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-Velocity-

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Everything posted by -Velocity-

  1. Hello all, I haven't played since before Breaking Ground released. I was eager to try out the robotic parts, but so far I have been extremely disappointed. Case in point: I was using a "servo motor" part to try to make a VTOL spaceplane. I attached Rapiers to servo motors, figured out how the KAL-1000 could be used to control the angle, and thought I was golden. WRONG. I was running into the issue that, despite the so-called servo motors being set to a target angle of 0 degrees, the motors were not achieving the target angle due to torque on the motors. Here's the kicker: the servo motors have PLENTY of torque to spin the engines all around their full arc of rotation. It's just that, target angles are never met because, unlike actual servo motors, the so-called "servo motors" in game apparently have ZERO feedback loop. Real servo motors don't miss an angle because there's a slight torque or force on the motor, they have a feedback loop that tells them their actual position and applies whatever actuation is needed to achieve the desired position/angle. Overall, I'm finding that due to the lack of any kind of feedback loop on the game's so-called "servo motors", they miss their commanded angles badly and constantly, making them essentially useless for vectored thrust. I've also had some issues with robotic parts shifting after my spacecraft was launched. I had a large number of pistons for landing legs on a base I launched. I wanted to be able to level out the base on whatever body I landed it on using the pistons. Well, once I got to the desired destination, I found that all the pistons had warped and skewed into an entirely different placement on my spacecraft- some were even floating out in space, not visually attached to the craft! I'm not using any mods other than Mechjeb. It only happened to the robotic parts and the parts directly attached to them. I was able to figure out that the warping of the piston placement happened during my burn out of Minimus orbit. And yes, the warping/skewing was very, very permanent. I was only able to fix it by manually editing my save file in notepad++ to restore the original placement of the parts. I also was having some issues with robotic parts, if they interact with your own vessel at all, they cause huge warp errors- as soon as I hit timewarp, my vessel's delta-V will change substantially, making me miss encounters with other planets entirely. Am I missing something? Are these robotic parts really this badly implemented? Literally every single time I've tried to use them, I've gotten badly burned by one problem or another.
  2. I just tried your design. I cheated it with infinite fuel to Eve and landed it real quick. It doesn't get close to making orbit from 1.6 km ASL, either with the throttle firewalled or by carefully controlling the throttle to TWR = 2. Are you sure you didn't mean it could make it to orbit from 5 km altitude, not sea level? Is it right to have the smaller side tanks stage first?! Please upload a craft file. Also, the small circular intakes ARE there, they are buried under the ground for some reason. By the way, this is with 4X xenon tanks under the fairing. 4 xenon tanks weigh as much as 4 kerbals. I can't see how I could be flying it wrong, I don't see how there could be a happy middle ground between firewalling the throttle and controlling it to TWR = 2 where this thing makes it to orbit. Your picture does clearly show the fuel going from the small tanks to the larger side ones... There are 20 oscar-b fuel tanks in my copy's long side tanks and 10 in the short side tanks. I assume the upper stage engine is an LV909 or whatever that thing is called (1.25m short, high vacuum ISP engine with 50 kN max thrust).
  3. Well, I hope so. The aspargus staging is strange, the smaller tanks go first according to the arrows on the fuel lines, but yea, 6 km/s. But wow, only 8-9 km/s?!?!
  4. I admit it's possible that the rules have changed significantly since I last played, but if they changed this much, I am extremely surprised. The rule I always heard- and that I experimentally found to be roughly true- was you need 12000 ms dV to get to orbit from sea level (with some safety margin). This craft only has a delta-V of 6000 m/s!!! You mean to say that they changed the game's aero model so much that you can almost entirely negate drag?! What is at the end of the side tanks? How does one fly this thing? At maximum thrust? You go from sea level to orbit in less than TWO MINUTES?! Because you certainly don't have enough delta-V to make it to orbit at TWR = 2. If you have essentially zero drag, though, it should work. Oh, I finally figured it out. That's a small circular intake. Shouldn't that be draggier?
  5. Four Kerbals in command seats attached to a rocket with a probe core, two panels, a reaction wheel and some batteries and an antenna. Dry mass about 1.15 tons including the kerbals (see the mechjeb info). The xenon tanks are kerbal mass simulators. The payload fraction of this rocket is worse than my last one but it ought to perform vastly better... at least it LOOKS like it will. I’d appreciate any feedback people who are more knowledgeable about KSP’s aero system might have. If the rocket is as aerodynamic as it looks, I wouldn’t be surprised if I had enough dV left over upon reaching orbit (from like 1500m) to escape Eve’s gravity. The upper asparagus group may be slightly underpowered, but it will kind of hard to fix that... maybe I’ll think of something. That said, the gravity turn ought to start near the beginning of the second aspargus group so maybe it’s ok. Maybe if I make the core engine something with higher thrust than an aerospike?(the second aspargus group uses 7-5-3-1 aerospikes). I’d love to see other designs people have come up with.
