Creature

Before setting up a kickstarter you should contact Squad about it. I'm repeating here what I said in the cubesat thread: you're planning to raise money using Squad's IP as a promoting tool. It might or might not be OK with them but you should ask. If they say no, you can probably still just create a kickstarter without mentioning kerbals at all. Anyone donating will anyways be from this community but I can see how a company might not want anyone using their IP material for their own projects even if they are cool. Anyway I hope this project happens! I'm just bummed that I can't help with it, would love to be there for the launch.

This is also a convenient explanation as to why we haven't heard of any advanced alien civilizations - they hole up in their computational center as simulations and don't want to venture too far away because of latency issues.

Duh!

Yay! Pads are being scrathed! I don't know what that means but I'm still happy

Loaded like a hypetrain Flyin' like an aeroplane Feelin' like a space brain One more time tonight, press F5

Also publicly funded agencies like NASA and ESA have political reasons to promote education and collaborate with universities and schools. Not with gaming communities. And in the world of actual scientific research something like 100k dollars for a launch to space is insanely cheap. Everyday lab equipment costs tens of thousands of dollars easily, every researcher on payroll costs some tens of thousands per year and so on. CubeSats are great pilot projects for small scale proof-of-concept demonstrations or even as purely educational tools when the people gaining the knowledge are actually worth the investment. I think CubeSat is a wonderful concept and I really hope more independent parties will start making them. Sadly I too don't see this forum pulling it off unless something dramatic happens. But like I said in the other thread too, thinking these things through is a very good educational experience and I think these threads should continue just for the fun of it.

Biological payload is well within possibilities and there was even GeneSat-1 that did such thing with a cubesat. It did cost quite a bit and was otherwise one of the most sophisticated ones but it's possible. Although the launch provider probably wants certain ISO standards met from whoever wants to bring bugs in a can on their rocket. So by possible I mean possible in general for a real research team, not for us though. All in all I'd say this thread is very educational for all who want to face real engineering challenges. We've gone from an "easy Phobos landing" to a "floating bucket in LEO that could maybe carry a camera or something." Really it doesn't matter what the satellite does as long as it does something funky or something useful. One problem is that we don't have any tech to demonstrate. If someone here has special skills to build something they think could be useful in future cubesat missions, speak up now. Otherwise we have nothing on that front so either find something easy to measure or test that hasn't been measured or tested before or think of something cool. In case 1 we might hitch a free ride due to scientifical utility, in case 2 we might raise enough money to pay for a launch. But that aside the real and massive and biggest challenge here is doing it as an internet community with people all over the world. And just saying we'll assemble in in K^2's garage isn't the answer here. Anyone who's willing to relocate to where ever he lives, speak up now. Realize that this isn't a model airplane and you don't just put it together over a weekend. You really do have to move physically to the assembly location and it does take more than one person to do it in any reasonable time. I don't know what K^2's real skills are but I'm assuming he or she is a physicist or something of that sort so if he's really good and motivated he could maybe assemble it all by himself given enough time. But I wouldn't build a community project based on one person doing all the work while the rest of us shout instructions over the internet. Also I wouldn't be surprised if the more administrative people at SQUAD are already looking at this thread with a finger on the trigger to stop the whole process. It's one thing to do something small as a fan work but if this project is trying to be serious, we're talking about raising possibly a hundred thousand dollars or even more by using their IP as a promoting tool. They might want to say something about that. And I don't mean to be negative here but I am assuming that people who say they're serious about this really are serious about this and even some sort of answers to these things should be first on the list. Once you have the team together you can think about what sort of skillset they have and what they could realistically accomplish. You can't build the mission if you don't have the engineers.

I'm all for crazy ideas but there's a million things that should be worked out right from the start if you're serious about this and not just daydreaming. Like the already mentioned fact that someone needs to build the satellite, manage the ground station (possibly build one), test, test, test and then test some more that all the systems work, make the contract with the launcher, take responsibility for it, go to a meeting or two, manage the delivery of the satellite to the launch agency IN TIME, operate and manage the ground station after the launch, manage all the legal and paperwork and take personal responsibility for the not-so-little 100k+ dollars of money involved. Don't be offended is SQUAD isn't jumping on the chance to promote this project until someone actually steps up to handle all the organization involved. If something goes wrong and the 100k gets wasted or missing you can only imagine the bad PR for SQUAD. I'm 100% confident that people on this forum have the ability to build some kind of CubeSat, it's the other stuff I'm more worried about.

