Justy

My vote: don't. I mean, keep your spaceplane -- it looks great! But use it as a spaceplane. Why haul wings and jet engines to Minmus? Make one of your spaceplane's earliest payloads a nuclear or ion powered tug. Then, future flights bring payloads up to be picked up by the tug and hauled to Minmus. This was the real job of NASA's Space Shuttle. We call the shuttle "STS", Space Transportation System, but shuttle was only supposed to be a part of a Space Transportation SYSTEM that would also include chemical-powered tugs (with heat shields for aerobraking) for Earth/Moon work, nuclear-powered tugs for deeper space work, and a maintenance dock at what was then imagined to be Space Station Freedom. The only optimizing I can see doing is to ensure your fuels are in proper balance. Once you get to orbit, you're on rocket power only, so you should have the right balance of liquid fuel & oxidizer for rockets, any extra liquid fuel beyond what you have oxidizer to burn with is dead weight from then on. There might be room to reduce some of the liquid fuel carried; between the wings and engine pods, you have a lot of storage there. Conversely, if you spend so much time on jet power that you reach orbit with an overabundance of oxidizer, that's dead weight too, and you should add more liquid fuel tankage so you can take advantage of it.

I know the basics of some of what you've listed, and almost nothing about others. Heck, I had to look up "steel detailing." The difference is that while so-and-so knows it is an honest indisputable fact that we're sending shuttles to the Moon from the ISS, I understand that I don't know anything about steel detailing.

Does Voidi's installation script still work? I was trying to help a guy on the /r/kerbalspaceprogram subreddit, but while writing him a tutorial on how to get KSP installed, I found the script couldn't log in to the kerbalspaceprogram.com webstore with my username and password. I copied over the script from a successful installation, so it already had my login details, and it failed too. I know my password is correct, though, since logging in to the website itself in a web browser works fine.

During the webcast, I thought I heard the Arianespace presenter proudly proclaim that while the first three stages of the Soyuz-ST were Russian-made, the Fregat upper stage was European. This surprised me, and doesn't seem correct... Do note that while Lavochkin seriously kerballed Fobos-Grunt, they did successfully return samples from the Moon with a robot, and only one (Hughes Aircraft's Pioneer 13 night-side lander) of the 11 Venus landers that survived functional on the surface wasn't a Lavochkin product. They had plenty of hiccups there (lenscaps popping off as designed but ending up right where surface tools needed to poke), but holy cow, they built stuff that survived to the surface of Venus.

There's a ferry service that runs between mainland British Columbia, Canada and Vancouver Island. There's roughly a dozen sailings a day on each of the three most important routes. At the very moment I'm typing this, the MV Queen of Oak Bay is making a westbound trip. We don't call it BC Ferries Voyage #368785, it's just the Saturday 8pm sailing to Nanaimo, a trip that the Queen of Oak Bay has made regularly and reliably since she was built in '81. Well, except for that time she sank more boats than the entire Canadian Navy since the end of WW2. That's what I want space travel to be. Flights should be so frequent that the launch schedule should look like the page in any port city's newspaper that lists the arrivals and departures of ships. SPACE STATION FREEDOM SHIPPING REPORT - ALL TIMES UTC - TODAY: Capsule 'Pete Conrad,' USA, passengers, from Kennedy, arriving berth 2 at 17:30. OTV 'Tsiolkovsky,' Russia, water and hydrazine, for OPSEK, departing berth 5 at 19:00. TOMORROW: OTV 'Turtle 2', USA, maintenance, for James Webb Space Telescope, departing berth 1 at 09:00. Capsule 'Pete Conrad,' USA, passengers, for Kennedy, departing berth 2 at 11:00. Spaceplane 'Silver Dart,' Canada, robot parts, from Gander, arriving berth 1 at 13:00 9:30 in Newfoundland. OTV 'Turtle 7,' USA, robot parts, for L5, departing berth 3 at 16:30. Etc, etc, etc.

