PakledHostage

Why? Please explain your rationale? Many people would quite reasonably consider it "wasting billions on a boondoggle" which is hardly good for any company. There has to be a return on investment. How do you anticipate that SpaceX would make money by sending people to Mars?

Coincidentally, the CBC's "The Current" radio magazine program interviewed Geoffrey Hinton - "the godfather of deep learning" - on this morning's program. You can listen to the program online here: "Deep Learning Godfather says machines learn like toddlers". The idea behind deep learning is that you develop the algorithms to allow the machine to learn and then you set it loose to learn on its own. Some of the results that researchers are seeing are quite surprising, impressive and possibly even frightening.

Not to mention that pure aluminium isn't good for much in aerospace structures (except maybe cladding). You've got to alloy it with other elements to make a useful raw material such as 2024 aluminium alloy, 7075 aluminium alloy, etc. People need to remember that there is more to materials science than just sending a few dwarves into a cave with pick axes.

May the fourth be with you.

But that is where the confusion lies... Moving relative to what? A point may be a point in your chosen reference frame but your "point" is moving in my reference frame. I maintain that my reference frame is stationary and that any point in it is stationary. It is your chosen reference frame (and your point in it) that is moving. And for the record, I am not saying you don't know what you are talking about. I am saying you aren't doing a good job of explaining your, er, point. There seem to be inconsistencies in your argument that need to be clarified. |velocity| gave a good answer above. Maybe you could explain your own answer in another context.

The girl mushroom went out with the boy mushroom because he was a fungi. The little bird complained, shouting "cheep cheep!", when its cage broke.

For what it is worth, the chart below shows the relative popularity of "Kerbal Space Program" as a Google search term. The chart was created using Google's "Google Trends" tool and covers the time span between January 2011 and May 2015.

The transmitter part doesn't have any functionality. Only the receiver part uses the plugin module. The receiver part looks for spacecraft that contain the transmitter part. It identifies the transmitter part by name. If you want to use a different part as a transmitter part, just change the name of your replacement transmitter part to that of the old transmitter part that comes with the mod. You can do this in the Part.CFG file. Any text editor (such as Notepad) is all you need to edit it.

I don't know. I haven't played KSP since [Gasp!!!] v0.19 was released. Now I'm just an old curmudgeon who hangs around on the Science Labs. And while I haven't seen such numbers myself, 20000 K does seem way too high (like close to an order of magnitude too high) for 1500 m/s at sea level.

A bittersweet moment... Our little probe has quite literally gone on to "touch the face of [a greco-roman] god"...

Even if it isn't just a display bug as Rathlon suggests below, it probably isn't a good idea to hold your breath while you wait for it to be fixed. I gave up on my re-entry heat mod (the original re-entry heat mod that predated deadly re-entry) when I couldn't get my heat effects (which were based on simplified compressible flow, convective heat transfer and radiative heat transfer models and which were surprisingly consistent with real world re-entry heating data that I could find, given the simplicity of my physics model) to correlate with the visual effects that were added in v0.19 of the game. When I first introduced the mod several months prior to v0.19's release, Moach even went over the code with his brother (HarvesteR) and Moach passed along some suggestions from Harv to me following their conversation. Clearly they know that there are alternatives to the way they coded it, but KSP's developers have said over and over again that they are making a game first; it isn't intended to be a physics simulation.

Thanks for the update. There are one or two little niggling bugs that I'd like to get to solving. I'll recompile, linking to the latest libraries when I do. Hopefully that will be soon. For the time being, I've updated the OP of this thread. If anyone runs into problems with this mod in v1.0 of the game, please post a detailed description and screen shots here.

The effort looks to be futile, but imagine if they can pull it off?

For the record (in case it wasn't obvious to anyone) I was joking around just as much as Sigma88 was. That and it seems that the quote is falsely attributed to Miriam Ferguson anyway... According to the Wiki article, the quote is first recorded some time in the 1880s, well before Miriam Ferguson was in office.

I'm around but I haven't downloaded v1.0 yet. Please give me some time. I've got a 3 month old who demands most of my non-working waking hours (as well as many of my sleeping hours) and who gets in the way of such things as updating mods.

