are only "nominal" so this might be a chance to bump them up to "skillful."

Well, I think it would take a whole semester really. I used to teach Evolutionary Psychology, as well as Human Origins, and Sex and Evolution and while none of those courses set out specifically to convince anyone that "Kuhltuur" is a word that describe a natural mammalian propensity to use the behavior of conspecifics as a guide to how to behave, and not only a description of highly derived and sophisticated human stuff, that was always one of the themes in my work. My old mentor wrote an article back in the late 1980s that is probably as good a place to start as any, but I'll be damned if I can remember the name of it. His name was Mark Flinn, and the title was something like "Cultural learning: the Developing Synthesis from Evolutionary Biology" or some such. He wrote an update to it in the last 5 years or so. If you google his name and all words "culture evolution" you should get some hits.

Hmmm, it is an interesting question and I haven't got this far yet. What about: 1. Put the fuel into a fuel depot in Minmus orbit. Me, I'd use those "inflatable" fuel tanks in that one mod (cannot recall the name now). = -150dV? (if that?) 2. For Interplanetary missions: A. Launch your interplanetary ship into Kerbin orbit (or skip it and go straight for Minmus) = - 750 to 1200 dV (you can get to Minmus cheap if you get the right Mun gravity assist and the stars are aligned) B. Rendezvous with the fuel depot in Minmus orbit = - 150 dV?? C. Escape Minmus orbit and return to "very high" Kerbin orbit = - 150 dV (probably a bit less) D. Execute your burn for interplanetary mission from there: in very high Kerbin orbit (between 45 and 47 million or whatever it is) So, just totally ballparking here . . . that would mean that for each interplanetary mission, you are expending between 1200 and 1650 dV, considerably less than the bare mininum to get into LKO, which (I think) means that (given any interplanetary ship that was not constructed in orbit has to effectively 'get to LKO' anyway) for missions launched from Kerbin, this is still more efficient. If you always insure that the fuel "payloads" you transfer are "large" (say 8 or 9K dV without payload) then even better. The other thing you could do to up the efficiency: Also have a "tank farm" depot in LKO (or even at ~240km). Design a craft with the sole purpose to deliver empty "Interplanetary Stages" to this Tank Farm. They can be mostly empty (include enough to get to Minmus perhaps). If you put a docking port on the retrograde side of your interplanetaries and configure your first couple stages to have just enough to get to the Tank Farm. Once it is at the tank farm, dock up with an "Interplanetary Stage" with lots of fuel storage (but is mostly empty) and head for Minmus. Because I use Stage Recovery, this would be particularly appealing as I'd be recovering more or less everything. Of course, the even MORE efficient method is to skip Kerbin altogether. Build orbital construction facilities around either Mun or Minmus and build the spaceship in orbit! There is at least one mod that allows you to do this. When/if humanity actually starts to get serious about exploring the solar system, it is my understanding that this is how it is likely to be done: getting into orbit and to the moon will only involve transporting personnel and materials/finished products that cannot be fabricated in space. With a few asteroids captured into orbit around the Moon, and Lunar bases that extract what there is to be had there (as well as self-sustaining orbital/lunar food and air production facilities) much of the currently prohibitive costs of space flight will be defrayed. Of course, this requires a level of infrastructure that we are not likely to see anyone willing to make the initial investments on for quite some time.

Personally, I'd just send up a ship with an extra seat (or a 1 seater assuming you can control it by remote). Orbital rendezvous are challenging, but far less challenging I'd guess than trying to use your jetpack to do a burn to put your spaceship into reentry. There are lots of good tutorials on how to do an orbital rendezvous. Not aware of any that cover "pushing your ship" while on EVA Pushing in EVA sounds destined to not work. In my experience, if you so much as bump into something at faster than 0.5m/s the result will be both the Kerbal and the object careening off into the cosmos, entering an orbit around Sagitarrius A . . . ADDIT: I found this particular thread (and the links in it) to be quite helpful in getting me proficient with docking . . . although in your case, you don't need to dock, you just need to rendezvous, i.e., get the two ships close and nullify relative motion so the tranded Kerbal can EVA from one ship to the other.

Ah! Given I've never looked at those files I had no idea what you were referring to. Good stuff! QUESTION: is that syntax C# or some variant of it? Where are the semi-colons?

Can you be more specific?

