PB666

I thought Kerbin's scale height is 5k alt. I have been using the equation that Kerbins atmosphere recedes at 8 fold reduction per 10,000 meters. In the real world scale height type calculation are only valid in a range. PV = nRT and this is a function of the molecular weight of the gas and its density. The heavier gases tend to settle in the lower atmosphere and the lighter gases (hydrogen and helium) are found in LEO. Also temperature falls to about -100 and then begins to rise. Finally, there is a density of gas inside the earths magnetosphere, and most recent articles (I posted here about 1 month ago) show that the gas and associated temperatures exist in tendrils that spiral around earth. Finally you exit the magnetosphere and you encounter the solar wind. In KSPs model gravity is contained in spherical SOI in which the graviational isoquants are also spherical, and pressure terminates at a fixed altitude. The earth is also spinning and there is a perturbative interaction of Coriolis effect, Earth-moon interactions, etc. To get an idea of what these are like compare real aircraft data for GPS altitude and altimeter data from aircraft. Commericial aircraft set the MSL pressure to a fixed value at 18k feet and ride waves of pressure under an assumption of atmospheric pressure-elevation above. This can often vary in any location by 1000s of meters depending on pressure, and these perturbations increase in flux at higher altitudes. You really don't want KSP doing real world pressure, given it takes massively paralleled supercomputers to model real world atmospheric conditions, the only way the could model real world variation would be to create a model Kerbin with a supercomputer devoted to generating pressure and use something like flight simulators real-world downloads to update everyones machine, and of course it would have to be done everytime you entered and exited warp, queriing their server with a new time-stamp. So, no, we are not in the real world; back to the original problem, how to verify the formula. . . . .is it really that important to get the calculation down to a relative variation of 0.001%?

Tagging onto this, there are articles posting on this topic online claiming "Moon in 4 hours", "Mars in a month", "Pluto in 2 years". I would just like to point out that while the efficiencies might appear at present to be quite high as K2 eluded to, the absolute thrust they can generate just before their electronics goes kaput is a tiny fraction of what the Apollo command module can generate. http://www.rt.com/uk/311088-space-travel-engine-revolution/ http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-07/24/emdrive-space-drive-pluto-mission http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-07/31/nasa-validates-impossible-space-drive I should point out that the drive has not been validated until it has been tested in the vacuum of space. If it is an ablater, it means it is cannibalizing itself, this means that it would not be able to sustain acceleration and deceleration required to land on Pluto. 1. No landings on any celestial, excepting things like 67P (which ~5 m/s is escape velocity) - No moon landings, no mars landing - you still have to bring all your deceleration fuel and a thruster with you. 2. Of course all that fuel weighs, ion drives will also not help with landings. So basically it still has to carry about 60% of the mass of the vessel in fuel for landings and re-ascents. 3. It still requires an internal source of power beyond the orbit of the asteroid belt, which also weighs. 4. Of course it is virtually useless until is supercedes the drag in LEO.

Phhttth. I was just going to come up with something funny.

One of NASA's deep space mission testing survival of rodents, I believe it was gerbals, was thrown off course by a passing neutron star and landed on the Kraken home world. Unfortunately long space flight disturbed the rodent species specific gender recognition and well, long story short Kerbals appears, much to the displeasure of the Kraken who were forced to leave and occupy various odd places in the system (though there seems to be some lingering strange attraction to the launch pad). Occams razon, why create a long complicated myth when a short one suffices (and answers two questions at once).

No, no, you send the male kerbals to Eve and tell them Eve needs men, and the female kerbals to Duna and tell them that Duna needs females. The Kerbals will never know the wiser and think they have a new home. The dumb ones you send to Jool and tell them gravitons need mates also. Laythe you send all those who profess SSTO theory.

