szputnyik

Aladár Mézga did it: http://indavideo.hu/video/Mezga_Aladar_kulonos_kalandjai_1resz_Masodik_dimenzio -as a child -under Communism -without his parents finding out

There could be typical train rails for a regular railway on Duna or the Mun, or for a mass driver on Minmus, and there could be a tethered rail more similar to cable cars but on the underside of the vehicle for better adhesion to Gilly for example.

There could be a tank-like rover, which would automatically lay down rails on a planetary surface, and railway-wheels available to be put on spacecraft. These rails could then be used to safely drive vehicles on bumpy planets and low-gravity moons, or even to accelerate them to escape velocity like a mass-driver.

In Hungary, biology (both primary and high school level) is considered a very important subject because addition to theory about animals, plants, microbes and genetics, there are also pretty in-depth lessons about the human anatomy, a very basic medic training, *** education and stuff like how to identify poisonous mushrooms and plants in the wild is also taught in biology classes. I still remember walking (more like crawling) into school at 6AM as a 10 year old, then minutes later trying to tell apart a champignon mushroom from a death cap in a test with a 5 minute time limit and struggling not to fall asleep in the process.

Doesn't "Luftaffe" literally mean "Air Monkey" in German?

I thought this thread would be about porting the game to the ARM architecture...

In Hungarian we say "űrhajós" literally "space sailor" or "space seaman", a neutral term used for astronauts from any country. Sometimes "kozmonauta" is used for Soviet cosmonauts. "Asztronauta" (astronaut) is rarely used, it was only popular in the 80s and 90s in children's sci-fi to give it a more "sciency" feel. Bertalan Farkas, the Hungarian cosmonaut who flew with the Soviet Interkosmos program in 1980, prefers to be called a "kozmonauta".

Just like most countries adopted the SI metric system for measurements, do you think the binary system could replace the decimal one for even everyday mathematical tasks in the future?

Sending radio signals is more difficult, if not impossible for interstellar distances, because in time, the signal would just fade into thermal or background radiation. I read somewhere that if in the future there will be human colonies in other star systems, and our understanding of physics doesn't change significantly (finding a way to send messages reliably to vast distances, preferably faster than light) it would actually make more sense to communicate with them with "snail mail", essentially written letters sent on probes that could automatically decelerate at the new system, than to attempt radio contact.

Mainly inspired by this: https://what-if.xkcd.com/64/ This could be a good follow-up on the Voyager probes. Launching an actual human body on a solar escape trajectory, so aliens could have a chance to capture and examine it in the future.

I found a neat video showing the encoded pictures on the "golden record" Voyager 1 took with itself to interstellar space.

But if it could construct atoms from cached protons, neutrons and electrons, or even those from cached quarks, it could also make a car from 1 ton of air or anything else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus_machine The Santa Claus Machine is the hypothetical ultimate matter replicator/factory/3D printer. It could essentially take in matter, disassamble it on the subatomic level and from the acquired cache of particles, reassemble any other matter. For example, it could suck in air surrounding it, and output a bucket of fried chicken, a light bulb, and Barack Obama at the age of 10 with all the knowledge and experiences he had up to that point. As long as a perfect, coded description of an item is available for it, it could disassemble inserted matter and reconstruct it indistiguishably from the original item. Does physics allow such a machine to work, provided we have the technology to construct things on a subatomic level and the computer power to process such complex code, which describes an item particle-by-particle?

"King Kai's Planet"! essentially a relatively small planet (like Dres) with a large gravity (like Eve) because its composition is very dense.

Paraterraforming means deploying large dome-like structures (either inflated or assembled) on the surface of a celestial body in which Earth-like conditions can be established. A base inside a paraterraformed environment can consist of ordinary brick and mortar structures and normal Earth-like agriculture can be used. In KSP, a paraterraforming module can be a big inflating dome, or a greenhouse-like structure that could automatically assemble by itself. After it is assembled, some years have to pass in game time and the inside of the dome will resemble the conditions on Kerbin (grass, trees, breathable air). After this happens, ordinary KSC-like base buildings could be built in the dome, rather than pressure vessels.

