Hotel26

"Don't ask. Don't tell." Oh the disappointment to learn this! I am taking the rest of the day off... @Kerbart @adsii1970 and yet it gets worse. We're not really here? I need to go lie down. Or never take another shower again... (After all, why should I: this sweat and grime is merely illusory?)

Smart people who go into trades often end up running small businesses of their own, employing other tradies, and then doing very well for themselves. Nothing to sniff at.

Shades of Gimli glider...

So I dummied up the following, Kometeer, without knowing exactly which parts you can use. The main feature is the staggering of the panels. You can point directly at or away from the sun and they will all receive 100% without shadowing each other. When the panel axis needs to be pointed at the sun, you simply rotate the craft 180 degrees longitudinally and you are back in business. That longitudinal rotation will give you 100% solar exposure at any[tm] attitude. At Kerbin's altitude, out in deep space, the panels will run the Dawn continuously. (This is why I, in general, like RTGs or fuel cells: they will work at Eeloo and during the night.) Looks like this has 17+ km/s dV. And you can launch it within a fairing. You may need an antenna for science and some way to get the kerb back to Kerba Firma. Part List: lawn chair (kerbal lying on its back) facing prograde Z-200 battery 5x PB-X150 6x OX-4L small RW Dawn ion engine

The answer to your question, in general, is yes for fuel cells. (But probably not for your comet application.) NB: The fuel cells, btw, have some battery capacity themselves. Terrapin Terrapin is a useful final or penultimate drive stage for medium-light interplanetary payloads. It is e.g. featured in my Scout mission vehicle. By itself, 6+ km/sec dV and 0.98 m/s acceleration. Don’t forget to activate the fuel cell arrays to power it!! In general, peruse my hangar: Mighty Ion P.S. I see I used Terrapin as the final propulsion stage in an unpublished work named Kontiki, a 7-kerb craft.

Hearty congratulations!! But that is not why I am here today... I am here today to announce: Our very first landing on Pol! We had over 3 km/s dV remaining after Jool capture, but there was Pol, orbiting right there mighty purty and, being oil men, we looked at each other in Mission Control, exclaimed "Let's Do It!" and high-fived. And Here We Be!!! Dang. ...14.08% Brent crude... Light & sweet! (628,000 kallons to be refined before lift-off!) Champagne time! (This is nearly 9 years after I was introduced to KSP: Dec 2014...)

Certainly true in the West for non-scientific reasons. "China plans to build as many as thirty nuclear power reactors in countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative by 2030." "Advanced pressurized water reactors such as the Hualong One are the mainstream technology in the near future, and the Hualong One is also planned to be exported." And, no doubt, financed. Consider any country that is a) developing with determination, b) low on population, c) stable geologically, and d) has plentiful water (e.g. large lakes). Start a candidate search with e.g. the Stans... Don't be surprised if other countries begin making the scientific and economic determination that nuclear power is both safe and economic. YMMV.

Split the difference then: keep it on Earth and power it with nuke. That would be the scientific solution.

I always find Map View image posts, such as this below, rather inscrutable to read, so I'll simply point out the salient points, after a narrative. JB14a Jool Beep is a small pod of 3x RA-2 relays that has arrived in the Jolian system in an unfortunate 174-degree inclination. I played a little with gravity assists but playing chicken running at high-speed in reverse is pretty scary (and futile). After adjusting inclination to a bold 180 degrees, I lucked into a low perijo with an apojo matching the lugubrious Pol. Moving backward so slowly at Pol's alittude that it's inclination in the Pol SoI would be 'easterly'. Yay. What the orbital speed will be at peripol will be announced by Mission Control whenever we get there. (And, of course, my mathematical intuition is warning me that I may be interpreting the "polarity" of the Focus View schematic wrongly.) OK, so actually, you can skip the details in the image! With my luck holding up, an Atlas III miner showed up shortly after and this vehicle just happened to have a perijo close to Pol's altitude and that got me thinking about establishing a mining station at Pol to assist with a) rescue of distressed orphan flights and b) Minmus-style departures(? almost certainly a very bad idea). Call it an outpost then rather than a station. And this has all stimulated some review of my harmonic GEO (Gilly-Eve Orbit) plan to have successive fuel depots periodically visit the vicinity of Gilly for fuel transfer/distribution to LEO. But it has now dawned on me that direct transfer to Gilly from LEO has very much the same (easy) solution equivalent to MKO: the Minmus-Kerbin loop for rendez-vous. A number of rows of my mental Tetris puzzle thus just collapsed in on themselves. Nice.

That's true with Super Heavy, isn't it, as I can't conceive of that object ever touching down on a barge at sea, even nearly empty.

A Pol refinery/rescue outpost -- for distressed ships entering the Jolian system? AP: 210Mm PE: 149Mm INC: 4.25d PER: 42d The only disadvantage I see is that rendez-vous times might tend extreme. I know that the right answer is to "just get it right[tm]", but: what to do with all those miss-putts...? What is illuminating is that I had never contemplated any use at all for Pol and Bop. (Lower on the scale than Dres, if that's possible!)

