wumpus

The only thing Blue Origin is "copying from" (or more accurately "following on to") is DC-X. They might be trying to reduce costs in a way similar to Spacex "don't throw the entire spacecraft away each flight", but you could claim they both are "copying from" the Space Shuttle just as well. I wouldn't be remotely surprised if Blue Origin *really* copied spacex and decided to recover the first stage and lose a second stage while going into orbit, but they aren't nearly far along enough to need to do that.

Actually it is more about a dead end that works well for small rockets and fails to scale. Even the scaling issues isn't so much a problem if you are willing to build a first stage rocket to replace your airplane. If you need a larger cargo for your Pegasus than can be air-launched, Orbital will launch it as a minotaur (a Pegasus with a surplus Peacekeeper first stage).

Looks like sometime after 2014. Stuff that *should* be current:http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/sls0.html It looks like the main issue is that the F-1 would replace the SS-ME/RD-25 engines which are half the point of the SLS (the other being the SRBs), so that went nowhere. So we have a rocket over for designed LEO, that can't make it to Mars and that NASA isn't taking to the Moon. Although I suppose in the end it doesn't matter if Orion is ready or not. The first Saturn launched without an Apollo capsule (it was late as well), and will allow NASA to push around budgets for several more years without needing to launch anything.

Care to be how many more Congressmen have owned Land Rovers (presumably buying Hummers instead if an election is coming up, but just as uneconomical)? Also Dragon and CST-100 "weren't invented here". I keep seeing suggestions about Saturns in this forum. Oddly enough, I think SLS includes most of the favorite tech (F-1 engines and the Apollo capsule).

Isn't it NASA's only planned manned space transport? Right now they can only hitch a ride on Soyuz, and they have a plan to buy tickets on Spacex (and ULA?). I'm sure Orion has a few friends in NASA as well as on Capitol Hill. On the other hand, every time I see the widely popular suggesting of reviving the Saturn, I can't help but wonder how that could possibly work better than the current scheme to revive the Shuttle (or at least build a "lego rocket" out of shuttle parts). Impressive rocket, but nowhere to go.

For sufficiently large batteries: cracking water would *become* a battery. Most of the issues involving fuel cells involve avoiding hydrogen because it is such a horrible fuel, but if you were producing on site you could likely live with it (and use most of it in a 24 hour cycle, so leakage is less of an issue). But as far as I know, cracking water in any efficient means is a fantasy. Any one know if an "unlimited" supply of platinum would change this, say a platinum asteroid re-molded into a capsule (largely hollow) shape and delivered into a lake/outback?

Best guess is: 1. increase Ap 2. Change inclination (at Ap) 3. circularize if necessary. Typically you get better results by combining burns, but since you need to be in different places for 1 and 2 this isn't going to happen. My only suggestion is to set up two separate maneuver nodes (one at Pe and the second at Ap) and adjust them until they add to the smallest number. Or you can work up a spreadsheet/small program and grind out the math. But that is how real satellites move from KSC inclination to GSO inclination. PS: Inclination changes just aren't done "on the cheap". This should be the cheapest way, but there is always going to be a steep delta-v cost in a place with Eve's gravity.

I'll assume it was a kerballess probe. Lots of science, little mass.

Cost effective: This is mostly a matter of time and economic growth. Of course, I think power usage is flattening out in some developed western countries (mostly Europe), so unless there is sufficiently abundant energy, it won't happen. Easy to use: Freewings don't have this issue, and for multiple rotors (no, just no) it would be a reasonably simple control logic issue. I have to wonder if there will be real attempts at "flying cars" after people accept autonomous cars. The biggest issue with having the general public flying is watching them fail at 2d real-time navigation. Creature comforts: I've often wondered why Cessnas don't look more like sailplanes: greatly reducing the frontal area should greatly allow for higher speeds. [N.B. I've heard of flutter and understand that it often limits max speed (literally Vne), but have no idea what causes it and how to avoid it], yet aircraft with the passenger beside the pilot greatly outsells having the passenger directly behind the pilot. Ignore this line at your peril. Complete replacement: The exceptions tend to prove the rule: one option would be for the plane to carry the "car" (segway?) if you can't quite land on top of the landing area. Note that it might be possible to convince enough people for a short production run (like the Lotus-based Tesla Roadster) for people willing to buy a car for each end of a flight, but that will never be mass market. Unless people are keeping a gas (probably their "old car") around and buying Nissan Leafs for running about (I suspect this was true for the pre-supercharger Telsa Roadster), I wouldn't even expect a car to remain for short trips.

