Sky_walker

You're still not reading carefully. Let me try to clarify it again: Heavy modifications would be mostly around launch escape system, mounting of a vehicle on top of the Ariane, and supporting infrastructure. There would be no heavy modifications required to the launch vehicle itself.

Complete boIIocks. Ariane 5 ascend profile already fulfils all the requirements necessary for manned spaceflight. In no way EAP boosters make payload launched as if it'd be "fired from a cannon". You have no slightest idea what you're talking about. [edit]: Latest proposition of Ariane 6 will follow similar ascend profile and have similar LEO capabilities as Ariane 5 making it equally suitable for flying manned spacecrafts. However at the moment it's a pure speculation as ESA has no manned spacecraft it could use on it's rocket. In theory - yes, though it'd require plenty of changes, new adapters, etc. to even mount Soyuz safely inside of Ariane 5. I'd be easier and quicker to just strap someone on a chair inside of an ATV G-forces involved would be higher than in a space shuttle launch, yes, but comparable to these during Soyuz ascend - still safely within what an astronaut can stand without a g-suit, with added plus being that ATV doesn't require any attention from such a crazy astronaut onboard - it does everything by itself all the way to the docking, so we could strap on TV on the other end of ATV and let him enjoy the views from the outside... or watch Interstellar movie Jokes aside - each country having manned spacecraft developed it's own requirements for a rockets that will lift it. NASA "human ratings" apply only to the US vehicles, so Soyuz doesn't have to fulfil any of them just like Orion doesn't have to fulfil Russian requirements. If you're curious - from what I heard Soyuz wouldn't pass NASA certification. Same with Chinese - they also have their own requirements and don't really look after other countries. If ESA would develop it's own spacecraft - or (very unlikely) use 3rd party spacecraft launched onboard Ariane it'd develop it's own set of "man rating" requirements.

Sandbox was completed months ago. Don't expect anything new for that mode At a very most you can expect additions that benefit everyone - and 0.26 will have plenty of them. So quit complaining.

You must be talking about a different game, cause the KSP has guys popping up on forum and reminding us about the memory limit when people ask for ~3 new parts to be added into a game.

DRE, DRE, DRE.... ...nah, it's probably just biomes from the custom biomes mod. Ok, at last one good news. Would be nice, even if only for a point lights alone. Extremely unlikely. Devs so far been very, very reluctant to implementing anything that might possibly raise system requirements in any significant way - and this mod does.

Mars core isn't cold, and there's plenty of speculation about current volcanic activity on Mars. Though yes - lack of a proper magnetosphere is certainly one of the biggest obstacles in colonizing Mars. Making Mars atmosphere breathable is out of question. HOWEVER we do not need whole atmosphere to be breathable. You are correct, but there is enough material on mars to grow plants as food for humans, possibly also an oxygen for city-size colonies, which is, pretty much all we need. Yes, there is enough water to support colonization and plant life. It's not unknown - it's certain. And it's not only on poles - water ice can be found in numerous places around Mars, though obviously it's much more of it the closer you are to the poles. But again - this assumes that we're not exporting entire China and India to the Mars but rather keep population size reasonable and sustainable (look - complete opposite of what we're doing here on Earth!). You don't need to heat up whole planet. It's enough you can collect solar or wind power to heat up a colony. Mars next to the moon is the easiest location to colonize allowing us to not only mine resources but also refine them sending back to earth high quality products - something that's difficult to achieve by mining asteroids or the moon (moon also got different composition than mars and is far less suitable for sustaining larger mining operations - mostly due to limited supply of water). That however would require a significant effort that very likely will be impossible to achieve any time soon (eg. at a very least you'd need to be able to refuel rockets on a mars that can fly back to Earth - which means production of rocket fuel on another planet - something extremely difficult on it's own) Point of having a place to live is to have a place to live on another planet. In case of a catastrophic event it'd prevent the demise of human kind. Living in oceans doesn't guarantee that. Moon is closer, but moon is also a very risky place to live on - single micrometeorite shower can wipe such colony out of a surface in a seconds. Mars has an atmosphere which is a game-changer.

Everyone would - but devs are busy with adding explosions to the buildings.