  6. This is my new Eve Launcher. Like all my Eve launchers I've made, it's two stacked asparagus-staged groups with a final, vertically-staged stage on top. I HOPE it's more aerodynamic than the last, but I'm not sure how the game's aero model really works. Any tips? I'm not planning on integrating it into a mobile base, it will be stationary, situated on a ISRU-enabled launch pad/base. The base it launches from will include the ladders the kerbals will use to get inside the fairing. (Fairings DO shield kerbals from aero forces... right? Or did Squad screw that up too in the latest patch? I was reading that service bays do not shield kerbals from aero forces anymore.) That 11800 m/s dV Mechjeb calculates is WITH kerbal mass simulators installed (4X 0.625m xenon tanks ~= 4 kerbals). It's quite a bit heavier than the last, but hopefully it doesn't have the drag issues the last one did. I am not using Making History, I heard that the parts in it are a little OP and/or buggy. I'm using the KS-25 engines in the lower asparagus group because they have good atmospheric performance and very good thrust to weight ratio (better than the aerospike) and even better thrust-to-area ratio. I just can't pack enough aerospikes under this thing, but it's easy to fit enough KS-25s under it. At an altitude of like 1500m on Eve, they still have something like 665 or 670 kN of thrust. Also, they have a very huge gimbal range to keep your craft under control, though I'm pretty sure that this ship is very close to aerodynamically stable, at least in its first stages.
  7. I just did my first Eve landing and return mission in a couple years. Both entry and return were significantly harder than the last time due to changes (or outright addition, can't remember how long it's been) of atmospheric heating effects and the aerodynamics model. I didn't use any heatshield at all to land my 150ish ton (mostly unfueled) rover/ISRU/ascent return vehicle. There simply isn't a heatshield large enough for it. Instead, I put a large de-orbit and entry stage on the bottom of it with about 3000 m/s dV, a starting Eve TWR of about 1, and an insane number of verner thrusters. The verners were mounted on short, forward wing stubs to move them further away from the CoG. See image at end of post. I put the lander into a rather steep descent (i.e., periapsis about 100 km underground) from an altitude of 150 km. I started the descent engines at like 105 or 110 km. It worked out well enough. The verners kept the thing oriented the right way, and it slowed down enough to not burn up. The engines in the first stage of the lander/rover/base were partly fueled, and assisted the parachutes to achieve a very light touch-down velocity. The reason I put the lander on a somewhat steep descent curve was 1) To hit a target more accurately (I needed a place I could refuel) and more importantly and 2) I didn't want to have to fight Eve's gravity very long before I hit the lower atmosphere (it wastes dV). Anyway, it turned out that the whole lander/rover/base worked, but I had some issues driving on Eve. It's like the ground is high temperature ice or something, because I would just slide down any hill more than 5 degrees and there was no way to stop. I could overpower the slide and drive up hills up to like 10 degrees, but that was it. The tires popped a lot too which kept Bill busy. The bad part was when the tires popped on a 5+ degree hill. Bill would fix the tires and then the rover would go sliding away from him and he'd have to run like h*ll to snag the ladder I think next time, I'll just build a better ascent vehicle that I don't have any concerns launching from 1500 m ASL and keep the rover a separate, lightweight vehicle. Speaking of the ascent vehicle, I had NO IDEA how draggy the windscreen for my kerbals would be. Turns out the aero model is a little silly, and my windscreen, which I thought would probably slightly decrease drag, was more like a parachute. I had to jettison the thing early after launch in order to even make orbit (I made a branch save early on in the surface mission just to see how bad ascent would be), even launching from a 2400 m ASL location. It's nuts. You could probably build a solid metal parachute in the game by just alternating stack widths. In fact, I plan to try. The aero model's sensitivity to variations in stack width seems MUCH too high, but I'm not an aeronautical engineer. For the next version of my Eve ascent vehicle, I plan to put the kerbals inside a fairing. How to get them in? Well, IRL, they could just use something called a DOOR. In game, if they climb up to just outside the fairing on a ladder, you can move the camera inside the fairing and right-click on the command seat and have them board it right through the fairing. It's kind of silly there is no other way to get into a fairing (other than a lander can inside the fairing already). I supposed one could use one of those hollow structural fuselages on the bottom and have them climb up through that, but that wastes valuable cross section and weight.
