wizzlebippi

Dawn is fine as is. Use a bunch of batteries, 12-15k EC, and you'll still be able to achieve a few minutes of run time at Eeloo with 7 Dawn thrusters. I only use 4 gigantor solar panels, ~3 EC/s at Eeloo, and one RTG incase I end up with no solar panels facing the sun during time warp. You still end up with 1.5'ish hour burn times and need to start from a very deep orbit to make the burn work. Bigger Xenon tanks and ISRU support would be nice though.

Aircraft aren't the best example. Engines have become more reliable mostly because fuel management and scheduling have been taken away from human hands (why some older airliners required a flight engineer). The odds of a mechanical failure really haven't changed. This is partly because engines are becoming more complex, and partly because they largely reuse the same core, give it a larger fan, and spin it faster. The real reason why aircraft like the 747 exist is because before ETOPS (Extended-range Twin engine Operations Performance Standards), the airlines were required to have aircraft with 3+ engines for direct routes. Basically, the aircraft was never allowed to be more than 1 hour away from an airport with a suitable runway unless it had more than 2 engines. Now, the FAA allows a twin engine aircraft to certify to whatever time it can sustain single engine flight after making it half way to its intended destination with appropriate reserves. There may still be a few routes inaccessible to a twin engine aircraft, but there can't be many left. For a rocket, none of this applies. Having more, smaller engines increases the odds of an engine failure, and any engine failure reduces TWR and can affect the rocket's ability to make the desired orbit. From that standpoint, you want the fewest number of engines possible. As previously mentioned, the only reason Space X's Falcon 9 has 10 Merlin 1D engines is it's cheaper to manufacture 1 engine with the ability to fit a longer engine bell.

I remember reading somewhere that each of the Saturn V's 1st stage engines burns 2 tons of fuel and 1 ton of oxidizer per second. If that's true, the fuel burn from the turbo pumps is likely trivial, and you only need to worry about the last few seconds before launch for engine start and vehicle stabilization. My guess is the rocket is 45-60 tons lighter by liftoff.

I disagree. The space shuttle was a bloated design with numerous compromises to satisfy the "needs" of all parties involved including capturing and landing with a broken satellite. 14 astronauts died because NASA accepted the lack of disaster as success instead of trying to fix obvious issues like foam shedding and exhaust blowby. Sure, if all you want to do is drag a satellite to orbit, a space shuttle like vehicle is overkill. If we are ever to establish a permanent presence in space, we will need a reusable craft capable of carrying both astronauts and cargo.

As far as I know it's all some version of C, and there is no OS. There's a boot block to load software from memory, and beyond that they code direct to metal. The simpler the software, the easier to debug and the lower the chances of "new features". The big drawback is that most any change in hardware means starting over on software.

Why not a compression fit skin suit with a smoke hood like hood and portable oxygen generator. The hood is in a pouch at the base of the neck with a tab. You grab the tab, which also starts the oxygen generator, pull it over your head and make sure it seals around your neck. It's no space suit, but it can be donned quickly and it would give you a few minutes to either patch the hole or move to a pressurized area of the ship.

Exactly. As a point of reference, the average adult has about 5-10 seconds of useful consciousness when suddenly exposed to an altitude of 35,000 feet or higher. It's a consistent time because you're racing how quickly oxygen can boil out of your blood. Pilots and other flight crew train to put on a mask within the first 5 seconds in the event of decompression. In this situation, unless this survival device is on you or within reach and quickly donable, you're dead. Even if it's a quick don helmet or something like that, you're likely only buying a few minutes at most to get to a shelter.

CKAN is a mod manager, and this mod is listed but will not install from there. The broken link appears to be attached to a pre-release version. Also, awesome mod. Makes for an interesting career experience.

CKAN returns 404 error when I attempt to install this mod.

Is there a throttle specific to a part, or a throttle separate from FlightInputHandler.state.mainthrottle?

NASA has looked into this in their highway in the sky program. The goal at the time was to develop an autopilot capable of flying the aircraft from takeoff to landing and see if the average joe could make it all work. Supposedly their work was the basis for the part 23 technically advanced aircraft category and most modern GA glass cockpits. Also, aircraft is plural. Had a professor that threatened to fail anyone who said or wrote aircrafts.

Personally, my plan A for a forced landing is an airport or road. Water is probably last on my list because I don't fly with an over water pack and suck at swimming. In KSP, I still prefer land, and assuming you are fortunate enough to be over a relatively level area, it's not much different than the tier 1 runway.

