EtoileSportiveDeDerby

After all the offensive posts on his transfer thread it's great to see the bloke becoming a cult hero, well done big Kaz 

Excellent performance. Big and strong, but can play a bit and has a nice touch. Definitely a better option for CF than Waghorn, in my opinion.

Is it just me who has never been impressed by Max Lowe as a player? I was really surprised Sheffield United took him. I always found he was one of those players that always flattered to deceive. He has the physical attributes to be good and is nice on the ball but defensively he's always looked extremely suspect and isn't good enough to be a winger. 

There’s 7 episodes of series 2 up on Disney+ Currently, with at least 1 more to go next Friday. You sign up on a month by month basis, so if you sign up and then cancel it will stop after a month. If you haven’t used it before, you can get a months trial free.

Moved up from Sekonda bottom.

One more left in the current series. Next Friday, I think . 

With @Davidposting his thread earlier, thought I’d bump this. Some of you might be uncomfortable with revealing any issues you are experiencing. 
 
it was roughly this time of year when i started this thread. 
 
Two massive things that I have learned since;
1- being aware something isn’t right is admitting to yourself, you’re on the path to feeling better.
2- however bad you’re feeling, you’re definitely not the only one feeling that way. 
 
Ive been told by many posters that just reading this thread gave them hope and help. 
 
take care 

The horizontal approach is to maximize the surface area in contact with the atmosphere. When returning from space this will help increase the air resistance to slow the rocket down and spread the heating over the widest area.
From space, especially if on an interplanetary trajectory, you are travelling *really* fast yet have to bring that speed down to zero. And you will have as little fuel as possible (because of the weight penalty). So getting close to the ground just optimizes this part of the process.
SpaceX has successfully landed more than 60 of its Falcon9 rockets from space missions, and these only relight one engine when close to the landing site, so they know that final burn can be done pretty close to the ground. 
At first this looks like a render, but it's amazing real footage! 
 

A couple of questions
Whats the idea behind the horizontal approach ?
why so close to the ground, it barely has time to correct itself back to a vertical position ?
 so close to the ground ? Barely has any time to correct

First flight was amazing. It all lasted just a little under 7 minutes.
The first 4:45 is a vertical ascent, first on all 3 engines, then down to 2, and then a single 1. The engines cut off and the ship coasts upward a little longer and turns horizontal, preparing to "belly flop" back to Earth, falling with style, until it approaches the ground when it relights its engines and turns vertical again, ending with a controlled upright landing. Quite how any Humans onboard (and ultimately it's meant to hold 100 of us) cope with the changing orientation is yet to be seen.
Well worth watching the full video. Including the dramatic finale!
 

It's a brilliant observation. You can have no idea how pleased I am you made it. 
This is a topic I think about daily (I'm writing a novel about it, a bit of a homage to my namesake's "Contact") and is exercising many of the world's great minds. It's perhaps the biggest challenge to modern science, trying to combine the ideas of the cosmological principle (that the universe looks largely the same when viewed from anywhere, that the laws of physics apply equally everywhere and there's nothing privileged about our place in the Universe) with our observations that there isn't a shred of evidence for complex life anywhere else in the universe. How long can these ideas remain compatible? 
We tend to think of the Drake Equation as part of old-fashioned SETI when people expected aliens to be listening with radio telescopes for whispers of intelligence elsewhere. Nowadays a lot of things are framed through the lens of Robin Hanson's Great Filter. 
Every nook and cranny here on Earth is teeming with life. Everything out there in the vastness of the Universe can be explained by dead processes. It's a conundrum.

If I agreed to run 10k every time DCFC lose in 2021
I wouldn't be around in 2022!
 