I'm more concerned with the engines (which weigh more than the tanks). If there is an ion engine with the decouplers (because I can't see them above it), that is where you are hauling way too much extra mass. Also since a decoupler has 1/4 the mass of an empty stage, having more tanks make sense. Looking closely, this was done in the example rocket (after 4 or so stages down, you see two decouplers per stage).

Ford plans to sell 500 "Ford GT" cars for $400,000 apiece (wiki claims the R22 is $285k, and sells ~25 a year). Tis a weird planet we're on. Another site lead me on a chase about autogyros. They cost maybe half that of R22 helicopter, and have much less safety issues (you are never outside of the autogyro height). The catch is that they still need an airport, and have all the speed and efficiency of a helicopter. Basically they *are* the "flying car", but have little to no advantage over cars if there is a road where you want to go.

If 0.1% survive, they will be closer to neolithic tech than medieval tech, and incapable of lifting themselves up to the industrial era since there is no longer easily accessible metals or coal near the surface. This is pretty much our one and only shot: we colonize someplace off planet or we collapse into an eternal sub-Amish lifestyle (which might not be so bad, but don't expect the modern medicine the Amish have access to. So "not so bad" life ending around age 40. I also strongly suspect that quote is from before 1989 (he died in 1996) when nuclear weapon jockeys could reasonably assume that any order to "push the button" was the real deal. There really were plenty of people chosen specifically for their willingness to follow orders ready and able to destroy most of human life at a single command. It was a crazy time.

I'd suspect that current tech can handle building a "rope" that can handle's Pluto's gravity, but I have no idea what Pluto's lack of temperature would do to it. I also suspect that any definition of "requirements to build a space elevator" haven't looked to closely to the dynamic effects of a device attempting to "climb" the elevator: since we're still at "stage one: support its own weight" the available calculations aren't likely to include this. But using "Pluto+Charon" shouldn't been the same as "Earth + the Moon moved to GSO".

60 hour total burn? That seems low. But if it is sufficiently low you might get away with using solar panels. I'm pretty sure that having all those extra engines and decouplers aren't helping. I'd recommend going with something much more asparagused (for lower burn time) and try to get the last bit (tall thin part) to increase fuel size quadratically. The ion engine weighs twice as much as a full [tiny] xenon tank, so after the first few stages you need many tanks per engine (or better yet don't lose the engine in a stage: fire off drop tanks sideways (with your near-massless-decoupler of course) and use a single engine.

The only real evidence for kerbal government we have are a limited number of kerbals. Gene is the only one who interacts with the player (if you can call his responses to accepting contracts "interacting"). There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of authority there. The big question is when Jeb invariably grabs the best seat on the rocket, is he pulling rank or is he the only one to jump into *any* parked rocket (even ones dedicated to rescuing single kerbals and need to be empty) and then the rest of the seats are filled as needed. I suspect that if he continues to do this after another kerbal (say Valentina) is recruited with the "badass" flag set, then we can conclude that he is pulling rank (and wonder why Valentina wasn't given a rank high enough to stop this).

Except that you can still use keyboard and mouse (and console device*, if you want) from your sofa if you use PC and HDMI out. While you can certainly attach keyboard and mouse to your PS4/Xbox1**, KSP won't let you use them for control. * Expect to still need keyboard & mouse. I'm not expecting a "console controls" mod anytime soon. ** Assuming here. Scott Manley kept droning on and on about how you could do this with PS4, I'd assume the same with an Xbox1.

I would call these "overnerfed". I can't think of any in game, but I'm pretty sure the aerospike fit, at least between its "nerfing" (.25ish? Before I started) and roughly 1.0 when the thrust depended on atmospheric conditions. The ion engine has all sorts of issues since it really wants to work in full (more than exists in physics time acceleration) time acceleration, but is hardly a "bad engine".

