Starman4308

That... is an opinion, I suppose? I'd veer towards "good games should not have weird side parts that wind up vastly superior to mainline jet engines". And, in the future, if/when they do fix the clearly unintended bug, just get ModuleManager installed and whonk this into a .cfg file somewhere in GameData. @RESOURCE_DEFINITION[IntakeAir] { @RESOURCE_DRAIN_DEFINITION { @isDrainable = true // Optionally, add @showDrainFX = true } }

1) Other than the intake air thing which is clearly the result of a typo, it can't really be considered cheating due to the rubbish Isp of the drain valve. Possibly funny if you set the drain rate crazily high and flip your rocket that way, but you'll use up tremendous amounts of fuel that way. The unlimited drain rate is funny, but hardly OP except in extremely narrow circumstances where even Sepratrons wouldn't give you enough TWR, and you don't mind blowing all your fuel in less than a second. 2) Substantially simpler and less prone to impinge on the tank is... symmetrical vents. 3) I play RO. With RTGs that decay. Please don't lump everybody together.

A simpler way to do fuel vents with thrust would be to use the existing engines code rather than trying to reinvent the wheel with an entirely new fuel venting module that requires resources to be defined as "ventable" or "not ventable".

As I understand this, the "anti solar panels" are existing technology with a headline-grabbing name and zero commercial potential. There's two elements to the majority of power generation systems: 1) The fuel, or power source. This can be fossil fuel combustion, the Sun, nuclear fuel rods, etc. Often, the energy from this fuel comes out in a high-entropy form like heat. 2) The generator, which converts some other form of energy (often heat) into some other form of energy (often electricity), where that second form is often a lower-entropy form of energy. In this case, the fuel is heat from the Sun. This... is hardly a technological breakthrough. The generator is a commercially available thermoelectric generator (TEG), the same technology used in radioisotope thermal generators (RTGs). TEGs, though, are very inefficient ways of converting heat differentials to electricity; they're primarily used in small systems where their solid-state nature makes them more reliable and lighter than more efficient systems such as turbines and Stirling generators. You'd need a lot of exposed area to collect the solar heat and a huge heatsink to store it. Now, there are actual, legitimate proposals that approach making sense to use collected solar heat for nighttime power generation. The one I've seen is to use a large mirror array to focus light onto a tower with liquid sodium as the heatsink, used to drive a large high-efficiency turbine similar to those used at fossil fuel plants. This actually solves two of the biggest issues with renewable power supply: not only does it provide consistent power through many weather conditions (assuming you don't get a long stretch of multiple cloudy days), but it gracefully handles moment-to-moment power surges and drops. One big advantage of fossil fuel and nuclear plants is the sheer inertia present in the turbines. If power load goes up unexpectedly, the turbines' rotation rate drops minutely, but the sheer rotational inertia gives the plant operators time to feed in a bit more fuel. Same thing when the power goes down: the actual power distributed goes up very little, the turbines gain a little excess energy, and the plant operators can reduce the fuel feed. Solar panels and wind turbines, however, have much less of this inertia, much less capacity to buffer these moment-to-moment fluctuations.

I'm on the fence about Trident. If NASA secures funding for proper flagship missions to the ice giants, it becomes partially redundant, and dips further into limited stockpiles of Pu-238. Other than Trident with its external factors, my two favorites would be Da Vinci+ and Veritas. Sorry Io.

To be fair, the major gameplay issues (i.e. getting to space on pure intake air) was thought through... and somebody fat-fingered the config. The crazy drain rate accessible via KAL is kind of a niche thing and doesn't supplant engines except possibly at extremely high drain rates. Drain valves should produce thrust; you're moving mass from inside your craft to outside your craft. There's velocity imparted. I believe, for example, that the Saturn S-IVB stages deliberately used propellant venting to steer themselves into their final trajectories (either heliocentric orbits or lunar impactors).

Does it count if I've launched 100 tons to Earth orbit? There's also one bloody lunatic on the RO Discord who managed to launch a fully fueled Saturn V to LEO with a launcher I can only describe as "why". I suspect you'll see a pretty bimodal distribution here: people who built giant launchers for the sake of building giant launchers, and people who build the launchers they need... and there's only so much payload one can reasonably need. There will be those who legitimately need giant launchers for insane payloads, but I imagine most of us don't try to launch gigantic space stations to low solar orbit. Emphasis on "most". I'm looking at you Stratenblitz75. And no, a fully fueled Saturn V is not a payload one might reasonably need in LEO.

First: CKAN will install dependencies to the mods you have selected. Second, please read this. There's not much information to work with right now.

