Diche Bach

Interactive is generally a good thing. But with only 30 minutes it could actually be detrimental because your audience might lead you down some blind alleys and lead to less comprehensive and cohesive coverage of what you would like to cover in the game. Also, with only 30 minutes, I think that a Mun landing might be a bit too ambitious and skip over many salient little details that newcomers to the game (even those with technical mindsets) will find confusing. I would suggest modeling your presentation on this video by Scott Manley. It might seem a bit elementary to KSP veterans. But trust me; I'm fairly scientific and even quantitative and I found this video to be quite useful when I first started playing. If you feel that it is too simple you could add 'next step' elements like carrying larger payloads, or executing different types of orbits (high orbit; geosynchronous; Mun encounter, etc.). I think getting to the moon and back is a bit much for 30 minute presentation where you should reasonably assume that you audience might know very little about astronautics, although have a sufficient technical background to get off to a good start.

I see that there are an incredible number of very interesting sounding gameplay modifications, plugins and other sundry supporting applications. I am an avid user of mods for many other games. I've come to love some of the better mod manager applications for favorite games I play: DayZ Commander; Nexus Mod Manager for The Elder Scrolls games; Six Updater for Arma II; the Tekkit Lite package for Minecraft (not exactly a mod manager but similar). There seem to be at least three different options for getting going with installing addons and stuff for KSP: 1. Install manually (prefer to avoid this at the outset if I can); 2. use KSP-Mod-Admin-v1-2-6; 3. use Kerbal-Space-Program-Mod-Manager Maybe there are other mod-manager options? Given the number of things that I'm interested in trying out, I'd much prefer an all-in-one addon/manager that allows me to browse a list and activate/deactivate specific mods as I choose. Something that also integrated plugins to some degree would be especially appreciated. What do you guys suggest? Sorry if I should've posted this in the addons section. I browsed those subforums a bit and it just seemed more appropriate to ask this question in the General section. I almost started to ask this in MacTee's Mod Admin thread, but then thought it best not to ask there.

OMG I want. Time to start adding mods I think !

Good to see System Shock 2 mentioned up above there ! That was my personal fav old game too

I am a social/behavioral scientist, but I know very little about engineering and physics. I'm a competent statistician but calculus is Greek to me. Nonetheless, in ~90 hours of play and tutorial usage, I've managed to bumble my way through a good 25 or 30 successful orbital launches; half-dozen or more nearly perfect geo-synchronous orbits of Kerbin; a half dozen or more relatively successful gravity-assist maneuvers around Mun; a permanent orbiter around Mun; a temporary orbiter around Duna; most recently embarked on my first space station and that so far has been relatively successful. So, I'd say that, with only a bit of physical science/math background it is possible by trial-and-error and building up intuition to get pretty far along. I would imagine that a reasonably bright 10 year could do at least as good as me if not better, even if they had never even had algebra or trig.

Exactly. I predict that within the next 15 years, either China will be "winning" or China will be ravaged by a civil war. It all depends on how well the Aristocrats who rule that country manage to strike a balance between reform and stability.

