FleshJeb

Median home price in my area is $700k+ I could actually afford to buy a $250k rocket engine and live in the bell. The HVAC system might be a bit over-specced though.

The ridiculously small size of the solar system and celestial bodies in KSP doesn't provide a good use case for orbital fuel stations. In the majority of cases it's cheap enough to travel to and land at mining station nearby. This also reduces the amount of player time and shuffling of craft. Kerbin options that I've used and enjoyed: Launch to LKO and use the onboard fuel to go to a mining operation on Minmus flats. Launch fuel from Kerbin on reusable boosters to an orbital station, then land the booster. It's very convenient from an operational perspective. Catching asteroids and bringing them back to Kerbin orbit to be mined is also an amazing amount of fun, and a good challenge. Low Kerbin Orbit is relatively expensive to rendezvous around, unless you get into aerobraking, so it's not really worth mining and bringing fuel back from the Mun or Minmus. Places where I might put an orbital station: Low Eve orbit, if I'm returning from the surface: Fuel would come from Gilly. Keep in mind it doesn't necessarily have to be a permanent station. Many times I'll just use a space tug that hangs out for the duration of the surface mission, and then drags them both back somewhere to refuel. Laythe orbit: Refueled from Pol or Vall mining. Pol is slightly cheaper to run fuel from, Val is more convenient. Temporary tugs can hang out over Tylo. There's also a good use case for mining Laythe surface and refueling an orbital station with airbreathers. Dres orbit: Grab some asteroids. (I actually haven't been to Dres since version 0.25) Moho orbit, refueling from Moho: If I were going to do more than one mission to and from Kerbin to the surface, it makes sense to break up the massive delta V cost of that mission there. Places where I would just surface mine: Duna: It's cheap to get to and from. MAYBE mine Ike and refuel on the surface. Don't bother repacking chutes, the air is too thin to bother. Just land propulsively. Mun: Same reason as Duna. Eeloo: Unless you're going to build a full colony there, don't bother. In any case, I hope you have a lot of fun, and you should do whatever inspires you. The small size of the system ALSO means very few solutions are actually terrible, so experiment as much as you want.

In addition to J's excellent advice: Don't look at your ship, look at the navball. The stock one has all the information you need except for distance to target and rotation, and for most docking, you can ignore rotation.

That's a trifle reductive. The core benefits of AutoCAD in the professional setting are sustained drafting speed, dimensional accuracy, as well as ensuring that the accuracy of what you're modeling is maintained. Command-line input is EXTREMELY fast (and RSI-friendly), as well as being explicit--Everything executed is intentional. This comes at the cost of memorizing approximately 300 shorthand commands, and benefits from autocomplete. AutoCAD is so fast and precise that I actually prototype my Factorio builds in it prior to rebuilding them in-game. (Even considering the instant-build sandbox mode.) For me, what defines "professional" is not being able to produce a product, it's being able to spot when things are going wrong, knowing what to do about it, and figuring out how to avoid it in the future. This means creating and adhering to best practices and workflows, and modifying them as necessary. If you want to see what unprofessional modeling looks like, I refer you to the multiple rocket engines in KSP that were modeled with the thrust axis off-center and published without that being spotted and corrected. Things you can't do in Blender or Sketchup: Below is a model of a boat ramp and the grading necessary to tie it into a model of existing terrain (not shown). There are a couple of minor flaws in the model (I didn't build it), but it's good enough at this stage to do the necessary volume calculations with. Every dimension and slope meets strict engineering standards and will be located in the real world and built to a very high degree of accuracy with minimal field revisions or modifications. (Those cost time and money.) Plan view of 3-dimensional model of about a mile of city streets, with utilities, and property boundaries, in real-world coordinates. Plan view of a 3-dimensional model of a large park, with real-world coordinates.

Ahem ^ I know a regular user of these forums (not me) with photosensitive epilepsy, so this is NOT a theoretical issue. Perhaps you could hit the Community Manager (author of said GIF) with the clue bat? On-topic: The Mun looks good.

Editor Extensions mod. I won't play without it. You can set any angle you want.

If you've got a week, stuff them in the wastewater treatment system, let the microbes do the work and decant the results. On a sufficiently large spacecraft, the maintenance hatch will be man-sized. If you must disassemble the body, freeze it first--There's plenty of cold to go around. Hacksaws should be in abundance. I used to design and inspect wastewater systems, so I'm hard to gross out and ruthlessly pragmatic. The first step to solving any problem is believing that a good solution exists and then going from there. There's no room for fatalists in space. If we were to approach this realistically, you wouldn't start a journey with insufficient propellant. So, we're probably looking at mid-transfer propellant loss from a micrometeroid in at probably one tank. Which means you have a braking/capture problem at your destination. The solution to that is to start hacking dry mass off the ship that's not strictly required. That will get you a lot further than 70kg of meat soup. For a similar situation, I'll refer you to The Cold Equations. I'll spoil the TV version by saying they ripped out everything from the ship they possibly could and everybody lived. The book version is FAR more satisfying.

