That's a known issue with S.T.A.L.K.E.R (standalone and Steam). I will now no longer stick all those dots in.
Ran into it myself because I have XP on I:. You need to edit the fsgame.ltx file which is in the STALKER program directory and edit the data path at the top of it to match your system.
I'm surprised you didn't notice quicker because your display settings would also not have stuck.
Go back to your Pokemon cards. The sun is not elongated with 2 bulbous points.
Okay... not sure why you're insulting me when I was offering an opinion of something you found confusing, assuming that was an insult, but hey-ho.
I've looked at both videos (right SRB forward camera and right SRB aft camera) and the only objects similar to what you have described that I can see visible at around 3:32 are either Discovery itself, which doesn't fully match your description and that - I presume - you would have recognised, or the Sun. In the forward camera it's a little distorted because the lens is covered with residue at that point, but is obviously the sun. In the aft camera footage, where the lens is clear, the sun overloads the camera as it points straight at it. This is quite common with digital cameras - instead of the entire image bleaching, as would happen with film, you get "spikes" sticking out of the bright spot. (See, for example this image of a Comet from SOHO where because of the CCD alignment the spikes are horizontal. In the SRB footage the spikes are vertical.
If you're unwilling to accept the argument that the object you are seeing is the Sun, then what do you think it is? And if it isn't the Sun, where do you think the Sun is? Remember that the Shuttle currently has to launch with full sunlight on it all the way to orbit for photography purposes - the Sun is there somewhere.
What is the long black contrail seen in the downfacing camera at 2:58? It's not the shuttle, because the camera is on the shuttle and the black contrail is miles away.
Shadow of the Shuttle's launch contrail. Remember that the shuttle's main engines produce essentially water vapour, but lots and lots of it - denser than most clouds. The combustion products of the SRBs (alluminium oxide is one of them, IIRC) also form a very dense smoke. So the launch contrail is a very dense, slightly smoggy cloud which produces, like all clouds, a shadow. The shadow looks especially dark in these videos because the camera is set for a good view of the Shuttle, which is in bright sunshine - dark shadows will be almost black with that exposure.
Also, what is the object seen at least 3 times as the camera rotates? It is most visible at 3:32 and resembles the object someone called a "lens flare" in the upfacing video. It is too solid to be a lens flare here
Not sure which video you're referring to (several have been linked) but at a guess - the sun. It's visible in several of the videos after the SRBs detach and are tumbling. There's also a number of instances where the sun is reflected from the inside of the camera housing and produces a sort of "spotlight" effect as the SRB rotates.
Multiple failure points? Somehow that doesn't sound very good, not when we're talking pieces of equipment meant to be thrown out in space away from any kind of servicing. Aren't these things supposed to be both sturdy and have redundant failure protections?
Almost every planetary lander has massive weight restrictions, and that leads to lack of redundancy. You can't duplicate every system because that leads to over twice as much weight (the extra weight for the duplicate, and the extra weight for the systems to sense failure and handle changeover); it also means a lot more complexity and for space probes that isn't a good thing. Complexity means more to go wrong; airbag landing cushioning is becoming popular because it's simply and there is very little to go wrong compared to traditional rocket-slowed soft-landing.
Most landers are pretty much on the limit weight wise as it is; put redundancy in for everything and you'd be able to have half the science being done, and for probes science is king. They're not carrying humans, so there's less need for everything to go completely right. Hence multiple possible failure points. It's not unique to Beagle 2; almost every lander that has succeeded has been pretty lucky, and for every lander that has succeeded there's been a failure.
"He thinks the craft may have hit the ground too hard"
In other news, this evening, the Sun will set over the Western Horizon.
