StrandedonEarth

? I’m pretty sure @tater is referring to being around for the first operational Falcon Heavy mission while on his way from the American SW to his planned London trip. Tater may even want to plan to pass through Orlando both ways, in the event of delays. A pilgrimmage to KSC, preferably capped by a major launch, is at the top of my bucket list I’m sure it can be arranged, depending how much you want to spend...

My understanding is that it would have its own weather if not for air conditioning. That must be one (or several) big honkin AC unit.

I haven’t read the account of her sinking, but the bomb could have jammed it up so it simply couldn’t move no matter where it was controlled from. No doubt the engineering crew was frantically working to get the rudder moving again (fixing the actuators or clearing the jam), assuming it wasn’t blown clean off.

Well, now I have to complain that all I can complain about is that I don't dare complain about the weather lest the weather gods smite me here in LotusLand. The weather has bern far too nice for January. Tell that to the dead slave left for the hyenas outside Pharaoh's tomb...

Those are quite the Easter eggs you left behind....

My T-shirts were carefully selected on that trip

Scrubs was hilarious. Never paid attention to the medical aspect as it was just a sitcom to me. The janitor (man is he tall) went on to land a starring role on The Middle (a great family sitcom; so few of those these days, and it ended last season) and Dr. Cox seems to have found a recurring role on Chicago PD. But it's hard to take him seriously as a high-ranking cop when I last saw him in that comedy role.

I've seen and/or touched what there is to see or touch at the California Science Center in "The City of Angels."

Beer would make their bellies convex, not concave. Concave must be from sucking in their gut whenever a flat-bellied she-turtle cruises by.

My two cents here and there on random stuff: 1.1 involved re-writing practically the entire game for a major Unity engine upgrade. While this introduced a new pile of bugs and required a complete re-creation of the wheel/landing gear module code, it also allowed individual ships to use separate CPU cores. Overall it gave a big boost to performance as well as a big boost to the bug count, and 'wheels' (including landing gear and landing struts) have never been the same. Since the major effort of 1.1 was the rewrite, there was little in the way of new features. One purported reason why Harvester left was project burnout. After the major push for the 1.1 rewrite, that's understandable. 5 years or so on one project is an eternity for a software developer (or so I've heard on this forum), and a change is good for clearing one's mind and bringing fresh blood views to a project. However, I don't quite recall exactly which update Harvester left after. With the plethora of new bugs in the 1.1 rewrite, IIRC 1.2 was mostly a major bug extermination effort. Many talented modders were hired to help in the hunt. Nobody knows why they all most of them left at the same time because of NDA's, but the two leading rumours involved their contracts simply being up, or unhappiness with working conditions. At any rate, they were no longer needed for a massive bug hunt, and by no means did the entire team quit. So the major effort of 1.2 was bug squashing, and not a lot in the way of new features (Commnet?) Take Two did not just buy KSP; nor did they buy Squad. They bought the entire Kerbal franchise, and kept Squad on to continue developing it. So any merchandising and future Kerbal games belong to T2. This is where it gets weird, as kerbal merchandise (especially the 3D Kerbal prints from Shapeways) have been pulled from the virtual shelves and can no longer be ordered, although Kerbal-themed T-shirts can still be found online (probably not officially sanctioned). One would think that T2 would be trying to maximize their return on their Kerbal franchise by pumping out the merchandise. 1.3 was mostly localisation (languages) and 1.4 was mostly the MH DLC. 1.5 and 1.6 have mostly been old part revamps, and the new dVee readout for 1.6 was a very nice, long-awaited surprise. IMO 1.6 has been the best update in a year or two. .

Could they still make the SuperHeavy booster from CFC? It doesn’t face the same heating loads. It could at least be an interstage.

308: Not keeping up to date on what SpaceX has been up to *coughVanamondecough*

*Leaves the porch light burning*

Well, now we know that @Vanamonde doesn't read the SpaceX thread... I'm wondering if maybe the SpaceX Starship development thread/discussion should be henceforth continued in this thread (no need to move old posts), and free up the SpaceX thread for missions and launches? Thanks for the album!

I'm surprised nobody has suggested KAS/KIS yet. I built a salvage rover for Duna and placed cubic octagonal struts as needed to be able to move the scrap cockpit from the ground to the top of my salvage rover. Remove what was no longer needed from the core, blow the side tanks and burn for home.

IIRC Electron already uses electric pumps

At least it’s not R5-D4, the one that blew its top in ANH. Keep on rollin’ those Electrons out to the pass....

A big part One important service the fairing provides is acoustic mitigation and protection. A cheap cone of steel would probably be pretty loud, and they don't have the engineering resources to spare to make it quiet, especially for an edge case. Why add another item to produce in their manufacturing space, when they don't have to?

Dented and hammered out equals extra work hardening, leftover wrinkles add stiffness at the potential expense of aerodynamics. Time to call the local bodyshop

In the Ablator vs Active Cooling debate, I think there are two factors to remember here. The first is that a stainless steel skin that sneers at 1,000oF doesn't need nearly as much protection as lesser materials, and requires no extra protection on the back side. The second is that the double-skin cooling channel approach should also provide a lot of the strengthening and stiffening of the windward side that would be required to deal with the aerodynamic forces anyways. All that should save a lot of mass compared to ablator.

Here's a few that my amateur hand took with my Canon EOS Rebel T5i. I really need to get a tripod. I experimented with a variety of settings. I'd post more, but time is limited. Cropped, but otherwise raw. E: The local radio made the point of "just find an eclipse someone posted online, save it, and post it on FB as your own. Who's gonna know the difference?"

The weather here is promising, but it may just be teasing...

Hmmm. My bad. I didn't stop to think the new decoupler's collider would be hollow. I usually do that when I forgot the decoupler altogther

I forgot to add, you will also need an engineer. Or your hat.