SpacedInvader

I think the point they are making is that, in this case, how they got the trajectory is the noteworthy fact.

Right, but the Voyagers used several gravity slingshots to achieve their final velocities whereas New Horizons was basically a straight shot out from Earth.

According to Wikipedia, New Horizons was the first spacecraft launched directly into a solar escape trajectory.

While I can imagine that there might be reasons to burn at accelerations higher than 1g for specific purposes like emergencies, it is still a considerable amount of thrust and nothing to be sneezed at. For example, at Pluto's furthest point from earth (7.5 billion KM), a ship capable of accelerating for a constant 1g could make the journey in about 2 weeks as opposed to the 10 years it just took New Horizons.

*As long as everybody reads through the entirety of every 500 page thread before asking a question and never under any circumstances asks for an update from a mod author... As for my flight plan, I'm still setting up my install... i tend to run something like 200 mods for my careers so setting up the game from a fresh install takes a couple of days. Not to mention I'm going to be playing career mode so I probably won't get to the point where I'm going to try for some time.

Ok, thank you, though the big one that seems to break with game updates has always been near future electrical. Either way, I'll give it a try and hope for the best.

I gotta say, this is why I love this community... a relatively simple question of "what is this thing and can KSP do it" is now two pages of discussion of its benefits and feasibility in the real world.

Wonderful! I'm excited to finally get a chance to try these together. Thank you for the reply.

Since the add-on release thread for this series of mods is one of the ones affected by the recent forumpocalypse and I don't want to place any pressure on Nertea to re-up the thread, I would just like to know if the most recent versions which are released for 1.2.1 work properly in 1.2.2 or if there was something in that update that broke them and as such I should wait for a proper update. Thanks.

Ahh yes, that looks like a probable culprit. Thanks.

If only lagrange points were real in KSP... I know I can simulate them, but you have to baby satellites you put in those spots because they drift a lot.

Was actually thinking of the D-T Vista with its insane amount of thrust and respectable ISP.

The only way would be to use something from one of the advanced tech mods like KSP Interstellar, though I've got no experience with those mods at all. Another option to simulate the same thing would be to use much higher than 1g acceleration (something I know some of those engines are capable of with large ships) for less than 15hrs and then fast forward to an opposing deceleration point to reverse the process.

Even if the planets weren't in optimal position, the effect of gravity would only add a marginal amount of extra distance to the transfer, which with this sort of thrust should be handled by a few extra hours of acceleration. If you were to fully double the distance the vehicle would have to travel, you'd only add about 20 hours to the travel time. Basically, with so much dV at your disposal, you'd almost completely ignore the hohmann transfer and just thrust in a direction that would give you a straight line to the target while accounting for gravity since 2-4 days is not nearly enough time to have a real curving orbital trajectory.

Looks to me like he trial and errored the heck out of that, but that could just be the way he's presenting it. What surprises me is that the constant thrust calculations seem like that shouldn't be that complicated (beyond my capabilities currently for sure, but still, all of the variables are known so the math should be doable), though the fact that no one has bothered to figure it out with hard calculations could just be because we don't have the drive technology yet, so there isn't much reason to do the math.

I did said it was a rough calculation All I did was look up the straight-line distance between the planets at their closest pass and then use the calculator to determine the time it would take to cover half of that distance at an acceleration of 9.8m/s2. I'm fairly certain this won't result in a 100% accurate calculation, just a rough estimate. I fully believe you that gravity would need to be accounted for, as would relative orbital velocities, but being able to sustain such significant acceleration would greatly diminish those effects. As a side note, sustaining 1g acceleration for 24hrs would result in a velocity of 846,720m/s or 3,048,192km/h.

I'm returning to the game again after some time away and while working through the process of setting up my ridiculously modded install, I'm finding that a lot of threads referenced through searches and CKAN are returning an error saying "we couldn't locate the item you're trying to view" along with the error code "2F173/1". I'm also getting blank pages with nothing but "Invalid thread: XXX", where XXX is the thread id from the URL. Many of these mods appear to be still supported with recent postings / updates by their authors, so I'm having trouble believing they've all just been closed and deleted. Did something happen recently that deleted a lot of threads, or could something else be occurring on my end that could be causing this? Thanks.

