Toxn

Very interesting, thank you. How does this all square with the oft-quoted assertion that the US has the highest per-capita detention rate in the world? Is it just that much easier to do time for holding a bag of weed than it is for running someone over?

This is the flea: The flea is a VTOL drone capable of cruising along at 550km/hour until it spots a juicy ore deposit. Then it lands to begin the feast: Once it's tanks are full, it takes off again in search of more ore to suck.

As a not-American, I will now try to shut up about this whole thing and let you guys sort your own stuff out.

Let's all cut to the chase on how this is going to go down: - there will be an inquest. - for reasons fair or foul it will not lead to a prosecution. - there will be an explosion of protest, probably culminating in damage to public property. - voices on one side of the isle will slam the protesters for getting violent and paint the inciting incident as an isolated case rather than yet one more manifestation of a wider trend. They will similarly pretend that historical trends don't influence the present and put the burden for fixing the whole mess on individuals. - voices on the other side will distance themselves from the violence and downplay the toxic relationship feeding poverty and dependance that exists and sustains itself without the need for systematic racism or oppression. They will also paint the people involved as passive victims of oppression rather than actors who can influence their own fates. Broader cultural pathologies will go similarly unexamined. - the people living in the area will come out of the whole ordeal with, at best, a few minor tweaks to the system that both produces and is produced by their misery. - SH will have another pissy fight about American left/right issues again shortly afterwards.

What's the range like?

And he succeeded in breaking his spine. Makes your average suicide case look like a bit weak. Not a direct witness, I'll note.

I think it's more a case of there being winners and losers, both plant and animal. As an example, one of the guys in my old department was forecasting crop yields - he discovered that we'd be producing about the same number of calories with our existing croplands (or a bit more), but proportionally more would be in the form of potatoes than maize.

30mm guided HEDP = win sauce 60mm guided mortar = even more win sauce

Hilariously, this also makes him more computer savvy than 90% of politicians.

Been following EXACTO, I take it?

So, global warming is definitely a thing and definitely caused by human activity (see: vast majority of climate scientists, IPCC). And this makes sense, because humans have been, you know, digging up all the carbon laid down since the carboniferous and burning it. And I have no problems with this at all. Here's my logic: 1. Earth's biosphere is apparently slightly better at burying carbon than recycling it. Therefore, liberating a bunch of carbon is a great idea if we want there to be a lot of it available for the rest of the 4 billion years that our planet has to exist. 2. I love the idea of 2-metre millipedes and dragonflies with the wingspans of eagles. So I'm all for us returning to carboniferous levels of atmospheric oxygen (which is what an excess of carbon dioxide will eventually lead to as biomass increases) 3. I also love the idea of verdant plant life, so lots of CO2 does not faze me overmuch. I'll miss the grasses when they get shuffled to niche habitats in favour of dicots, of course, but that's a separate issue. 4. There is good reason to believe that humans are a massive fluke. After all, it took half of the lifespan of the planet for us to arrive and the earth has birthed no other similarly intelligent species in the past (as far as we can tell). Accordingly; there is good reason to assume that, once our species is gone, it will take at least hundreds of millions of years for something sapient to emerge. In the (unlikely) event that it ever happens again, it would be good for this new species to have a fuel source as potent as coal and oil to draw from. By liberating it now for recycling, we are making sure that it will stick around reasonably close to the surface for long enough to maybe get used by our successors. 5. I've heard some pretty convincing arguments that our present civilization simply could not have arisen without copious amounts of energy. So fossil fuels are a must. We as a species probably have only one shot at becoming truly spaceborne - if we somehow crashed back to the Neolithic now there would be no rung on the ladder of energy sources are to climb to the point where intra-solar spaceflight is viable. So we'd probably be stuck with pre-industrial populations and technologies, spinning our wheels until we exhausted our time on the planet. If we want to get ourselves and our ecology off planet, then right now is the only good time. It follows that we should expend as much effort as possible to push ourselves upwards and outwards before we inevitably fuck everything up. I see no reason why we should not opt, as a species, to burn hot and use as much energy as we can in the hopes of improving our chances. So, yeah. Global warming - our fault, pretty inevitably, probably not that great for our present environment, probably pretty good in the very long run, hopefully a necessary byproduct of manning up as a species and taking ourselves and everything we love off-planet. And if we fuck that up; hopefully whatever comes afterwards will be able to make use of the new coal deposits while wondering about the thin, faintly radioactive layer of hydrocarbons and metal oxides that represents humanity's final mark in the geological record.

