FleshJeb

My understanding is that while Kerbiloid is Russian(or former Soviet) by birth, he's lived in Portugal for some time. I've always assumed (without concrete evidence) that he takes robust advantage of Portugal's very liberal drug laws. So, I'm hoping he's just in rehab or taking a break or something. He and I have many substantial disagreements, but he has an utterly unique sense of humor, is far from stupid, cultured, and when the heat of argument dies down, he's been gracious. That sets him apart from the vast majority of people. We've both been here about 11 years, and I've never spoken to him in private, but I'd miss him terribly if he were gone. As opposed to some of these folks, who I wouldn't liquid on if they were on fire.

@kerbiloidYou'd better not leave me alone with these boorish cretins.

The ones featuring my craft, of course. On a more serious note: Everything by Cupcake Landers: https://www.youtube.com/@CupcakesLanders/videos The state of KSP cinema and gameplay has come a LONG way, but this was utterly mind-blowing 10 years ago: And this one because sometimes I like to blow out my speakers with a TASTY metal riff:

It's not politics, it's water resource engineering. Anyway, I'm given to understand that the thinnest amount of plausible deniability is now sufficient to justify doing exactly what one wants to do, so I'm just going along with the zeitgeist. Perhaps some people will reflect on the fact that it's a rotten way to go about doing things and re-evaluate some of their behaviors and opinions. Anyway, onto technical matters and an actual good-faith question I had: Starship is being considered for a lot of roles. At what points does it make sense to specialize a sub-variant to the degree that it doesn't share much commonality with the base design? A parallel might be the F-35B vs the A and C variants. There's been a lot of critique that trying to overgeneralize the design to accommodate the VTOL really harmed the other two variants. For instance, is there merit to going with a nearly clean-sheet design for a tanker variant, that's never going to leave space again, versus something that's re-entry capable? I thought ULA's ACES system made a lot of sense, and I'd expect "Tanker Starship" to have many of the same features or solutions. I'm sure folks are well along to figuring this out, I'm just unaware.

https://www.google.com/search?q=vasimr+site%3Aforum.kerbalspaceprogram.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirk_and_Uhura's_kiss

The Captain, being well-qualified for her position, prudently chooses to dodge. Because what kind of gorram idiot would be willing to take ANY kind of impact when they don't have inertial dampeners, and the Engineering Department has not provided the specifications for the elasticity of the shields. Of note, the AIM-26A (250 t TNT equivalent) was retired in 1972, and the AIR-2 Genie (1.5 kt) in 1985. Now I know sci-fi is terrible about using realistic masses, but 350 tons?!? That's less than a 747 airliner. This is 328 tons and has a crew of 28. It's teeny: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone-class_patrol_ship

I would ordinarily be in agreement, but it's just a harmless bit of fun, and you can always poke it with your adblocker. I cut all the annoying bits out of every website I use--It's a very peaceful browsing experience. EDIT: The element zapper for uBlock Origin didn't seem to persist on refresh, so here's the custom filter: ||kerbal-forum-uploads.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/monthly_2025_01/Forumcommunity4.png.819cf608c689ba778662bafcc648c8bd.png$image

Two papers published today: "An evaporite sequence from ancient brine recorded in Bennu samples" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08495-6 "Abundant ammonia and nitrogen-rich soluble organic matter in samples from asteroid (101955) Bennu" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-024-02472-9 Links lifted from: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasas-latest-asteroid-sample-hints-at-lifes-extraterrestrial-origins/ EDIT: Ninja'd by Joe, that's what I get for checking my work

I have a headache. A "Record Of Survey" I'm currently working on--Still need to clean up details C and F. Identifying information redacted--Too much to redact on the main map page to show it. Also, I'm cheesed off that the paper size standard for these is 18"x26". I know it's been that way for 100+ years, but it's damn inconvenient.

I'd start here: https://github.com/MuMech/MechJeb2/blob/dev/MechJeb2/OrbitalManeuverCalculator.cs The code is highly modularized, so you have to do quite a bit of digging to actually understand what's going on in any given module. I'm not an expert on the source or the math, just a terrible programmer trying to learn things. (Also, this is the first time I've looked at it in half a decade.)

Hi Geoff, I enjoy semi-informed theorycrafting as much as the next nerd, but the exercise loses its value and becomes unhealthy when self-aggrandizement and ego come before curiosity and exploration. This is a common human foible, and physicists are well aware of it because they get thousands of emails from amateur physicists each year. By way of illustration, here are some lightly paraphrased quotes from the transcript of a video produced by a theoretical physicist: Hopefully you're seeing some parallels. Hopefully you don't with the following: So, that's the reason Oxford hung up on you. Many of the communications they receive from amateur physicists are angry and violent, because the amateur's ego is on the line. I don't believe you're one of those, nor do I mean to discourage you from thinking and dreaming, but I thought you should be aware. I wish I could engage with your ideas, but I'm several decades out of school, and I'm more of an applied scientist. This involves a shocking amount of wandering around in the woods and beating things up with a machete or a sledgehammer. Occasionally, I get to do some math. I'm not solving any grand questions, but I DO enjoy it. --FJ

Guys, read some critiques of the Gilded Age, or why a high Gini coefficient is bad for economies and societies. None of this is theoretical, there are observed effects. Or at least realize there’s a logical conflict between “Daddy billionaire will pay for it” and There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. In any case, here are some known stats: Without service, Hubble will die sometime between 2030 and 2040. That’s at least an additional 20 percent of its existing service life. I don’t think trying to do a high technical risk maintenance mission just to get private astronauts some training is worth getting it for free. Hubble can only serve 1/5 of its requests for scope time. We have much better instruments available than were originally installed or retrofitted onto Hubble. The Nancy Grace Roman telescope will be going up soon, and it’s built on a KH-11 spysat that NASA got for free. There’s a spare KH-11 just sitting in storage. The optics are great, it just needs different instruments. We can put an additional better quality, longer lifespan telescope up for comparatively little money. (Caveat: NGR is slightly worse at some things than Hubble) Wait for Hubble to be much closer to end of life before allowing private maintenance/training on it, and have replacement ready to go if they screw it up. It’s not worth the risk to a public resource, yet.

I’m in the same camp of, “Even KSP one is unacceptably buggy.” My two best arguments are: Do you still have to manually slow your timewarp before an SOI change so that your trajectory doesn’t go to hell? Do you still reflexively quicksave before doing almost anything? Not because you’re afraid you’ll screw up, but that KSP will. I tried playing pure vanilla about 5 years ago when mechjeb was in bad shape. Was doing a very simple, very standard mission to the mun. Did the transfer burn, set up my capture burn, punched the stock Warp To Node button, and the damn thing blew right through the SOI. I pretty much quit playing after that. That kind of thing should never have survived ten minutes of QA. Between that and my experiences with other games, I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the game dev industry has very little respect for player time and energy.

Look, I came here for an argument…