The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

Sounds like a bad Sci-Fi movie, but it's really a site for you astrogeeks.

Jay Melosh, an atmospheric scientist at Purdue, has created a nifty little “impact calculator” that lets you figure out the consequences of a large asteroid hitting the Earth. If the asteroid of the moment, YU55, were to enter the Earth’s atmosphere at 11 miles per second, it would burn up, and the remaining chunks would, on impact, create a crater four miles wide and 1,700 feet deep.

http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth

Sounds like a bad Sci-Fi movie, but it's really a site for you astrogeeks.

Jay Melosh, an atmospheric scientist at Purdue, has created a nifty little “impact calculator” that lets you figure out the consequences of a large asteroid hitting the Earth. If the asteroid of the moment, YU55, were to enter the Earth’s atmosphere at 11 miles per second, it would burn up, and the remaining chunks would, on impact, create a crater four miles wide and 1,700 feet deep.

http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth

Purdue always has great stuff!

Reminds me of a computer game we used to play back in the stone age.....Lunar Landing.....you had to apply just the right amount of fuel for thrust to land on the moon. We all had a try at burning up all of the fuel in one thrust, then letting the computer calculate the dimensions of the hole you blew in the surface on impact.

LOL. I remember that game. I did the same thing.

This game?
http://www.thepcmanwebsite.com/media/lunar_lander/

Similar but not quite. The graphics are FAR better than in what I played and it doesn;t seem to  show the crater you crash landing makes.

I do not recall the one I played having any graphics at all.......yes, some of us are that old LOL

 
Not only that, but I played it on a monochrome display!

This one is much closer to the original. Brings back memories. http://www.springfrog.com/games/lunar-lander/

Oh yes. A had a green screen. Easy on the eyes.



Still no crater, but this looks a lot more like what I remember. I have to wonder is I can find the original one I played somewhere on an archive of old Apple IIe games. There I could play it again in an emulator.

 
It was 1970 or 71, our middle school science teacher had a dial up access to the local university's mainframe..... and the interface we had was a dot matrix printer... I think......it was a while ago.

The text-only version where you entered the burn rate (0 to 100 or something like that)?

 
yep. And an all text reply with the results of your burn.

I remember seeing a version like that coded in some version of BASIC in an issue of (I think) Creative Computing long ago. I may have even seen it being played on a teletype connected to a mainframe once, but I never got to play it.

 
When I think of playing that (and the level of pure joy we had....WOOT A computer GAME!!!)  compared to, say, watching my son kick a$$ in Dark Souls.....hard to believe it has been such a short time.

I remember saying to my significant other once how neat it would be if you could play a video game that looked just like an animated movie only you could control the player....welcome to the 21st century and games that do just that. So cool