I'm not a doctor nor a pilot and I only did a few jumps when I dabbled with skydiving but I'd throw a wild guess that pilots should have similar medical requirements so no heart conditions, no serious respiratory illnesses, no epilepsy even if non-symptomatic while under medication or basically anything that's affected by the low pressure. The lowered pressure leads to less oxygen in your blood which leads to heart rate going up and getting out of breath. I wouldn't risk it.

If the sat would get to even LEO it could so smarter things than carry model rocket SRBs (although I'm not denying the awesomeness of this, just that it's maybe not worth 100k). I don't know what kind of astronomical measurements or tests are done in orbit but basically do something that requires direct exposure to vacuum or upper atmosphere. Things where the expendability comes into play. Or you could try exposing some extremophiles or algae to LEO conditions and see if they grow or make a long term materials study or maybe some sort of environmental imaging. Heck, you could proably follow the movements of tagged whales or something. Going interplanetary would be quite a feat. I tried to search a bit and found one that was placed on heliocentric orbit where it was terminated after 3 months. There might be others but I don't think anyone has made an actual planetary flyby?

Depending on the disease/medical condition the "completely cured" is not necessarily infallible and when you're in charge of a plane costing tens or hundreds of millions with hundreds of people on board some officials might be a bit protective and rather just throw a blanket disqualification if they even suspect that the pilot might be a liability.

Just doing it as international over-the-internet collaboration project by a gaming community with kickstarter funding is a pretty big achievement. But still it should have a proper scientific purpose if at all possible. I doubt many people are willing to back it if the mission profile consists only of floating in LEO taking photos.

Well to be precise it would keep thrusting until the pressure inside the tank is equal to outside atmospheric pressure. After that the ambient pressure will start working to keep the water in the tank. But you're right though, once the valve is opened and the air flows in, you can't cut the thrust fast, the pressure must equalize first and that might not happen before all the water is out. Additionally the response time for air throttle would be slower and less precise so if you can make the direct throttle to work it's a better solution.

Are you using the solenoid for throttle control between the water tank and nozzle? I don't know how it would work in practice but would it be possible to have a separate pressure tank connected to the water tank with a valve in between as throttle? It would be easier to control the air flow than the water flow. Depending on the nozzle size you might still be able to cut the throttle completely. But it would change the dynamics a lot so I have no idea if this is feasible at all.

Yes this is what I was after, thank you for taking the time to deal with my questions For some very odd reason orbital mechanics and gravitational forces haven't really been even looked at on any of the physics courses I've studied. I should probably get a proper text book on the subject so I don't have to figure out everything on my own

A quick search revealed that the mechanism function via expressing an enzyme called alkane hydroxylase and it's actually present in certain marine bacterial plankton already. I didn't find any mention if this being the only source of energy for the cells though but if it's in otherwise energy-poor environment it would use polyethylene exclusively. You could possibly insert the gene in a plasmid to an already existing wild type strain and let it loose on the area. If it's too big for a plasmid then just do a few rounds of selection based on the hydroxylase expression or to be more precise you'd want to select solely based on growth speed in a growth medium with polyethylene as limiting factor since it's uncertain which other factors contribute to effectiveness of energy source usage. Either way you could let it loose on the patch where it would have a competitive edge due to being more effective at consuming the available energy source. The only thing it could do compared to a wild strain is drop the plasmid or be outcompeted by other strains if there's better energy sources available. Once the polyethylene is consumed in an area the modified strain will die out and return to normal levels. Any chances of random mutations are exactly the same than with any other wild bacteria in the region. However there's big chance that it wouldn't be such a huge successs, ecological systems are unpredictable and if using polyethylene as competitive advantage would be a good idea, there would most likely already be a plankton species exploiting it.