A _very_ interesting question and one that I have pondered myself rather often. As a social/behavioral scientist I am in fact quite sympathetic to the perspective from which the question arises. However, I think that ultimately the question is fallacious as it poses a "False Dilemma." The question itself is nonetheless interesting philosophically in that it reflects on the shortcomings of humanism or the 'incomplete' status of human 'ascendance' for lack of a better term. Most all the problems you describe are 99.99% preventable. Take for example, death by rabies. This terrible disease (and terrible way to die) takes the lives of (IIRC) several tens-of-thousands of humans every year, most of whom are residents of less-advantaged nations, and moreover remote area dwelers where proper health care infrastructure is lacking. A simple post-exposure treatment after an exposure (animal bite or whatever) is in 99.99% of cases sufficient to 'cure' rabies before the irreversible onset of the fatal symptoms. It is simply the lack of availability or knowledge of the fairly inexpensive and easy to administer post-exposure treatment that is the ultimate cause of these peoples deaths every year. In theory, if a couple billion were spent to setup proper health care / communications infrastructure to under-served regions of the planet, these deaths (and a lot of other preventable deaths too) could be avoided. However, this theory is quite faulty in that it assumes that all that is needed is to spend the money and *poof* a perfect solution is then permanently in place. In fact, health care even in the most advantaged nations is exceedingly problematic and plenty of people still 'slip through the cracks' even when the systems put in place are impeccable. Not to mention the operating and upkeep costs. Not to mention the vulnerability of such systems to corruption, etc., etc. In reality, if you wanted to save those people from dying of rabies, you'd probably need to 'take over' all those nations where those deaths occur at a high rate and manage them yourself so that you could avoid these issues: yeah right! We all know that, even in the most 'advanced' nations, corruption, in-fighting, partisanism, etc. make 'solving' these kinds of complex problems seemingly impossible. Not to mention that many of these issues that we could label as 'Failures to Advance Toward Utopia" are in large part reflections of nothing more than arbitrary cultural values and not even a result of malfeasance per se. For example, North American automobile fatalities. Working just from memory here, but . . . they peaked at about 80,000 per annum back in the late 1980s prior to the advent of seat-belt laws and Federal imposition of a speed limit system. I'm sure that changes in vehicle design played part too. Over the past ~30 years this rate of death (and morbidity too) has dropped pretty steadily, but with some very clear plummets immediately following imposition of various regulations (such as the seat belt laws). In recent years, this rate of mortality has hovered in the 50K ballpark, and if memory serves it took another major drop a year or two ago, down to less than 40k. There are obviously many things that go into this drop in preventable traffic fatalities, but what I'm really getting at with this example is as follows: 1. Most people don't really care about automobile fatality rates even though they are in fact one of the most salient risks to which we are all exposed to varying degrees. 2. The ~59,000 sum total of U.S. military service personnel who were killed in action during the total duration of U.S. involvement in the "Vietnam Conflict" has probably received 10,000 times as much social commentary as the millions of automobile deaths in the U.S. alone. I figure an average of 60k over the course of 50 years? what is that ~3 million killed in the "North American Automobile War?" 3. Despite problems like automobile fatalities being largely unacknowledged, the change in rates demonstrate that the problem is largely preventable. If a few policy changes and enforcement practices can snowball societal changes leading to reductions of ~50% over the course of ~30 years, then it would seem logical to conclude that: with the right policy changes and enforcement it should be possible to reduce automobile fatalities down to the absolute minimum, reflecting _ONLY_ that rate of deaths which is completely unpreventable (random mechanical failures, freak weather events, etc.) All of this to say: putting a man on the moon is easy relative to actually creating "Utopia." Moreover, it is not really a matter of either (a) putting a man on the moon, or ( creating Utopia. As I hope my ramblings above show, creating Utopia is exceedingly complicated and cutting space programs would be unlikely to drive advances toward Utopia any more than promoting space programs deters such advances. In fact, because things like the International Space Station necessitate more and better international cooperation, one could argue that, in general space programs contribute indirectly to the sorts of cultural and social changes that ultimately make advance toward utopia _more_ likely. Thus, as I said above, I believe this question is a false dilemma. It is not a matter of EITHER we advance space exploration OR we advance utopia.

Ability to rename and redesignate objects even when their batteries are dead. For example, I have a Stayputnik satellite with flat batteries that I can neither rename nor reset as debris. It shows up in my "active flights" list and I have no way to reset it to debris and it is completely dead. Seems like it is probably a fairly small tweak in the application, but down the road in Campaign mode the inability to redesignate objects with flat batteries into debris could prove to be bothersome.

Not sure if I really should create a new thread for this, but it does seem to be a "related" suggestion so hear goes: Ability to transfer directly from flying a space craft to the Tracking Center without going through Space Center first.

Cool, thanks. I figured it was something along those lines and I can't say I fully intuit what you are saying, but with these pointers I should be able to get it sorted out I did have one of my 5 or 6 geosynchronous ones that I sent up that just by random chance wound up pretty much right over KSC. However, I think none of my "geosynchronous orbits" so far have really been perfect as they all seem to be slowly drifting around. Really does need to be EXACTLY 0.0 m/s relative to surface doesn't it? As far as the "directly above" stationary part, are these things in RL LITERALLY directly above? Or is it really more like they are within a narrow band (say a 1km wide section of the equatorial orbit?)?

