Galane

I wonder if there's a video of this? http://life.time.com/culture/hubert-alyea-the-science-teacher-you-wish-you-had/#1 Princeton Professor Hubert Alyea apparently gave some very entertaining presentations in the 1950's on how nuclear reactions work. "Breeder" reactors that make more nuclear fuel than they consume (by transmuting Uranium into different radioactive elements) were well started on the R&D path, until the "greens" got that whole field of inquiry stopped off in the USA. Instead of recycling "spent" fuel we waste it by pulling it out and holding it in big pools of water and have a criminally wasteful on-again off-again plan to permanently discard it under Yucca Mountain (or not). It doesn't matter to the "greens" that there's no water for thousands of feet beneath that mountain, and the tunnels have been carved into a layer of solid rock. The material might somehow, possibly escape, sometime, maybe in a few thousand years. I'd like to think that long before then (if the facility ever gets used) that sanity would return to this and the nuclear material would be recovered for use. There already is a perfectly safe, non-explodable, type of nuclear reactor. The "pebble bed". The "pebbles" are about the size of softballs and have many small spheres of enriched uranium embedded in a graphite sphere. Around that sphere is a layer of ceramic and another layer of graphite - repeated to seven layers. There's not enough uranium in one sphere to be able to reach melting temperature and the shells are thick enough so that no matter how many are packed together, melting temperature cannot be reached. The heat transfer medium is Helium gas. If there should be a leak, it goes *up*. "But what about cracks?!" "There's no such thing as a nuclear pebble without cracks!". Yup. There's not. That's why the seven alternating layers. The odds of even one pebble getting a crack straight through all its layers to the center is very tiny. That's why pebble bed reactors have a system that pulls pebbles from the bottom, tests them for radiation leaks and if none is found the pebble goes back into the top of the reactor. If one is found to be leaking radiation (has one ever?) it's shunted to a shielded storage area. One of these reactors in Europe did have a problem with that system. IIRC a pebble got stuck but instead of calling in the people who knew what to do, the people on site decided they could fix it but instead damaged the pebble extraction system. Big stupid anti-nuke, media fueled broughaha followed and the reactor was shut down instead of being repaired. There was no radiation leak, nobody was in danger. The only people who should've had any problems with it were the ones who didn't follow the procedures they were told to. "This is your job. If something happens with anything not your job, you call in the people whose job it is." As for Fukushima, if you've seen some of the pre-tsunami file footage of the control room, you may have noted that it looks like it's technology from 40 years ago. That's because it *is* technology from 40 years ago. These plants were built then the anti-nukes have beset them ever since with lawsuits and regulations that have blocked any progress and technology updates. The damage caused by the tsunami and the results must've been like a ******* ****** to some of the "greens" so they could say "See? I told you it was a disaster in waiting!". They care more about being "right" in their wrongheadedness than actually improving people's lives. Some have wised up over the years, look up what the two guys who founded Greenpeace got into after they quit their own organization. Part of the problem Three Mile Island had was due to the even then aging technology. The control room had walls encrusted with controls, gauges and indicators. The lamp indicating the stuck open vent valve was on a different wall from where everyone was clustered, trying to figure out why stuffing more and more water into the thing wasn't working. When someone noticed the light and hit the manual override to force the valve closed, problem over but the reactor core was trashed. Only a small amount of radioactive steam escaped the buildings. The radioactive water was all contained. Historically, nuclear plants have taken so long to wend their way through the process of being allowed to be built that they're technically obsolete the day they first start generating electricity. The designs had to be "locked in" years before construction could start. Looking at San Onofre and its premature steam generator tube wear, I'd bet it was an issue some engineers were concerned about before the first shovel turned dirt on the site - but nothing could be done to change the design without delaying it for years. A modern system, as seen in many newer power plants and factories, puts everything in view of the operators on computer screens. If there's an alert, it doesn't depend on a tech making a circuit of a huge spread of gauges, the alert comes to the tech on his or her monitor. If TMI had had even the (what would now be primitive) best technology available at the time, someone sitting in front of a screen of green or amber text would've been flashed an alert about the stuck valve and there would have been no incident at all. Great idea but just try and get it added to an old nuclear power plant. Humans still have walk around and observe lots of separate and disparate things and make lots of notes. The 1977 TV series "Battlestar Galactica" likely had more advanced technology on its Galactica bridge set than TMI had in its control room. As an analogy, compare the original flight deck of the first Boeing 747 with the flight deck of a Boeing 787. The old nuclear plants are still at first 747 level when they should have received complete control upgrades at least once a decade or even closer together. Big airliners get upgrades, ships get upgrades, the Space Shuttles got upgrades. But not nuclear power plants. This "can't change a thing" craziness doesn't just affect nuclear power plants. In the 80's a company with a furnace they used to burn their waste to generate electricity for their plant needed to replace the refractory burner grates. The furnace manufacturer was long out of business. New more efficient burners could have been retrofitted but nope, wasn't allowed. either the system had to be restored to the same condition as it was when installed or the entire thing had to be replaced with an all new system. I don't how they came to talk to my father about their problem but he was able to take one of the old grates, made some forms from sheet metal and cast some new burner grates that passed muster with the regulators. Same shape, same or similar material, good to go. Here's some real big booms... Nice, safe, non-nuclear chemicals... I think somewhere there my be a video of the test where 25,000 tons of TNT were exploded - to see if the blast effects would be like those of an atomic bomb calculated to be equivalent.

