Sky_walker

I think he wants to be up to date.

Research tree is going to be rebalanced in 0.24 I though someone already said that in this topic.

Not aesthetics - actually giving you some rough idea what is where and where to put the things. If someone cares enough - he might even have some very rough idea on how to hold a weapon (one of they guys I know instinctively held the gun right, instructor was surprised, but all the experience he had was from playing BF3 and some other random shooters). And to use your comparison - your argument for KSP being a simulator is based purely on aesthetics? Orbits in LEO cases look like they are in a real life, but playing KSP has literally nothing whatsoever to do with an actual control of the space ship, which depends on so many factors and elements that there are hundreds of people hired to take care of it all.

No, it does not. There are SoIs, magical atmosphere borders, no gravity gradients or effects of magnetic field, no reentry heat, no drag.... and that's just a beginning. Not really, though if anything is roughly similar in real life to KSP - it's rendezvous. Well, there is recoil in (though you obviously don't feel), reload animations tend to be based on real weapons, switches on guns are in a correct positions, crosshairs look similarly.... when you'd compare percentage of knowlage you get from BF3 to real skill in shooting say: M16 and then compare KSP to real skill in, say: controlling a cube sat - BF3 would look like an ultimate simulator. And besides - people playing BF3 know that it's BS shooter, while people playing KSP think that they actually know stuff about space flight. That's by far more dangerous and stupid. As our recent "KSP CubeSat" topic has perfectly shown beyond any shadow of doubt.

You see - that's exactly what Klingon Admiral has been talking about. You think that they don't, when in reality: they do. I can't really give you any empirically verifiable proof of that, but let me put it this way: I knew more about shooting from playing BF3 then you will about space flight from KSP.

I do. For looks

Yea, they actually had something that can explode. That's a testimony to them having 1 billion times more experience than vast majority of people in this topic has. (number pulled out of my arse) It also means that majority of people vote for Phobos Mission.

Shooters teach you more about shooting than KSP teaches you about space flight. ^ They should have a sticker like that on a loading screen.

...about a government-sponsored cube sat with an actual scientists working on it, not just random forum members of a random forum. If he says so. It must be.

Well then, that's much more than expected. Congratulations Making a transmitter that works fine at the range of 50 km is an achievement on it's own. Well done! But yea - pointing at the target is a major challenge. Both: for receiver and transmitter. As far as I know - it won't pass through the tests. No living thing is allowed on a launch vehicles. There are very strict rules about contamination with biological matter. As I said before - read the Ariane 5 user manual in my footer. It's interesting from a KSP rocket builder perspective, but also contains tons of info about qualification tests satellites need to pass before getting on a launch vehicle. You're one of the most active users in this whole topic, you really, really, really should read it carefully from the first page to the last one.

No, it's not. You need precise control over thrusters, ability to send and advanced, multi-stage commands to the computer on a cube sat, reliably execute them... then there's a problem with your ability to transfer multiple images down to earth, preferably in a single comms window... though you don't even know how long these will last, yet along got any clue about data transfers you could possibly achieve. One of the cheapest ways of orienting cube sat is by orienting yourself to the sun - then combining this data with time and your location on the orbit to find out where the ground is. You see guys - that's the problem. You don't even know such a basic things. No idea why you waste time posting here instead of READING and LEARNING some BASICS. And exactly how far can you transfer this data? --------------------------------------------------- Reality check! GTO 90% impossible to happen (10% shared with extreme luck and extremely expensive) Debris de-orbit tech demo Impossible. Pulse propulsion You'd need to elaborate what you mean by "pulse", but if it's what I think you mean, then: Impossible. Ion propulsion system(Less unique then the others) Very Expensive. Solar sail Impossible. Live visual footage feed Impossible. I didn't put the Lunar or interplanetary ones because those are essentially impossible for our first mission. Not only your first, but pretty much: every single one after that. Unless you get hired by one of the governmental space agencies.

Again - streaming a video is extremely difficult without proper professional infrastructure. Laser comm? Seriously? You know that both: ESA and NASA still consider it an experimental tech and you want to use that in your a cube sat? It's not a cheat. It's how you do things in a cube sats. Warp drive. Easier to use, quicker, and can be renamed to Karp Drive. On a serious note: think about reliable technologies. Not stuff that didn't even go past the experimental stage in a real space agencies. There are ready-made computers capable of handling images and then dedicated transceivers to transfer them. But it's not streaming. And just yesterday an idea was to save money and build that yourself from some commonly available parts instead of buying pre-made cubesat computers and transceivers for tens of thousands of euro (cause that's the rough cost of the equipment capable of transferring images). Well, this and: it has to have some chance of success. Sending a cube sat to fail (read: Phoebe mission) might get some money from few naive KSP forum members, but that's about it.

Good idea, but we'd need to have some helpers in GUI for that. Otherwise "100 degrees west" is meaningless.

If you're from Europe than there are 2 moments when it's worth checking - before going asleep and after waking up. They usually post updates after the midnight, so I'd expect 0.24 to be in roughly the same time window.

AFAIK XS-1 is a project from 2010, or something like that. Basically - military guys try to do what NASA failed to. Deliver fully reusable space plane (no boosters that you loose with each launch).