Maybe not the Enterprise, but certainly lolKerbal.

Of course, you learned to play KSP on the PC then took those skills to the PS4. I've watched some of Scott Manley play PS4, and it is pretty scary. If Scott Manley has trouble getting into orbit (with what, three consecutive failures)? What chance do newbies have against both the KSP-cosoles and the issues of "learning rocket science" teamed up against them. I've certainly heard griping on fark.com's "friday gaming thread" about people trying to learn KSP on consoles. I suspect that anyone who can master KSP on PS4/XBox1 in its current configuration (not after flying tiger/Squad relents and allows keyboard/mouse control) could truly be called a member of the "master race" (and I'd suspect green skin and either "Jeb" or "Valentina" as a name).

Travel time, mostly while commuting (much harder) or for more irregular trips. I've heard pilots describe private planes as a "time machine" that gets them there wildly faster (presumably without TSA waits). The other thing that it enlarges the "places I can easily go" by several multiples (largely because increasing linear velocity increases the square of the area available, assuming you aren't on a thin island or something). Do people only buy cars instead of bicycles because sometimes it rains?

In a nutshell, that is why we don't have a (long distance) flying car. Your other arguments upthread explain why we don't have local flying cars either. I wonder if Google (and similar Silicon Valley companies) is doing any research into this type of thing, although "airplane replacement for the googlebus" could probably be handled by the same aircraft that handle regional airlines (although building communities around STOL runways might make sense for this type of thing). I suspect that any vehicle that meets all the criteria above (less noise, there will always be noise) will rely on multiple untested ideas (such as my freely rotating engine idea). A single untested idea is usually enough to sink most startups, and this will rely on several, which if they don't all work almost exactly as imagined will cause the thing to fail miserably. Don't hold your breath for a flying car [PS: this is typically the value of "idea men", to provide things that can sink a company and put people out of work. Look up what Seymour Cray had to say about being a "pioneer", and then look up what happened when he decided to pioneer GaAs].

IMPORTANT NOTE: "Drones" need not mean "quadcopter". Drones hit the public conscious with the Global Hawk, which was fixed wing and certainly not a quadcopter. Quadcopters are great if you don't car about fuel (you are using lithium batteries charged by main power, and power consumption is trivial). They just don't scale up. Anything that needs to carry a passenger needs to rely on aerodynamic lift (at least once you complete takeoff). Yes, I've heard the Goodyear (I think) Blimp go overhead. Unbelievably loud (think a low flying jet that just *stays* over head moving at ~20mph). Loud and long. While mufflers on planes might be unthinkable now, I suspect they were nearly as unthinkable in the days of the model-T (and they had to avoid spooking horses). Maintaining altitude by forced airflow isn't going to work. You need to use aerodynamic lift. Which is why you don't want to have to taxi to a landing strip (the "car" isn't remotely optimized for ground travel) beyond the simple issue of extra distance. You use aerodynamic lift, you suddenly lose a ton of issues like noise (be prepared to include mufflers on planes). You might also gain huge issues like stalling, but there are ways about that (note that the only way to get the previously mentioned freewing scorpion to stall was by extremely slow travel: it was even less possible to stall than the vari-eze, and this typically happened only when the propeller was pointing nearly up). Complexity: A VTOL aircraft capable of maintaining flight via aerodynamic lift sounds like a recipe for disaster. Certainly the Osprey (the only high volume example I can think of) is most famous for crashing and killing marines. On the other hand, the example I keep bringing up didn't have all those issues (of course, it couldn't *quite* manage vertical takeoff/landing) . See http://www.freewing.com/ for examples (and it appears to be resurrected, at least in internet/possibly vapor form. I thought the company had died 20 years ago, but these new pages are copyright 2016). Note that there did exist a variant that supposedly flew straight up, but I was under the impression that it needed more development and was never designed to land that way. One possible modification to the design would be to let the engines (presumably plural, possibly single in an asymmetric craft that moved the engine between the fuselage and the wing but remain aligned with center of mass/center of pressure) rotate as freely as the wings, and be angled by a tail (think aircraft tailwing) that would pull the engine horizontal as speed (and drag) increased. Presumably this would let the engines (and propellers) point straight down during launch and land and nearly horizontal during the main flight without introducing a mechanism that would allow this to fail (if the tail structure broke, it would almost certainly fail in the "launch/land" configuration, but that doesn't compare to actuator failure). I suppose that four or five motors would work to maintain flight in "quadcopter" configuration, and eventually bring the safety it needs. The transition priod between post-prototype low volume and high volume would be horrific (lots of ways to kill that don't rely on single motor failure). There is only so much testing you can do, and the public will do crazy things no test pilot would dare. Using an extra rotor should allow for redundancy (using four *should* work, but expect a lot of stress on the two motors besides the failed motors. Using five should let you rate the motors much closer to 1/5 the thrust you need. You still would have all the noise and efficiency issues, and likely not get much faster than land transportation for longer distances. PS: this is part of the point of my previous example upthread about using a "corvette engine in a cessna-massed airplane". You should be able to lower mass so that TWR>1.0, but if you try to maintain those power levels for very long, you will die (especially if the engine is the only thing holding the plane up, or possibly if you take the plane into flutter). That engine can pull hundreds of horsepower for long enough to frighten most owners into slowing down, but only tens of horsepower for hours on end (which might work well for a VTOL craft that could also act as a regular aircraft, assuming that the power wasn't abused). Presumably "hundreds of horsepower for hours on end" requires modifications at least as expensive as buying a flight-rated aircraft engine of similar power (and I suspect is close to where aircraft just upgrade to turbines).

