PB666

Having tested several designs this appears to be close to the mark. Asparagas works to improve delta-V but only with increases in fuel. In fact increasing side fuel tanks even without adding engines worked well if the launch engine had good take off ISP stats. Asparagas will work for you but you will need aerodynamic launch engines. It worked best for highly aerodynamic tanks with drag lowered. Therefore the critical problem is TWR (ISP of the engines in particular) and drag resistence. _ I had a poodle on a bigorange with a F2 pod and covered by a fairing. - three side F1 rockets LV-30 with left 2200 dV at orbit - 6 side side F1 rockets LV-30 (3-3 asparagas) 2600 dv at orbit - 8 side F1 rockets LV-30 (2-2-2-2 asparagas) 3400 dv at orbit All of these required a large number of small boosters to get the craft up to 1000 meters or so, otherwise the super efficient poodle would not have enough momentum after the gravity turn to efficiently make orbit. - big orange on a F2 booster with high aerodynamic side fuel tanks 3400 dv -with Asparagas fuel tanks this produces 3500 dV in the orange tank at minimal orbit. {note the edit, the 5000 value appears to have been a glitch in MechJeb and could not be reproduced). I managed to get a third set of fuel tanks with a booster -Marginal utility of gain -Additional tanks cost about the same, but only deliver a few additional dV -large booster (w/tank) have overheating problem with long runs, you have to trottle them down or they overheat. The problem on asparagas is that the added weight of the engines, the engines need to pay for themselves during the launch, and all the drag parts needed to feul and stabilize. The large booster has a cleaner design, I would push the weight of the side tanks as high as I practically could versus going to asparagas.

Thanks, this needed to be said.

Iridium mines are too good -their Mach1 should be 100 m/s! -their KSC [start game] should be on Eve. -they should be sent too Jool to condense The Morph Kraken essence. -their strut connectors should be made of chow mien noodles! -they should have to face the killer rabbit and be thrown in the cave of aaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhh. - - - Updated - - - If you want to go this direction, I would argue the game is missing good instructions on how to build stuff. The parts complaint is hollow in my opinion, I think people who can design premium parts deserve to play a premium game. If you can't, then thats a game level you haven't stepped up to yet. It like in Wow, folks who go out an buy mounts or you spend a month on a quest to get a mount there is some effort to get the premium stuff. In KSP its alot easier, if you are good you can make the dream part you want in a few seconds or download it from a mod site, trade with your friends. "- solar panels f.e. need to be extendable in the editor to check, if the ship works properly." launch the vessel, test the part on the launch pad, then recover, you don't loose anything. A few parts, IMO, should be extendable in the VAB, you end up having to activate the part on the launch pad. "- Payload wobbling through the fairings and no option to strut the payload to the fairing." Yes you can, you can strut from the payload down to the base of the fairing near the outside edge as long as the entire strut is inside the fairing. This may not seem like much but if you have many segments between the struts origin and the fairing you will lower the segmental flexibility. See my post in the modding thread. I built a whole new station hub just to take advantage of the fairings and alow connector attachment (origin). http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/124274-Aero-fairing-compatable-station-hub "- No possibility to mount something to the side of the fairing." mounting to the outside I would not support. Its a cheat. "- No option to select out of how many slices the fairing is constructed. Gets essential when it comes to constellation type missions for example." use multiple fairings (See link) "- The constant crashes on OSX" Doesn't play on iPad either, but thats another issue. Now I think the game needs a 2.5 ghz processor and 4 gigs of mem so we are not talking about every computer. When Unity 5 comes out I may have to buy a new computer. BTW, are you sure its OSX and not one of the mods or addons. Check your reload log file, I had alot of obsolete mods that did not get installed correctly.

The problem is that the craft has lost almost all of its power, its only capable of running a few instruments now. This is something folks should think about, why the pluto mission is a fast flyby, on of the limitations is to get there and get the data while it still has enough on-board power to do stuff. At sun-ship distances greater than Mars electricity is a major limitation, we are very fortunate that these two craft have enough power to communicate back to Earth.

^^^^^ + Build my own parts. Mostly.

Wormholes of this type do not exist. Their existence depends on exotic matter or perfect vacuums of energy and matter. They might be able to be formed for brief periods of atomic size, but that would mean you would have to atomize matter to get it through the wormhole. There have been claims that the amount of energy required to create a wormhole would be associated with such high gravity that humans would unlikely be able to approach them. Sorry, No SG1 in our futures.

