Rascal Nag

Condensed version, exactly 800 characters after changing the 'I' to 'we' and revising some bits to say 'The US' or 'America' instead of we when I could. 'Here\'s a video, as we may not be able to elucidate this as eloquently: http://youtu.be/CbIZU8cQWXc It is repulsive that the greatest era of our nation, and maybe even the planet, was struck down before its time. The dreams of a country are now dying. The US need a kick. We need to inspire the populace, placing within them a fire of innovation and ambition. Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo did this. But with no manned space program, a whole generation has little to motivate them. And with no drive in students, it\'s no wonder education is failing. No one wants to learn. But if we show our youth what\'s possible and what this nation can do, and we electrify this generation, America will ride a wave of prosperity of a level never before achieved. And we\'ve got a starting point: A Penny for NASA.' Also, the video is just the share link from the youtube page. Not the full link in the address bar.

I\'ll give it a shot: I will start with a video, as I may not be able to elucidate the subject as eloquently as this puts it: I find it repulsive that the greatest era of our nation, and maybe even the planet, was struck dead in its path before its climax was reached. The dreams of a country are fading. The hope of a people is dying. We need a shove in the right direction, and the only way to do this is inspire the populace and place within them a fire of innovation and desire for brilliance. Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo all did this. But now, with no manned space program, a generation is growing up with little to nothing to drive them to greatness. This lack of a drive leads to a lack of enthusiasm in the young men and women of this nation. And with so little desire in students, it is no wonder that our education is failing. It\'s just like a mother fruitlessly trying to feed a toddler spinach - they just tightly close their mouths and shake their heads until they have the stuff smeared all over themselves. Later, it just washes right off and nothing has been learned. But, if we take our youth and show them what is possible, they will respond powerfully. If they see what we truly are capable of as a nation, their hope and drive will never die. If we can succeed in electrifying this new generation, this country will ride a wave of prosperity and innovation of a level never before achieved. And if we really are committed to accomplishing this, there is one thing we can do to get the ball rolling: A Penny for NASA. Well, think it\'s adequate?

We became dreamers out of fear. Now our priorities our set in such a way that failing banks go before dreams. In previous times, the two almost always were level with each other.

Too true. The banks and armies of the world won\'t be what allows humanity to survive. We need space travel for that. The world has recently undergone a terrible change, one which has drastically changed the mind of the average human. It has been retooled so that the driving force behind the citizens of this planet is no longer our dreams of the future, but the size of our wallets.

I find this highly accurate. And saddening. Edit: I can\'t just sit around with these thoughts in my head. Something needs to be done. I say we try to spread this. Tweet it if you can, try to get it trending. Try to get celebrities to see it and draw attention to it. Look at what happened with Kony 2012. I think the world would benefit from the same thing happening to this video. Just do something to try to spread it. When a fire sparks on the internet, it spreads as if it were in a pure Oxygen environment. We need to make a spark for this.

I know that, but I did not want to add the ASAS to the top since, although it would destroy the redundancy, it would make the lander a bit too tall for my liking. So I just put it at the bottom.

9/10 for Apollo. Also, I think I might want to start calling anti-purists dirty heretics. Reminds me of Green vs. Blue propaganda in Ace of Spades.

Those personality tests have always said I am INTP, which is pretty accurate. I\'m definitely an introvert. I don\'t avoid talking with others and I don\'t have a problem when I am, but doing so is not one of my top priorities.

I may try.

Billions and Billions is Carl Sagan\'s line.

