cantab

Old black cabs have godawful suspension though. I've actually got backache from riding in them with a driver who took all the speed-bump riddled back streets. I hate speed bumps.

Down to -3

The mission was always planned for an elliptical orbit, so they don't need to lower it much either. The main engine is hydrazine/nitrogen tetraoxide bipropellant, while the RCS is hydrazine monoprop. My understanding is they run off the same hydrazine tank, which would mean the RCS can get pretty decent delta-V. And the oxidizer has been dumped.

Tongue?

-4 (-)

This has been discussed before. To me it goes back to the ARM engines being all wrong, since the Vector is a quarter of a Mammoth. They both reflect the Shuttle engines. To my mind the Mammoth should be less powerful but perhaps more efficient, the Vector taking the same effect, while the Kickback should be considerably higher thrust. This would also help correct one of the problems KSP shuttles have, which is too much thrust and mass in the orbiter compared to the boosters and ET. The real Shuttle stack had only 20% of its thrust and 5% of its liftoff mass in the orbiter, not much off-centre mass to cope with. But then I'd like to see the whole engine lineup rejigged.

e^(i*pi) (-)

I think your conclusion that it's not really shutting down is correct.

Minus to minus one.

Struts?

Air launch to orbit is a proven concept, and I think it is 747 for practicality not performance. The carrier aircraft doesn't need to go especially high to get the rocket above most of the atmosphere; the real advantage is it can then use a near-vacuum-optimised nozzle, and you also save on air drag and potentially on gravity drag. There are also operational advantages. The exact altitude I don't see as critical - the difference between 35,000 feet and 40,000 feet isn't much.

Lots of good points from people. I agree that the Technet model is better - a copy of the top voted answer, then the thread in chronological order. I also agree that the thread (question?) list could be more like elsewhere on the forum, there's a lot of info gets missed. To summarise there's potential in the Q&A format but currently, like most of the forum, it has shortcomings.

KSP became successful by choosing realistic physics, a bold decision when it launched in an era where unrealistic sci-fi flight was the norm, and I feel it should retain that philosophy. To that effect I've no problem with the game outright omitting "realistic" aspects in order to make things simpler and more accessible. I'm fine with no fuel boiloff, engines that can deeply throttle and relight as often as you like, and even the lack of life support. But if some feature or aspect of spaceflight goes into the game I feel that realism in that aspect should be strived for. In particular I feel the goal of the aerodynamics should be realism, and not some "fun" arcadey flight model. I also feel that the science collection wants a thorough overhaul, followed by the career system, to more closely follow how real scientific study and real space program administration respectively works. Of course there can still be exceptions. For example I consider full-sized planets bad for gameplay because they make orbital launches take too long.

Unless you kept a copy of the older versions yourself, you can't. KSP doesn't use any DRM, so you can just copy the entire game folder out of Steam and put it where you like.

@Columbia your plane is awesome, really distinctive with the wings up front so far and evidently a successful design. As for me, well a mission to Arin gave me the last few hundred science to complete the tech tree. Hurrah! Arrival at Arin to finish the tree! by cantab314, on Flickr I had meant to make an express trip to Asclepius, but Transfer Window Planner gave me misleading figures and I couldn't make the transfer I wanted with the dV I had. So I messed around a bit and found a standard Hohmann transfer to Arin instead. Arin is about as close to the Sun as Moho is in stock. This is not the end; on the contrary, it is just the beginning. Now I've finished the tree I will reward myself by (re)installing UKS and then I can get to some base building and serious spaceplane work.

Yeah...because this thread is ever going to be non-political...

Minus one, takes us to unity. Which seems fitting.

Technically this isn't allowed - the resulting number should be clear without context So I'll go on from Claw's 4 on the floor, and drop it down to a 3 on the tree.

You can get into the technical details, but that's not necessary. You're communicating with them, so all you need to send is: The following tone is a period of time we call one 'second'. Beeeeeeeeep. 86400 seconds make one day on our planet. Change tone for flash, continuous stream of binary 1s, whatever works. Go on to explain time how you like. Any red/blueshift will be insignificant. From that you can also do distance. During one second, this radio signal travels 300,000,000 'metres'. Adults of our species stand about 2 metres tall. Go on to explain any distances you like. And from that you can explain mass by describing the shape and size of a known mass of a common element.

With pumped storage the energy per kilo of water stored depends on the height you raise it through, basic gravitational potential energy. So it's good in large scale systems built into mountains. Incidentally it is by far the leading way to "store electricity", accounting for 99 percent of global capacity. It might be possible to employ it in tall buildings. Loads on skyscrapers are primarily wind so the extra weight of a water storage tank up top, perhaps within the architectural spire, could I think be engineered for without major increase in cost. But in a domestic house, it's not gonna be very effective.

11 (-)

Words?

KSP has a grand total of one female character, who was only added recently. It still has a total of zero fleshed-out and multidimensional characters. Is it any surprise that shipping isn't a thing?

Money?

Drop it like it's hot like a baker's dozen of pies. 12