I can't get excited about cargo airships anymore. They hooked me as a kid with the "Hystar" demonstrator at Expo '86, when heavy lift airships were just a few years away from transforming the logging industry (no more logging roads, and selective logging will be so cheap there'll be no more clearcuts!). But cargo airships have remained "just a few years away" for the 28 years since (Hystar's main business since then appears to be moving its headquarters from New Brunswick to Maine to Delaware to Nevada). I was up in the arctic when Discovery Air, a moderate sized charter operator who, to their credit, run services with oddball aircraft like their trio of Dash-7's, announced they were going to buy a fleet of hybrid airships from the UK, but by then I just didn't believe anymore... and lo and behold, it didn't happen. Might be a case of very forward thinking. At least, the future of America's roads is very much in question right now, and we don't have a top-notch rail system to fall back on.The availability and cost of energy for transportation use will be a problem before the roads fall apart. You can't save long distance transportation in North America (Canada has the same problem, only worse!) with a system that consumes more energy to move the same payload the same distance. If airships can't compete on a cost-per-ton-mile (or cost-per-passenger-mile) basis, an all-powered VTOL has no chance. Nevermind passenger rail; if you want to enjoy the future, pound tracks for freight rail, NOW.

Decades ago we had air raid sirens on the mainland, they used to fire up the one in Port Coquitlam (just outside Vancouver) on Remembrance Day at the end of the two minutes' silence. I know I heard it the first time I went to the ceremony as a kid in the very early '80's, but it was torn down shortly after. I'm not sure if there are any public warning sirens in service in BC aside from Tofino now. The Province of British Columbia promotes subscribing to text messages from the Provincial Emergency Program's Twitter feed. This way you can be woken up at 3am to be notified of a forest fire evacuation 900km away, or an offshore earthquake already judged to pose no tsunami risk. It's a terrible system.

Canada does not have anything like EAS. The closest we have is Weatheradio / Radiometeo, our version of your National Weather Service All Hazards Radio where you get a special little receiver that listens for tornado or flood alarms. It has the ability to carry non-weather alarms too, same as yours (it even uses a compatible region code, like you ise for counties), but it's unclear on whether it'd actually be used. The province of Alberta built a more involved system after a tornado hit a major city (Edmonton) in 1987, and their system is more like EAS, interrupting commercial broadcasts etc. I think the village of Tofino on the west coast built its own tsunami siren, too. Aside from that, no, we do not have a national CONELRAD / EBS / EAS, and all attempts to build one have been answered with, "yeah, that's a great idea, we should have one... some day."

I THINK IT'S A BAD IDEA. I'M NOT YELLING. I'M JUST PRACTICING TALKING OVER THE ROAD NOISE AS MY TIRES ROLL OVER ENDLESS MILES OF RUMBLE STRIP AT HIGHWAY SPEED. But seriously... we can't manage to keep bridges and tunnels in good enough repair that they won't collapse, the idea of building roads from discrete tiles that requires someone come along and re-tighten the bolts every few months is scary. And of course they won't wear evenly and we'll have uneven edges between tiles, just as we do now with the concrete blocks that make up I-5 and I-90 in Washington State, only now it'll be a mini-speedbump every one and a half feet instead of 20 feet. I really wish I could like this idea, but I can't.

The manned Soyuz capsule has a launch escape system, and it's been used twice, both times successful. 1975, just before the 5 minute mark climbing through 145 km, the third stage lit even though the second stage failed to properly separate. The flight computer fired the Soyuz' service module engines to move it clear of the booster (the LES tower was already jettisoned), then separated the SM and OM from the RM manned capsule. 1983, 90 seconds to launch, a kerosene fire on the launch pad. Mission control had to activate the escape system via radio backup because the fire had burned through the control cables! From there, automated systems separated the spacecraft and cut the payload shroud, fired the LES tower to pull the RM and OM clear (17 gees!), ditched the OM, dumped the heavy heat shield, deployed parachutes and fired the braking rockets, all automatic. The crew was recovered a few minutes after; the pad fire burned well into the next day. They made sure the launch escape system on Soyuz worked. Twice it turned "disastrous spaceflight accident kills three cosmonauts" into "triumph of engineering protects lives of three cosmonauts." Fun fact, the Russian term for Launch Escape System is Sistema Avariynogo Spaseniya. Russians know how important it is to have SAS on a rocket! As far as Proton goes... Proton has had its share of failures, most of them to do with the upper stages ("Blok D" or "Briz," depending on the flight), and the rest in the first & second stages. The third stage was only a problem twice before, once 24 years ago, the other so far back man hadn't landed on the Moon yet. The third stage has been perhaps the only reliable part of that rocket. For now, politics is not interfering with the CURRENT operation of the ISS, though it is raising some questions about its future. Soyuz TMA-13M is still planned to fly on May 28, carrying Expedition 40 -- one Russian, one American, and one European (German).