I think spacex will see substantial cost reductions eventually, but it won't be for years. They're going to need to recover several boosters, examine them, test for residual strength, and implement their findings in the design multiple times until they can recover a booster with no structural damage. If they launch a recycled booster in the next 2 years I'd be surprised. Even more surprised if it carries a customer's payload.

I had never thought of trying to send a probe into Jool until I read this. Now that I have, I agree. It either needs to crush or melt the ship going for the middle of Jool.

Or you could switch on the ELT (Emergency Locator Transmitter) and draw a line to the scene of the crash on radar. Far less work when you're trying to not die.

The problem is navigating an aircraft is a 2D problem, and the navball is for 3D navigation. For aircraft, there should be a toggle to replace the navball with an HSI (Horizontal Situation Indicator) that has an attitude indicator in the middle. The HSI should show your target/waypoint on a heading with an up or down arrow to indicate if the target is above or below your altitude. I also think this toggle should affect pilot abilities. Instead of prograde, normal, target, ect, it should be altitude, heading, and navigation (path to target holding altitude) holds.

I don't know about interstellar travel because KSP's tech has always been grounded and a bit retro, but a larger system to explore and a basic premise for why the Kerbals feel the need to pour money into space travel would be nice. Maybe a contract like there is a large asteroid coming to destroy Kerbalkind and you need to redirect it in the next year, or there are rumors of aliens on Laythe that you need to investigate. Something more long term that just collect science data from _______.

I think the problem lies in science generation, not the tech tree. Right now, you can easily complete about 75% of the tech tree without leaving the Kerbin system. Science needs to be harder to get or have diminishing returns as you progress through the tech tree. More parts and nodes would be appreciated as well.

For the record, a win32 application by default can only utilize 2GB of RAM. A long mode enabled application can use 3GB.

I can forgive that, but only on the premise that they were carrying extra fuel and supplies for the mission, and that it makes no sense to start off with anything less that full tanks.

Also, the Columbia accident was inevitable. NASA has a bad habit of considering the lack of failure a success. Despite knowing that foam from the external fuel tank had been damaging the orbiter's heat shield for decades, little was done until Columbia broke up on reentry. We could just as easily be talking about any of the other shuttles. Apollo 1, Apollo 13 and Challenger are all good examples of this mentality.

There are a few misconceptions here 1. For a rich owner/pilot, you're generally looking at small 4-8 passenger jets upwards of about $10m. Beyond that, they either don't care enough to fly it and can afford to hire a pilot, or the aircraft is corporate owned. 2. Rich people are by far in the minority for aircraft owners. The vast majority are owned by companies like Netjets who rent them out complete with pilots. In fact, Aerion's major customer is flexjet, and they're likely only interested because it's faster over the ocean. In all likelihood they'll fly their passengers to and from the Aerion jet in a more conventional Cessna or Leerjet. 3. For the feasibility of it, anything's possible if you throw enough time and money at it. They already have customers, and no one else is trying to make anything like it. Aerion could prove to be disruptive to the business jet market.

Most passenger aircraft use high bypass turbofan engines (bypass ratio of 5-10) with 80-90% of the thrust coming from the fan, so that's 500-550 KTAS (Knots True AirSpeed) guaranteed. Beyond that, since all jet engines eat air at < 0.3 Mach and many fighters use complex variable geometry inlets to slow intake air, it's probably possible to make an electric ducted fan that would produce thrust at up to Mach 2-2.5. How fast the aircraft would go depends on drag, but supersonic is probably possible.

@AeroGav: Yes, anything penetrating the shock cone causes a significant increase in drag. This is why the SR-71 has a delta wing positioned very far aft and creates lift from the fuselage with vortices (why the fuselage has flanges). However, in the case of a space plane, you operate over such a large speed and altitude range that dealing with that extra drag is unavoidable. This probably can be mitigated by keeping speed under the critical mach number until the extra drag is manageable. Or just with extra thrust like the Mig 25. If I remember correctly, NACA tr-1135 contains all the information you need to estimate the critical mach number for having a wing tip penetrate the shock cone. @K^2: Some early fighters actually had to dive as well to achieve supersonic flight.

Wave drag is due to shockwave formation, transonic or supersonic, anywhere on the aircraft. A bow shock or shock cone is just the shock wave produced by the nose of a supersonic aircraft. A bow shock is a source of drag, but is not the entire source of wave drag. The main picture in this article should help. [url]http://phys.org/news/2015-08-schlieren-images-reveal-supersonic.html[/url] Anywhere you see a dark line in the schlieren photo is a compression wave and the lighter lines are expansion waves.