If you want to be very kerbal - make a rubber tube, put a firework inside, and fire it up in a sky. That will be a very kerbal thing to do. What you're talking about is a very nonsense thing to do. Nope. The biggest challenge is in establishing stable connection. And even then - you have very short windows to stream data (how short - depends on an orbit and equipment used, but it might be anything between hours and a minutes in one go). Live streaming is a joke. You might just as well go with Mars orbiter. It has exactly the same chance of achieving mission objectives. For a live streaming you'd need an infrastructure along an entire orbital path of the satellite. Infrastructure that's synchronized and can exchange data with itself and the satellite. Simply put: it's nothing within your reach. Even national space agencies got a problem with that and often rent infrastructure from NASA or ESA. Then there's a problem with transmission rates, and other things like that. Most of the cube sats communicate with their ground station using... well: basically an equivalent of a morse code. And you're thinking about not only transferring images, but also a video... in a live stream. Come on K^2, you can do better than that. You most likely can't achieve the level of precision required. If your satellite has any detachable parts - it has a very low chance of surviving through the tests before launch. And finally - there's just too many things that can fail. If you want to test deorbit - do something more reasonable, like deployable tether. Though I very much doubt you'd be able to achieve even that. If you'd be able to grab it without a dedicated port and then make a controlled deorbit - it'd be amazingly interesting and one of the best achievements cube sats have ever done. Each time I see posts about delta-v I smile. You don't even know how to aim your spacecraft at the earth, and already think about delta-v and going somewhere. What a nonsense. Stop thinking about satellites in terms of KSP. Real life is nothing like KSP.

lol. Thanks for a laugh.

0.24.5 There's no need to wait all the way till 0.24, and IMHO it's pretty certain that either 0.24.5 will happen, or 0.25 will be released much, much quicker than 0.24 was. I honestly doubt we'd have to wait another 3+ months for a fixes in contracts. Usually each huge release should have a follow-up patch fixing some things in it that came out with large public testing it - and that's a good chance to also add some new contracts in as well as new biomes... though my hope is that 0.24 will have AT LEAST Duna in.

Update and some more information about IXV testing: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Launchers/IXV/ESA_s_spaceplane_set_for_flight

24-77 uses liquid fuel which has much lighter tanks when they're empty (that's ~50% difference) and it's far easier to add large liquid fuel tanks than large RCS tanks (which basically require using multiple parts instead of just one, especially if you want it to be longer than wider). Equation and comparison isn't even remotely as simple and one-sided as you want to make it.

We know that there's at least one "surprise" that was mentioned in dev notes but never got it into the news stories or FAQ, so I wouldn't be so definitive about saying "no" to that. My answer is: wait and see.

I must be doing something wrong, cause I rarely use strouts. Even my cross-planetary launch system uses only 4 of them, and often I don't use any at all. Though whackjob isn't my thing so that must be why....

Well, I hope it's nuclear engine.... Other than that - I think that all of the scientific equipment will be really expensive - if they'll take real life as an example...

Really? Hahahahaha, oh man, this topic is really awesome. Awesome That's a great start! Try building something that can transmit over 1km range and automatically find a target - that will definitely be a good 1st stage of testing if you don't want to buy an off-the-self station. And beware that the further you go the worse it becomes. And more expensive. Transceiver and an on-board computer are not? And that's just a beginning, I'm afraid. You're just one small step above Star Wars fans. Only Star Wars fans realize that their world is full of misconceptions - meanwhile many of KSP fans are truly convinced that this game got a lot to deal with a real space flight. This whole topic is an ideal illustration of that.

(edit: ) oh, I just reminded myself one thing - you see the link in my signature? The one to Ariane 5 manual? I recommend you all to read it through. It'll give you an idea about how is the commercial satellite launched and, perhaps more importantly, what tests and requirements it needs to go through before it gets a green light for launch, what are the factors involved in a launch and what your satellite might need to survive. I'm yet to see any person from this CubeSat team to actually show any proof of that supposed knowledge. K^2 at least appears to have some slight idea about how this thing works but even he is missing as essential things as the cost of ground station (which I already pointed out few pages before, and he answered just above me). Sorry, but there's absolutely no reason to drop the high altitude test. It's not about credibility - it's about knowing what you're talking about and being able to actually pull it off. Seeing how you talk about dropping tests and Phobos mission - I dare to say that you are one of these daydreamers with no slightest idea about scope of the project you're about to undertake. I'm pretty sure that people at NASA will laugh even more from nonsense that people talk in this topic than guys from my work did. And who exactly is going to build it? And what are you plans to test it? How about compensation for atmospheric interference, etc.? You even know what exactly are the challenges ahead of you? You ever build any antenna that receives even most basic radio signal? Just to remind you: People here are very much for transmitting images. Not just Sputnik-style beeps. What's the benefit for them? How do you plan to seek them out and convince to spend their time on it? 10k is an amateur low end station... if you actually manage to buy it for that price. As long as you go to LEO - it shouldn't be necessary. Satellite will deorbit itself due to atmospheric drag (again: real life is not KSP). In theory you could try doing what students in Poland failed to - deploying a long wire to accelerate deorbit. Look for info about PW-Sat.