[Where's the EVA headlamp switch?]

Yes there is! press "L"

[1.0.4 suborbital flights: too slow to land safely ?]

You can acctually get some lift by angling the pod away from prograde, which can be useful sometimes.

[Quantum Mechanics: Einstein vs. Bell]

For anyone looking for a slightly less involved introduction to this topic:

[Mix two DNA strands in one cell, what happens? Random speculative idea...]

You can certainly replace to nucleus of a cell. And if you replace the nucleus of an embryo then you end up with an organism that is (nearly*) genetically identical to the organism the nucleus came from. As the organism grows, the nucleus reproduces itself but the rest of the cell is coded by the nucleus. So the new organism would almost entirely resemble the organism that donated the nucleus.

That is assuming that you remove the old nucleus, which I suspect you'd have to do because I don't think an embryonic cell will tollerate having multiple nucleuses (or if it does it will probably divide into two cells, and then you'll have two disticnt lineages, one of which will outcompete the other).

Also this works best with closely related organisms, it definitely works within the same species (in fact in the UK we're now doing this to cure some genetic diseases). It can work with closely related species (like cows and guars, I seem to recall). Bamboo and Sequioa are not closely related, their last common ancestor may have lived 300 million years ago, so I wouldn't bet on nuclear transfer being viable.

*I say nearly identical because the the mitrochondria and, in plants, chloroplasts have their own DNA and that would continue to be present in the new organism.

[Realistic Fantasy Adventuring Armour]

Just a point about bodkin arrowheads: While a lot of people assume they were intended to be armour piercing, current archeological evidence dosen't seem to back this up. The Royal Armouries looked at the metalurgy of the medieval arrowheads in their collection, they didn't find any examples of bodkins points made of hardened steel. By contrast type 16 arrowheads (which are fatter than bodkins and have barbs) were often found to have hardened, high carbon tips and cutting edges (generally welded onto a softer iron core).

[Is a Wet Workshop a practical solution for interplanetary travel and space stations?]

How much of a problem is remaining fuel, don't you just open the throttles and it will all evapourate and vent into space? If you need to you can leave it exposed to vaccum for a week or two, nothing much is going to be left.

[How to make Re-entry more deadly?]

It's the 1.02 atmosphere, compared to 1.0 it's a step back to the old soup-o-sphere. The higher drag means that pods tend to slow down in the upper atmosphere and so avoid much heating later on. In 1.0 pods punched straight through the upper atmosphere then got fried lower down.

[Interplanetary Transfers - They take years?]

I just started playing again with 1.0 (haven't really played much since 0.25). Did they ever add anything in game to determine launch windows?

I'm playing in career mode and haven't unlocked everything yet, so I have no idea if such a function exists in game. Or do I have to continue using 3rd party websites for this function (or eye ball it)?

Sadly they haven't yet, it's probably the single biggest "missing" feature for me. There was a really good suggestion made in the ideas forum about adapting the maneuver nodes system so it could be used in the tracking station. Basically you would be able to place a node on the orbit of a planet like you can currently do on the orbit of a ship, then target another planet and edit and drag the maneuver like normal.

[Squad on the recent Aero changes]

The main problem with the steep reentries IRL is not that you won't slow down to terminal velocity. It's that you'll do it too fast, and you won't like. AFAIR the worst was Soyuz 7K-T No.39 - 21.3g, and that wasn't even stuff like lunar orbit. Don't worry about terminal velocity, due to how fast drag scales with speed, it WILL slow you to terminal velocity. You just don't want it to happen too fast.

That depends very much on the mass/drag ratio. Most meteorites on less than 8 tonnes will slow to terminal velocity, but larger ones won't. An empty V2's terminal velocity is roughly 400 m/s but it they impacted twice as fast. Though you would expect most real life most pods would always slow to terminal velocity given that much denser meteorites do.

[Squad on the recent Aero changes]

It's nowhere near reasonable. With 1.0 aerodynamics, the pods will crash into ground before they can slow down enough to reach speeds, where it would be reasonable to deploy drogue parachutes.

No they won't. I did test this. Unless you're plunging vertically through the atmosphere your pod will always slow to bellow 300 m/s which is a perfectly reasonable speed to deploy drogues; it's not massively faster than the soyuz drogue deployment speed.

Also drogues are occasionally used at supersonic speed (Felix Baumgartner used one to stabalise him on his supersonic skydive). Nasa even uses gigantic supersonic parachutes, for example during curiosity's decent.

[Thud engines (the radial LFEs) appear to be fairly draggy, making them once again not-so-great.]

This might be why such designs are uncommon in real life?

[Squad on the recent Aero changes]

Ok I still have 1.0 so did some testing. I used both the 1 man pod and the 3 man pod - both with (physics fixed) heat shields and parachutes.

On a 75km x 25km re-entry trajectory both slowed to less than 300 m/s by 4km - terminal velocity was about 270-280 m/s.

On a vertical suborbital launch up to 75km the pods slowed to less than 300 m/s before I had to deploy the chutes to prevent a crash (so about 500m).

I think this is pretty reasonable. Yeah some pods in real life do have a lower terminal velocities, but it's a matter of degree. In KSP 1.0 you should always have time to deploy the 'chutes at subsonic speeds before you hit the ground (unless you have a really high suborbital trajectory, or de-orbit straight into the ground - but there's no reason to do that).

Something heavier and more areodynamic than a pod might hit the ground much faster; this is totally realistic - a V2 rocket, mostly empty tank, would impact at 800 m/s (half its peak velocity) from 100 km high suborbital trajectory.

A more pressing issue occurs if we make pods slow down more, as in 1.02. Basically too much drag high in the atmosphere kills too much of the pod's speed preventing heating (which isn't linked to drag in the games physics). This makes heat shields pointless since in 1.02 a naked pod can survive a return from essentially any altitude.

[Uh, SQUAD, it's one thing if a capsule can survive re-entry, it's another if a space station can.]

The problem is the 1.02 drag boost means that stuff slows so fast it doesn't get a chance to cook properly. I think we need to revert to 1.0 areo then nerf the low altitude thrust of the jets to compensate.

[Which atmopshere do you prefer?]

I think what bothers me the most is reports that:

A) That the increased drag means the best launch profile is once again ascend to 10km vertically and then turn - which is really jarring because real life rockets turn almost immediately.

Heat shields are almost irrelevant because the atmosphere slows you down before the heating becomes too severe.

C) That you can't smash into the ground at supersonic speeds because that was quite fun (and also things do occasionally do this in real life; V2 rockets impacted at about 1000 m/s)

[Heat in 1.02 (and reentry)]

I've not got 1.02 yet because the patcher is broken but if this is true it's quite disappointing. I like the fact that a objects could punch straight down through the atmosphere - like stuff does in real life. Also if stuff slows down too high up then that makes heat shields pointless.

I don't think there's much wrong with 1.00 areodynamics - the invincible parachutes, massless heat sheilds and uber-explodey tailcones were there own issues and shouldn't have been dealt with with such sweeping changes.

I really hoped I'd seen the last of the soup-o-sphere.

[Has anyone got a spaceplane in orbit yet?]

Guys I think I have few tips for when you're doing re-entry:

Firstly, 10-20 km is kind of a Death Zone, if you are doing anything like orbital speed in this region you're toast.

That means you need to slow down as much as possible high in the atmosphere. Drag is now your best friend. On the other hand, if you have a needle-like dart then it's going to cut straight through the upper atmosphere and then melt lower down.

With the new areodynamics most planes have very low drag when flying absolutley nose fowards. So don't. Point your nose as far away from prograde as possible. Nose up is best since you can generate a fair bit of lift which keeps you higher for longer (I think proper skip re-entries are now possible). S-turns can also be used.

Lastly I've not tried the airbrakes during re-entry but I gather some people are having great results.

[No Flamable rocket fuel]

This thread did get me thinking about something: There's no perfectly safe way to store large amounts of energy. We've all seen explosions with rocket or jet fuel, but we've also seen lithium batteries burn, compressed gas canisters can burst, flywheels can shatter and even springs can cause spectacular destruction when they snap.

Basically if you ever need to engineer something with high energy density then you have to run the risk of that energy being released much more rapidly than you might want.

[Blue Origin Thread (merged)]

They should say "dragon has wings" when the solar panels deploy.

They do... it's actually on my list of annoying NASA TV cliches.

[James Webb Space Telescope]

Just shows how much trust they're showing Arianespace by ordering an Ariane 5 ECA instead of doing it on US vehicles... but then again, that is currently the world's most reliable heavy lifter.

My theory is that NASA chose Ariane specifically because they're not american. This way if (god forbid) there is a launch failure NASA can blame it on those "darned incompetent europeans!" (while ESA can say "Oh well, we weren't the ones that payed for that $9 billion firework show!").

[Blue Origin Thread (merged)]

Was really confused by the clock flashing yellow? Apparantly Falcon 9 is too much for the universe to simulate in real time?

[Let's Burn Down the Earth's Forests!]

there are about 638 million tons of carbon in the Earth's forests.

That seems pretty low. Dosen't the US produce something like half a billion tonnes of timber annually? (obviously timber is mostly Oxygen but still).

edit: well wet living trees are mostly oxygen, dry timber is about 50% carbon.

edit: a little more googling and it seems the total carbon content of the worlds forrests would be between 100 billion and 250 billion tonnes.

[Transfer Nodes]

This is one of the best ideas I've seen on the forums! I also think we should have a sort of stock version of Kerbal Alarm Clock, so manuever nodes, transfer nodes, encounters etc, would all appear on a "Launch Calander" and give you alerts when they're abou to occur.

[Storable propellants for nuclear engine?]

If we had a reactor core at 3500, instead of 3200, then NH3 would get about 545 Isp

We should also consider that if LH2 won't be available for the return trip for nuclear, then it won't be for chemical either, and these nuclear thermal propellants would be competing against the likes of propane

Pretty good, all things considered.

Yeah but Uranium Dioxide melts at 3138K. The NERVA prototypes heated their propellent to at most 2550K.

[Storable propellants for nuclear engine?]

If your not going to use Hydrogen then there's really no point in Nuclear Thermal Rocketry. The ISP of an engine is proportional to the exhaust velocity, which is affected by two factors: Tempurature and the Molar Mass of the gas. NTR engines don't run at a higher tempurature than chemical rockets but they can use a (much) lighter exhaust product, pure Hydrogen. This is where all the ISP gain comes from and if you use a much heavier gas like methane or ammonia thats no more efficient than a Hydrolox rocket.

[Zubrin's Ares launch vehicule]

It's an issue of re-using as much of the shuttle design as possible. Though given the massive redsign of the ET needed to support the payload on top its usefulness is somewhat questionable...