  8. In KSP, this one was pretty good. This was from a much older pre-official-release version. Things used to be a lot more explody, like, joints would fail much more easily. Also, nose cones weren't actually needed because aerodynamics weren't in the game yet...
  9. Ugh... just came back from a long break and this is one of the first things I noticed. There was always a physics jump but this is getting much more extreme. Also, landing legs on my ISRU bases just randomly fly off or start exploding when I load into them, especially if I have a giant ship docked onto the top of them.
  10. If you can do a reasonable approximation of a suicide burn, 6000 m/s works well as a "safe" value. "Safe" and "suicide" don't really belong in the same sentence, but it is what it is. If you don't use quick saves then don't get too attached to the Kerbals you're going to try sending down there.
  11. Back before they nerfed ISP on the stock engines (what was that... 0.23?) you could quite easily make a lander that could land and take off of Tylo all without discarding a single part. Basically, your lander had to be almost entirely fuel tanks and high TWR, high ISP engines. Heck, you could even put it on wheels and make it a rover, since wheels didn't weigh much more than landing legs. You just had to be a low orbit when you released it from your mothership, and it could only fly back up to a low orbit. I doubt that's possible anymore, you're probably hard-pressed to exceed 5000 dV now without having to drop stages, and you need like 5500 m/s to give yourself a safety margin while landing and taking off. That said, with ISRU, making a fully reusable Tylo lander/rover that discards no components at all should be easy (relatively speaking). Technically, you probably only need 2700 m/s dV, but to be safe you could shoot for 3500 m/s. You'd have a large margin for error. Your starting TWR should probably exceed 2, but not be more than 3. The more dV you have, the lower the TWR you can get away with, obviously. My old single stage Tylo landers had a starting TWR of like 1.5, but that was OK, because that starting TWR was not used fighting gravity. The TWR on those craft would climb to well over 2 during the latter parts of the landing burn, when you actually start wasting delta V on gravity (the more TWR you have, the less time you spend wasting delta-V cancelling out the constant pull of gravity). With ISRU, your starting TWR is equal to your takeoff TWR, so you better make it pretty high or you'll waste too much fuel just fighting gravity. Also, you have to land these things using something that approximates a "suicide burn". Ideally, you burn retrograde at 100% thrust until you touch down. In practice, you just get as close as you can to an ideal suicide burn (unless Mechjeb or some other mod has a suicide burn calculator, in which case you can probably get very close to a perfect suicide burn... the math is pretty simple). But if you're one of these people who kills their orbital velocity to zero and then drops to the ground from like 100 km'... you better start learning how to land properly
  12. Something greater than zero and less than 100. Perhaps you are not aware that we actually regrow brain cells, that we pee out used-up neurochemicals, or that cells constantly are repairing damage to themselves. But I think you are just are trying to be argumentative.
  13. Do you experience death every millisecond as your body starts converting some different part of your brain into urine or feces? The point I was trying to make is that there is nothing special about the atoms that make up your brain. Sleep is irrelevant to the topic. If you want to know, then sleep is just the temporary suspension of the conscious operation of the information pattern that makes you, you. The fact that you wake up and remember who are is because that is by definition a part of the information pattern that makes up your mind.