Noise: The ascent/decent of a "flying car" is bound to be loud. This may be the issue that both kills the "flying car" (or more specifically, the personal VTOL craft) and makes the flying car a reality (because then you *have* to taxi several km to the designated takeoff/landing zones). I don't expect the rest of the noise issues to be significant (if they are a problem, fly higher). Energy: They almost certainly won't get the efficiency of a Prius. I'd expect them to get better efficiency than a Ford F-150 (the best selling vehicle in the USA). From what I can figure from the life cycle of cars and looking at things in terms of l/km (well, really gpm, but lets keep things metric) US vehicles should strive for 90% of a Prius' efficiency (that last bit seems to be bragging rights, but could very well be needed once the Saudi fields pump water). Risk: Right now, in the USA human controlled ground transportation is the single highest killer of children/teens and a major killer of those under 50 (and likely the biggest in industrialized countries outside of the US). Degrandfathering human control out of ground transportation appears impossible, but improved autopilots for air traffic don't appear unreasonable. In the long run you are probably wrong with this one. Energy: I'm guessing that the biggest issue of energy production (and thus consumption) is nucleophobia. The large unsolved issue with nuclear fission is the production of nuclear waste. Thus, compared to all other means of energy production, one form concentrates its pollution into a controllable means while the rest spew thiers forth hither and yon to the winds (and seas and ground). At some point we should ask ourselves if it is really all that much better to litter all your trash into the wilderness or simply collect it all in a trash can for disposal. And right now we should know the answer to that. It used to be said that "diffusion solves pollution", but that was before somebody checked the chemistry of those pollutants and demanded scrubbing, and then found out that the levels of CO2 were an issue when evenly dispersed across the entire globe. At some point we have to give up our bias for diffusion and understand that nuclear waste might be a better case of pollution and not a worse one. PS: don't even ask what Fukushima would have been like if the tsunami swept through the dozens of heaps of coal ash that would have been there without a nuclear reactor. Mass transit: Only works in areas where "everybody" wants to go to the same place, and preferably from the same place as well. This implies dense cities (and presumably fission reactors. I suppose you could have huge solar plantations out in rural areas and use high voltage lines to bring power in, but expect a ton of losses not included in usual expectations of a solar future. It also might work well if users kept "electric smart/kei/whatever" cars near the "work destination" to improve mobility (and reduce the feeling of lack of independence from the mass transit). Hydrogen: Launching stuff into orbit happens to be hydrogen's absolute best case. Its extreme light weight gives it a huge advantage over everything else. Now look up recent launches and check how many of them use hydrogen-oxygen (especially for more than just the last stage). Tell you something? That the weight issue (which is a tiny advantage to anyone else) doesn't overcome hydrogen's huge disadvantages? How about air transport? In aerospace mass is everything. Ok, in aircraft it isn't quite as overbearing as in space, but it is still huge: the latest big jets can takeoff with 55% or so of their weight in fuel (presumably UK-Down Under flights). Now try to buy hydrogen-powered aircraft. Remember, you should be able to double the available mass for tickets/cargo fees by using your favorite fuel (after lengthening the fuselage by a large multiple to carry all that hydrogen), but you still can't find one for sale. Now ask why anyone else who doesn't obsess over weight all day should be remotely willing to put up with the awfulness that is hydrogen? Medical/trauma transport: presumably this would be to lower the cost of helicopter transport and reduce the time that land based transport takes. Assuming an autopilot would throw a ton of political fuel into a fire that already has an overabundance (in the US) of political issues (pilots, drivers, and the entire helicopter business chain would suffer). There is also the question if cold sleep/hibernation might be a better solution to the "golden hour" problem than hurrying as fast as possible ("you aren't dead until you are warm and dead").

