Arrowstar

Holy moly! This is huge! Yay for more awesome airplane parts in the future!

Probably both, though perhaps not simultaneously.

Hey Nova, I just downloaded your updated pack (the Alpha 1) and noticed that the engines seem to be offset from their decouplers when building rockets, making the the engine (and everything about it) look like it\'s floating. Any chance those attachment nodes can get moved up some?

I\'m certainly not suggesting that the work Nova is doing will be identical in functionality and scope to the full feature set that Squad is looking to implement. On the contrary, it obviously won\'t be. All I\'m suggesting is that some of the problems Nova encountered while working on this will also show up when Squad takes a crack at it. Since Nova typically does good work, Squad may be able to quickly move through those particular problems Nova has already solved just by looking at his code.

When Harv & Co. get around to implementing re-entry heat in the core game, you should really pass along your work to them. I imagine it might speed up their development work considerably if they\'re not re-inventing the wheel.

Probably for the best. After all, we know then that Rick\'s never gonna give her up, never gonna let her down... You, sir, have been rickrolled by KSP.

Darn it, Harv, and I have quizzes to grade for Monday. My students are not getting their work back on time next week, lol. Thanks for the awesome effort!

As I just said, the speed of light is constant in all references frames. There does not need to be an inertial frame to make this so, and in fact General Relativity has as one of its outcomes a distinct lack of inertia frames. Now, how is the speed of light constant in all reference frames? Frankly, it\'s the way the universe works and as an engineer we didn\'t get into the philosophy of the subject too much in my relativistic dynamics course. Unless you\'re willing to go through the tensor calculus yourself to demonstrate the basic principles of GR, however, you might as well take my word on it. EDIT: In short, your premise is incorrect: a constant speed of light does not imply an absolute frame.

Light travels at the speed of light regardless of reference frame, so yes.

Hey Harv, did you see this new game that just got released as a demo? It\'s called \'Kerbal Space Program\' and you get to build awesome rockets and watch them blow up and stuff. It\'s pretty sweet, you should check it out. =P

Is it just me or are we on the verge of an Inception joke?

I\'m pretty sure this has come up on multiple threads before and been shot down on each subsequent thread. Probably not going to happen.

Happy to hear everything\'s okay!

Donut planets are impossible under the current gravitation model. The two body assumption HarvesteR is using assumes spherical gravity fields with a point source. You will not get that if you have donut planets. Sorry, folks.

No wai!

It\'s complicated, but only because getting a rover the size of a MINI Cooper down to the Martian surface is hard. The airbags approach that was used for MER is no longer possible with the weight of MSL, thus leaving rocket propulsion as one of the few available means to safely land. JPL engineers are the best in the world at what they do: it\'ll work.

Creative burnout usually takes more than a week to recover from. Heck, I\'m just now coming back to a project I stopped working on 3 months ago...

Just remember, the enemy\'s gate is down.

You\'re not actually orbiting at that height, are you? ARE YOU?!

They are radially-mounted RCS tanks from KSP - Silisko Edition.

Regarding crashing in Orbiter: it\'s generally taken that as a spaceflight simulator, the aspects of the program dealing with the 'ground' are fairly limited. You\'re supposed to stay in space! (This is why landing and ground motion in Orbiter tends not to work as well as it could, perhaps.)

I just landed on the Mun a moment ago, shut down the engines, and rotated the camera to take a look around and see where I was. And, as I was doing so, behold: Gorgeous.

NASA couldn\'t do it ever, technically. Shuttle is a strictly LEO vehicle.

Precisely. The \'free-return\' trajectory is just one where the turning angle of the hyperbolic orbit is precisely that to send you back the way you came.

Well, something is goofy with the orbital mechanical then, because I\'m fairly certain that you can\'t do this in real life. Even the Apollo folks needed a capture burn at some point, and I can only assume that if they could develop a trajectory that didn\'t need one, they\'d use it.