Wyrm

All speculation on FTL drives are just that, speculation, even the so-called 'realistic' ones. All known FTL drives that have any sort of sound theoretical basis require exotic matter of some kind  that is, matter we're not even sure can exist in our universe. This especially includes the Alcubierre drive. In that case, even if we had the exotic matter, we don't know how to put it together in a way to create the Alcubierre metric.

Indeed. Ted said that SQUAD supports the use of mods. That is, SQUAD doesn't mind at all when someone modifies their base game to do something it wasn't originally developed to do, and are completely okay with the neat things modders are able to accomplish. This is completely consistent with them having a subforum where mods are posted, documented and supported by their authors, and host a site where those mods are distrubuted. That said, SQUAD don't support mods  they don't provide help (technical or usage) concerning the mods themselves and aren't responsible for debugging, developing, and updating those mods. That's what support means in computer lingo. As it should be, because SQUAD is not familiar with the mods and have no place maintaining them or providing help for, which the mod authors are in position to do. The addition of the word "use" in Ted's message is a subtle, but important difference.

While you can make an eclipse unlikely by choosing an orbit far from Kerbin, it will always appear to precess relative to Kerbin because the terminator itself drifts around Kerbin once every Kerbin year. The sun-synchronous orbit results from perturbation effects that are not simulated. That said, the orbit solver in KSP is one of the cheapest things in the simulation. I estimate that finding the current position of each object in orbit comes under a hundred flops, even with one numerical root finding for each solution. Unless your computer is positively ancient, it should be able to easily handle a constellation of 20 satellites.

True dat. Alas. All of which cause varying but usually extreme amounts of !!FUN!! when they are jostled.PS, love to death your Atomic Rockets page!

The bolded directory is the culprit, I believe. All the individual parts directories should go directly under the Parts directory. No subdirectories.

I'm really digging the chunky look!

Hey Pleborian, why do you call it a Hosmann orbit when it's actually a Hohmann transfer orbit? Also, I've worked out why your orbital inclination maneuvers cause you to stretch out your orbit. When you begin your burns, your thrust is applied perpendicularly to your orbital velocity. However, as your orbit tilts, your thrust is no longer perpendicular to your orbital velocity. We can then split your thrust vector into two components: a component that is still perpendicular to your velocity vector, and also a component that points prograde (it will always be prograde). The perpendicular component tilts your orbit as expected, but the prograde component causes the orbit to stretch. To avoid excessive stretching, you should adjust your vector every so often to keep your thrust pointing perpendicular to your orbital velocity. Hope that helps.

Quite frankly, I don't see why the RCS draining logic doesn't just use the RCS tank with the highest staging number. Preferably drain from RCS tanks due to be dropped off sooner. Simple and sensible. (Right?)

Um. Good for you, I guess. Yeah, I use lots of mods as well. Unfortunately I may have to recompile the Electrical plugin myself to get it to play well with the camera-ed version of MechJeb.

Provided you fill the balloon with only the smallest amount of helium, an ordinary balloon can easily hold against the interior pressure in space, provided that the balloon\'s skin can survive in the space environment at all. The equilibrium is where the pressures of the outside atmosphere and the back pressure of the balloon\'s skin at a certain extension is equal to the gas pressure within — and in a vacuum, the outside atmosphere is at (nearly) zero pressure. Party balloons aren\'t really able to generate much back pressure — the fact that you can blow one up to bursting with your unaided lungs is testament to that. In space, they wouldn\'t be able to store any appreciable amount of gas. You would have to go to materials that are able to maintain a larger back pressure to do that.

To be fair, the attraction of an aerospike has nothing to do with being able to use atmospheric oxygen, but rather compensating for the effect of ambient atmospheric pressure on exhaust expansion. A rocket bell has to be designed for a specific altitude to work most efficiently. Operate too high and the gas expands past the bell, lowering efficiency; operate too low and you\'re dragging weight of unused bell, as well as having the potential for dangerous oscillations. The sabre engine is an example of an engine that can switch between air breathing and sucking in oxygen. Thanks, Braun.

You can do this with the two-engine design as well, so I don\'t see how it would be an improvement. Sure, but then you don\'t have the jet engine available for a powered landing, which some space plane designs would need. You\'d then have to lug the jet engine along your entire trip and you\'re right back where you started. Yes, a chemical rocket probably isn\'t going to play well with atmospheric oxygen, but a nuclear rocket —where energy production from the fuel has jack all to do with the reaction mass you squirt out the rear— this might be an option.

Why does this plugin stomp all over the old map images whenever I open KSP? (Mac OS X 10.6.8, 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7 CPU, AMD Radeon HD 6750M GPU, 8 GB) (KSP 0.15.2, ISA only)

An engine that could switch from being a jet engine to a rocket would not be pointless. A jet engine gets its oxidizer from the surrounding atmosphere, which means that your vehicle doesn\'t need to carry that oxidizer with it. This makes a smaller rocket for the same payload. The increased mass of the exhaust vs. the input fuel means you can lower the speed of the exhaust without sacrificing force, so the effective Isp is larger for a jet engine than for an equivalent rocket engine using the same reactants. This, again, raises delta-V. If the two engines are separate, in order to get both the advantages of a rocket (operates in space) and a jet engine (operates on free ambient oxidizer), you need two engines — one for atmospheric flight, and one for space flight. That\'s a weight penalty, resulting in a lower delta-V. If you have an engine that can switch between these two modes, air breathing in an atmosphere, a rocket in space, then you don\'t pay that weight penalty.

Except the sqrt(1-v²/c²) is in the denominator, so time dialation is infinite at v = c.