Technical Ben

I made something with the Orion engine(s). I may need to upgrade my payload sizes.

Wait. I just realised. Why on earth am I so stupid so as to consider putting one of these on my rockets. No. That's insane. Why would I ever put one on a rocket. No, never. It's just not right to put one on a rocket... ... ... ... no, I need to put 2 on it! That's the only rational thing to do.

Thank you so much. I now know my true calling in KSP... It is... to make the mother of all interstellar craft, powered by the one and only (almost) stock engine up to it! (PS, well, I've done it with nukes in stock, but time for a little more fun... if you can call it "little".)

Almost practical to build, with massively efficient DV. It's possibly the only other "not imaginary" space craft propulsion other then the extremely hard to make antimatter annihilation, or ion craft.

Here we go again...

I send Bill, Bob, Jeb and a couple of others to a different star system! (Though not realistic scales of cause) Took them about 80 years.

Thanks. I hope KSP gets new/different systems one day. It really changes how we play the game.

Part count is astronomical on the ion versions (I've tried) and manageable with nukes. I have a few super setups for ion, but part count makes them unfun to try to fly and I've not got them out of orbit so far.

One last look back at Dolas and CZF30 as the return craft continues it's burn. Slight problem with the engines. For some reason they overheated, then exploded. But explosions and failures are all part of this story, and it seems the craft works fine on one engine. After a very long time, eventually a star and some planets come into view... The first sight of Jool for over 100 years! The craft heads straight for Kerbin, and the pods wake up the crew. The crew rush to the coms. Bob: This is the crew of Longburn One. Come in KSC. Please respond... There is a short period of silence, then a muddled reply. KSC scientist 1: Hey, why is my coffee machine taking? KSC scientist 2: That's no coffee machine, that's the old radio cupboard. Bob: Hey guys, it's us! Were back! KSC scientist 1: Is that some old recording? Who left that playing? I'd better turn it off. Bob: No, it's Bob, Bill, Jeb and Lars. We are back from Dolas and we have the data to save Kerbin from the solar flares! KSC scientist 2: The flares? They were decades ago. Last time a mission was launched for those, was when they sent Jeb and... wait! You guys are up there in orbit now? Jeb: Yes. Do we have permission to land? Bill: Since when do you ask for permission Jeb? Jeb: Since I noticed my Booster pilots licence expired 125 years ago, and KSC is the only ones with the re-approval stamps! KSC: Permission granted, welcome back. Just a little warning. Things may have changed a little since you were gone. I hope you packed some re-entry shielding, as the flares have energised and intensified our atmosphere. That and, well, there were some other changes. You're not going to believe what also happened... So the Kerbals made it home. All in all I got 10600 science. Not amazing, but I was limited in part count and what I missions I could manage. They survived 1 or two game breaking bugs (unable to use rotation controls in interstellar space and SOI errors and other rounding errors) a lack of proper planning and some really unforgiving planets. After all that... and I'm still planning to do it again in 1.1!

The Kerbals look over the DRAKOS manifest and specs. Hudson: Four automated robots, a fully fuelled return section and a combined suspended animation and re-entry crew pod. Jeb: Great, I'll be back flying boosters in no time. Hudson: One small problem with the pod though. Bob: Another? What is it this time? Hudson: It was built to the original mission spec. Before we had a hitch-hiker. Lars: Could you and Bill not just move across one of our pods from the Longburn? Bill: Um, I think so, how many are still functioning? Bob: You mean some have stopped working? Hudson: They have been running for decades. The spares are used up. Jeb: The shuttles have some parts, we can reuse those? Hudson: I guess so. I'll go check to see if we can remove them. Hudson floats across the station towards the atmospheric shuttle. The Longburn one had changed a lot since the start of it's voyage. Clean and tidy interiors were not dotted with tin foil patches and welded joints from maintenance. It felt like home though. Much more than Hudson could remember from Kerbin. Inside the shuttle he sat in the combined cockpit and suspended animation pod. These things were built only for short journeys. He could not see them working for the 50 years needed to get Lars back home. He know they would not work. It had been a lot of work making all the craft repairs and refits over their time in the Dolas system. Hudson and Bill had been able to fix and make anything they needed. But this time was different. This time Hudson knew, it would have to be something else he would make, and not a return craft... *Clank* *Slush* Lars: Is Hudson removing the pod already? Jeb: That sounds an awful lot like a fuel transfer. *Clunk* *whoosh* Bob: He just detached the shuttle! Bill: What? Where is he going? Hudson, what are you doing?" Hudson: Sorry Bill. There are not enough working parts left. I can't risk Lars life if a pod fails. He can have mine. Bob: But what about you? How are you getting back. In that shuttle? Hudson: I'm not going back. I've decided. There is just enough snacks and parts for me to make a nice little place here. Jeb: No you can't. I'll come out there and stop you! Hudson: It's no use, I've got our only atmospheric shuttle. Bob: That's never stopped Jeb before. Hudson: I'll be fine here. I know the workings of the craft and have plenty of supplies. With the Longburn as a nice observatory too. It's like home. The Kerbals left on the station look out the window. The shuttle slowly descends to the planet. The crew slowly take what they need across to the transport. Not much is said between them. The end of an epic journey. Not many souvenirs except some rocks and science samples. Bill picks up one last thing, Hudson's spanner. Bill: I'll leave my spanner here and take yours with us. We will swap over next time we meet. Right Hudson? Hudson: Right Bill. I'll come visit, or you lot swing by next time you're passing. The crew get into the pods, and the automated systems fire up the engines.