Bear in mind that impact damage was just one of many possible failure modes for Beagle 2. Transmitter failure, failure of the antenna to deploy, failure of the solar panels to produce enough power, failure of the onboard computers, and so on - there are lots and lots of reasons why it failed to transmit back to Earth. Up until now there's been an assumption catastrophic impact damage occurred, but if the interpretation of this picture is accurate then Beagle 2 appears to have made it down in basically one piece and may have actually been working long enough to unfold and deploy - so the impact was not catastrophic, but may have been far enough out of the designed envelope to damage the transmitter or the antenna.
The technology that this article is presumably talking about is DVB-H - Digital Video Broadcasting for Handhelds. (As opposed to DVB-T - digital terrestrial, DVB-S - digital satellite or DVB-C - digital cable). DVB-H is basically a variant of DVB-T designed to be used in a "burst" mode - i.e. the hardware that the incoming DVB-H data is coming in on (which could be broadcast, or could be over IP via wireless, 3G, EDGE, GSM, etc) is powered up and a buffer is filled with enough data for a period of playback, then the reception hardware powers off while the buffer is emptied, and so on (not new for video over IP, but a fairly new idea for broadcast). It's mainly power saving. Definitely not purely for phones with tiny screens - imagine a Sony PSP, Nintendo DS or a Nokia 770 with DVB-H.
700,000 unique users, not 700,000 hits. And they're not closing it due to lack of interest; they're closing it because of financial reasons. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/news/2005/06/29/20 281.shtml for full details, but in a nutshell they're closing websites which they feel "do not provide sufficient distinctive public value for the investment required".
I suspect it also really means "sites which we can close without people noticing or getting upset about" - allegedly - in which case they've really boo-booed on this one. It's possibly the only site that anyone with an ounce of sense could have told them would produce exactly they kind of negative backlash that they are getting...
You could do what most people who are not in region 1 do, which is get a multiregion DVD. They're not hard to find - in fact, in the UK it's harder to find a DVD which is region locked than one that isn't.
Region coding is pretty much dead. It's not an excuse for piracy.
If anything serious happens they get in the Soyuz capsule and come down. End of story. You can't do "emergency rescue flights", despite what the movies tell you. And this flight isn't "fastest they can come up with anything" flight - it's scheduled. It's always been scheduled for that date. They haven't come up with anything.
It takes a lot of time to prepare a spacecraft for launch; for example, the next space shuttle to fly is already being prepared and has been for quite some time, despite the proposed launch date being three or fouth months away. Progress and Soyuz launches may process a little quicker, but not that much - and they get built to order, so Soyuz vehicles for some flights next year may not even be assembled yet.
The only situation where an "emergency rescue flight" could be attempted is where a spacecraft was already fairly advanced in processing and the processing could be accelerated in some way. For example, if it had been realised early on in Columbia's last flight that there was wing damage in theory it would have been possible to accelerate the processing of the next shuttle (Atlantis, IIRC) so that it could launch, rendezvous with Columbia and transfer the crew just before the resources on Columbia were used up. However, that would have required the processing and launch to go completely smoothly with no holds of any kind and Atlantis to launch with the same possibility of getting the same damage.
In that situation, however, it would have been attempted - there was no other choice (other than a jury-rigged attempt to repair the damage). Unlike on the ISS there was no other craft to re-enter in, and not enough resources to wait more than a few days.
If Atlantis hadn't been due to launch relatively closely behind Columbia there would have been no "emergency flight" possibility at all.
Astronauts, cosmonauts, and space tourists - once they're up there they are on their own. It might only be a couple of hundred kilometres, but it may as well be a million if there's a major problem.
It looks like we've finally found the advantage to being stuck with Series 1 hardware and 2.5.5 software. Almost makes up for not getting Home Media Option and all the other additional features...
when it takes Burt Rutan 4 days to get his ship back into orbit
Bit of a fallacy here - Rutan is doing nothing even vaguely similar to the Shuttle (or even later Mercury flights).
SpaceShipOne was nowhere near going into orbit. Orbit requires horizontal speed, not vertical height, and - more importantly - a way to safely bleed off that speed on re-entry without burning or breaking up.
