cpast

Release an update on Steam, which is actually 0.23.5 but with "Fooled you!" on the main menu?

First: "aerobraking" with actual satellites does not normally mean what it does in KSP; it refers to having an elliptical orbit which dips not very far into the atmosphere, which lowers apoapsis over hundreds of orbits. Aerocapture is using the atmosphere to go from hyperbolic escape orbits to elliptical orbits, and has never been done with interplanetary craft (skip re-entry has been done on Earth, which is sort of similar, but that was from a lunar return and not an interplanetary trajectory). To do an aerocapture, you not only need a very good heatshield system that probably needs to provide a lot of lift as well (to control g-forces), you also need to be able to do it within extremely precise tolerances, and you only have one shot to do so (during which you effectively cannot control what the satellite is doing; the onboard control system needs to be independently able to control the capture maneuver).

Well, yes. I'm just saying that even once you get there, you need to be able to have the cubesat survive. I don't see how it being hard to get a cubesat to a Mars transfer orbit makes capture easy.

It's not a "little more fuel"; the Mars Global Surveyor capture burn was 977 m/s. That's why so many people are interested in aerocapture as a possibility, because it lets you avoid a very high delta-v maneuver. The issue is how to perform the aerocapture with the needed precision, and without destroying the satellite.

For Phobos mission, how would you protect and control the satellite during aerocapture? As of now, that's never been done on interplanetary trajectories, both because it puts a lot of force (and a lot of heat) on the hardware, and because it's one-shot: if there's any issue, any miscalculation, you can't really fix it (unlike with aerobraking, which happens over hundreds of orbits *after* an injection *burn*, giving time to adjust as needed). Now, that means that something transmitting data from the aerocapture could be interesting by itself, but it would definitely give anyone considering funding you or giving you things (e.g. a launch) for cheap/free pause.

You fail to realize that Danny2462 already has 0.24. Anything you could do pales in comparison.

The R&D isn't surprising - that's basically how a lot of real spacecraft work (NASA designs many of the rockets and spacecraft it uses, but they're built by contractors, but the contractors *also* do design work and have engineers involved in the process). For experimental parts, again, kind of simple - the parts aren't certified for general use, but you have a prototype of them. The company has already made it, but needs to verify that it works right before it's cleared for mass production.

I think they're designed to be moddable? Pretty sure I saw that somewhere. (not sure what FAR for Funds means, but if you mean 'make costs more realistic', I suspect it's quite possible to adjust part costs via MM).

Someone will almost certainly make a mod for it.

The actual post said:

The experimentals have been being updated for weeks now, ever since experimentals started in fact. Reply to edit 2: There's always been an x86 executable for KSP. It's always been a 32-bit game. There is now *also* a Windows x86-64 executable.

Probe cores do not affect this behavior in any way.

This is the dual thread to my last one here: from time to time, I find threads marked as "unread", even though I'd read all the posts in them and they'd previously been marked as "read". What gives?

Indeed, I can't think of anything else "decline contract" would mean.

Right, but when people bring up reality as an argument, it's legitimate to counter with reality. I was replying to a post saying it's needed to replicate real designs by pointing out there were only 2 real designs, ever, which used it. If someone said that something was needed to replicate real manned Mars missions, pointing out that those don't exist would be legitimate. I'm not saying KSP has to match reality; gameplay trumps realism, but the post I quoted was the one that made the realism argument,

Those are in fact the only two. Ever. In history. And one has only done it once or twice thus far, in test flights. You may want to reconsider how important it is to real spaceflight.

Specifically, this thread (it's a mod that lets you control dropped stages).

There are a total of two designs in the history of orbital spacecraft (one past, one current) that reused dropped stages - the Space Shuttle (SRBs) and Falcon 9 (still in testing, but they have made a successful test flight). It's not a major issue for recreating historical craft.

If I had to guess, it's because accidentally cutting the throttle is less likely to lead to disaster than accidentally turning it all the way up.

That would actually be appropriate for the budgets release

Will this help the 502 errors?

On another forum I'm on, we (well, I) call this "community DDOS".

Who let *Danny* have a Kerbal rescue contract!?

You have that precisely backwards. The kraken resulted from floating-point issues related to calculating physics on a craft far from the center of a coordinate system. They *reduced* kraken issues by making your craft the center of the coordinate system. Furthermore, "you move around spacetime" is meaningless as a concept -- you don't do anything over time in spacetime, because adding a time dimension already accounts for changes over time. Instead, your entire path - past, present, and future - is a single curve in spacetime that does not change. As far as Newtonian gravity goes, it makes not even a tiny bit of difference whether you're moving or the universe is moving - aside from you moving at high speed causing some sort of floating-point precision issues.

3 interesting things I noticed: 1) In Sandbox, it still seems to tell you how much your rocket costs, which is nice if you, say, want to test a career craft in sandbox. 2) Is the only way to gain rep by doing contracts? Can you not do it by doing your own missions places (e.g. rep boost for landing on the Mun)? 3) One of the previews (I think Danny's) had a contract for "flag on Mun" given after he had, in fact, placed a flag on the Mun. What's up with that? If I'd already put a flag there, would accepting the contract automatically instantly fulfill it? He never said they're for 0.24, and I think he only started work on it around when 0.24 went into testing. It could just as well be a case of "work on this now, because your 0.24 stuff is done".