Nightside

My thinking is that the F9 system would lose too much payload capacity after adding all the new shielding and landing hardware.

Would you also end up with a giant battery?

Well this sixth planet is crossed off, so we know its not that one. Also, the antenna is pointing at Earth. What are the gray line/dashes? ------------------------------------------ Best scam ever? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nigerian-astronaut-lost-in-space/

Looks good!

Is that to scale with the lunar rover and astronaut figures? How does “Artemis Discussion Thread” sound?

Sounds like another Elon bitcoin scam to me

Has anyone ever even said they've even a ticket? Do customers sign an NDA?

Great photos, very dramatic lighting.

Axial thrust isn’t really the limitation, it is oscillations between structures. Of particular concern is a situation where oscillations resonate with the natural frequency of a structure. The force applied does not need to be large enough to destroy the structure all at once. Resonant oscillations are the trouble maker. A building (or other structure) can be considered as a lollipop, a mass on a stiff spring attached to the ground. If the ground is accelerated in a single burst, the mass will oscillate with a frequency that is defined by its mass, the length of the spring and the stiffness of the spring, this is its natural frequency. Of course earthquakes don't come as a single burst, but as waves, and waves have a frequency. If this frequency is close to the natural frequency of a structure, then the structure will get pushed further and further over with each wave, eventually this is what will topple buildings. Since most structures in a region may be made of similar materials, height is the main differentiating factor. A given earthquake may have a frequency that topples only midrise buildings, but leaves homes and skyscrapers unscathed. Because of their sized and cost, skyscrapers and other large buildings are designed to have a natural resonance outside of the expected earthquake accelerations, for extreme cases like Tapei 101 (built on a fault system) they will even something like a Tuned Mass Damper to reduce the shaking in the upper floors. For a spacecraft, the driving oscillations (from an engine) should be easier to study and determine, but the natural frequency of the structure could change over different mission profiles and combinations of different spacecraft docked to each other. All of which is to say that mass (and placement thereof) definitely matter, but also that these are issues that are probably addressed on all spacecraft that have propulsion, especially those with large solar trusses and antenna arrays.

This may be true...

Well they have been building 3 huge prototypes...

He was quoting Blade Runner.

asteroids and ring ice would be a good source of water for props.

But Mars is still a ways off. A Dragon ferry would allow manned Starship missions in the local Earth-Moon neighborhood while giving them experience.

Might be the way to deorbit passengers too, if there is no abort system forthcoming. Makes a lot of sense, as lifting reentry seems so much riskier.

The orbit would have to remain outside the event horizon though, right?

Everyone is assuming that the failure rate has been low, because spacecraft typically have a low failure rate. But this is a new age of cheap access to space. (Especially cheap if the launcher company = payload company.) Because access is cheap, there is no need to build quadruple-redundant spacecraft that can operate for decades. Instead, launch thousands, and hope that ~90% work well enough. This is mass production (for comparison, iphones had a failure rate of 3-22% in the last 2 years). For Starlink, the redundancy is in the shear number of pieces in the system. There is no way that all 60 of the first batch of Starlinks received the same care and technical oversight that a GPS, KH, or NASA probe gets. In addition to Starlink and the 2 other similar systems planned, it is access is now cheap enough to send all sorts of art projects, space urns, university projects, tech demonstrations, etc - will all these be controlled and tracked as a communication network? I don't think so. What if neither sat has control?

Those pictures are... not very good. what are we looking at?

That would make a good dynamics problem.

@Snark, thanks for your efforts! I made it through most of the thread so hopefully these are new Qs. - Will planetary exploration still be “biome” focused? If so, Will they come up with a better word than biome? - Will the ground be deformable? Will Jeb make a crater when he augers in?

DX11 support for KSP 1.8? Great news! Somebody better make sure @Shadowmage hasn't fainted!

A physical model? Or digital? Are you doing this from a youtube screenshot? How detailed are you trying to get? You can grab free digital elevation maps for most of the earth's surface, however the resolution varies depending on the location. In North America (where I live and keep my stuff) you can often find free 3m resolution elevation data, elsewhere in the world you may only be able to find the SRTM data (30m resolution). If you don't actually need (or want) super-high resolution, check out Terrain.Party , a site for making custom gamemaps for Cities:Skylines. Also the file sizes are small and it draws from the best quality data for a given area. Based on your current method, this will probably be much easier . These elevation maps are greyscale image files with elevations represented as shades of grey between 0-255, (black-white) with a known low point and high point. You may need to convert ft/m. But if you want good accuracy and have good data, you will probably have to use a GIS. QGIS is a great opensource GIS program. Use Google Earth for spot checking. Let me know if you have other questions.

They shoulda aimed for a flagpole.

I’m at work so I can’t quite figure out what that video is about. Dymaxion map projections? I work with elevation maps a lot and have played around bringing real topography into KSP (see my Mahia Launch Complex, for example). What is your goal?

It’s a bit hard to find but MJ does let you change window size, color, transparency as well as customize content.