SpaceShipOne is not capable of going into orbit, and never will be - it has neither the power to reach the Mach 25+ speeds required for orbital velocity, nor the ability to withstand the heating required to lose those speeds on reentry.
It's the equivalent of the early Mercury-Redstone flights from 1961(Freedom 7 and Liberty Bell 7) - short sub-orbital hops. The difference is that with a new booster (the Atlas) Mercury was capable of re-entry from orbital speeds.
I wonder if this will have any effect on the planned (and contraversial, although little heard about in the mainstream press) data exchange from EU airlines to the US?
There does seem to be a fallacy going around in intelligence circles that all that is required for good security is as much data as can possibly be obtained - which of course isn't the case. What is required is good and timely analysis of relevant good quality data. Airlines can't even book seats correctly 100% of the time - what are the chances that their data is going to be good quality 100% of the time?
Say what you will about Reagan, regardless of how you felt about his policies (many were quite controversial), he sure could deliver great speeches.
The best lines in it, however, were paraphrased from John Gillespie McGee's famous poem "High Flight", which is also what Melvill was most likely thinking of. It's a standard reading at the funerals of pilots, and I personally feel that Reagan's speech would have been better, and perhaps more fitting, had he finished with the entire poem. It sums up the main reason why astronauts - military, governmental or private - will always want to strap themselves into something that will never be 100% safe and fly.
Source CDs come with package, or are downloadable with the update (those who bought the first version can download the updated version ISOs free-of-charge).
You'll need to purchase it if you want to try it - see here - currently $50 for US users, but most people who'll be interested in it will have existing Sun suppliers who may have better deals, or evaluation arrangements.
It's nothing special as a distribution, IMHO - not bad, nothing standout - but it's main strength may lie in its integration with the Sun Control Station and centralised distribution and control, which I haven't had a chance to play with.
Part of it was because he was writing as it was being recorded so it has a very random, stream of concious feel to it. The third and later books were much more cohesive.
That was only true of the second radio series (Fit the 7th to Fit the 12th, IIRC) - the first series was written before recording (although there were numerous rewrites, and at that time he was also the Doctor Who script editor and under a lot of time pressure). The second series was both written and recorded in a huge hurry, with writing happening while the actors were waiting and - once - the episode almost being transmitted before the end of it was ready.
The writing in the second series shows to a large extent why Adams was so fond of continously rewriting - he couldn't do it on that schedule, and it shows. An epsiode and a half worth of the "shoe event horizon" was covered by half a page when it made it into book form.
It also shows why it was a failing, too. The first two books were written in a hurry (to the extent that the first book ends at the point where the dispatch rider from the publishers turned up to collect what he'd written, regardless) and that seemed to make them funnier, along with the fact that the plot & dialogue had already been honed for the radio series. The third book onwards weren't written under such enourmous time pressure, and weren't so closely based on the second series, and I think he had a tendency to rewrite some of that excitement and humour out.
Adams was always best when he was converting something he'd done for another medium - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, for example, was based on at least two episodes he'd written for Doctor Who and so the plotting was already done. Long Dark Teatime of the Soul was less satisfying to my mind because he got lost in the plot.
Having characters called things like Slartibartfast and Zloat kind of makes me think he was taking stabs in the dark at writing a having a huge joke over on his readers/consumers.
Well, given that it was a radio series when he wrote most of the character names it would be "listeners".
And Slartibartfast came about because he wanted the character to have something that constantly depressed him and made him secretive, and he decided it would be a really terrible name. It started off as "Phartiphuckborlz" or similar, and they switched the syllables around until it was almost, but not quite, entirely safe to broadcast.
You should read about his writing technique; it usually involved taking three pages of dialogue and rewriting them mercilessly into about four sentences over the course of a day. Part of his problem with deadlines was because he was never ever totally happy with his work.
nitpick:
Soyuz flies on its own rocket (also called Soyuz). Proton lifts 3 or 5 times more than the Soyuz and is not man-rated.