Admins/mods, apologies if this is inappropriate or in the wrong place!
As part of a personal mission to make a difference both to myself and others next year, and hopefully to also provide a boost to our local healthcare services, I am committing myself to running 10k each time Derby County fail to win a game (i.e. draw or lose) during 2021. If current form is anything to go by, I'll be stick thin by March!
I have started a GoFundMe page to hopefully do a bit of good while also having a bit of fun following our beloved Rams next year. I struggled to settle on a particular charity to support but have gone with the Derby and Burton Hospital Charity in light of the fantastic work they have done in tough circumstances in 2020. If you would wish to donate and provide me some much-needed motivation I'd appreciate literally anything!
https://uk.gofundme.com/f/running-10k-if-Derby-county-dont-win-dbhc
My other thought was for the Derby City Mission who I know we had done some fundraising for on this forum earlier in the year, please also consider helping their cause if you would prefer;
https://www.derbycitymission.org.uk/
Long and the short of it is...
We're going to make it a good year in 2021. Quote me, screenshot me, @ me.

Yep.
Although my dislike for them is powered by the inherent rationality of supporting Derby. If I wasn’t a Derby fan, I wouldn’t be arsed.
My new dislike for Millwall, on the other hand, is due to obvious, specific reasons.

What a setup that was for Stretton: Strength, passion, skill, and awareness. It had everything.
Deserved an assist and nail the win that.

Why has Waghorn been playing instead of Richards?

I love that there seem plenty of space geeks on here. Something that's going to come increasingly into the public consciousness over the next few years will be the work from Elon Musk's SpaceX to transport many tens of thousands of Humans to Mars to build the first sustainable settlement on another world. It sounds like fantasy, but the amazing thing is they're doing this in public view in Boca Chica, on the coast of Texas, and we can all watch. There are lots of livestreams and over the last couple of years a barren field has started to be transformed into a shipyard. But not for ordinary ships, for spaceships. The goal is ultimately to have completed ones roll off the production line once a week. And each will be able to take a hundred people at a time.
The optimal time for going to Mars in terms of minimizing fuel (the launch window) comes round every 26 months and the plan is to have a fleet of Starships gather in Earth orbit that will then travel to Mars together, before returning to bring more settlers for the next launch window. Tickets will cost you about $250k but there'll be high baggage charges on top I should think. The secret to the low price comes from reusability and scale. SpaceX has pioneered rocket reusability and landed 65 or so "first stages" (the main rocket booster) after orbital insertion. No other company has done any - they're at least a decade ahead of the competition, but the competition should worry because their pace of innovation is extraordinary.
The new rocket being built in Texas will be the first fully resusable craft where all of it flies again and again with minimal refurbishment, just the same as an airplane. The top section where the passengers and cargo will go is called Starship and the lower section to help boost it into orbit is called Super Heavy. In a dramatic innovation, instead of being built from an advanced carbon fiber skin these are both made from stainless steel. Making them a fraction of the normal rocket price. The Super Heavy booster is needed to escape Earth's gravity well. Once there it will return to Earth and launch half a dozen tankers to refuel Starship in orbit so it can fly much more quickly than normal to Mars (normally a spaceprobe just has enough fuel to reach escape velocity and then coasts all the way to Mars). Refuelling in orbit hasn't been attempted in the past, but is a technology we need to master to become a spacefaring species.
Because Mars is smaller, with lower gravity (one-third of ours) the Starships can be what we call "single stage to orbit" when they take off from the red planet for the return journey. We'll build factories on Mars to manufacture fuel through a process called in situ resource utilization (ISRU), which is another technology we need to master to become spacefaring. And because they can carry so many passengers at a time, the price of the trip becomes a lot cheaper as it's divided between many more people.
The Super Heavy booster will be quite similar to the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, just a lot bigger. So in principle SpaceX already knows how to design, build, fly and land that. They have started on the harder problem first, by developing Starship, the first ever fully resuable second stage. This week there's been a lot of work on the eighth prototype (called SN8 standing for serial number 8 ) which will probably be the first to attempt a high-altitude (15km up) test flight as the key trial of the novel landing system (the "belly flop"). Before now three different partial Starships have flown 150m on one engine only. It's been amazing to watch. Here's the Starship SN5 "hop test":
While SN8 is the focus at the moment, also partly built are SN9 through to SN14, each better than the last, and also the very first Super Heavy booster (SH1) is being constructed. There's a good chance that the first Starships (without people) will go into orbit and return next year. There'll be hundreds of test flights before they start taking crew, but I'd expect the first uncrewed Starships to leave for Mars carrying cargo and experiments either late 2022 or early 2025.
The reason SpaceX was founded was to safeguard Humanity's future by building a self-sustaining community on Mars, the aim to reach a population of a million by the end of this century. This is why the company is privately held and you can't buy shares, because shareholders might look at the amazing technology and say Mars colonization is a waste of money when we can do a lot of profitable stuff closer to home. However, NASA wants to return to the Moon by late 2024 (though after the US election this date will slip) and are contributing funds to create an adapted Starship to land on the Moon (the normal engines are too powerful for this because the rocket is so big, so SpaceX are going to add smaller thrusters higher up to do the job). However, Elon Musk has said it's easier to just go and land on the Moon than jump through all NASA's certification to say they'll allow someone to launch astronauts safely to the Moon.
I hope we'll be able to keep this thread going over the next decade while we watch developments until the first Humans get to land on Mars, and it can be a wonderful record of the progress that took us to that point.