There's definitely something up with @UmbralRaptor's calculations; in RO, I tend to get 3.5-3.8 km/s ejections to Mars/Venus, and 6.7 km/s for Jupiter (both starting from LEO in the plane of the ecliptic). As to gravity assists in general: there are some that are pretty easy to set up even without KSP-TOT or a lot of patience. KKJ (and its EEJ analog in RSS): Eject into a 2-year heliocentric orbit 2 years prior to a Jool transfer window. Make a moderate retrograde burn at apohelion to set up a Kerbin slingshot to finish sending you to Jool. Moonbrakes: Both Ike and Tylo are pretty good for braking into eccentric orbits of their planets. All you need to do here is make a mid-course adjustment burn relatively early during your transfer, target the relevant moon, and tweak a balance of radial/prograde until you meet the moon in the right place at the right time. Satellite ping-pong: Once in orbit of a planet with a complex system of satellites: if you have an eccentric orbit in the same plane as said moons, you can make small burns at apoapsis to set up flyby after flyby after flyby. It's brilliant in RSS for visiting all the moons of Jupiter/Saturn/Uranus/Neptune.

There's also one specialized advantage of 2x Skiffs: if, for some reason, you need roll control, a pair of engines gives you that. Granted, this only comes to mind because I'm accustomed to RO where reaction wheels are a decadent luxury instead of something you have almost by default, but it still is an advantage.

First: focus on making a rocket that can get to the Mun. Second: lightweight and efficient are relatively synonymous. That said, if you're looking for cost efficiency over mass efficiency, the cheapest designs may be somewhat heavier than the lightest designs. Third: I've played RO/RP-1 for so long that I'm probably at this point a terrible player of the stock game, and am a bit out-of-touch on specifics. That said, I suspect you're probably looking to stage every 3000-4000 m/s, using vacuum-optimized engines everywhere except the first stage. Nuclear engines are probably counterproductive due to high monetary cost, high mass, and the low dV requirements of Mun landings. Fourth: when in doubt, cut extraneous payload. Remember the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation: dV = Gm*ln(mw/md) Fifth: when in doubt, cut extraneous payload. This bears repeating, especially if you ever want to dip into the Dark Arts of RP-1.

In my view, it's not really the coefficients or ease of getting there that are any sort of problem. The issue is biome farming: that data from the ninth biome is worth the same as data from the first. Deal with that, and Minmus is what it should be IMO: a stepping stone that takes a little finesse to get to, easier than Duna, harder than the Mun (in terms of learning the game, I am aware Minmus requires less dV to get to).

One little modification I feel would be quite neat: Give those turbopump exhausts 1-axis gimbal for roll control and give them a dimmer, smokier exhaust. There is that element of education, and "why does the Mainsail's secondary exhausts have a different plume from the main exhaust?" could lead to some learning.

I worked out the relevant spherical geometry issues a while back, working under the assumption that launch was instantaneous and occurred at a fixed altitude. Since neither is true, I'd have your kOS script switch to a PID loop once you're within tolerance of your desired azimuth. I... don't remember the equations I came up with, but I do have the spreadsheet! I know I posted it somewhere, so I'll edit this post once I find where I did the math. Note that the spreadsheet is configured for this strange planet called "Earth". https://www.dropbox.com/s/ljtxh571ll9qy05/Azimuths.xlsx?dl=0 EDIT: Found my original post:

Are you warping through any SOI transitions? That could cause issues if you are at high timewarp while passing into a new SOI; I'm not sure the patched conics solver handles that properly. I advise using KAC to set SOI crossing alarms and keep timewarp at a crawl for the transition.

Minor point of technicality: Baikonur is at 46 degrees inclination. The reason their minimum inclination is 53 degrees is because, in order to not drop rocket stages on China, they have to launch a bit north of east.

There's also the question of "what is best?" to consider. Total cost? Mass? Redundancy? Burn time (and thus you time)? Compatibility with existing infrastructure? While chemical engines have inferior vacuum Isp, they have the following advantages. 1) Almost always better sea-level performance 2) Much cheaper on a cost-to-thrust basis 3) Much better TWR 4) Scales up and down: there is no Ant-sized nuclear engine It is important to note that nuclear engines are not inherently more efficient, they inherently have better vacuum specific impulse. What is actually most efficient depends on what you are attempting to do.

That's 10.3 mph in Chicago, or about 4.7 m/s. And, as was pointed out, energy generation is roughly proportional to the cube of wind speed; a factor of 2 increase in wind speed gives you a factor of 8x more power generation.

On air density: yes, it's sufficient. See the relevant Scott Manley video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xtW7g4R_vs On your non-sequitur: it's a non-sequitur intended to evade the point. Callisto: point taken, even if there are still issues involving the long distance and high dV requirement.

