Vaebn

Can start from Kerbin Low Orbit, go to any planet. Do a Landing with a Rover. Recover the Lander and the Rover (well, except EVE obviously), and then return to Kerbin Low Orbit. It does that without losing any parts, therefore the lander is essentially a SSTO for all the planets it lands on, and the entire a Kerbin Orbit to Kerbin Orbit round-trip ship. Tylo included.

No, because it's playing God. j/k. j/k. It could be fun for a short while (my definition of "short whiles" can last several thousands years), especially for Terrforming purposes and stuff if brain uploads take too much time to do. It also an obvious to do for food production, drug production and so on. Plants are basically self-replicating nanotechnology, that convert air and ground into stuff! Different sort of plants could be used for construction purposes and stuff, but that might be just me wanting to live in epic treehouses. Brainless animals could easily take the moral problems out of eating meat, potentially in an easier, cheaper and more tasty way than lab-grown meat which is always "50 years away". However eventually the answer is going to be no. After "humanity" switches its conciousness from meat bodies to something more resilient, there will simply be no more purpose to the rest of the ecosystem. It might have been fun going around planets and seeding life to them for artistic purposes, however the truth is that this is probably quite rude thing to do. Whilst the immortal VR humans inside their computronium might be sucking sun and playing all day, any such life would still continue to suffer, get ill, hungry and die. Gazelles (or genetically modified martian gazelles) would still feel the agony of being eaten by lions (or genetically modified martian lions), mother cats would still worry about the kitten that has fallen ill and isn't moving much. Birds that might have broken a wing dragging it behind them and wondering in whatever intelligence they have why its not working. Instead I believe it is the moral obligation of any such life is to, well, politely put. Wipe the surface of the planet clean. Thus forever ending the suffering and death of any life that doesn't get to play forever immortal like it. This isn't such a weird position to have. After all any non-immortal life would have died eventually. So we might as well do it once and get it over with. After the earth has been wiped clean and all mass of the solar system begin to be put towards making more computing substance / shapeships or whatever, there might be a bit of a debate regarding wither it is worth "simulating' any such life that might enjoy some of the advantages. Like immortal cats or whatever. However I do think that even that position will be found a bit iffy since you would essentially be keeping around things that are purposely "stupid" for the purpose of basically making ourselves feel better, no matter how happy they might be. Plus any such simulation would waste energy better put into thinking what the hell will be done once the suns start to die out... Hows that for an answer?

Because it's there! I mean... isn't there. I mean... you know what I mean.

In regards to plants. It's actually rather green, almost *too* green in fact. Colours are simply a bit desaturated because I thought it looked more "realistic" that way. In fact, here's a different render with a somewhat different texture with some extra desertification going on. (desert as in being cold and plantless, not hot) The green in this picture is the same texture as the green in the other picture. As opposed to the reddish bits which are closer to the planet's original colour. However, I do have to admit that whilst I was poking around with it, I was actually thinking about the plants on the ground. And what I was thinking, is that the conditions that are more likely to model the fist biomes on Mars are basically, the Canadian/Siberian Tundra. Grass, moss and lichens, growing on permafrost at near -28 C for at least half the year. These areas of the world look basically like this: So at no point was I thinking something lushier and junglier than that.

I've been working on a little project of mine, and just made this. ^^ (fixed link)

HALO orbit => Lagrange points shenanigans => N-body physics. Cool article tho

I hope you are not just tossing that Alienware into the garbage btw. Someone can cannibalize those selling spare parts on ebay and recover quite a bit of money, if you wish to carefully disassemble it. The least, screen, ram, battery and disks should be able to be sellable sold. Possibly the GPU as well if it is removable, possibly the wi-fi card too. (and hope that whatever it is you toasted, it stopped toasting at the PSU or mootherboard) Even the plastic panels, if they are in a nice condition, because someone, someplace has possibly ruined his and is seeking a replacement. Overall, and seeing that some m17 screens seem to go for £70 on ebay right now, I wouldn't be surprised if up to £200 can be recovered from it. Here's an example of someone selling such a spare part ( http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dell-Alienware-M11x-Left-Right-Screen-Hinge-Hinges-Bracket-0NDT4N-NDT4N-V-/390789143001?pt=UK_Computing_Other_Computing_Networking&hash=item5afcd919d9 ) even if individuals don't buy these, that's the way repair shops often do.