Quite correct, and I'm properly slapping myself on the head here. However, there have been Soyuz launch vehicle failures - for example, the Foton M1 satellite launch in February 2002, which exploded thirty seconds into flight and was the incident I was thinking of when I said Proton erroneously...
...the accident rate on the Shuttle isn't too bad, considering.
If two out of five 747s exploded, would you call that a bad accident rate? Even considering?
747 is a bad example. The Comet is a better example. The high losses of Comets was down to one factor; no one knew any better. First versions of anything have high losses.
Considering that the Shuttle was so fundamentally different from ever other spacecraft before it, and how few of those there were, losing two craft in over a hundred flights isn't that bad. The only reason why there were no losses in other US manned craft was down to low flight numbers, and Apollo (somwhere near 15 manned flights including Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz, IIRC - someone will correct me) came close on a couple of occasions.
How many Soyuz have we lost in the past thirty years?
About the same as shuttles, IIRC - two. Over less flights. (Soyuz isn't up to 100 yet, unless I'm misremembering). I think there have been some unmanned losses, and Proton failures (which would have lead to a Soyuz loss if it had been a Soyuz mission) - again, someone else will likely know the exact figures.
I just don't get this whole shuttle thing Nasa are going on about at the moment. It's been flying for decades with respectably few accidents, but now its suddenly too dangerous to go anywhere other then ISS.
Actualy, the accident rate on the Shuttle isn't too bad, considering. However, the CAIB inquiry was by far the most in-depth study of the Shuttle, even including the Challenger inquiry. And it revealed lots and lots of potential failure situations that could lead to loss of craft and crew. Once those potential failure scenarios are known about the past safety record doesn't matter. They could happen - that they haven't up until now is luck.
At any rate if the only danger is that the heat proof tiles get damaged then why on earth don't they just pack enough supplies to let them hang around in orbit long enough to be rescued?
It's not the only danger. Firstly it's not just the tiles - there are a lot more components to the thermal protection system on the Shuttle. The component damaged on Columbia was one of the reinforced carbon-carbon wing leading edge panels. Secondly, longevity on orbit is a tradeoff between payload capacity and supplies. You take more supplies, you take less payload. Plus there are some systems that will degrade or run out on orbit and can't be replenished in orbit - thruster fuel is one, if I recall rightly. And thirdly, there's always the possibility that damage to the thermal system might be combined with another fault. Some of the Shuttle's abort modes (like TAL (Transoceanic Abort Landing) and AOA (Abort Once Around)) are required for things like life support problems, and have almost the same heating as a normal reentry. In those situations they can't wait on orbit.
Plus, of course, what happens if they do have to be rescued? It takes a long time to prep a shuttle. In the case of Columbia Atlantis was being prepped and perhaps could have been prepped for a rescue mission in time - but it would have required triple shifts and no problems turning up, plus the assumption that the same thing wouldn't happen on launch. Plus you can't really keep a Shuttle on the pad "ready to go" - again, systems degrade.
It just seems really stupid to waste the shuttles just because they're so image conscious that they have to avoid losing astronaughts at all cost, I mean they may as well not go anywhere near space if that's going to be their attitude
It's all tradeoffs. Nasa's attitude doesn't really matter in this circumstance; it's what the American people - and, let's face it, mainly Congress et al - think that counts, and Nasa are desperate not to have another disaster. Nasa like manned spaceflight, and want to do more of it - they want to get the funding and be allowed to do it, not forced into doing only robotic exploration for the next 50 years,
"There are two gyroscopes still functioning, and that is enough to stabilize the station, Suffredini said. If one of these remaining gyroscopes fails, the station will rely on thrusters to keep it steady."
Too bad they can't do that for Hubble too.
No thrusters on Hubble, of course.
