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  1. spcefrk

    Breaking the sound barrier on Mars.

    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...
  2. spcefrk

    General Question Damaging the Space Shuttle - orbDamage or dll?

    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...
  3. spcefrk

    News Electric Guitar inventor dies.

    :( 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...
  4. spcefrk

    Hardware Installing more RAM.

    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...
  5. spcefrk

    Hardware Installing more RAM.

    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...
  6. spcefrk

    Just saw a UFO in Orbiter

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

    RC DeltaGliderIV project

    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...
  8. spcefrk

    Slipstring Drive Theory

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

    Lunar hoax believers: DO NOT OPEN THIS THREAD!

    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...
  10. spcefrk

    Cost overruns plague U.S. space agency

    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...
  11. spcefrk

    Question Your Favorite Movies

    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...
  12. spcefrk

    General Question Space Shuttle Cargo bay hatch doors

    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...
  13. spcefrk

    Science History Channel: Blow asteroids to bits

    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...
  14. spcefrk

    News Microsoft fails again (Z2K bug)

    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...
  15. spcefrk

    SpaceX Successfully Conducts Full Mission-Length Firing of its Falcon 9

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

    A Translational Hand Controller Finally?

    I ran across this tonight. I think it's anyone's best bet for a THC. The pros: It's USB so it's simple to implement It has a simple connector to add up to 10 buttons It's cheap - $15 + shipping. The cons: It gives one 2 axes so you'd have to implement Z with the additional buttons It's in a...
  17. spcefrk

    Suggested college courses

    You want CIS-322: Whips, Chains, and Other Methods of Academic Bondage:lol:
  18. spcefrk

    Poll DGIV or XR2

    Both. What are you strapped for bandwidth or HDD space?
  19. spcefrk

    Putting a face to the name

    Graduating with my M.S. in Aerospace Engineering.
  20. spcefrk

    Making Mars Rovers Survive

    I'd prefer to see rovers running on fuel taken from the atmosphere as a means of testing Mr. Zubrin's concept.
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