PB666

BUt there is no way in the game to add deep space tracking network, so . . . . . . You would need 1. Transmission lines 2. Remote site parabolic antenna arrays 3. Satellite telecommunications or undersea telecommunications from areas that are not directly connected by land. There is a satellite communication network around Mars.

Yeah, thats the problem with Multimeters, connections often give buggy signal. I saw some struts, they are released. The proximal side inflated a bit, so thats not a hold back. it looks like the distal side has not, a little heating cooling may get it going. It might be that something inside just stuck.

Well they terminated operations for 22 hours. They are going to swap out the multimeters for tomorrow, probably. "Expansion did not occur along the pressure curve". (Translation no measurable expansion). Hopefully it will miraculously expand overnight. Steps 1 through 3 completed successfully Step 4, iniital expansion phase, proceeding with difficulty.

Well they increased pressure from 21.0 on the multimeter to 22.3. it dropped slowly back to 22.1, then he opened for a sec at 23.7 final. The module is not expanding, and pressure dropped again slowly "No noticeable change". Things are a bit concerned on the ground. So looks like the are increasing internal pressure, the pressure is dropping slowly but no noticable expansion. Could be a leak? So they are questioning right now whether to continue or try again at some later point. The last pressure I saw before the video rotate was 23.5 I got another glance it was 23.5. So with the drop in pressure they should have seen some expansion, but the pressure loss has stabilized and it appears to be filling something, equilibrating, but the module is not inflating in a measurable way.

Well its 0700 CDT here, the expansion was stopped because of overpressure on one of the indicators. Because of that the decided to slow the rate of expansion. So the decided to recalculate and . . . . This then interfered with several exercise schedules on the ISS. So then they had to confer with everyone and get permissions from the Russians to delay their exercise schedule. And so now waiting to get permission . . . . . . And the vid link froze again is not updating..... Saw two multimeters on either side, not sure if one is registering voltage, looks low, the other was on previously but is no apparently off.

Wuh oh, problem, something has gone over pressure. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36389843 my link to NASA has gone black.

Yep, i think this thread is cooked, we can do it again next week/month unless someone stickies it.

The two stations are relatively close and not on a pole, so how donthey track you when they are on the side of the planet facing away. Of course kerbal could have as part of the game the launching of tracking satellites. also. if you travel to another planet, your orbital period differs, so at some point kerbin is on the other side of kerbol, and blocked. That would mean that before you go. To solve this you need to satellites in kerbin circum kerbol orbit that are 120' from kerbins position so that all parts of the system can be tracted. Make two stations and put all the f grade kerbols on them.

If Orion to a future in obscurity then why? took to long to develope, 8 years, or because its too colaborative and not enough focus put on completion and use.

Thats a real vote of confidence.

Kouston, ke kave a kroblem.

So the bottom line is: Don't see gravity, interstellar unless you are going out of your mind with boredom and just need to use your Amazon Prime. See the Martian, maybe, but then close your eyes when certain unrealistic effects are about to happen. And the story-line not very professional. Approaching the unknown, some kind of space rebel movie about a guy who's ships runs through a strange brown cloud. I haven't seen any of these movies. The last space movie I bought was HHGTTG. I still watch it.

