Codraroll

So much of our sci-fi, particularly in movies, revolves around good people getting up and close with the bad people. The parties that engage in a battle can't be farther apart than those that engage in conversation. What good is a battle if the good guy can't throw a quip at the bad guy during the action? As such, the ideal weapon in cinematic fights are swords or even fists. See the prequel trilogy of Star Wars, for instance, where sword fighters engage large armies of blaster-wielding robots and win handily. This might suit the storytelling medium a lot better, but it does give an unrealistic view on how battles are actually fought, and - to flip it around a little - it means we won't see realistic battles portrayed on screen very often. Has there even been a non-historical movie showing the effects of artillery in a battle? To believe the movies or even most video games, field battles are fought by running up to the enemy and shooting a rifle at them at a range no greater than the distance you can spit. I think my "favourite" example here is Starship Troopers, where a modern army of riflemen engage with huge, monstrous bugs - by getting within two meters of them and spraying them with hundreds of rounds of ammo while trying to avoid the bugs' dangerous claws. Meanwhile, a short clip halfway through the movie shows a few low-flying aircraft clearing an entire valley packed with bugs by dropping some cluster munitions - and then it's back to face-to-face infantry battles again. They clearly have effective weapons and effective tactics, but choose not to use either, because the screenwriters want it to be "personal". The same movie shows the bugs' claws easily piercing the armour worn by the human soldiers, which makes me wonder why they even bother to be encumbered with it in the first place. To tie this back to the question posed by the OP: Not only are plasma cannons useless, they may be totally irrelevant depending on the medium. What he fails to grasp through his endless torrent of question threads like this is that the needs of the story tends to come before the realities of hard science, that's why it's fiction. Every sci-fi story has to include a bit of magic, where the author assumes "this works, somehow". If everything described would work within the current understanding of physics, engineering, and economics, we could have built it already. If you want plasma cannons, use them. If you want plasma cannons that work, have them work your way. Or in other words: make assumptions and use them to tell your story. No need to spray new threads all over this subforum every other day because you've hit another snag in your writing process.

Are there any good let's plays of the career mode in Interstellar out there? I've watched (the entirety of!) Scott Manley's Interstellar series, of course, but it's from 2015 and a tad outdated compared to how the mod works nowadays. Because, well, KSP Interstellar is a little overwhelming to try to get into. You unlock your first reactor and a thermal nozzle, and wonder "what can I do with this?" Have you just revolutionized launches into orbit, can you now send a probe to Eeloo with ease, or wouldn't it be efficient to use it from anything smaller than an interplanetary mothership? Or do you need to unlock half a dozen nodes on the thermal management end of the tech tree to use it without blowing up your ship? Most resources I've found about the Interstellar pack delves deep into the nitty-gritty of the physics of the various reactors and nozzles, but do little to explain how you can use them in KSP. I'd really like to see a resource that shows, with practical examples, how one can use the various parts to assemble a functional spaceship and what you can expect from them. I find myself returning to standard LF+O chemical rockets from Stock, KW Rocketry or SpaceY, because I know how those work. With Interstellar, it's a little more difficult to find out what nodes to try to unlock, which parts you need for other parts to work well, or what the practical use (and limitations) of the various parts are. A resource that isn't overly technical in explaining the inner workings of the parts, but rather puts them into context of the KSP career mode, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance!

See, that's exactly the sort of advice I was looking for. Is there any sort of "How-to-KSP Interstellar" out there? Every resource seems to quickly bury itself in the nitty-gritty details about how the technology works, but not how it relates to the career mode gameplay of KSP. The Atomic Rockets website is great fun, of course, but I feel it goes in the opposite direction of what I'm looking for. I'm not looking for what sort of alloys would be needed to create an inertial fusion containment chamber or how xenon poisoning affects the power output of a nuclear reactor. I'd just like to know where to find a little bit of advice on what parts one should focus on unlocking, how to use them, and what to expect from them, within KSP. Not theoretical considerations about their inner workings in real life, which is what all guides on the subject seem to burrow into.

To clarify, that was what I did. I built a conventional, chemical rocket to send a nuclear-powered probe to orbit. Once I had a circular orbit of around 100 km, I disconnected the chemical stages, let the reactor take over, and ... pushed the probe into an elliptical orbit before running out of fuel. Given the size of the probe, I had kinda expected more. 450 m/s of Delta-v wasn't much when I could easily have gotten five times that out of a similiar-sized upper stage powered by a Poodle. Then again, I suppose I could have given it a bigger fuel tank. Maybe the power of nuclear engines is only really seen when building really big ships.

I think the critique is mostly there to downplay the fact that they've tried to build a successor to the Soyuz since the 1970s, but each attempt has been fruitless. So, like the kid who throws up his hands in math class and declares math to be stupid and useless anyway, they've decided that it's functionally impossible to build something better than Soyuz, and that all other spacecraft have dangerous flaws or design compromises that makes Soyuz superior in the long run. "We couldn't do it better, therefore it's perfection, and you will find that your attempts are flawed too, even if it looks like you've got something with twice the capability for half the cost. So there!"

