lajoswinkler

After a dangerous drive up and down Eve's mountains, the duo has finally spotted Katla ascent vehicle on the horizon. Parking nearby. Taking a portrait in front of the vehicle. Ready to go home.

Interplanetary space is too dense for such endeavours. Interstellar, on the other hand, is pretty much fine.

Dyslexia is all about being unable to read properly because one's brain can't organize letters normally. Dysgraphia is concerned with writing skills, and can extend, often to a lesser magnitute, to typing. If you can't write/type properly without mixing letters, you've got dysgraphia.

You mean dysgraphia? Go, my child, for thou art forgiven. (MS Office Word has a spell checker, and Firefox has such add-ons.)

Are the blatant spelling errors in the video on purpose?

We don't, lol. I distinctly remember we had more than one properly supplied shop in my town, but now I can't find anything. I don't understand, it's a stupid archival paper, it was available just like ordinary ink or whatever. I'll probably have to make something on my own. Regular printer paper soaked with a mild solution of sodium hydrogencarbonate and then dried. That is plenty of mild base for at least 500 years of gradual acid neutralization. It will look rough, but who cares?

Canons. You never said they need to reach the ship intact or alive.

I went to an art store and they just stared at me blindly like I was asking for pancakes made of iron. Tooth, that was one of the ideas I had... I do have a wisdom tooth already sealed in 70% ethanol, and I do have plenty of my baby tooths somewhere.

I might include some stamps just because they will be highly valuable in 2114. I'll seal the glass with glass.

Springs are enough. They would be useful for stress absorption upon landing. You could coat the whole probe with them.

You really thought a Kerbal could swim there? Use hack gravity upon loading. F12 to open the console. Turn off gravity, turn on RCS thrusters on the Kerbal and return to the vehicle.

I've had two more failed landings because of landing on mountain slopes. Reentry was without any damage. One of the touchdowns was some 15 km away from the target, which is great, knowing that I've eyeballed this by thrusting on the other side of Eve. Parachutes deployed fine every time without any damage. I've thought about landing with the shield on, but the speed of impact would be too great. I had to briefly use engines to go from 10 to 4 m/s. The lander now looks like this. It's stable, but very tilted. 9620 m/s delta-v on the surface. Kerbals are now on their way towards the ascent vehicle. Tug is still in orbit.

It's not funny to joke with someone's death like that. Wikipedia says she's dead, but it seems she's alive and well.

It would have to be an acid-free booklet, and I think those are hard to find and expensive. Also, you can't seal that in glass to protect it from moisture, organisms and being read, after all. Polymer embedding would have to be done by chemical process or melting and either one would alter DNA molecule. I think I'll pluck few eyebrows and put them in a separate, inner vial. Hair follicles seem to be excellent at preserving genetic information. If anyone has suggestions what else to include in the vault, I'm listening.

It made my computer almost completely unresponsive when I tried to view it in Firefox. It works ok in Chrome.

That part in Gravity, when they catch on with the destroyed shuttle, is one of the mild mistakes in the movie. When they catch the rotating shuttle craft and their kinetic energy is shared between them and the craft, they'd still feel substantial centrifugal force, so they would need to carefully hold on all the time, yet that isn't really apparent in the scene. Regarding your question, the resulting motion would depend on how well the astronaut is fixed to the second body, the position of grab, etc. It would be difficult to describe. If it's a proper station, the change would be very weak as the station has a lot more mass. I, too, did a lot of such experiments in KSP. I'd let a satellite tumble and then, using a Kerbal, try to grab it. It's very difficult

They probably didn't suffer. When temperature starts dropping, gecko's body goes towards brumation, which is a kind of dormancy. They do need water, so they wake up to drink, then go to sleep again. If the temperature is low enough, they don't wake up. So it's not a terrible death for them. They had a good time and went to sleep, never to wake up again. If you want a proper life and death, that's what you should aim for.

Tommygun, I don't have the time (or the money, to be honest) to create a microform of any kind, but yes, that would be a way to store lots of information and the lifetime of such storage would be sufficient. KerikBalm, too complicated if one wants to do it properly. Also, hydrolysis would ruin it in less than a month.

No, because relativistic velocities are being added by a different formula. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity-addition_formula

It will not hold that long. Flash memory will degrade in less than 50 years (probably less than 20, though) and any video recorder, whether it's digital or VHS, would rust or at least the polymers in PCBs would degrade and crumple.

Nomograms aren't obsolete. They're routinely used for at least fast approximations during lab or field work in science. Thanks for this, it looks very useful.

Here's the thing - one of the oldest banks in my country has opened its vault for people to deposit stuff for free. The vault will be opened in 100 years, and the closest relatives will get the stuff. I want my descendants to get my firsthand account of what was happening in 2014, my fingerprints, various data about body, and a sample containing my DNA, which might help them one day if they inherit some disease, or just wanted to know stuff. The problem is that each person is allowed to save only one item and one digital photograph the bank will print out and save. My idea is to assemble several objects and seal it in glass. However, numerous problems arise. The information must not degrade. That's where I need your suggestions. Any digital data storage is useless. Not only commercial storage units will probably degrade in a century, but there probably won't be anything able to read it in 2114. I'm not just talking about the hardware. The software will be lost. JPG won't mean a thing, just like obscure digital technology and protocols from Apollo era are now useless, and that was less than 50 years ago. Maybe there will be few knowledgeable people on the planet, working in various institutes, who will be able to decypher the binary code, but I want the stuff to be readily accessible. So far, acid free paper and a higher grade graphite pencil for writing a letter seem like the best idea for preserving written information in a small space. Ink is longlasting, but graphite is forever. In order to kill every trace of life potentially detrimental to the paper, I'd include a crystal of naphthalene into the container. It will fill the space with pH neutral, but biocidal fumes. What about DNA? Liquid anr wet samples won't work if they aren't buffered, cryo-protected and kept at -80°C or lower because of the chemical reactions which are too fast. If a sample is to be kept at room temperature in sealed environment (ampoule within an ampoule, to avoid naphthalene fumes), it needs to be solid. Follicles from scalp, eyebrows, nails? Think about it. I've got few days to do this before the vault is sealed.

I've successfully shaved off excess speed upon Eve encounter, and after annoyingly long time, parked the thing into 100x100 km orbit. Next, reentry test. Eyeballed. Controlling the ship was very hard, so reentry was under lots of tilting back and forth. Consequently, small stuff such as some parachutes and perhaps ladders overheated and exploded, but the overall structural integrity was preserved. If it weren't for the crooked parachutes, the lander would have landed straight, but... It landed on one side, so the impact wasn't distributed evenly and one set of landing gears failed. The landing site was hundreds of kilometres away from the target. This was just a preliminary test to test the required levels of manual precision. Next time I'm doing it right. The game is saved so I can try again.

I hope it helps.

Well at least someone is paying attention and reads posts thoroughly. Well done.