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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 23rd, 2024

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  • The show made a fair few changes from the books, mostly for the better. Off the top of my head, Avasarala and Draper are introduced earlier in the show, Drummer got the consolidated stories of several other side characters and Elvi Okoye’s and Ashford’s personalities were significantly changed. IMO, Show Ashford is a much more interesting character than Book Ashford. In addition, the season 6 side plot with the kids is told much later in the books.


  • Thunderfoot’s psychotic obsession with Musk and the complete denial of reality happening before his eyes it necessitates has destroyed any credibility as a scientist he ever had. The authority of a food chemist on matters of rocket science is questionable in the first place. Your blind, unquestioning acceptance of whatever drivel escapes his frothing mouth is no less pathetic.

    And with that, I’m going to toast to the memory of the brain cells I’ve lost over the course of this “conversation”. Hoping for anything even resembling a reasoned argument from you is clearly a fool’s errand.






  • I suppose I’m somewhat fortunate to have been a poor bastard for most of my life. 25fps with moldy potato settings was just fine, as long as the game didn’t crash or deep fry the CPU, so I’m not as sensitive to the occasional drop below 60fps and don’t feel slighted when I have to turn some settings down. Though I can understand being incensed when you’ve poured thousands into a bleeding-edge gaming rig that’s supposed to handle anything at 4k, maxed out and a stable 120fps and it’s the game itself dragging your experience down.

    But the stutters weren’t the only problem people reported early on. There were cries of the game being unplayable, on account of endless bugs, visual glitches and repeated hard crashes. Worst I got was the normal mapping on Cal’s face getting real weird in certain lighting conditions. That’s hardly game-breaking.




  • Cause no one wants to look like the idiot. And when no one has read the article, it’s a lot harder to dispute the claims of what the article is about. It’s a vicious cycle - someone who hasn’t read the actual article makes claims about it, others who also haven’t read it react and before you know it, you’re ten posts deep, arguing about something that may or may not have happened. All it takes is one person to make an under-informed post and another to pick up on it. The difference between thousands and millions of users affects only the probability of it happening.





  • There’s a point at which you learn more from actually building something and putting it through its paces than simulating. It’s a tough balance to strike , no argument there. Simulating until you’ve covered every conceivable edge case and failure mode is ludicrously costly and time consuming. Relying entirely on yeeting shit and seeing how it fails risks missing the edge cases. But so far, I’ve seen little reason to doubt that SpaceX has found a working balance between simulation and practical testing. They’re certainly progressing faster than the industry historically has and the F9 has had no failures, even partial ones, in over 200 flights. That’s a track record that most launch vehicles can’t meet. It’s definitely possible there’s a 1/1000 flaw in the Falcon 9, but until it actually happens and they lose a rocket and/or a payload (gods willing it won’t be crew), it’s nothing but a hypothetical “but what if…” scenario.


  • No they didn’t. They had, a mockup of an empty shell into which they might eventually fit the vehicle. And they still have that.

    Blue Origin: “Here’s renders and a papier-mâchė model of what our lander will look like. It’s assembled together in lunar orbit, from an automated cargo ship, our own lander and another Orion.” Note that this isn’t what they won the option b proposal with.

    SpaceX: “Here’s renders of what our lander will look like. We have a full scale prototype out in Boca and we’re blowing it up to see if our math and simulations are right on how much pressure the tanks can take. It’ll require some modifications, such as larger landing legs and dedicated landing engines.” And their HLS proposal isn’t a vehicle carried in the Starship’s cargo bay, it is the Starship.

    what you’re failing to understand is that this 2.94 billion dollar bid was already AFTER they were informed of the budget changes.

    I can find no source for SpaceX’s initial bid being higher, let alone 2x higher (to meet your claim that they bid on the same level as BO, not even gonna consider Dynetics).If you have one, I’d like to see it. And if it is the case that SpaceX was picked because they were willing to slash their bid in half, then I would expect BO’s follow-up litigation to be based around that. Instead, BO focused on the claim that NASA didn’t give their proposal proper evaluation and consideration.

    I doubt minimizing corporate loss was Lueder’s motivation there. Presumably neither Steve Cook or Jeff Bezos offered Lueders a large enough bribe job matching her qualifications.

    That wasn’t my point. The point was that if their proposal had been closer to the budget set aside for the award, as opposed to being double the budget, they might have been contacted to see if they could complete the contract for the lesser amount.