Are you claiming nothing changed between 1.0 and 1.1? Every time they add a part or change a calculation they are meddling with the sandbox. To me, career is just "sandbox with restrictions" (although that really isn't accurate in gameplay: sandbox won't tell you the value of recovered data and presumably other things players might be interested in. I'd recommend playing career starting with an unlimited money supply and enough money to unlock the tech tree over playing "sandbox").

First, my hate began in the VAB GUI and remains in the VAB GUI (and spaceplane GUI as well, but I don't make many of them). When HarvestR announced that he was fixing the GUI, I had great hopes. Alas, he "only" worked on the in-space GUI (which *is* vastly improved), but didn't get to the issues that makes it a crap shoot between building your rocket and tearing it apart. I think a lot of the issues people are now whining about came from people pushing unity 5.3 (well, unity is shipping 5.3, not sure which KSP uses), expecting all the lag to magically disappear. Oddly enough, a lot *did* disappear (and the game can even be played on 8 1.2GHz bobcat CPUs (i.e. PS4/XB1), don't even think about it with KSP <1.1) which was a lot more than I was hoping for (and I run on an "8 core" AMD job. Not exactly a single thread beast). I'm willing to believe that all these new bugs can be directly traceable to either the changes in unity itself or the changes made in the code to adapt to changes in unity. KSP just wasn't ready. Note: I can't say I've even noticed crashing in 1.1. I think I'd prefer crashing to what I've run into: saves that turn into insta-destruction (that were fine in the playthrough while saving), mysterious phantom torques that prevent docking, complete removal of critical bits of spacecraft (typically involving the command chair. Don't save in vehicles with a kerbal in the command chair), failure to display one of the spacecraft while docking (I think it was the one I was piloting. If I could see the intercept (and the time/distance) I could dock, but I can't recommend the procedure). I think those last two may have been leftover from 1.0.x) The other issues that get me are career mode. KSP is basically a sandbox game with a career mode tacked on. It feels natural it should have a career mode, but every change to sandbox throws huge wrenches into career, and career isn't all that good to begin with. I suspect that HarvesterR left because he got the sandbox to as far as his wildest vision could see (well, at least what he knew he and Squad could code) and knew he had to leave career for another. Unfortunately for his replacement, sandbox was never really designed with career in mind, so trying to shoehorn such a thing will be tough (although I assume this is common for "single player mode" in fps shooters). I'd suggest digging deep into the KSP community "campaigns" of old (disclosure, I started with them and found them ideal for learning KSP). Career mode forces you into artificially limiting* situations, while if you can't be bothered with a campaign's "nuke the koviets" (some sort of probe to hit another continent), there was nothing stopping you from going straight to the Mun (or better yet, Minmus. Career shouldn't be so insistent on Mun first). Summary: I have a burning hate for the VAB GUI and suspect that it will remain for as long as I play KSP. Unity and working around unity should eventually remove a lot of bugs. Career mode should get better, but don't hold out for any "quick fixes". I suspect that at some point they will have to declare sandbox "done" to really make career work. And most of sandboxes issues now appear to be bugs, not lack of features.