cantab

Is it carbon?

Launched the first of my four Laythe ascent vehicles. My ascent was a bit iffy, and I made a stable orbit but ran out of fuel, so now the orbiter's going to have to pick it up. It's a good thing I didn't use the smaller one I'd considered.

Youtube videos abound of craft with masses of girderwork and no struts. The results are predictable to anyone familiar with the game.

And if it is broke, fix it, don't throw it out and start over. The Soyuz line has had several modifications and upgrades, making today's craft quite different to those of the 60s.

In theory it's the same as for a normal departure, you need the right phase angle between Jool and Kerbin. In practice it will be somewhat trickier to do, but provided you have at least a reasonably close approach to Kerbin you can probably make a course correction at some point.

Hmmm...is it the Heartbleed bug? Or shellshock?

This thread?

Dodgey? Riddle?

Tylo is the leading pick to boot you out of the Joolian system. Laythe and Vall are options but have less "power". With Tylo it should be possible to get enough of a gravity assist to put you right into an intersection of Kerbin's orbit, though actually getting the Kerbin encounter requires proper timing. If you can't quite get there, make a burn during your assist.

Is the drive one that touted any special "features"? Things like encryption, or some sort of fancy movies/music stuff. That might cause attempts to partition it to throw issues. Other than that, you could try the option in GParted to make a new partition table, perhaps that will help if it's got messed up somehow.

The opposite is my concern. It's necessarily orbiting and thus the view is slowly changing. Though it will still be in the same general direction over the lifespan of the telescope, will this not cause issues with making follow-up observations?Pointing in one direction isn't necessarily a dealbreaker mind. That's what Kepler did and it discovered about as many planets as everything else put together.

Probably everyone has had at least one rocket collapse on the pad, though .23.5 made it less common. That would now trash the pad. Also stuff like buzzing the VAB or the tower or flying under the bridges is somewhat popular. Raising the stakes will only make it all the more satisfying to pull off a close pass - and all the more disastrous when you hit. And of course there's always royally screwing up a landing. In short, there are ways to accidentally blow up KSC.

As others have said, just pitchover a little shortly after takeoff. Unless your launchers are extremely on the margins 5 degrees isn't going to make much difference.

Well, towns and cities wouldn't strictly speaking need to be destructible, but it's an obvious way to make them have a gameplay impact. Drop a rocket on one and you're going to take a rep hit. The work I believe Squad have done on making those town buildings and making them destructible will then be what they've applied to the space centre in .25. Especially if they have some sort of generic system that was straightforward to extend to the space centre buildings.PS: I'd like to see aero looked at after Unity 5. That's probably going to shake up the physics anyway after all.

I'd say it puts Kerbal towns and cities as a VERY strong possibility. It would really bring Kerbin to life and would explain the artists being very busy. Those towns and cities need to be destructible to come into the gameplay. And just so you don't ignore them, add some lucrative contracts asking you to do things like land a plane on a tricky runway, making for high-risk high-reward. Or even a contract to destroy a particular building in a city somewhere. Unless it's a jet-propelled (or rocket-propelled) rover it's not going to hurt the VAB. And if you build a jet-propelled rover you deserve what you get.

Possible, yes. Overwhelmingly unlikely that ALL the bodies in the system would be that way though.

What you describe makes me suspect a corrupted CD or iso file. For an iso, check the md5sum.

We can be very confident that objects exist with enough mass and density to be inside their event horizon - we've observational evidence of them. As far as I'm concerned that's what a "black hole" is.

Don't crash into the VAB

For Earth orbits go like this: Low Earth orbit: From 160 km to 2000 km. Medium Earth orbit: From 2000 km to synchronous orbit. Synchronous orbit: 35,786 km High Earth orbit: Above synchronous orbit The 2000 km LEO/MEO orbit is basically arbitrary, while the "bottom" of LEO and the height of the stationary orbit both come from physical situations. For Kerbin we have those same physical considerations. The lowest stable orbit is just under 70 km, and it's actually sharply defined unlike with Earth where it's a gradual reduction in drag. Synchronous orbit is simply defined and is 3469 km. So it's only the low/medium orbit boundary that needs to be chosen. And as it happens the game does give us a candidate value: 250 km, the altitude where science experiments switch from being "In space near" to "Space high over".

I thought Orion drive (nuclear pulse propulsion) was up to the job of a quick-ish interstellar trip. It would still require a big ship, probably needing something like lunar or asteroid mining to make costs tolerable, but use a proven method of nuclear fusion rather than something still in the distant future. As for telescope wavelengths, well astronomers like to use the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum because there's useful information everywhere. Visible light is quite good for general use because it's the range that many stars peak in - it's because the Sun peaks in those wavelengths that our eyes evolved to see them as visible light in the first place. For the specific task of studying exoplanets infrared may be more useful, since stars don't outshine planets quite as badly at such wavelengths. Regardless, for all but the extremes of the EM spectrum a telescope can produce an image - a set of intensity measurements each corresponding to a certain patch of sky. Whatever the original wavelength we're free to display it in greyscale or false colour for our appreciation. For example look at the maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background.

I had a space lego set that included some magnets. On that they were used to allow rockets to be picked up by cranes and stuff, but I wonder if it might work to attach the boosters to the core allowing them to "decouple". Or just a clip-type fixing would be simpler.

Yeah, in terms of resolution interferometry is where the real potential is. It'd take a lot of precision, but a set of telescopes in high Earth orbit would have serious resolution. Ramp it up to scattered around the solar system and we'll be imaging in incredible detail.

If we can't, we postpone the mission until we can. Otherwise we basically end up spending a lot of money chucking a brick at Alpha Cen. Although more realistically the probe's primary mission would be to investigate the edge of the solar system. In that case it doesn't matter if it's a brick by the time it gets anywhere near another star, or if nobody's listening. But then neither does it matter if it's way off-course, indeed it doesn't need to be aimed at any specific star at all.

I stand corrected *blames phone for not making picture clear earlier*