My guess is that it behaves like a wave when traveling and like a particle on its arrival. Gravity is a measure of warping of space time due to energy density. Since many energies smaller than that of an electron or proton have such energy the particle would have to be much smaller than these and it is far far weaker than any force, thus the particle would have to be very very small. IF you take fluid particles and make smaller and smaller spheres of them keeping the total mass the same, eventually you reach a state where the collection of particles behaves just like a wave, Gravity may be one of these, it may be so small that the only way we can detect it is in mass, where the collections of particles behave like a wave. Experiment (thought). Create a new empty universe. Place Hydrogen molecule (Proper) in the universe, then add another hydrogen molecule to that universe with energy relative to the first of say 0.0001 Kelvin. Track the motion of the first and second without observers paradox (Heisenberg uncertainty). Without EM we cannot see any acceleration or deceleration, but if we add EM we add energy, if mass can bend light, then light can move mass. The experiment is essentially impossible because the premises of the experiment violate empirical and theoretical physics. However the experiment must be reasonable even if we cannot conduct, a force particle must be sent from one part of space to the next. How fast does gravity act, over planks time? And how big are for hydrogen atoms in mass, multiplied together the particle would be very small. How could you detect something that produces so little force. Thus when we look at superstellar events and we see the wave, we are actually seeing particles, but the particles are so numerous, from all realistic points of view they look like a wave, because we do not have a perspective that can resolve the particles. I don't believe you can create a circumstance in the universe where you can see the particle (given that it is massless, traveling faster toward it will not make it bigger).

Photons red-shift slightly coming out of a mild gravity well. Coming out of a black hole the bend backwards in the direction from which they propagated. I suppose those that are pointed strait out end up red shifting into the long wave-length radio waves. Solar panels are dependent on wavelength, since this is essentially Einstein's photo electric effect. Therefore if the wavelength falls below the wavelength the photoelectric effect could disappear entirely. Although the sun is not a big emitter of X-rays it does produces alot of short-wave length UV and therefore red-shifting would only result in UV light becoming visible and the visible spectrum becoming infrared. Note that the yellow green part of the Sun spectrum is the most intense, a larger more massive star would emit more blue light, none the less massive red-shifting would cause a dimming of intensity at the visible spectrum for a variety of reasons (less EM emitted at short wavelengths, gravity bends light)

You can't get energy from nothing, but there is something everywhere, just not matter. At the quantum scale matter and energy can appear and disappear.

I think that if it transfers momentum it is either because we dont understand 1. The scale variation in which quantum/classical divergence operate when pushed, the virtual particle effects 2. The full ramifications of Higgs and its so-called variants. people who have claimed the standard model is complete have been somewhat premature. For example how the higgs field propogates through space. I suspect the first is true, and when this drive is put into space i bet its thrust would be virtually the same as thrust given by any directed EM, ions in the vicinity will get a slight rise in back and sideward velocity, and the effect does not propogate on any particles more than 10m away. The most energetic would be those that passed within millimeters of the drive. It wont violate conservation of momentum. - - - Updated - - - Dark matter does not interact with EM, does not interact with electrons. On massive objects like the earth its effect is always relative minor. Its effect accumulates over the vast emptyness of space. if you can imagine a hihgly eccentric orbit, the sweep area per time is uniform, then at apogee those particles are traveling real slow, and thus they spend most of their time closer to their apogees, and a small amount of time whizzing through 'earths' and shortly out of the sokar system again.

That wasn't the point really, hubble over its many lives has witnesses many things, but its not specifically designed to characterize small bodies that are only visible with reflected light. But we need many more and better hubble like scopes. The webb scope is barely hobbling along out there, its past its mission life and has control issues. - - - Updated - - - 1. Space telescopes are not limited by their latitude or longditue, they can pretty much cover one hemisphere of the sky on any 'night'. 2. They a not limited by water dropplets in th upper atmospere, glare created by other light sources. Can pretty much fix on an object and remain so indefinitely. 3. You dont need to send people to nose bleed elevations in some foriegn country where politics and funding issues become an international problem. 4. You could move your scope potentially to a deep systm orbit and get better images, if you can get the power problem down. 5. one can, in a single point operation and a combined scope see gamma, xray, UV, IR, visible, microwave and ionized particles (cosmic rays). So for instance, if one suspects a star is about to nova, then point and start sampling.