So I don't want to soud argumentative, but: This is all fine, except you're calculating at roughly 1400 kilometers below the surface. Plug in the correct 6 400 ~ish kilometers for Earth's radius and you arrive at a more familiar value. And no matter how much you change the second mass, it always cancels out. Like I already calculated in abstract form and this is also what K^2 said earlier about the falling body's mass not affecting the acceleration caused by gravity, only the mass of the second body affects it due to elimination. Again I don't want to sound argumentative but to quote myself with some added bolds for emphasis: Which at least in my mind sounds exactly what you just said? Or could you be more precise as to what you think I'm confusing with what? As I said english isn't my first (or second) language so maybe I'm not expressing myself the way I think I am? But my point was that if my mass is equal to Earth's, the gravitational force between me and Earth is increased, leading to Earth actually undergoing a significant acceleration towards me while still not affecting my own acceleration towards Earth in any way. So if you're watching from a stationary frame of reference at a third point (again ignoring the fact that the actual force depends on distance due to being irrelevant towards this problem): Case 1, Earth and normal me: I accelerate towards Earth at 9,81 m/s^2, Earth stays essentially still. Impact at t= X seconds. Case 2, Earth and Earth-sized me: I accelerate towards Earth at 9,81 m/s^2, Earth accelerates towards me at 9,81 m/s^2. Impact at t= X/2 seconds. Right or wrong? So to revisit the original question of If my above statement is right, then this is essentially correct too, although we need to be talking about bodies around the same order of magnitude for it to be of any practical meaning.

Keep the egg! You need a mission objective, don't you? The way I see it, you need a craft that can slow down to a halt first and then lift off again. This can be to a hover or to ground, for now it doesn't matter. Just build in enough thrust time to facilitate a short hover for egg landing if it seems plausible. If you can do this then it's all up to control finesse what else you can do.

What I meant with the drop height thing was concerning more about the testing phase. When you're doing the real thing, go as high as you can of course Like I said when coming down with a parachute you could just as well drop it from an airplane (which I don't recommend doing). In any case it's awesome that you're not afraid of a challenge, but be mindful of time constraints and plan the desing process logically. Right now your top priority is getting a throttleable rocket engine to work. This is pretty much the thing that's gonna dictate your error margins and the amount of control you have, everything else is just paper rocket science for now and not a top priority. If you really want to hover-drop the egg, you need to have some pretty fast and accurate controls on the throttle plus all the engines need to have a steady, reliable thrust curve. This is why I strongly suggest you keep the landing legs at least as a possible option somewhere on the back of your mind because truthfully I'll be flabbergasted and positively bamboozled if you can pull off the precision you need to get the egg to come to a halt within 2 centimeters of the ground. I really have no idea if this is possible or not but once you have some real data on the engine we can start speculating. Everything is always easy on paper but in real life engineering you need hard data and all equipment operates within a certain range of tolerances. This margin is something you need to find out by doing SCIENCE! on it. The other important part is the actual control logic and circuitry. So you need a unit that can receive sensor data and send out a command to a servo to adjust the throttle. A good place to start here is the gyro. The most basic thing is keeping the craft level. Once you have that logic in place, you can easily add other inputs. I don't know how R/C helicopters or arduino quadcopters do this but that's probably a good place to start. I'm really fascinated by this project just for the sake of knowing if it's possible to do this. Even if it doesn't work as planned you'll still win and get a very good learning process from this. Also take anything I say with a grain of salt, I have no experience in mechanical or electrical engineering. What I do know is project design, data analysis (at least as long as we don't go too heavily on the statistics) and labwork in general (also bioengineering but you probably don't need that). Some things I recommend you do is get a lab book and take notes of everything. Second thing is to get dirty with the engine and throttle control right away, that's your primary component that defines your operational capabilities. Third thing you could consider is starting a blog about your project once you have something substantial to show for it.