Okay, so I've gotten to play around with the new aerodynamics model on KSP. It's fucked. Putting a normal jet engine on the K-21 model I recreated now gets you all of mach 1.1 maximum at sea level, with worse performance at altitude. Put in the turboramjet and you get mach 1.1 at sea level and mach 3 at altitude. And then your plane explodes. I'm going to wait a week to see if any of the mods get updated.

Yeesh... those accents!

We're talking at least a 100m diameter ring here. This would put it in the same size category as the ISS. Only, you know, spinning.

Agreed. The guy who got sick (he went from perfectly healthy to drowning in his own lung fluids within a few hours) was younger and fitter than me. His dad, who's a slovenly polish physicist, had no problems. What does help is living at altitude and having mutations for the same, both of which my family ticks off on. None of us had issues.

And also to jump over the wall and mount/be mounted by the neighbour's german shepherd.

Having just come back from a screening of the new Avengers movie, I can now confirm some of the exciting Seff Effrica-related topics touched on in the film. SPOILERS, obviously: The South African Empire does, indeed, include a city on the east coast with a large breaker's yard just outside. I think it used to be called Mombasa. South African citizens do get a racial bonus against fear-based mind control and exsangiunation from loss of extremities. South African accents, however... We are presently fighting something of a cold war with Wakanda.

Mountains kill people. Tall mountains kill proportionally more people. Mountains with parts in the death zone kill the most of all. As someone who regularly does passes in the Drakensburg and did Kilimanjaro years ago (where a bunch of folk in another group died while we were doing the summit and one of our group had to be rushed down due to altitude sickness), this is pretty much non-news. Edit: the above is not intended to buff my credentials or anything - I'm very much not a pro hiker. It's just to point out that even a bit of exposure teaches you that mountains kill.

Update Since KSP is about to drop an update that includes/supplants many of the mods listed here, I'm going to extend the competition till the end of May to allow contestants to rework their old designs in the new system. Existing contestants may choose whether to use their old or new models, and the K-21 will be reworked for 1.0. I will update you on the plan of action going forwards if B9 and/or BD armoury don't work any more. The prize for the competition will be gold for WoT or WoWS (3000/4000)

This is the Solaris 2: By putting together approximately every battery, I've managed to make an electric plane capable of flying for 17 minutes. Evidently Kerbals are much better at rockets than electric motors... Edit: to give an idea of how much juice the motors suck up, you can mount a laser cannon on the nose and use it to lase things for almost five minutes without relying on the panels. In full sunlight, you can melt things for over eight minutes.

This is one of those much-talked about options that nobody actually ends up doing. My suspicion is that you need a ring over a certain size to prevent everyone getting sick from perceived gravity changes and coriolis effect. When lying down and standing up presents a different sensation of gravity and everything falls in weird arcs, then your solution might be worse than the problem.

I'm not talking about a well-designed reactor.

How possible is it to brute-force the reaction by going prompt critical inside a really heftily-constructed housing or something? I mean, SL-1 disassembled itself (and its three operators) in something like 10 milliseconds. So what would have happened if it had been operating encased in a big ol' chunk of steel designed to keep the reactor together as long as possible?

Those motors will eat the battery bank in two minutes at takeoff power. Panels aren't an issue, and can already (almost) run the motors at cruise. I'm going to combo glide ratio/battery capacity and see how it shakes out.

That's the consensus view, yeah.