Maxwell Comp

I saw Spectre the other day, and I can't count the number of errors in it. It has such an abundance of the classic unrealistic aspects that the 007 franchise is famous for. I'm not talking about jetpacks or submarine cars, I'm talking about the stuff.

I've done this a few times, though only with Windows 8 and XP (xp didn't know what hit it, lol). I believe I used Acronis and their free trial to do it, as I couldn't get EaseUS to work quite right either. http://www.acronis.com/en-us/personal/computer-backup/ As a rule, of course, keep the prior drive for a while in case something goes haywire. Sometimes a problem might emerge a week or two later after an automatic Windows update. Make sure that you get the drivers for the SSD too; I recently had some problems with that caused by a Windows update.

It's good, but it's probably more than you need. It has a lot of extra cost, and only a bit better performance. Any desktop i5 processor should do the trick. Other than that, you'll want 8GB RAM, and a discrete graphics card. There are tons of graphics card models, but there is a chart at http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html that lists all of them in descending order of performance (the two columns are just for the two different major brands, each row is about equally powerful). If you get anything on or above the line that starts with "GTX 260", you should be fine. The higher on the list, the better. Kerbal doesn't use much graphics power compared to other games, but if you play anything else you'll want one of the more expensive cards. Graphics cards change model numbers every year, and each of the two makers (Nvidia and AMD) make several cards to fit various budgets, so the specific models can get a bit confusing to follow until you are fluent with their naming patterns.

I came here to say exactly this. If it's overheating, a probable cause is a lack of thermal paste. I have some Artic Silver that I used when re-seating my old computer's CPU heatsink and it's pretty good, but really almost any thermal paste will do the job if you apply it correctly. It's hard to get a bad paste, and the high-end ones perform only a few degrees better than average ones when they are both applied correctly. A kit may come with a cleaning solution to remove the old paste, and you should use a coffee filter or microfiber cloth to wipe off the CPU and heatsink contact points. Don't let any dust or fingerprints get on the contacts, because that will decrease it's performance.

I would like a sister planet to Kerbal, in the same or a very near orbit, and maybe 10 or 20 degrees ahead along the orbit. This would be a much easier target for a first interplanetary mission. Let's call it Kerbal Prime. It could be part of a storyline that says Kerbal Prime is about to be destroyed by the asteroids or somesuch, and we want to reach it to do some science while it still exists. Whether Kerbal Prime is populated or not is an exercise left to the reader (if it is populated, please give them a planetwide focus on digging and drilling, just for the opposite factor, and because that could be part of its impending doom). Maybe have some benefits for rescuing some inhabitants of Kerbal Prime too - like extra resources because they love digging.

I think you guys are finding brilliantly exotic ideas, but there's a simple one we could try for the in-atmosphere ejection. Because of Mar's low atmospheric density and lower mass, it requires much less power to reach escape velocity than from Earth. In fact, a small rocket could easily be made that could escape Mars's atmosphere, with mass and space to spare. According to Air & Space magazine, a rocket the size of a pencil could do it. That rocket can be fired upwards away from Mars and collect atmospheric samples on the way up. The other 150kg of mass ejected earlier could be another rocket, and the two rockets could link and begin a return trip to Earth. It's a relatively simple sample return mission. The hardest part would be the orbital docking, but the rockets will already be along aligned orbits. Preservation of the returned sample will be important because there will be very little martian dust/atmosphere in it, but there will be enough to experiment with.

I second the App suggestion. The trustworthy Ti-83 is hugely overpriced. It's good for what it is, but I think the price has been constant for at least 10 years with no real changes.

You forgot the lowest-cost storage medium, and it's one that is still common in many industries:tape storage. Yep, old-fashioned tape drives. Modern tape cartridges can hold up to 4TB on a single cartridge, and are often the most cost-effective form of long-term storage for massive amounts of data.

You probably could. The computers used by Apollo were very specialized, whereas your phone has a general-purpose CPU. Your phone can do much, much more because integrated circuits have advanced tremendously.

You should look up Esperanto. It has no irregular conjugations, and I think it allows nouns to be conjugated. For example, in English we can say "it is raining" but we cannot say "it is summering", because summer is only a noun while rain can be both a noun and verb. I have heard that Russian allows conjugations of nouns, at least under certain situations. Esperanto is probably the easiest language to learn, but English is not very difficult. The Romance languages are somewhat easy too. Slavic/Balken/etc languages from Eastern Europe are very difficult (I hear that Polish and Hungarian are particularly hard), and legend is that Icelandic is the hardest national language. I believe Russian has some of the most beautiful pronunciations of certain phrases, but unfortunately few people speak the language to sound beautiful. Not to denigrate French or Italian - they can sound beautiful (and often do) - but Russian has a handful of charming words that a Romance language couldn't produce. Anyway, you will probably enjoy a mathematical field called Discrete Mathematics, as well as Propositional Logic. The things you have written are well thought-out.

