Diche Bach

Welcome Jack! Nothing wrong with sucking at this game I know I still do after some ~200 hours of play.

Yeah, 10% seems to be about what they think the "bomb driven" ship would offer too. Hell, 10% ain't too bad! That would be about 40 to 50 years to Proxima Centauri? Hard to imagine how that would work, but yeah doable I guess. Would suck pretty bad if a multi-generational crew arrived there and found, "Welp! Nothing here! Just a couple useless gas giants a lot of radiation. Guess we just head home?"

Hmmmmm, have to admit I'm very tempted! Especially since for a mere $5 I can get the BF3 and Sims. Few of my old Eve Online buddies play BF3 and I've always wanted to check out the Sims. If I buy this thing, can I get it all through Steam? ADDIT: I see, some are available via Steam some only via Origins. What is so bad about Origins? Based on how you guys are referring to this "Origins" entity like it was the Momma Alien from planet LV-426, don't want to know anything more about that! But Steam I do like. ADDIT: damn! those things are selling like hot cakes too! I coulda swore when this thread first started it was about about 130k maybe 150K and it is now up to 205k! Truly brilliant marketing. Wish the Execs at my wife's firm had even 10% of that ingenuity. ADDIT*2: Holy crap! In about 30 seconds it went from 205 to 270,000!!

Agree it should be in the base game. But it should be an optional on/off feature. It adds to the difficulty of learning the game quite a bit so I don't think forcing new players to adapt to it (either in sandbox or career mode) would be a good idea. Squad seem pretty clearheaded about all that stuff though, so not like I'd really be concerned.

Hmmmm, that language is just a bit suspicious don't you think? Call me the eternal cynic, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if "Origin's and EA's share" of the proceeds was (hidden in a confidential contract between them and their sales partners or whoever) actually only ~2% of the total, and moreover, that the other ~98% of the proceeds were going into conveniently distributed channels that circuitously lead their way right back into the wallets of whoever owns the intellectual property in the first place. White collar 'crime!' You gotta love it!

Ah yes, the cult of personality . . . by which I mean, reading about him, you could conclude that HE was actually sitting in front of the computer screen, running the calculations, drawing the diagrams and actually _designing_ the things! What is it about intelligent, good looking and suave entrepreneurial type men that just makes every journalist and media voice go gooey eyed? Well you gotta hand it to him; he is clearly a sharp cookie and knows how to make good use of being a filthy rich capitalist. What is he on now, his 4th wife and 5th kid (all sons of course!). Modern day Genghis Khan LOL!

Yep! Same here The worst part (that I'll never let bug me again) is that infuriatingly flip-flop from one side of the orbit to the other that the P and A do. Sounds like it is just not worth getting it down to that precise of circularity at all.

Where do these ribbons come from anyways?

EA is the one that is notorious for ripping off gamers and having terrible intrusive DRM?

More or less what I expected. So conceivably, an ideally designed and scheduled craft could use a modicum of its delta-V to get up to some theoretical maximum from gravity assists, then kick in the antimatter or nuclear explosion boosters and head off into the deep black beyond! ADDIT: Ahhh, well that's not really particularly helpful is it. Looks like the highest velocity planet in our solar system is Mercury at about 48km/s . . . I suppose really if you wanted to use the big kahuna it would be a flyby around the SUN! but that is probably a very long term maneuver . . . Wiki tells me sun is only going 220km/s relative to center of the galaxy so . . . that pretty much answers my question! Flybys are NOT a viable solution to interstellar travel although they might offer some minimal assistance to save on fuel. Found this reading up on the Orion's wiki page: Antimatter space propulsion at Penn State, kinda disheartening to see the citations are the early 90s and the last time the page was updated was more than 10 years ago

Wow. So we really are still primitive ape guys using fire and plumbing. Will check out Scott's Orion video! One more specific question that I'm curious to hear if any of you guys can answer: is there some sort of practical limit to how much velocity can be added to a vehicle using nothing more than fly-by maneuvers and course corrections? So for example, if you had simply a very large rocket (lots of liquid fuel) could you just keep doing fly-by after fly-by and (as long as you still had more fuel to execute the maneuvers) just keep adding more and more velocity?

I've got quite good at not blowing up. Consistently getting the same performance out of one my standard models is a different story, but I don't blow up much at all

I used to be one of this tinfoil hat Steamophiles . . . but even old dogs can learn to use new forms of software retail. So yeah, go Steam.

Yep. So here is a related question that may expand on the discussion: art their any credible plans to develop technology to go faster? What are those technologies likely to look like? How long till they could be brought to fruition? I've noticed that, when it comes to these discussions, at least as they manifest on things like Wikipedia, there seems to be a big jump between reality and the "what we might do" conceptions that are essentially nothing more than intereting theories. For example, Wormholes, antimatter drives and the like seem to get brought into discussions and it seems to me that those are basically make believe. Is that really the best we got? The prospect of reasonable journeys to other stars depends on make believe?