An admittedly very rough calculation using this displacement calculator resulted in a total travel time of about 41.5 hours with earth and mars at their closest positions and a constant acceleration / deceleration of 1g for the whole transfer. That's assuming straight line travel and doesn't take relative velocities of the planets into account, but I'm willing to assume that the only significant variation in time would result from different planet positions. Considering KSP interplanetary distances are far smaller than real life, the resulting travel time is only about 15 hours, something that might actually be possible with 4x acceleration.

I'm getting ready to start a new save and have been thinking about including this mod to get access to some of the very end-game engines since I'd like to colonize several planets and they would help with that significantly. That said, I'm also a big fan of the Near-Future Technologies mods for what would end up being mid-game in this save, yet I've gathered from some searching through this thread that some serious balance issues crop up when using the two mods together. Am I correct in this assumption, or do they mesh well together? Thanks.

In the video you suggested he says the Hermes can accelerate at 2mm/s/s.

Its always saddened me that the only real reason we managed to put boots on the moon was because we wanted to "show the Reds" rather than really wanting to do it for the furtherance of scientific and technological understanding. That said, considering that we've had nearly 50 years of further development since then and still probably won't have another human on the surface of another orbital body for 20 more years, I can only imagine how far we'd be from that original goal without the cold war.

Watching the Adam Savage interview right now. I actually don't remember seeing it in The Martian (I admit I haven't found time to read the book sadly). The two sources I've gotten the idea from are the old tabletop RPG games Battletech, Mechwarrior, and Aerotech and then also newish Syfy show The Expanse.

Over the years I've read in several science fiction franchises about a method of interplanetary travel in which a vehicle accelerates at 1g for half the transfer then flips and reverses the process, allowing for a sort of linear gravity simulation as well as an absolute minimal transfer time. First, I'd like to know what this maneuver is called and then I'd like to know if KSP is capable of simulating it. I am getting ready to start a new career after some time away and I'm debating installing KSP Interstellar which I believe has technology capable of giving enough dV to perform such a maneuver, but I would have no idea how to go about planning or executing it. Thanks.

