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Comment Threads

• Sean Eric Fagan commented on In happier news ...
  History has fairly conclusively shown that dynamite and whales are a very, very bad combination....
• Charlie Stross commented on In happier news ...
  Can't. My publisher is not in the business of publishing my books as fast as I write them; they're in the business of publishing roughly 150 books a year, on a conveyor belt, three a week. I'm a small supplier throwing raw product at a production line, in other words. There are occasions on which the production line gets cleared to manufacture a single bespoke product at high speed ("The Pope wants a purple metallic SUV with custom wheel rims, stat!") but this tends to cause chaos so it doesn't happen unless million-plus sales are at hand. The Laundry is...
• bellinghman commented on In happier news ...
  I would also take a certain amount of issue with the idea that we need an orbital probe to have the beginnings of an idea about a planet. Telescopes nowadays are very, very good Indeed, telescopes are very good, but they can only provide a subset of what a space probe in orbit can do. Firstly, there is, as already mentioned, the advantage that a probe gets in being several orders of magnitude closer with a camera only one order of magnitude smaller than Hubble. And secondly, the probe gets a better geometry. Whenever we look at an outer planet...
• scentofviolets commented on In happier news ...
  if you want to optimize for velocity, you want the specific impulse of your rocket to be about 2/3 of your delta-vee. OK, if we say that we want to have a delta-vee in the 50 to 100 km/sec (5e4 to 1e5 m/sec) range, that means the Ve is 3.3e4 to 6.6e4 m/sec (Isp 3300 to 6600), no? Yes, that's right. Did you read the whole paper? At the end the author optimizes for payload, which might be a better way to go. Hmm . . . this is, er, one man's interested opinion to say the least, but I'll...
• brucecohenpdx commented on In happier news ...
  Sean, your link got borked. Here's one to the video of the whale....