Just what we need, more global warming. This sounds like a good idea until you realize that the stray microwaves would instantly fry anyone who got underit. It would incidently make a great space weapon. Just find some politicians campaign rally out in an open air site, and boil their brains. Could you imagine a despotic leader taking a microwave energy and whoops, gee Im sorry I melted greenland, so what are the bank account codes cause I thinks it straying in the direction of Antarctica. One thing space has alot of, vacuum. You could have space liposuction:cool: The problem with electric power generation that makes it useless for space power concepts is that it needs to be efficiently generated close to where it is used. If you are deflecting light down on solar panels in Nome Alaska on december 30th this is not to much of a problem, since heat is not a problem. In Needles California in mid August, its less so welcome. So then you end up having to have a transfer station safely 100s of miles from the users in increasingly fewer isolated places (Australian outback, Sahara desert, Gobi desert, Antarctica, Greenland, Northeasern Siberia). Antarctica would be a really good place, because any water you melt will instantly refreeze, only the exterior of the continent in melting, the interior is safely frozen; and it has alot of water. Electricity + 2H20 --can---> 2H2 + O2. And you can ship the hydrogen where its needed. Problem is that hydrogenesis is extremely inefficient, even with pure Antarctic water, any gas you produce would need to be shipped under or over a glacier and then to the three southern continents by pipeline.

Neptune is still pretty messed up about the whole thing, last I heard he made some dude suffer on an Island for like 2 decades while other men played with his wife. (space reserved for face palming).

Future Death Star. We could have it patrol the galaxy snowballing any world that dares to defy our mighty will. The humilitation of being snowballed from behind would suffice to make sure everybody in the galaxy bows to [WT_ the original OPs nick is]. We will also have a giant space tether that gives wedgies to any upstart planet that tries to rise up. (Bawa hah hah hah hah hah, snort).

Aliens are coming in 1200 years.....or more.....maybe never......too far for us to even dream of traveling.......placeholder earth until we can get Keplar 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 to look for stuff that is alot closer. I am a big fan of what NASA is doing, but they claim they have difficulty finding red dwarf stars at a much lower distance. How accurate could their estimate of this planets likeness to Earth can it actually be.......I'm skeptical, needless to say 1200 light years? It might as well be a planet in Andromeda. I wouldn't call this Hypetrain, but geeze could we get some of this stuff vetted by peer-review in the scientific literature (and not an op-ed or quasi-refereed piece in Science or Nature). BTW, I am a big big fan of Keplar, I think we need dozens of these up there sniffing away, also wish we had much much more powerful space telescopes.

No, please, no dorky space music.

The KSP model is very much simplified. Each planet has a spherical SOI and does not show deviations like L1 and L2 orbits. The devs have no desire to change this model, its a moot subject. Your ball should not move in a precise ellipse. The only way it moves in a precise ellipse is a two body problem. Mass is moved to a point at the center of the galaxy. In a spiral galaxy masses are surrounded by matter, in fact even at the furthest radius stars are still interacting with dark matter. N-body problems of the galactic scale are not solvable, and this does not factor in unknowns like: 1. red dwarfs with current technology are only visible at close distances to the observer, many go undetected 2. Neutron stars and such are virtually invisible past a certain age, you would need a graviton telescope to see them. 3. Gas dust and protoplanetary disks may only be visible in the late stages of star genesis. Of course the nebula from which they from are with the proper level of backlighting stars. 4. Most of what is in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud is invisible to us. You should look up papers on the deviation of star motion from predicted in the Milky Way, it is one of the factors that supported the existence of dark matter.

Technically it orbits the planet every year. There is also the L2. Objects at L1 and L2 orbit about a focal point in the L1 and L2; however, and these orbits are very unstable and need considerable station keeping. This is however convienient, because if you placed all the things you want to keep at L2 (an excellent point for observations) they would be all stacked and interfere with each other. If you instead cluster them in a small L2 orbit; however unstable, you can keep the spaced apart from each other in space.

I see impact craters in the dark areas of those images, small ones but still.

Obviously not career mode.