Nice. I like the layout and gizmos. Do you need that many airbreaks though? Took me about a week or two to get a similar design to land. Still waiting for the instant overheat bug to be fixed so I can test a bit more.

Thanks for this mod. Adding a second system to try to explore, and having a single mission (done with one cargo ship, one crew ship and one backup) to visit it, was epic in 0.90. Doing the same in 1.1 will be even better.

You can set a "force roll" option. You would have to set the correct roll (I think MJ2 supports this), else set a port/etc that has the correct orientation as the "control from here" part. Launch in the orientation you want, and then MJ2 will roll over to the other way (upright I think). So I guess you may need an upsidedown docking port/probe core and set it as the control point. Mechjeb might roll early too, but it would be close to the desired effect.

A child getting letters backwards is an error/bug, not a feature. I can tell you the difference between a b and a p. However, my wires occasionally get crossed and put them backwards (actually not for me, mine is with different letters, but many have that problem in expression and sometimes in reading. That is a language problem, not a visual or observational one and not a computational one. Show the same people a cat/dog and they get it right every time). Thus your examples are way way under researched and your understanding of the problems and systems is not deep enough to comment on the actual mechanical or mathematical functions. Eg, "we will have fusion power in 10 years time", or "we will have FTL travel in 10 years time" or "we will have AI in 10 years time". The problems are not the ones we think they are, and are harder than they seem.

Or any physical system. No matter how much "software", it still needs to run on silicone, or optical cable, or quantum "chips" or whatever. All computers, no matter how advanced, run on... matter. To which there are the same limits our human brains, and nature, already deals with and already finds the "most efficient" solution. So we either gain computation, at the risk of power use and hard lock ups, or gain the flexibility at the expense of lower computational power. There are no true "perfect" solutions.

They can help in certain instances. KSP could have some parallel processing. For example, each craft in the area could be a separate thread that just waits for the next to update before taking a "step". Or the craft part tree could be split into smaller pieces, and again, each one a separate calculation. Currently though it is all mainly done in one big go. However, some of the really really big supercomputers may not have the bandwidth to get the FPS updates in time. They are great for replaying the physics, back in realtime or in slow motion, but not in outputting to a screen in realtime. Eg "Thank you for booting up KSP, sim running for half and hour, will report back then, goodbye".

But it has as much sense and credibility as "fairies did it". So no. Recent comment "does this ultra HD upscalling DVD player improve my old TV to ultra HD?"

Some planets have clouds of nitrogen etc.

This. My (sandbox) Jool challenge craft was suppose to be 200-250 max parts, but ended up being 301. It will drop a little once the booster/transfer stage has burned it out to Jool. It's kind of the limit on my 5 year old PC.

I cannot consider anything that talks about it. I have to move away, escape, ring alarms... It winds me up no end! (The moon does not have a "dark side" other than a shadow side, and in the picture it's the far side not, and never is the "dark side"... it's like people calling their left hand their "lower hand" or "left foot" it's completely wrong!)

I used fraps uncompressed for quite a while with KSP. Gave good results. But Open Broadcast does better with optional compression.

If I have a RepRap and it's just a matter of progressive iteration, could I not turn it in to an Apple Ipad producer with relative ease? If my RepRap does not have this ability, what additional features do I need to get to that? At what point do I go from "can only make things out of plastic" to "can make everything from glass to metalwork to transistors to silicone chips"? If it requires not additional complexity for a construction system or manufacturing process to progress, then any RepRap/constructor can be programmed to iterate into a universal constructor. I don't see that happening, so it seems there is a limiting factor to manufacturing processes. Von Neumann machines/UCs might be possible, but in no way are they assumed to be possible for us to currently construct.

True. So we'd need to send everything. Or hitch hike on a nearby passing rouge planet.

[edit] Ah, a mix of both ideas... a "we don't know" as the real answer? [/edit] There are symbioses and other animals that share resources and work together. There are many examples in nature where larger/different (advanced/complex are the wrong words to use) animals that depend on each other and work together. The more intelligent, the more likely for them to check before eating the other animal ("dumb" fish just gobble up anything near them ).

So a heat leak/engine of some type? If heating is the main factor, and not the actual magnetron?