ModZero

I assure you EMP doesn't require ether, a magnetic field is necessary for hijinks in starfish prime style (like, trapping charged particles to cause fun times for ages), and radiation itself is also quite a bit of a problem. But anyway, confusing radiation with electromagnetism is, like, yhm, okay, I don't even know where to start explaining this to you. For now I'll just point out that ether was disproven a few years ago. And if you want to find out what happens to electronics in presence of hostile electromagnetic fields full of funky charged particles (y'know, *radiation*), find out why Europa Clipper won't go into orbit around Europa. Spoilers: that might ruin more than just orion drives. From the ground. Look at the wiki page. The photos are funky. EDIT: Theoretically. Get rid of the charged particles and they're gone (until the magnetic fields trap more of them, which could take a long time, I guess). As far as I can tell, nobody treats it particularly seriously.

Except in actual deep space you don't particularly need Orion drives. And EMP is an issue outside of atmosphere – again, even hte tiny reactors on Russian probes caused trouble to scientific satellites in Earth orbit, so it's reasonable to worry about impact of actual detonations. As long as we're outside of va belts it shouldn't lead to starfish prime style whackery, but I wouldn't discount the risk of zapping a comsat or a dozen GPS sats.

But what we know from project K is that yield isn't directly related to damage – soviets used 300kt and fried a power plant (I suppose the militaries were trying to rush tests before the inevitable ban, because the stuff is hilariously depressing). Of course in deep space it no longer matters, but a "nearby" comsat would likely be quite unhappy about getting a bunch of small EMP pulses. Of course I'd need actual numbers on EMP from small yield nukes, but the lack of such is what put the damper on my enthusiasm. EDIT: before anyone writes it - we know why K did more damage - mostly because location matters in more than one way - but that also means location matters in what damage you do to relatively fragile orbital equipment.

Oh, I misread! I was actually surprised because I remembered it was far higher up, but decided I must have been wrong. Turns out it was today when I was short of coffee. The things you find starting from such pages. I am pretty sure it used to have mentions of this idea in "see also". EDIT: first read about Starfish Prime really put a dent in my excitement of Orion drives. Then I've found out even the puny reactors on Russian probes annoy scientists.

Sigh. Some of us just don't like the idea, and some of us associate 1337-speak with a rather obnoxious bunch of script kiddies that tended up to disrupt conversations and ruin everyone's day with recycled humor and lame pranks since over two decades now. So not only it's a boring joke with a beard, it actually has leftover food in its beard. Now, making sure that we have versions 1, 1.17, 1.23, 1.42 and 1.5 is much more worthy. Or basing the version scheme on approximations of the E number.

Considering how much damage it caused (and it was just 10km up!), no wonder. The general attitude of nuclear tests was somewhat amusing. I mean, "previous tests were hastily executed"? Who "hastily executes" a nuclear test?

We can only guess why (I tend to thing it's ego and recruitment, mostly), but they do seem quite eager to release videos and make enormous advancements in the amounts of GoPros strapped to rockets. So it makes a bit sense to wonder why wouldn't they publish one from a particularly endearing event (not as obligation, but as motivation, as in "what's different this time?") – but we don't really have much to build our speculations on. Me, I vote they can't decide on the soundtrack - it's hard to decide between Benny Hill chase music and Monty Python opening theme.

I find your lack of faith (in forum trolls) disturbing.

You wanted to say 10 years 13373... I'm so very sorry.

That's why you don't dodge lasers, but refrain from being predictable and take solace in the light lag. Mind you, that's nothing that would make fighters any better (lasers and even plain old high velocity kinetics would make short-range fights a mess even without a meatbag inside, and fighters don't seem particularly useful outside short range). could do without personality cults. Especially from someone calling other personalities "idiots". Y'know, there're actual Asperger people reading this. Like yours truly. They weren't idiots (and calling them that is unnecessarily abrasive, and if I say something is too abrasive, that's telling something), they were writers telling stories. The science-ey things in the books made as much sense as was necessary to keep the reader, sometimes a bit more to stroke own egos, but nobody paid them for hyperrealism (nor being super real always feels real, see also amazingly agile spacecrafts and people complaining about E:D behemoths not being agile enough), worse, get too real and you start getting rid of humans from your space exploration. Now that time has passed, the audience got a bit more sensitive, which is perhaps why so much of SF kinda aged less well than fantasy. Point is, SF authors did a lot of wonky science, for many reasons. Them stuffing a ship inside an asteroid isn't really grounds for calling that realistic. EDIT: gah, sorry, now noticed Beowulf actually was making same point, got lost switching pages. Just replace this with a snarky question about how it's any worse than a non-interstellar wall-street ;-)

The forum link on kerbalstuff is broken

Those are the same, from the perspective of the "sponsored".

Yesterday there was a (rather gross by my standards – I'm an internationalist brand of socialist) moment where the people in SpaceX HQ started chanting U-S-A. So this really depends on the company. Even more, there's plenty of speculation of government involvement in funding of some companies (Google!), and in some cases it's just what companies are (Statoil, for example). Finally, company power bows before government real-quick like when necessary (see generics in pharmaceuticals), and conversely, really like offloading all risk to the state – so I don't really see them doing things like Mars out of their own unless the price tag drops so much a billionaire can do it just because that's where ostentatious consumption has went.

