Recent content by spcefrk

1) Mars has a thin atmosphere but it's not nonexistent 2) You can calculate the speed of sound through a medium using one of several equations, not the least of which are: a = sqrt(yRT) = sqrt(yP/rho) where: a = speed of sound (in ft/s or m/s) y = Specific Heat Ratio (1.4 for earth's mixture...

Part of what I enjoy about X-Plane is the support for flight failures. For the most part that's an engine out, flap locked down, control surface locked, wing section removed, etc... It's fun and instructive to learn not only how they affect flight and more importantly how much they affect...

:( I'm a Fender Strat man myself, but I've been dying to try a Gibson. I was just enamored with the Strat from day one and learned about the Gibson design much later. And for those who are listing artists, I don't think there's a better guitarist out there than David Gilmour. And he plays...

Judging by the scarring on the motherboard, it looks like it came in on the ethernet cable and arced over to the power plug on the motherboard. When I tried to turn it back on... no power to the motherboard but everything else appears to be fine. I've kept the motherboard ever since because...

Hi all. I've built a couple of computers myself and am eagerly awaiting Windows 7 for a lot of reasons. The biggest, is that I've got a 64 bit processor but I'm running Windows XP Home 32-bit. But the other reason I want it, is the support for more than 4GB of RAM. Long story short, my...

It was the S-IVB. No big deal ;)

It's looking really good! If you don't mind I'd like to pass on a few tips: There's really only a few places that need to be structurally beefed up on the fuselage: the gear mounting, the wing carrythrough, and the motor mount. Everything else is carrying air loads which balsa stick and some...

No kidding. The list of references from my M.S. Thesis was longer than that.:lol:

To believe it was all a hoax means you have to subscribe to one of two ridiculous things: (1) NASA and the contractors and subcontractors (totaling about 400,000 people) developed a spacecraft that cannot actually survive the travel to and from the moon (for any number of reasons). And yet of...

I don't recall where I found this originally but it's the best argument I've ever seen against the "lets pool all our money away from space until all the problems on the ground are solved" argument. I saved it here: http://spcefrk.deviantart.com/journal/21489185/ It's a letter from Ernst...

The original Manchurian Candidate was genius! It still blows my mind. I'm partial to The Wall for similar reasons (and it has a brilliant soundtrack ;) ) and Apocalypse Now for much the same reasons (despite completely hating Joseph Conrad's original basis for the story). Equillibrium and...

1) Can't you do that with OrbiterSound? Can you not set whether sounds play when in external view? 2) If not (though I'm almost positive you can) couldn't you write over the PBD sound file with zero volume noise (just record ambient noise and kill the volume on it)? In that case Orbiter would...

I'm getting progressively more and more disappointed in the History Channel. They keep encroaching on topics not really related to History at all; and they don't do it nearly as well as the Discovery Channel (who doesn't do a great job to begin with). It all leads to documentaries discussing the...

Since there is no one else to praise Microsoft, I will praise Microsoft -- will say that my Zune (80GB) has worked flawlessly every time I turn it on. The software is a pleasure to use, easy to organize and find all my songs (no simple feat at 210GB) without any noticeable slowdown. Adding...

I call this into question. STS-51F climbed to orbit despite an SSME failure.