It wouldn't work for Hubble anyway - thrusters are a fairly coarse method of control, resulting it lots of banging and vibration. While on the ISS that would be fine (although some mu-g experiments would probably be upset) on Hubble it would render it unusable until the vibrations have died down after every thrust. Plus, of course, while observations take place they couldn't use the thrusters - and hence the lack of control is going to make those observations pretty hopeless anyway.
If the robot mission to attach a gyro pack to Hubble goes ahead (which I hope it does) then it is likely to have thrusters on it - however, I would suspect that they're not for day-to-day control but to control Hubble when it's re-entered.
so the poor grandparent with his GeForce 5200 is bound to be struggling
Grandparent! Heesh, I'm not even 34 yet...
Young whippersnappers. When I were a lad we had 8" floppies, thermal printers with capacitors the size of soup cans and 64x64 graphical resolution - if we were lucky.
Yes, the 5200 is a relatively old card now but it was cheap and has two DVI outputs. Plays Unreal Tournament 2004 at smooth framerates, and what else does one need?
It certainly does work on my system (XP Pro SP2(RC1),AMD Athlon64 3000+, NVidia 5200, 1GB memory) although the frame rates are less than impressive. So if it's faking it, it's not doing it by not working...
(And yes, being a suspicious puppy, I did look at the network traffic while it was starting up just in case it was downloading on the fly...)
But 64K? Pah! There were more fun games in 16K - I mean, who can forget 3D Monster Maze and JetPac?
Slashdot Mirror
Ran into it myself because I have XP on I:. You need to edit the fsgame.ltx file which is in the STALKER program directory and edit the data path at the top of it to match your system.
I'm surprised you didn't notice quicker because your display settings would also not have stuck.
Okay... not sure why you're insulting me when I was offering an opinion of something you found confusing, assuming that was an insult, but hey-ho.
I've looked at both videos (right SRB forward camera and right SRB aft camera) and the only objects similar to what you have described that I can see visible at around 3:32 are either Discovery itself, which doesn't fully match your description and that - I presume - you would have recognised, or the Sun. In the forward camera it's a little distorted because the lens is covered with residue at that point, but is obviously the sun. In the aft camera footage, where the lens is clear, the sun overloads the camera as it points straight at it. This is quite common with digital cameras - instead of the entire image bleaching, as would happen with film, you get "spikes" sticking out of the bright spot. (See, for example this image of a Comet from SOHO where because of the CCD alignment the spikes are horizontal. In the SRB footage the spikes are vertical.
If you're unwilling to accept the argument that the object you are seeing is the Sun, then what do you think it is? And if it isn't the Sun, where do you think the Sun is? Remember that the Shuttle currently has to launch with full sunlight on it all the way to orbit for photography purposes - the Sun is there somewhere.
Shadow of the Shuttle's launch contrail. Remember that the shuttle's main engines produce essentially water vapour, but lots and lots of it - denser than most clouds. The combustion products of the SRBs (alluminium oxide is one of them, IIRC) also form a very dense smoke. So the launch contrail is a very dense, slightly smoggy cloud which produces, like all clouds, a shadow. The shadow looks especially dark in these videos because the camera is set for a good view of the Shuttle, which is in bright sunshine - dark shadows will be almost black with that exposure.
Also, what is the object seen at least 3 times as the camera rotates? It is most visible at 3:32 and resembles the object someone called a "lens flare" in the upfacing video. It is too solid to be a lens flare here
Not sure which video you're referring to (several have been linked) but at a guess - the sun. It's visible in several of the videos after the SRBs detach and are tumbling. There's also a number of instances where the sun is reflected from the inside of the camera housing and produces a sort of "spotlight" effect as the SRB rotates.
Almost every planetary lander has massive weight restrictions, and that leads to lack of redundancy. You can't duplicate every system because that leads to over twice as much weight (the extra weight for the duplicate, and the extra weight for the systems to sense failure and handle changeover); it also means a lot more complexity and for space probes that isn't a good thing. Complexity means more to go wrong; airbag landing cushioning is becoming popular because it's simply and there is very little to go wrong compared to traditional rocket-slowed soft-landing.