Ceres may have been hit by larger numbers of small impactors causing the earlier craters to loose their distinction. The sun has also been increasing intensity and this may have caused degassing of lighter element deposits on the surface.

I agree, if a mars sized planet orbited the earth the tides in many areas would be 30 meters high. If you moved it further away it would be plucked from its orbit by the gas giant. Even tideless areas you would expect the daily tides to be a couple of meters. Not much sea faring going on in those cultures. The claim is that the moon is the remnant of an ancient collision where crustal material coalesced into the moon and a much closer orbit than present (presumably with much greater tides). But a Mars size planet would not be so easily accelerated into higher orbit, it would remain relatively close to earth and the tides would pretty much erode the continents into shallow seas. It can exist, its just not so favorable to sentient life forms. Venus's atmosphere is not equivocal to Earths atmosphere, most of what comprises Venus's atmosphere is what we find in our oceans (oxides of carbon, sulfur the like are dissolved in water). Remove 2/3rds of the radiation hitting Venus for a millennium and Venus's atmosphere would change considerably.

The problem now is that the most efficient engines have terrible low altitude ISP. You using LV-30 which has reasonable take off ISP. But you would be better off with a SFRB like a "10" at the bottom to get you up before engaging those LV-30s. The problem is low ISP mean low thrust now, not just low efficiency and your time spent lumbering around over the launch pad is wasted delta-V. In your rocket design you should use disposable rockets to get you to 100 m/s as quickly as possible (2g if possible). LV-909 now cannot even get you off the launch pad with a pod and a small tank. Look at your thrust as your rocket is going up and your g-forces. Over powering a rocket is also bad particularly now since drag is based on profile. Speeds over 100 at sea level and 160 at 5000 meters is the optimal lift with a CoD of 0.2, if you streamline your tanks you can lower the CoD and raise the velocity making the launch more efficient. For example your T800 can be replaced with an aerodesign that also has fuel in the fusiform section. These, admittedly are guesses. I will take a look at several designs to see which is that case. Theoretically asparagas is bad design for launch vehicle because of the transverse segmental flexibility and drag interactions. Of course you could use jets to lift the vessel to 20k m and launch from that altitude. That would be very efficient.

The part attachment on larger cylinder allows for 2x 12 surface attachment planes oriented vertically. If you use a 12 side collider then some parts may attach below the surface of larger cylinders. This is not a problem on smaller cylinders because the lowest high on the highest cylinder is higher than 1-cosine of the radius. But on the larger cylinders parts like RCS thrusters and strut connectors can disappear below the surface. If your visible surface of your cylinder is smooth its perimeter is going to be circular, but the collider meshes surfaces are flat. There are several solutions, make the collider with more rectangles = two trigs on the surface, or make radius of the virteces of the collider bigger. If one does the second, some parts will attach above the surface of the cylinder. A third solution is to use shade the surfaces flat visible mesh. On my space factort (Factor24 cylinder) I broke the cylinder up into eight side parts, then the change of angle per change in side is small, the number of rectangles per side is reduced and the collider mesh outer surface is easy to make. The convex rule only applies to a collider, it does not apply to multiple colliders on part or concavities creating in crafts. So the convex rule looks problematic until you realize all the ways to get around it, and then its more of a nuisance in construction.

Meh, MSFS killed at least 4 sticks, some of them quite expensive. A mouse is a buck, 15 if you buy a wireless, buy several keep them charged and ready. BTW I find that when the battery on my wireless is dying, one function on the mouse usually begins to fail first, thats its way of warning you that its time for a recharge. I found this out reading the tech diagrams for specialized equipment, most circuits are rated for a certain voltage, but if you test those circuit you find that certain parameters vary in the production, so there is often one part that needs slightly more voltage than the others to operate.

Sci-fi games don't really sell without conflict so of course they are going to magnify human conflicts, technological nations are not commonly warring at least not a large portion of the population, the media tends to blow conflict out of proportion, WWII we see millions of people involved in war either as soldiers, as the persecuted or as the civilian victims of collateral damage. Since WWII the number of civilians killed in international conflicts has been relatively small and the large genocides that take out substantial percentages of the population are generally underdeveloped nations (Rwanda, Algeria, Cambodia). Typically technologically sophisticated societies are more likely to negotiate for the sake of trade, than to loon-out in isolation (pol-pot shows the ultimate turn of events). Isolation on Mars is the enemy not something to be sought after. Your basic premise is that of the 150 nations on earth the colonies are more likely to model themselves after North Korea, and less like say the European Union. Despotic autocracies are more imperiled from internal forces than from external pressure.

