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[Gentlefish]

So... the Art of the Deal is throwing a tantrum for a month then giving up?

Per the actual book, yes; the idea is that you only make deals you can afford to lose, then threaten to let them fall through until you get everything you want and more concessions on top of that for good measure, because your opposite party wants a bad deal more than they want no deal at all.

It's exactly the kind of approach you might expect someone who's come to rely on other people to bail them out to take, and in that context it works -- but one of its obvious fail conditions is when you try it on a deal you need. Trump, by all accounts, didn't understand that the shutdown was such a deal.

wow that sounds so much like mercantilism where trading is zero sum and there's a loser and a winner.

[MrRoboto75]

So... the Art of the Deal is throwing a tantrum for a month then giving up?

Per the actual book, yes; the idea is that you only make deals you can afford to lose, then threaten to let them fall through until you get everything you want and more concessions on top of that for good measure, because your opposite party wants a bad deal more than they want no deal at all.

It's exactly the kind of approach you might expect someone who's come to rely on other people to bail them out to take, and in that context it works -- but one of its obvious fail conditions is when you try it on a deal you need. Trump, by all accounts, didn't understand that the shutdown was such a deal.

wow that sounds so much like mercantilism where trading is zero sum and there's a loser and a winner.

Capitalism

Capitalism never changes...

[Reelya]

Mars, you can land, go outside, build a nice sheltered place underground with a contained atmosphere, and maybe even make use of the sunlight. On Venus, if you use glass it'll be eaten away by acid, you can never go outside, and you can afford exactly zero failures in your habitable space, because it there's a failure you fall out of the sky and burn, or you burn and then fall out of the sky, or you sink a little bit before being crushed and burned, or....you get the point.

Uh, that's not true. The density of the Venusian atmosphere at the level you're floating is the same as the density of air in the floating city. You're not going to plummet since you're not lighter than the air, to start with. Small leaks are going to diffuse, not explosively decompress. The pressure going in is the same as the pressure going out, so the overall density of the airship won't change because there's a hole. For the same reason, you're not going to have pressurized sulfuric acid squirting into the habitat if there's a leak, and you happen to be passing through a sulfur cloud, just gradual diffusion.

[Max™]

Mars, you can land, go outside, build a nice sheltered place underground with a contained atmosphere, and maybe even make use of the sunlight. On Venus, if you use glass it'll be eaten away by acid, you can never go outside, and you can afford exactly zero failures in your habitable space, because it there's a failure you fall out of the sky and burn, or you burn and then fall out of the sky, or you sink a little bit before being crushed and burned, or....you get the point.

What we call air is a lifting gas on Venus, you really gotta fuck up over and over and over again for things to get so bad that you fall out of the sky.

I give a Mars colony three generations before people grow up wondering why they have to listen to these old farts insisting on cleaning AND replacing air filters and seals.

[Trekkin]

Things in larger orbits ("higher" orbits, perhaps) have more energy. In order to switch to a lower orbit, you must lose energy. In order to get to a higher orbit, you must gain energy. It turns out that losing enough energy to reach Venus is not substantially less difficult than gaining enough energy to reach Mars, at least not using ideal Hohmann transfer orbits.

Certainly higher in terms of semi-major axis, and you mean velocity, not energy -- at least, not without being able to just magically change altitude. Nobody's going to Venus by making their ship really cold.

You're also failing to take aerocapture into account; LEO-LCO looks like it takes more energy than LEO-LAO, but more of that is going from capture to low orbit in the Cytherean case.

[Madman198237]

No, I most certainly mean energy, as in the energy contained in the orbit itself. Kinetic energy, if I recall the derivations correctly. The smaller the semimajor axis of the orbit, the lower the energy. In fact it's all negative energy because an orbit is a bound state, but that doesn't really matter for us. In order to move to a smaller orbit, you generally have to reduce the energy of your orbit.

And yes, I mentioned basic Hohmann transfers when I said that. I'm not going to dive into aerocaptures unless there's science to collect in KSP and the actual required delta-V's because the fact remains that Venus is not a nice place, and that being able to actually land is a really nice benefit.

[Trekkin]

No, because if you meant kinetic energy, we could change orbit by changing mass and we wouldn't need rocket engines. Why do you think we talk about delta-v instead of delta-e?

[nenjin]

Also: did Trump hire a mouse to be press secretary?

Who knows?!?!

Clearly, someone told Cadet Bonespurs that never before in the history of the world had a president instated a mouse as press secretary.

Guess White House pest control is also on furlough.

[Madman198237]

No, because if you meant kinetic energy, we could change orbit by changing mass and we wouldn't need rocket engines. Why do you think we talk about delta-v instead of delta-e?

You CAN change orbit by changing mass. That's called rocket thrust.

In seriousness, if you could change your mass enough you COULD change your orbit like that, it's just that the mass of your spacecraft is so pathetically tiny compared to the mass of the object you're orbiting, it doesn't matter [except in the rocket-engine case]. If you changed, say, the mass of the Earth, it's orbit would dramatically change. If you doubled the mass of the HST and quadrupled the mass of the ISS and added them together...the orbit would change. A very, very small amount since even that much is a miniscule portion of the Earth's 6x10^24 kilograms of mass.

And of course since kinetic energy varies with velocity and velocity varies [in well-defined ways] with the orbital parameters, a combination thereof can give you a measure of the energy of an orbit. Changing this energy (by adding or removing velocity or mass) will indeed change the orbit you're on. However, you'd need a LOT of mass to make a measurable change. You need a lot of velocity too, but it's a much smaller "lot" than the immense changes in mass you'd need. Also, it's a lot easier and more efficient to bring some mass, then throw it away at high speed, as opposed to bringing lots of mass, and just...dropping it.

[Trekkin]

If you doubled the mass of the HST and quadrupled the mass of the ISS and added them together...the orbit would change. A very, very small amount since even that much is a miniscule portion of the Earth's 6x10^24 kilograms of mass.

Okay. Go to the science thread (since we keep derailing this one) and prove that mathematically.

[smjjames]

Yeah, it's gone way past tangentially related to politics.

[MrRoboto75]

Yeah, it's gone way past tangentially related to politics.

Congress is a perfect metaphor for inertia.

An object at rest tends to stay at rest.

[delphonso]

All you science nerds should know that building on the moon and it being the waystation for further travel is the only way to go. Colonizing anything else beforehand is foolhardy.

[Starver]

All you science nerds should know that building on the moon and it being the waystation for further travel is the only way to go. Colonizing anything else beforehand is foolhardy.

You can't realistically build on the Moon before getting rid of all the whales there.

[MrRoboto75]

All you science nerds should know that building on the moon and it being the waystation for further travel is the only way to go. Colonizing anything else beforehand is foolhardy.

You can't realistically build on the Moon before getting rid of all the whales there.

Ah, the next logical step to Brexit. Taking Wales and putting in on the moon.