I've been trying out this pack for a bit and have gotten far enough into a career to start unlocking things from the 500+ science nodes in the Community Tech Tree, which is where I guess the fun parts of this mod begin. However, I keep finding myself returning to chemical rockets time and time again, because, well, I really don't have an idea how to properly use the Interstellar stuff. For instance, I tried sending up a huge rocket with the Molten Salt Reactor, a big fuel tank, and the Krusader engine, and pretty much nothing else, and got a whooping 450 m/s of Delta-v. A chemical upper stage would have been half the size and given me ten times as much Dv, for one tenth of the cost. Obviously, I'm doing something wrong here. The parts list in my VAB is now full of tanks carrying all sorts of strange fuel types, but I don't know the advantages or drawbacks (or requirements/compatibility) of any of them, so I find myself sticking to what I know works: Liquid Fuel + Oxidizer, and engines from Stock, KW Rocketry, or SpaceY. I mean, Interstellar looks wonderful, but it's all so ... daunting. Is there any good documentation out there? A how-to or let's play that tells you when to use what, with some practical examples? Scott Manley's excellent LP was great in that regard, but the version he played seems pretty obsolete today. Most guides I've found gives an overview of how the parts work, but not how you should use them. Any help out there? Thanks a lot in advance!

If I recall correctly, some SpaceY parts interact quite strangely with the stock tech tree. You unlock the Quad Emu before the Emu, or something like that. Maybe that's the case for some of the fuel tanks as well.

I could see a scenario where a few hundred launches per year could be feasible or even necessary. It goes well into speculative fiction, however, and may not be entirely realistic, but entertain the idea for a second: Imagine if starship is as inexpensive to launch and recover as SpaceX is hoping for. Suddenly, the cost per kg to orbit becomes very low, and the rocket can carry large volumes as well. While the market is slow at first (as nobody has built any payloads of that size and mass yet - why would they, until now?), someone at NASA is quick to see the implications here and manages to sell a proposal to Congress about using this leg up on the market to cement the US' position in space for the foreseeable future. Plans to build the American Space Station, several times larger than the ISS while also several times cheaper, are approved with a quick schedule for construction. Gotta strike while the iron is hot, after all. It is not a capability the US will have to itself for long. As said, so done. Starship launches several huge modules to low Earth orbit, where teams of astronauts and robots assemble them together to form the largest space station the world has ever seen. Meanwhile, the Chinese are working hard on their own Starship version and announce grand plans for orbital construction as well. The US decides to press its advantage while it's still there. A bunch of universities pool their resources and seek the government for support, and before long another space station is under construction. After all, the know-how and manufacturing capabilities for space station modules have been developed, and now that the AmSS is complete, they have to choose whether to dismantle the operation or find new customers. The latter choice is made: Orbital University, a joint project between so many actors there aren't even room for all their logos on the hull. Universities all over the world bid for the opportunity to send somebody there on a two-week stint in their labs. Maybe other stations are built as well, even military ones. Having an astronaut training facility in orbit would be revolutionary for future, longer-distance missions, after all. For all this, Starship would mostly be used to tug modules and materials into orbit, with the crew launched on other launch vehicles (including SLS, because Congress gotta Congress), but now it takes the role as supply ship as well. Between the various stations, a three-digit number of people are in orbit at the same time, and hotel chains are beginning to contract modules as well. The launch cadence capability of the spaceports might be the limiting factors for how often they can launch at this point. Operating these stations is hellishly more expensive than the ISS ever was, but more value is added per dollar spent than before as well. A whole ecosystem of space companies join in on the fun as well. The mission control operations would quickly outgrow the capacity of Houston Space Center, for instance, so maybe another private company starts offering its services. For every astronaut in space one needs a large group of people on the ground, so this could be a sizable sector of the economy before long. Yet other companies may contract a Starship launch or two to send prospecting probes to promising asteroids. Probes not built at JPL or KSC, but at Harry's Spacecraft Shack in Smalltown, America. If, and it's admittedly a very big and uncertain if, Spaceship makes it feasible to send large payloads into low Earth orbit relatively cheaply and easily, all sorts of organizations would begin to build large payloads. That could trigger a gold rush, as every activity in space needs to be supported by dozens on the ground, and with economies of scale, those activities could be cheaper too. The problem right now is that everything space-related is prohibitively expensive, and so there are very few actors involved with it, and so it remains prohibitively expensive. But if the key operation became cheaper, it might clear the log jam and really propel us into that sci-fi future we've considered right around the corner since, well, Sputnik or so. As they probably said about every innovation in space technology since the early sixties: "If we can pull this one thing off, the road lies open". One day it might come true.

I'm having contract problems too. I got a contract to perform the Retrograde Quarks experiment in Kerbin orbit (thankfully not further away). I first launched a whole new research station with an experiment probe connected. Deployed everything, generated quarks, generated Eurecas, finalized the experiment, all that yadda yadda. Got the T-shirt and everything. I disconnected the probe, checked that the green tick mark for "Complete in orbit around Kerbin" was still there (as I see others have had this problem before), and it was. The experiment probe was safely landed a few kilometers offshore from the KSC. As it was bobbing up and down in the water, I once again checked for the green tick mark. Still there, all good. Now click "Recover vessel" ... ... and the contract isn't fulfilled. I got the science points from performing the experiment, but the contract did not complete. I tried sending up a new experiment probe, did everything again, had the green tick all the way until landing, but upon recovery it doesn't register. So far I've only tested this for Retrograde Quarks in Kerbin orbit. I see new contracts for performing the same experiment around the Mun and Minmus too. Come to think of it, I don't think I've seen contracts for any of the other Station Science experiments in this whole career. Is Retrograde Quarks bugged somehow? EDIT: I went into CKAN to try to force-update the mod, which instead simply removed it entirely. Now the whole station is gone, along with three brave Kerbals. Perhaps I shouldn't have done that. EDIT2: I re-installed the mod, and thankfully had a quicksave. Hadlan, Urke, and Kerlong are all safe!

Not so sure about that. In real life, somebody will probably tap you on the shoulder and give you a reminder if you design a parachute-dependent landing capsule without a parachute.

Read the replies by Sevenperforce. Either none at all, or it would rip apart Jupiter.

One of the Dragon capsules could be outfitted with just enough stuff to legally make it a space station. There must be some tax loophole or other that SpaceX could take advantage of by making one of those.

Isn't there always another backup date? I mean, it's that or abandon station, isn't it?

Dang, that's a scrub, isn't it?

What about reticulating splines? ... oh wait, wrong game.

Interesting reading for a while, but it sort of degenerated into incoherent screaming at the end.

Nah, the render shows the equivalent of those horse coach rides you can currently take in Central Park, between the glass-and-steel skyscrapers of Manhattan. A veteran vehicle shined up and/or recreated for tourists.

Solution: build a second space station orbiting in the plane of the TLI maneuver (assuming such a thing exists). After all, in this scenatio we've re-introduced the shuttles used to build it already.

It is a pretty cool rocket, all things considered. The problem is just that it's become rather expensive for what it does.

I think you would be much better off with a launch vehicle that carried the payload safely to low Earth orbit, where it could sit for a while waiting for another spacecraft to be launched (at its own leisurely pace) to rendezvous, dock and transfer in the safety of the vacuum and stable(-ish) orbits, and then afterwards boost itself to whatever orbit it wants to go to. Doing it the KSP way, in other words.

If you could come up with a way to turn your ceaseless rate of questions into a propulsion system, you would have a contraption so effective you'd never have to make another thread here again.

I just realized that the captains of the fairing recovery vessels have the completely opposite job of naval commanders: Every now and then, under certain circumstances, a state or non-state actor may find it upon themselves to launch rockets into the atmosphere. The rockets shed stages as they go. Very high up, pieces separate from the tip of the rocket and fall back to earth. The job of the captains is to know precisely where those bits are going to fall down, and to ensure that their ship is placed directly where the impact happens.

Not all of which would be needed to solve at once, though. I think there already is a market to be tapped into there, given a cheap enough way to get a spacecraft up: prospecting. Sending a bunch of probes to various promising rocks and having a good look at what they're made of. Then build a database, and sell the data at exorbitant prices to the guys who are developing spaceborne excavators. Each company would then need to develop less tech and carry a smaller risk. If you have good prospecting data, you can make money even if there is no excavator. If you're building an excavator, you can use the prospecting data to know where to send it. It's probably a process that can be broken down further too. Say your little rocket company develops a great space tug that can take a decently-sized payload from Earth orbit to the asteroids. The prospecting companies would love to use your services to get their ground-penetrating radars to the most promising rocks. You're making money without having to deal with the hassle of mission control. They might even have bought the radars from somebody else, who specialize in geological survey equipment but don't want to run their own space mission. The prospecting company would have the probe assembled by another company with a clean room. Mission control services could probably be contracted as well. The challenge with space is that a lot of tech development and a bunch of lengthy processes with various required expertise is needed to do things. It's expensive as heck. But given easier access to space, the challenge can be split into many fragments, each small enough that the required tech development, infrastructure and expertise is manageable for a single company, lowering the risk far enough that it doesn't take a lot for the venture to become profitable. You wouldn't need to build a whole space program to get anything done, but buy the services off somebody else and add your own special ingredient to create a unique product. Most involved companies wouldn't run their own missions, but deliver a product or service to be used by somebody else. Put another way: It would be impossible to run a profitable taxicab company if you had to build cars and lay down roads.

Well, I would say that if a patient were to breathe an inert gas at close to boiling temperatures for a quarter of an hour, the chance that they will die of the coronavirus becomes extremely slim.

Plausible, yes, that's the case for many of the listed examples. But there's a fair long way to go from "plausible as a concept" to "operational on the battlefield right now", and the Russian ministry of defense tends to mean the former when they claim the latter.