In 1987 when I was an undergraduate, I had an intro Astronomy course. For this course, I wrote a short research paper on "Unmanned space probes." Seems I was curious about exactly the same question at that time. Having grown up watching the original Star Trek and being in elementary school shortly after the Apollo missions, and in High School during the space shuttle's early work, I was exposed to a lot of TV media that hyped up manned space flight. I was just a bit puzzled why you would send up space craft with no one to control them or seemingly 'do' anything. What I learned from this paper was that manned space flight was in fact, at that stage (and probably still to a considerable degree today) somewhat useless and expensive compared to what unmanned probes can accomplish. No doubt someone will disagree at least slightly, but I think it is safe to say that most of the actual scientific advances made as a result of Apollo could have been achieved far more cheaply and with less risk to human life using various unmanned probes. Now obviously there are all sorts of indirect benefits from solving the myriad problems of safely sending humans to and from the moon, etc. Just based on those indirect scientific/engineering benefits, I believe all the manned space programs have been well worth it, and indeed wish that humanity could/would put even more focus on promoting and expanding manned space travel. But strictly in terms of acquiring information about the cosmos, unmanned vehicles can accomplish seemingly 95% of the grunt work. Hubble for example, possibly the most 'lucrative' scientific instrument ever in human history = unmanned. In closing, I wanted to share some links to an inspiring pair of unmanned space probes that I think really captures the imagination, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/ Have a look over on the right middle of the home page Seems they've been souping up this page a bit and it is quite nice. The little ticker showing distance from the sun and sunlight travel time is pretty cool. It is awe-inspiring to contemplate that these two little machines, launched in 1977, have been making their way intrepidly outward into the cosmos for over 35 years and 10 months. They have provided us with insights about the outer planets and the boundaries of the solar system that could never have been predicted. The impact they have had and will ultimately have on the astronomy and science more broadly over the next 100 years is I think massive. There may not be any astronauts on board, but genius, hard work and love of many thousands of humans is the main propellant of these 'unmanned' space craft, and in that sense they are even more awesome.

Ah DMagic. I will try that. I hadn't thought of turning off some of the reaction wheels

ADDIT: watched the Scott video linked above and that did clarify a lot of my questions, but still would love to see more discussion of these issues. How do the real life astrophysicists determine these things? For example, who figured out that the "Grand Tour" alignment that allowed Voyager 1 and 2 would exist and that the missions needed to when they did? I understand the basic premise of a gravity assist and have managed to bumble my way through a few in game; a couple of which actually seemed to help my velocity quite a bit. However, the math for describing one of these interactions is beyond me. 1. Is it possible to 'master' the art of gravity assists using mostly intuition or is it really necessary to get into the maths? 2. Also, how does one use the in game map or other tools (mods? addons?) to judge when celestial bodies are in good alignment for a series of fly bys? 3. I've looked around for discussions on the concepts of planning and executing gravity assists in Kerbal and haven't found anything that clarifies what exactly are the good alignments. Any links to something like that would be much appreciated. 4. It would appear that approaching for an exact optimum angle (and not simply from behind and slightly orthogonal to the assisting bodies trajectory) can make a big difference to how these work out. Out of the six or so I've done (all using Mun) I would say two of them actually seemed to backfire and slow me down else throw me into some crazy escape trajectory that only made matters worse (and no I didn't approach from the braking angle [from in front of the approaching planet and slightly orthogonal] I don't think). The ones that seem to have imparted the most delta-V are when I was actually yanked out of my approach trajectory and swung into a new trajectory. In one case, I literally was yanked around in front of the Mun and then approached it nearly head on and achieved about a 5000m periapsis. Based on this I have a few working principles on how to perform these but would love to learn more short of getting into the math. A. Use a periapsis burn to extend an apoapsis close to the planets orbit: not sure if this apoapsis should be inside its SOI band or just outside it or perhaps even beyond its orbital path? Also not sure if the exact time and place of the periapsis burn can be eyeballed based on the position of the assisting body? B. Time warp and wait for an encounter to show on the map (this part seems really amateurish; would love to be able to launch on a specific time and day and know that a particular rendezvous was optimal). When an encounter is plotted, try to use some very minimal burns to get a suitable fly-by setup. I find the map a bit difficult to work with at this stage, and judging whether a particular encounter really is or is not suitable for a fly by seems difficult with the way the periapsis projection markers are shown and do not show up when you shift focus. C. Try to shift orbit so that it is more circular around the apoapsis to see if this will improve the fly by, in the sense of reducing the periapsis at the assisting body and giving a good escape trajectory (short of entering the atmosphere I understand the most delta-V will come from the closest fly-by). D. I have no idea what to make of the escape trajectories. Is it really possible to eyeball these and the positions of other farther away bodies and judge whether they are good enough or should be adjusted? E. Burning at the periapsis, or thereabouts can further augment the 'sling shot effect.' However, in several of my fly bys, the trajectory that I would've expected based on the "escape Mun" and/or "escape Kerbin" marker seemed irrelevant and I rather quickly just clicked back into an orbit around the sun.

