JB0

That could be argued as a test, I suppose. Wasn't what I was thinking of, though.

A. I know that. It's some kind ramjet on steroids. B. Anyone know where I can find any info on that concept. It seemed like an interesting one, but I don't know what that idea is called. 316174[/snapback] Sorry, it sounded like you were presenting scramjet as the name of the ship. Anyways... a scramjet is just a high-speed variant of the ramjet. It burns in faster environments than a standard ramjet does. Part of the reason it was dropped may have been that it's not a single-engine atmospheric solution. Ramjets and scramjets don't work in a subsonic environment, necessitating the addition of a conventional jet engine to get them past mach 1 before they're ignited. Afraid I dunno where to find any info on the concept vehicle. ... Random google search for scramjet shuttle replacement gives me this... http://www.csa.com/hottopics/newshuttle/overview.php Which mentions a shuttle replacement named the X-33.

Fact: Everyone that didn't vote for Millia is a homosexual. Runners-up are Vanessa and Misa.

You forgot that the protoculture ruins in Macross 7 would only open if there was proof that the zentradi had been sucessfully reintegrated into protoculture society(or something remarkably close to the protoculture, like humans). But that may have been an intentional omission as opposed to an oversight on your part.

Not really. Neither of the shuttles we've lost died due to age. One was a rocket being flown in an out-of-spec environment that failed to operate properly(hence why it wasn't spec'ed for that weather). The other was a chunk of foam that hit the heat shield at a relatve velocity of something like mach 20 and ripped a hole right through it. Stopping that chunk of foam would've been a major accomplishment for high-quality tank armor, never mind a heat shield that was never intended to take impacts at all. A. Scramjet is a kind of engine, not a ship. B. Like all the other replacement concepts, it got scrapped at one point or another.

I see. So you're saying that the US can print lots of bills, trade them for natural resources, and everyone wins? Not quite. But to a degree. Yes, they would be. Of course, we have little companies like Intel ensuring we've got something worth trading for. Not really. Economics = witchcraft.

Actually, the pen was freely developed by an independent company. And was developed to solve major problems with penccil shavings and eraser turds in a 0G environment. Rather than staying in teh sharpener, or falling politely to the floor, they drift through the air, until they A. are inhaled, B. get stuck in someone's sye, or C. drift into electrical parts and cause a short. That's why Russia and NASA BOTH bought space pens once they were available. The average item often doesn't work in space. Except only one fork is properly equipped to keep the spagetthi from floating off it between your plate and mouth. For that matter, only one plate is properly equipped to keep spagetthi on it. ... Actually, I think spaghetti in and of itself is not available in space. And underthinking it results in a lot of problems because you neglect to consider that things don't alway swork the same once you remove gravity. Has your GameBoy undergone a decade of testing to ensure long-term reliability in extreme environments including, but not limited to, rapid temperature shifts and irradiation? Is your home theater system quadruple-redundant so that if there's a catastrophic failure it continues to function normally? Is EITHER device something you would trust with your life? If you cannot answer yes to all three of the above, than the shuttle computer is superior to whatever it's being compared to for the task at hand. Furthermore, the shuttle computer has more than enough power to do EVERYTHING IT NEEDS TO DO. You do not upgrade a computer merely because you can. You upgrade because you NEED MORE POWER THAN YOU HAVE. Could they be running quad dual-core Opterons with the latest and greatest 64-bit OS in the shuttle? Sure. Would they use even a fraction of the available power? Not a chance. Are the odds good that the system could fail during a mission, leaving the crew up the proverbial creek? You bet your ass they are.

The hell? We haven't been on the gold standard for decades, at least. Fact: In the modern world, MONEY HAS NO ACTUAL VALUE. IT REPRESENTS NOTHING. That's why there's exchange rates. Because the only "value" it has is the ability to buy products in the nation that issued it. And that only works because the nation that issued a given currency passed laws making said currency "legal tender for all debts public and private." Which it had to do because no one wanted to take the non-gold-standard money. The modern dollar/peso/yen/whatever is little more than monopoly money, the only REAL diffrences being the quality of the paper used and who owns the presses.

I grant the sizing is about right on the first one, but there's no actual letters there.

Purely friction. Well... you're still within the atmosphere well after the balloon ceases to be an effective lift device. Remember, the balloon only lifts because helium is less dense than air, not because it is a magical negative-gravity source. As you get higher, the air gets thinner. Eventually it's the same desnity as the helium balloon. And then your balloon starts expanding, and eventually pops. And there's not a whole lot of lift there to start with. Balloons only work with relatively light objects. Of couse, going up isn't the fun part. It's coming down that matters, and no balloon in the world is gonna help that.

