szputnyik

I would like it if there was a planner tool, that would calculate optimal launch windows for planetary slingshots for you. It could be an extension of TriggerAu's Transfer Window Planner, or a separate, similar program. For example, let's say you want to do a free return mission to Eve, in which you launch a spacecraft to Eve, it swings by Eve, and returns to Kerbin with minimal orbital adjustments. The planner would give you a launch window to Eve, where the date of the Eve periapsis corresponds with an Eve-->Kerbin transfer window, so the spacecraft would return to Kerbin with a minimum of dV. More complicated arrangements could be using the gravity assist of a planet, to reach a more distant planet with less dV. This time for example, it would give you a launch window to Eve, where the time of the Eve periapsis corresponds with a transfer window to Moho, so you could go to Moho with less dV than by directly burning to a Moho-encountering orbit from Kerbin. An even more complicated arrangement would be a "Grand Tour" where the planner would give you a launch window, with which you could visit multiple planets with gravity assists.

A manned Eve flyby, just managed to do it yesterday. Although I did real orbiting and landing mission with huge rockets to other planets in the past, I somehow feel a greater sense of accomplishment with managing to do an interplanetary free return mission with a limited amount of dV. Jeb and Valentina swung by Eve in a few hours, a few orbital tweaks here and there and they were on their way home to Kerbin!

Yesterday I made a successful manned Eve flyby mission, where the gravity of Eve slingshots me back to Kerbin. Today, I tried to do the same thing with Duna. After tweaking around with the Duna periapsis to plan my return trajectory, I found out that Duna's gravity is too small to sling me back to the correct solar orbit that would get me back to Kerbin's nowhere-near-closest-approach position and I didn't have enough dV left to boost me to this orbit. Bill and Bob flew past Duna, then entered a solar orbit that touches the orbital height and inclination of Kerbin, but Kerbin is nowhere nearby.

I thoroughly cleaned out my case and wiped down the fans of the power supply, graphics card and CPU with alcohol wipes yesterday evening, and today the problem didn't appear! Looks like the problem was inefficient cooling because of dust buildup. Thanks a lot for the tip!

Is there anyone else here who got better in Orbiter because of playing KSP? I first started playing Orbiter in 2008. I learned basic orbital mechanics from it, like going up to LEO, rendezvousing with the ISS, and flying to the Moon, but I could never figure out the more complex rocket science needed to fly to other planets. I was clicking around in TransX and IMFD and didn't really know what I was doing. I remember once trying to reach Mars using the more primitive but easier to understand Transfer MFD, and managing to get close enough, that Mars was a small circle in the distance, not a red star-like object, but that was the most I could do. When I started playing KSP, I had a large head-start of simpler orbital manoeuvres because of Orbiter, and thanks to the ingenious, simple and intuitive map view of KSP with the manoeuvre function, I successfully flew to Eve after about 2 weeks of playing KSP, when the whole interplanetary transfer thing clicked in my brain and for the first time, I actually knew what I was doing. Did anyone else get a better understanding of orbital mechanics that could be used in more complex sims, like Orbiter, because of KSP?

I don't know if I should put this topic here, because this seems to be a general computer hardware issue, not a KSP issue, but it may have affected someone else playing KSP here. About a week ago, a peculiar problem with my computer started to appear. When I try loading KSP, it has about a 50% chance of loading correctly, or during the early stages of loading (right when the loading screen should appear) the computer either reboots, shuts down, or hangs in such a way, that I can only restart it by turning off the main switch on the power supply, then turning it back on again. It also happens most of the time if I alt+tab out of KSP. This problem also affects another game that I play, Take on Mars, but on a much more severe scale. I run Windows 8.1, my computer has an AMD fx 8120 8-core CPU, 8 GBs of RAM, and an Nvidia Geforce GT 640 graphics card. I run KSP on Steam.

We use "űrhajós" in Hungarian, it means "space sailor". Bertalan Farkas, the Hungarian cosmonaut who was on an Interkosmos mission in 1980 still prefers to be called a "kozmonauta". Astronaut or "asztronauta" exists, but is not really used. Terms from other countries like "taikonaut" are mostly unkown.