I've noticed some very strange behavior with my multi-stage ship that I was using to try to setup a geosynchronous space station. After the launch boosters the final vessel is basically two stages. Lower one is the orbital placement vehicle, top one is the actual station (cupola) but with a small engine and 720 tank. Both stages have smaller engines (the Poodles I think) and 720 Rockomax tanks, plus some RCS (and the large Rockomax size tanks) and battery disks. The lower stage has one of those unmanned 'pods' and the upper one also has some solar panels. I noticed that the stock space station has two 'reaction wheels' when I took it apart so I copied this sort of (not knowing if those where there because of the multi-directional docking thing). The top of the cupola has a docking port and then one of the multi-directional docking hubs. In between the cupola and its docking port are the two reaction wheels (exact ones used in the stock space station and same order of stacking). When I get close to 2868 km altitude and I am fine tuning my orbit to get it circularized, I start to notice some very strange behavior with the SAS on versus off. As seems to be common, when you get to a very close to perfect circular orbit the periapsis and apoapsis markers start to quiver and waver, and this seems to relate to everything in the Navball and map view being a bit shaky. However, here is the part that seemed really weird and maybe it had to do with having too many SAS units in the vessel? When I would set a maneuver and then time warp to get to it, both my maneuver trajectory marker and my prograde (and retrograde) markers would wobble and shuffle around the navball very erratically with SAS on, whereas turn it off and they were relatively smooth (only as shaky as I typically notice when doing the circular orbit adjustments).

I've managed several geo-stationary orbits but what is the trick to getting them synchronized over a specific spot such as KSC?

Hell yeah! 4X while flying ion thrusters is better than nothing at all! Thanks for clearing that up for me guys I have a bit of a tendency to over-engineer I guess Thanks for clarifying that I'm well above the optimum maximum probe size. I think now that I know about this physics warping and also that 1 gigantor can power a ion engine I'll go back to the drawing board and see about something nice and light. I tested out a series of 6 or 8 probes and managed to make some nice progress with them. One dropped off its penultimate stage as an orbiter at Mun right after I lucked into a gravity assist that helped me get the main probe all the way to Duna. However, once I got there, I had to expend all my RCS and eventually that probe ran out of fuel and I left it for dead. None of the others ever had enough power flow to run the engine at full blast, and so when I designed my final one I went a bit overboard on everything with the intent that the vehicle can be multi-functional or something.

Something like that would certainly add much more utility to ion thrusters. Based on how the engine seems to 'pause' for calculations, and then 'resume' play whenever you pass an encounter node, it would seem (to my naïve eye) to be the sort of functionality that is already in the game in some sense. Ideally, a system whereby one can plot a maneuver with an ion-thrusted vessel, tell it to "stay on trajectory" and then go away and play other flights or whatever while it was chugging along would be great. But that seems like it would be a couple steps more complicated than a "jump-to" sort of functionality. Ah thanks for that info Kaleb. My initial attempts were really just exploratory to get a feel for how the components work together and they were woefully underpowered even with only 1 engine. I tried adding a few of the 1x6 panels and that didn't seem to do the trick and iterations 5 through 8 wound up in the dust bin for various reasons . Finally I just decided to go overkill and put a total of 6 Gigantors _plus_ additional. I think my "Viking 10" model must have about 16 of the 1x6 extending panels, 16 of the small cheapo tack-on panels plus the 6 Gigantors = running one ion thruster at full blast became no problemo!

