Kerbart

That'll be an interesting conversation with Immigration. "Please state the reason of your visit" "The president invited me over" Congratulations!

Given that the movie has to take place in 2035 we can argue that medication has evolved much further and the microgravity issues with antibiotics have been fixed. Further, the movie suggests that he uses everyone else's stools as well. So perhaps for the first two weeks he relied on the fertilizer made by his crew mates, before he utilized his own?

I thought that "Europa Report" did a good job on that. But yes, in general ships seem to have ample amounts of space. I guess once you have the anti-grav technology it doesn't matter that much. - - - Updated - - - Yes, that mistified me. It adds a funny note to the movie, but really, the way it was done in the book contained just as much tension (maybe even more) and wouldn't have been that much difficult to implement, I'd think. Maybe it was reasoned that for a generic audience the way it went down in the book wouldn't look dire enough?

Every movie has holes in it; the question is if they are small enough to be ignored by most... We're on page three of this thread and nobody complained about the fact that the gym on the hermes was laid out like a regular gym with lots of duplicate equipment (for a crew of 5, 6?) and ample room and BIG FREAKIN' PANORAMA WINDOWS?! Those windows were at least 5m2 each if not more, for no good reason other than "it looks good." Just think how thick (and thus, heavy!) those windows had to be to withstand the pressure difference between the ship's atmosphere (even if not 1013mBar) and vacuum. Speaking of withstanding pressure... I felt that covering the blown airlock hole with a sheet of plastic and some strips of duct tape was overly optimistic. And I doubt Mark Watney would not wear his spacesuit inside when it was flapping back and forth in that storm! Don't get me wrong, I LOVED the movie and I do feel it set new standards for "scientifically accurate" in the genre... There was very little of "applied magic" instead of science, but as seen in this thread it's not perfect either. And perhaps that's better, as some of Ridley's decisions where without doubt to make the movie more enjoyable, or because it wouldn't impact the story but provide better visuals. Translating a book to a movie is hard. They are two different media. Time is an abundant resource in a book; in fact we want a book to be "long" (well, most readers do, at least). In a movie it's a problem. LOTR was incredibly long because Tolkien wanted to tell a really really long story you could read at cold winter nights curled up in front of a fireplace. Thus, a 10+ hr epic was created. I didn't hear anybody complain about it being too short even though even then parts of the story were left out. Interstellar was nearly three hours, and considered very, very long... Make a movie longer than two hours and your audience will get restless. So there's the challenge to keep a movie as short as possible. I think that the right choices were made to cut a lot of meat off the story. Most of the science doesn't translate too well into movie making, unless you want tons and tons of monologueing, which, again, would turn off most of the audience. What remained was a great, relatively fast paced story that made for exciting entertainment. The only part where I felt cheated was that the entire trek to the Aries IV launch sites as done with a simple “400 sols later†(or whatever the number is). I do think that the movie could have done with a twenty minutes more of that, just to emphasize the duration of that part, without adding all the disasters that happened in the book, but just to emphasize the drudgery. Or maybe the dust storm episode as a "reason" why more movie time is spent on that part (I'm sure some suitable disco music could be found to cheer up the whole episode). Fast paced? Definetely. But nothing is worse* than a slow paced action movie for the sake of being slow paced. Rushed? When looking at the book, yes. But it's a movie. It has to move faster; time is an extremely constrained resource. * Pre-emptive snark: yes, this is a hyperbole. There are many things worse than that: war, poverty, children dying of starvation, etc. But this is meant in the context of the movie adaptation.

Well there is, just not for the one using it. But for the one selling it, as they can charge a fortune for it.

I have no clue, but perhaps they feed the bacteria that break down the dead top layer of your skin, so that fresh skin cells get exposed?

It seems like one of those “what could possibly go wrong?†ideas.

2.0? You mean the version that will follow 1.1?

So the game we play is expanding the games we play on the forum of a game we play, by studying the games others play on a forum of the game they play? And I thought rocket science was confusing...

"Hopping across various areas we refer to as 'biomes,' so we refer to it as 'biome hopping'--a process we're planning to patent" I'm just waiting for that to float up in the press.

You're right, absolutely right. In fact, so right, that if it were a smidgen more right we'd have to call it starboard instead. At the same time though, reality is not always what is sought after; it's a game and it needs to be enjoyable. Suppose it is possible to reproduce actual soundlevels during a launch. Would I enjoy that? Probably not (the neighbors certainly wouldn't). As a kid I watched too many westerns where sneak attacks happened at night. On TV during daytime. In "realistic" dark settings, which meant that on a 1970s TV you were staring at the screen for minutes without being able to see anything So yeah, realistic light levels are cool. Seeing something not washed out is cooler though.

Obviously you do not live in NJ, or you would not associate I-95 with "light speed"

we should judge KSP by the trailers...

Revert to and HyperEdit, as mentioned before. I also have no qualms about using revert when finding out that I forgot to readjust the staging order when the editor decided to move those TT-18's back to their own stage (after putting them in the right spot), or when I just frontdoor in general. Because "in reality" you'd have an engineering team to take care of that, although one can observe that my only (lack of quality) is representative for the failure of my Kerbal engineers.

Hyperedit is easy to use.

Excusez-moi parse que je ne parle pas Francais... But that is one cool internship!

And yet that gnarly rockhard previous generation, with all their hard work, never managed to set up a self-sustaining colony on the South Pole, which really is dead easy when you think of it. If they weren't able to do that. (We still don't have a self-sustaining colony on the South Pole, by the way...) how could we do it. And if we can't get a self-sustaining colony on the South Pole off the ground, how can we do it on Mars? It's really not that easy.

Just set up an intercept for an outer planet. Moons have a mysterious ability to interfere with that.

Well doh. It does enable all crossfeed, except for a few exempt resource flows (mainly liquid fuel, oxidizer and electricity).

NASA published a piece some time ago, in which they described how the crews in charge of the rover were kept on a Martian clock and it drove them absolutely nuts. Apparently our biological clock really can't handle days that are "a bit longer." -- it's like jetlag but then on a continueing basis (and any of you who has experienced real jetlag knows how bad it can be). The conclusion of the article was that the concept of "we'll just adjust our clocks to the mars day" needs some serious reviewing and study because it's not that simple.

An aerospike isâ€â€as far as I knowâ€â€constructed to keep performance in vacuum and in atmospheric conditions level. Better than a vacuum optimized engine in the atmosphere, better than an atmosphere optimized engine in vacuum. This, on the other hand, is purely to reduce drag. It will be considered "cheating" by some, and "getting even with a broken model" by others.

Most people will tell you to start turning as quickly as possible for an efficient ascent. And they are right. But this is not "most ships." And your "effeciency ratio" gets multiplied with a 1|0 factor indicating if you made it into orbit or not. As others pointed out, the aerodynamics of this vessel are nearly not existent. So I'd shoot this one straight up in the sky and only dare to make a turn once you hit the 50km altitude. Or consider using fairings. Or a different design. Or both.

BE AWARE! When buying rocket fuel, check the label. Make sure your rocket fuel contains pure ethanol and not high fructose corn syrup! YOUR ROCKET'S HEALTH IS AT STAKE!

Angular momentum doesn't keep a bike upright. What angular momentum does do is turning the front (steering) wheel into the direction the bike is falling. As long as the bike is in a nearly upright position it will keep the bike stable, but once the bike is going it's obviously not enough.

I love the idea! Maybe a separate building for the Kerbal Record Keeping Society, where you can see all records an achievements they handed out contracts for?