cantab

It's worth more like $400 Canadian, at least that's what Best Buy are currently charging for it. If you want a home/office PC it's fine, and nice to not have a massive tower taking up space. If you want play games, not so much. As far as upgrading goes the big unknown is the power supply; you've no idea if it's a standard format that's upgradable, or something proprietary with no option for anything better. *If* it can be upgraded, you could add a low-profile 750 Ti or similar, but of course the new PSU is an added cost.

I got this Lego set. It's a pretty nice set and enjoyable enough build. And some money. Which is good, because in the back of the build instructions I saw an advert for this set and was immediately like "OMG I WANT THAT" Oh, and headphones, but I had those a few weeks ago because my old set broke. And chocolate of course.

Sure. A bare pod can safely re-enter from Low Kerbin Orbit without needing an extra heatshield. So you just need to give it a push. You can EVA out and use the Kerbal jetpack to push the pod, launch another ship with a claw to grab the pod and deorbit it, or launch another ship that just physically pushes the pod. Or do a straight rescue mission sending up a new re-entry vehicle to bring your Kerbal down. In all but the EVA-push case you will need to learn orbital rendezvous. It's one of the key skills in spaceflight and gives most people trouble the first time they try, NASA included! But it's just another technique to learn and practice really.

Structurally it should be manageable. There are irregular asteroids larger than the first death star. As far as blowing up a planet goes, the superlaser is routinely misanalysed. It's powered by a "hypermatter reactor" that effectively draws fuel from hyperspace, so it doesn't need to carry all its fuel onboard. It's described as variously making "the target's atoms to split into matter/antimatter pairs and annihilate themselves" and "sending part of the target's mass into hyperspace", which in either case means the superlaser is no longer obligated to deliver the entire binding energy of its target. The superlaser is arguably not so much a cannon as a disintegration ray. The details are all made up technobabble of course, but the principle may be valid in reality. For example suppose you could somehow make all the oxygen in the Earth fuse. That's 0.3 Earth masses / 32 proton masses number of fusion reactions, each releasing about 8-9 MeV, which works out at around 1037 Joules - a hundred thousand times Earth's binding energy. That's just one hypothetical way. Other stuff would work. Maybe you trigger proton decay. Maybe you can turn matter into antimatter, or even directly into gamma rays or something. The message is that to destroy a planet you don't necessarily need to hit it with its gravitational binding energy, the planet already stores the energy for its own destruction, if you only knew how to release it.

Yeah, rate of change of acceleration is known as jerk. It's actually very important when considering human transportation, since too much jerk means our muscles cannot respond quickly enough and injury can be caused. Lateral jerk is also relevant to railways, and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_transition_curve is designed to control it.

Nice, awesome work! I've mainly been practicing flying mine. I haven't done many VTOLs so I've had a lot to learn. So far I've found that maintaining some forward speed when landing helps, about 30-40 m/s touchdown speed is ideal but I've done as slow as 10. Trying to climb or descend vertically at any speed tends to pitch the plane, I saw you found the same effect. I can get down in tricky terrain, but am not very precise yet. screenshot319 by cantab314, on Flickr

Prop. Requirement Met refers to air. You don't have enough air intakes. Try flying faster or adding more intakes.

-58 (-). I'm loading up the ore tanks on this submarine.

This mean you don't need anymore an internet provider for your house and a telephone-internet provider for your cellphone Kraken blast it, trying to quote more than one post on this forum is IMPOSSIBLE. /rant It's how I discuss that satellite internet is limited - something you agree about. Expressed either as number of customers to get a target bitrate, or as bitrate per customer for a fixed number of customers, the capabilities of satellite internet are less than cellular networks which in turn are less than fixed line networks. I don't see how any plausible technological or economic development will change that in general; satellite internet only does well covering places that are poorly covered by ground networks. Because of those limits, the idea that a large portion of the population can go satellite-broadband-only just doesn't work. Satellites can technically offer fast internet over large areas but only as long as not many people use it over that area. And because the supply of the service is limited, the satellite operator can and will jack up the prices. Cheaper rocket launches may make satellite internet cheaper, and lower orbits make it better by cutting latency, but it's still going to be one of the most expensive forms of internet access in terms of dollars per Mbps. And as for personal impact, if you live in the middle of nowhere this could be big. If you live in a rich city it's irrelevant. And over 80% of Americans live in cities; I believe the figures are similar in Europe.

It can launch the Dragon v2 when that capsule is ready. As far as Bigelow stuff goes, well if it fits in the payload size and mass limits it can, otherwise it can't.

Cheating should not be needed. Pushing a command pod around allows refills. If ladder lifters still work you can climb off Kerbin.

Try getting a planet mod and using that?

