Ol’ Musky Boi

Robotics? Sadly looks at all of my stock bearing craft, with the knowledge that they are now redundant technology. Seriously, this DLC looks bloomin brilliant, I'm so pumped to buy it!

Thanks! I figured it'd look nice on a Jool-5 mothership.

I saw someone use the narrowband scanners to power a bearing once (can't remember where), so I thought I'd try it out for an AG ship! The AG "hub" is about 5m across and spins at 30 rpm, which corresponds to about 1g of centripetal acceleration. This craft is just a proof of concept, I might improve the design in future by adding re-dockability and smoothing out some of the vibrations. Feel free to tinker with the mechanism yourself if you want Craft file: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1QLoxLydc9-f727619l_yu22QUyerpDQY

At least the name would make sense.

Guess you could say SpaceX has really set the bar high. I'll show myself out.

That's really rough, I hope you get better soon. I agree with the others in this thread and recommend MechJeb, I've never used it myself but it would make playing a lot easier.

If humans are anything to go by, intelligent life will always have weaponry, however culturally and scientifically advanced they are. If not dedicated weapons at least an ability to destroy things (a relativistic starship could destroy a planet no problem). Such is the nature of evolution, kill or be killed. But that does not necessarily always have to be the case. Most conflicts on Earth, in all corners of nature, are over resources. But in space there are essentially unlimited resources just ready for the taking, leaving very little motive (at least from a human perspective) to agressive behaviour. Of course, if there is intelligent life out there and it does pose a threat to us, then there is likely nothing we could do. We can't hide - we've been too loud already, we can't fight - their weapons would far surpass ours, and we can't run - they will likely be capable of relativistic travel. All we can do is hope that life is peaceful. Although this is getting slightly off topic. I more was wondering what we should do if we found primitive life in our own solar system, rather than what we should do if we found another civilisation (that question really merits it's own thread).

I don't know much about astrophotography, but I tried my hand at taking a photo of the moon for a school art project. It's not the greatest quality (certainly doesn't hold a candle to the amazing stuff in this thread!), but for a first try I don't think it's too bad. I might invest in a slightly better set up in future.

There's often a lot of talk about where we may find life in our solar system, from Mars to the moons of the gas giants there's certainly no shortage of candidates. But there's often less discussion about what we should do if we find life. Not only would such a discovery have a massive impact on society, but the implications for space exploration are huge. What restrictions should we put, if any, on the study of the native life? Should we leave the planet alone if it is already inhabited or do we have a right to take samples of life for study and return to Earth? How do we ensure that future exploration des not contaminate habitable worlds? Or is preservation ultimately impossible to maintain? To what extent would this discovery change societal views? Would we see a greater move towards co-operation in light of the fact we are not alone, or would the discovery change very little at all? Of course we will never know the answers to all these questions until it actually happens. But it's an interesting thought experiment, and an important one at that - if life does exist in the solar system we will certainly have found it by the end of the century, so this scenario isn't so distant.

Capsule McCapsule Face?

The cool thing about Nova was that it could've been used for a single launch manned Mars mission if done using Mars orbit rendezvous. Then again if it was ever built it probably would've only flew a few times because of the immense costs involved. Starclipper is a favourite of mine too! Would've been pretty feasible to build in the 70s/80s as well, unlike VentureStar, which was probably a little ahead of it's time. That's cool, I'd never heard of the LKS before (furiously plans to build it in KSP).

Personally, I love the pre budget cuts plans for the Space Transportation System. We could've be living in 2001 A Space Odyssey by now.

All very good suggestions, but I was thinking it was more because of this...

What is it with the soviets and ball shaped spacecraft?

I feel like this ASAT test has been massively overblown by the media. It was a low altitude test and as such won't produce any long lived space debris, and there are very few satellites in such a low orbit anyway so the risk of Kessler syndrome is minimal. The real concern is with high altitude ASAT tests that do pose a genuine risk to spaceflight, and international law regarding conventional weapons in space should be introduced to mitigate that risk.

So essentially commercial crew / cargo but for the moon, that would be great! Commercial lunar landers are already a reality (yay SpaceIL!), I wonder if they would continue building landers if there was governmental interest...

I do agree with you, but the initial budget proposal does come from the President - Congress just has to decide wether they approve of it or not. So it's quite likely that with enough support from congress we could see the replacement of SLS / LOP-G in favour of a more practical approach (i.e utilising commercial launch vehicles).

Looks like that'll be happening sooner than we thought. Wether or not NASA will be able to stick to it's 5 year deadline is uncertain, the amount of times we've seen presidents promise to send humans back to the moon "and beyond" only for NASA's budget to stay the same has made me highly skeptical. If the US wants to send people back to the moon it'll take more than a speech, they'll have to seriously up NASA's budget, especially if they want to get there within 5 years. Although their deadline does lie within the Presidents possible second term, so it seems that the completion of the goal will be determined by the results of the next election. But let's just avoid talking about the politics of that.

1.875m parts wouldn't be available to players without MH so a 1.875m RAPIER in the stock game would be out of place. Besides, I don't think that a 2.5m RAPIER would be overpowered at all, it'd just be like using 4 RAPIERS but with less parts. I'm with you on nuclear engines, they'd make Eve too easy.

I think its not so much the rovers that impress people but rather the amount of progress the CNSA has made in such a short amount of time. For sure their achievements don't hold a candle to NASA, but they've certainly got a lot more direction than NASA at the moment - particularly in manned spaceflight.

broom broom mother truckers

That'll probably be the first task of any moon base programme, preparing landing/launching pads by making bricks from the lunar regolith. You don't want to sandblast your shiny new base every time you send a new crew. Moon bricks are also great for building lunar habitats, if you can pile enough mass on your base then it doesn't hold in any internal pressure. It also adds a lot of radiation shielding. I thought Starship now only did 100 tonnes? Still plenty for a moon mission regardless, especially with orbital / lunar refuelling.

I'm not sure how accurate this explanation is, but it's how I've always understood it. If you, for example, wanted to go from an elliptical orbit to an escape trajectory, what you really want to do is speed up to escape velocity. You could apply this change in velocity at apoapsis, where your orbital speed is slowest, but that would mean you have to speed up a lot more to get to escape velocity. If you apply that change in velocity at periapsis, where you are already moving very fast, then you have to speed up less than you would have to at apoapsis. It doesn't violate conservation of energy, because at apoapsis your kinetic energy becomes stored as gravitational potential energy, and at periapsis your gravitational potential energy becomes kinetic energy (i.e more speed). The Oberth effect is all about making use of all that pent up gravitational potential energy rather than letting it go to waste.

Absolutely, competition drives innovation (just look at the space race). Also, welcome to the forums!

I agree. There are so many heavy lift vehicles in development that at this point the only hurdle is the lunar hardware. This is why I see a governmental / commercial collaboration as the most likely future, SpaceX and Blue Origin don't really have the money or the workforce to design and maintain a lunar base on their own. And NASA (i.e the US government) won't ignore the capabilities of commercial LVs when SLS class boosters come online (Starship / New Armstrong?). In many ways we are already seeing this happening: NASA has repeatedly said that if commercial alternatives to the SLS exist then they will be utilised, and in a recent Senate hearing with Jim Bridenstine (director of NASA) they even discussed launching EM-1 on a commercial rocket! It's not too much of a stretch to imagine a commercial crew programme but for resupplying a moon base (we've already got the commercial lunar payload services), that way NASA could build and operate the base but the recurring costs would be minimal, making it more popular with the government and less likely to be cancelled.