Of course its a lot more doable. And the sights are going to be amazing! I mean. It already looks gorgeous (and pizzalicious) from space, can you imagine how it looks from the ground? It's probably full of multicoloured sulfur thingies all over the place. And then a volcano erupts, and a mushroom appear in the sky 330km tall. Mountains taller than Everest! Sulfuric magma rivers! Dried out lava tubes! And then Jupiter rises over the horizon 40x time the size of the moon! SO AWESOME. Meanwhile the rover on Venus is photographic hot rocks. And then some other hot rocks. And then the 116 day Venus night comes and even the hot rock photos suck. Boo. *attempts to hijack the thread with his io-roving agenda*

Venus is just a big, hot ball of bleh. I want a Rover on Io.

Here's a picture of the moon I took today, I am pretty proud of. Now. I know what you are thinking. You are thinking "uh. ok. A bit crap". But the reason I am proud of it, is because it was done with a 2011 smartphone (iphone 4s), with no lens attachment whatsoever. If you have tried to photograph the moon with a smartphone, you'd know that this is not exactly easy! The way it was done, is that I first had to lock exposure to a lit LED light right in front of the camera to force it not to let so much light in, and then do the focus and moon shot separately. Left to its own devices it always over-exposes the moon resulting in a way-too-bright smudge, as opposed to this, almost features discerning, grey smudge!

^^ So, would solid Hydrogen become a bose - einstain quantum thingy near absolute zero too? Would it still occupy the same volume even so?

Hm. Solid State you say... I would also be interested then, in the variant of the initial question, regarding cooling it, And compressing it. (but not fusing it)

Just don't crash this, because you and the house values in the entire neighbourhood in a 5 mile radius are going to have a bad time.

I've have had an interesting question lately and knowing that there are people whose geeky is of significant magnitude here, I'd like to toss it here as well. How much hydrogen can you pack in an area (ie, a cubic cm, or cubic m), at, say, 1 bar pressure, whilst simultaneously cooling it, all the way to absolute zero? As I understand it, the hydrogen would first become liquid hydrogen. Then it would become liquid metallic hydrogen, which is a state similar to the one inside Jupiter, only this time, due to "cooling" rather than pressure. And finally, it would become a Bose-Einstein condensate. At which point I am confused. Do Bose-Einstein condensates have volume, or is their volume, in fact, that of a single atom, no matter how many of those you pack in? And how many of those can you pack together (still cooling vigorously), without them "fusing". All the way until gravity becomes important? A hard limit before that, having to do with ZPE or something? P.S. I know that technically cooling "to" absolute zero, is impossible, so the question is about anything (and the amounts of, in a cubic cm/m, 1 bar) taking place riiiiiight before it.

You mean, if I want one, or do you want one? Haven't really poked with modding in KSP at all but I could take a look at it. Do you mean something that is going to be barely bigger than a command-seat, with a structure over it, to basically excuse chairlanders? This sounds quite easy. Or do you mean something you can see in the IVA view? This sounds quite a bit harder. Even if you could see a different Kerbal inside the same thing, like in the hitch-hiker module, I have no idea how you'd tell the game to "freeze" the animations. So at most it would look (if you could look at it), like a Kerbal peaking out of a window.

Btw, here's an interesting variant of that Lander: Features: - Tylo LV-N SSTO, which means it can also be used as the ship's main propulsion section. - Parachutes for Laythe / Duna - Reusable Pressurized Rover! ^^ I might be redoing the Jool-5, for the "a rover on each moon" cookies. KSP+mechjeb is kinda of an ideal game to play windowed and with no sound on when doing something else, which is how I play it. However it does compete strongly for the processor with 3ds Max, which I use a lot lately, so this time I might take it a bit slower, rather than an all in one post.