I am going to show you an example of how to save your stuff when all things go wrong in hard mode. This is the story of a high orbit rescue mission. First thing I discovered when making my transfer burn was that my ship had no battery left, since it relies on a remote guidance it was dead. I decided to rescue this ship with a solar paneled and manned version, then transfer the man to the dead ship and use the rescue-rescue ship to do the actual rescue. This all worked well. I did a 45k atm brake and then leveled the orbit to 75 /33k orbit about kerbin with reentry over the badlands continent. Then things started to go wrong. I hit the space bar, however instead of the decoupler firing the parachute fired (and this was not the stage order either). So I reacted by setting the parachutes pressure at 0.25, re-entry went as planned but then the dreaded message appeared that the chute was destroyed by pressure, however I was only going 250 at the time. It seems that the kraken was taking a few whacks at me here. Not sure why. I could go to a recent backup, but I had one more trick up my sleeve. The attached engine and tank still had not fallen off and appeared to be stuck. So lets let them break the fall. I went to alt-F12 and hacked gravity. This allowed the ship to slow down enough and kept the trajectory around 45' lengthening the amount of time to slow down and decreasing the small gravity vector relative to drag. I turn the ship sideways to face the wind and decided to open the storage bin doors in hope that it may help. This got the craft down to about 10 m/s, -surface relative velocity on direction and kaboom the engine blows up and slows the craft down, however the tank and decoupler still do not fall off and the ship is flipping end over end toward water and I cannot any longer control which hits the ground first. luckily the next bounce hits on the tank and the wide open instrument storage and stops the spinning, so then as the ship came to its next bounce I unhacked the gravity and the open doors of the storage bin brings it to a prompt stop. Mission salvaged and of course the decoupler, still 'fired' and still stuck. Yeah its cheaty, but when the kraken puts a few claw marks in your back side kicking him in the nuts is proper order.

YOu still have to get the water off of ceres and into a useful orbit. What you need is a giant soda straw (doesn't work because ceres lacks pressure). Oh well. Space elevator

You can copy the [game] directory at major stopping point give it new name and it will take care of it show up in your saved game list in the game. I have been doing this since 0.90 because there were so many bugs, particularly in EVAs and ground missions. I generally backup the game after every 10 or so missions. And frankly if I restart hard mode, I am not going through all the pre-Mun stuff again its a grind and basically SSDD. I mean there are only so many tedious ways to Max out KSP science and shoot rockets 2 km to land on water, shores and grasslands. You have to watch your warping some ship designs will spontaneously explode during or after warping. With the 0.90 features of part compression/expansion and rotation and all. If you find an error on the launch pad, you can recover your vessel at no cost. If you hit alt-F4 it will restore your ship to the launch pad if under acceleration (clearly a cheat). Though not in all cases. one of my vessels lanuched but the SFRB was literally glued to the floor of the launch pad. I found out that if the winglet barely touches the pad it will get stuck. - - - Updated - - - I guess it depends on how you play. I don't see as many in 1.0.4 as I saw in 0.90. However, as I posted back then kraken alters the way you play the game in ways you don't even realize. Its a subconscious kraken avoidance mechanism. In general I see a critical bug about every 20 missions or so. Uneven tank draining I have traced, its usually do to an assembly error. I place a cubic strut under the command module (its a physics-less part) door, and then two going sideways, when jeb gets out he lands o the strut, Then i can hit R and get then [shift] and s and he recedes from the ship. Again, the bugs alter the way you play. RCS I never use except for dedicated docking ships and refining intercepts, keep it off until you need it. So for example, suppose I am fine tuning a planetary intercept (focus planet) I first try to get close using my engines, then switch to RCS and use these to refine proximity. Once the orbit is refined I turn off RCS, because if you don't before warping or after warping the RCS will kick in and change attitude, but by doing this it applies differential thrust that will alter your orbit. To be safe you can shut off both the reaction wheels and RCS. If I do this I never have a problem and the ship intercepts where it is supposed to. If you design your ship where each thrusters along 3 axis are exactly the same distance from the center of gravity this should not happen, but this is difficult to do.