Little Jeb was too busy doodling model rockets in his notebook, and didn't pay attention when his teacher was trying to tell him the names of the planets! Little Bill and Bob tell him it's okay, it's easy if he remembers one simple phrase... My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas. Many Very Educated Men Just Screwed Up Nature (minus Pluto; XKCD gave me a better mnemonic for this one but it's not for polite company). My Very Excellent Mother Constantly Just Serves Us Nachos, Pizzas, Hamburgers, Meatballs and Eggplants (includes Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, Eris). These are mnemonics for helping people remember the names and order of the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and sometimes Pluto. I invite you to comment with your version for the solar system of the Kerbals. Include an "S" or "K" for the Sun/Kerbol if you like, or don't. Ignore Dres as a dwarf planet if you like, though if you do include it, a really good one will include a way to distinguish between the two adjacent D's (in the example in the thread title, DR = Dres. Maybe you'll have a phrase where the first D-word evokes Duna somehow.) Any ideas?

I've been having an issue with the four-way hub in the newest zip (but I have not tried the newest experimental code from GitHub). I can't add it to a vehicle in the VAB unless I either start with it as the root part, or I'm connecting it using the forward or backward node. If I attach with the top, bottom, left or right nodes, it snaps into place but remains a ghost. Has anyone else experienced this? I am using KSP x86_64 0.23.5 under Ubuntu Linux 14.04, but I have seen a similar issue with another mod (Kerbin Shuttle Orbiter System v1.06? I don't have it installed anymore) under KSP 0.23 in Windows 7. I will try the new GitHub code tonight, since you specifically mention you've made some updates to that part. Thank you for a SPECTACULAR mod, RoverDude!

My first computer game was subLOGIC A2FS2, the immediate ancestor of the first MSFS (Microsoft bought out the original developer). It was on a double sided 5-1/4" floppy disk, 140 kilobytes per side, you physically removed the disk and flipped it over to finish loading the game; still, I had it good, I hear there was a version on CASSETTE TAPE. It had four discrete regions of scenery; in theory you could enable the infinite fuel hack and fly your 124mph Piper Arrow all the way across the empty featureless void from the patch of a few airfields around Chicago to a few more around New York, but with no autopilot and no joystick, I never bothered. I only had a monochrome amber monitor at the time, too, so pretending to fly that far IFR would have been very difficult, as my artificial horizon was a black-and-yellow checkerboard pattern for the sky, and a slightly offset but otherwise identical black-and-yellow checkerboard pattern for the ground. It had great pack-ins, though. Along with the usual instruction manual there was a separate, slightly thicker manual on the basics of flight, laminated keyboard reference cards, and best of all, printed maps of each region for VOR/NDB navigation.

Reminds me of Stunt Race FX for ye olde 16-bit Super Nintendo!

"The best way to defend against E-bomb attack is to destroy the platform or delivery vehicle in which the E-bomb resides. Another method of protection is to keep all essential electronics within an electrically conductive enclosure, called a Faraday cage." --Globalsecurity.org

Are these abbreviations common in the English speaking world?"EE" is common for an Electrical Engineer, yes. But as for the others? "ME," in my experience, more commonly refers to either a Medical Examiner (also known as a Coroner, a doctor who investigates deaths for the police) or a particularly horrible version of Microsoft Windows. I've never seen anyone abbreviate Chemical Engineer to anything before now; "Chem-E" may be a common abbreviation among engineers, but not among the public.