It is such a shame that it died in non-spectacular fashion. It would be wonderful if it had somehow presented a 'threat' to Earth (but the type of threat that is only a threat according to the most ratings-obsessed media). It's been a while since we had an End Of The World, and the 2012 Mayan one wasn't even celebrated much. The last good End Of The World was Y2K. We need some type of once-a-decade celebration. New Year's is every year of course, the Olympics are every 4 years (or every 2 years if you include winter Olympics). So, something once every 10 years would fit right in. Doesn't the sun have a cycle duration of about 11 years? We should start a movement to predict the end of each cycle, and celebrate that. The prediction doesn't need to be particularly accurate, it is just an excuse to celebrate.

I have a small experiment that may help illustrate an interesting idea hidden in the question. Get a helium-filled balloon on a string, them get into your car with the balloon. Hold the string so the balloon is floating without touching anything else, and then keep an eye on it while you accelerate. The question is, which way does the balloon move when you accelerate? If my memory is correct, the balloon actually moves forward. This is because it is lighter than air, and so it will be displaced by the air due to the slight pressure change caused by the acceleration. Pressure in the back of the car will be slightly higher, so the balloon moves forward a bit into the lower-pressure air. In light of this interesting fact, what do you think will happen to airplanes that are flying if the earth's rotation suddenly stopped?

Is there any form of climate modeling software that is (somewhat) easy to use and "all batteries included"? I know that climate modeling is incredibly complex and requires much more computing power than the average home user has, but a simplified planet should be model-able with a home computer. That model may not be able to model the effect of ocean currents or arctic melting. But, it would be nice to have a planet with atmosphere that we can experiment with. As an amateur software programmer, I have considered trying to make a simple model, though honestly a project like that is well out of my league. I would need to quit work and devote several years before I could begin to make real progress.

On my first manned Mun-and-back mission, some of the landing gear broke. Fortunately I had enough inline stabilizers to partially lift the ship and get into a orbit with the bit of fuel I had left. Unfortunately, that orbit was completely wrong. Plan B: burn almost all of my remaining the fuel to get into a Kerbal orbit - but I didn't have enough to enter the atmosphere, so I burned retrograde at periapsis to ensure I continued orbiting only Kerbal. Then, I launched my rescue craft, full of fuel and space for the crew. The Mun lander didn't have docking ports, so I just planned to EVA the intrepid crew into the rescue craft. After 20 minutes of fiddling with orbits and alignments (I don't use MechJeb - I would use it, but it doesn't seem operable on my system), I got an orbital rendezvous within 200 meters. I cannot describe the incredible satisfaction of manually reaching orbital rendezvous as I saw the two ships hover in space. I transferred the crew to the rescue craft and burned retrograde into LKO to prepare for re-entry. It was at that moment that I discovered a problem. Where are my parachutes? .... I forgot to put parachutes on the rescue ship. Plan C: Rescue Ship 2.0 (Parachute Edition) was sent up, did another orbital rendezvous in LKO, EVA transfer, and finally I landed the crew on the ground safely.

I would change the laws of physics so that I could (at my own discretion) become completely invisible, except for my retina. The retina need to be visible because, if light passed through them, it would be impossible for me to see anything. That would negate most of the invisibility benefits. If I couldn't do that, I would simply change pi to equal 4. I am aware that this is rounding upward, but 4 is a nice square number, and it would allow circles and squares to have the same circumferences and areas if they have the same diameter. I'd like to see what would happen to the universe if this were instantly changed.

Speaking of reducing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Shell is working on carbon capture technology. See Shell's website on climate change. The paragraph at the top of the page is amazing and I cite it any time someone tries to debate climate change with me. It may prove more cost-effective to store carbon underground in the future; it's not an ideal way to handle it, but it is better than releasing it all into the atmosphere. Also, natural gas releases less greenhouse gas than coal, so it is a preferred alternative. The fossil fuel in danger of running out is oil; coal is still plentiful, and I think that the US estimates that it has a 300 year supply based on known domestic reserves. Regarding the ozone layer, my very limited knowledge is that it helps filter the ultraviolet light from the sun. Excess ultraviolet light is linked to skin cancer and sunburn. I'm sure you know that the ozone layer is harmed by CFC's, but here's a not-quite-fun-fact: the man who invented CFC's also invented leaded gasoline, which put large amounts of toxic lead into the atmosphere. He had good intentions, but a very unfortunate legacy.