Hello! Rascal Rockets Incorporated is proud to present its collection of all-stock rockets: RRI HMI Rocket that can take you from the Mun and back. Has a dedicated return stage. Sleek and elegant in appearance, powerful and effective in usage. RRI HMI-A Although the original served its purpose, he landing was by no means perfect. With only a sliver of fuel, the lander had touched down on a very steep slope (can be seen in one of the HMI photos), and it became a choice of either abort and take off with the return stage, or try to get to the flat ridge of the slope. I chose the latter, and barely managed to make it there. However, due to an extension of the second stage with 3 small fuel tanks, HMIA can use the second stage for things previously done by the lander stage, allowing much, much more fuel to be present at landing. The 'RRI' always stands for Rascal Rockets Incorporated. Naming system: Rocket sizes H - Heavy S - Standard L - Light Mission types M - Munar P - Interplanetary D - Deep Space (Not to be confused with interplanetary, this is for asteroid rendezvous, leaving the Kerbol System, and other far off missions not stopping by planets) O - Orbital U - Other The Roman numerals correspond to the iteration of the craft. If necessary, A, B, C, etc. will be added here to specify a slightly modified version, but not a new major installment. All new rockets I design will be placed here.

Well, I\'m pretty sure it\'s theoretically possible. I\'m thinking that it would be beneficial to know the range of Kerbin-Mun orbits we\'ll be dealing with per munar orbit. The Mun, IIRC, usually travels about 80 degrees of its orbit for the usual trip to it. And since we\'d have to go back to Kerbin each time, we\'d get around 2 Kerbin-Mun orbits per munar orbit. Also, while not the same, I thought of a similar challenge while making a little diagram of this one. Basically, you would go to the Mun and escape it in such a way that, without approaching Kerbin closely like in this challenge, you intersect with the Mun again. You would be set for escape of the Kerbin-Mun system, but then the Mun catches you and shoots you back inwards again, and this repeats. Kind of useless science wise, but a neat thing to thing about in my opinion.

Not entirely correct from what I\'ve read. It\'s not directly aimed at us, but it is certainly is hitting us. And the forecast here predicts intense lights on Friday: http://www.gi.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast/NorthAmerica/2012/03/09 Though this may mean Friday morning. Either way, I\'m staying up both tonight and tomorrow to try to get a look at them.

I hate to break it to you, but the heavy elements released in Supernovae aren\'t exactly ever going to start fusing. Stars can only fuse up to Iron, and even then this only happens in the biggest of stars. And when you get to iron, it collapses and explodes, and during this outburst of energy it fuses much more heavy elements which are used to create planets and sometimes life, not more stars. So no, far in the future, new stars could not form. There would not be enough fuel. When you get here, all that\'s left are black holes, a few rogue planets (planets without stars), neutron stars, white dwarfs. Then, as time goes on, the black holes dissipate, the neutron stars have given off their energy, and all the white dwarfs cool down to black dwarfs. And these just get further and further apart with the expanding universe. Because of the expanding universe, the temperature asymptotically approaches absolute zero. Or we could be immensely unlucky and be living in a false vacuum. If so, A bubble of energy, low energy on the inside and VERY high energy on the edges could nucleate at any moment and expand at nearly the speed of light. This would instantaneously destroy anything in its path, and we would never be aware of it coming. This is called vacuum decay, or a vacuum metastability event. Afterwards, when the entire universe has been changed into a true vacuum due to this event, not only will all things existing now have been destroyed, but the very physics of the universe would be different. Have a nice day!

Oh, no problem then. In fact I probably can see why, since the servers weren\'t exactly perfect yesterday... Well, I guess I\'ll just default to 7/10 since I\'ve never been interested by WoW but I\'ve never really hated it.

'In computing, an avatar is the graphical representation of the user or the user\'s alter ego or character.' The picture is meant to portray not just Carl Sagan but the personality associated with him. That is how it is the representation of my 'alter ego or character'. That is the type of personality I usually display in an online area. Also, -?/10 for ponies.