The space dejunking is probably the most useful function of all, they could charge nations and companies that make space waste to have them dispose of it. A better strategy is to elevate to a geosynchronous orbit and then transfer it to a lunar orbit were it can be used in the future in space. The stuff is useless on Earth, provided its out of harms way it could be extremely valuable. Even 2x geosynchronous is far enough out of the way. My vision of a garbage truck is a carbon nanofiber chainlinked fence cage with an opening at one end entering a cavity which is on a two prong pivot where the ship blocks the opening. DUring the off-cycle at robot assembles and balances the junk at the back of the cage, during the on cycle the ship pivots to the back of the cage and using sensors at the front allows the object to enter the opening, the sensor use small talons to close the opening, the ship returns and covers the opening, the robot places and secures the junk and the ship moves to the next target. When the cage is finally filled, the robot seals the opening leaving the cage in orbit, a new cage is delivered by a small rocket where it is picked up. Meanwhile another ship picks up the filled cages and carries them to high earth orbit. Finally, and this is the most important part, cyborg aliens arrive and assemble the cubic cages into one giant ship that then takes over earth and assimilates everyone giving then names like 8 of 7 and 6 of 10, I think you get a free augmentation also, but not too sure about that. Think a smiley face is needed there? Moving on. I would put my money on fusion before any other planned technology. Tritium is not that dangerous, there's already large amounts in the oceans, Fission devices need a dedicated and rather gutsy specialist to be safe in launch, because the fuel rods are best kept isolated during launch in the event of a disaster otherwise a launch becomes a dirty bomb. But provided the right precautions can be made a dedicated self-contained fission driven device is plausible. The only anti-matter I see being used are on-site generated anti-matter used to catalyze low-grade thermonuclear explosions, because of the hazards involved this is strictly interplanetary (the Earth is still reeling with massive increases in carbon-14 from the nuclear testing in the 50's and 60's). Solar energy is not just solar panels, in response to another poster, solar technology can be encorperated into parts, it is substantially more efficient than when the panels were placed on the ISS, the panels are lighter and there are new stronger lighter space-age materials that can be used for structural. Solar, in part is not a bad choice for VASMIR power supply because the VASMIR RF plasma generators generate alot of heat, and thus there will need to be some sort of radiative cooling system, anyway. If you use a Fusion reactor, the transformers that feed the lasers and other equipment need to excite the core tritide and dueteride ions also generate a substantial amount of waste heat, so these are going to need a cooling system also. Unless they can come up with electronics that generate less heat and operate at a higher temperature they are going to have alot of devices competing for radiative cooling systems and this requires surface area. My bets are on VASMIR and Solar being the ride that gets humans to the other planets, what gets them safely back to Earth, I'm not taking odds.

The time to ask that question in when they can sustain themselves in the short term. For example, when they are capable of producing their own solar panels and/or thermonuclear power, In a situation like Mars. In the case of Venus the ability to sustain a safe level of insolance. Mars would need to be equiped with its own independent hospital. The other and most important term is trade, can they sustain the level of economy to buy things that would be hard to make on Mars, such as complex drugs, new strains of cultivars, return trips to Earth. The base assumption is that there is enough life-bearing minerals in the rocks that an efficient burying culture could eventually tap enough H, C, O, N, P, S, Na, K, Ca, Ar, B to allow for modest growth. The most needed metals are aluminum and Silicon for frame and glass. This would be followed by rare earths used to make solar panels, efficient panels are a must, with a level of radiation 1/9th that of earth it will take at double the best efficiency 4.5 times as many panels on mars to make the same level of energy. There is no passive energy on Mars either, you are going to use LEDs and electricity to grow stuff. During dark semicycles there will need to be electrical storage. This means minerals like Pb, S, Cd, and Ni. Transporting Lead between earth and Mars is more expensive. In addition Mars will need to make its own form of solid explosive, probably mineral based since H, O, N and the other components are going to be in short supply, no wasting Hydrogen for launches. They will need to be able to launch rockets with trade goods into interplanetary orbits if they want to trade. I don't think this will be a problem in the next 200 years. In addition, since they are likely all to be dependent on Earth, and probably one or two powers on earth are going to be stable enough to maintain colonies that reach that level, they will all be adherant on earth politics, and it is likely they would be treated as territories like Puerto rico with limits to elected politics. The other problem is that we have not established that it is safe to raise children any place accept Earth, low gravity or zero gravity may be deemed as child abuse by space going governments meaning that all generations will be born and raised on earth prior to reaching space.