The Kerbals are lucky to have such amazing spacecraft in their sky. Points are updated, and I wish I could give bonus points for innovation, cleverness, orbital assembly, and the ability to create an eclipse through spectacular size.

When you wake up from a bad dream and say to yourself "oh, it was only an alpha build... It'll be patched soon." when the dream had nothing to do with KSP or software at all. I write a bit of software. And yes, I once did think a dream was an alpha version of real life.

mhoram, that is a beautiful ship! I just updated the leaderboard. Blazefallow and vyznev, you are right about the period of eclipse. Perhaps thermoelectric generators can provide enough power to keep the center on limited operations during the period, though the inclined orbit would work even better - the challenge is now updated to allow an inclined orbit. A large number of radioisotope thermoelectric generators may concern some kerbals who are unfamiliar with the excellent construction and safety procedures of the Kerbal Space Program, so it may be reassuring to operate them far away in space rather than at the space center itself. I admit that the greatest risk of failure and contamination would occur during launch, and the energy is being delivered to the center by a beam of focused radiation anyway, but those are risks that were not foreseen.

After years of devoting the entire Kerbian economy to our space program, we have discovered that we now face an imminent energy crisis. Our scientists have come up with a solution, and fortunately it is the same solution they always propose: we must launch a spaceship. The engineers have promised that this plan will allow us to continue the Space Program. If you can launch a craft that generates at least 500 E/s of electricity and has a satellite dish, we can beam the energy back to a receiver at the space center and power the space complex. The station needs to roughly orbit the equator. If the station is in keostationary orbit, the engineers can continue working 24/7; but if not they will work during the half-time that the station is overhead providing power. Requirements: At least 500 E/s electrical generation while in sunlight. At least 1 satellite dish Reach (roughly) equatorial orbit over Kerbal Space Center. Submit an image of the craft in orbit while producing power, preferably taken from the angle of the sun (that makes it much easier to count the solar panels). If you can submit an image from launch (or from gravity turn) that is great but not required. Hard Mode: Generate an additional 50 E/s with thermoelectric generators. Points: Look How High I Am - Double points: reach (roughly) keostationary orbit above the Space Center. The most insightful scientists have suggested an inclined orbit to maintain constant light, but this is not required. Couldn’t Hit The Broadside Of A Barn - negative 100 points: reach keostationary orbit on the wrong side of the planet. Taking Care Of Business - 1 point per E/s of energy generated through solar panels. Is It Supposed To Glow Like That? - 10 points per E/s generated with thermoelectric generators. Armstrong and Aldrin - 100 points: Include a crew of at least 2 Kerbals, they will be needed to clean the solar panels. Blinded By The Light - negative 50 points: place every crew capsule above the solar panels, thus blinding your crew with the reflected sunlight. 50 points: Include a docking port so the station can provide assistance for any future missions Limits: Stock parts only*. Basic assistance/informational utilities can be used, but you must launch the craft and reach a stable orbit using only stock parts and your piloting skill. No docking with pre-existing crafts in orbit. *Non-stock parts are allowed to be on the craft, but cannot be used to generate power, launch the ship, or hold the ship together. Mechjeb can be used to get from a stable orbit into keostationary orbit. Advice from Jebediah: The satellite dish does not need to point directly at the space center. as long as it is included on the ship, the engineers will figure out how to aim it. Keostationary orbit is 2868.4 KM. Scoring will be done based on a count of the active solar panels and thermoelectic generators when they are all deployed. If the panels can be placed in a geometric or repeated pattern, it would be greatly appreciated because that makes it easier to count. If a mod can tell the amount of electricity generation, that is wonderfully helpful. Leaderboard: 1: 9632 points: mhoran (previously 4079.84 points with an earlier entry) 2: 3344 points: BlazeFallow 3: 3196.8 points: Kasuha (in optimized orbit) 4: 748 points: Maxwell 5: 6: My sample submission: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=189830340 It has 36 Gigantor panels for a total of 648 E/s generation. It also has the two intrepid explorers (safely under the panels). The satellite dish is the barely-visible thing mounted to the launcher tanks. I am working on a larger craft, but have only test-launched a half-done version so far. my crafts were made during .21, but the changes in the update should not have made a difference.

Desktop: Intel quad 6600 Nvidia 9800gt with 1 gig 3.2 gig RAM (4 gigs installed, but 32-bit can only use 3.2) I have gotten graphics lag, probably because I have a 27-inch 2560x1440 IPS screen. Beautiful though. Don't spend $1k on a screen like this - the same ones are available for $300 if you know where to look.