eataTREE

The Jukebox To The Stars

I'm pretty sure an atmosphere is going to make fireball effects, which are going to be bad for your NSWR spacecraft. Does Zubrin's paper mention an atmosphere? I only skimmed it because I'm NOT a fluid dynamicist....

Hmm, you said you're getting rid of the antimatter, which is probably the most lethal of the "kills you dead immediately" methods of theoretical space travel. Is it D+D fusion, then? Or something similarly neutronic?

NSW and MH provide that unicorn of rocketry: high ISP AND high thrust. If you want to go jetting around the solar system in days at a comfortable constant 1G acceleration, Expanse-style, you need both.

Atomic Rockets doesn't forbid much. Reactionless drives and FTL (especially insufficently-well-thought-out FTL drives that would break the universes they appear in) are the only hard no's.

Inertial pulsed fusion thruster of some sort?

OMG. My Kerbals yearn for the stars (and don't believe in cheesy warp drives). Nice plasma-beam effect too. I can't wait to haul out my Kansas-sized radiator panels!

Gonna launch a rocket to orbit from Gosa sea level. Just as soon as I figure out how to land without exploding. 10/10 these are my new favorite exoplanet packs.

Saved game under previous version. Bob was standing on a terraformer on Lua. CKAN updated Beyond Home to 1.4 before I next loaded. Enclosed please find an invoice for Bob's funeral expenses. Great mod, brings new life to career mode!!

The development version (build 644) works on KSP 1.2 right now. Interplanetary transfer planner doesn't seem to be working perfectly, but that is the only issue I've noticed so far. You can get it here.

In the early stages of my 1.2 career save. Performing rescue missions to get free astronauts, while I contemplate a science-gathering mission to Duna, Dres, or Eve. Thinking about which "other star system far away" pack to install. "Rigid attachment: on" is my new best friend. I used to build long, skinny rockets with a reinforced "exoskeleton" of struts and girders, just so they wouldn't flop around like dead fish during atmospheric flight. Now I just launch long, skinny rockets that fly straight and true like arrows.

Every new career save game, I fly a ceremonial mission to the Mun without the use of any autopilot, to prove that I still can. Then I use MechJeb for every subsequent flight. NASA doesn't fly rockets by hand, why am I supposed to?

If you make a working(*) Bussard Ramjet mod, I can die a happy man(**). * Of course, recent scientific analysis suggests that it doesn't work: even if you somehow solve the problem of inducing proton-proton fusion with less than a star's mass worth of hydrogen, Bremsstrahlung and other radiative energy losses limit your speed to a pathetically small fraction of c. Maybe a RAIR (ramscooped hydrogen for reaction mass, onboard deuterium for fusion fuel) or something? ** I will go interstellar some day, in a career game.

Awesome, it's great to see all these mods updated so quickly for the new version. One question, how does SCANsat interact with the new KerbNet system?

I'm so glad you're developing this. When you get around to charged-particle radiation, will electromagnetic shielding be a possibility? (Will we be able to use the electromagnetic shield as a magnetic sail to generate microthrust?)

So, I've added the test release to my career save but am too frightened to actually launch any of the parts yet. (I did make a seven-NSWR beast of a cargo tug that could, in theory, take off from the pad with two hundred tons of cargo and then haul it to Plock, but chickened out on launching it. Have you modeled any interesting ramifications of setting off a "continuous nuclear detonation" in the atmosphere?) You have made... an antimatter pion torch. I'm wondering how realistic you've made it in terms of the waste heat that such an engine would produce. Real-world proposals for this include 500 square kilometers of heat radiators and/or fancy theoretical droplet radiators to get rid of the energy from absorbed gamma rays -- should I assume that your model has comparable heat dissipation requirements? I also notice that you're working on a ray-traced radiation mod. (Yay!) An antimatter pion drive would produce rather a lot of radiation, and by "rather a lot", I mean enough to kill you stone dead from 100 km away. Does or will your radiation mod model this lethal gamma-ray shine? (If so, how many thicknesses worth of 2x2 structural plates does it take to attenuate the gamma rays to survivable levels?) Love, love, love your work.