It is my understanding that the fastest space craft to date were the Helios probes: “The probes are notable for having set a maximum speed record among spacecraft at 252,792 km/h[1] (157,078 mi/h or 43.63 mi/s or 70.22 km/s or 0.000234c).†I make this out to be 4213.2km / minute or 70.22km /second. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_probes However, a substantial portion of this velocity is a result of the probes inescapable orbits around the sun, i.e., their ‘falling toward the sun.’ As such, I would think it is arguable that the fastest ‘controlled velocity’ (in the sense of an orbital trajectory from which the craft still could carry enough delta-V to change to a substantially different orbit) is held by either the New Horizons spacecraft (which achieved the fast launch velocity at 16.5km/second; or perhaps the Voyager I spacecraft, which is leaving the solar system at 17.145 km/s (all according to the respective Wiki pages). Obviously, the idea that Voyager I could perform anything like a substantive trajectory maneuver at this point is probably pretty questionable. With all the recent media attention paid to exo-planets, and wild speculations like "it is probable that the Milky Way has a hundred million Earth-like exoplanets . . ." etc., I feel that a reasoned consideration of our capacity to attain very high speeds is quite needed; if nothing else to temper potentially unrealistic enthusiasm about prospects of interstellar colonization at any time in the near future. Certainly the discovery of exoplanets excites me as much as anyone! But it doesn't mean that we are actually _any_ closer to going interstellar, a somber point that I do think deserves about as much attention as all the cool finds in recent decades. I have been trying to dredge up some of my past posts on this from another forum (1BC Civilization forums) but cannot get a search that hones in and sifting through all 10,000 of my posts on that site is too tedious! However, I did some maths to calculate the travel times to various star systems which have now famous exoplanets, as well as the nearest stars (Proxima Centuari, etc.). The number I came up with were rathering sobering. It seems like the fastest travel time I came up with for say Proxima Centauri was about 40,000 years! So with this thread I’m asking you guys to discuss the topic of: 1. Using current technology, and every trick in the book (e.g., multiple years of flyby maneuvers around objects in our solar system??) how fast could we conceivably ‘go?’ 2. How long will it be before humanity really has any reasonable prospect of reasonably ‘quick’ interstellar travel? Or any other related question that you choose to talk about! I was gonna post this to the xkcd.com thing but I just barely have glanced at that. If one of you guys feel like it would make a good ‘what if’ question (e.g., What if a contemporary space probe was sent on multiple repeated flybys around objects in our solar system, how fast could it conceivably get up to?) for that guys blog I’d love to hear what he has to say.

One of the key lessons of caving that has saved my skin on more than one occasion is redundancy. Always have a spare of critical equipment. Had the policy been: we do not launch a vehicle unless there is a sister vehicle and crew ready to carry out a rescue mission . . . well obviously it might have ended as a story of the heroism and genius of NASA instead of a boneheaded tragedy. The same applies to many high-dollar engineering and industrial enterprises. For example, the Deepwater Horizon's Oil Spill. I am no engineer so forgive me if my understanding is simplistic. But it seems to me that, if there had been two of these rigs, deployed within a couple of miles of one another, one operating at normal capacity, the other 'backup rig' operating at nominal capacity but ready to be cranked up to full power within a few hours notice, that the majority of that terrible ecological disaster could've been mitigated. After the explosion that sank the rig and started the leak, the primary reason the leak was so bad and so difficult to plug (as I understand it) was the tremendous pressure. Had a second rig tapped into the same deposits been available to come on line shortly after the disaster, that pressure could have been reduced, allowing the leak in the destroyed well to be plugged more readily. This is to say nothing of the shortcuts and cost-savings that led to the explosions that killed the crew and caused the rig to sink in the first place. IMO, crews shouldn't be sent into orbit if there are not sound and reasonable contingency plans to rescue them. Whether a rescue could or couldn't have actually been martialled, it seems quite clear that NASA was malfeasant from this standpoint. There really shouldn't be anything like a 'half-ass' space program, but a failure to have a rescue vehicle on standby seems to me to be quite a clear example of that.

I think some studios/publishers use expansion packs and DLC as a way to maximize profits, and little else. For example, I suspect that the multiple expansions for Civ 3 and Civ 4 could've probably been combined into fewer packages than were sold. I was mildly irrirated by this. This irritation, combined with not liking what I heard about the game led me to never bother with Civ 5. But I don't get the impression Squad (at this stage) are prone to operate that way. They are incredibly open with their users/customers and it seems like in addition to being gifted game designers and business men, they are true-blue gamers, who wouldn't want to rip off their fellow gamers. I think you've got to judge these things on a case by case basis. Some DLC/expansions are suspect of profiteering, some aren't. In the case of Squad I'd probably buy any expansion or DLC they sell. In the case of some other studios/publishers, I'd be skeptical if not rejecting of such a prospect.

