For Questions That Don't Merit Their Own Thread

[Clamp-o-Tron]

31 minutes ago, K^2 said:

That is very clearly a joke article.

I dunno man, the source is very renowned and we all know that when something is spinning, it modulates the tachyon field, making stuff do weird paranormal things. (Side note: that's also what ghosts are)

 

Spoiler

I guess you didn't get my sarcasm.

 

[kerbiloid]

Cars... Wheels... They're spinning... and spinning... and spinning

[Codraroll]

Imagine you have a quite large blob of liquid water in a pressurized zero-G environment. It would form a sphere due to surface tension, or something close to it at least. Would it be possible to push this blob around by hand (assuming you had something firm to brace against) without splitting it into multiple small blobs or your hands sinking uselessly into it? Say a sphere 40 cm in diameter, which would weigh around 30 kg. Could you get it from one end of the room to the other using only your hands?

 

I'm trying to wrap my head around it, but I simply have no reference for how a body of liquid would behave if it wasn't restrained by anything, such as a container or gravity. 

Edited October 7, 2020 by Codraroll

[Entropian]

Hydrogen bonds between the water molecules would cause cohesion, which would keep it in some sort of sphericalish shape.  If you pushed it around with something that water easily adheres to, some of the water would adhere to the object, and create smaller blobs.  I would think that a non-adhesive object would be able to push the spheroid around, albeit slowly.  The acceleration would be determined by the strength of the hydrogen bonds keeping the blob together, and the force due to acceleration from pushing on the blob.

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Could you get it from one end of the room to the other using only your hands?

I should carefully blow at it.
(As it hasn't boiled, I presume it's not in vacuum.)
Hands would probably break its surface into separate parts and result in blobs. At least, according to videos.
 

Edited October 7, 2020 by kerbiloid

[Fraktal]

Now this is interesting. NASA announced the discovery of a Hot Jupiter exoplanet with a 34 hour orbital period... around a white dwarf.

Astronomers have NO idea how the hell it got there. There aren't any other Jupiter-mass planets in the system for the required gravity assists and it couldn't have formed there either because the star's collapse would've blasted it to space dust.

 

In either case... in your face, After Kerbin. 

[kerbiloid]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_planet

[Codraroll]

16 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

I should carefully blow at it.
(As it hasn't boiled, I presume it's not in vacuum.)
Hands would probably break its surface into separate parts and result in blobs. At least, according to videos.
 

Yes, I said "pressurized" for that reason.

And the videos of water in space - for understandable reasons - tend to include rather small amounts of liquid, a couple decilitres at most, making them behave almost like soap bubbles. I was wondering how a larger volume of water, a couple dozen litres or so, would behave. 

[Spacescifi]

Those of you that know of the Medusa variant of project Orion... one thing troubled me.

If the spaceship begins to yaw or pitch or maneuver, will the tethers move along with it or will they just get tangled?

Because otherwise they would have to pull in the 'umbrella' before ANY maneuver.

 

What do you know? On this?

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

On 10/7/2020 at 3:47 PM, Fraktal said:

Now this is interesting. NASA announced the discovery of a Hot Jupiter exoplanet with a 34 hour orbital period... around a white dwarf.

Astronomers have NO idea how the hell it got there. There aren't any other Jupiter-mass planets in the system for the required gravity assists and it couldn't have formed there either because the star's collapse would've blasted it to space dust.

 

In either case... in your face, After Kerbin. 

Okay - but the capture assist planet could be now part of the star or millions of years away @whatever speed it took on to fling the planet into a captured orbit - right? 

[Fraktal]

Well, the white dwarf is part of a trinary...

[Entropian]

1 hour ago, Spacescifi said:

If the spaceship begins to yaw or pitch or maneuver, will the tethers move along with it or will they just get tangled?

I would assume the centripetal acceleration would keep it (relatively) in place, as the CoM is far from the tethers.

[kerbiloid]

I think, they hadn't gone so much deep and were focused on the propulsion itself.

But imho this soft, elastic design is not viable at all, while the hard Orion could use RCS in usual way.

Edited October 9, 2020 by kerbiloid

[Spacescifi]

5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

I think, they hadn't gone so much deep and were focused on the propulsion itself.

But imho this soft, elastic design is not viable at all, while the hard Orion could use RCS in usual way.

I was thinking almost the same.

 

An easy fix I think is a bimodular Orion, fly module ahead towing the 'umbrella', and leave the other one behind it to throw the nukes at the umbrella.

 

Result? A really long bola whenever both modules engage RCS.

 

[magnemoe]

8 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

I think, they hadn't gone so much deep and were focused on the propulsion itself.

But imho this soft, elastic design is not viable at all, while the hard Orion could use RCS in usual way.

You could probably steer by changing the center of mass a bit relatively to center of trust, you would only need to correct for center of mass errors and other minor stuff anyway something like an medusa is not designed with maneuverability in mind. 