It may not be recent as i have just noticed it but do we have a new moderator in town ? 
Equal pay ? ?

It may not be recent as i have just noticed it but do we have a new moderator in town ? 
Equal pay ? ?

We have 2 new moderators 
@angieram and @ThePrisoner

Happy Friday one and all!
I should probably apologise in advance as I feel a little bit spammy, but I'm pretty excited to say that Pride (or Pride: The Inside Story of Derby County in the 21st Century to give it the full, far too long name) will be available from the club shop and online from this weekend!
Link - https://www.dcfcmegastore.co.uk/item/2865/Books/Pride-Na.html
For those who don't know, Pride is a project I've been working on for around three years in total, and it's seen me work with just over 60 former players, managers, chairmen, coaches and #ITK fans to tell the tale of the club from the moment we moved into Pride Park until the beginning of this year. It's not really a game by game account, it's more of a focus on each season, the on-field and off-field dramas (even the crash), all told by those who lived it from the inside. So to put the 60 people into context, it varies from the likes of Stefano Eranio, Steve McClaren and Warren Barton through to Gary Rowett, Harry Wilson, Giles Barnes, Inigo Idiakez and Jake Buxton.
The club have been extremely supportive and it's been a huge surprise to have them come on board, considering the content paints a factual tale, but they've been a huge help and it's fantastic to have them on board.
For anyone who has pre-ordered already - and a massive thank you for your interest in what began as just a daft little project to pass the time - what I'm going to recommend to people is that they cancel their pre-orders with Amazon and the likes, because hopefully money won't have been taken. Then the book will be available for around a week or two at the club and the megastore, before hitting the wider world. Unfortunately this one was out of my hands so I'm expecting a few pelters ?
I'll try not to spam too much but if anyone has any questions or comments on the book, what it's about or why certain people didn't make the cut, just reply or drop me a message. And most of all, for anyone who is keen and interested in understanding almost every major development and in-story of the club over 20+ years, I really hope you enjoy it. I'm on Twitter at @PrideDCFC where I'll be rambling to myself and sharing a few articles I've done over the past few months.
You might see/hear me a bit over the media over the next few weeks, so I'm always here to throw abuse at! I had a chat with the @Steve Bloomer's Washing team as well for their latest episode: https://soundcloud.com/user-147200653/sbw-94-Derby-county-2000-2020
 
Cheers,
Ryan

His microwave has broke. He is on Tesco meal deals till its fixed.
 

Sea bass with chorizo, red onion, black olive and garlic on samphire ?