Most landers are pretty much on the limit weight wise as it is; put redundancy in for everything and you'd be able to have half the science being done, and for probes science is king. They're not carrying humans, so there's less need for everything to go completely right. Hence multiple possible failure points. It's not unique to Beagle 2; almost every lander that has succeeded has been pretty lucky, and for every lander that has succeeded there's been a failure.
"He thinks the craft may have hit the ground too hard"
In other news, this evening, the Sun will set over the Western Horizon.
Bear in mind that impact damage was just one of many possible failure modes for Beagle 2. Transmitter failure, failure of the antenna to deploy, failure of the solar panels to produce enough power, failure of the onboard computers, and so on - there are lots and lots of reasons why it failed to transmit back to Earth. Up until now there's been an assumption catastrophic impact damage occurred, but if the interpretation of this picture is accurate then Beagle 2 appears to have made it down in basically one piece and may have actually been working long enough to unfold and deploy - so the impact was not catastrophic, but may have been far enough out of the designed envelope to damage the transmitter or the antenna.
As has been mentioned, the technology being talked about is DVB-H - you can probably guess what the D stands for, I hope.
The DVB-H project homepage is at http://www.dvb-h-online.org/
700,000 unique users, not 700,000 hits. And they're not closing it due to lack of interest; they're closing it because of financial reasons. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/news/2005/06/29/20 281.shtml for full details, but in a nutshell they're closing websites which they feel "do not provide sufficient distinctive public value for the investment required".
I suspect it also really means "sites which we can close without people noticing or getting upset about" - allegedly - in which case they've really boo-booed on this one. It's possibly the only site that anyone with an ounce of sense could have told them would produce exactly they kind of negative backlash that they are getting...
Region coding is pretty much dead. It's not an excuse for piracy.
March 28th for the first 13 episodes, at least here in region 2.
A 8
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0007L6S
It takes a lot of time to prepare a spacecraft for launch; for example, the next space shuttle to fly is already being prepared and has been for quite some time, despite the proposed launch date being three or fouth months away. Progress and Soyuz launches may process a little quicker, but not that much - and they get built to order, so Soyuz vehicles for some flights next year may not even be assembled yet.
The only situation where an "emergency rescue flight" could be attempted is where a spacecraft was already fairly advanced in processing and the processing could be accelerated in some way. For example, if it had been realised early on in Columbia's last flight that there was wing damage in theory it would have been possible to accelerate the processing of the next shuttle (Atlantis, IIRC) so that it could launch, rendezvous with Columbia and transfer the crew just before the resources on Columbia were used up. However, that would have required the processing and launch to go completely smoothly with no holds of any kind and Atlantis to launch with the same possibility of getting the same damage.
In that situation, however, it would have been attempted - there was no other choice (other than a jury-rigged attempt to repair the damage). Unlike on the ISS there was no other craft to re-enter in, and not enough resources to wait more than a few days.
If Atlantis hadn't been due to launch relatively closely behind Columbia there would have been no "emergency flight" possibility at all.
Astronauts, cosmonauts, and space tourists - once they're up there they are on their own. It might only be a couple of hundred kilometres, but it may as well be a million if there's a major problem.
It looks like we've finally found the advantage to being stuck with Series 1 hardware and 2.5.5 software. Almost makes up for not getting Home Media Option and all the other additional features...
SpaceShipOne was nowhere near going into orbit. Orbit requires horizontal speed, not vertical height, and - more importantly - a way to safely bleed off that speed on re-entry without burning or breaking up.
SpaceShipOne is not capable of going into orbit, and never will be - it has neither the power to reach the Mach 25+ speeds required for orbital velocity, nor the ability to withstand the heating required to lose those speeds on reentry.
