Buster Charlie

This is more a Ckan issue but I hope it can be addressed. Is there a way to set it's dependency for firespitter core instead of the whole firespitter mod. I really want to use these engines but don't wish to have all the extra firespitter parts loaded in my game.

I feel documenting the reentry might be useful insofar comparing projected failure of parts vs real life. Not that we expect to survive reentry, but how our material modeling stacks up to real life. Kinda like how they model new aircraft performance in a computer, but they still load a real physical one with strain gauges and bend the wings and other strains to verify it. Except on the ISS, you can't do destructive testing, until you're ready to destroy it. Why is this useful? Because if something lasts longer, or not as long. It gives us an extra data point to check our assumptions.

Not really answering my own question, but I found the most reliable way to launch to rondevouez with mech Jeb, because it sometimes needs a few dummy launches to figure out a ships profile, is this: Launch to rondevouez with a slightly higher orbit (say my station is 150k, I launch to 160k) then once launch guidance gets to apogee I cancel autopilot. If all goes well either the ascending intersection or the descending intersection should be close enough to engage rendezvous autopilot. This way it directly engages fine tune closest approach and match velocities at closest approach without needing to orbit do a true Hoffman transfer. Seems to be pretty fast and reliable.

Although, I bet a system could be engineered to which the cameras would be hardened and transmit to a black box with solid state memory (sorta how they recovered the Columbia video? right?) The black box would be designed to survive rentry and impact, we've done this before, and then and this is the key part... You either need to have a way to locate them with a radio signal after the impact, or you need a way for them to deploy floats that would survive impact and come to the surface? I'm not saying it's easy, Like Kennedy said.. "It's HARD".

Not if it defeats the purpose of the station in the first place. Long winded answer: If you build a cruise liner, and the only way Russia would pay for 10% of the Cruise liner was to put it in a lake, it would make it pretty useless as a cruise liner. And then you say "Ah ha, but only Russia has a tug that can load passengers onto the cruise liner so it's actually good!"

Fair point, I don't feel it's too political. I guess my point was it's easier to spend money on something when you don't feel it has any consequences, this is why certain radio financial advisers tell people to use cash vs a credit card, a credit card makes it to easy to get into debt. So you want to buy that big screen TV, are you more likely to do it if all you need to do is swipe a card and deal with it when the bill comes vs pull out a fist full of $20 or $100 bill and hand them over. So that is the essence of my argument, it's easy to say "Sure let's do it" when it has no consequences. If we have nothing to show for it, then it was a waste of money and we should cut our losses. If we can say we gained a huge amount of data on micro-gravity and human space habitation, then even if the machine is destroyed the knowledge gained from it is not lost. Same can be said about the Apollo Program, there are pieces of the Saturn V Apollo rocket that are lost forever, but all the info, experience, and gains are still with us. We don't need to bring back the Apollo 11 Landing stage to make Apollo 11 worthwhile. My understanding is the ISS is essentially squandered due to politics, the original idea of using it to stage deep space flight was killed when we put it at such high inclination, and the only reason we put it at that inclination was due to the Russians paying for a tiny percentage of it (they needed that inclination to reach it easily). Eh.

I'm having some issues with them not firing, they're armed and blue i'm facing the right direction. I can fire them manually. I test fired them above the launch pad before I launched and they worked. Now on reentry, they're not firing, i'm splashing down in the ocean, so they not work properly over water? EDIT: I used hyperedit to shove the same craft a little to the north so it would land on the ground, and the rockets fired as expected. So at least on my install, they don't seem to fire above water, only land? Edit: apparently this is known issue, I don't remember reading about this in the OP maybe I just need glasses.