As I'm playing, my game seems to stutter / pause for 0.5-1 seconds every 10-20 seconds. I have plenty of RAM available still, and my CPU isn't getting anywhere close to max, so I'm wondering what could be causing the issue? I'm running 1.1.3 and here is my mod list: KSP: 1.1.3 (Win64) - Unity: 5.2.4f1 - OS: Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (6.1.7601) 64bit 000_AT_Utils - 1.0.1 Filter Extensions - 2.6 Toolbar - 1.7.12 USI Tools - 0.7.4 Zero-Point Inline Fairings - 1.0.2 ABookCase Orbital Reference System - 0.3 Advanced Jet Engine - 2.7.2 Animated Decouplers - 1.3.2 B9 Animation Modules - 1.0.3 B9 Part Switch - 1.4.3 B9 Aerospace - 6.1.2 B9 Aerospace - 6.1.2 B9 Aerospace HX Parts - 6.1.2 B9 Aerospace Procedural Parts - 0.40.7 Chatterer - 0.9.90.1289 Community Resource Pack - 0.5.4 Connected Living Space - 1.2.2.1 Contract Configurator - 1.17 ContractFilterContinued - 0.1.1.1 Contract Pack: Anomaly Surveyor - 1.7 CC-CP-SCANSat - 0.6.0.1 Contract Pack: Clever Sats - 1.3 Contract Pack: Field Research - 1.2 Contract Pack: Kerbal Academy - 1.1.4 Contract Pack: Bases and Stations - 3.4 Contract Pack: RemoteTech - 2.1.3 Contract Pack: Sounding Rockets - 1.2 Rover Missions - 0.1.6 Contract Pack: Unmanned Contracts - 0.3.25 Contract Reward Modifier - 1.0.2.3 CryoEngines - 0.3.5 Custom Asteroids - 1.3.1 CustomBarnKit - 1.1.9 Deadly Reentry - 7.4.7 DMagic Orbital Science - 1.3.0.2 CapCom Mission Control On The Go - 1.0.2.4 Contract Parser - 1.0.4 Contracts Window Plus - 1.0.6.4 Progress Parser - 1.0.5 EditorExtensionsRedux - 3.2.14 Engine Lighting - 1.4.5 EVA Transfer - 1.0.4 Ferram Aerospace Research - 0.15.7.2 Firespitter - 7.3 Flexible Docking - 1.0.2 Impact - 1.4.2 Interstellar Fuel Switch - 2.1.4 JSIAdvTransparentPods - 0.1.7 RasterPropMonitor - 0.27 Kerbal Attachment System - 0.5.9 keepfit - 0.10.7.5 KerbalAtomics - 0.2.5 Kerbal Construction Time - 1.3.4 Kerbal Engineer Redux - 1.1.1 Kerbal Joint Reinforcement - 3.2 HyperEdit - 1.5.2.1 Kerbal Inventory System - 1.2.12 kOS - 1.0 KRASH - 0.5.21 Historian Extended - 1.2.4.12 KSP-AVC Plugin - 1.1.6.1 KWRocketryRedux - 3.0.12 MagiCore - 1.1.2 Infernal Robots - 2.0.5 Infernal Robotics Sequencer - 1.0 MarkIVSystem - 2.2.1 Modular Rocket Systems - 1.12.8 ModularFlightIntegrator - 1.1.6 Docking Port Alignment Indicator - 6.4 NearFutureConstruction - 0.6.4 NearFutureElectrical - 0.7.7 NearFuturePropulsion - 0.7.4 NearFutureSolar - 0.6.2 NearFutureSpacecraft - 0.5.1 NRAP - 1.5.1.1 Outer Planets Mod - 2.0 PEBKAC Launch Escape - 1.1.3.2 PlanetShine - 0.2.5 Procedural Parts - 1.2.5 QuickSearch - 3.0.2 RCS Build Aid - 0.8.1 RealChute - 1.4.1.1 RealFuels Stockalike Configs - 3.2.1 RealPlume - Stock - 0.10.9 Real Scale Boosters - 0.14.5 ReentryParticleEffect - 1.1 RemoteTech - 1.7.1 AmpYear - 1.3.6 DeepFreeze Continued... - 0.22.3 IONRCS - 0.1.3 SCANsat - 1.1.6.6 SETI-Contracts - 0.9.7.1 SETI-ProbeParts - 1.0.1.1 SETI-Rebalance - 0.9.7.2 SETI-RemoteTechConfig - 1.0.9 ShipManifest - 5.1.2.2 SolverEngines - 2.3 SpaceY Expanded - 1.1.11 SpaceY Lifters - 1.13.1 TAC Fuel Balancer - 2.8 TextureReplacer - 2.4.13 ThrottleControlledAvionics - 3.2.2 TAC Life Support - 0.12.2 TimeControl - 2.2.2 Kerbal Alarm Clock - 3.7.1 Alternate Resource Panel - 2.8.1 Transfer Window Planner - 1.5.1 TweakScale - 2.2.13 USI Core - 0.2.4 Asteroid Recycling Tech - 0.8.4 USI Exploration Pack - 0.5.4 Freight Transport Tech - 0.5.4 Karbonite - 0.7.4 Karbonite Plus - 0.6.4 Kolonization Core - 0.2.4 Konstruction - 0.1 Malemute Rover - 0.1.4 Sounding Rockets - 0.4.4 UKS - 0.40.4 VenStockRevamp - 1.9.5 Waypoint Manager - 2.5.3 WildBlueTools - 1.4.2 Buffalo - 0.6.2 Pathfinder - 0.9.39 [x] Science! - 4.20 System Specs: i7-4770K GTX 960 16GB KSP installed on an SSD Any help would be appreciated. EDIT: after some additional searching, I've found lots of references to garbage collection causing this, however, I've never experienced this before, even with a nearly identical mod list on 1.1.2, so I'm wondering if something changed?

I currently have one of those KSC explorer contracts as I've done many times in the past, yet for some reason I can't complete this one because no matter where I go on in the area, I can't find the Astronaut Complex biome (I've even tried inching all the way around the building), so I can't do the required experiment. Currently my complex is no upgraded at all, does this have anything to do with the problem? If not, has anyone else experienced this, and how did you go about correcting it? Thanks.