Dumbest. Comment. Ever.

Fortunately we arne't Ringworld. We have gravity holding air down. A hole in a space elevator will just leave it with air pressure equal to its surroundings down the entire length. 1 atmosphere at sea level, 0 atm at orbit. ... You know, unless you forget to turn the air pumps off.

Making a new Shuttle will not fix the problem of ice laden foam from damaging the tiles on the shuttle. But it fixes the problem of "there's only 3 orbiters, and they're old." (though Endeavour's not THAT old) Nice thought. The hole that killed Columbia was punched through a carbon shield, though, and there was likely enough power left to rip through something under it.

Could build a new one, as we did after Challenger. Hell, the Endeavour's the best one we have, precisely BECAUSE it's newer. Could also refit Enterprise and make it spaceworthy, though I gather that'd be as expensive as building a new one. Not that I really think either is a good option.

Depends who you ask. Majority opinion seems to be that the larger models are more reliable, though. (I wouldn't be surprised, given there's precious little room in the slimline for heatsinks or fans).

You are quite mistaken. The shuttle was NOT designed solely to build ANY space station. Certainly not the ISS, which was inconceivable at the time of its design. Actually, the shuttle is one part of the two part budget-tight NASA vision for space after Apollo (that is, after the whole permantent station on the Moon/mission to Mars ideas had been shed by the congress and the Vietnam War), which was having a huge space station up there and a Shuttle to service it. However, as it turned out, the budget was further restricted, and evetually there was only enough money to get one of those (and then some -__-), so NASA, instead of stepping back and doing a low cost-Russia style (highly successful, if not in scientific achivements or what not, at least in a LOT of experience) space station/expendable logistics approach, decided to push on with the low cost shuttle model, because without it there wouldn't be a not-so-costly way of putting their space station up there. Now, the jack of all trades - that's further cost problem. Even the Shuttle program was over the new budget, so NASA had to go to the Air Force and tell them they could launch their stuff on the shuttle and forget all about those costly expendable boosters. Problem was, the design required some extensive modifications (ei, more power for heavier payloads, enough thrust to launch polar orbits, enough cross range to be able to launch and land in Vandenberg doing just one orbit) That, of course, meant the shuttle was getting heavier, and suddenly it's recoverable booster was getting bigger (and more expensive to develop) than the Saturn V. NASA missed this second decision point and it's alternative (launching a Skylab like station on a Saturn V, service it using Gemini derivatives - like the Big Gemini - on Titan IIIs), and hoped than with a good enough launch rate, the development would pay off. But neither NASA or the Air Force could provide such a rate, so it was decided that practically EVERY US launch would be done with the shuttle. Of course, that's a flight a week launch rate -______-U Recipe for cr@p, I say. Further cut costs and weight limits decided that a big reusable booster would be impossible to develop and whatnot, so NASA went for smaller booster rockets (although they were supposed to be liquid, eventually they become solid as those are cheaper to design and fly - to be eventually replaced by liquid. Eventually) and external fuel to save weight on the orbiter. Bingo. The original plan was a thing of beauty. What ultimately arose was far less so. Of course, the Challenger launch was in an environment that was out of spec for a safe launch, if I recall. *quick search* Totally unrelated, but... Never knew the Challenger was a conversion job. Was apparently originally a test vehicle like Enterprise, and not space-worthy. Of course, NASA DID kludge a bailout system onto the shuttle after the Challenger accident, but it's useful in VERY limited situations(relatively low speed, orbiter seperated from fuel tank and solid rocket boosters, and in a controlled glide) and should be considered non-existant for most purposes. http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/techno...sts_egress.html Of course, there's not a bailout system in the world that would've saved the Columbia's crew, but the crew of the Challenger might could've been spared if there was any provision for a proper ejection system. I love the shuttle too, really. It just seems to be a fundamentally flawed design. My mistake. I was thinking SpaceLab. I know more than one of those was planned. As was a mission to bump the one we DID get up into a higher orbit.

You are quite mistaken. The shuttle was NOT designed solely to build ANY space station. Certainly not the ISS, which was inconceivable at the time of its design. It really never should've been flown. It was a jack-of-all-trades compromise that was created solely to appease a president that hated the space program and wouldn't approve anything more ambitious, and has never met most of its design goals. http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/caib/html/start.html I strongly recommend reading the CAIB report, as it has a good deal of historical background information imbedded in it.

