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    Bug Typo in description of website support sub-forum

    The description for the website support sub-forum reads: "Support section for the Orbiter-Forum.con website"
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    Move over 'Omuamua

    I think the title of the paper speaks for itself: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.07224 !!!
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    Bug Legacy gallery

    Where is stuff from users' legacy OF galleries stored? Nothing shows up in the "your media" section (which seems to be where one would store such things with the new software). My sig pic still appears, so it's still stored somewhere, but if I try clicking on it (which would have taken me to it...
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    Catalogue of stable resonant orbits?

    Does anybody know of a catalogue of what sorts of orbital resonances are self-stabilizing? For example, a 1:2:4 resonance with the phase relationships of the Galilean moons is self stabilizing, as is a 1:1 resonance with a 60-degree phase difference between the bodies (within certain relative...
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    Coloring the interior of the Mandelbrot set

    The Mandelbrot set is the set of points c on the complex plane such that when you start with z=0 and perform repeated iterations of z=z^2+c, z remains bounded. Most color visualizations of the set color the exterior (the points not in the set) according to the escape time (the number of...
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    Hyperbolic geometry question

    Minimalistic statement of problem to be solved: Given a straight line (geodesic) A in hyperbolic space, a hypercycle H with A as its axis, and a second straight line B tangent to H, what is the separation between B and H as a function of distance from their point of tangency? Actual problem...
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    Gaming Replacing magnetic storage in a DOS retrogaming machine

    I have a 1995-vintage PC that I use for retrogaming / general retrocomputing. The current configuration has Dos 6.22 / Win3.11, Win95, and Debian 4 squeezed onto an 4 GiB IDE spinning-rust disk. I have ambitions to move it all to a larger disk to give Win95 and Linux some more room (DOS, as I...
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    [Speculative Biology] Sugar/oxidizer reactions with components stable in (possibly aqueous) ammonia

    In trying to do speculative biology for a sci-fi setting, I've run across the problem that nobody seems to have done a lot of previous well-thought-out speculation on alternatives to oxygen as a biological oxidizer (you'll occasionally see suggestions of fluorine or chlorine, but there seem to...
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    Average distance between objects on Keplerian orbits.

    Given a central body A, and two bodies B and C on Keplerian orbits around A, how easy is it to calculate the time-averaged distance between B and C? For circular orbits it appears to be dead simple: the average position of both B and C is exactly the position of A, and the minimum possible...
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    Dynamics of test particles in the formation of the solar system

    I've got a bit of a weird question. I'm thinking up an FTL system for a Sci-Fi campaign in which a large number of FTL access points exist, but they barely interact with normal matter (or each other), so you have to survey for them (barely interact, that is, except that they are affected by...
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    Question Am I technically a German citizen?

    I recently looked over https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nationality_law , in particular, the "Descent from a German Parent" section, and have come to the ridiculous conclusion that I may, on a technicality, actually carry German citizenship: My great^2 grandfather emigrated to the US in the...
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    Question Vendors for low-end, maintainable laptops

    My dad and I are looking for a laptop for my mom, who is a non-techie, with low performance requirements. In shopping for family systems (or, for myself, for personal systems), where we have somewhat higher performance requirements, we've generally gone with buying professional-grade systems...
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    News Apparent accident with testbed engine for Russian SLAM-style missile

    I'm surprised nothing has shown up about this on OF yet: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/08/russian-nuclear-powered-cruise-missile-blows-up-creating-mini-chernobyl/ The article is a bit sensationally titled, but the upshot is that the Russian government had prevously...
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    Planetary accretion code

    I know that several people on OF have in the past developed projects that have involved, as part of their scope, randomly generating planetary systems (OrbiterGalaxy and Spaceway jump immediately to mind, both are defunct, as I recall). I know that a lot of hobbyist code has used some variation...
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    Testing to reproduce forum issue

    I encountered a 502 when posting to a thread, and am trying to see if I can get it to happen again. The mods can delete this when they see it, I'll know if I need to file a bug or if it was a one-off as soon as I've posted.
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    [GER] Englische (un)Rechtschreibung

    In diesem Thread gibt es ein Youtube Link, und das Video hat ein Vorschaubild mit die Wörter "Chilliges Abhängen im Erdorbit. Es ist unvermeidlich, dass Sprachen voneinander Lehnwörter wie "chill" nehmen, aber ich muss das deutschsprachige Welt (witzelnd) warnen, ganz vorsichtig zu sein. Man...
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    Variant on the double slit experiment

    I've been wondering lately what would happen if we took the double slit experiment and, instead of trying to measure *which* path the particle takes, rather measuring whether it takes one path or both. For example, we set up a pair of detectors at either slit, and wire them to an XOR gate. We...
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    Electric jet engines

    I've thought of a few modified turbojet/fan engines, and I just wanted to get an idea of how feasible they might be for various uses: 1) Put an electric motor on the shaft of a normal turbine engine, and plaster the wings with solar panels. Advantage: during daylight, the solar panels take up...
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    Question SD card weirdness

    So tonight I flashed a 16 GiB microSD card with a raspbian image, and afterwards the card showed up in GParted as being exactly the size of the flashed image, rather than its full 16 GiB capacity. Looking for similar problems on Google, I found lots of people reporting the exact same behavior...
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    Name and literature on a mathematical object

    I've been musing on a certain mathematical object recently, and have not been able to find any information on it via Google. I'm trying to figure out if it has a name that might be easily searchable ("integers mod 2pi" and similar searches don't return anything relevant), and any mathematical...
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