Requia

nnoooope. NASA and SpaceX have a 1.6 billion dollar contract for those flights. Payload is absurdly small too, though I suppose being pressurized and climate controlled on the way makes up for it a bit. http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012/oct/HQ_12-355_SpaceX_CRS-1_Launch.html

Private sector fund communications satellites and nothing else. Maybe we get some asteroid captures going forward if that turns out profitable, everything else is just a high risk bid for government money.

It can't really help but be cheaper. Saturn V was a rush job to meet a somewhat crazy goal of pulling the first landing off before 1970, this led to some crazy stuff (those 30$ bolts were because in order to make sure the thing didn't fail with only 3 years development they needed every component to be chemically identical, that meant people had to be paid to ensure every bolt came from the same mine shaft).

Or the last time they showed up they saw dinosaurs. There's some pretty extreme scale issues, they'd need to be covering hundreds of thousands of stars a year in order for the odds to have put em at Bronze Age, if we assume that life is actually possible in a place like Europa exoplanet maps don't help much.

The cost I think comes down to the infrastructure to recover and refurbish, rather than the marginal cost. The more you launch the more sense it makes. They're stopping recovery because they don't plan to use this thing anything close to as often as they used the shuttle. The SRBs they're using now are just to have something while they make new boosters regardless though. At most they might use them for budgeting once the new ones come in (depends on the boosters they select, the one on the table with the lowest total payload are actually cheaper on paper than the ones they have now, which is a realistic possibility if they can get congress to relax the 130t mandate). The use of boosters is probably the biggest advantage over the Saturn V, it wasn't even considered at the time. But it's what makes the whole thing work, without being the size of the Nova. Also, we're not paying 30$ a bolt anymore (not joking, Congress called North American to the carpet for charging 7$ a bolt and NA said 'no actually it's 30$ a bolt'). So that alone makes the SLS a better system.

2kg/kw is overoptimistic, but NASA estimated 1085-1954kg for the 200kWe converter being designed for Prometheus, so 20 is pretty pessimistic. Though there are also scaling issues with that tech, the largest Brayton cycle converter actually built is something like 3 MWe with 10MWe in R&D.

Interstellar/Alcubierre drive are mandatory to get to Cercani! You you mean you don't think it's viable to get enough DV together or that the code literally won't allow it without those? If it's the former I might just take that challenge

Thanks everyone

So how exactly do you do the final burn, given that your orbital path is gonna change by about 150 degrees during the course of it?

KSP.x86_64 is the program to run. you prefix binaries with ./ to run them (so ./KSP.x86_64 from the KSP directory in this case). Or symlink it to ~/bin (so ln -s [kerbal directory]/KSP.x86_64 ~/bin/kerbal makes it so typing 'kerbal' will launch the program, adjust of your KSP_Linux directory is somewhere other than your home directory). (I have no freaking clue how to do it graphically that stuff is hard).

I've got a very low thrust (45cm/s2 so still better than real world, but low) nuclear-electric system I'd like to try to do some interplanetary travel with. I've figured out fairly efficient arrival on an earlier system (transferred with chemical arrived on plasma). I've figured out A way to do it, by spiralling out to 7000m so that the orbital period is long enough the burn is practical, but I wonder if anybody might know a more efficient way I can finagle such an interplanetary transfer (this one will take an extra ~1300 dv, which I have cause wheee plasma, but I figure there must be a better way). Time is a minimal concern I'm happy to let it run in the background, it's only if I need a ton of different burns with large time gaps between them things come up cause I know of no way to automate time warp). (While I haven't yet messed with kOS I'm willing to do so to pull this off)

When you have a small stack of textbooks so that when you mess with configs you get it right.

With a certain combination of mods installed (really its mostly TAC and KIS) the number of items when right clicking certain parts shoves the bottom of the right click menu off the screen. Are there any mods that make that menu scrollable or similar?

Boil rate also varies with solar temperature. I lost a ton of hydrogen on a trip to Eve, barely any on a trip to Duna, I'd assume it would have been empty if I tried to use it to brake at moho.

The capture burn that was supposed to take ~13 minutes was going to take 20, and the fuel/electric ratio was completely different. Though I guess this is actually NFP doing that and you're just duplicating (I stopped checking once I found it) so that's on Nertea for making a weird design choice by altering stock parts.

http://pastebin.com/3ZsMzv8L this ended up being long. Also: your configs appear to nerf the ion engine, but ONLY if Near Future Propulsion is installed, which led to some reallyw eird behavior with an old probe from before I installed it not behaving correctly. Edit: this is totally straightforward, the stockalike NFP confing only activates if NFP is installed, and has substantially different from stock values.

Hrm, so this is only happening to me then. Ok, change to tech support request: HHow do i specifically set the max techlevel of an engine? I'd like to see if I can just override it

Weird, they have effects just fine for me. Hmm, I wonder if the problem is that file is out of date?

After you grapple it save then restart. The Kraken has a short attention span.

LVN Clusters is the mod name. Hmm, I guess you're nto supporting it anymore based on the frontpage. Updating didn't remove the old config.

The LVN clusters config doesn't allow the double LVN to be anything other than tech 3. I have no idea why, the quad works just fine but is essentially identical in configs except that numbers are slightly more than twice as high.

How much RAM do you have?

That variable doesn't do anything to engine mass, even if changed in RealSettings.cfg It's RFSETTINGS { useRealisticMass = true that has to change to false. It the filename super important? I just named the patch that changed the lv-n mass at random and that works fine.

how would I write an mmpatch to permanently make useRealisticMass = False? keep losing it every time I update and forgetting to change it back.

Oh, that's me yeah.