The Lander is capable of an one way trip down to Kerbin (or Eve for that matter). I simply don't like doing so because it can't reach orbit again. After it has been assembled, the ship is meant to be something that is "parked", in Kerbin LEO, and when the time for a mission comes "departs" and then "returns" to it, in one piece. I actually had the Lander section, not from this challenge, but from a personal game objective of mine to do a ship that can visit the entire system in such a way. I simply noticed that if I launch a "stretched" version of the external tank, I could do the Jool-5 thing too. Kerbin <-> LEO crew transfers however were always presumed to be done with an SSTO shuttle. If you absolutely, positively, want to see some screenshots of the Lander land on Kerbin, now that someone can edit fuel levels, a Lander based return from that mission can be simulated...

It was something on an Amstrad, but was too young to know what I was doing. I do however specifically remember one, (which was also my favourite). After some searching it turns out to be this, played on a green on green screen. Lucky me it was only one of the most difficult games ever, but, the bouncing pumpkin made it all worth it. :] Then, it was probably Bubble Bobble on DOS, which a neighbour had. And then probably SkiFree on Windows 3.11

None, because going faster than the speed of light leads to causality violations therefore currently appears to be a logical paradox. [/party pooper]

*Stands on his rhetoric pedestral* See? See the folly of the SI-ists! Confused about their own unit definitions! Planck units I say! Planck units! Driving our cars around and talking about their speed directly in terms of "nano-c" is what Einstein would have wanted.

Hm, correct. I hadn't realized the full implications of its triple pointness. I still prefer planck units though, just due to what they do to so many of the constants and equations E = MC^2 -> E = M! How cool is that?

Well even those are quite a bit arbitrary. Triple point of water under 1 atmosphere? Whose atmosphere? This is something humans might feel good about, but would be completely meaningless to an alien civilization. For that matter not even Earth has 1 atmosphere of pressure all over the place. Second has been retconed to match Rubidium. But of course selecting "Rubidium" specifically out of all isotopes was an arbitrary decision because it was conveniently close to the previous arbitrary lenght of the second, which happened to be the 60th division of the arbitrary minute length, which in turn was the 60th division of the arbitrary hour lenght, which in turn was the 24th, of the arbitrary but I supposed pretty meaningful, "day" period. Which is based on Earth's locally significant, but universally insignificant spinning speed. Planck units on the other hand, ought to be immediately understandable even to an alien civilization assuming our physics are finally anywhere near to reality. " "Which is your base unit of lenght?", "The smallest possible one", "Oh that one". "Which is your base unit of time?", "The smallest possible one", "Of that one". etc Equations become sexy too. The speed of light for example is C = 1

The great power of the metric system is not the actual length of the first few base units, is the relationship of the units with all the rest. This then allows for easy multiplications and mathematically meaningful/easy to deal with orders of magnitude and stuff. If a change was to happen, I'd say these: What you actually pick your base unit to be is utterly irrelevant (always) and it would be particularly so in a universe which is "infininetly big" and "infinitely small". However, interestingly, our universe does not appears to be so, there does seem to be point where reality's meaningful "detail" stops, and that's the planck lenght. Because we build our system from the meter downwards the current lenght of the planck lenght is defined as 1.616199(26) × 10-35 metres. This appears to be a bit of an ugly number for a thing (potentially) so meaningfully fundamental. A feel good change then for a sexy species caring for this sort of thing, would be to define the planck lenght as the fundamental unit "1". This doesn't go just for length. In a similar fashion, the smallest unit of time can too be defined in term's of a planck length (planck time), it's current value being 5.39106(32) × 10-44 s. Again I think there would be some elegance in calling "it", unit "1". Everything then would be redefined in terms of multiples of it. Although even "Terraplancks" and "Pettaplancks" don't approach usable lengths for daily usage. So... yeah. I hope you like superscripts on all your daily units.

Here you go Ziv. I've gone a little bit "misson reporty" on this, writing quite a bit of commentary for the pictures, so I hope people will click to see the album in imgur.

Cassini! It takes YEARS to reach Saturn. Cassini launched in 1997, and didn't reach Saturn until 2004... In comparison, Mars is next door.