Assuming you are referring to Kerbin, if you have the heat settings high enough, and if the altitude/orbital velocity are high enough, and assuming they are not protected by an ablator somehow: as far as I know yes, they will die. It's the nice thing about thick atmospheres, they burn up most of the junk that falls out of the cosmos. If you put a command seat "behind" (on the radial/retrograde/"up" side of) a heat shield, then the command seat and Kerbal can survive no problem. But then you have to make sure the thing doesn't flip over in flight, i.e., that the face of the heat shield stays prograde during the descent.

What the heck are the good for "in orbit" though? Fuel? Science? Real Estate?

You, like all we see or seem, are but a dream, within a dream. If Ray Bradbury were alive today, would he approve of KSP?

No.

Dramamine please.

Doh!!

An awkward little peccadillo, no doubt. Who will acknowledge the lives of the lost geese?

Same experience except I lived between ICBM bunkers out in the cornfields of northwest Missouri. It was the occasional tornado warning sirens (also used for the "The Big One is Coming") that got us worked up.

Lets hope it isn't "improved" too much though. After all, if it is just as easy to fly with SAS as without it, then the point of reaction wheels, and pilots becomes more moot, no? I actually hope they keep the balance between SAS no-SAS about like it is today = there is a real benefit to using probe cores, reaction wheels, and pilots.

Impressive, most impressive.

Yes, and you may have missed it but "Chimpanzees have culture." Its the new thing in natural sciences: tearing down the anthropo-barriers! (I love repeating that, it must make the hyper-PC PoMos go ape-poopy given their highly anthropocentric notions of identity, subjectivity, relativity, etcetarativity) Hell, crows probably have culture, maybe even horses! I really enjoyed Kerbiloid's posts up above, but I wanted to point out: asteroids do fit the definition of natural selectors quite nicely, even if they destroy the entire biosphere by melting the surface of the planet into a molten lake. Natural selection is merely the elimination of that which is worse relative to that which is better given any particular environmental conditions. A bolide impact changes environmental conditions = new rules about what is worse/better. We should be thankful for this, because apparently we exist because a nice asteroid changing Earth enough to open up some niches for our mammal ancestors to radiate into, thus faciliating the evolution of the primates (but you probably already knew all that . . . it was mostly just for the spectators). Also, I take 'mild' issue with the notion that the transformation from full-time foraging to full-time farming "took a long time" 10,000 before present (BP) to 7,000 BP doesn't strike me as "a very long time." Yes, it didn't happen in a couple generations, but 3,000 years is only 35 to 190 or so generations depending on whether you want to define a generation in terms of the maximal lifespan or the time to sexual maturity.

Eukalale. Have had this as my desktop for a while now (always had a thing for red heads) and this one has been bugging me If Dark Phoenix and Buddha had a kid, what would happen?

Same here! You've particularly captured the effect of #2 @Brikoleur (person who reopened the thread) . . . I agree in general about the planes. I too have a bit of experience with flight sims, and I find the planes in KSP to have the same sorts of problems you describe. That said, one can (sort of) get the hang of it, and through a combination of (a) building them the 'right' way; as well as (b) using the authority control settings on the control surfaces, they can be flown reasonably reliably. There was a thread I started a while back "Aircraft Design: Need Help" I believe it was titled. Several of the players who are knowledgeable and experienced with aircraft design responded to that thread and it proved to be a watershed for me. I went from making planes that were functional but less than optimal and flights that were literally gripping and unfun, to planes that are quite good (though perhaps still not 'perfect') and flying with considerable success and ease.

Ah thank you Phil! Wow, that is pretty damn cool. I recall that they had predicted comets may have organics in them, but I somehow missed that they had actually discovered them. So water, not organic . . . only stuff that binds with carbon? I always found that to be a strange way to divide the field of chemistry, but perhaps were I to study the subject more it would make sense. Why is that particular division conceived that way? ADDIT: and also, why the hell does a comet That is mind boggling to me, but the again as you've noted, my understanding of organic chemistry is pretty rough . . . so maybe it isn't as amazing? How the hell did that stuff get there!?

I tracked down the comment that sparked this discussion of elements, one line in the Osiris Rex Wiki Page This statement is derived from this source: http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2011/may/HQ_11-163_New_Frontier.html and a search for "organic" in that article turns up two entries, both in this paragraph Unfortunately, while the NASA source says simply "organic molecules" (lots of organic molecules don't have a lot to do with amino acids) the wiki pages adds "amino acids" and this is peculiar to me. "Organic molecules" . . . oh sure, that didn't get my attention at all. Water is an organic molecule after all! But Amino acids from meteorite and comet samples!? Really? I am highly skeptical that is accurate