I wrote this a bit over half a year ago. Life is beautiful, delicate and fleeting. It is the most precious of all things in the universe, and seemingly the only thing that gives the universe purpose. What good is a painting if no one is to see it? But unfortunately, the universe is shy. It is all too ready to hide its secrets from us, a personality trait that makes scientists\' jobs hard. But what fun is life without the unknown? Our minds salivate at the prospect of what lies in the dark. The universe\'s reluctance to share is both a blessing and a curse. But it was not always like this, nor will it be this way forever. Heavy elements did not become abundant in the universe right away. Life was impossible a long time ago. But now, as we can obviously tell, it is achievable. And it will be for quite some time, even on pretty large timescales. But all good things must come to an end. In many, many years, life will be impossible to sustain, at least in the way we are familiar with. When it is gone, no one will be there to experience the beauty of this vast cosmos. There will, one day, be a last life form. Some magnificent stars may still burn, but the last true testament to the artistic talent of our Universe will be gone. We have no way of knowing who or what this will be, because life has a hard time finding each other, at least in our experience. Later, after an unbelievably long time, the final bit of matter will be gone. The universe will be nothing but light. Life, the only thing that can accept all the gifts this Universe has in it, will eventually be gone. Though our wars, inequalities, discrimination, poverty, short-term over long-term mindset, volatility, and naivety makes it hard for our species to survive long enough to qualify for any mention on a cosmic timeline, if one were to exist, we often imagine the future of humans, sometimes millions or even billions of years from now, as if the human race is eternal. In the words of Carl Sagan: 'We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.' We will be gone one day, and so will the rest of the life in the universe. We must make it our goal to become worthy of being placed on that cosmic timeline, to be something wondrous before it is too late. For, in spite of life\'s beauty, on the cosmic scale it is still fleeting.

7.5/10 The idea of the picture is nice and I know what it basically just by looking at the picture, but text becoming unreadable in avatars gets on my nerves a bit.

but the ship IS capable of touching down as seen here: I\'m sure I could have flown it more efficiently but I figured I had more than enough fuel to just point it in one direction and floor the throttle for most of it. Impressive. I gave up after my best run was thwarted by the decoupler glitching and blowing up on me...

AHA! I\'m not the only one then. When it decouples, does it just spontaneously explode, or does something that decouples bounce around and blow stuff up? If the former, I have the same exact problem. I really have no idea what causes it, but it doesn\'t seem to want to go away no matter what I do.

Rules: Only stock parts. That should be all. Build a spacecraft that can land on the Mun, then from there pick up and leave the Kerbol system. I think that this should be an adequately challenging task for any builder. And if you say it\'s impossible, then that means you just didn\'t make enough blood sacrifices for the rocket God aren\'t trying hard enough. In all seriousness, it is going to be extremely tough though. But we\'ve done tough things before. I\'ll start trying this now. Edit: Just ran my first try. Here\'s the decoupler getting stuck in orbit, as I\'m going off to the Mun (the engines exploded when they ran out of fuel for some reason) And the landing (What a nice background!): Munar takeoff (Dropped unecessary engines): After one burn at munar apoapsis and later, after kerbin escape, kerbol periapsis, here is the apoapsis: Mind you, this apoapsis was achieved by only a little over 1 tank of fuel on the Munar surface. If I could build a rocket that gives me maybe two tanks to work with, or maybe even just 1 and a half to 3 quarters, I\'d be golden. edit: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! So ridiculously close...

Nope, no Valentine. But the most important question is whether or not I was hoping for one in the first place. And the answer to that is no.

Don\'t hold your breath on that one.

Thanks. Mine: AMD Athlon II X4 635 Processor (4 CPUs), ~ 2.9GHz 4096 MB RAM (I believe DDR3 after a bit of searching) AMD Radeon HD 6770 1024MB GDDR 5

Go to the Russian one (first one), do the code thing on the bottom left, then it will lead you to a page with an orange shaded area with a checkbox + a link on top of it. Uncheck the box, click the link and there you go, it should download. I\'m trying to upload it somewhere but the .rar is either too large or it takes too long to upload. Edit: Also, if you have Chrome, go to it with that and it should give you an option for chrome to try and translate the site. Makes it a lot easier. Edit: And the second depositfile mirror is working for me.