Looks like something the Kerbals would design. http://life.time.com/culture/37-weirdly-beautiful-science-and-tech-photos-from-life-magazine/?hpt=hp_c3#35

Fly this little all stock rocket with ascent guidance. http://pastebin.com/0qpSi2cS The first stage burns, the second lights then immediately MJ moves the Separatrons to the same stage and lights them too. There is no structural failure! It doesn't matter if "there's no code to do that" in MechJeb, it does it anyway. That's what bugs in software do, things you do not expect and did not intend to happen. This is with the DLL in MechJeb2-2.1.0.0-98.zip Fix this and I bet a lot of "structural failures" that are actually caused by MJ lighting up engines when it shouldn't will go away. Like I've said before, the triggers seem to be a stage with a low TWR and/or engines without a decoupler in their stage. With this small test rocket, it's not low TWR. The Separatrons don't have decouplers in their stage. I was attempting to see if MJ would use them to attempt to get into some sort of orbit but I've launched it several times and every time it lights them up instead of waiting for the 2nd stage burnout.

That's a KSP limitation. The only bits of the universe that fully exist are the ship you're currently flying and anything within 2.5 kilometers of that ship. If the current ship and anything else are both in an atmosphere, once the anything else gets over 2.5KM away the game deletes it, unless it lands before exceeding the delete distance. A quirk of this is debris can orbit a planet with atmo for a long time, even with its orbit all in atmo, and not burn up because the game puts anything you're not looking at "on rails", only tracking its trajectory. That's why Kethane scanners only work when they're on the current ship and same for Kethane drills. You just gotta sit there and wait in realtime or crank up the time warp until the tanks are full or the planet is scanned.

The old small drill is still in Kethane .8 but it's category has been set to -1 so it won't show in the parts list. It still loads on previous ships but can't be added to new builds, unless you edit its cfg. I made sure to make a backup copy of the files so I can keep using it. I like the looks of it better and its longer reach, and how it mounts inset into other parts.

The solution to MJ continuing to idle engines after a node seems to usually be adding more power. Throw 2 or 4 of the little orange radial mount engines on and see if it still does it. On my 32K unit kethane lander I put four of the large white radials on and it could make it up and down from Mun OK, a bit slowly on the ascent with a full load, and most of the time it wouldn't shut the engines off after circularizing. So I added 8 of the small orange radial mounts. Burns about the same fuel, uses less corrective steering and shuts the engines down properly after making orbit. Still not quite perfect because to ensure it can make rendezvous at 15KM I have it sit there and make some fuel. Should try taking everything down to 10KM.