-57 downdowndown

-56 (-)

Lower orbits help the latency, but there are still reasonable limits to the spectral bandwidth and the area on the ground that has to share that bandwidth linking up to the satellite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViaSat-1 can serve as an example. It quotes a total capacity of 140 Gbps, spread over 72 "spot beams". Sounds impressive. But then consider that if we assume each beam has 2 Gbps, if one of those beams is serving New York City then each New Yorker gets an internet connection speed of about 20 bits per second. A lower orbit isn't going to turn bits-per-second into megabits-per-second. Satellites are hopeless for serving dense urban areas.

Rereading, it sounds like the problem is the ship is on the way back from the Mun, with a Kerbin periapsis that it can't survive. The solution then is to raise the Kerbin periapsis. Do this as early as possible, using either a prograde or a radial-out burn depending on exactly what your orbit is like. It shouldn't take much fuel to bring it up to something like 50 km, enough to slow you down a bit but not burn up. Then make several orbits aerobraking each time. If this fails, then EVA out and use the jetpack to get into a stable orbit. *Don't* try aerobraking in the jetpack, just get periapsis above the atmosphere then burn retrograde at periapsis to bring apoapsis down so you don't get caught by the Mun again. Then leave the Kerbal in that safe orbit until you can rescue him.

Thanks for the help earlier everyone. I carried on working on my craft and at last got the Space Shuttle Gallifrey into LKO. Another angle by cantab314, on Flickr The design is still recognisable but I took on the advice. Since the last pics it has larger tailfins inspired by the X-15, a more rearwards tailplane with the angle removed, and the main wings brought forward. It could handle better but it's flyable enough. On KerbalX if anyone cares, but I do consider this a test article without much useful purpose. That said if you put extra fuel in the payload bay as well as a cargo it might work. http://kerbalx.com/cantab/Space-Shuttle-Gallifrey Now to set myself to actually making this into a shuttle. Which will mess up my carefully-placed CoM on the orbiter, fun fun.

After countless crashes, disintegrations, nearly-there's, and design refinements I got my spaceplane into space The Space Shuttle Gallifrey in orbit by cantab314, on Flickr Only just, but that's what I needed. It's a stepping stone, the basis for a planned Shuttle capable of delivering cargo to other atmo bodies. Think of it as loosely my Enterprise analogue.

I play New Horizons myself. Do remember that Sonnah is another celestial body with its own science results and requires no special finesse to get out of Kerbin's SOI for that. Heck, you can probably hit it just flying by the seat of your pants if you want.

Modular Rocket Systems has some monoprop engines too. Balance is a bit tricky. I think the first thing that's wanted is to make the monopropellant tanks have a decent mass ratio, currently they're awful. Then assuming they are less efficient that bipropellant engines, what do we make the advantage? Higher TWR is currently used, but too high and it bumps against the lifter engines. Lower absolute mass is an option, but would need remaking the Ant and Spider as monoprop engines I think. Low cost is good for career but not for other game modes.

Satellite internet will never be able to match even ground cellular networks, never mind ground wired/fibre networks, for delivering high speeds to large populations. You've got a finite radio bandwidth to use and a large area to cover with it. It's useful for sparsely populated areas where that large area still doesn't mean many people, it's useful for poor countries where people don't expect as much, but it's not gonna cut it when it comes to rich cities.

Here's another use case. I have a VTOL lift engine in a cargo bay. I would like one action group to toggle the bay doors and the lift engine. But I can't, because I'm told the engine "cannot activate while stowed", even when the bay doors are opening at that moment and even if I've set the throttle to zero. I'm forced to use a second action group, and I don't have a bottomless supply of them.

I'm not sure that works. So much in the game is on the basis that 1 metre is 1 metre. If you suddenly think it's actually 10 metres you get all sorts of weird results - orbital speeds become several times too fast, accelerations become extreme, and more. I don't believe the stock aerodynamics was strongly influences by the small size of Kerbin either. When the soup was replaced by a vague semblance of reality, the reduced delta-V to orbit was compensated for by heavily nerfing the rocket Isp - in fact I'd previously run a similar nerf myself in old FAR. If I had to blame the excessive drag on anything, I'd say it's that having played FAR, realistic drag is a nuisance because aeroplanes take ages to slow down for landing unless you use airbrakes.

Probably US. Maybe UN if there's some international co-operation going on. For an outside bet, India. Russia is past it when it comes to space. ESA doesn't have the serious interest and budget, nor does JAXA. China do have the resources and the motivation, but I don't believe the USA would let China be the first to Mars.

Point at destination. Burn. You may need to slightly "lead" your target, but remember your trajectory will be a straight line pretty much. The Mammoth offers slightly greater TWR than the Vector, but your acceleration limit is still "only" 266 m/s2. Both are blown away by a couple of the SRBs, with the best being the Launch Escape System, capable of 833 m/s2. Even that I think won't let you burn all the way on an interplanetary trip with a reasonable playing time.