Adding an antenna to your circumlunar flight will yield one additional crew report, which earns you 5 science * 3 science multiplier for Mün space * 100% transmission efficiency = 15 more science returned to Kerbin. But is it worth the cost? The cost will be the antenna ($150) plus, maybe, one battery. Don't bother with a battery to power the antenna; there's enough power in the capsule. Each transmission burst sends 2 Mits of data, a crew report is 5 Mits, the cheapest antenna uses 10 power per burst, so 3 bursts = 30 electricity). But that leaves you with only 20 power for reaction wheels. You made it there and back with the 50 power in the capsule and no solar panels; can you manage maneuvering with 20 power, or do you need the insurance of a battery that would give you an extra 100? One small battery ($80) is still a lot cheaper than a solar panel ($300). Total cost then for the antenna + battery is $230. Yielding 15 science, that's 65.22 science per megabuck. Since that's higher than the 63.29 your mission has without it, it will raise your efficiency. The antenna with a solar panel costs $450, or 33.33 Sci/M$. Since this is lower than the 63.29 your mission has without it, spending this much on the extra science would bring your efficiency DOWN. If you can go without the battery, the antenna adds 100 science per megabuck that you spent on it (15 more science for $150). EDIT:OH! The dish is cheaper! But it uses 1.5x the power. Sending the crew report home will use 45 power, leaving you only 5 for reaction wheels if you have no battery. With one battery, 15 science for $180 total = 83.33 Sci/M$. Such a deal, you can't afford NOT to.

Well, I thought I had a winning strategy; a manned/kerbed flyby of Eve. Eve was the perfect choice; reasonably accessible, high science multiplier, and most importantly, different biomes (land/ocean). That makes the crew pod a HUGELY valuable scientific instrument, with results for crew report and EVA in high orbit, and crew report and two EVAs in low orbit (one EVA report over each biome). ...except it doesn't work that way. First, I forgot that you can only hold one crew report no matter what biome it came from; you can transmit it without penalty, but I didn't bring an antenna. Second, there is only one "space low over Eve" biome, regardless of whether it's over land or sea (I didn't know this, I'd never visited Eve before!). I'm out of town and away from KSP for a couple of weeks. When I get back, I have a revised plan for the kerbed Eve flyby that *should* allow a science-per-megabuck in the high 50's. I need to recalculate my unkerbed lander's potential, since all my assumptions for its science yield were wrong too.

Well, I knew approval wasn't a sure thing, which is why I checked before doing the build. I started with a clean career mode and I'm still researching the parts needed for the mission, the test article was built in a separate sandbox. But fair enough; the Space Force will keep the stock LV-Ns for Jool, and we'll use the new bigger reactors for upgrades at the powerplants, and when the lights come back on we'll announce on TV that, um, it was a planned upgrade all along! Yeah. We totally built the nuclear-thermal rockets for the real purpose of making safe clean power for Kernada. (Psst. Hey, North Kerbia. We invested a lot in R&D and it didn't pay off. Let's talk.) Back to the serious: I should probably pre-clear my whole mod list. I'm going pretty mod-heavy here, but I want to do a proper challenge more than I want to use most of these mods. The next most questionable part is also from the KSO pack, the current draft uses the shuttle's main and OMS engines. So the full list is: RemoteTech2_Release_1.3.3 (all unmanned craft will be properly remote controlled) Kerbin_Shuttle_Orbiter_v112 (oh, there's an update...) While KSO as provided is achingly beautiful, I will probably need the Low Resolution Texture Pack before I'm done. [*]Chatterer_0.5.9.2devBuild [*]SCANsat_b5 [*]6sSerCom_v1.1_byNothke (equpiment bays; if anything, it imposes a weight penalty for aesthetics) [*]KAS_v0.4.5 [*]KerbalAlarmClock_2.7.0.0 [*]MechJeb2-2.1.1.01 [*]CrewManifest_v0_5_5_0 [*]TacFuelBalancer_2.3.0.2 [*]Home Grown Rocket Parts "Radish" 2-man Gemini-esque command pod [*]Habitat Pack v0.3 inflatable habitats and "orbital orb" command pod [*]Crowd-sourced science logs [*]I will probably look into the current generation of memory solutions: Active Texture Management, Squad Texture Reduction Pack, etc [*]If I use Kethane at all, it'll be to top up the ship at Minimus before departure and an extra sensor on mapping satellites. There will be no mining in the Jool system -- at least, not this trip. Communications and mapping satellites will be sent on an earlier ship. That ship will be available as an emergency backup tanker in the Jool system, but it shouldn't be necessary, and the main ship will otherwise carry all mission equipment. If any of this stretches the challenge, let me know so I can fix it before I start assembly. And with that... back to scienceing the Mün!