I'm a railfan, but not because of Thomas . It aired in Hungary when I was about 5, but I found that show very boring. I became one because we always traveled by train to the other side of the country to visit my grandparents and other relatives when I was a child, and many of my relatives there were railway workers, so discussions about the railways were common. It was particularly interesting to hear rumors about the railroad in the former Soviet Union, such as how they change the wheels to the other track guage at the border and how do those long-distance sleeping trains look like. I used the word "rumors" since visiting the Soviet Union before 1990 was like visiting North Korea today: You could go on a pre-arranged trip to state-owned tourist sites isolated from the locals, but you couldn't even dream of independently crossing the border and doing a railfan tour of small village stations and gauge-changing facilities, so most of their discussions sounded like as if the Soviet Union was in another dimension. Since then, I've taken some railway-related trips to Ukraine and found it very fascinating.

I would like to see Stargate Universe continued. It ended with a cliffhanger after just 2 seasons

In Hungary soda syphons are still popular, but with a twist: vodka is poured into them instead of water. The resulting fizzy vodka is called "fény" (light).

In Hungary soda means carbonated water, and pop means music like Rihanna and Lady Gaga. An interesting convergence on Arkansas vocabulary is that old people call every kind of sweet soft drink "Cola". Fanta is called "Yellow Cola". Probably because the first Western-style soft drink in Hungary was Cola.

The sci-fi series Stargate SG-1 and its spinoffs mainly deal with Earth-like planets on which humans live, who were kidnapped from Earth in the Ancient and Middle Ages. While most of these planets have a stagnant, low-population society, where the level of technology is still at a similar level that it was at their kidnapping (mainly because of hostile aliens), some of these planets developed technology that is at a similar level to Earth. These planets are usually protrayed to be somewhat less advanced than Earth, have a rundown look and don't feature things like vehicles and advertisements, so they end up looking like Eastern European countries under Communism. Good examples for these is the 8th season episode Icon, and the 9th season episode Ethon, where the inhabitants of the planet Tegalus developed a society and technology level that is similar to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. If a human from Earth was transported to one of these planets, he wouldn't immediately think he was not on Earth. This got me thinking, if the above really happened (humans from the Middle Ages and earlier were transported to another Earth-like planet and developed modern technology there) how different would their settlements, structures etc. look like compared to Earth. Three things that would also happen there I think are settlements organized into streets, since either something similar existed in their society on Earth, or they would discover on the planet that its more efficient than building houses haphazardly, street lighting, which reduces crime after dark, and self-propelled vehicles without which a modern society couldn't work. Do you think something like this could be a believeable picture taken on another Earth-like planet inhabited by humans?

Minecraft single player is still worth playing in my opinion. Currently I'm very fond of the Electrical Age mod, which is, at least to my knowledge, the most realistic electrical circuit simulator in which in contrast with programs like TINA, and Edison Multimedia Lab, you can actually wire up a simulated 3D environment with electrical circuits. While it simplifies some things (eg. there is no AC and DC electricity, just a mixture that takes the best from both worlds) I've always wanted a simulator where you can build a house/village/building etc. and then can wire it up realistically with electricity. With the help of this mod, I've built a hydroelectric power plant transmitting electricity to three NPC villages, which all have streetlights and electrical supply in every house. You have to account for voltage drop, generating enough current to not have lights flicker when you turn on an electric furnace, etc.

What do you think, which transportation technology would be more likely to become the standard form of long-distance terrestrial transport in the future? Airplanes which have some way of storing or generating massive amounts of electricity, and using this to simply suck in and expel air through the turbines, creating thrust. Or maglev trains, which run at hypersonic speeds in vacuum tubes with Martian atmospheric pressure. The first option would require the invention of much higher capacity batteries or supercapacitors, the second would be possible with present-day technology, but the costs of constructing such a railway would be enormous. Perhaps we'll get the second one much earlier on the Moon or Mars, than on Earth, since no low-pressure tubes would be required there.

This guy tries to explain the sinking below the horizon thing: