Fuzzy Dunlop

Playing hardcore career I almost went bankrupt and only had the money to launch one mission - which had to reach orbit. As a result most of my probes are part of the "Silent Prayer" family...

Nope - Bob died on the very first flight because I forgot the chute...

Yeah the stock landing gear is pretty inadequate now. With the new giant Mk3 parts they just look like roller skates on a jumbo jet.

Not sure it's a bug, just a limitation of the editor - if one part is attached with a symmetry mode all parts attached to it must have the same symmetry enabled (or no symmetry).

That's awesome! I can't wait to see what wierd and wonderful creations I can make with all the new parts!

It's possible (indeed necessary) to simulate in stock KSP. Honestly all this "centre of lift must be behind centre of mass" stuff is a gross oversimplification. If your CoL is behind your CoM your plane's nose will drop. To raise it you must shift the CoL in front of the CoM, you can do this by increasing the angle of attack of cannards (which adds lift to the front of the plane) or by decreasing the angle of attack of your elevators (adding negative lift to the back of the plane).

Firstly, Cargo Cyclers? - cargo is litterally the worst possible use for cyclers. If you just wanted to send something like a rover, or a crane or a hab module to the martian surface you would be much better off just shooting it directly at Mars on a Hohmann transfer. Cyclers are for stuff you don't need on Mars but do want on the journey (like radiation shielding and the capsule that lands you back on earth). Secondly, well of course you want life support on Mars, but that's probably going to be seperate from the life support on your transfer vehicle in any case. You're not going to want to launch your life support system back up from the martian surface but you'll need something for the journey back. Most concepts for a manned Mars mission involve putting some infrastructure on the surface robotically first.

It is that high: At the apohelion of an Earth-Mars Hohmann transfer orbit our spaceship will be moving about 2.5 km/s slower than mars. We can massivley reduce the dV required to match orbits by using the Oberth effect. At best, with an instantaneous insertion burn while scraping the martian surface we can cut the dV to a little under 750 m/s. This will leave us in a highly eccentric orbit with a very low periapsis where our spaceship will be travelling just under escape velocity. The nearest example I can think of is India's Mars Orbiter Mission which used 1098.7 m/s of dV to insert into a 423 x 80,000 km orbit Leaving the mothership in an almost escape orbit isn't a bad idea, and would probably be better than braking it into a very low orbit. High ISP propulsion systems may be less useful than you think. Currently avaliable systems would struggle to slow our spaceship before it shot past Mars and started falling back towards Earth. At the very least you wouldn't be able to take full advantage of the Oberth effect. Of course if you have a NTR then that's great but at the moment we don't. Areobraking from a transfer orbit is called 'Areocapture' and is much more challenging than traditional areobraking. Normally you skim through the very top of a planet's atmosphere to shave off a tiny sliver of velocity at a time - often this is repeated 100s of times. This spreads the heat load over a great deal of time and also allows for more control (the density of the upper atmosphere varies unpredictably, hence the amount of braking you get from each pass is pretty random, but with multiple passes you can correct for this). With Areocapture you only get one chance, which means much higher tempuratures (probably requiring heavy protection) and flying on a knife edge in terms of avoiding crashing into the planet or shooting off into space. There's a reason we've done a lot of areobraking but never attemped an areocapture. There are a lot of different cycler orbits, some have lower dV, some allow the same cycler to be used for both legs, some are faster, some are slower. If you have an NTR it's probably not a good idea to have that coming back to earth, it's a bit risky. Once they're switched on they contain a huge amout of radiation, they're also fairly big and very dense so they'll re-enter intact, and then hit the ground, vapourise and render a large area uninhabitable. Certainly areocapture is out of the question.

Yeah but you need that 748 m/s twice, once to break from the transfer and once to boost back into it. And probably slightly more than that because you wouldn't want to be in such a massively eccentric orbit. And 1500 m/s is a very significant chunk of dV - a 100 tonne mothership would require 58 tonnes of USDH/N2O4 for that. If you want to reuse the mothership you have to park it in earth orbit at a cost of 360 m/s and then, presumably, boost it back to Mars again. In total that's at least 2220 m/s of dV or 97 tonnes of USDH/N2O4 for a 100 tonne mothership. Compared to 0 tonnes for an ideal cycler. Edit: Also the Aldrin cycler takes crew to mars once every 2.1 years - which is the same frequency as the Hohmann transfer orbit window opens. Fair enough you need 2 cyclers (inbound and outbound) but it's not a staggering investment.

It's about 1060 m/s in real life as opposed to about 110 m/s in KSP. Which is quite a lot bigger than the usual ratio of real life : KSP. So I don't think it's a useful guide. Also areocapture of the mothership is difficult. Shedding over 1 km/s in one pass will require at least some form of thermal protection. Interesting stuff: Duna capture burn: 110 m/s -> Low Duna orbit: 370 m/s (so lowering the orbit requires 336% of the dV of capture) Mars capture burn: 1060 m/s -> Low Mars orbit: 1440 m/s (so lowering the orbit requires 135% of the dV of capture)

The other big thing about the cycler orbit is the return to Earth. Lets ignore any hab vehicle or radiation shielding for a second. With a normal Mars mission profile all the consumables for the return flight have to be: 1) Accelerated to the Mars transfer orbit 2) Deccelerated into Mars orbit 3) Accelerated into Earth transfer orbit With a cycler all you have to do is boost all this air, water and food into the cycler orbit and the crew can just rendezvous with it after leaving mars. That's a big fuel saving. When you consider you'll probably want a larger living space than the mars launch vehicle and some radiation shielding - well it doesn't make sense to waste fuel powering that into and out of an orbit around mars where it won't be used.

I think part of the problem is that while dumb can mean "cheap" big often means "much more expensive than first thought". It's the infrastructure cost as much as anything. I doubt Sea Dragon was meant to launch from the ocean right from the initial inception, but once on the drawing board it grew so huge that there was no economic way to handle it on land.

Yeah this! (though I acctually have a gut feeling SLS will be a survivor). Seriously the shuttle programme failed to meet it's objectives, that doesn't mean that we should abandon those objectives. Throughout its history America's most effective moto has been "If you at first you fail, try again!"

Basically the wings act as a thrust multiplier - instead of using your energy to accelerate a small amount of xenon to a very high velocity you can use it to accelerate a great amout of air to a much slower velocity, which is more efficient in terms of thrust to power ratio.

SLS desperately needs a payload - a launch system without one is not only economically inefficient but politically indefensible. Fortunatly one of the best ways to convince Congress to open its chequebook is to convince them that an earlier investment will be wasted if they don't (this is one of the ways military contractors get so much money - at first a project only costs $2 billion, then they come back an tell you it will cost $5 billion but if you cancel it the $2 billion has been thrown away).

That was cool, but the point remains that without extra money none of these payloads can be built. Which makes SLS itself a white elephant.

Anyone want to calculate how much Liquid Hydrogen has boiled off so far?

Maybe you're just cursed and it will be all systems go as soon as you close the stream

Stupid Boats...

I acctually wouldn't expect the "tail height" to have a special name because it dosen't seem that important. Really its only purpose would be to avoid collisions while moving the aircraft into hangers, and how often does that kind of accident happen? Wingspan and Length are more important when you consider how often aircraft smash into each other while taxiing (much more than you would expect).

Also Hayabusa wasn't the first asteroid lander (though it was the first, and at the moment only, to return samples from the surface). NEAR Shoemaker landed on 433 Eros in 2001. It's worth noting that as well as being much further away comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko is about 300 times more massive than Hayabusa's target 25143 Itokawa (though Eros is about 600 larger than the comet).

Neither of those events are as important as is portrayed. Airships were already being overtaken by aeroplanes. Additionally there was a series of disasters involving very large airships: The british R101 in 1930, the USS Akron and USS Macon in 1933 and 1935 (both of which used Helium). The Hindenberg was just the final nail in the coffin. Concorde failed in 1973 when it lost almost all its orders apart from from the 14 from Air France and British Airways. Without a proven market for supersonic transport no one has been willing to gamble the $Billions it would take to develop a successor. The crash didn't have that much effect; by the 2000s the airframes were nearing the end of their lifespan, spare parts were running out and the cockpit and cabin were becoming very dated. That said, I think this is may well be the end of Virgin Galactic.

One of the political selling points of the Constellation program was that it was re-using shuttle hardware (it's a lot easier to get the goverment to fund something if they think they've already bought half of it - because otherwise they'll feel they're wasting their investment). The initial design concept of the Ares I upper stage had some commonality with the External Tank - but had a much smaller diameter (which meant little of the tooling could be re-used). In any case the design evolved quite a long way away from that.

There use to be a "decals" tab, maybe they'll bring it back for heat sheilding parts?

Partly this is just because males are significantly more likely to die violent or accidental deaths. Men more likely to be murdered, killed in war, die in car crashes (because they drive more and more recklessly) and die in accidents in the mining, fishing agriculture or construction industries. That all shaves a few months off life expectancy.