HAHA! I loved that movie.

Maybe they're doing it that way on purpose? Trying to set a standard? It would be a pretty low tactic, could it be possible? 315622[/snapback] Quite likely, actually. A lot of people in the position to make the laws haven't quite gotten over the "games are for kids" attitude. Of course, the fact that the ratrings board is complaining about it indicates that at least some of them rcognize the fact.

I'm gonna skip most of the post as I was being a dumbass last night. As I understand it, Atari programmers generate the vsyncs and keep track of 37 scanlines either by sending 37 wsyncs or using the Atari's internal timer. The latter lets you do some logic before the blanking period ends. The software doesn't need to be "informed" of anything, as it's driving the TV and rasterization itself. How to do all this is all pretty well documented, and I'd found that it was described pretty decently in a couple pages of text. Yes. I gather the timer was the preferred mechanism, for what it's worth. It's just an added piece of complexity. Though like many things on the VCS, it can be used to make effects that the hardware "can't" do. Interesting. Guess Australia has a different philosophy from the ESRB. Too bad they hate guns. Heh. It's possible they WILL revoke the game's rating. Just gotta wait for the beaurocracy to get moving and see what happens. One thing I DID notice rummaging through that site is the australian ratings board has on several occasions complained that the 18+ rating of their other media ratings devisions isn't available to their software division, essentially forcing them to outlaw any software that is deemed inappropriate for persons over 15. Seems tehir legislature needs to update the law.

I remember seeing this in the Mars base episode ("Bye Bye Mars?"). I think it's more likely a case of lazy animators. Probably. But wheels wouldn't be a bad idea for smooth terrain. It's both. It IS an alternate version of the events of Space War 1, but it's not the "real" version of them.

i couldn't agree more. sure it takes incredible technology to build a robot that looks that much like a human being, but why would you want to? 5 year-old girl, school teacher, what's next? nurse? kogal? 315423[/snapback] The end target is probably cheap receptionists. Much like automated telephone menus.

Yes. Though the complexity is a bit more than it looks, since they're working with a scanline-based renderer. But the textbox is a seperate background layer overlaid on top of the primary instead of being drawn on the same layer, so it's less than it could be(if they were, say, hacking the NES installment in the series). PS1 only. ... Well, maybe the N64 too. PS2 uses a custom chip that I don't recall being based on anything that was ever stated. XBox is a Pentium3 derivative. GameCube's a PowerPC derivative. Dreamcast was an SH-4, if I recall. The Ataris and the NES are 6502-based, SNES is 65816(16-bit version of the 6502), the Genesis is 68000-based. my (albiet limited) familiarity with compiler technology, and some direct experience hacking data files and looking at hacks that have been done by others, I would assess that making significant and extensive changes to a binary executable such as adding a whole minigame and splicing it into existing code compiled from a natural language is orders of magnitudes more difficult than hacking data files. But my point is(or was) that translators DON'T just hack data files. If this assessment isn't one you give much credit to, despite the fact that it's related to what I sorta do for a living, then either you've already come to your own conclusion on how difficult inserting gameplay elements from scratch into a game like GTA is (not old console games that are much more simple and written in assembly to start with and thus not prone to what compiler optimizations can do to code), or I guess there's something I just don't know. And the latter is a very possible thing. I didn't say it wasn't hard. Just not impossible. And for what it's worth, there's evidence that some of the later 16-bit era console games may HAVE been coded in a high-level language(it's known fact that the XBand modem's code was written in one), though the PS1 was the first console where it was a widespread practice. *shrugs* Seemed relevant. And as far as complexity goes, I'd argue the older hardware is MORE complex from a coding point of view. It takes a lot more fancy tricks to get a given effect on the older hardware than newer systems. You may see an SNES game shift video modes 3 times over the course of a single frame(actual game in mind: HyperZone) but on a PC it can all be done in the same graphics mode. Hell, the 2600 didn't even have provisions for telling the software when a VBlank period began. They had to run a timer from the instant the system was turned on to keep the game in sync with the screen AND draw each scanline as it was generated by the TV(no framebuffer). You're saying it's easier to work within the confines of 128 bytes of RAM, on a system that can only draw a single scanline at a time, has no provision for informing software when a vblank period starts, has been described by one programmer as requiring you to discard every good programming practice known to man, with software that uses more undocumented hacks than actual system features, in a situation where you have to count exactly how many instructions you're adding because there's only a dozen or 2 free instructions per frame(the reason no one hacked trackball support into 2600 Centipede was that there literally weren't enough spare clock cycles to read one) is easier than code that's messy, but has no other restrictions? They're DIFFRENT challenges, sure. But not neessarily lesser ones. Yes, adding speech to Berzerk is impressive. But the impressive part is the programming efficiency and prowess with crummy hardware, not in the actual part of hacking we're discussing the difficulty of-- how to decipher the meaning of the code you're looking at, figuring out where to insert new functionality, and doing it properly so it doesn't break anything. How is that part not relevant to this? If it were a programmed from scratch version of Berzerk, I'd see why the hardware restrictions were the relevant part. I'd debate the "simple" part. Ah-ha. That would be another way of looking at it. An old console's hardware might be poorly understood, but they're still relatively simple and limited in complexity, and understanding them is more of an excercise of finding documentation, experimentation, and observation. In fact, the raw code sometimes is an aid to figuring how such hardware works. More of an aid than usually non-existant documentation, anyways. But I suppose if you simply feel that the difficulty of what your friends do in classic console hacking, as impressive as it all is, is truly representative of the difficulty and possibility level of other forms of hacking-- that because it is close to the epitome of what would constitute difficult hacking, all other types of hacking, no matter how involved and complex and how different in nature, are thus possible and even probable, then there's not much I can offer that would persuade you otherwise. It was originally cited merely as an example of adding new code to existing code. From there I was just saying that it's harder than you make it out to be. *shrug* I guess I'm still waiting for someone to hack me new gameplay and content into an executable of a title that was made in the last 10 years. Didn't find an example, but I DID find this: http://www.refused-classification.com/Games_DN3D.htm Apparently Duke Nukem 3D had a similar issue in Austrailia as GTA is having now. Only Australia's (government-operated) ratings board decided the old rating was stil good. Oooohhhh... they have a whole page of GTA. As of yet, no action has been taken against San Andreas, but they are considering revoking it's rating.

