Clamp-o-Tron

Imagine: Fuji but it's got an HTV as a service module.

In a jet engine, your reaction mass is the atmosphere that’s pulled in through your intakes and expelled due to a pressure differential caused by the burning of jet fuel with atmospheric oxygen. In this concept, you simply do the same thing but with your own oxidizer- so you can have higher Isp, because you’ve got more reaction mass per kg of propellant spent than a conventional rocket engine. Anyway, this would be better for the NFT thread, as cryogenic fuels are in no way necessary for the operation of this. I would be careful with Eve and Jool Although there’s nothing wrong with the concept, it works there too, you may have a problem at these higher atmospheric pressures simply due to the much lower chamber pressure than a conventional rocket engine (~800 kPa). The actual exhaust pressure is probably a bit lower, as per the image below (generalizing jet engines). So you’ll get significantly less thrust as you approach this boundary, less than 8 atm (I’m not doing the specific math lol), eventually getting nothing- just as regular engines do. It’s just that this boundary is a lot lower pressure. (The paper in case anyone worries what we’re talking about: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212540X20300407)

More Fuels! Version 0.3.0 Lots of bugs still left here, but there's a clear path to fixing all of them. I just ran out of time (hard to do when you have 6 months). In this, I've: • Renamed to More Fuels! • Major rewrite of central features. • Added RCS fuel switching. • Added a couple more resources and fuel mixtures. • Added a Real Names patch (in the Patches/Optional directory) to change stock fuel names to fit with the rest of the mod. Some known issues persist: • Currently lacking a system to switch monopropellant to other RCS fuels. Upcoming in 0.3.1. • RCS fuel switching is currently broken for parts with multiple instances of ModuleRCSFx. Upcoming fix in 0.3.1. • HTP/LF patch appears to be broken. Upcoming fix in 0.3.1. (Ignore the dozens of B9PS errors you may be getting, they are harmless and are a product of the second listed issue.) I don't think I can say that I'm proud of how long this took, but here it is for your enjoyment. v0.3.1 coming in less than 2 weeks, assuming I can figure everything out. GitHub

Hemeac’s back, which has given me a kick of motivation. Expect v0.3 beta sometime tonight. (Time zone pedantry will not be tolerated ) EDIT to avoid spamming the thread: hopefully people notice this, but I'm pushing it back one day. I had some problems with B9 throwing errors out of nowhere for whatever reason, and it should also give me a bit of time for some more polish.

Yeah, that seems right. Fuel ratios seem about right for hydrolox, and although the engine seems a bit large, it’s probably an NK-19 derivative.

Interesting. I'm not sure how to approach this (in a way other than looking for a bug) than asking for a few screenshots of your attempts. I would be wary of the cargo storage inside the Rodan, it's possible that you have a few hundred units of ore weighing you down.

It’s already balanced for JNSQ, crew Rodman has plenty of margin on just Ghidorah 9, to the point where it can nearly be done with an RTLS booster landing. You may be putting too much mass on your capsule (11 tons is about how much it should mass IIRC), or try to fly a more efficient flight profile (close to vertical with S1 when doing RTLS to avoid much of a boostback burn, or regular with droneship- your entry burn can handle the heating)

I remember a story (possibly from Scott Kelly's book) about astronaut candidates in the late 1990s playing a game at JSC in which they would watch Armageddon a single time and note any inaccuracies they could find. In my very fuzzy memory of his telling of it, the record was over 150.

According to the wiki, 308.15 years. KER’s just a little confused on the days.

That's not what it is- that stuff is called Multi-Layer Insulation (MLI), and it's basically space-grade Mylar sheets layered (of course) over each other to thermally insulate (of course) a spacecraft. It's quite good at keeping thermal radiation from moving around, but is abysmal at stopping heat conduction- which is why it's only used in vacuums where conduction isn't an issue. Most of the time, radiation shielding for your electronics won't be needed- you just want specially designed hardware to greatly reduce the chance or impact of a cosmic ray or high-energy proton flipping a bit. In extreme circumstances, like passing through the largest planetary magnetosphere in the solar system, what you're looking for is something like Juno's electronics vault, made of 1 cm thick Titanium, which- unfortunately- isn't very good at being lightweight, weighing about 35 kg for a square meter of shielding. For illustration, here's a picture of the installation onto Juno. (The vault is the box thing, of course). So a service bay wouldn't do much good- but it's still a good idea to add radiation damage to computers (probe cores), and a way to protect them from it in high-risk areas like magnetospheres or coronal mass ejections. And BTW- computers are by far the most vulnerable to radiation. Electronics are all around any spacecraft of course, but they aren't affected much, as the damage from radiation is usually microscopic, on the level that memory is encoded onto a hard drive. Mechanical components will almost never fail because of these issues, although there is one notable case where reaction wheels kept breaking because coronal mass ejections caused static discharges through the flywheel assembly, causing the steel ball bearings to deposit little bumps of metal on their casing, hindering their movement. This has been fixed with a move towards ceramic bearings instead.

No. Please don’t force players to find a hidden planet that would be several times harder than Eeloo to find even IF you could see it. This would heavily hurt sandbox players, people who want to do craftfile sharing, everyone who sees the parts in trailers and screenshots and YouTube videos, and basically everyone who isn’t part of a dedicated KSP community- probably >75% right now, and even more with KSP2 being more accessible and published by an AAA studio. Easter eggs should be cosmetics at most- and usually I prefer to see them as additional story points, or jokes between developers and players. Even not-completely-serious parts like those from the mod “Kraken Science” probably don’t belong as Easter eggs, nevermind integral parts of the game and its progression.

Clementine I think

Somebody show these to Felipe in 2010… he would have just about the biggest shock of his life.

The title says it all. Do you pronounce it Jill-y, like the name, or Gill-y, like a fish's breathing organ? Personally, I pronounce it Gill-y, with a painful amount of #3 as well.

as always, yes. I've made some things I haven't pushed yet, and am a bit distracted by another (secret!) project.