Rakaydos

That's what the monoliths are for....

I think you missed the context. This is planning for post-game, caveman-tech monolith hunting. That requires kerbnet access, which crew cannot provide.

You may or my not have been able to make out my "KSC biome rover" design. I'm thinking 16 hitchhikers and a pair of pods for reaction wheels rolling off the runway, getting 3km clearance for lag reasons, and mounting docking ports where they can link up with previous hitchiker rolls. That means I only need about 100, 120 launches, plus a buttload of engineer time to mount the antennas.

Yea, looking it over, hitchhiker containers look like my best bet, 18 parts per part. But starting my actual caveman run.... Day 1

Hmm. My prior calculations (done many updates ago) seem to be off by a solid order of magnatude. If this is correct, I need 30,000 HG5s near kerbin, to link to 20,000 HG5s near duna. I know I can (could?) reasonably put ~10 antennas up in a launch, but there's a big difference between a hundred launch campaign and a thousand launch campaign. Can storage parts bypass the launchpad limit? is there even storage in caveman tech levels?

Since the final update is in the news, I may be coming back to this. I've long had a plan for building my own DSN with spammed mass relay antennas, in order to monolith-hunt on Eve/gilly and Duna/Ike at closest approach. I havnt played since the SLS part update, though. What caveman-related changes will I need to watch out for/shamelesly abuse, when completing a basic Caveman run in preparation for Caveman 2: Monolith Hunter?

Congratulations, you just added a piston system, one that only works for the heads of crew members who are strapped in at the time. The entire point of the Orion piston system is to be a pillow for the whole spacecraft at once. A really well designd pillow, that allows higher useful acceleration by dampening the detonation pulse into a continuous stroke of acceleration.

And because this author is notorious for not getting the point let me give an example with numbers. You're floating in your cabin and the captain says they're about to engage the Orion drive, so you float over to the back wall. There's a countdown, and when it reaches zero the entire room seems to suddenly start moving. The back wall impacts you at 3.6 km an hour, and you bounce away from it because you're still in zero g. One second later, the room jerks forward again, and you impact at another 3.6 km an hour. This happens again once per second for about 10 minutes. That's 600 m per second of Delta v at an acceleration of 1 m per second per second. 1/10 of an earth gravity.

The problem is, each munition in an Orion drive only releases a single pulse, which passes over your entire spacecraft at almost the speed of light. That means your change in velocity per pulse, is however many meters per second, times an insanely small fraction of a second. Basically if you don't have a piston on the back of the spacecraft, your passenger's legs have to be the piston,to absorb the spacecraft suddenly moving when it wasn't before. It also means that there is no acceleration between bomb pulses. That means there's nothing to hold you against the ground, so the next time the bomb pulses, you're going to fall against the back wall, based on how much you bounce off of it the last time it went off. The piston isn't to moderate the acceleration. Is to moderate the change in acceleration... Meters per second per second per second, which is technically called jerk.

Speculation on NSF is that the white sections Will go to join the other lunar lander mock-ups.

You're missing my point. On average, every single point in the orbit will receive the same number of relativistic hydrogen ions. As such, it doesn't alter the plane of the orbit so much as it shifts the plane of the orbit aft. This provides a drag force back on the gas giant due to gravitational coupling, which the fusion candle will have to compensate for.

Statistically, debris should be striking evenly on all points of the orbit. It's no worse than the planet the moon's orbiting flying out from underneath them. If a piece of debris is large enough that the impact could significantly alter the inclination at a single point, you should be able to see it coming far enough out to Miss it if you try hard enough.

Building a gas-giant colony ship is not as difficult as it looks. Build a fusion candle. It's called a "candle" because you're going to burn it at both ends. The center section houses a set of intakes that slurp up gas giant atmosphere and funnel it to the fusion reactors at each end. Shove one end deep down inside the gas giant, and light it up. It keeps the candle aloft, hovering on a pillar of flame. Light up the other end, which now spits thrusting fire to the sky. Steer with small lateral thrusters that move the candle from one place to another on the gas giant. Steer very carefully, and signal your turns well in advance. This is a big vehicle. Balance your thrusting ends with exactness. You don't want to crash your candle into the core of the giant, or send it careening off into a burningly elliptical orbit. When the giant leaves your system, it will take its moons with it. This is gravity working for you. Put your colonists on the moons. For safety's sake, the moons should orbit perpendicular to the direction of travel. Otherwise your candle burns them up. They should also rotate in the same plane, with one pole always illuminated by your candle (think "portable sunlight") The other pole absorbing the impact of whatever interstellar debris you should hit (think "don't build houses on this side"

That's called recycling, and yes.

I'm calling "it worked last time " as the second rocket lab launched to have reusability.

Practicing countdown and fueling ops, and other mission control related operations. In general, they want to figure out how not to have so many holds.

Dragon can talk with the ground, or radio the station, but is having trouble connecting the CAT-5 cable to connect "hard line" with the station. As with most aerospace problems, "I could probably solve this with my boot if I could GET TO the problem."

Especially since Horus does not have storms in his portfolio. Set does. And they're kind of enemies. By invoking Horus you brought the wrath of Evil Day.

Thou shalt not invoke the demon Murphy.

At 500 starlinks a flight, that's still 60 flights every 5 years for the full constellation, if I recall correctly. One flight a month baseline load, while also supporting other missions, can justify plenty of reuse.

There's a super rotation, which I've always assumed to be like a jet stream on steroids. Anyone want to correct me on that?

There is an official statement from the NASA administrator that he wants to get human space flight added to any post coronavirus economic stimulus spending bill. I won't get into why space flight is considered economic stimulus, to avoid the politics.

Someone on NSF estimated that without a heat shield, you'd only be able to scrub off one to two meters per second per pass. Translunar injection, as done by Apollo, is a bit over 3 km/s. That works out to 1,500 aerobreaking passes to return to LEO.

... That's why you gimbal to the center of mass so that doesn't happen.

The problem is thermal expansion- specifically that steel and ceramic do it at different rates.