For a non-kethane, level 2/3/Jeb effort, are the Kommit Nucleonics FTmN atomic engines acceptable? Here are the advantages it gives me over a similar design with stock engines: simplified on-orbit assembly decrease mass at Kerbin departure by 3 tons (about 0.8% of the ship) 17% more thrust - initial TWR increases from 0.19 to 0.22 improves total dV by ~2% reduces parts count by more than 50 pieces, the main driver for the request. Pictured here is the structural test article, "Majestic," representing the ship as it might look after orbital assembly. It stands at the Royal Kernadian Space Force top secret research facility just off Hwy 1 in Kernwall past the Jeb Horton's, you can't miss it. Majestic has 12 LV-N engines installed, but these are actually SKIDU power reactors borrowed from the Brews and Picklejar nuclear powerplants who would really like them back so they can turn the lights back on. The advantages list above comes from replacing the engines with three Advanced SKIDU reactors packaged as FTmN-280 engines. The habitats are lightweight, but there's nearly twice as many of them as necessary (24 seats for 14 crew: 4 dedicated to running the ship, and five 2-man lander teams). The KSO external tanks have a slightly worse mass fraction (87% fuel) than Jumbo64s (89%). BUT THEY LOOK COOL. And is a bunch of shuttle external tanks carried to orbit and assembled into a giant cluster not what man dreamt of when first he gazed upon the stars?

I guess it comes down to the question of whether or not "man-rating" means anything. If it does, then you must test it unmanned before putting people in it. If it's okay to put people in an unproven rocket, then let's quit pretending otherwise. Personally, I believe in unmanned tests, as did the people building every crewed system other than Shuttle: Vostok was a well tested spy satellite with a driver's seat installed, and a proven launcher. Voskhod was a modification to that. Mercury had numerous unmanned flights, both to test the capsule itself using custom-made test launchers and the full Mercury-Redstone and Mercury-Atlas stacks. Gemini-Titan had two unmanned test flights before manned flights. Apollo, Saturn I and Saturn V all had unmanned tests both independently and together. Soyuz launched three times (one failure) unmanned before the first manned flight... and in the end, the first flight proved they should have done more unmanned tests. I think the Buran-Energia program had it right. Fly the launcher, fly the launcher and the spacecraft unmanned, then consider putting people in it. In Buran's case that never happened, for reasons. But I think the method was sound. If SLS fails, maybe you're right, it'll set a potential, hypothetical, uncommitted, unfunded Mars program back by five years. But if SLS kills people in its first flight, it's going to set American manned spaceflight as a whole back a lot further than that.

We salvage a crashed ship, then the aliens come back looking for it? hmm.... Closer to , I think.

That's brilliant, I wish I'd thought of it and I'm doing to do the same. I have a ship planned with nearly twice as many seats as kerbals, the idea being that the large inflatables held zero-g sleeping and hydroponics areas, with their daytime work and exercise areas in the centrifuges (mounted back-to-back so they counterrotate). So now I can make the work areas actually perform work!

Ah! That makes sense then. I *am* using RemoteTech. I just didn't understand that "optimal" meant drift-proofing. My own calculations usually tried to keep the Line Of Sight between two satellites above the atmosphere, and that gave plenty of play for drift. It did end up a bit higher though (740km?). I'm using your specs now (721.61 km / SMA 1.32161). You have helped prepare the Kernadian Space Agency's Stayputnikom Series II constellation to support missions throughout equatorial cismünar space!

Does KSP not count the weight of the landing gear? From the specs, three Small Gear Bays *should* weigh more than your whole craft. But it seems to weigh the same as mine. And yours clearly performs better; using computer-controlled throttle, yours can do better than 11,300m, 900m better than mine. KSP physics is the best physics!