So how the heck did this Musk guy, who never finished grad school, manage to design the first successful commercial space cargo vessel, whereas NASA's first dozen rockets blew up on the launch pad!? Is he just that brilliant? Or are bureaucracies/committees/govt. projects just that inept? Or is it that there are plenty of experts to hire these days and Musk had the good business sense to hire the right ones and effectively facilitate them doing their jobs?

Wow! Great work. Good to see I'm not the only one with some serious OCD Doing it in a swimlane diagram _might_ be better, but I like the phylogenetic feel of this one.

I think the points about pragmatism and money are very valid. To be honest, the most powerful drive to explore space (we will NEVER 'conquer' it, just as we have never truly 'conquered' Earth) is wonder, marvel, imagination, elation, curiousity. These drives are common to many intelligent animals, particularly several of our primate 'relatives' and to a considerable extent some of the more social mammals (e.g., canines). These traits have persisted, and arguably elaborated substantially in our own hominid lineage (reaching a perhaps fever-pitch in we humans) because they contributed to Darwininian fitness: surviving, thriving, leaving offspring behind after an individual's death. But these traits only do so to the extent that they afford real material benefits to the individual. Exploring and the curiousity and interepidness that drives exploration can be beneficial to the extent that they lead an individual to discover useful or pragmatic things: food, water, shelter, unoccupied habitats, mates, perhaps even something as mundane as a moment of tranquility, peace or contentment at experiencing novelty or beauty (and yes, I do believe that other animals besides ourselves experience such things). So in sum, these pragmatic things have always been issues with exploration and define the balance in the tradeoff between self-destructive and salutary exploration. For about 15 years I was a _very_ active caver while I lived in Missouri and then in Atlanta. By this I mean, I was probably among the 500 most active and accomplished 'hardcore' cave explorers in North America for a few years there. I went caving literally every weekend, often on trips of 24 to 36 hours duration, and even on 4 to 5 day camp trips underground. While being 8 hours journey from the cave entrance is nothing compared to being millions of kilometers and days journey from Earth, I believe it is sufficiently analogous that it affords me some insight into the explorers 'euphoria.' I certainly always conceived of it as 'Well, since I didn't become an astronaut, this is a good second.' Caving is of course a very physical activity, crawling, climbing, swimming, enduring mud and rock and cold, navigating pitches using technical vertical gear, traversing across chasms, braving low-airspace "water crawls," tight spaces, etc. But it is also a quite technological challenge, starting from the underwear or other bottom layer you wear (wetsuit, 'furry' suit or whatever) to the coveralls, boots, pads, helmet, lights, pack or shoulder bag, food, water, etc., etc. I absolutely loved it. It was my life and, were it not for the self-imposed moratorium on caving as a result of White Nose Syndrome (something I hope/wish most cavers have opted to do in recent years given we are not sure the role that cavers have played in transmitting the terrible disease from one cave to another) I would be just as active today as I ever was. I hope to feel able to get back into an active caver lifestyle eventually, though if the WNS epidemic does not somehow resolve, I don't feel I will do so in good conscience. I can tell you that there is NOTHING more exciting in life (not women, not money, nothing) than being the first to visit places that are remote from human experience, and where no one has ever gone before. I have had the great luck to have this experience quite a number of times. Yes, these were just caves, just cavities in limestone formed by water, but they were all marvelous and I can practically 'replay' some of the most poignant trips of discovery in my memory even today. While I don't believe that most people would ever get into true hardcore caving, nor for that matter any specific form of exploration, I do believe that a drive to explore, to 'go where no one has gone before' _IS_ a species-typical human characteristic. We sate this drive in myriad ways, and unfortunately not all of them are particularly salutary, nor socially-positive. And just like the other animals, at the end of the 'day,' exploration that does not actually yield something 'useful,' or worse, which exacts some sort of toll, cannot be justified by an individual much less a society. I'm not entirely sure why I felt compelled to write all this down, nor if it is really salient to this thread . . but well, there ya go! I hope it might be of some interest! ADDIT: and that Neil deGrasse Tyson clip was awesome! Very inspiring!

This I just found a better signature than my current one (which I notice a couple of you guys have in one form or another)!

That looks great! Only thing I could suggest is: the ability to include various instruments like those on some of the famous remote unmanned probes would be neat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_10#Scientific_instruments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Scientific_instruments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Mission_science

Wow, with accounting like this . . . did you guys work for Lehman brothersback in summer/fall of 2008?

Which can be particularly .

Would like to read me one of them space history books Derek. What authors/books would you recommend as a good 'grand tour' introduction?