Will the baby kerbals eat all your mined resources? Geeze Kathy what happened to all or LfOx? Oh, I thing junior broke into the storage, my has he grown. We don't have a biological resource flow yet in the stock game, all the resources flow is for non-biologicals. Before you can have an effective breeding colony given Kerbals have mass E = Mc^2 (Yes I know this is crudely applied here, but chemical energy must be stored in biologicals in terms of C-H bond energies (100kcal per mole). Therefore increasing the mass of kerbals requires energetics and

The most time consuming problem that I found with blender is not specifically a blender problem, its setting up the properties of the 3D Mesh to make it useful in KSPs incarnation of Unity. Reading the tutorials is a must, you don't want to try to figure this stuff out through trial and error. Crudist workflow from blender to unity is Designing with the KSP surface attach and collisions in mind. 1. Is the mesh going to have concavities or not. If so do you need 2 or more collision meshes 2. Is the mesh going to have more than 255 convex trigs. If so, you need to start thinking about a collision mesh you might want to save the low complexity mesh as a different file along the way, then continue with the mesh building 3. Are you going to have emmisives or action parts? will you have to parse these out along the way? Create Mesh Mark Seams where painting would be the simplist. (e.g. black surfaces surrounding by its seam, other colored areas marked by seams, Picture insets defined by seams). backface culling and flip anti-normals. Create Material Add Texture UV unwrap. Rearrange the unwrap Save the unwrap schematic Paint the saved schematic Load the painted schematic shade again (texture) and check for reversed normals, repair. Revert to object mode, object should not have defect. Save the blend. [Optional] Open alternative meshes Refine alternative meshes Save the blends. Get all the Voodoo fetishes (either that or 2 versions of the Part Tools - 0.20 and 0.23) you can find, get them ready because you are heading to the KSP alternative Unity-verse.

Thanks. The face smoothing had undesired consequences in blender. In reality its because I would have to select specific vertices on the surface to apply the smoothing. Critiquing my own part. - No Iva (since I have never built an IVA space) - It needs an EVA port (Near the bottom) - Visible depression and attachment Node coordinates for the Ports are not deep enough, needs - Horizontal nodes need symmetry = value - On the north and south sides it needs EVA holds (climb handles) - Glass windows lack 'reflections' - Smoothing on surface triangles (except around the attachment nodes, this had a spoiling effect) - The cfg needs a crew capacity, and since it has windows it can serve as a command. (it should be moved to a different catagory) - The decompression chambers on the ports need submarine door graphics. oh and most importantly it needs a vanity Decal for the blingy stuff. The station needs docking lights. The problem is that the ports need to be back lighted, with a LED emmissive, but since this is a stock part the altnerative is a telescoping boom with lights attached that.

This is what i came up with http://i.imgur.com/Jf3XhKn.png sorry cant link on this ipad. The part both accepts fairings from below and can also seat size3 fairing

