PakledHostage

Then don't ignore the period. Punctuation is your friend.

It is also worth noting that Gallipoli is a very significant event in the history of Australia and New Zealand. Probably as important in defining their nationhood as Vimy Ridge was for Canada. Gallipoli and Vimy Ridge were tragic first world war battles that came with the silver lining of helping these commonwealth countries to assert their independence. It is entirely worth marking the 100th anniversaries of these events.

I promise I won't distort your words if you do me the same courtesy. I know that English isn't your first language but I know you can read better than that. The 5000 years number comes from Kibble's thought experiment about what Sumerians (who lived ca. 3000 BC) would have regarded as a waste of time, yet we consider to be among the pinnacle of our technological achievements. I did not put it forward as an estimate of when we would start to exploit resources from other planets. You clearly believe that it should be possible to begin to exploit resources extracted from asteroids and other celestial bodies in some admittedly unspecified short time frame (within a couple of decades?) and you are entitled to your opinion, but I am also entitled to disagree with you. I think your projections are overly optimistic, possibly because you over estimate near term technological progress or possibly because you under estimate the technical difficulty of what you're envisioning. Or maybe there's another reason? You also seem to be hand waving away the issue of who's going to pay for the development of the technologies that you envision and how they are going to see a return on their investment.

I'm not sure I get your point? You are talking about a people who lived about 5000 years ago. The technology of a civilization 5000 years in the future was just as unimaginable for them as it is for us. But people like AngelLestat aren't talking about a time 5000 years from now. Much like many of us here, guys like AngelLestat forsee a future where we live throughout and exploit the resources of the solar system. Unlike many of us here, however, they seem to think it has to be forced to happen imminently, before the economic drivers exist for it to happen more naturally. I feel like a broken record saying it again, but Rome wasn't built in a day. We are building Rome. It may not seem like it to people who read too much sci-fi or play too much KSP, but we are building Rome.

That's a straw man argument... Either that or you greatly under appreciate the technological achievement of the Apollo program. There's a vast difference between building the pyramids using 2500 BC technology vs. today's technology and flying to the moon using 1960's technology vs today's technology. No, that is a way of seeing things for those who are pragmatic. It isn't too much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that most of us here would love to see thriving colonies on Mars, Ceres, the clouds of Venus, etc. The real world isn't KSP, however. The real world runs on money. The Apollo program was only funded because of the cold war. It was a matter of prestige to succeed and thereby demonstrate the superiority of the capitalist system. Nobody has gone back since because there's no justification for spending the billions of dollars that it would cost. We can do as much as we currently need to do for less money by sending robotic probes. And while there may well come a day when we step off this planet and become a true space faring civilization, it isn't going to happen in our lifetimes. Rome wasn't built in a day. All the wishful thinking in the world isn't going to change that.

I have little doubt to what you are referring with your "97% of scientists have reached a consensus about this" remark given your previously stated position on the topic, but you seemingly didn't read the post above yours. Cpt. Kipard made a very valid point: Most scientists would love nothing more than to be able to disprove an established consensus. If nobody has succeeded in disproving a consensus that exists among 97% of experts in a field (who, as previously stated, would love nothing more than to disprove one another), you'd be a fool to doubt the consensus. You might retain a bit of healthy skepticism, but in the absence of a conspiracy the experts are probably correct and can be regarded as such.

I can't agree more. A closer analog is Antarctica, and even that continent is far more habitable than Mars. It is warmer, wetter, you can breath the air and you can go outside without a having to wear a pressure suit. Yet even though Antarctica was discovered in 1820 (and we've had the means to get there since well before then), the only people living there reside in scientific research stations. There aren't any colonies. To be fair, the continent's resources have been protected from being developed by the international Antarctic Treaty, but only since 1959. And this fact actually helps me make my point. Without resource extraction, there isn't any compelling reason to colonize Antarctica. The same will be true for anywhere else in the solar system. It will be a long time, if ever, before resource extraction from Mars makes financial sense. Asteroids are a better bet, but I find it hard to believe that even they will be mined for their resources in our lifetimes.

Thanks. Now I'm having an existential crisis...

I don't think that is a good analogy. Your car's wheels on the road don't have as much latency in control response as SpaceX's rocket does. And because (as I understand it) it has too much thrust to hover, it has to zero out vertical and horizontal velocity simultaneously, just as it touches down.

Certainly PPS GPSs would be accurate enough for the purpose, but I am still a bit surprised to read that? Also, what do you know about how the control system compensates for wind? Does it attempt to account for wind drift in its control inputs (feed forward) or is it purely reactionary? There seems to be some evidence of breaking waves in the videos I've seen. That would suggest winds were not negligible at the time of the landing attempt. Presumably feeding near real-time wind speed vs. altitude data of the near surface winds to the rocket's control system would help preclude some of the over controlling that we see in the videos (if it was aggravated by wind drift, as I assume it was).

That begs the question: Too hard for survival of the rocket or the barge?

"Take care, sir," cried Sancho. "Those over there are not giants but windmills." - Miguel de Cervantes

Just thought I'd share this for the Star Wars fans around here who have small kids. There was a story on the CBC this morning about a new Star Wars kids book series illustrated with felt figurines called Cozy Classics: Star Wars. I mention it because the artwork looks very well done.

But jerks HAVE killed and injured plenty of people over the years.

You're thinking of metaclorians... Best you forget about those (see Rule #3 of "4 Rules To Make Star Wars Great Again").

Erm, there's no poll? Aside from that, I have Plague Inc. on my phone but I've only played it a couple of times. It doesn't do it for me because there is a strategy that makes it quite easy, even on the hardest level. I thought I would like it because I really enjoy the board game "Pandemic", but sadly it didn't turn out that way. As far as games for my phone are concerned, Bridge Constructor is probably my favorite. ...But I digress.

As you've pointed out, a hang glider is an obvious example of an aircraft that is controled by shifting the pilot's weight around, but for a crippled airliner, you'd be better off trying to use differential thrust from the engines as the crew of United Airlines flight 232 did in their efforts to land their crippled DC-10 in Sioux City.

I don't think caffeine is a placebo? Maybe it doesn't work for you, but it certainly gives a lot of people a buzz. It picks me up after lunch when my body desperately wants a nap but my boss and coworkers would frown on me for giving in to the urge. I've always taken my coffee without sugar or cream so it isn't those that are giving me the lift, either.

It depends on what kind of coffee you are drinking and how much... In many places in the world, "coffee" means espresso or some variation thereon. North American style filter coffee is surprisingly high in caffeine by comparison to a shot of espresso. According to that link, 250 ml of filter coffee has a lot more caffeine than a red bull's 80 mg.

I think it is pretty clear that SpaceXray is a really big fan of the movie. Nobody is going to convince him that it is anything lessthan great so it is pointless to try. Similarly, he needs to understand that he'll never convince those of us who don't think Interstellar was much to write home about that it is anything more than a mildly entertaining (but mostly forgettable) movie.

And the sonic booms produced by Concorde were stronger than those produced by a little fighter. I've heard sonic booms from both* and the Concorde's would literally give you a thump your chest while those from high altitude fighter jets pretty much just sound like thunder. *As I've previously explained elsewhere on these forums, I sailed across the Atlantic via a northerly route about 12 years ago. We heard the Concorde go over a good dozen times during that 3 week passage. You'd feel the thump in your chest each time. This despite the fact that it was 50 odd thousand feet up and almost certainly not directly overhead.

I'm confused? How could your grandfather see that the culprit was a 13 year old from way up high in his airplane?

A bit off topic, but I'm going to step in and defend the airlines for a moment: At the end of the day, a seat on a plane is a seat on a plane is a seat on a plane... Baring some obvious perks in business class or whatever premium class an airline may offer, there is no difference in your seat between a cheap economy ticket and an expensive one. The difference between a cheap economy ticket and an expensive one is convenience and flexibility. That is what you are paying for when you buy an expensive ticket. To put things into perspective for yourself, you can dowload just about any major carrier's annual report and divide the annual revenue seat miles by the annual operating costs and you'll get an approximation of the cost per seat mile. The number is typically about 0.12 USD per revenue seat per mile. That means anyone paying less than about $600 USD (plus tax) to fly from LA to New York and back on an airline like Delta or American is being subsidized by someone who's flying on a premium ticket. Now note that I'm using revenue seat miles not available seat miles. This is important because airlines are already doing everything that they can to increase their load factors. Increasing the proportion of seats you sell on every flight has obvious benefits to the bottom line. There are limits to what is possible, however. Low cost airlines manage higher load factors by flying less frequently and imposing restrictions on passengers to ensure that they actually show up for their flights. Low cost carriers also manage lower cost per mile by flying to airports with lower landing/ground handling fees and paying their staff less. Large full service airlines can only achieve so much in the load factor department, however. They count on the people who are willing to pay the big bucks for a seat. Those people want convenience and flexibility. If their meeting is done an hour early, they want to be able to jump on the earlier flight. If there isn't an earlier flight, they'll book with the competition that does have more frequencies next time. Unfortunately for the airlines, those extra seats on the more frequent flights then have to be filled up. Sometimes there just aren't enough people who want to fly on a route. Some of the extra capacity is sold below cost (it is better to get something for those seats than nothing), but there is a balance. If you make too many cheap seats available, people will just buy those and be willing to abandon their unused tickets rather than pay a higher price for more flexibility. Too many cheap seats also create an expectation that air travel should be cheap, making it hard to price the expensive tickets sufficiently high that you break even. No, you've got to create demand for the higher priced expensive tickets. Letting the guy who bought the cheap ticket have the same flexibility and convenience as the guy who bought the expensive ticket erodes the value of the higher priced ticket. EDIT: I should add that this post is not intended to be an exhaustive treatise on airline economics - just a rough overview of some of the basics. Other factors like demographics and customer loyalty programs (among others) are also important. The key point is that airlines have to impose restrictions to create value and thereby justify their price structure. And on a note more related to the topic of this thread, BA and Air France created value for Concorde tickets by making it prestigious. It wasnt so much about saving 3 or 4 hours off your 12 hour door to door journey. BA's Concorde operations had its own wing in T4 at Heathrow. You were treated like someone special right from when you entered that part of the terminal. I almost experienced it myself one time, getting as far as buying a one way ticket from LHR to JFK, but I got a refund on my ticket when the amount of money that I'd spent on it sunk in. Round trip at the time was over 20 000 CAD. I got my ticket at a significant discount, but it was still a lot of money. I guess the prestige wasn't worth it to me... I regret that decision in hindsight, but so it goes.

One nautical mile equals approximately 1 minute of arc along a meridian. It equals exactly 1852 metres. A minute of arc along a meridian varies from about 1,843 metres at the equator to about 1,862 metres at the poles, with a mean value of 1,852.3 metres.

I stumbled on a paper titled "An Independent Assessment of the Technical Feasibility of the Mars One Mission Plan" a moment ago and thought I would share it. The paper was written by Sydney Do at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and presented at the 65th International Astronautical Congress in the fall of 2014. To quote the paper's conclusions: