PakledHostage

It is worse than that:

Thanks for taking us along for the ride. I hope you thought to include the URL to this thread in your letter? Just for ....s and giggles... I have found archived copies of some of my old Usenet posts over the years. If inane Usenet posts are still recoverable 20-25 years later using a simple Google search, I see no reason why some of this crap enlightened discussion won't be recoverable 100 years from now.

I hadn't seen it but thanks for sharing! The boom is a shock wave, sure, but it is almost certainly moving at supersonic speed. This shock would start out propogating significantly faster than the speed of sound and would slow down as it expands away from the source.

Trouble is that they probably don't have Michaels or AC Moore in the Balkans...

The plugin exposes Lat, Lon, number of visible satellites and DOP for other plugins to access. Those other plugins must be coded to use that information in some way, however. An example of a mod that has been adapted to work together with Figaro is SirJodelstein's Persistent Trails mod.

Re-reading my post above, I can see how it could be interpreted as being a bit sensitive. That wasn't my intent. I sincerely doubt that any mod maker expects all of their users to be happy with their work. Least of all me. I am fully aware that this mod could be more polished if I had the time to dedicate to polishing it. But my main point from above still stands: While you are welcome to make suggestions about how I can improve the mod, the tone in which you do so makes all the difference.

Feel free to read about the history of the Luftwaffehelfers. A small percentage volunteered but most were drafted.

For what it is worth, it wasn't just the adult pilots that were dead or captured. They were running out of suitable conscripts for all sorts of roles. My great uncle was 15 when he was captured at the end of the war. He'd been drafted as a Luftwaffenhelfer and forced to man an anti-aircraft gun. Edit: I guess that is was Lajos was getting at too with the video he posted... Except in my case, someone who I've known all my life was one of the "boys" manning the anti-aircraft guns.

I'm sorry, but I am going to call BS. You are being critical. It is unfortunate that this mod doesn't work together with someone else's mod but I support it in my free time. Why not be grateful for what you've got rather than complain that it doesn't work the way that YOU want it to? This mod is made possible through the VOLUNTEER efforts of people like M4V, MrPwner and myself. I have said from the very beginning that it is a SCIENCE mod, intended to get people thinking about where their navigation information comes from. Navigating a real-world spacecraft requires extensive support hardware, from onboard IMUs, GNSS, TDRSS, ground radar, and on and on. Very little is done in real time. While rigid simulation of the complexities of real world spaceflight would be tedious, I believe that the challenge of launching your own global navigation satellite system is rewarding enough to be worthwhile. Sure the mod has limitations, but it will always have limitations. Someone will always wish that it was better. Complaining about it on the mod's thread isn't helpful; it is only disrespectful of the people who's efforts you're already benefiting from. If you want to make a suggestion on how it can be made better, please do. But realize that your suggestion may not get implemented because there may not be a big enough ROI for the greater community of the mod's users.

Intuitively, it makes sense that the virus isn't that contagious. After all, it is currently endemic in highly populated regions that lack adequate sanitation and clean water, yet it has "only" spread to a few thousand people so far. Even so, I think that Aningaaq makes a good point. Educating the people is a key component of controlling the spread. It sounds like public health efforts are having some effect because I've read reports that people are avoiding physical contact and are washing their hands everywhere they go. But there's a darker side too. People who have been exposed to the virus have to understand that they carry a burden of responsibility themselves too. Two recent cases where several health workers were unwittingly exposed to the disease while trying to care for a person who they thought was only sick with malaria occurred after the patients (or their families) lied about their being exposed to Ebola. Contrast that with the incredible story of the people of Eyam, England who chose to isolate themselves when plague was discovered there in 1665, rather than let the infection spread. In the absence of a vaccine, sanitation and social responsibility will probably be the greatest factors in getting this outbreak under control. Edit: I read another article that indicated that the genome of the virus responsible for this outbreak has already been sequenced as part of the effort to understand how it has spread so far. They know that it has mutated a few times already and can trace it all the way back to patient zero. That is pretty impressive. I also understand (someone please correct me if I am wrong) that the experimental drug Zmapp introduces three antibodies that interfere with the virus' ability to cause damage. IIRC, the antibodies are grown in GMO tobacco plants. Again, that is pretty impressive technology! In short, there's hope that this can eventually be brought under control with biomedical technology, but while we wait for that, the world community needs to continue to supply public education, sanitation, clean water and health care to the affected areas.

I found this article in Science Magazine's website about numerical modeling of the spread of Ebola and thought I would share it. They are careful to point out that "garbage in equals garbage out" but their findings are fuel for discussion. Certainly groups like the UN, MSF and the WHO want to control panic as much as they want to control the actual spread of the outbreak, but I wonder if they aren't downplaying the risks too much? These researcher's numerical model seems to suggest that things will get worse than any of those organizations are admitting in their public statements. I would like to keep this a science discussion rather than sensationalis or alarmist discussion, but what do readers here think will be required to get this outbreak under control?

You just did. Twice.

Thanks for the support! You are absolutely right that I wasn't implying that my craft had been captured. Only that my multiple gravitational assists had resulted in sufficiently slow speed relative to the Mun on the third encounter that my craft was in an elliptical trajectory relative to the Mun rather than a hyperbolic one. Clearly that is advantageous when attempting to reach the Mun's surface from LKO using minimal delta-V.

Sorry, I should have been more clear for posterity... I was posting about strong auroras the night of August 27th (morning of August 28th UTC). As it turnrd out, things were over by the time I posted this thread so it was a non event by then. The data suggests that it had been very active about 2-4 hours before my post, however.

I agree. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I would like to say again that I really don't understand how manned missions are somehow more "inspirational" than robotic missions? Sure, as a one-off accomplishment, the Apollo landings stand out as being among the greatest in history. But robotic missions like the Voyagers, Cassini, and even MSL are up there too. Why put all of our eggs in one basket? For the cost of a manned Mars mission (or even a replacement ISS, for that matter), we could easily fund robotic lander missions to Jupiter's moons, Titan, and probably even the Uranus and Neptune systems. Sure a manned Mars landing would be an incredible accomplishment, but I don't think it is worth sacrificing the scientific ROI and "inspirational" PR value of a whole spectrum of robotic missions for it. The reality is that funding for scientific projects is limited in the current financial climate. Lets put our money where it reaps the biggest benefits.

For what it is worth, my aurora alert app just went off to let me know that there are currently strong auroras going on. I think the strongest activity was about 2-4 hours ago but the planetary Kp index is still sitting at 5. I can't see anything from my location but maybe others who are located on the North American plains will have better luck? Maybe post pictures if you see anything?

This post inspired me to go looking for my old "Minimum Delta-V to the Mun" challenge thread from a couple of years ago but I think it might have been lost in the Great Forum Derp... While that challenge is only peripherally related to this thread, it is still relevant to Lajos' post above: The point of my "Minimum Delta-V to the Mun" challenge was to get from a 100 km starting orbit about Kerbin to a landing on the Mun using the minimum Delta-V. Guys tried all sorts of things from bi-elliptic transfers to simple Hohmann transfers and everything in between. The two methods that resulted in the lowest delta-V expenditure in the competition were Stochasty's, who built a craft that could survive a roll-on landing at over 100 m/s and my own. Stochasty still beat me, but I got close to his score by using a double gravitational assist off the Mun, then intercepting the Mun for a landing on the third encounter. I used the first munar slingshot to raise my periapsis about Kerbin and the second Munar slingshot to lower my apoapsis about Kerbin. When I entered the Mun's SOI the third time, I was actually on an elliptical trajectory rather than a hyperbolic trajectory. Using Stochasty's landing technique at the end of the multi-gravitational assist trajectory would have shaved even more delta-V off the transfer.

I used to not bother with flu vacinations, but my doctor won me over with the herd immunity argument when H1N1 was going around. While the flu may not be a very big risk for young healthy people, we don't want to transmit it to someone who is vulnerable. The low risk of complications for any one individual is outweighed by the benefits to the population at large. An interesting example of how a lack of herd immunity can lead to outbreaks happened this past spring: There was an outbreak of measels in British Columbia, Canada that started in a fundamentalist Christian school. The immunization rate among kids in that school are reportedly near zero. Immunization rates in the "Bible belt" communities in that area are also low. Hopefully better policies will evolve out of this case study before an outbreak of something more serious happens in that community or in others like it.

I just got back inside after shooting some frames of that part of the sky. I still have to stack them but I can tell already that they they won't be anything to write home about. Even so, in advance of stacking my frames, I wonder about a little red dot that I see in every frame at about the location where comet Jacques is supposed to be. Has anyone else been out to shoot photos of it this evening? My wife suggested that maybe the red dot was Rudolf since we can see blitzen, hear donner and we're looking for comet...) Does anyone else pick up the distinct red "star" at the expected location of the comet? Or does my camera maybe just have some bad pixels?

IIRC, even the space shuttle had a launch termination system. After the Challenger broke up, the range safety officers manually fired the two wayward SRB's flight termination systems. And of course there's the famous video of the Little Joe test of the Apollo LES where the booster failed for real. The LES functioned automatically and flawlessly in that unexpectedly realistic test. Edit: I just watched the video... That's one expensive ring vortex! Ouch.

How do you know? Were you there?

I agree. I finally got around to watching this video this evening. Time well wasted. Thanks TeeGee!

How so? Please provide an example of how most of the contributors to this thread barely understand the concept themselves? Please educate us since you seem to believe that you know better than the rest of us.

It is an interesting point. But the trouble is that even the fundamentalist Christians don't seem to be consistent. A significant number of them interpret the bible literally enough that they believe the world is only ~6000 years old, yet you don't hear them arguing that the Sun goes around the Earth? Why not? The Bible says that it does... Are they, as Penn and Teller ask in the video below, fighting one battle at a time and will get to that one once they put the evolution issue to rest? Or are they tacitly acknowledging that the Bible is wrong in places? If they are tacitly acknowledging that the Bible is wrong in places, why are they so hung up on fighting the idea of evolution? As much as creationists like to frame evolution and even atheism as faith based belief systems, the foundation of science and atheism is really skepticism. Doubt. Evolution may well be a fact, but we won't call it that because we're open to possibility that the theory, as it currently stands, may change as we get more evidence. If there's ever enough evidence for intelligent design or even outright creation at the tip of some deity's finger, then science will almost certainly accept it. But the reality is that there is no evidence for those possibilities. This, ultimately, is the reason we can't do as the Monkeh asks and disprove evolution. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7_lhfUhrHY

I thought it was the devil? I was told by one creationist that the devil placed all the evidence that the world was over 6000 years old in order to trick us away from belief in The Truthtm.