American born and raised but my paternal Grandma was Canadian so let's give it up for the Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_CF-105_Arrow http://www.avro-arrow.org

In space observations, what things looked like years ago is an important resource to see how they've changed over time. That's how items like potentially Earth smushing asteroids and comets are searched for. "Hmmm, that's an odd dot." *searches through olde photos* "It's been moving." *finds even more olde photos of object* "It's an asteroid. IT'S COMING RIGHT FOR US!"

...you look at screenshots and videos and right click your mouse to try and swing the view around for a look at other parts of the scene.

Found something odd with IR. load this and throw it on the pad. Zoom in and observe the fuel tank do a little dancing. http://pastebin.com/3y4i6XGw Remove the stack of pistons and launch again. The tank is sitting perfectly still. Plug that piston stack into the side of a big tank like one of the ReStock Thundermax ones, with the same probe core on top and it gets downright violent the way it jumps around. Odd that the movement gets larger on a much heavier object. Does it even with torque on the probe core disabled. Extend the piston stack all the way and the wiggle slows down. Before I had this 8 piston stack I put together a 5 level one and didn't notice any wiggle like this. I made a jumping Kethane tank with the 5 stack. Extend the pistons, it tips. Retract and it tilts up onto the pistons, extend but not too fast and it jumps a bit. Repeat until it hops off the edge of the pad and explodes. Is there a way to shrink the node sizes on all these rods smaller than the full size B segment, and make them snap in place like engines do onto fuel tank ends? I've tried many times but cannot get the 1/4 size C segment to attach to the 1/4 size B segment, even when the B segment is attached directly to something else.

I sorta like how it's aiming all my Mun transfers for Mun impact. Makes any parts I pop loose after the TMI burn "self cleaning". They all continue on course when I do the circularization burn at the Mun. Some times I even get to see them crash.

There's still some interference with Infernal Robotics. Load this craft without the KJR mod installed and click the arrow to extend the rails. They go down like they should. http://pastebin.com/tfNJx78E Now install the KJR 1.1 mod and extend the rails. Uh-oh. It's like they're pushing against a virtual floor, trying to push the rocket up, things break and go boom.

Ohhhh, yeeesssss! Finally, the Kerbals have bolts to connect their rocket components together instead of Blu Tack, chewing gum and duct tape. What *is* the deal with having the rockets slam downwards a bit when physics kicks in? Many have been the launch vehicles that would be perfectly fine in flight with far fewer struts - if the game engine didn't start off with a body slam to the mat before launch. Easy fix for eliminating the Lurch? Temporarily invoke Unbreakable Joints then do the physics initialization "off screen" to find out how much the rocket will drop. Once that's done, render the launch screen with the rocket placed at that calculated elevation with the launch clamps "pre drooped". If there's not enough clamps, render the carnage of exploding rocket and pop up a message about needing to add more launch clamps.If real rockets were set up like this game, they'd be hung from a crane, the supports attached then the supporting cable cut loose to let the rocket drop until all flex and slack in the supports was taken up. The result would be pretty much like what happens to an insufficiently strutted rocket in KSP.

First try turning off antialiasing. Then try setting texture resolution to half.

It's a 5KW handheld demolition laser. http://www.gizmag.com/twi-yb-fiber-laser-demolition/29544/ And then there's this.

Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen. That's most of what's in pretty much everything classed as organic. Called CHON in Frederik Pohl's "Heechee Saga".

And now there needs to be communication lasers. NASA just successfully tested a 600+ megabit/second laser transmitter from the Moon to Earth. Steve Wozniak lives in a place where the fastest landline internet is 1 megabit DSL but there's 600+ megabit from the Moon. How @#%$@ up is that?

