Niccolo

Not quite - orbital velocity is well above 6000 mph. A circular orbit in LEO requires a velocity of 7-8 km/s, or 25-30,000 km/h (~ 15-19,000 mph). It's still seriously damn fast though. I'm not entirely sure supercavitation would even be possible at such a speed. The sub would probably outpace any gas bubble that tries to form and what follows would be exactly what happens when a rocket plows into the ground, since at that speed there's not much difference between hitting water and hitting rock.

Assuming perfect conditions for both options, then the single continuous burn will be more efficient than a two-stage burn of elevate followed by accelerate. Going to space requires two steps: First, get high enough (elevate) to be outside the atmosphere. Second, go sideways fast enough that you stay out of the atmosphere (accelerate). These are basically vertical and horizontal vectors (Yes, math has entered the game). A gravity turn involves your rocket tipping over, such that a portion of the thrust goes towards acceleration instead of elevation. A theoretically 'perfect' launch involves you burning such that you are burning all the way to your apoapsis with a perfect, continuous gravity turn such that as you hit your target apoapsis, your rocket is perfectly horizontal and thus putting all further momentum straight into acceleration. Drawn out, the perfect launch has a hyperbolic trajectory with a horizontal asymptote at your target altitude. A single continuous burn (without your nose dipping below the horizon) means that your gravity turn is dead perfect, and that your tipping rocket has smoothly transitioned from elevating to accelerating with an absolute minimum of wasted energy. Basically your rocket's path has minimally deviated from the perfect path. In contrast, a two-stage burn (even with a gravity turn) means that your rocket's trajectory reached the target height too early, and so your path deviated from that of perfect. An imperfect trajectory requires additional energy to essentially "bend" it into shape so that it will (in the future) intersect again with the perfect path.

There's a lot of questions there, so I'll tackle them one by one. Could the light have been that bright without their flesh bursting into flames? It could have, yes. One thing you need to remember is that, above all else, above its destructive force, its massive radioactive fallout and its thunderous, literally earth-shaking roar, is that a nuclear explosion is really, really bright. So bright that one of the smallest tests, Trinity, burned a hole through the photographic film. The light from Trinity was seen three hundred and seventy-five kilometres away (about 280 miles). This was light so bright that it turned the air around the explosion opaque for a few moments. Depending on your distance from the explosion, it is fully possible to be close enough for your eyes to be overwhelmed by the light, but you are otherwise (mostly) okay in the short-term. First-degree burns would be common at the inner limits of this range, appearing as really bad sunburn. Could there have been enough x-rays emitted that they could be seen by the human retina? No. The compounds in our eyes that enable our vision don't react to X-Ray spectrum photons in a way that our brains interpret as a light signal. The viewers might have experienced phosphenes, but those generally aren't discrete and are instead flashes. Maybe something caused the calcium in their bones to momentarily fluoresce. Although I may be wrong on this, I'm fairly sure that bone fluoresces in blues and/or greens, which would be absorbed by the flesh in the way. If the bones were fluorescing brightly enough that that was why we could see them, then your hand would probably be on fire. However, bones are very, very opaque - even moreso than flesh and skin. So what is instead possibly happening is pretty much the same thing as if you hold a torch under your thumb and switch it on. The light shines through the flesh and blood, but not through bone. Finger-bones are too thin to show up that way though, since the light just diffracts around them entirely and hides them from view. So a torch won't show your finger bones. A penlight under your palm won't shine through your hand since the meat is too thick, but enough light (such as the light from a nuclear blast) may well. Even better would be the bones in your forearm. Those are big, and so have a decent chance of casting a shadow compared to the (relatively) less opaque flesh. Or maybe one person just said it as an exaggeration and others repeated it just because it sounded cool. Distinctly possible. There's a lot of hearsay and anecdotal evidence, but as you said it may have started as an exaggeration. Who knows? I for one do not want to find out the truth firsthand.

I'm by no means an astrophysicist so this is well outside of my comfort zone... In regards to your first question, it would appear so, yes. Gravitational waves of small enough wavelength and amplitude appear to be affected by gravitational lensing, judging by the very extensive answer given to this Stackexchange physics question. A further Google search reveals a lot of scary math, but the general consensus seems to be yes. Extrapolating from that, LIGO could potentially detect lensed gravitational waves. Which is awesome.

You, uh, could try uninstalling Navhud first? CKAN will refuse to overwrite files it finds in the Gamedata folder.

I mean yeah, at it's core the principle of space travel anywhere within a single galaxy is pretty much constant - align your orbit with the target's and burn for an intercept. The only hiccup comes courtesy of the old N-body problem - and when N is a couple of trillion, then actually mapping your orbit and trajectory gets helluva messy. Voyager 1 "aiming for the constellation Ophiuchus" though may just mean that its trajectory out of the solar system is in that direction. Although the constellations have no actual influence on our day-to-day lives (no matter what Griselda the tarot reader tells you) they are handy celestial markers for the trajectory of spacefaring objects. Alternatively it may actually be aiming for a flyby of one of the stars of the constellation, which is what some news articles seem to suggest. I'm not really sure.

KG3 's solution is technically correct, and is one type of thermite reaction (the other being Iron (III) Oxide instead of Iron (II) oxide). However, peadar1987 is still correct, you would still need about 5.7MJ of energy in a 100% efficient conversion. It's just that in this instance that energy is provided by the reaction of: 2 AL + 3 O --> AL2O3 + (lovetons of heat) The result would be a crucible (You are doing this in a crucible, right?) that, assuming it hasn't exploded due to containing a 2,500oC flame, is now full of molten aluminium oxide slag and little pellets of iron that are really, really hot. Regarding the magnetism of rust, peadar1987 is pretty much correct. What we conventionally call rust (the red stuff) is, to all intents and purposes, essentially non-magnetic. Conventional 'red' rust is Iron (III) oxide, or Fe2O3, in a hydrated matrix written as Fe2O3.H2O. The Fe2O3 crystal by itself is called haematite and is itself basically non-magnetic but will very, very weakly respond to an external magnetic field. The hydrated form (red rust) is also itself non-magnetic, but as it has that haematite core unit will still respond to an external magnetic field. However, this response is so weak that it requires really powerful electromagnets to generate. To summarise though, red rust isn't magnetic in the everyday sense.

Essentially, yes. If you wanted to rendezvous with, say, an icy comet that's chilling in the inner Oort cloud (~50,000 AU) then it's much like KSP - burn, and burn, and burn, and burn until your apogee is way out there, then burn once you're out there to match velocity. Of course, you'd better have about 10 millenia's worth of books and batteries, since your travel time is going to be ridiculous. You could also do as the Voyager craft and New Horizons did and use a gravity assist to save on /\V expenditure. This will rapidly increase your travel time however, and you'd only be able to launch at certain times to take advantage of these windows. Spiralling on from that, a third (more expensive) option is to burn powerfully and put yourself on an escape trajectory out of the sun. Voyager 1 and 2 did this, essentially - they shot out of the solar system at ludicrous velocities thanks to a lot of burning and a veritable cornucopia of planetary alignments allowing Voyager 2 to hit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune for a chain of gravity assists. The more you burn, the faster you'll get out there, but the more you'll have to burn when you're out there in order to slow down and convert your outwards momentum into orbital momentum and thus match your target's velocity. As a side note, Voyager 1 has since hit the interstellar medium and thus exited the sun's direct influence (and is considered the first interstellar craft!), but has not actually encountered the Oort cloud yet. NASA anticipates Voyager 1 will be all up in the comet nursery's grill in about 14,000 years. If instead you're aiming for the outer Oort cloud (~200,000 AU), then... uh... good luck. We're not entirely sure if the outer Oort cloud is actually even orbiting the sun, since it's about 3.2 ly out, and thus entirely at the whims of the gravitational field of basically everything that passes by. But again, same principle. Burn like hell to make your way out there, turn around and burn to slow down. Assuming that the objects had the same mass and orbits, then yeah, their orbital velocity at that point would be at a 45 degree angle and 1.414x increase. Different starting orbits means different vector addition. Things get weird on the other side of the planet, though. Sudden increase in velocity means that the apoapsis is going to shoot out to compensate.

Flew new rover to Minmus. Landed rover on the flats. Ordered rover to the Highlands. Got message it had arrived, so switched to rover. Physics coming back online and terrain weirdness launched rover skywards. Flying new rover to Minmus, Note to other drivers: Be really, really careful where you order your rovers to go. Local terrain weirdness, particularly in lower-gravity environments, can transform your rovers into (temporary) spacecraft.

Ah, thanks. It's what I suspected - they're best when applied to really high mass ships.

I'm sorta having a little trouble with applying this mod (and the Cryogenic engines sister mod) (Not a technical issue! The mod functions technically perfectly). Basically, I'm not really sure of the situation in which to use these engines. Chemical vs. Nuclear vs. cryo, it seems that chemical wins every time - For the same amount of dV, a chemical fuel tank + chemical engine costs far less and takes up way less room. An equivalent cryo setup costs more than the chemical setup and takes up more room, but it provides pretty damn nice thrust... Still makes for rather huge rockets, though. I'm not sure if I'm using them in the right niche, but oh well. The nuclear setup, though, I'm not sure. I haven't quite worked out their niche. Can you guys offer a little guidance?

Hmm, I think something similar might be happening with VSR, which adds the Shiba.

I have double-checked , and it definitely just has electric charge as a resource. Not sure what exactly you mean by a pre and post welding file... May I ask which file in particular? I'm also still trying to work out the source mod for the piece... Again, I'll update when I get home. Thanks for your patience in helping me with this, guys, and definitely thanks to Alewx for what is otherwise an awesome mod!

Hrm, that first config file looks pretty similar to the part file for my welded 8K battery. Except, of course, mine defines 10x800V batteries duct-taped together instead. It'd appear that the weldment is forming correctly...? I don't think so. I'll have to double-check when I get home, but I'm almost positive that the batteries are only batteries. Unless it's something weird that's crept in from another mod. When I get home from work, I'll take a closer look at the CFG file.

I know that welding multiples of certain parts together is not a smart move - multiple lights, legs, etc. Does anybody know if this extends to merging items like batteries? I merged a stack of batteries into a group with 8000 V of charge, but it's not appearing in the file list even after reload. It is definitely generating, since it's listed in the gamedata/ubio(something)/parts folder. I also know the mod is working correctly, 'cause my one other weldment (a resized antenna and some trusses) has appeared properly. I'm just trying to work out if I'm doing a stupid, or it's a bug and I should gather the info for a proper bug report.