wnderer

I'm no expert and I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I can't help thinking about these things when they talk about colonizing Mars. For me the difference between a colony and camping trip is construction. Bringing everything with you and then leaving it there just makes you a messy camper. For construction on Mars there is nothing there, at least to start with, but stone, CO2 and sunlight. To build on Mars we need miners, stonemasons and explosives. I think we could use dry ice as the explosive. It's cold on Mars and CO2 condenses naturally so I think a machine that condenses dry ice out of the atmosphere is practical. My recipe for an explosive is just the ideal gas law PV=nRT or rearranged P=(n/V)(RT). we get the (n/V) from dry ice and the RT from sunlight. I think the rate or derivitive (dP/dt=(n/V)(RdT/dt)) is also important to the explosion. My guess is that with drilling, packing dry ice, exploding, jack-hammering to clean up the hole and removing the material, we could advance a 3x3 meter tunnel 1 meter per day. After 2 years we have a 700 meter long tunnel. We start at the bottom of a crater mine upwards to the surface, so empty carts go up and full carts roll down. How do we power these tools? Dry ice air compressors! We use sunlight and shutters to control the temperature and pressure of dry ice pressure tanks. Batteries are heavy so minimize the use of batteries. Maybe even dry ice generators instead of batteries. Even a more rough guess is that it would take 20 years to hollow out 100 meter diameter hemispherical dome. Human housing is mined into the walls of the dome. Sunlight is brought in through a light pipe from surface. Light is collected by mylar mirrors which can be rolled up during dust storms. The light is focused on a fresnel lens which shines on a parabolic mirror which focuses the light into the light pipe. Fill the dome with pressured Mars atmosphere heated by the sunlight. Grow plants to convert CO2 to O2. Burn hydrogen to make water. (Okay, I'm not sure where we get hydrogen from.) People can't breath in there but they can walk around with just scuba gear. And that is Stone Age Mars. After Stone Age Mars, comes Metal Age Mars. We need furnaces to make glass and metals. These furnace look alot like the habitat, but with more mirrors focusing more light into much smaller crucibles. Then Industrial Age Mars using the glass and steel to make chemical processing plants and buildings on the Mars surface.

The first mod I added was KerbalJointReinforcement. Sometimes I think the developers spent too much time giggling. "Haha, Jello ships!". I think more struts are also a burden to simulation time and memory. I think hiding parts from the simulation behind shrouds would improve performance. Ladders, parachutes, landing gear and other hidden stuff would add payload weight while reducing effective parts count for the actual simulation and give faster simulations and fewer crashes.

I haven't played KSP2 and I don't know if this stuff could be done with mods. What I want are better design tools. Something like this. I think there is too much trial and error. I want to design stages to have so much thrust, for so much time with a starting mass and ending mass. I want my stages to have so much acceleration above gravity and account for air resistance and want graphs and tables of data to help me work it all out. Adjusting how much fuel there is and how much thrust doesn't help unless I know how long it is going to burn. I want wind tunnel tests. I want to collect data I can analyze after rocket flights. To me, there seems to be a lot of science and engineering built into the simulation but very little built into the game. As for game play, I think linked anomalies would be fun. You start with an artifact which gives you a clue of where to look on Kerbin. That anomaly tells you where to look for the next one and so on. Maybe there are keys you need to find that open artifacts to get Easter eggs about alien civilizations. Or linked science. You build satellites to map the planet, that gives you maps you can look at. When you deliver it some scientist tells you more tests to setup and that leads to some Easter eggs that tell you about the evolution of the planet.

I disagree. Take Two sold KSP because its narrow appeal meant it would never sell a lot of new licenses, but from a directed marketing viewpoint, its narrow appeal is its value. It's the same reason companies sponsor PBS shows like NOVA. These are the eyeballs you want. Because of Musk's politics, it would be in the interest of SpaceX to spend money on public relations to continue to attract the kind of employees they want and to maintain support for their space program interests. Boeing with all its mishaps would also benefit from positive public relations. That's why I think NASA should run some sort of open source community effort with sponsorship from their contractors. The value of KSP is not in sales but in the contact it provides with a certain group of people.

You could try contacting NASA and they could run an open source project funded by sponsors with volunteer programmers. They would buy they code and the sponsors would get their Logo displayed when you start up the game. Companies like SpaceX, Boeing, Blue Origin, etc. Companies that want to promote interest in the space program.

I suggest going a route similar to thedarkmod. The Darkmod is a game built on the Doom3 engine. It is now stand alone with a deal from ID. KSP the next generation would be an "official" package of mods and external support programs built on the KSP1 engine. I think for the most part the KSP1 engine is fine. It is the chaos of competing, abandoned and unsupported mods. A pared downed standardized set of mods with a wiki and tutorials and an official group of community developers would define a path for the future and give newbies a foothold without having to get lost in outdated documentation and forum posts.

It's not a problem. It's just funny to watch. I don't think it's sliding. I think it's a Dean Drive. I've repeated it three times landing in three different places. The video works for me. This forum I have trouble with.

Ship Walking Video I used my cellphone to make a video.

It did it on two landings. The first time I thought it was the wind and rushed around cutting chutes until it tipped over and exploded. The second time I realised it was running in the opposite direction of the chutes. I think it has to do with the wobble of the neck. I wish I had a movie. The legs are bending and stretching. It looks like it is running.

Here are old threads on the topic. I copied the ladders to a new directory and made my own high temperature ladders by changing: maxTemp = 2000 //= 3200 to maxTemp = 4000 //= 5200 I'll see if that works.

I want to use aero braking. The ladders tend to explode. Is there a way to protect them from the heat?

Yes msbuild works. I thought I needed Visual Studio to use the csproj files. When I searched for c# command line compiler I got a tutorial for csc.exe. Thanks

I looking for precisenode_1.1.3. I found the source code here https://github.com/blizzy78/ksp-precisenode/releases/tag/1.1.3 I'm trying to recompile it with the command line CSC.exe. I'm converting the csproj file to an rsp file. I'm stuck on how to convert these resources. </ItemGroup> <ItemGroup> <Content Include="CHANGES.txt" /> <Content Include="Parts\CBAtexture.png" /> </ItemGroup> <ItemGroup> <None Include="LICENSE.txt" /> <None Include="Parts\CBA.cfg" /> <None Include="Parts\CBA.mu" /> </ItemGroup> What do I do with these files? Thanks

Does Kerbal Joint Reinforcement effect the new aerodynamics in KSP1.0.+ ?

What I need is a structural fuselage that fits the Rockomax rockets. I don't know if there is one ahead of me when I get more science.