This is the only life support mod I ever use. Glad to see that it's still getting updates and love. ObligatoryFeatureRequest: Make the Water Splitters generate LH2 instead of "Waste", so we can mine ice for fuel like real science fiction heros.

As a Misson Controller with a job, a wife, and a family, this is the deciding factor for me. I only have a certain amount of real-world time to get that damn payload up there or it's going to have to wait until next weekend. The traditional semidisposable rocket is quick to get to orbit, almost always on the first try; the SSTO requires a lengthy flight through the atmosphere, not to mention the endless tuning and repeat attempts required to actually get it into space. And then there's re-entry. I put SSTOs in the "neat, but impractical" category.

KSP doesn't do a lot of disk reads or writes at runtime, so making your disk faster isn't really going to help all that much. Like most games and simulations KSP is cpu-bound rather than I/O-bound (i.e. the limiting factor is the speed of your processor and graphics card, not the speed of your disk). As others have pointed out, modern operating systems provide a memory-based disk cache that effectively gives you all the benefits a ramdisk would give you anyway. The easiest way to improve your KSP performance is to run 64-bit if you aren't already. The next-easiest is to add more RAM unless you're already up to 16GB. Beyond that you are looking at upgrading your CPU, mainboard, and/or graphics subsystem.

I use MechJeb constantly. But I only use Smart A.S.S. and Maneuver Planner, though -- no autopilots. That isn't because I'm virtuous, I just think I can fly ascents and landings more efficiently than the autopilot. (Sometimes this belief is more firmly grounded in reality than others.) I've never had a Kerbal set foot on Eve. I've never had a Kerbal set foot on Dres. I've never had a Kerbal set foot on Laythe or Tylo. I use OPM religiously, but of the planets it adds, I've only been to Sarnus, and that only once. I've never even sent a probe to Eeloo. I don't use probes nearly as much as I should because I'm too lazy to set up a real communications network (and too proud to uninstall RemoteTech and use "easy probes".) I quicksave and revert all the time. I make space stations and bases with way too many parts, then never visit them because they kill my framerate. I am. The. Worst. Spaceplane designer in all of Kerbaldom. My spaceplanes don't take off. If they take off, they stall out at subsonic speeds. If they make it to the hypersonic regime, they either blow up or can't circularize. If, by some miracle, I make a plane that actually takes off and flies into orbit, it blows up during re-entry.

I did the thing where you are so happy that your spaceplane made it into orbit, and then your happiness turns into horror when you realize that the craft is incapable of surviving re-entry. I landed it with Hyperedit. I feel terrible.

Hmmm, I think I qualify for number of hours. I live in Grass Valley (NE of Sacramento). Also I am old. Do you need young photogenic people specifically?

[quote name='herbal space program'][FONT=Arial][COLOR=#000000]You know how they say getting there is half the fun? Well for Moho, it’s all the fun![/COLOR][/FONT] [/QUOTE]In my case, it was getting [I]back[/I] that was most of the fun (almost in the Dwarf Fortress sense of Fun). Like everyone who goes to Moho, I initially thought my mission was ridiculously overbudgeted for delta-V. But I ended up having to get home via a bi-elliptic transfer, as I couldn't afford a direct return shot. Fortunately I brought lots of life support.

I have been to Moho. I did take a lot of radiators, but this was to dissipate the heat from my nuclear thermal rocket rather than because of conditions at Moho. (I don't recall having to deploy the radiators at Moho, except during a burn.) My biggest problem with Moho is that a) as you point out, it takes a ridiculous amount of d-V to get there, and b) when you get there, it's freaking boring. Airless, monochromatic, and a landscape like Dres, only not as feature-rich or interesting. Once things get more stable again (right now I'm having bad, bad problems with crash-to-desktop on scene change) I might load some mod like Interstellar and build a solar-powered microwave transmitter station/antimatter bottling plant in Moho orbit. Other than the intense plentiful solar energy, or to cross it off The List, I can't think of too many other reasons to go there.

This, to me, is the KSP song. I find myself humming it whenever I do a launch. "Doot-doot-doot-doot-doot-doot-doot-doot-doot-DEE-doot-DEE-doot-DEE-doot-DEE..."