And yes it has design challenges like how to get the parachute to expand in the first place, my guess would not be so soft and not really something you could curl up, not something solid in the way that it would stand up in the gravity of the moon but rater that it would stabilize in that shape in zero g. 

[Flying dutchman]

If the sr71 was flying at mach 3.6 or 980 m/s, what percentage of normale Gravity did the pilots experience?

Edited October 11, 2020 by Flying dutchman

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

In which direction? 

[kerbiloid]

98.4%

[ARS]

Is it legal in air force to decorate your aircraft with liveries such as squadron emblems, nose art (such as sharkmouth motif), kill tallies, etc? (Though not to a ridiculous extent that involves totally replacing the whole camo of aircraft with something like bright pink)

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

12 hours ago, ARS said:

Is it legal in air force to decorate your aircraft with liveries such as squadron emblems, nose art (such as sharkmouth motif), kill tallies, etc? (Though not to a ridiculous extent that involves totally replacing the whole camo of aircraft with something like bright pink)

Generally speaking - not 'illegal' as in you can go to jail or be fined... But commands reserve the right to approve or disapprove art on government owned aircraft.  Very common, actually, to have unit marks on vehicles that help commanders identify individual vehicles (think of the differently oriented chevrons on tanks) and unit markings on aircraft. 

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-22/us-marines-battle-for-control-of-nasiriyah-in-2003-1/10916888?nw=0&pfmredir=sm

This one tells me that this is a tank from 2nd Platoon, Alpha Company 8th Tanks. 

Rarely, usually only during combat deployment, individuals can apply small personal touches to a vehicle, such as kill tallies, or maybe something like the Memphis Belle - but these need to be relatively small: certainly not to the extent of repainting the whole vehicle. 

 

Each service has their own traditions, of course.  The Marines seem to allow the least peace time modification - but we were pretty lax about it in 2003, at least on the ground side once the bullets started flying.  My tank had my personal mark - my handprint - along with the Unit's tiger motif designed by one of my SSgts.  So the 14 tanks of our company all had the unique (to us) tiger and my tank had the unique (to the tank) red handprint in addition.  Other tanks had their own distinctive marks as well 

 

 

Edited October 13, 2020 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[Fraktal]

Huh. A space telescope in Hawaii located an object approaching Earth at an unusually slow speed from a nearly circular heliocentric orbit. Said object might be the Centaur upper stage of a lunar probe launched in 1966.

Trajectory predictions say it's going to get captured by Earth's gravity for four months before drifting off again.

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Generally speaking - not 'illegal' as in you can go to jail or be fined... But commands reserve the right to approve or disapprove art on government owned aircraft.  Very common, actually, to have unit marks on vehicles that help commanders identify individual vehicles (think of the differently oriented chevrons on tanks) and unit markings on aircraft. 

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-22/us-marines-battle-for-control-of-nasiriyah-in-2003-1/10916888?nw=0&pfmredir=sm

This one tells me that this is a tank from 2nd Platoon, Alpha Company 8th Tanks. 

Rarely, usually only during combat deployment, individuals can apply small personal touches to a vehicle, such as kill tallies, or maybe something like the Memphis Belle - but these need to be relatively small: certainly not to the extent of repainting the whole vehicle. 

Each service has their own traditions, of course.  The Marines seem to allow the least peace time modification - but we were pretty lax about it in 2003, at least on the ground side once the bullets started flying.  My tank had my personal mark - my handprint along with the tiger motif designed by one of my SSgts 

Having marking on tanks makes perfect sense anyway then they are assigned different tasks as it should be standard. 
Think it was some markings on trucks and battle taxis we used back then I was in the army in Norway. 

And think illegal here is against the handbook, not against the law, although the military has their own legal system with fines and you can even be put in the guardhouse, and the internal legal system could come into play if you refused to remove some nose art. 

[kerbiloid]

I have googled if we can see the Moon from the poles, and my life will never be the same...

https://www.quora.com/Can-we-see-the-moon-when-standing-at-the-North-Pole-and-the-South-Pole

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

I have googled if we can see the Moon from the poles, and my life will never be the same...

https://www.quora.com/Can-we-see-the-moon-when-standing-at-the-North-Pole-and-the-South-Pole

Yeah - trying to picture this stuff is fun.  I remember when I realized that the curvature of the lit portion of the moon points to where the sun is, even when we can't see it.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Seeing as meteor showers are often caused by (or attributed to) the earth passing through comet trails... what are the possibilities of bombardment periods or 'Dinosaur Killer' asteroids being caused by the sun (and hence the planets) passing through a 'star forming region' or heavy 'dust' cloud during its orbit of the galactic center?

 

(I know that the presumption is that 'bombardment' periods were only during the remnants of the planet forming period of the vestiges of the dust cloud that formed the sun and planets... but isn't there a possibility of us being dragged through a heavy dust cloud left over from another star forming region as the sun orbits?)