They follow the SDFMacross timeline. The DYRL timeline was abandonded and made into a "movie within a movie" in Macross7. Like the people in Macross7 had DYRL as a movie within their universe. This was dreamed up when M7 came out, 9 years after DYRL came out in theaters. My personal opinion is (and I am always right), Kawamori saw how weak M7 was going to turn out, maybe because he hired transvestite writers or something, but it was a way to tie something that was already considered great to something that needed some serious help. Or from a more realistic point of view... Kawamori realized he had two fundamentaly diffrent and wholely incompatible versions of Space War 1, and that if he wanted a coherent continuity he had to sit down and pick one as the "real" version of events. He went with the longer and more detailed version, as it provided a sturdier foundation for future works. But rather than abandoning DYRL totally, he decided to cast it as a movie created within the Macross continuity. Also note that by coninuity, DYRL was not filmed on the Macross 7. It was released several years before the Mac7 was even launched. 315250[/snapback] Yeah thats right, because it was made in 84, by real people... 9 years BEFORE they decided to glue it to the M7 sissy parade. 315258[/snapback] Yes, it was. And then Kawamori tried to retire the license, but Big West wouldn't let it die. So he came back to do more entries in the series. But he needed a firm foundation for the new entries. That foundation couldn't be provided by two competing versions of events. Macross Seven may have been the show that announced DYRL was a movie within the Macross universe, but the change was important for Plus and Zero, along with the other non-animation productions.

Is that what the problem is? Boo. Seconded. BOO INVISION! Regularity is debatable. There's some games that people've been poking at for a few years. Like this one. Most extensive (visible) change I can think of in a translation hack so far consisted of a completely new text display routine, because the original game used vertical text. Actually, it is. ROM hackers don't just yank the japanese and replace it with english. ... Well, they used to, but that was when the "scene" was in its infancy. Now they expand the ROM to make room for a decent translation, hack in new compression schemes, variable width font routines, etc. You don't. Actually, it's because a large part of the "scene" is in there to take good (or not-so-good, in some cases) games that never got an english release and make them english, not make new games. There's really very little homebrew activity on the classic japanese consoles. It's all on 1st-era systems and the modern platforms. But on the 1st-era side, people have hacked trackball support, speech synthesis routines, and music into 2600 games. That should count for something, particularly given the insane constraints of the 2600. Haha. No. I've seen them rip entire routines out and replace them with entirely new routines. I've seen them run through and change the location of entire blocks of data. I've yet to see a disk check skip, particularly as there's really no way to be booting a console game WITHOUT a disk. *shrugs* I still say sifting through raw assembly on a system with poorly-understood hardware is harder than sifting through raw assembly on a well-understood system.