LEGO® Ideas 21309 NASA Apollo Saturn V

[mako88sb]

I'm looking forward to getting one. Somebody must have anticipated this and came up with his own lego crawler:

[Allan F]

Delightful video, thanks for sharing 

Lurky

If you play KSP, you must know Scott Manley.

[QuietElite]

Delightful video, thanks for sharing 

Lurky

If you play KSP, you must know Scott Manley.

Indeed.

[BazBear]

That would be an ... interesting ... number of pieces. (0, in Unix internal timestamps, is Jan 1, 1970, 00:00 UTC).

It was January 1, 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC. The epoch moves every time a leap second is added to the UTC time scale.

Using UTC instead of TAI (GPS didn't yet exist) was a major mistake. Don't get me started...

Never thought of that; but of course it would.

Time/date manipulation, on computers, is harder than most people - including all too many developers - realize, especially as as soon as time changes enter the picture (you aren't even safe in a single time zone, if that zone has daylight savings - or ever changed in the past).

Here's one of the Computerphile guys having a bit of a humorous rant about coding for time zones.

[Glom]

Maybe this would be a better idea than my decade old Apollo spacecraft, which has lost three LM footpads, the APS bell, the LM low gain antenna and the SM high gain antenna.

[ka9q]

That's a wonderful rant, BazBear. But he still hasn't covered the full madness that is UTC, without even time zones, daylight saving time and international date times. Because UTC can have 61-second (or theoretically 59-second) minutes, it is fundamentally impossible to represent UTC as a single integer count of seconds. You just can't do it. You have to keep it as years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds, the latter of which can reach 60.

And then you have UTC in the 1960s, before the present leap second system was adopted (in 1972, I think). To keep it in synch with earth rotation time the length of the UTC second was continuously varied relative to the atomic second!

I got into this because I was interested in simulating historical space trajectories, such as those from the Apollo program...I don't know that I ever got past the time conversions.

[jfb]

That would be an ... interesting ... number of pieces. (0, in Unix internal timestamps, is Jan 1, 1970, 00:00 UTC).

It was January 1, 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC. The epoch moves every time a leap second is added to the UTC time scale.

Using UTC instead of TAI (GPS didn't yet exist) was a major mistake. Don't get me started...

Never thought of that; but of course it would.

Time/date manipulation, on computers, is harder than most people - including all too many developers - realize, especially as as soon as time changes enter the picture (you aren't even safe in a single time zone, if that zone has daylight savings - or ever changed in the past).

The few times I've had to do it have been painful and left a bit of scar tissue.  Not something I'd choose to work on again if I could help it. 

[ka9q]

And they're all self-inflicted scars, too. I can accept that handling relativistic effects is complex, but relativity is a law of nature that cannot be ignored so you gotta do it. But using UTC as it's been (re)defined for the past 5 or so decades created a totally artificial and unnecessary problem.

[PUshift]

Adam Savage Builds the LEGO NASA Apollo Saturn V!

[Bryanpoprobson]

Had to share this quote from my 3 year old grandson Finley, he is 4 in July and have bought this for him as a project with Granddad as I have already said.
Finley to his mum "I want to go to the Moon!"
"How do you get to the Moon, Finley?"
"In a big rocket!"
"But where can you get a big rocket?"
"From the big rocket shop, silly!"

[Glom]

Toys r uskosmos?

[Al Johnston]

One of the 1969 pieces is a flag that can be accurately placed for the LM Ascent stage lift-off:
Apollo_20170625_077 by AlJ1964, on Flickr