You are assuming that every battery has the same decay rate, and capacity, which is wrong. There is a lot of mathematics involved in estimating a battery charge, and it has its own name fancy name: State of Charge Estimation (SoC) and Remaining Useful Life estimation (RUL). For Li-Ion batteries, estimating the SoC involves having a model of the battery (which actually involves a lot of math), and a method for extrapolating the SoC based on a number of things: battery health, charge use profiles, etc. This is usually done by mathematical estimation and prognosis methods: Kalman Filtering (EKF, UKF) and Particle Filtering (AKA Monte Carlo) are two great approaches. You can't assume everything is constant and linear all the time, and you cannot assume that every battery is equal (not even same model/make batteries are equal in terms of charge and discharge).

No, the point is that the Saturn V was expected to get a CSM and a LEM sitting on top of an S-IVB into LEO. The S-IVB was expected to get the CSM and LEM to the moon. You can replace the S-IVB and everything above it with whatever the fuck you want and the lower stages don't give a shit because it's just mass to them. The reason the Saturn V had such high specifications is because everything you need to get three astronauts on a lunar trajectory is *really fucking heavy*. If you replaced the astronauts, fuel, and other equipment required to go all the way to the moon with something else of equal mass, the Saturn V could put that into LEO just as easily as it sent astronauts to the moon.

The nature of rocketry is such that a very light thing in a very high orbit tends to start out as a very heavy thing in a lower orbit. From the perspective of the lower stages of your rocket, a heavy thing in a low orbit is just a heavy thing that needs to be put into low orbit, regardless of whether it eventually ends up burning a bunch of fuel to put itself in a higher orbit, making itself lighter in the process, or if it just sits in that low orbit forever.

LEO is on the way to the moon. The Saturn V delivered to LEO a payload consisting of the Command and Service Module, the Lunar Module, and a booster with enough fuel to put all of the above on a lunar trajectory. You could replace all of this with any arbitrary payload of equal weight and the Saturn V would be able to put it into LEO.

Saturn V wasn't used to boost large payloads to LEO

On a lunar mission, the Saturn V would put the Command and Service Module, the Lunar Module, and a booster with enough fuel to put them both on a lunar trajectory, into LEO. That's a pretty damn large payload, the largest payload to LEO of any single vehicle ever produced. The fact that the payload eventually boosted itself the rest of the way to the moon isn't relevant to the vehicle's ability to put mass into LEO.

It is the nature of rocketry that any small mass in a high orbit will tend to get there by going through a period in which it is a large mass in a lower orbit. In a staged rocket, it is useful to think of each stage as its own vehicle, with all of the stages above it as its payload which it is capable of delivering to a certain point.

So, since when do you use B in octal?

You mean this thing? It feels like shit to type on, like a laptop keyboard.

It's even worse than that... People don't know what a good keyboard is. People *seek out* Apple's craptacular desktop keyboard (which is basically just a laptop keyboard, mushy feel, flat keytops and all).

I'd be willing to bet that SpaceX will put anything into orbit that you ask them to, as long as you've got the paperwork in order. Satellites? Check. ISS cargo and crew? Check. Space tourists? Why not?

Think of it this way: It's hard to push a car, even though there is very little friction in its wheels. Zero gravity doesn't mean zero mass, it just means you don't have to counter gravity.

Is it too much to ask, though, that women feel it socially acceptable to ask men out? Gender equality goes both ways. I'm tired of finding out after it's too late that someone was actually into me, and I find it crass to ask out every woman I meet in the hopes of scoring a date.

Perhaps one day when we have more experience we will be willing to launch a vehicle directly into its target orbit - One hour from the launch pad to being in sight of the ISS should certainly be possible. However, in this circumstance, caution is the ruler of the day. This will be SpaceX's first ever attempt at an orbital rendezvous. There's nothing on board that is using consumables to survive, there's plenty of time to slow down and get things right while remotely piloting a never-before-flown spacecraft into an incredibly expensive space station with several people on board.

Modern DSP techniques can implement a brick wall filter with a phase response anywhere from linear phase (equal pre and post ringing) and minimum phase (100% post-ringing). You can even do maximum phase (100% pre-ringing) if you're crazy.

> even home recording is laughed at (technically) if you are not using 24/96

This is mostly home recordists one-upping each other. Actual professionals in the audio industry, especially people working on gigantic projects like movies where halving your DSP/CPU/HDD needs is a direct benefit of 48k over 96k, recognize that there are very very few actual audible benefits to 96k over 48k.

PCM audio was originally recorded on video tape, and you needed to be able to record it in both PAL and NTSC standards. So the fact that the number is highly composite is largely a consequence of having to be divisible by both 50 and 60. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44.1_kHz

Actually, modern delta-sigma A/D converters are capable of near-brickwall lowpass performance at nyquist.