Added 2 new A* pages:It's kind of been rocket launch week here in the A* news ramblings, and while I've been maintaining that one you've seen one rocket launch, you've kind of seen them all, the question is, have you seen them up-close, in slow motion, and from multiple angles? That's what these NASA imaging technicians have put together for us, of Space Shuttle launches; their commentary about the various things going on during each split-second of the launch sequence is pretty interesting too (I didn't know the Shuttle's exhaust was shooting into a pool of water, for instance), although they also spend a lot of time nerding out over their cameras. ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2VygftZSCs
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And more pertinent to this last page of the comic, and coincidentally enough a site a non-reader linked me to today: with Impact Earth you can enter various parameters like density, diameter, and speed to simulate the effects of an asteroid hitting Earth. With the help of a sphere calculator (since Impact Earth only lets you enter speeds up to a paltry 72 km/s, so I had to figure out how much additional weight I had to compensate with) I tried having it give me its projections for what this impact on Paralt in our A* story here would do.
The way it handles input and results could be a lot better—certain things tend not to agree, and really they should have some kind of visual feedback, too—but it does give some results that seem a little more solid than others, like impact crater size (73 km across, 1 km deep—hm that seems a bit shallow, ah well), how much ejecta would land on an observer at distance x (3.5 cm on someone 1000 miles away!), what magnitude earthquake it would feel like at distance x (9.3 at 1000 km!), what the airblast would be like (150 mph at 1000 miles...but that doesn't apply on Paralt, since it has no atmosphere to speak of), how often Earth has experienced an impact of this magnitude (once every 28 million years?) and so forth.
Hm actually their calculations for Earth's atmosphere may have cushioned those figures a bit, too, but you can't disable it, and past a certain point it stops telling you what the atmospheric adjustment is like, so ah well. Still kind of fun to mess with, in a horrible sort of way.
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