  14. There is nothing special about what specific set of atoms presently make up my brain. The body is self-repairing and the brain is naturally throwing away tiny bits of itself and rebuilding itself with new atoms. A very large fraction of the atoms that made up your brain five, ten years ago ended up being flushed down the toilet a long time ago as urine and feces. So if you think that the atoms of your body make you, you, then you're constantly dying and being reborn as a different person. That does not match our real-life experience of consciousness at all. What if you were to replace a single neuron in your brain with an artificial neuron that behaves and is exactly configured the same as the one it replaces? Are you still you? What if you slowly replaced all your neurons with artificial ones over the course of a year? Since the new artificial neurons work exactly the same as the old ones, you wouldn't ever notice anything changing and your behavior would be exactly the same as it would have been if you had all natural neurons. So if you can replace your entire brain with an artificial one over the course of a year and you are still you, then why can't you just replace your entire brain with an exact artificial replica over the course of a single surgery? If the man with the fully artificial replica brain is not the same as the man he was before, then why? Again, the body already throws out and replaces bits of your brain every second. What is so special about natural neurons vs artificial ones, if the artificial neurons work exactly the same? Taking it further, why does the artificial neuron need to reside in your skull? Why can't it reside as a simulated neuron inside a computer? Why can't they all reside as simulated neurons inside a computer? Anyway, what it boils down to is that any mind is nothing but information. There really isn't such thing as a "simulated" mind. That's like saying that the number seventeen that I write on a computer monitor is a "simulated" number seventeen, while the number seventeen that I write on a piece of paper is a "real" seventeen. No, they are both the number seventeen, they are just encoded in a different information storage medium. It doesn't matter whether it is composed of cells, or artificial cells, or the state of a flip-flop, or as electrons trapped on a floating gate field-effect transistor. Information is information. The number seventeen is always just the number seventeen, there are not different kinds of number seventeens. Likewise, I am an information pattern that is constantly changing. It matters not at all what information storage and processing medium my information pattern is recorded on. So, copying a mind is the same as writing a second number seventeen. Now you have two number seventeens recorded. Which is the "real" or "original" number seventeen is ridiculous question, because there is only one piece of information that is the number seventeen. Yes, it can be instantiated multiple times, but every number seventeen is by definition exactly the same as any other number seventeen. What about the soul? Well, if the soul DOES exist, and it is directing our actions, then the presence of a supernatural soul WILL be eventually scientifically proven at some point. As neurologists map the brain and brain activity closer and closer, they will have to notice eventually that causality is getting broken inside our heads. Energy will not be conserved, for example, chemical compounds will found to miraculously be formed or broken with no energy lost or input from the outside environment. As you can probably tell, I find the concept of the supernatural soul pretty ludicrous, but you can't rule it out- yet. We haven't looked closely enough at a thinking brain in action yet to show that everything within it follows the laws of physics, but why the heck would it not?!?! SO, anyway, to answer the original question: To murder an AI would be to destroy its unique information pattern beyond practical recovery. To simply suspend or disrupt the operation of its information pattern against its will would be the same as physically assaulting a human and knocking him/her unconscious. So you could destroy the computer that houses the AI and not really murder it, as long as you just backed it up first. We do start running into thorny ethical questions when we start to operate multiple instantiations of a specific being's information pattern. Initially, the two patterns would be essentially the same but as each was subjected to unique stimuli, they would start to diverge. At the end point, you would clearly have two different, unique beings, so clearly at some ill-defined point you have to start considering each separate instantiation its own person. So ethically and legally, it might be simplest to just not allow multiple copies of the same being to exist. By the same argument, laws against child abuse are just to protect other's feelings, not the child's feelings. You can't prove that children have sentience. Of course, that's ridiculous. People enact laws against animal cruelty for the same reason we enact laws against child abuse: it is insanely obvious that all animals, human or otherwise, have feelings, and it makes us feel bad when we see them suffer. The fact that it makes us feel bad doesn't take away from the fact that it makes us feel bad because we recognize that animals have sentience, and we empathize with an animal in distress or pain.
  15. Incorrect. There is overwhelming evidence to show that all animals are sentient. The law already recognizes animal sentience (through the existence of laws against animal cruelty) because it has been plainly obvious to anyone who has eyes since the dawn of mankind that animals have sentience. Just because a large number of science fiction authors misuse the word "sentience" doesn't mean it's fine to do so as well. Actual scientists certainly don't misuse the word: https://www.livescience.com/39481-time-to-declare-animal-sentience.html, nor does the dictionary: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/sentience?s=t
  16. Actually, according to Mike Brown, Planet 9's aphelion is in Taurus. So no, it's not towards the galactic center unless we're very unlucky right now (its orbit is so elongated that it is most likely near aphelion right now). Also, it's not the "glare" that makes planets harder to find if they are near the galactic plane (or especially, galactic core) in the sky, it's the sheer number of faint background stars.