But they still do not reduce drag VS the flat nose of a bare fuel tank. Stick a cone on a tank and you have the combined drag of both. To make them work properly would require them to be able to have a minus effect on the drag of the non-nosecone component they're attached to, but not so much as to throw things into negative drag numbers. There would also need to be a way to block cone stacking to get crazy low drag numbers and again to prevent negative numbers. Imagine stacking 100 nose cones with a simple minus to drag and having the rocket just spring into the air from all that negative drag sucking it up to 10KM. As they are, still better to forget the nose cones and save the useless weight and increased drag.

Doing a test right now, trying to stack all the telescopic pistons largest to smallest but cannot get part C of the 1/2 and 1/4 to stick to anything. Part C of the full size was very difficult to get to stick to part B. Looks like the node sizes need reduced. Can't see when the part turns green because the nodes are larger than the end of the parts. Part C of the full size is only turning green and sticking when angled off one tick to left or right. Full size A and B there's no problem getting them to go together. With editor extensions' vertical snap, the parts go to perfect alignment but will not stick together without a lot of moving and trying to bring the segments together from different directions and using different camera angles. (Pretty much like normal parts with symmetry on a complex rocket. Stick it on from *that* side works but not from *this* side even though the result is identical.) I wanted to see how far an assembly of all nine pieces would stretch. Smaller nodes on the smaller parts and see if they can have built in alignment snap like fuel tanks, engines etc. What I'd like to see on this mod is a way to minimize or hide the window in the VAB. At least it can be dragged mostly off screen, unlike the MechJeb windows. I used the A and B sections of the 1/2 size pistons to mount landing legs to so they could spread way out on a kethane mining Mun lander with two side by side 16,000 unit tanks. With all these parts it should be possible to build virtual machine tools like lathes and milling machines. Needs a way to read in G-code files and have virtual materials that can be dynamically modified to simulate being cut.

I was able to add Debug = True to the Kethane cfg and reset Kerbin's deposits until I had a good patch on land under KSC. However, I also had to change ShowOverlay to True to get it to show the grid. Had to go back and forth to the map screen several times before the debug version of the Kethane window would display correctly. Before I manually changed the overlay setting all I'd get for the kethane window was two bars like the top and bottom of the window, with the bottom at the top - sort of like an old CRT television with bad vertical hold and the picture displaying with the vertical blanking interval in the middle. Debug is itself a bit buggy.

What's extra weird about Fluorine is that it's one of the most, if not the most, reactive elements yet produces some of the most stable and nearly indestructible and non-reactive compounds like chlorofluorocarbons which include polymerized tetrafluoroethylene (PTFE, AKA Teflon). Until specialized glass was invented to contain it, the only way to constrain pure fluorine gas (with any kind of permanency) was in containers lined with some kinds of waxes or made of crystallized fluorine. The first time it was isolated, whomever did it trapped it in a sealed glass tube. He then heated and pulled an end of the tube down to a point so he could carefully file off the tip to sample the gas. Bad idea. It blew up. Would've done so on its own one it had dissolved its way through the thin spot. (The History Channel used to have good shows on this science stuff.)