It's the equivalent of the early Mercury-Redstone flights from 1961(Freedom 7 and Liberty Bell 7) - short sub-orbital hops. The difference is that with a new booster (the Atlas) Mercury was capable of re-entry from orbital speeds.
There does seem to be a fallacy going around in intelligence circles that all that is required for good security is as much data as can possibly be obtained - which of course isn't the case. What is required is good and timely analysis of relevant good quality data. Airlines can't even book seats correctly 100% of the time - what are the chances that their data is going to be good quality 100% of the time?
Say what you will about Reagan, regardless of how you felt about his policies (many were quite controversial), he sure could deliver great speeches.
The best lines in it, however, were paraphrased from John Gillespie McGee's famous poem "High Flight", which is also what Melvill was most likely thinking of. It's a standard reading at the funerals of pilots, and I personally feel that Reagan's speech would have been better, and perhaps more fitting, had he finished with the entire poem. It sums up the main reason why astronauts - military, governmental or private - will always want to strap themselves into something that will never be 100% safe and fly.
You'll need to purchase it if you want to try it - see here - currently $50 for US users, but most people who'll be interested in it will have existing Sun suppliers who may have better deals, or evaluation arrangements.
It's nothing special as a distribution, IMHO - not bad, nothing standout - but it's main strength may lie in its integration with the Sun Control Station and centralised distribution and control, which I haven't had a chance to play with.
That was only true of the second radio series (Fit the 7th to Fit the 12th, IIRC) - the first series was written before recording (although there were numerous rewrites, and at that time he was also the Doctor Who script editor and under a lot of time pressure). The second series was both written and recorded in a huge hurry, with writing happening while the actors were waiting and - once - the episode almost being transmitted before the end of it was ready.
The writing in the second series shows to a large extent why Adams was so fond of continously rewriting - he couldn't do it on that schedule, and it shows. An epsiode and a half worth of the "shoe event horizon" was covered by half a page when it made it into book form.
It also shows why it was a failing, too. The first two books were written in a hurry (to the extent that the first book ends at the point where the dispatch rider from the publishers turned up to collect what he'd written, regardless) and that seemed to make them funnier, along with the fact that the plot & dialogue had already been honed for the radio series. The third book onwards weren't written under such enourmous time pressure, and weren't so closely based on the second series, and I think he had a tendency to rewrite some of that excitement and humour out.
Adams was always best when he was converting something he'd done for another medium - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, for example, was based on at least two episodes he'd written for Doctor Who and so the plotting was already done. Long Dark Teatime of the Soul was less satisfying to my mind because he got lost in the plot.
Well, given that it was a radio series when he wrote most of the character names it would be "listeners".
And Slartibartfast came about because he wanted the character to have something that constantly depressed him and made him secretive, and he decided it would be a really terrible name. It started off as "Phartiphuckborlz" or similar, and they switched the syllables around until it was almost, but not quite, entirely safe to broadcast.
You should read about his writing technique; it usually involved taking three pages of dialogue and rewriting them mercilessly into about four sentences over the course of a day. Part of his problem with deadlines was because he was never ever totally happy with his work.
Yes, at least twice - I have the original version somewhere at home, and it's pretty easy to find the current version.
Soyuz flies on its own rocket (also called Soyuz). Proton lifts 3 or 5 times more than the Soyuz and is not man-rated.
Quite correct, and I'm properly slapping myself on the head here. However, there have been Soyuz launch vehicle failures - for example, the Foton M1 satellite launch in February 2002, which exploded thirty seconds into flight and was the incident I was thinking of when I said Proton erroneously...
If two out of five 747s exploded, would you call that a bad accident rate? Even considering?
747 is a bad example. The Comet is a better example. The high losses of Comets was down to one factor; no one knew any better. First versions of anything have high losses.