Yeah I was afraid that was a real constraint. Disappointing to hear you confirm that it is. Am I the only one who finds this limitation on using the Ion thrusters to be 'annoying?' If so, then I guess there is really no point in Squad trying to figure out some sort of work around. But if other players agree, then perhaps it is worth Squad thinking about some sort of workaround to make ion thruster ships more useable? IMO, ion thrusters are more or less useless at present, though I'd be very curious to hear if anyone has a way to use them that mitigates this slow acceleration issue. At present, with only a fairly small solar system to 'explore,' and no real science to do, this issue with ion engines being less than optimally useful may seem fairly trivial. But as the game evolves and the desire for scenarios or campaigns that model economically-efficient long-range interplanetary or edge-interstellar missions grows, I think it will be realized that this shortcoming in how Ion Thrusters operate is a serious limitation. It is my understanding that, for long-range space craft of the next 50 years, ion thruster technology is likely to be one of the most prominent. Unless I misunderstand how these systems are used and will continue to be used in real life, applying thrust for long periods is typical. And that is not very practical to do in KSP at present.

Very encouraging to see that Squad does have plans to implement a resource system into the game! I do hope that they read these threads closely as there are some excellent ideas in here! Long-long term, wouldn't it be cool to see Squad collaborate to integrate a grand strategy game in the genre of Civilization, Supreme Ruler or Victoria into their space game? Imagine being able to control a societies development from pre-aircraft through to galactic civilization but with the more realistic space travel physics in KSP!

No idea how useful access to the source code would be for modders. However, I just wanted to point out that, this is not just a game; it is a commercial product and intellectual property. It is also a fantastic, revolutionary game. Whether there are geniuses in the community who are "way more talented" than all of Squad put together and/or whether their 'potential' to make free mods is or is not hampered by access to the source code is IMHO ultimately irrelevant. I suspect we would all (or 97.5% of us anyway) like to see Squad survive and thrive a studio. KSP remaining a proprietary intellectual property through which Squad can make a good living is obviously essential to Squads success at this point. Releasing source code to anyone who is not a Squad employee obviously involves some risk to the integrity of the intellectual property and its commercial viability (no?). As such, it would seem the risks to Squad, the game they are developing and their future potential to offer fine gaming to all of us (talented modders and average users) from releasing anything more than Squad wants to release (legal waivers or not) outweigh any putative benefits. If talented modders really want to go deeper into it, why not seek employment with Squad or something like that?

Yes agree totally!

Fantastic game 91 hours logged on Steam and I've got a nice constellation of satellites & probe ships in stable orbits around Kerbin, Mun, and Duna and a few others careening off in trajectories I didn't quite intend. By far and away the finest space game ever made. All other designers should take note of how space games really should be based fundamentally on real physics. After many attempts to design an efficient long-range ion thruster driven probe, I have finally achieved a nice balance. Five Rockomax Mainsails, plus four solid boosters take it into orbit then on to a Mun encounter. A smaller engine and a 720 Rockomax tank is good for at least a couple of fly-by maneuvers. The final main mission vessel has 1 ion engine, enough tanks and batteries for 7800 xenon gas and 2010 electric, plus the scientific instruments of course. With 6 gigantors and a few other smaller panels this configuration can run 1 ion engine at full thrust indefinitely in good sunlight. However I'm disappointed at how the game mechanics (still using vanilla no mods installed) make Ion Thruster propelled space craft fairly unusable (or at least less fun) to play with. Specifically, because of their low acceleration performing all but the most minuscule of maneuvers requires that they 'burn' for several minutes; sometimes as much as 45 minutes or an hour. As such, it seems the only way I'll be able to use my long-range ion driven probes is if I leave the game running at 1x speed while I either stare at the screen for 30 or 45 minutes or put the game in the background. Obviously both viable. However, my suggestion (if it is possible) would be to adjust the game mechanics so that it is possible to leave these types of engines running even while the space ship is not the focus. I did a search and did not notice any threads that clearly were suggesting this change to game mechanics.