Recent content by Radu094

Or build a weapon several orders of magnitude bigger than the Death Star 2.0, which the Empire built whilst having most of the galaxy's resources at it's disposal. It's like ISIS suddenly building a carrier 10 times the size of USS Eisenhower. Because f*ck logic; the movie was good: "look how...

Somebody needs to explain that Huffington guy the relationship between distance, speed and time ;) This was one of the first things that bothered me as a 6-year-old watching ESB: The Millenium Falcon's hyperdrive was not working. Getting to Bespin or any nearby system at sublight speed could...

Boy, what a view that little lump of rock must have had!

Isn't that kinda rare/unusual? Granted, this has been a long time ago, but I distinctly remember something on disk accretion about the imposibility of asteroids either forming or remaining in low perihelion (or inner solar systems) orbits, and that they preffer the quieter and colder places of...

Ok, something's been puzzling me about the impact being at 9:30 am. So either the object was orbiting prograde but at a slower vel than Earth's, or it was retrograde. Both of which, I imagine, are pretty unlikely... I was always under expectation that a big asteroid should impact between 12pm...

I've been woking on accretion disk simulations for the last couple of years. Granted, it isn't a profesional simulator, but it's a pretty solid piece of engineering. After some "billion" simulations I've never encountered a stable quintuple, not without manually tinkering with the system anyway...

According to Kepler (and many others), a orbit must describe either an ellipse, a parabola or a hyperbola. Without adding or removing energy from the orbiting body it will never describe a spiral (which is what you are drawing there). Then use the polar equation for an ellipse: R(T) =...

Hmm.. funny one! indeed sprintf SHOULD produce an equivalent string as strcpy, provided you do not have conversion specificators(ie. "%s")in the name.Also, IIRC, there was a difference in the way multi-byte-characters are treated, but that shoudln't matter either. Anyway, I guess it's water...

LOL! Well, somebody had to post this: A bit long, but well worth it..

Just to make sure I understood: you want to apply a rotation to a vector (V1) with an angle 'a' , around axis V2 And you want to have V2 be the Y-axis in V1's frame of reference. Now the problem is that one vector does not a frame of reference make. ie you need at least 2 vectors to properly...

Yes. 300km ApA seems a bit much for starting the second stage. I have no idea what the actual Titan profile was, but as a rule of thumb aim you ApA to be 10-15% below your intended MECO altitude at staging. Then on the second stage aim to keep that ApA constant (adjust it to your intended MECO...

Reducing thrust to meet MECO objectives is wasteful as you are essentially fighting off gravity loss for no gain what so ever.(ie. part of your engines burn so that you do not fall) If the launch profile wasn't sufficient to meet the expected MECO (VS=0 , V= Vcirc ,etc) I usually call on a...

If you launch from a body w/out atmosphere, the optimum pitch profile implies tan(pitch) to decrease linearly over time, such that pitch=0 and VerticalSpeed=0 at MECO (ie. you are at Pe). Anything else is suboptimal. When you add the atmosphere things get complicated. You want to climb above...

Well, thinking in terms of normal ATS comm: the ATC has a limited number of digits and letters to speak when identifying a craft: YR854 becomes yankee romeo eight five four,etc. There is little to suggest any future ?STC? system will not employ a similar feature; assuming it will be done by...

This could be overkill but I've been using Newran in my work for quite some time. As others have pointed out before, it's not the "randomness" that's the useful part here, but the various distributions it allows you to generate. This allows you to bind these random numbers directly to a...