Well I guess, once again, we'll have to agree to disagree. I think you're comparing apples and oranges. There was huge interest in the first Apollo landings but even by the time of Apollo 13 very few people cared. At least not until after the infamous "problem". And certainly far fewer people cared about the space shuttle program and the ISS than cared about Apollo. Science isn't supposed to be a popularity contest or a gladiatorial sideshow. The MSL and Philae landings showed that many non space-minded people can get excited about robotic missions and maybe even be inspired by them. Maybe not as much as boots on the ground on Mars might, but at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'd rather that the limited budgets that are available be focused on the highest scientific ROI rather than "inspiring the masses" (whatever that means).

Where were you when Curiosity landed on Mars? What about Philae? Trust me, it wasn't just space-minded people who paid attention. Most of my wife's facebook friends were watching those events live, just as my non space-minded wife and I were doing. Most of those people would rather crush a beer can on their foreheads while watching a hockey game than pay attention to anything "sciencey", yet they were right there cheering on Philae and MSL.

You showed that there was an economic benefit to the Apollo program, yes. My point is that you can't extrapolate that out to argue that a manned mission to Mars would pay similar dividends. We've already picked the proverbial "low hanging fruit". There may well be some economic benefit to a Mars program (after all, the money we'd spend on it wouldn't be loaded into a spacecraft and shipped to Mars, we'd spend it here on Earth), it likely won't be as great an economic benefit as the first time we did it. And please don't put words into my mouth. I did not say that we shouldn't be exploring space. I just fail to see why we should send people to do it. As many here have already argued, we can do very high value science using robotic probes for a fraction of the cost of a manned mission. We could reasonably expect to fund robotic missions to Venus' clouds, a lander to Jupiter's moons, orbiters to Uranus and Neptune, and even another Titan lander for much less than the cost of a manned mission to Mars. We may not learn as much about Mars by doing those things, but we'd learn a lot about those other places. As sad as it is, the funding doesn't exist to do everything. I'd rather that the limited budgets that are available be focused on the greatest scientific ROI.

And what was the economic benefit of the Human Genome Project? An entire industry arose out of that effort. We can now (as a result of the technology that was developed for the purpose) sequence an individual's (or their disease's) DNA in a fraction of the time it took the first time it was done. Previously unimaginable opportunities were created in the biotech field that have yet to be fully tapped out. Apollo yeilded dividends in much the same way, but that doesn't mean it will happen again if we go to Mars, just as biotech won't see another new paradigm by sequencing more genomes.

This is a very good point. There are only so many dollars available to allocate to "Big Science". ITER, the LHC, the Human Genome Project, etc either have or stand to yeild bigger scientific return on investment than any manned space mission (relative to what can be done with robotic probes alone). Robotic missions are an efficient use of government research budgets.

What if Philae actually had thrusters? Or what if the screws and/or harpoon had actually worked? In short Philae isn't a good example because it was a very simple lander that was basically tossed at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in the hopes that it would stick when it bumped into the surface. The cold gas thrusters didn't work because the tank had leaked enroute, without the thrusters, the screws couldn't work and the backup harpoon didn't work either. A manned mission almost certainly wouldn't have landed the same way, and had a robotic probe had more redundancy or control authority, it would very likely have stuck the landing too.

Lemme guess? In the immortal words of Miriam Ferguson "If English is good enough for Jesus Christ, its good enough for you"? N O T - S E R I O U S

The answer may be obvious to you, but I suspect you're oversimplifying the problem. A pile of ore isn't worth much. You need to refine it to get the valuable stuff out. Then you need to get it to market where someone will buy it. Refining ore in space is far beyond our current technological capability (here's a link to a brief explanation on how rare earth metals are currently refined). There is currently no market for rare earth metals in space. Returning unrefined ore from orbit so it can be processed on the ground presents its own problems. Even returning refined rare earth metals and their oxides from orbit isn't easy, as you'd have to send up empty "re-entry hoppers" to bring it down.

I respect your wish, AngelLestat, but I hope you'll allow me to point out a problem with RedPine's post that may not be clear to some. I realise that you have touched on it already but I wanted to highlight it: RedPine is making an argument from authority. He (I assume RedPine is a he) is a meteorologist but not just any meteorologist. He's an aviation meteorologist! He claims to share an opinion with all of the aviation meteorologist colleagues with whom he works. Trouble is that meteorology does not equal climatology. Being qualified to forecast changes in weather does not necessarily qualify one to forecast changes in climate. That and the accusations of a conspiracy in academia, and in particular the field of climatology, is ridiculous. If RedPine were a climatologist and backed up his argument with data that solidly refuted the vast body of evidence that supports the existence of climate change, I and many others would listen. As it is, the argument in his post is nothing more than an unscientific logical fallacy.