I know that RAMBLING ALERT: I read a little bit about the last years of the MIR, and I understood then why they let it die. When I was younger when it deorbited I was like "Oh man what a waste" but doing some further reading made me realize it's probably for the best. As they say that's the nature of space flight, As Kennedy said "It's hard". I want people to think about the reality of money in this regard. Some people say we should spend $0 on space flight 'because we got problems on earth', I disagree with that logic for many reasons. However while I support human space flight, I used the "Fix the American flag" as a extreme example to drive home a point. As an American I would in fact like our bleached white american flag (I do wonder if the side facing the dirt would have any color, or would it be bleached too by general radiation exposure vs just UV exposure?) to not be laying in the dirt on the moon. However It would be an incredible waste of human life to do so. That's what people need to think about when they talk about recovering the ISS. Money is an abstraction of human labor or creativity and the value we put on that. When Tax dollars go to space flight it's essentially either taking by threat of violence people's money, or more realistically asking peoples children, grandchildren, or yet unborn generations to pay for it at the threat of violence. So in general when I advocate human space flight, I always try to keep in mind just what a "billion" dollars really means. People only live so long, they only pay so much taxes before they retired or die, that is money they don't get to spend on themselves. That represents a percentage of their precious life. If Elon musk said "I want to spend my own money to recover the ISS intact! I'm going to build a heatsheild 200m diameter and a parachute 100km across!", at least the manufacturer of that heat shield and parachute would be paying employees some good money to build it. But the point is, if he earned that money lawfully he has the right to blow it on a completely sentimental endeavor. If Senator So and So From Such and Such state wants to do the same, he's essentially asking everyone else to pay for it, against their will at no immediate risk to his own lifestyle. I hope this isn't considered too 'political'. I'm just saying that besides the technological aspect of "can we do it" you should also be asking if it's ethical to do it? The Moon landing may have been symbolic and a big 'waste of money' to some, but at least you can point at specific developments that came out of it. And also, I doubt you'd have found many Americans alive during the Apollo 11 landing that would be mad at their tax burden in regards to an achievement such as that, but I can't cite a source so that's just my opinion. Contrast the achievement of sending a man to another world (no matter how close, how small, or how boring that world is) vs trying to bring back a man made object from LEO? We know it can be done, it's just very very very expensive, so what is the achievement in "borrowing money to spend it to prove we can spend money"? So if we did send a Moon lander back to the moon to set up a base, or as a dry run for mars, then that serves a purpose. And if along the way they fixed the American Flag, that's a bonus. But sending a mission just to fix the flag is theft and abuse of power. So would it be nice to have the most expensive human creation in the Smithsonian? YES. Would it be worth essentially squandering an unimaginaiable amount of human effort to pay for it? NOT IMHO. And that's the kicker, the ISS isn't expensive because it's particularly expensive because it's some amazing construct. The Large Hadron Collider aparently cost $13.25 Billion, I bet if you tried to build it in space it would cost $132.5 billion (pulled that number out of somewhere). So if the significance of the ISS is that it's an ordinary construct that exists in an extraordinarily expensive place to build things, and requires expensive Inspection and certification for safety reasons.... Well then we could build a log cabin in space, it would cost a few billion, and we could bring it back to earth for a few more billion, put it in the smithsonian and say "This log cabin was in space" and nobody would be able to tell the difference. Fun fact, the Wright flyer at the smithsonian isn't even the actual working aircraft, they crated it up for the transport, and they lost some parts and probably mis-assembled some parts, and the result is the Wright flyer at the smithsonian is made of the parts of the Wright flyer, but isn't actually the wright flyer. So if we built a time machine, and it costs $500 billion to use the time machine, would it be worth $500 billion to go back in time, and recover the working wright flyer and put it in the smithsonian? I'm so full of it, i'm sorry, it's the coffee...

You know the Apollo 11 flag got knocked over during lunar ascent, why don't we spend a trillion dollars to go fix that? That would be so cool.

In event of heat death of the universe, how will I submit bug reports?

So a while back there was a mod showcases that could upgrade parts. This had given me an idea that I don't think would be any harder to implement than that or even tweaks calendar. What is safety factor, off the top of my head I'd say it's building parts much stronger than they need to be in order to lower the chance of RUD. What could be more kerb all than throwing this out the window? So imagine if you could select a part and move a slider to adjust the safety factor. So say 0 to 100, 50 is stock. The lower the safety factor, the lighter weight the part is (this is a good thing) and maybe it's even a tad cheaper. But this also lowers it's impact tolerance, and heat resistance. There are other things it could effect, node strength, but that's all messy details. The inverse is true ,you can over engineer a part to have a higher temperature and crash resistance, but this causes it's weight to go up, and possibly cost. Thoughts?

I didn't realize the engine could switch on the fly between monopropellant and LG. This certainly adds a great backup fuel supply. I was not aware and now I am!

Let's put this another way. Why is NASA spread all over the US? Is it because Florida is the best spot for launches, Texas is the best spot for mission Control, we'll do a little in bit Mississippi? Anyone who knows anything about politics knows the corrupt horse trading that leads to these deicisions. Now in the case of SpaceX, they're constrained by cost more than NASA, but they're not crippled by being seen as a jobs program for Congress. So maybe Texas gave them a sweetheart deal, but ultimately they would choose the best launch site location they could afford.

I wasn't specifically criticizing you, I don't think your question is stupid, it's not like you suggested cutting a hole in the barge "for the rocket to slide into"(seriously). I'm just saying sometimes there is info the layperson can't even speculate at because the info is not available. I'm going on the assumption this is a privately owned ego project for Elon Musk and he's not going to deliberately tank the company. So as to the how wise it is your do this, I'm not sure anyone outside of space x really can say for sure without sounding like those TV news reporters who make up stuff to fill air time. I'm talking about Falcon 9 first stage landing, not the Dragonly. Quick Wikipedia says 9,300 pounds dry weight for dragon , I think the estimated landing mass of the first stage is around 55,000 lbs or so. Someone did a hilarious breakdown on slowing it down by parachutes, it gets out of hand real fast because you need to slow it down enough it won't collapse on impact. Which is why the souyuz has SRB to cushion the parachute landings. But specifically, I've done some fairly good reading in the subject, and found a lot of my assumptions were wrong and I don't think I'm stupid for asking quesitons. I however never said anything like "man space x is stupid, just use parachutes". Which again nobody here has said that, but I've read a lot of comments like that and it makes me shake my head and cry with sadness.

I love all the Internet rocket scientist saying what space x should do. I've heard "they should shold just use parachutes ", and "they need a big tube in the drone ship that the rocket can slip into" (seriously). So I'm operating from the presumption that Elon Musk has more insight into the internal workings of space X than are available to the public, and that they have a lot of dedicated and specialized smart folks who have looked at "obviously better ideas" people like you chastise them for not doing. Seriously it is hilarious how many people suggest parachutes.