StrandedonEarth

So, NASA has been and is doing what it and its predecessor, NACA, were chartered to do: research and develop aerospace technologies that private industry can't afford to, to be transferred to American commercial industry for the benefit of all. Meanwhile, they continue to break new ground with new vehicles as best they can, hobbled by the requirements of Congress. Glad to hear it. Maybe I'll see boots on Mars in my lifetime after all!

As compared to an "artisan created" (synthetic) diamond set in primordial asteroidal platinum (mined by an artisan-created robot asteroid miner)? Well, the idea is to be able to make the money back by churning out products made with generous amounts of platinum to get maximum benefit from platinum's unique properties. Try to make it inexpensive to sell more of them. The market would need to be crashed or people would just snag the product to break out the platinum and recycle it. Palladium is currently priced a little more than platinum, and iridium is a little less. Rhodium is nearly double, but rubidium is currently about 20% the price of platinum (which can change by several hundred dollars per ounce over a year).

Remember when reentry was harmless? Peppered Ridge Farm remembers! Remember when destructible buildings became a thing? Peppered Ridge Farm remembers!

Platinum is a very useful element as a catalyst for many things. Its rarity makes it a precious metal and its price is mostly driven by industrial demand. Due to its price, it's often considered the "Holy Grail" of asteroid mining concepts, but it's often not considered worthwhile because if a large lump (only 218 tons sold in 2014) was dumped on the market, the price would crash, making it not economical. But what if that was the plan? What if a company went searching for a platinum asteroid, but not to make money selling the metal on the open market? What if they wanted to secure a large supply of cheap platinum in order to pump out platinum-based goods, crashing the market price of platinum in the process? The particular product I have in mind is fuel cells. Currently, fuel cells are too expensive for widespread market penetration, presumably due to the price of the platinum required. There is lots of research going on to find alternate catalysts for various processes, or making the absolute most of the platinum they use. Research that wouldn't be as necessary if platinum was cheaper. Could that be a valid plan, for a company to find and wrangle a platinum asteroid, so they could sell millions or billions of cheap fuel cells of all sizes? Residential fuel cells would be a game changer for distributed generation, co-generation, and backup generation, if only they were a tenth of the cost. Propane fuel cells would likely be a godsend for RV's. Discuss. Any other products come to mind that would benefit from cheap platinum? Edit. What sort of possibilities and opportunities would there be if platinum was the price of silver? copper? aluminum?

Sweet pic I remember when SWG came out some 14 years ago, the water effects blew me away. I wanted to dive in myself!

That is an up and down trip, 7.5ms. The return trip is another 7.5ms, so yeah, 15ms return ping. Which brings up the interesting question of how this sort of system works.How many ground station / backbone connections do the netsats (websats?) have? I assume the signal bounces from netsat to netsat until it finds a ground station (probably necessary in remote areas), but how many bounces would there be on average? And how much latency does a "bounce" have?

Yup, must be love...

Thanks! It’s not like CCR fits with the other two either, but it worked in the video. I spent quite a while poring over my music library looking for fitting tunes.

Yesterday I created this: (sorry if anyone thinks I posted it in too many places....)

When I was a kid, men were done walking on the moon, the Shuttle was gearing up for her first flight, and SkyLab was falling down. And we had PONG! Which was all the rage until my cousin got an Atari...

If the ship’s mass at the start was 95% fuel and it arrived nearly empty, then the TWR might get up to one. Especially if there are buoyancy effects

I really have no idea how I found the demo. But after building an ever more clustered series of MonkeyLaunchers, I bought it back in 0.22, missing the free DLC deadline by a few months. Oh well. Untold hours wasted invested. My wife tolerates it because then I leave her alone.

And without an upper stage or payload

Gravity is always there, but in orbit it is balanced by the engineering phantom commonly known as centrifugal force. So at the GEO level, you would be weightless. Below that on the tower, you would be below orbital velocity, and would therefore experience gravity. Above that, you would be above orbital velocity for that altitude, and would tend to want to ‘fall’ outwards. So if you were standing in a glass room above GSO in this tower, Earth would be above your head and you’d see stars under your feet.

Well, it took them a year to make it with a bigger, more experienced team than they had before. It would been nice to have started sooner, but that’s life. The charging extra is for mission functionality, and the editor to create our own missions is just bonus. Although I realize that’s not how they’re spinning it. And on top of that, a bunch of new parts to call stock! Yeah, ok, on second thought maybe Blizzard was more of an exception in including map editors.

Lando is being played by Donald Glover, no relation to Danny Glover of Lethal Weapon and a zillion other things. The story of how Solo got the Millennium Falcon according to the Expanded Universe* is as follows.... It'll be interesting to see how they handle those parts of the story. * (gut says The Jedi Academy trilogy, I think, may be wrong about which books it was in, don't have them anymore)

You didn't notice the button for fly agaric? That's a hallucinogenic toadstool!

"Sure, you can take 'Ol Sooty' at the back of the lot there. It probably won't survive another landing anyways!"

Most games that have campaigns and missions in them used an editor tool to create that content, and it is usually included with the game (Starcraft, for example). KSP didn’t have missions yet because @SQUAD didn’t have that tool yet. Now that they’ve gone to the trouble of creating said tool, they’ve tried to make it easy to use, so everyone can use it (sounds like it’s easier to use than the StarCraft map editor). Along with the Mission Creator, they are also including some missions created by Squad, presumably using the MC. One would hope that they will continue to create and release detailed missions, hopefully as an official “mission-of-the-week” (not user created). Am I on the right track, @Darth Badie? Speaking of missions, there’s been no word on how they will be shared. I hope there’s a better plan than “Post your Dropbox link here,” preferably an in-game ‘net connection to Squad’s KerbNet mission server, complete with leaderboards. I really hope T2 doesn’t get fixated on mission-pack DLCs, because they might find that a hard sell

Oops, it seems I killed the Goat thread. Uh... Goat Steak anyone?

Crossfeed was abandoned long ago as not worth the engineering effort. Or core burnout would have been much later Really? Kinda disappointing if there's not even basic suit telemetry to see how it performs.

Elon time, double it and add 30 (months)... So, late 2022?

Wow, just wow, so much to say I find myself almost speechless. Congrats to Musk and his hard-working SpaceX team for pulling this off (so far). There's going to be no shortage of Starman screenshots and memes orbiting around the net, I'm sure. I'm partial to this screengrab myself. So I get out of my staff meeting and hit the locker room to go home. I peek at my phone to see 200+replies to this thread and know that the big bird must be off the ground. I managed to catch a quick mute launch replay on an office pc before my ride was ready to go, then it was the 30 minute drive home of ignoring my phone, so I could hook up my laptop to the 50" TV and crank the sound bar to watch the whole thing. Totally worth the wait! I'll definitely be watching key parts many more times, I'm sure. E: Then I had to make myself wade through 10 pages of posts here before posting! I'm sure the Starman suit must be loaded with sensors, Musk is not the type to waste an opportunity to do MOAR SCIENCE!! But I agree, the speedo needed to be pegged, perhaps at Ludicrous Speed. Maybe a "Plaid" spot on the speedo?