Strange title, for certain. The basic problem that I see in this forum is that someone comes with a niave question or theory, and ten or twenty post later we see something like . . . . . Quantum physics explains everything to [some very low absolute variance]. i thought about this from my own observation point and I think that were the two disagree is the realm of science. There are two areas of human occupation where obsolescnce is fundemental to activty. Art, for example is that which expands on the boundaries of art. Once something is created, a repetition of the original act is merely a copy, a design element. Science is that which expands on th boundaries of science. If, as has been implied, we know everything about quantum physics then the LHC is not needed, but the folks doing experiments on the LHC claim they are looking for additional Bosons of the force carrying type. The problem when comparing Newtonian physics, Einsteinian physics, and Quantum mechanics has everything to do with scale. Although K2 and I have argued about this, fundemental quantum mechanics accepts a divergence with physics of 'mass-action' scale as on approaches planks scale. It is unknown whether scale is continous below these units of time and space. IOW if one tried to move an particle the size of an electron neutrino 10-50 meters it might only move 1.5 x 10-35, or some multiple of that distance. We tend to think of this as an error but its not, because the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics rely alot on the experimental perspective. In this case because of Comptons wavelength and the prediction of the most higly energentic EM, and since practical limits are 12 magnitudes or more or above this it is impossible to know which is the case. However, there are common observations that tell us that the universe at very small scale is less predictable than the observable universe. Aside from the diffraction slit experiments with photons, the is the case of radioactivity. So lets say that i place a strong oxidant (so strong that it reacts reductants of redox potential below zero) at 1k. If i surround the oxidant with reductant, it will undergo reduction as soon as a reductant is encountered. Since this is on the Angstrom scale, first order rate kinetics apply. Next I have a similarly unstable material, except this time I have an 125Iodine atom. I can have this atom as a free ion in solution, as a dried salt of sodium or covelanlt linked to an aromatic 6 member ring with a high level of energy stabilization. I could cool the compound to 0.001K and isolate for every source of known radiation, or I could place it within the center of an array of high powered lasers at all the exciation frequencies of Iodines electron, blasting the electrons into solar system size orbits. None of which makes a difference, half of the iodine molecules will undergo decay in about 60 days, 1/4 th will undergo decay between 60-120 days and so on. Now we can change this, using heat, pressure, additional particles, but the consequences are often a different type of decay that is not spontaneous. Einsteinian physics can explain how much energy the gamma particle will release on decay, it helps to explain whether a particular decay emits a beta or alpha partcle or neither. It does not explain at all precisely the rate at which particles decay, and neither can pedict accurately when a decay event might occur. The problem in quantum mechanics is predicting the effect of cumulative events when the effect time only covers one or few events or the effect scale only encloses one or few particles. In the case of Iodine, if you are doing an assay you only care about the specific activity at Reference time and the decay rate and you can predict instantaneous rate of decay, but if you have a emission counter you will certainly observe the actual number of emmisions go up and down and the rate of flux is easily explained by the binomial probility distribution and statistically verified using Fisher Exact Test (given you can accurately determine the number of radionucleotides in a unit space). The affect of uncertainty at this level is not trivial, it could determine for instance whether a dominant lethal mutation appears that eventully kills the bearer. It can determine if a cell could become cancerous at some later point in life, but more important uncertainty is the foundation of evolution and all living things. The statement was made that God does not play dice with the Universe, of course the subject is also of topic of uncertainty, but the creator of life is certainly playing chance with life. The critical argument, at least from my perspective, is how far outside Planks scale, or more importantly a distibution of likelihoods at distances in which Einsteinian physics attenuates to Quantum mechanics, and with the outer limits of this range can unexpected physical effects still be observed. We have afterall a trillion fold difference between the predicted lower limit and the observable lower limit.

Space flight is so much easier when one does not have to leave th early planning phase.

I think the 2 threads need to be merged.

Well, that would put a kink in breast feeding and teething.

On the ascethics scale both reset the lower limits. NASA's looks a cross between my sisters coffee table on laundry day and what one expects to find under the airbag cover in the steering wheel of a car. Yours gets style points for representin long forgotten diners, I would be polite since the fuel tanks give a salt and pepper impression and say that if condiments were the inspiration for the WWII pulse jet (v1) program, this might have been result. Although clearly a step above a coverted 1959 cadillac pretending to be a interstellar space craft might I make the following recommendation. Without to much trouble you can flatten stock parts, including fuel tanks. the volume equation is pi r ^ 2 * h. Second is that you could do the same for heat shield, and convert it into a tank. In the second example stretch the y axis of the heat shield. Its not appreciably difficult to use size3 fairings into space, you could launch in two phases, on with drag breaking device that is elevated by Jet craft followed by a final rocket into space jettisoning the jet when the cease to provide lift. The PL and fuel could be delivered and ported with the first in space. I would do this quite differently I would have very low density sheild in front of PL and 3 behind to feather th craft. possibly 5 meters off axis. the middle fairing would be ejected by rocket thust and channeled off in two half circles. Once chute deploy speed is achieved I would release drogue chutes from the inside edge of the feather devices. The would be followed by oversized chutes on the outside edge that gradually extend the radius as the craft gets closer to ground. As landing thruster come online the extensions woul reach a distane of 15 meters from central axis. Finally i would have landing struts capable of stopping a craft going 30 m/s. much like the energy absorbing part in the front frame of modern cars.

There should be a retractable/telescoping mount(s) of some kind in stock game. I'm kind of remineded of Zephram cochrane's warp rocket in First Contact. .

Meh, sometimes. I was working with a blender model that did not have a valid texture in Unity. I tried refreshing the *.blend several times in Unity. Finally, i had to rebuild my assets from 0.23 PTs and reload the blender and texture. If there is something major wrong in the blend file (e.g. edit-mode save, texture or mesh modifyers not applied as selected) you can't rely on Unity rescuing your patches it will become confused and give up. Best to del the Unity project in its directory a start a new project.