Empty it. You can regulate the amount of solid fuel through twakeables in the editor. Empty SRB is almost like a balloon - large, but light Quite easy to carry. I strap two symmetrically to my sounding rocket. Fly up, then trigger them. Easy money. Depends on a specific contract. Some don't give you any, or very little, science but do give cash. You do know that it's a standard contract that keeps on reoccurring for every playthrough, right? It's almost like a moon landing contract, only it's suppose to teach you an orbital rendezvous.

That's they key, basically. I got dedicated cheap, low-tech sounding rocket for all of the "sub-orbital" and "in-flight" tests. Obviously rewards are a huge factor in that. I don't do any of the in-orbit tests as IMHO they're not worth the time. It's much more profitable and quicker to send an orbiter to, say, Moho, and farm science and cash contracts from there than keep on sending missions to the Kerbin orbit, often redesigning the rocket to accommodate the payload in case you need to test something larger or heavier.

Spoken like a true NASA fanboy.

Sir, you have won this topic.

That's nowhere near important as being able to deorbit itself. Important problem with hypergolics is their toxicity which makes keeping them under control in a long term very challenging. But yes, they do degrade over time. Like pretty much everything (each fuel type got it's own "weak point", a reason why it can't really be stored in large amounts for years in space, though obviously some are safer than other). Question is - if you can use the fuel before it expires. If there's enough demand - fuel degradation wouldn't be much of a problem. However currently there isn't. We'd have to regularly go beyond LEO with manned spacecrafts to create such demand - and as of now we're nowhere near that point. (And an eve of electric propulsion for satellites pretty much negates the need for refuelling. We're reaching the point where a fault to the satellite hardware is likely to occur than it running out of fuel - hence satellites grow bigger and bigger: to have redundant equipment onboard). KSP got no relevance to the real life. Read my signature. I'd suggest you read through that for a good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propellant_depot#Engineering_design_issues Only difference being that steam contamination doesn't last years. That's why people are afraid of nuclear powerplants. Not because they can kill people here now, but because of long-term consequences. (And before you try to defend against it - I know, and I very much agree that nuclear powerplants are a way to go). You mean like an anti-machine dogma disappeared? Oh, wait... people are still pissing their pants over "robots" taking over their jobs. Nothing changed since XIX century. Yea, just like GMO plants, which are also a response to the raising populations.... *eyerolls* Humans are really bad in thinking on a global scale.

It'd be more efficient to simply send a whole upper stage there instead of a separate fuel tank. Yes, it'd require separate design, but could be cheaper and less risky in a long term. What you propose is relatively risky and requires a lot of changes to the procedures, creating new docking ports that allow fuel transfers, etc. . Even if such fuel depot would be creates - there still would be plenty of spacecrafts launching with all the fuel supply they need. And depot cannot stay in space for too long due to fuel degradation... so there we go - you just re-discovered the reason why no fuel depots exist on an orbit as of today. Doubtful. You'd think that super-safe modern nuclear reactors would negate anti-nuke dogma, but then one of the oldest reactors on the globe got an accident - Fukushima - and suddenly whole dogma comes out again. And that's the reactor sitting in land, not flying over people's head

Or... just head on collision course with an E-class asteroid.

Tell me, why exactly would I suggest you what you want to do in your experiment? Think of it as a sort-of independent review. No reviewer will ever tell you what sort of project you're suppose to work on. That's not what reviews are for. You do realize that we are talking on a KSP forum, don't you? Good, I see an objective here. We can start with that. Now please, explain me how growing moss in a cubesat is going to help you with any of your future planned missions? Or if that's not the objective of this moss experiment - then what is? I assure you that compared to other communities trying to send cubesat - you know very little. Last time I checked - you didn't have even a slightest idea on how to communicate with your satellite, there was only some idea that one guy might, or might not, build some DIY receiver that might, or might not, work. And the fact that some of your team members got a high aversion to reading (yes Nicholander, I'm looking at you too) isn't helping you guys with anything. No, I didn't. Good news, I suppose. Glad to be proven wrong. Underestimating complexity of what you're doing isn't a particularly good prognosis for a project. So... is it moonlike or marslike? And similar experiments were already done on ISS (and I'm quite sure identical one was done as well), only with by far more in-depth analysis than anything you propose and a plants that actually can benefit astronauts: Here: http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/04/Gravi-2