So, opinions: Mercury: Hard to reach, even with complicated time-consuming MESSENGER-style flyby series. Elevated solar radiation. Extremely long day/night cycles, virtually mandating a nuclear-based night-time power system anywhere except elevated polar regions where are in constant sunlight. Baking on the day side. Freezing on the night side. Very little in-situ water. The metals it has are more easily obtained from asteroids. There's almost no reason to visit here with a manned mission until solar system travel becomes borderline routine. Venus: The surface is basically a no-go for manned missions, being a high-pressure anoxic incinerator. Even robots will struggle there. I would describe the surface as "WHYYYYYY". The upper atmosphere and cloud cities can be described as "why?" You can conduct some experiments, but those can be handled by robots at much less cost and risk, and I'm not really aware of any atmospheric resources worth bothering with there. Earth: I hear the outdoors is scary. I'm playing it safe and not conducting any crazy missions to the outdoors. Moon: Close enough for reasonable tourism, may be a source of He3, and close to us in many, many senses. Any interplanetary shenanigans should really start here. Some issues in a long day/night cycle (you need to pack either a nuclear power source or 14+ days of batteries/regenerative fuel cells), but has that overwhelming close-to-us thing going for it. Mars: At least a thin atmosphere with fast winds (permitting wind turbines). Day/night cycle beautifully close to Earth's, good from both a power perspective and a human-diurnal-cycle perspective. Distance is pretty borderline for "need mature solar-system travel". Surface resources likely more easily accessed than Earth's from an industrial perspective, but it'd be an awful bear shipping it back. I rank this third on the priority list. Near-Earth asteroids: Plenty of rare-Earth metals. Relatively cheap and fast to get to. Number 2 on my to-go-to list courtesy of relative ease of travel, plentiful solar power... and those rare-earth metals. Nearby dwarf planets (e.g. 4 Vesta, Ceres): Of some scientific interest, but increased dV requirements and likely lesser concentrations of rare metals disfavor these bodies. Jovian moons: Its most interesting moons are all within murderous radiation fields, and its outer moons are tiny iceballs. No real reason to go here before near-Earth asteroids. Saturn's moons: Some interesting moons, but Saturn and beyond is going to require very mature solar-system travel due to the very long distances. Beyond Saturn: See above. Overall, I don't really see reasons to visit anything other than the Moon, near-Earth asteroids, and possibly Mars until the relevant technology is basically sci-fi level. I dislike speculating beyond there, because by that point, we don't know what the limiting factors and tradeoffs will be.

Other major points have previously been covered (e.g. Star Wars vessels throwing the term "orbit" out the window). Otherwise, that could simply be one of many squadrons covering Naboo. If Star Wars vessels are able to shoot at ranges of a few thousand kilometers (which admittedly throws out the SW aesthetic of Battle of Jutland in SPAAAAAACE), you'd need just three squadrons to cover 90%-ish of the surface and all of the low orbit approach vectors above a certain altitude. Four squadrons, you have 100% coverage. I'm assuming that for some reason or another, to support each other, these squadrons have to be placed at distances that would make sense at the Battle of Jutland, and not at distances that would make sense in harder sci-fi (i.e. "visual range is knife-fighting range").

If you're looking for thrust in a liquid motor, the two key variables are going to be specific impulse and propellant density. Specific impulse counts because you get more impulse per kilogram of propellant moved into the combustion chamber. Density counts because you can get more kilograms of propellant into the combustion chamber. The practical propellants with decent Isp and high density are either solids (primarily ammonium perchlorate composite propellant), or the major hypergols (hydrazine, MMH, or UDHM as a fuel, dinitrogen tetroxide (NTO), mixed oxides of nitrogen (MON), or inhibited red fuming nitric acid as the oxidizer). The impractical king of this is the aforementioned mercury-based rocket motor, which has terrible Isp but makes up for it in overwhelming density. As to the original question, of what you want in an on-orbit interceptor, that would basically mean MMH/NTO or MMH/MON. Reasonable specific impulse, storable without complicated insulation/refrigeration equipment, does not have tons of mercury, and there already exists a wide variety of RCS motors for the stuff, etc. The primary issue is that it's an on-orbit interceptor, meaning you're locked into a specific orbital plane. This dramatically reduces your options.

At least with Bon Voyage v0.14.8 on KSP v1.7.3, there's an issue where, on picking a target on the map, latitude and longitude are mixed up. This leads to lots of "path not found" errors, as there's a nontrivial chance that you're trying to enter a latitude of greater than 180 degrees. It's possible this only occurs when selecting a site of longitude 180-360 degrees; I forgot to test that. EDIT: The temporary workaround is to enter lat/lon manually.

I get the opposite behavior (right is preferred) in Surviving Mars. The degree to which I do not care about this "bug", though, cannot be overstated.

You can certainly make a complicated hydrocarbon mix. With enough effort put into it, you could probably make something that matches the RP-1 specification. The major question is: why? The RP-1 specification is the way it is because it is (relatively) easy to make it from a feedstock of petroleum. If you don't have access to petroleum, though, it would be needlessly complicated. There are valid reasons to try to get bigger hydrocarbon chains than methane. More extended chains can be made with more of the easily available CO2 than difficult-to-acquire hydrogen. More likely, however, you're going to see something that isn't RP-1, but a new specification of "a mix that can be readily made from CO2 and hydrogen".