I just finished playing through again! Not coincidentally, I found myself marveling at the hulking geometric constructs marching off into the distance in The Fall. Really tremendous visuals. Some of the best ruins depicted in any game.

Classic Star Wars with the XCOM engine. You hand-pick your team of Jedi, Rebel troopers, and astromech droids, infiltrate Imperial bases, and then accidentally look at your Steam page to see that you've broken 200 hours in the game.

Looks like a pretty sexy airplane.

I always made my Blacktron 2 guys good, and fight the evil Blacktron 1 guys.

I will happily spend my time playing new X-Wing games.

You know what sold me? Getting to say "mark!" like that.

You gain precision...but lose accuracy.

Man. I guess that was a decade ago. I made MAPS for those games in college.

It's not a stupid question! There are some papers out there that hypothesize some flow features on Mars were CO2-driven. (I think the proposed mechanism is that an underground, solid CO2 reservoir sublimates, and the gas bursts out and flows around a bit, carrying things with it.) You might very well ask whether we're…

Also, you know that before the balloons came parachutes, aeroshell heat shields, and all that stuff, too, right?

You couldn't take after another failure? NASA hasn't had a Mars mission failure since 1999. Mars Odyssey, MER Spirit, MER Opportnity, Mars Recon Orbiter, and Phoenix make a pretty awesome string of successes. If you ask me, there's nothing wrong with NASA sticking its neck out on a less conservative approach and…

Both your other replies are correct: MSL Curiosity is too massive for that method to work, and that's a rather inaccurate way to land.

You're welcome!

@EricWithNoC, and in general:

Too bad they are gravitationally unstable. If the star is the tiniest bit off-center relative to the sphere or ring, the two will collide. It'll take some massive engines to correct for that!

Sorry; there comes a point where I shouldn't say too much before said proposals come back!

This video was basically a quick demo for our proposal partners to show that the idea is surprisingly easy to implement; it wasn't intended to present detailed experimental results. That rigor will be coming as our group's work proceeds.

Nah. I'm a grad student: the university pays ME! ;)

We've got some proposals out!

(Oops - extra comment deleted! The new site confuses me and my browser!)