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Order of Bogatyrs Hello fellow gamers: warriors, pilots, builders and strategists.If you are looking for a gaming clan which would suit your interests and you are a strategy, sandbox, space or simulation genre gamer, this is right up your alley. (just hover over spoilers and you will see the text) Games The Order of Bogatyrs is now recruiting new players for pc.We are currently one of the largest and most established clans on starmade, a space sandbox game, whilst also provide facilities for clan gaming in the following games: Star Wars BattlefrontTotal War Rome: IITotal War: Shogun 2 (and Total War Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai)Napoleon: Total WarEmpire: Total WarMedieval II: Total War (and Medieval II: Total War: Kingdoms)Rome: Total WarWe also plan on expanding clan facilities to Space Engineers and a few other games. We are a casual community that tries to have fun, and in doing so get better at the games we play. Here at OOB you are guaranteed to get advise and help if you need it on some of our official clan games, as well as get to be part of a social community. Activity There are no set activity requirements, as we understand that real life takes priority, however all the facilities necessary for roleplay are there for those that are interested. Requirements to Join To join the clan you have to promise to respect people's privacy and not to be very rude, unpleasant, markedly racist or try to communicate in a purposefully hurtful way (unless roleplaying, and then only in roleplay channels). You must have access to the internet and have an email. An email is required to fill an application form. You will not receive emails unless you opt in for subscription to our website's official newsfeeds. You are recommended to use discord, a free voice and text chat application. The Order of Bogatyrs is at present not a large clan, however we are growing and plan to expand our community as we go. Find us on Twitter Find us on Facebook Check out our Main Website

DARPA wants to build a robotic waystation in Earth’s orbit http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Space-640x360.jpg Everyone can see that when it comes to space, real progress is going to require some innovative new ideas. Maybe that will come in the form of a 100,000 kilometer ribbon of experimental nanotubes stretching all the way to geosynchronous orbit, or perhaps just an enormous, spinning spiral ramp. But any solution must give us a better ability to get to space and do work once we get there. Now, rumblings from DARPA and NASA show that they may be fantasizing about a new, semi-permanent installation in space — and they’re already working on the technology that could make it a reality. The idea is basically to create a construction, repairs, refueling, and mission restart hub, in space. Currently, all these functions require a return to base — the ISS receives shipments of supplies, it doesn’t generally dole them out. With such a station, NASA could imagine a new satellite design, pick a currently defunct old orbiter, and send up only those parts necessary to transform the old into the new. The solar panels, thrusters, and other time-tested hardware can stay intact, while computers and scientific instruments are swapped out by a series of robotic arms and manipulators. space station 2These arms are reportedly already in the works, and are souped up versions of the space shuttle’s original Canadarm. These would be capable of doing all the complex manipulation needed by an orbiting robot space mechanic. DARPA is already doing work on a mission called Project Phoenix, which looks to reuse the most valuable parts of old, dead satellites — it has also been working on grasper technology that could shear apart and potentially reassemble old space tech. In fact, this idea for a space-based repair station seems almost like a successor project to Phoenix, making its piecemeal efforts into an automated repair station. space-station-2.jpg http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/space-station-2.jpg Speaking at DARPA’s Wait What? conference (yes, that’s what it’s called) in St. Louis, former NASA astronaut Pam Melroy, now deputy director of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, said that some sort of orbital staging and upgrade station could change the way NASA deals with space. The ISS orbits at a messy 400 kilometers, well within “low” Earth orbit, meaning that a geosynchronous station would open up all sorts of new possibilities. She said that it could do for the Earth what the great port cities of yore did for Europe — leading to perhaps the first ever time I’ve hoped that Mars doesn’t have any indigenous inhabitants. The idea, as proposed, is to build this station in geosynchronous orbit, or around 36,000 kilometers above the surface. At this height, it could enter an orbit that would keep it directly above a specific spot on the Earth’s surface, but it’s also too high to enjoy any real protection from the Earth’s atmosphere or magnetic field — this hypothetical station would need to either be shielded in some all-new way or, more likely, be robotically controlled for the vast, vast majority of the time. Even with some sort of super-next-gen launch technology like a space elevator, it’s a certainty that on a long enough timeline, we’ll have to eventually stop building spaceships anywhere but in space. We’ll never be able to mine resources in a vacuum, but other than that there’s nothing about the ship building or maintaining process that has to be down on the surface; not that there was ever any doubt, but we now know that NASA and the US military are very aware of this fact. Source http://www.extremetech.com/

http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/tethys-arcs-head-640x353.jpg A new image released by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows an incredible new surface feature discovered on Saturn’s icy moon of Tethys: enormous, red arcs that span most of the moon’s northern hemisphere. They’re strikingly obvious, even from space, and scientists involved with the Cassini probe which took the pictures have no clear idea of what they are, or what causes them. There are ideas, of course, but for now the red streaks of Tethys are one of our solar system’s most galling mysteries. Cassini first took detailed pictures of the arcs in April, surveying the moon now that its northern half has moved into its summer phase and is thus bright enough for real investigation. It took a variety of pictures at different wavelengths, then combined them in the false-color image embedded below. The arcs really are red, and they really do stand out from the color of the surface around them, but the harsh red-grey distinction has been intensified to make the arcs easier to see. NASA will use Cassini to take more detailed readings of the Tethys surface in November, which should grant more insight into the nature of these enormous features. Until then, scientists can only speculate — and speculate they have!http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/tethys-arcs-2-640x456.jpgRed like this is somewhat unusual in the Saturn system. It’s indicative of a number of possible chemicals — none of them known to be abundant in the area. It’s possible that they are the result of contamination of ice, but the question remains: contaminated with what, exactly? And is that contamination streaked across the surface like this? Geographically young surfaces, like Jupiter’s Europa sometimes display this sort of red coloration, but the streaked pattern is still mysterious. One possible explanation is outgassing, in which a moon (or asteroid, or comet) squirts enormous volumes of gas out of a heated, pressurized interior. Tethys is going into its summer, as mentioned, and it could be that these arcs will be gone in short order — a form of surface contamination that marks the passing of Tethynian (?) seasons. It’s been theorized that these streaks were noticed when illumination of the surface made them visible, but perhaps they weren’t visible before because they simply didn’t exist without that extra solar heat to create them. http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/tethys-3.jpgTethys, zoomed out, and without the color correction. Credit: NASA/JPL There are other ideas, however. The resolution of these pictures still leaves a lot to the imagination, as every pixel in the above image stands in for an area about 2,300 feet (700 meters) across. It’s possible that the red material is coming from below the surface, via fractures that are too small to be detected at that level of detail. Interestingly, the same color-enhancement process that makes the red streaks more visible has also tinted the left section of the image a yellowy color. That’s because the radiation from Saturn’s magnetosphere is constantly slamming into this particular hemisphere of the moon, modifying it chemically. This wouldn’t be visible to the naked eye, but with color filtering in place we see that Tethys has actually be planet-burned by its proximity to a gas giant. Source http://www.extremetech.com/