Sky_walker

Looks like I opened Pandora's box by mentioning procedural fairings. lol Poor discussion got pushed off course. I'm not a big fan of a procedural parts, but fuel lines, struts, and procedural fairings are certainly an exception to that rule - I love them. I made several spaceplanes and atmospheric planes trying to convince myself that they're nice things... but in the end: rockets are my thing, I don't care much about aerospace. Still though - addition of a hangar bays is a huge thing, regardless of what one thinks about wings.

Hahaha, great work. I didn't expected anyone to try re-creating SC ship in KSP, mostly because SC ships are.... well, very different from KSP "tube"-based design, but you made it surprisingly well.

Yes, well, we don't have fairings either (*hopes for procedural fairings to make it into the stock game*). But anyway - rocket-shaped cargo bays make perfect sense. Only you look in a wrong way at it. Instead of thinking about rockets releasing cargo - think about spacecrafts with bays for landers, probes, impactors, surface bases, etc. Hangar bay in a shape of Kerbodyne S3-14400 Tank could open a whole new world for spacecraft designs.

All of them are garbage. Can't lift large XL fuel tank onto the orbit. Seriously though: There's no such thing as ultimate plane. And if you want to show off your own designs - general discussion is a wrong section to do so.

o_O you must be seeing things I don't. Yea, they're very good parts, no doubt about that, but are they so much better in terms of quality than what KSP offers right now? I don't think so. The only thing that goes way beyond KSP level of quality is cockpit. But then again - that's partially thanks to other mods, and partially thanks to giving up on KSP cartoonish looks and going for something more realistic (and I wouldn't mind of KSP would follow that direction too). (BTW: Before someone jumps on "but take a look at Mk III parts and how ugly they are" - for me they don't exist.)

Biomes on all planets would be a good start...

What's the second-to-right part? It ends with.... horizontal flat surface? o_O

Not only spaceplanes can have cargo bays, right? RIGHT?

Yes. That's pretty much the most interesting part in this whole thing ^^

Thanks a lot for that summary. I was just about to ask what's that small slice in a bottom left corner. It sounds great overall. I'm really curious if now when we'll have Mk2 cargo bays - will they release any additional? Only Squad knows, but.... it'd be great. Yea, too many unknowns, but I'm pretty sure they will want to mess with the parts balance on their own.

http://kerbaldevteam.tumblr.com/ Sounds awesome, doesn't it? I'm not really a spaceplane guy but I am very excited to finally, after all that wait, get a cargo bay (confirmed). Oh, and I so very much want that cockpit in a stock game! hehehehe With a bit of luck we might get a nav lights... though they're not a part in S+ so my hope might be in vain... anyway: Looks like we'll finally be able to reproduce a space shuttle mission without resorting to some obscure hackarounds like using docking ports for cargo bay, lol. Some pictures from the mod page:

Yes, but the price remained roughly the same. One one hand you got lower costs due to higher volume of sales, on the other hand you got higher expenses due to basically: throwing a rocket that would otherwise be reusable out of the window for each launch (just to remind you - not even a single commercially launched rocket has been reused so far). Costs perhaps will go down in some unspecified point in future, but we're not there just yet. No it's not. It's a base price for their commercial customers. It quite clearly states: "standard payment plan (2016 launch)". Pure price of the rocket, excluding all of the additional costs like facilities, transpiration, operations, etc. remains unknown, but from NASA/government perspective: only thing that matters is what they pay.

That's a price for commercial clients. Basically: US government gives money to the Space X sponsoring random private space endeavours. In this topic we're talking about pricing from a perspective of NASA/US government and that's ~$141million per launch. Arianespace receives roughly 120 million euro per year in subsidies (it varies, used to be 100, but SpaceX price dumping forced them to ask for additional subsidies). SpaceX gets 80 million dollars per launch - in this year it'll be ~9 launches, in next: probably 18. Arianespace did a lot to reduce it's dependence on subsidies since 2005 (back then it used to be ~200 million euro per year - still over 2 times less than what SpaceX receives these days) and it seems like the next variant of Ariane 5, ME, will lower that funding even further (here). Anyway - point of this whole pricing stuff, for those who missed it, is: SpaceX pricing isn't as attractive to NASA as you might think on a first glance. It's still a good price point, no doubt, but nowhere near as good as some SpaceX fans try to picture it.

*scratches his head* Well, that just popped on google when I searched for a price that I actually remembered from some other french article - thought that it's the one, but obviously not, though the number they cite is correct.

If you're suppose to constantly "terraform" Mars than it'd most likely be cheaper and better to build domed cities (easier to do on Mars due to lower gravity) than indefinitely pump resources into something that simply cannot achieve stable terraformation. Anyway - there's a whole article about Mars terraformation on a wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars

That's a price that they can offer only thanks to the government subsidies. A real price launch price is ~$141 million (source).

It's... 9.6% contribution. It's not a race - your spot doesn't matter much, your contribution does, and UK contributes some pathetic amount of money to ESA considering how well-developed their space program used to be. Just to put it in a perspective: Belgium contributes 6%. US attitude "everyone serve us" shines from this article. "The Air Force research laboratories in the States have carried out some modeling to verify that the SABRE does actually work, that it is a real engine" - yea, we did that in Europe already some time ago. That's why they got funding for a large-scale prototype. But what do I know - everything that wasn't verified by the US isn't meaningful.

New gallery from a docking procedure with some very nice photographs: http://www.artemjew.ru/2014/08/13/atv5-dock-foto/

I understand that just fine, thank you. I never mention that all radioisotope dating is radiocarbon dating nor that it's always used in the same matter. Please, read carefully next time before posting.

Decay speed is constant, but the presence of radioisotopes isn't, that's why calibration curves are an important factor in radiocarbon dating.

FYI: Theory of relativity was born by nitpicking. So don't dismiss that so easily. You should doubt them, as every few years we're getting new calibration curves to the radiocarbon dating. We try to estimate dates using various objects from different eras to calibrate the measurements, but there's only as much as we can do - pretty much everything beyond written history is impossible to calibrate. Yes, well, people do that cause they think that, simply put, scientific theory described "easy" parts while the details that determine whatever it's a valid theory or not are in this "hand-waving" as you put it. In general molecules similar or identical to these used in living cells are fairly common. Some of them are even speculated to exist in nebulae. Hahaha, good joke. If it'd be that simple - we'd build our own first living, man-made organism already o_O noone mentioned anything alike nor any of the stuff you talk about later on in your post.

There's plenty of theories that are better proven than the theory of evolution. Atomic theory being a most obvious example (we basically can "build" new atoms on our own now). Or if you want something from a field of biology - cell theory comes first in mind. Most of the question marks about the theory of evolution focus around the very early stages, like the evolution of first living cells, a very long period between the appearance of first prokaryote and eukaryotic organisms, or one of the most common examples - the studies of probability combined with our lack of evidence for extraterrestrial life.

Not even close

That won't happen, not when ATV is retired. Ability to bring more people up and down from ISS isn't a deciding factor to the amount of crew onboard. Ability to bring life support and experiments (work) for them is. None of the commercial resupply vessels come close to the capabilities of ATV or H-II.

It's ~450, not 465. 465 is an Isp of RL60, engine that never been flown on any rocket.