If you are a human, why indeed. If you are a space tug delivering non-perishables, you save alot of fuel, which means for instance you could carry fuel, a different kind of fuel for chemical rockets to mars to do something like land or return humans back to earth. If you are being bombarded by cosmic rays, you have space induced cachexia, and your food and oxygen supplies are ticking down, you aren't going to sit around 4 to 6 months for an Ion drive to kick you into a partial transfer so your ion drive and efficiently finish the task. You could however ride to Earth L2, pick up a ride on an ION driven transfer ship, ride to Mars L1, get off ride down to a LMO, pick up fuel from another Mars-LMO/Mars L2 recycling ion-driven tug, land on mars, return to LMO, pick up more fuel from the space tug, go back to L1, catch a ride on the same ship back to earth L2, then refuel from another ion driven refueling station, and finally land on earth. The infrastructure being in place, in mar LMO and L1, you could have deliveries of supplies to LEO that are tugged to L2, Mars L1, Mars LMO so that the transfer ships are always conserved, only the supply pod comes from LEO. The only scenario where ION drive is not useful is scenarios that involve inefficient transfers (e.g. short than the 6 to 9 months). Even so with higher powered solar panels some of these can be pulled off. Before you think of ION drives you have to think, am I launching Kepler ST or am I launching Voyager. If im Kepler ST and I am losing valuable coolant by the second, I need to get to my station and do as much work as possible. If I'm voyager or the like, going with ION drive can allow me to add another RTG or two, I can use the ION drive to push me toward the heliopause and use more RTGs to keep me running longer. Any excess that the RTG produces early in life I can use for pushing my little ship faster outward, I'll be running for 75 years, long after Keplar is space junk. Another reason, there are micro ION drives, these can replace inefficient monoprop driven RCS trusters and can be used for holding course for longer periods. Another reason for ION is that you can vary your ISP, if you need a burst of speed, such as at the beginning of a transfer, you have some liberty to accelerate more gas to a lower exhaust velocity. Imagine that you really need to get going fast, you don't care how long it takes but you really want some speed. So here is what you can do, using a very high ISP engine, good solar paneling you and a small powerful chemical engine. You first use the efficient 20,000 ISP drive and drive at sunrise termination line out of earths system, working in the direction of mercury and burning at the highest ISP Possible, as you prepare to do a gravity assist around mercury, you then use the high efficiency ION drive to increase speed, passing mercury periapsis at optimum you burn 75% of your chemical fuel, using the oberth affect to really increase speed, once in view of the sun you then hit the ION drives a full 9x Solar irradiance, you then push to Venus, and repeat with the remaining chemical fuel at Venusian Pe. Again you burn out at 2.5x solar irradiance, dropping your chemical engines and fuel tanks, you then burn as hard as you can to mars orbit, supplimenting your power with the RTGs, as you pass close to Jupiter, finally you drop your solar panels, and you are now pushing out on RTG. Finally somewhere beyond saturn you run out of fuel. I had some RL like specs for ION drive payloads that had dV of 70,000. Imagine what you could do with that. Leave the solar system at 60,000 meters per second. The problem of course are the panels, barreling toward mercury you realize that panels do overheat and age quickly, that they may not be producing 2.5x solar irradiance at Venus, and you might end up with alot of leftover fuel even if you could burn it. Lets take another scenario, lets say you were the philae lander, rather than using a chemicals thrusters and harpoons, why not slow down with small ion drives, rather than plunging into a comet (I know it was only going a few meters per second), why not light on the comet and push down ever so lightly with ion drives on the surface using the lightest force to keep the lander down. A delicate circumstance needs a delicate device. So these are examples were you choose the right golf club for the shot you need to make. Sometimes ION drives are not what you want (Launch, expedite) and sometimes they fit the bill.

Thats another caveot they have to plan for, to make use of a gravitational lense you need to place a series of satellites in orbit with the inclination of alpha Centauri, and they have to be at a distance from the sun that would maximize the signal. Pointing the receiver at the sun is bound to pick up alot of other radiation also, so that the recievers would have to be so focused they only pick up radiofrequencies that pass a certain distance from the sun, and not in the sun. From wikipedia.

Which means you need a high density power supply. Good for traveling insides venusian circum solar orbit orbit, not so good for whizzing out of martian atmosphere. That could all change with fusion power.

Efficient matter antimatter conversion, fusion has two high of a mass fraction. Its not doable.

Thats because they chose not to circularize or come anywhere close, the best place to start the LEO burn to exit is in the atmosphere, just turn toward flat, somewhere around 20 degrees of horizontal the gain from circularization (trading altitude for gravity fughting omega squared r) is less than the gain from doing all your burn as fast as you can to escape. Eventually the orbital vector passes omega square r anyway and within minutes you are so far from earth that g is no longer a significant factor. You can fire strait up, but you will be fighting full effects of gravity all the way out the SOI. To get that 14000 m/s at pluto they need to burn as quickly as soon as they can after establishing omega sq r / g = 1.

No one knows how they intend to pull it off, the foil antennas they propse are not like to be accurate enough to direct a signal back. To be frank, the whole idea is not so much about reaching alpha Centauri, its about getting the space industry out of its sweet little rut of using chemical rockets and start thinking about other means of getting science out our kuiper belt and fast. If you think about it highest human earth relative velocity was achieved in1976, basically, new horizons is going a tad faster, we have made almost no gains in increasing spacecraft in 40 years. So the idea is lets set a target and lets see what we can do, if we can get a quarter way to alpha century in say 50 years we can design bigger and better. So I am for the project of trying, for the idea we are not there now but if we.....various and sundry intities.....try along the several different areas needed then we are going to be further ahead than just accepting chemical rockets, SEP, and waiting every year for fusion in the next 20 years. That does not mean I think they will achieve thier goals, but alas i didn't think SpaceX could land on a brage two flights in a row. Its hard for any one person to have a complete scope of what science can do Near future. We have many new discoveries, some I posted here in the last year, some of these, actually most, are hype, some are breakthrough. To get between that future-fog and future technologies you have to pay engineers to sit down and work out the details, blend new technologies together, and test hypothesis on the really small scale in a lab. To give an example they plan to fire GWs of power at a meter square of foil, my experience tells me that no metal can perflectly reflect. If you put a mirror in very bright light the mirror will get hot, and if the reflector is three atoms thick it will reach that point very quickly and it will eventually melt. But they may know something about materials that i don't know, in which case their tolerances could be a thousand/million times higher.