  17. It's extremely easy to combine the function of rover and lander into the same vehicle. You can even combine more than just lander and rover. This is rover/science research base/lander/interplanetary transfer ship/ISRU base all rolled into one, for example, for use in the Duna and Kerbin systems: Notice I have two sets of engines- the primary engines in the back aligned axially and the landing/take-off engines in the middle pointed downward. This was due to aerodynamic considerations within Duna's atmosphere, but honestly, it might not be worth the trade-off. If you stay outside of atmospheres, you CERTAINLY only need a single set of engines, and if you are only landing in weak gravity (like, less than 3 m/s^2) then you are better off with LV-N nuclear engines. In fact, the LV-Ns can be used even for Moho and Duna landing, it just gets more difficult, you start needing a lot of them to get a decent TWR. Here's another example that only combines the lander and rover functionalities. As for how to get the rovers into orbit, yes, they can be draggy. Start a slight gravity turn almost immediately off of the pad so that you never have to make your rocket turn so much below 30 km that there is a greater than 5 or 10 degree difference in the surface prograde vector and where your rocket's nose is pointed. A lot of KSP players in my experience (based on forum surveys I read a long time ago) do not start their gravity turns early enough anyway. So, as long as you keep your rocket pointed within like 5 to 10 degrees of where the surface velocity vector is pointing, your rocket's control system should have enough authority to overcome the inherent instability of having your center of drag too far forward. If it DOESN'T, you need to add more control surfaces and/or fins to the back and/or add more engines with thrust vectoring capability. This is what my ISRU rover looks like on the pad: If you're wondering how that relatively small rocket gets that huge rover into orbit, it's because I'll launch big things like that with mostly empty fuel tanks and then refill them on Minimus. And this is that over rover I showed on the pad: ALSO: Do NOT try to go too fast in the lower atmosphere with that big, front-draggy rover attached to your rocket. Keep your TWR pretty low, you should have a lift-off TWR below 2, and your TWR shouldn't get much more than 3 or MAYBE 3.5 before going second stage- and that's assuming you aren't controlling the thrust from getting too high, which you actually should, especially in this case (generally, the rule in the lower atmosphere in the stock game is to control your TWR to be around 2). The slower you go, the easier it is for your thrust-vectoring engines to keep your rocket straight (assuming the rocket is aerodynamically unstable), and slower can also mean being more efficient in the lower atmosphere, especially with a lot of drag.
  18. Good shot. I can't help but wonder how spectacular this galaxy would be if it wasn't so close to the plane of the Milky Way. Its light must go through a fair amount of dust extinction. Even with that, it was one of my favorite galaxies (though I had a lot of favorites) back when I was an active visual observer.
  19. How exactly do WIMPs slow down and clump together? Is the only way that they can shed kinetic energy through gravitational waves? I suppose they could trade kinetic energy with other objects through gravitational attraction, but I don't think that there is any total change in kinetic energy + gravitational potential energy when that happens. In the very distant future of the universe, might dark matter "cool down" enough to start coalescing into objects smaller than galaxies? Obviously, WIMPs can interact weakly, but that's going to be an extremely low probability event... but the gravitational waves they emit will also be extremely, extremely weak, so which dominates?
  20. Only mods are Mechjeb and visual enhancements. OK, I didn't know spacebar did that during EVA, thanks! Normally when I go EVA it's like spacebar is depressed ALL the time- my kerbal always faces where my mouse looks. That is the behavior I want. How did you know to use spacebar? If what I'm having is a bug, then spacebar is superfluous, because EVA is supposed to be spacebar on 100% of the time, so you wouldn't have known to use spacebar. So what toggles that mode on and off? Maybe I'm striking that key by mistake. It's not left-alt, "cycle movement mode" or whatever, I just tried that and I didn't fix the problem. I don't know where logs are stored.
  21. I've been having this annoying problem (x64 executeable) where Kerbal EVA controls keep getting broken. Basically, on EVA, when I enable the EVA RCS thrusters, Kerbals are SUPPOSED TO face where your mouse is looking (within the rotational plane that they are stupidly locked to, at least). However, they're getting stuck facing the same direction for me. The only way to turn the Kerbal on EVA is to use the "Q" and "E" keys. The only way to fix the problem that I've found is to restart the entire game, and that only works MOST of the time. Is there some view irritating and obscure view option I am accidentally activating, or is this a bug? Also, is it true that Kerbals are only locked to a single rotational plane during EVA, or is it at all possible to go completely free?
  22. OK, so I just started up the x86 exe. The TRACKING STATION shows that my rover is speaking to KSC by using the transfer tug as a relay. But if I actually take control of the rover, it says it is not connected to KSC. I just discovered the "CommNet" button, and I was able to turn it on so that relays were shown in the map. However, it didn't help anything. See the screenshot below. How am I "Not Connected" when I clearly AM connected?!?!?! The red line goes to Kerbin.
  23. Oh yea, this is the x64 exe. And nothing's out of electricity. I've been playing KSP since 2013, so I wouldn't make a mistake like that. However, I don't understand the new antenna/comm relay system, so there could be something involved specifically with that that I am missing. Oh yes, this is career mode and my tracking station is level 2. I will try x86 exe next.
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