Photons are what we intercept' date=' the wave form travels, wave particle duality of light. The wave does not disappear, although annihilation under certain circumstances is possible. The waveform cannot fade, but in different inertial reference frames it can shift. As I understand it CMB was once in the high energy gamma portion of the spectrum in its reference frame. However as the universe expanded and as the light moved into new inertial reference frames (can't really have inertia without matter, and the cooling universe created matter, which was traveling out from its center of expansion at very high velocities. The further the Opaque light travels from its center, the more different the inertial reference frames are and the more red shifted the light becomes, at one point it was visible light (100s of nm wavelength), somewhere a few billion years ago the outward expansion of the Universe increased, this along with the travel of CMB light eventually results in the sub infrared light seen as the cosmic microwave background radiation. Of course you can argue what about the opaque light from [i']our part of the Universe, should we not still see gamma, and the answer is that this light has moved away from our (milky way) intertial frame, farther than the furthest blue star generation 1 galaxies that we can see (obviously matured billions of years now), and because those observers are moving away from us at close to the speed of light, they only see CMB also. Since light travels as a wave and since moving apart stretches the wave out (since light can never travel faster than the speed of light no matter how much faster we travel outward, it always travels the same speed, but for each wave peak to reach us gets stretched out from our reference point of view). There is some CMB radiation from some areas of the universe that will never reach us. Because of cosmic inflation this placed some inertial reference frames an estimated 10s of billion light years from us, though the distance from the opaque era is much smaller, it will have to travel 10s of billions of years more to reach earth. The distance of what we can see back to CMB defines our Universe in the strictest since. And since our Universe is essentially uniform and exhibits euclidian geometry in all directions, this universe neither has a center or edge. It is boundless in all directions. In the sense that light may travel endlessly and never reach us, it vanishes, but if you placed yourself on a near light speed ship and traveled in the direction of that light it would appear. I don't think it is possible for the spectrum to recede so far in to radio waves that it finally cannot be observed. Technically it may be possible, at that time I think the bigger concern for an observer would be how does life exist close to 0'K, since it is ambient radiation that inevitably determines temperature. Lets make the statement that light could disappear spontaneously. OK then there would have to be a random rate, 1% per year. You would not observe other galaxies and most of the milky way would become invisible. 1% per million years you could not observe many other galaxies, 1% per billion years CMB would start to dissappear and become anisotropic. So if light could disappear it would have to be on the order of less than say 10% per billion years 1/1E15*sec. But since even over 1E15 seconds light does not age; and since anything traveling the speed of light cannot observe the progression of time, it would mean that light would have to be traveling less than the speed of light, which is, in and of itself, a contradiction. And if light were to decay, what would light decay into. This does happen, but I think that the interference that is created has to be approaching Comptons wavelength, and the differential wavelength is something rarely encountered in space at this age of the universe; and is so energetic that it can create matter and antimatter pairs.

Sky, dark and night are words. Dark means absence of visible light. visible is what are rods and cones can detect. If there is electro magnetic radiation present and we cannot see much of it, then its because we lack adequate sensitivity. Night is part of the diurnal cycle, the earths rotation places the outward facing surface oriented away from the sun, the major source of visible light in proximity to the earth. Therefore the next question is what determines luminosity on the radially facing surfaces. 1. Universe. According to one researcher the Universe was intially dark, with temperatures so high matter could not exist and light only existed momentarily. As the universe cooled it created the progenitor of the cosmic background radiation CMB during the opaque phase. This EM is ever present but we cannot see it, our rods and cones only see down to the near IR range. Our aged universe has spread matter and energy out considerably. 2. Our galaxy. There would have been a time when our galaxy would have been bright with very blue stars and gas giants made of hydrogen. These eventually exploded resulting in stars and planets. Earth is one such planet. The aging of our galaxy has significantly red shifted the wavelength of stars produces, many stars are smaller, and aged and no longer produce shorter wavelengths of light. Once we merge with andromeda the science predicts a rapid red-shifting of wavelengths due to the merging of black holes and x-ray emmisions that drive hydrogen into intergalactic space. 3. Our local group. Not very crowded, certainly not crowded with bright stars. None that are in any close proximity to our star. As alpha-centuari approaches the part of the earth will have a brighter night, but only slightly. 4. Our system. No bright planets in close proximity to earth (mars is smallish and a dull red). 5. Earths system. Earth does not have many moons, and the moon we have is not really close. Earth could have been in a polar orbit of a gas giant and thus part of earths night would have been illuminated. 6. Urban sky. Of course I see no stars at night, I could almost read by the background EM at night because of light reflected off of tiny water droplets in the night air. 7. Your house. Turn on the light.

Here is a link http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33596274