cubinator

Another exercize exercize excersize exersize ecsersize exercise in overzealous orbital maneuvering today as the first crew of CLOUD ONE were finally launched in two different landers on one lifter! The two landers will make their way to the space station and dock individually, and the twenty Kerbals will make preparations for the jump to Duna. Yes, I said Duna! Due to the fact that we are literally scraping the bottom of the fund barrel (which is quite real, it's an old oxygen tank where we dump our money), there isn't enough money to launch any more fun stuff to attach to CLOUD ONE just yet. HOWEVER, we did manage to scrape up enough cash to throw those two very capable landers on there (though the orientation control system has proven to require regular whacks to keep working...) and we are going to fly it to Duna to cash out on a few old bets. That should net enough new Funds to launch some more parts to the station, including some new stuff that I've decided might be necessary. Here's what we're planning on shipping to Jool on this thing: Propulsion Section A cluster of nuclear rockets and a few huge fuel tanks. This will get our rocket going like a train! (That means slow acceleration but fast speed.) Cool Truss Trusses make any space station look cool. These trusses have lots of radio dishes on them, which looks super cool. Engineers also added that besides being cool, they also provide communications for the station which is nice. The communications also make lots of really cool green lines in the map consoles. The truss also has docking ports so we can add more things onto the station later! Habitation Section The habitation section consists of a ring in four sections and a core section. It has space for 80 Kerbals and there is a pool table. Cargo Landers These cool landers are also very useful. They have docking ports on the bottom, which means they can carry big stuff like base sections down to a moon or planet's surface. They have lots of delta-V on their own and can take up to 10 Kerbals on a ride. Big Lander The Big Lander's design is not fully finalized yet, but it is needed for landing on big worlds like Tylo and maybe Laythe. It will go near the back of CLOUD ONE. Airplanes? Maybe a space plane would be a better lander for Laythe. It's hard to make one that can transport more than a dime, though, so we might stick to stick ships. Tiny Probes Tiny Probes can do lots of useful stuff. There are already a lot of probes on the station that are used for moving modules around. Other probes might have science equipment to land on moons remotely, small comms relays, and big ion engines and claws for moving asteroids around. Convert-O-Tron It would be wise to have a way of manufacturing fuel in space. I want to add this capability to CLOUD ONE, but it might not happen right away. It might have to be shipped to Jool on a future flight. https://imgur.com/a/4QyHrAv

Duna is destroyed by a massive laser and reduced to an asteroid field, Laythe crashes into Tylo, and Bop becomes a moonmoon of the new Laylo. /s

Heh. How typical.

I'm replaying Half Life 2 after going through Alyx. But when I get to Episode 2, I'm definitely doing a Gnome Run. (For those that don't know, there is a little garden gnome in the first level and you have to carry it with you all the way to the end of the game and launch it into space.)

I suppose they'll eventually do hop tests with the Superheavy booster as well.

Yeah, this comet that will loop right by the Sun closer than Mercury, probably disintegrate, and then swing away in the opposite direction from Earth? Sure that's the one. They pick up this same story on practically every little pebble that comes within 1 AU of here. It's hard to read any news article about an asteroid that isn't a forum post by an astronomer. By the way, make sure to invest in toilet paper when Apophis comes for a visit in nine years.

Some new discoveries about Jupiter's magnetic field in the 1970s led scientists to realize that passing through it would fry electronics on the upcoming Voyager space probes. The probes were scheduled to be shipped to the Cape, and there wasn't time to come up with a neat solution...The engineers headed to the local supermarket and bought all the aluminum foil they could, washed it in sterilizing solution, and covered all the sensitive electronics in the probes, successfully protecting them from Jupiter's powerful magnetic field.

Measurements of it's path across the sky, I suppose. It's mentioned here and here. Here's a paper on the 1844 comet. Orbital elements are on the last page.

It shares an orbit with the Great Comet of 1844, which means it might be a fragment of the same original comet.

I started Half Life Alyx today. It's good! I got through the part where it's dark. In VR. You can imagine what that was like.

9^2+9 bottles of beer on the wall 9^2+9 bottles of beer take one down, n=n-1; eighty-nine bottles of beer on the wall

I think it's possible to lock planets in place in Universe Sandbox. You could simulate an approximate cylindrical planet by placing many planets in a line and throwing moons about.

That's the Saturn 1 though, a much smaller rocket than the Saturn V. I wasn't able to find anything about Saturn V baffles. I know there were ullage motors on the third stage.

Well, you could have an infinite cylindrical mass and have a moon orbit around it in a spiral. I think a finite cylinder would just cause the moon to be ejected once it reached the end. Here's something really fun though: toroidal planets. A donut planet would theoretically be gravitationally stable, if you could get it to form in the first place (basically, you spin it up so fast that the centripetal force balances out gravity and you essentially form the planet in its own GEO) and it gives rise to some interesting properties, which I coincidentally explored with friends in college late at night on the back of an actual napkin. Here's what we came up with. But first, a visualization: This planet has a small moon which orbits in a figure-eight around the hole of the donut, seen in the third illustration. You could also have a moon in an "orbit" that just goes up and down through the middle of the hole. Both of these options are probably quite unstable. Some other interesting things about the donut planet that aren't explicitly related to orbits: Mapping is nice. Not only does the left side cross onto the right on a rectangular map, but the top and bottom are connected too! There's still some distortion around the edges, but you can get around that by having separate maps of the outer and inner regions. The outside and the inside of the donut, which we named the Outer and Inner Circles, respectively, have some distinguishing properties. They are separated by the North and South Circles, which are analogous to Earth's poles except that they are long loops instead of spots. Seasons and daylight on the Outer Circle work just like they do on a sphere (for reference, we decided to give this planet about 45* axial tilt, you'll see why it needs more than Earth in a moment). Crossing over to the Inner Circle, though, we encounter some very odd changes. First of all, timezones are phase-shifted by half a day! So you'll have to change your clocks by 12 hours going over the poles. Nighttime occurs when the Sun is behind the ground, but a lot of the ground is actually in the sky now! That's problematic because if the planet has low axial tilt, most of the Inner Circle won't ever get any sunlight! This is why we gave the planet high axial tilt. The Inner Circle is still in darkness during the spring and fall equinoxes, and thus is likely much colder than the Outer Circle. Of course, when you're in the Inner Circle you can see the other side of the donut hole above you. The horizon actually has negative curvature when you're looking to the equator, and positive curvature when looking to the poles! During nighttime you can see the part of the Inner Circle that's in daylight above you, so most of the time the night is quite bright. This effect is even noticeable in the Outer Circle. The polar radius of the planet is quite small, even smaller than Earth, but the equatorial radius is enormous. Thus, if you're standing on a mountain looking around on a clear day, you'll be able to see extremely far in the equatorial directions, but a very short distance in the polar ones. Standing on the inner edge of the poles, you'd be able to see that walking longitudinally you'd go in a big circle.