Lack of competition isn't an excuse. I didn't. Feel free to point me towards these plenty of floundering kickstarter games that would be so much worse than KSP. Or perhaps other way around: how big rockets / space stations did he build? I had quite good impressions until I build my first space station. Then bubble went burst. And: no, I didn't use mods back. It's both. You want a sample for when it's SQUAD fault? Build a spacecraft with 6 Advanced Grabbing Units and observe FPS count. You can try sending it into space or hooking them all to some asteroid.... I still remember my 10 FPS asteroid descend mission - an asteroid that got just a few chutes mounted on Klaws and an orange tank with engines.

I think you're meant to say something different: Hard mode might be hard if devs fix major issues with balance we have now. BTW: Yesterday I finished career on a Hard difficulty. 3 afternoons. Got 1.6M funds spare, network of satellites, few landers (including Moho one lander that doubles as a satellite - leaps few meters above the ground to take a science sample from "space" ). I did use money-to-science but only for a moment before spotting how stupidly broken that thing was, do I didn't pump much science from it. I also didn't bother with a space station like I always do, so it went bit quicker than usual, but still.... I feel like I had more fun playing Battlefield 3 single player than KSP in it's current iteration.

Well then, you have very much failed sir, cause what you say makes no sense. Like: none at all. Next time: try to use logic.

0.23.5 /10char

You have 10 000 + whatever you reclaimed from the wreck. But in case you meant that you used 10 000 on your last ship that crashed - just go and get some contracts. They're paid up front. Do them, bang, problem solved. But if you still insist of failing even that - you can grab contracts, all of them, build a ship for every single fund you have, spawn it, go back to the space center (with ship sitting on a launch pad), cancel all of your contracts, then go back to the ship, reclaim it, and voilà- you have funds back again!

I do think it's overpowered and I do pay for parts. Few satellites in crucial locations = no problem with cash. Ever. Using SSTOs and small satellites also helps, but as long as you don't build one of these monstrosities people used to visit all moons of Jool - you won't have too much of a problem with cash. Yea, I did revert, but only because of bugs. I'm here to play the game, not fight against buggy code in KSP (I play hard with quicksave enabled - got way too bad experience with bugs all over the place (eg. random spacecraft deassembly when crossing SoI) to harass myself with that) Different - yes. Hard? No. IMHO current hard difficulty with load/save enabled should replace "normal" difficulty. With 2 steps harder above it. And a game balance fixed. Current easy difficulty is a joke. It's like a sandbox mode, only with more dialogs. And... what exactly you are trying to imply here? Yea, that's pretty much the only way to have a sensible balance in KSP at the moment. Still far from perfect (eg. deadlines are meaningless joke) but better than toying with thousands of science you get flooded with otherwise.

No, it couldn't. Bankruptcy is still impossible.

Well then, you have a problem. Or two problems, actually. First one being that the experiment you propose was already done in space, including by far more in-depth and interesting analysis than anything you proposed here. It was done more than once, on far more interesting topics than just "growth". One interesting fact here: ill-fated Columbia (yes, the one) took moss in Petri dishes analyzing it's growth in space: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/01/030115065325.htm (if you really want to know - moss didn't survive). So I very much doubt that sending moss in space and snapping some photos of it would in any way increase your chances of having a free flight. You don't even have any idea of which aspect of moss you'd like to study, not to mention anyone with education background in biology to at least make you some ground work on a topic. What you are doing is not an actual scientific experiment, it's just an excuse to send a cubesat into space. An excuse that might not really work well, as your project in it's current form will most likely be perceived as nothing more than a private mexican company wanting to pull off PR stunt for US taxpayer dollars (yea, sounds harsh, but people judging your project won't do you any favors either) And secondly - that excuse is very fault-prone. You rely on many very crucial components working in extreme environment with no experience working with any of them. I'm not really into the whole cubesat hobby thing, but I heard about simpler and more reliable cubesat-based experiments failing (read about PW-Sat and it's failed solar tail experiment). You should really read stuff about KISS rule.

Not true. Minimus south pole got a hole through the terrain. Been there yesterday.

Fixed for you. Not as much "low" as "normal". All that you speak of happens already in normal difficulty. .