From a KSP point of view (knowing nothing and caring little about real life), I think delaying the flip until Starship has gained some decent separation (exhaust-wise) and then performing a much slower flip before full burn-back thrust is applied, ought to be considered. So I can see some motivation to go faster (including being 'flashy'). If it meant beefing up some RCS control on the booster. I can also imagine the usage of small, 'reserve' tanks that are kept full until the flip to avoid ullage problems. The first two interesting issues might be a) how quickly the turbines slow down, b) how fast a flip could they actually withstand, c) what the atmospheric density is at flip altitude and what is required to prevent going 'unstable' during a slower flip. In any case, responding to AckSed above, way, way, too early to think about giving up, especially as the hot-staging concept itself has now been demonstrated. Mmm, nope. You'd (both) be completely throwing out the whole economic model of SpaceX, the sine qua non.

I'm in. I'll take the blue pill, please.

3) Earth is in the Goldilocks[1] zone.

Only the obvious implication that this too is NOT modeled. It does seem that, during the average 12 hours a day of sunlight, albedo cutting 50% of incoming solar energy would be far more significant an effect comparatively than that of terrestrial radiation, even over a 24 hour period. Otherwise, we'd have a constantly-warming earth, with constant cloud cover, and runaway temperatures. Yes? I do remember in the video some views from space of the planet, showing great patches of cloud cover somewhere over the vast expanse of our oceans (very bright, very white).

He was the grandson of TH Huxley, a protege of Charles Darwin (known as "Darwin's bulldog") and an active supporter of Malthusian ideas on population control. Another grandson of TH Huxley, Aldous Huxley, is most famous for his 1932 novel, Brave New World. [Not a topic for this forum.]

Nobel Laureate John Clauser: Climate Models Miss One Key Variable (also on Apple Podcasts) (both audio only) (original video episode at American Thought Leaders, but behind a pay-wall.) I saw this on American Thought Leaders when this interview first came out in early September(?) but the video was behind a paywall and I couldn't share it easily. The summary is that Clauser claims that the IPCC has a collection of ~40 models that all work only part of the time and generally do not agree with each other much of the time. NONE of them work with cloud cover: that is to say that they all omit cloud cover as a variable, and assume clear skies. Clauser, a physicist (quantum entanglement) and a sailor who has crossed the Atlantic, noticed that cloud cover cuts energy input to the surface by 50% (out in the Atlantic on the open ocean). Noting also that more than 60% of the Earth's surface is ocean, he thinks of the global weather system with cloud formation as a gigantic planetary thermostat (paraphrase). Greater temperature causes increased evaporation and humidity and cloud cover, reducing retained energy input from the Sun, causing coolling as positive feedback. His conclusion has been that miniscule anthropogenic inputs to our global system are well within the ability of nature to compensate. The above is by far the best interview with Clauser after he made his recent public statements. (As I recall, he received his Nobel Prize in 2022, and was then safe to state his mind in 2023.)

the acceleration on all 3 (car, warship and person) is identical. The force applied is greater for the warship than the vehicle (proportional to mass of each) -- and, in each case, a small component of the force applied to/by the car and vehicle is transmitted to the person, in proportion to the mass of the person. Actually, no, and one has to understand now the term "G-force". [The first two terms (mass, 'stress') are related, but not the third, when acceleration is the same: "same turn, same speed".] So assuming that the "same turn, same speed" is constant, but we are increasing the mass of the vehicle -- and considering F = m . a -- same turn/speed requires the same acceleration, so F (force) will have to increase linearly with m (mass). The force applied to the person will be the same, because the person's mass is still the same. Because it is hard for a person to think in terms of the acceleration applied, and because they feel this as heaviness or weight, especially in the common case of fighter pilots or F1 drivers, the standard, useful comparison is by weight and this is not only related to your mass but also the Earth's gravitational field. It's only a comparison and the G-force you mention is not in this case nor usually due to gravitational force. Gravitational force is the pull of the Earth or any body with significant mass, but G-force is expressed as an acceleration, e.g. 9.8 meters per second per second, which has the mass factored out and is just a standard acceleration. Maybe this will help. A conventional airplane flying level at constand speed in a 30-degree bank will execute a standard Rate-1 turn (180 degrees in 1 minute). "G force" will feel slightly higher than in straight & level flight. In a 60-degree bank, G-force will be 2 G's and be very noticeable. This is a Rate 2 turn (360 degrees per minute). You will find this very noticeable! And this does not depend upon your weight on the bathroom scales or the type of equipment. There is technically a gravitational force, but whenever you usually hear the term G-force, it will be referring to the acceleration applied -- not only by gravity -- but very often any kind of acceleration being measured by this useful yardstick. it is often abbreviated to "G's", which is maybe less confusing.

I can't remember the last time I lost BOTH stages... Uh, RSS, OK...

Uh, this is crazy stuff. I have to Endorse this... +10

Just a bit too aggressive with the aero-braking, descending from GKO (Geosynchronous Kerbin Orbit, for a (missed) return to KSC, after depositing a geosync spy cubesat...

Quite so. I recommend this great article: Getting Started with Kerbal Konstructs by @Caerfinon

I was able to land my X-37B impression on the Mun at Armstrong Base. The attempt to relaunch it: was madly successful:

Thank you indeed for your post. I got all inspired and did an impressionist (not replica!) version, OTV-37, and have been having a lot of fun with it. It has a small equipment bay and I'm thinking I might be able to jimmy some SCANsat instrumentation in there (but probably not); and I'm about to send one to the Mun and attempt a landing and return from there. For no obvious logical reason. It is fun, anyway, to have up in a 60-degree orbit and then pick an airport to attempt to bring it back to. [I now return you to your SpaceX live feed.]

I'm not a nitpicker, nor a nitpicker's son, yet I'll be a nit-picking simulacrum until a nitpicker comes. There! I used the word simulacrum in a meaningful sentence...