Considering that the Shuttle was so fundamentally different from ever other spacecraft before it, and how few of those there were, losing two craft in over a hundred flights isn't that bad. The only reason why there were no losses in other US manned craft was down to low flight numbers, and Apollo (somwhere near 15 manned flights including Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz, IIRC - someone will correct me) came close on a couple of occasions.
How many Soyuz have we lost in the past thirty years?
About the same as shuttles, IIRC - two. Over less flights. (Soyuz isn't up to 100 yet, unless I'm misremembering). I think there have been some unmanned losses, and Proton failures (which would have lead to a Soyuz loss if it had been a Soyuz mission) - again, someone else will likely know the exact figures.
Actualy, the accident rate on the Shuttle isn't too bad, considering. However, the CAIB inquiry was by far the most in-depth study of the Shuttle, even including the Challenger inquiry. And it revealed lots and lots of potential failure situations that could lead to loss of craft and crew. Once those potential failure scenarios are known about the past safety record doesn't matter. They could happen - that they haven't up until now is luck.
At any rate if the only danger is that the heat proof tiles get damaged then why on earth don't they just pack enough supplies to let them hang around in orbit long enough to be rescued?
It's not the only danger. Firstly it's not just the tiles - there are a lot more components to the thermal protection system on the Shuttle. The component damaged on Columbia was one of the reinforced carbon-carbon wing leading edge panels. Secondly, longevity on orbit is a tradeoff between payload capacity and supplies. You take more supplies, you take less payload. Plus there are some systems that will degrade or run out on orbit and can't be replenished in orbit - thruster fuel is one, if I recall rightly. And thirdly, there's always the possibility that damage to the thermal system might be combined with another fault. Some of the Shuttle's abort modes (like TAL (Transoceanic Abort Landing) and AOA (Abort Once Around)) are required for things like life support problems, and have almost the same heating as a normal reentry. In those situations they can't wait on orbit.
Plus, of course, what happens if they do have to be rescued? It takes a long time to prep a shuttle. In the case of Columbia Atlantis was being prepped and perhaps could have been prepped for a rescue mission in time - but it would have required triple shifts and no problems turning up, plus the assumption that the same thing wouldn't happen on launch. Plus you can't really keep a Shuttle on the pad "ready to go" - again, systems degrade.
It just seems really stupid to waste the shuttles just because they're so image conscious that they have to avoid losing astronaughts at all cost, I mean they may as well not go anywhere near space if that's going to be their attitude
It's all tradeoffs. Nasa's attitude doesn't really matter in this circumstance; it's what the American people - and, let's face it, mainly Congress et al - think that counts, and Nasa are desperate not to have another disaster. Nasa like manned spaceflight, and want to do more of it - they want to get the funding and be allowed to do it, not forced into doing only robotic exploration for the next 50 years,
Too bad they can't do that for Hubble too.
No thrusters on Hubble, of course.
It wouldn't work for Hubble anyway - thrusters are a fairly coarse method of control, resulting it lots of banging and vibration. While on the ISS that would be fine (although some mu-g experiments would probably be upset) on Hubble it would render it unusable until the vibrations have died down after every thrust. Plus, of course, while observations take place they couldn't use the thrusters - and hence the lack of control is going to make those observations pretty hopeless anyway.
If the robot mission to attach a gyro pack to Hubble goes ahead (which I hope it does) then it is likely to have thrusters on it - however, I would suspect that they're not for day-to-day control but to control Hubble when it's re-entered.
Young whippersnappers. When I were a lad we had 8" floppies, thermal printers with capacitors the size of soup cans and 64x64 graphical resolution - if we were lucky.
Yes, the 5200 is a relatively old card now but it was cheap and has two DVI outputs. Plays Unreal Tournament 2004 at smooth framerates, and what else does one need?
(And yes, being a suspicious puppy, I did look at the network traffic while it was starting up just in case it was downloading on the fly...)
But 64K? Pah! There were more fun games in 16K - I mean, who can forget 3D Monster Maze and JetPac?