Let's say you're driving on the highway and suddenly a traffic-stopping accident happens in front of you, or you notice a developing traffic jam too late and you're about to run into stopped or slowly moving cars. You floor the brake pedal, the tires squeal, but it's just not strong enough to stop you in time, you either underestimated your speed, the magnitude of the situation, or the accident just happened too quickly. Suddenly, two SRB rockets ignite on the front bumper of the car, quickly decelerating it and stopping the collision. Would a system like this work good for cars as an added safety measure?

kOS programs don't run when the spacecraft is out of remotetech radio range. The built-in flight computer of RemoteTech works, when there is no connection, for example if I put a maneuvre node on the opposite side of Kerbin from KSC, and I tell the flight computer to execute the command when there is still contact with KSC, but if I tell kOS to establish an orbit, then coast to the other side of Kerbin and fire the engines there, it won't do anything after its out of radio contact with KSC.

I think you can do this with kOS. You'll essentially get a lua-like programmable interface with which you can write a program that the spacecraft will carry out.

I'm looking for a mod, with which I can send commands to a vessel, when there is a remotetech connection between the vessel and a base, and the vessel could execute these commands, when there is no remotetech connection with a base. Essentially something that works like the basic flight computer of remotetech (which can do this) but extends its functionality with more autopilot things. I've tried out MechJeb and kOS so far, but both seem to behave in a such a way, that despite there are pre-programmed commands sent to the vessel, when the vessel goes out of remotetech radiorange, it stops executing these commands. For example, I purposefully not put an antenna on a vessel to test this out. I activated ascent autopilot with MechJeb. When the vessel got out of radio range at about an altitude of 2000m, the main engine immediately stopped. With kOS I wrote a simple ascent program and tried the same thing. Again, when the vessel left the range of the Remotetech radio, the main engine immediately shut down. Do you know a mod which effectively extends the functionality of the basic RemoteTech computer with things like programmable ascent and stuff?

If the ion engine would become less powerful AND consume less energy, similar to the ion thruster of the IRL Dawn mission to the asteroid belt, BUT time warp would be available during its acceleration, it would be a good choice for smaller probes. The main problem with the ion engine is not its power, but the inability to accelerate time while using it. The real life Dawn probe uses its engine for months, but in a game, such long waiting times are unacceptable. If the engine would have one quarter of its current thrust with a somewhat smaller energy consumption, but the possibility to time warp while using it would exist, I think it would be more popular.

I'm using the RemoteTech addon, and because of the realistic communications delay, direct control of spacecraft that are sent further than the Mun or Minmus is not practical. What addons are there that are compatible with RemoteTech and allow a pre-programmed soft landing and if possible pre-programmed rover-driving?

The LM-kind of capsule would have no heatshield or parachutes, it wouldn't be capable of entering the atmosphere and landing on Earth. The Earth Return Vehicle would go to the moon automatically, thus the weight of the astronauts could be replaced by payloads on the way there.

If there are going to be future manned missions to the Moon in the next 10-15 years what do you think, which approach would be more practical and cheaper? 1.Doing the mission Apollo-style with a Lunar Orbit Rendezvous, and taking the LM and the CM with one single big launch. OR 2. Sending an automated Earth Return Vehicle to the Moon, then with a separate launch, sending the astronauts to the Moon with a bigger LM-kind of capsule, and landing them near the Earth Return Vehicle. At the end of the mission, the astronauts would abandon the LM, board the Earth Return Vehicle and return to Earth. Which method would be cheaper and more practical with modern technology and why?

That's the difficult part. Maybe the astronaut would have raised edible insects in a container and instead of space food, they would've packed insect food.

Keep in mind that this would've happened during the Cold War, a few years after the last Apollo moon mission. It would've "worth it" because Americans managed to put a man on the moon of another planet and safely returned him, while the Soviets couldn't even put a man on our own moon.