Those aren't customers, those are investors *wink-wink nudge-nudge*. Though I'm not buying that Elon will go, he has like two dozen children or something. Now, at risk of going off-topic, the scary reality (if it would succeed) would be rich people exporting lots of people to Mars, which might kinda put a strain on workplace inspection budgets. Also, it's nice to see the quoting system is causing trouble to other people as well. It's barely usable on fondleslabs :-(

Well, SpaceX kinda pretends to want to do it out of their own megalomania, pardon, goodwill, and while I may have a rather obviously unfavourable opinion on the subject, it's their stated goal. And, as the thread is (predictably) mostly about either cheering or expressing cynicism (I'm not cynical, I just see space as not actually most important thing around), I'll express my own hope here: that by the time we send humans there, we'll be thoroughly done with the idea of sticking flags into places we visited. Edit: though we might just make all the astronauts stick a flag for the xp and Final Frontier badge.

That's because you didn't think it through. A private, self-managed mission to Mars would be more terrifying than cool. Musk already has shown disdain towards concepts such as "labor rights" and "planetary protection". I'm going to be watching the F9 landing attempt because tech is cool, but there are places I prefer democratically elected governments. Managing a planet is definitely one of those places.

You must be a lot of fun at parties. Newsflash: in the gaming context, the term "simulator" is much wider. I mean, seriously, you'll find theme hospital in the genre. And it doesn't even have an articulated cockpit. Anyway, congratulations to Squad.

It's not going to be a flag... ...it's going to be a baguette. More seriously, I think we're talking decades, so predictions are premature to the point where the flag might be of the Holy Empire of Luxembourg, or Unitet Soviet Republic of Canada & Texas (no real USR can stand not having an odd oblast in a random spot on the map). Currently there's very little real motivation for sending manned missions wherever (even the prestige/might thing got worn down, and science generally works better with robots, lots of robots), so the main driver are theoretical enormous drops in space access and travel time (on the level of sudden development of fusion engines, presumably by Luxembourg). Having said that, of course it's going to be Russian. It's the red planet, after all.

Putting anything at very high temperature in the atmosphere and you'll end up with interesting nitrogen compounds (atmosphere provides its own nitrogen and oxygen for some basic pollutants, you just need to heat up and stir). Whether the amount is high enough to be a bother is another matter, though with the kerbalistic amount of launches anything is possible. I'd hope that ksp nukes are closed cores, so should be fine, but seeing the general mood of the game, I wouldn't be surprised by anything. Ah, and apparently the cores should be able to survive the rocket not going to space today. The bigger wonkier cousins (pulse engines) are fun, as they produce part of the "pollution" as electromagnetic pulses (see: Starfish Prime, please no Orion drives in my magnetosphere).

Santa Monica Urban Runoff Recycling Facility and some Romanian woman. (The links lead to the actual Kerbal things).

Because ore is already a weird resource, and it's in there by default. If you're using other mods, there's a MM patch around that converts everything to the MKS pipeline which makes more "intuitive" sense — I think it's linked in the first post?

Good enough for me :-) Not the same, but I did actually stack them (yeah, I built monsters) — you can think of them as ludicrously oversized tank caps.

Ah, what about R-7 style boosters, if talking slanted? For small rockets these tend to end up overpowered, but I remember using the ones in KW Rocketry quite a bit back in 0.25 (AFAIR, they were 2.5 and 3.75, just tanks, but not at all stock-alike :/).

Hm, so, have you considered Discourse? I don't mean "OMG change decision 6 days before pulling the trigger", I'm just occasionally involved in picking such things, and wondering if other people doing that found reasons to avoid it besides "it's not PHP+MySQL" (which is quite a big one in itself). I do like the new layout, by thee way, and if it's actually usable on phones, that'd be great.

[quote name='MrOsterman']Which does beg the question: Is the "Game" the "Game" or is it the "Game + Mods"?[/QUOTE] You're treating this way to seriously, I put an emoticon there for a reason. [quote name='MrOsterman'] MrsO insists that it's the "Game + Mods" and that makes things sticky. Of course WoW does something a little different: it pushes the new code to a test server weeks ahead of release and allows modders full access to the updated API so that the day a patch drops (and usually with fanfare) the mod sites can all push their updated mods up as well. [/QUOTE] This is typical for online-ish/competitive games even if they don't allow mods (Eve Online, Diablo III, for example). There are plenty of reasons to do that, more related to the competitive nature than mods themselves. Some modders and youtubers do (or did?) have access to pre-release KSP code, but that involves signing an NDA; due to the non-online nature of KSP, if you release anything to the public, you might as well just plainly "release" it. Now, you could use a secondary "beta" channel — and KSP did exactly that, AFAIR (someone correct me if I'm wrong) Squad stopped because consequences overwhelmed their customer support. Not particularly surprised, while KSP community wins against many others on not screaming racial slurs into microphones, it can get pretty angry at anyone who writes code, whether Squad or mod author.