Did you actually fly the rocket to see what it's not doing right? Here is a version that I finally got to stop it lighting up the upper stage engines. http://pastebin.com/Gepq13w4 That's after multiple versions of adding more engines at the bottom. The version just prior to this only had fuel pipes going from the big tanks to the small ones. When the fuel ran low in the big tanks, MechJeb would light up the pair of poodles in the upper stage. I flew it that way a few times and *every time* until I added the other pipes it'd do that. The only change from that one to this one is I added fuel pipes running back from the small tanks to the large ones so all the engines will run out at the same time. I've had this happen many times on rockets that are pushing the low end of TWR in a stage, with nothing wrong structurally - until after MJ goes looking for more thrust. I did add four struts crossed between the orange tanks and the large tanks, and two more struts from the orange tanks to the nosecones on the SRBs, but that was to counteract the breaking from the downward jerk when physics kicks in. No other changes to the main stack. Before switching to LV-30's added, I tried skippers but the throttle up after the SRBs dropped was too much and it all came apart. Turning off terminal velocity limit was also not a success with that configuration. Same as the original LV-30 config, I only had pipes running from the big tanks to the small tanks above the skippers. Too much thrust with too abrupt throttle control. Before that, I tried adding first four, then eight of the white, radial mount engines. The more power I added, the higher altitude it'd reach before MJ would fire the upper stage. MJ could really use a throttle response speed control, ideally settable per stage. Would reduce the need to spam a rocket with struts just to handle the throttle abuse MJ dishes out. Buggy Booster is going to need the poodles upgraded to skippers and possibly will need some more engines strapped onto its upper stage. Two of the LV-30s will get moved so all four will be on one side because two of these stacks are going under the tandem 16K tank kethane mining lander. Might have to lash on some more Rocko Monster SRBs too. Something has changed in this since the 2.0.9 release. MJ 2.0.9 in KSP 2.1 would blow up this one http://pastebin.com/HmBZ2WgW by firing the separatrons and the LV-909 at the same time. (Yes, I tried it several times.) To make it not do that I had to swap the stage positions of them, pairing the separatrons with the decoupler. I just tested it, reverted to the configuration (as pastebinned) that didn't work before, now it works in .22 with MechJeb 2.1.0.0-92 Other than the micro reaction wheel from KSPX, that rocket is stock parts. BUT there's still the issue that MJ will not auto stage the final on the missile, no matter which way they're ordered. (I'm going to put it back the way it was, with the separatrons going first because it missed the target this time by a long ways with the separatrons as stage 0.) I have a couple of manned landers that MJ will not auto stage the lander engine even though it is paired with a decoupler. Start the landing with just a little fuel in stage 1 and MJ will let the ship crash instead of popping off the dry stage and lighting up stage 0. I should try this with my Kethane rovers on the Mun. When making the first landing I manually stage off stage 1 because the landers have to make it down on the fuel they have onboard. Could test by first stopping at one of the refineries and draining all but a little fuel then go to land and see if MJ will do the staging properly.

MechJeb is still altering the stage assignments for engines. http://pastebin.com/jSQTHXF9 The only mods that one needs are ReStock for the monster solid boosters and the very long tanks, and the large inline reaction wheel from KSPX. It launches smooth towards a 71KM orbit with corrective steering on, the SRBs drop and it keeps going for a while just fine until suddenly the upper stage engines get activated and moved down to the first stage and the rocket goes out of control. That. Should. Never. Happen. If the rocket doesn't have enough thrust in the current active stage, do not try to "fix" things by activating more engines somewhere else on the vehicle. This is a WIP design for one half of the booster that will go under my WIP 32,000 unit Kethane mining lander - but testing is a bit difficult when MechJeb decides to stick a finger in where it shouldn't.

The kethane tanks are side by side and the lander's four fuel tanks are stretchy tanks with LV-909 engines on their bottom ends. The fuel tanks are stuck to the sides of the kethane tanks. From above it's like an 8 with a smaller circle top and bottom (the drills) and smaller circles to either side of the upper and lower sections of the 8 (the fuel tanks). The 16,000 unit kethane tanks are just tall and when full they're heavy. I thought about laying them down side by side to lower the COM but given the problems I had with Large Rover built around one laying down tank and another with two 4,000 unit tanks in tandem (I tried assembling them *on top* of a Bigger, Badder, Bi-coupler with stack separators.) I figured upright and underneath the bi-coupler and making it a lander would be easier, especially for building the booster.

Kethane map data is stored in the persistent and quicksave files. There is a debug setting for the mod to be able to reset the map individually for each body. It keeps the hexes you've scanned so the new deposits will appear instantly if they're in places already scanned. I need to find how to do that and reset Kerbin's kethane.