With a problem like this integration is essentially just adding a tiny step to the equation. It's usually taught so that when you're integrating an area under a curve, you divide it into thin rectangular slices starting from y=0 up to the curve and then adding all those bars together. Now since you have only a short time interval, you can simulate it with excel without needing any integration at all. What you do is you plug in the parameters like mass flow,total mass, thrust, speed etc. at t=0 into excel. Then you add a timestep, like 0,05 seconds and now since you know what the mass flow out is you know the new total mass at t=0+0,05 seconds and you can calulate the the new acceleration, new speed, thrust and whatever you want based on the new parameters. Then just keep adding the timesteps for a nice acceleration curve, variable thrust and even dropping the egg as an additional reduction in mass. This takes some excel skills but you're gonna need them in any case later in life with 100% certainty so it's not a wasted effort. But it's also a lot easier than learning integration with multiple variables. The downside is that it's not as accurate mathematically but I'm pretty sure that the inconsistencies in the actual craft will generate more error than the approximation from the steps (if you keep the steps small enough). I still would want to point out one thing with your dropping altitude. Since you're coming down with a parachute, when it's open the craft is descending at terminal velocity so it makes no difference whether you drop it from a 20 or 50 meter tower or from an airplane. So when designing you don't need to get to 50 meters to test anything, just make sure the chute is fully deployed and the craft has reached terminal velocity when doing tests. In fact you only need to test the terminal velocity with the parachute deployed, then afterwards calculate how high you need to drop the craft from to achieve the same speed and further on just test by dropping it from that altitude above the parachute cutoff point. For example if your cutoff point is 5 meters from the ground and terminal velocity is 5 m/s with the chute, then you only need to drop it from roughly 6 meters or so to simulate the cutoff speed and altitude. Also what I'm thinking is that the safest bet would be to use a analog altimeter (strings with weights attached to them) as someone already suggested. Use 4 and when the weights hit the ground, they release the switch for the landing rocket. As Duxwing calculated, you have very small margin of error to drop the egg. What I'd suggest is you use the water rocket only to touch down, have 4 landing legs with shock absorbers and a switch to sense when the full weight of the rocket is on the legs. This switch releases the egg from precalculated drop height (1-2 centimeters off the ground when landed) and simultaneously ignites solid rocket boosters that lift the craft off the ground. These are available commercially but I don't know about your contry's legislation, at least in my nanny-state they're very highly regulated and you need a license. But they are powerful and light weight. In ideal situation you'd have the lander cut the chute, come down in freefall (remember aerodynamics!), weights hit the ground and ignite water rocket at exactly known altitude, craft lands (can be a bit bumpy too!), switch drops the egg and ignites the solids and the DragonEgg is laid in a puff of smoke, steam and fire while the lander soars off and possibly gets all tangled up in the still-airborne parachute and catches fire.

Well I'm not sure if I'm expressing myself all too well (english not my first language). What I mean is that let's say I'm teleported so that I'm floating in space next to Earth. I start to experience the gravitational pull F=G m(me)m(Earth)/r^2. For my acceleration F=m(me)a where F is the gravitational pull. So m(me)a = G m(me)m(Earth)/r^2. m(me) cancels out which leads to gravitational acceleration g (roughly 9,81 m/s^2 on sea level). So that's why the acceleration is independent of my mass because it cancels out. But when I appear, I start to pull the Earth towards me with the equal force F=G m(me)m(Earth)/r^2. Now the m(Earth) cancels out and the Earth accelerates at a=G m(me)/r^2 which is pretty small. But if you substitute the regular old me with a super-sized me that's the size of Earth, then suddenly my surface acceleration is also 9,81 m/s^2. Now the Earth starts to "fall" towards me at a=9,81 m/s^2 (independent of Earth's mass, this is me pulling Earth). So the point was that in first case I fall at 9,81 m/s^2 towards Earth and it falls at me with essentially zero acceleration. In second case we both have the same acceleration towards each other, so if you're caught between the Earth and super-me, you'll have the planet rushing towards you at 9,81 m/s^2 acceleration and a huge scared-looking bearded guy from the other direction at 9,81 m/s^2. So doesn't the collision happen twice as early in case 2 than in case 1? So the both masses do matter, it's just irrelevant unless the masses are in the same order of magnitude. Or am I misunderstanding something? EDIT: Of course not taking into account the r^2 factor here when I'm tossing the 9,81 m/s^2 around but I don't think it's relevant to the actual question.

Sorry if this is a silly question but the force acts both bodies separately, even though it's equal for both directions? If I'm regular sized me floatin in space, Earth pulls me at 9,81 m/s^2 and I pull the Earth at essentially zero force upwards. If I were the size of Earth, it would still pull me at 9,81 m/s^2 but I'd pull the Earth at the same acceleration towards me so while the acceleration caused by Earth on me is the same in both cases, in second case I would collide faster because the falling speed of Earth would be bigger due to my enormous mass? Or is this already taken into account somehow?

I don't want to discourage but 50 meters is pretty high. You're not gonna find a board like that. In fact I was gonna ask where you're planning to drop it from? You need something like a crane or a tower of some sort. I just checked that where I live the highest water towers are 55 meters tall. So imagine a wooden board the length of a water tower or a large factory pipe. That's 50 meters.

We COULD clone the entire dev team. They could work in 8 hour shifts 24/7. One clone works and the others play around in ball pit until it's their shift again (this is what I imagine devs do in their free time).