Using a corpse for propellant is the ethical equivalent of "feeding the tree" in the Integral Trees, or reclaiming the "gift of your body's water" in Dune. It's not that dissimilar from Soylent Green, except there was no consent involved. While I've read a generation-ship's worth of science fiction and can't specifically recall corpses being used as propellant, I'm certain it's been done before, but perhaps I found it so non-shocking that I didn't note it. Personally, if I believed in an afterlife, I'd be giggling my non-corporeal butt off as my component parts were blown out the engine. It's the most exquisite "burial at sea" I can think of. (Space travel will almost certainly be following naval traditions, because all lasting traditions are pragmatic, and are a product of the circumstances, rather than the other way around. You even could build a very fun religion around the spiritual/poetic aspects of being reaction mass.)

There's an old bug (that I'm not sure still exists) where making the cargo bay the root part of the craft can prevent it from shielding the parts inside. Are you closing it with the slider or the button? Even if the slider is set to 0% and the button says open, it's open. I've never heard of that engine bug, I'm inclined to think it's mod-related. I'm assuming it's a mod engine? Did it work correctly on that planet before? For diagnosing problems, it always helps to have pictures of the craft and a mod list.

(I actually have this book)

More pics and links here: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40391/the-biggest-airplane-in-the-world-has-taken-to-the-skies-a-second-time-after-two-year-hiatus

How does that work if you're flying something like a dropship, where your control axis is horizontal to the planet instead of vertical? "Down" is relative to the craft, not the planet. What you're experiencing is a case of your TWR being too high for a precision landing with the controls we have--It's a design and operations problem. Precision Mode [Caps Lock] can help by giving you finer throttle control, but you can also bind the thrust limiters on your engines to an axis [like H,N] to tweak them in-flight. My favorite solution to this problem is a pair of overlapping spotlights facing the ground. The size of the lights on the ground, plus how fast the overlap changes, tells you everything you need to know about which way you're heading, and what altitude you're at.

I can confirm that I've had serious warping issues in 1.11. I'd go back to the 1.9s, although 1.7.3 and 1.3.1 are the most stable KSP releases. I've quit playing because I've given up on Squad's quality control. 6000 hours in, and I'm using my energy to tell people not to buy KSP 2 because the current knucklehead management have murdered the franchise.

Shoutout to @mobylettespaceindustriesfor the vid.

My dumb question of the day is: Is there a propulsive efficiency cost in the phase-change of the fuel from liquid to gas? I forget all my thermodynamics, and I am now frantically googling what "adiabatic" means.

I kind of want to hit up the Contact page, pretending to be one of: An enthusiastic venture capitalist Retired Air Force General-turned-defense industry "consultant" A particularly venal congresscritter Must include the line, "Liquid fuels and the metric system are a Communist plot." Unfortunately the creative writing bug and the necessary sadism are not coming together. EDIT: Nevermind, I did a little doxxing, and I'll skip it.

The average density of Kerbin is 58.48kg/liter, so I'd like to complain that the fuel is too light. /s

I'm going to agree on this--The long-reach boom just makes it look spindly. Because I'm unbearably nerdy, I found a high-res photo and determined it's a Komatsu. It looks like an early 90's PC220LC-5. Those are 25-ton class, so comfortably mid-sized. I got to drive a 35-ton once and it was a monster. (I also saw the operator pull a lit cigarette out of a guy's mouth without breaking it. He was VERY good. )

I don't think that's the right pronunciation, but you do you. (Also, it's Myoon not Muhn, because we're not sociopaths.)

I did a Block Element on those with Adblock Plus and it works fine. I trimmed it down to just this: forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com##.ipsComment.ipsComment_ignored.ipsType_light Up to about 70 on my ignore list now.

Yes, SLS bad, but damn, that was exciting. I'm sure they got some excellent data.

The ore concentration is dependent on the save seed. This challenge as-written will have highly varying difficulty (or be impossible) for each contestant. You might want to specify a seed that works, and have contestants edit their persistent file to use that one.

Hi Mike. Since you are so new and so gracious, this is the thread you're looking for:

I have this anthology somewhere (I have a LOT of anthologies): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Wonder:_The_Evolution_of_Hard_SF I remember the essays on science fiction in the preface, as well as the author bios being really educational. Not limited to hard science fiction, but you might as well consider the best of the best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_joint_winners_of_the_Hugo_and_Nebula_awards I can't find a comprehensive list with all categories in one place, but these are a useful reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award#Categories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula_Award#Categories I've read 1/3 to 1/2 of the entries on all those lists (up through the 1990s), and I've never been disappointed.

In addition to Liam's advice, Rhinos are vacuum-optimized. They produce relatively little thrust at sea level. I will avoid writing a paragraph and just say, use the Mammoth for your side boosters.