More idolatry, presumption and supposition. After rereading the TL:dr link i realized there are some grains, describing how they chose an otherwise obsolete airframe that happened to config for a launch vehicle. but grains you could have easily cut and paste and given a framework, like why Orbitals predecessor decided to go with a airfoil launched platform versus a verticle launch platform. We dont need to sign Ceasars praise or know every single polical backdrop. The other 99% of what the engineer might want to know is missing, like why they chose an ATK engine, how they decided to build the frame, how was the flight dynamic controls made, why certain materials were chosen over others. The thread is about the difference between the game and real life. It sounds to me like 'we didn't want NASa to launch, we didn't have SpaceX' and as you correctly point out all the private non-US contract companies were not robust. As a consequence they chose a lower cost launch platform. Cost is not engineering.

The problem, if you want to take advantage of low orbital based transfers you need power, burning hard at low orbit allows you to create a single path out without having to circularize to gain energy. It can be done with ION drives, but you its about 66% efficient byt the higher ISP drives can give 3500 so it might be worth it. OR if you have the time, you burn for about 20 degrees (-10 to +10 degrees) your burn window. (called a kick), then do nothing for 340 degrees, you pass the burn window you kick, with each orbit you waste more time doing nothing. Finally at some point you have enough momentum to kick to an apogee that if you burn along the prograde vector you can burn out of the system. This could take months, for an interplanetary mission your initial burn point could be 90' degrees (relative to the suns radial) from where your last kick takes place. During the last burn you could also add a few seconds of RCS to help the kick. In most cases the launch will give the ION drive the momentum such that when its ION systems come on it can push out of the system. One way is to push to L2 (for mars) or L1 (for venus) which buys time for the ION drive to gain momentum, once it is passed the L points it then establishes the heading to reach its target.

1st they want to send thousands, hoping 100s or 1 will survive. So chance are they might pass close to a planet. 2nd they wont brake unless they use lithobraking or coronabraking. 3rd they will try to create all of its trajectory in 300 seconds of accleration based on lasers, lasers should be accurate enough to target it. Meaning, if it can stay in the laser beam for the full 300 seconds it takes to reach 0.2c, then its going to reach AC unless they have got their relativistic physics wrong. 4th. they will not come back, handwaving that they can communicate backwards. Its uncharted technology. You should call the project lead and ask, maybe in 20 years they will have an answer.

And the point of the link was? Devoted to the discussion of engineering or Meta-space relationships? Orbital ATK did not exist until 2014, don't give us that bunk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Sciences_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_%28rocket%29 Note that this is 8 years after the company formed. Like I said, its alot of hard work.

Just go back and review all the news reels from the 80s and 90s from small privately funded rocket companies, most of them are long gone. Fallovers were the lingua franca. Some BMW driving hotshot hier grandstanding through a sales meeting, I would have done my research before I wasted a redeye ticket for the meeting, BTDTMO. Space has alot of appeal, its just like the restauarant and recreation industries, but there are alot of failures.. Nobody ever talks about the fact that certain industries are a hell of alot of groung work, much more taphsn is apparent from a media oerspective. To survive you got to put your nose on the ground and pay your dues. Nobody ever talks about wanting to start a grabage truck manfacturing company, or a tractor manufacturing comoany. Oh 'im going to launch my new oil field restoration equipment company'. Oh hes . . . . . . OrbitalATK, idolize, idolize, idolize. I didn't really get why Kryton posted that here, it really gave no greater insight than showing some paranoid grandstanding fool does not no how to manage his potential clients.

same thing, until you have a strng track record, you're a novelty.

you mean the culture of a free lance rocket engineer. Watching spaceX will tell you Steps. 1 - 2. get a launch vehicle that is reliable Step 3 get an in-space deliver vehicle Step 4 build your payload out Step 5 go pray at every temple, church, mosque, .... you can find Anyway that was 1986 and that was pretty much the game. 2nd only trust launch execs who drive around in 15 year old chevies impalas or toyota camrys with 200,000 miles on them. Alternatively ford F150s flleetside extralong bed regular cab, camper/tool package on back, in which can be found a bunch of pieces that are going back and forth to the testing lab, several toolboxs, maybe a lincoln arc welder as a back up.