Archgeek

Yup, before that was a thing, and before I'd learned to fly a kerbal on EVA (a trial by fire that really helped with learning docking later) I had an EVA accident wherein I nearly lost my ship in the darkness. I started putting z100's on after that, just to serve as a beacon in the black if I got too far away again. Ambient light has prevented it since, to the point that I was able to do some orbital construction on the dark side for an experimental vessel I'd forgotten to include construction lights on.

Ack, don't TLA that, it makes it far too easy to accidentally read as "FART".

In either .235 or slightly later, destined for a Project Bring'em Home series, one of my saves was centred around a collabarative attempt at an Eve land/return mission with a 2-kerbal pod (stack of two lander cans) that finished making orbit with ion engines (and thus idiotically brought a pair of gigantors with it). A test of the super-heavy lander revealed it to be an excelent craft for running out to Duna, whereupon the pilot got stranded due to landing error destroying most of the vehicle. The other two, are predictably, stuck on the surface of Eve, as the lander was designed with KER's help, which had quietly been showing Kerbin TWR. Post-failure analysis has indicated that the lander would've worked if two early-stage skipper engines had been mainsails. The associated Project Bring'em Home entry will heavilly feature the automated rescue vehicle, which will not carry ion engines and gigantors to the surface of Eve.

It is said that .mus are "container files". Considering recent experience, I wonder what one gets if one renames one to a .zip and tries to pop it open.

Listening to it on my phone at lunch though...that sounds like several sound effects files running at once rather than a buffer loop. A motor idling, hydraulics loudly moving around, and some welding sound effects.

Welp, with a list like that, I critically doubt the sound's stock. If I were to guess, I'd suspect an interaction between RoverWheelSounds and Quickmute, or possibly KerbalKrashSystem and QuickMute if it has sounds. Switching scenes a lot is a common trigger for things to get funky, and I would not be surprised if part of a sound file got loaded, canceled by quickmute, but played in a loop because sound code likes to use circular buffers.

Epic thread: 10/10 Literally ate some actual popcorn reading that. Well done all.

It was, and it is. In fairness, I think imgur broke them at the same time they greatly improved the upload/management interface. I doubt it's too hard to fix their embed code to match, but they haven't done it yet for some reason.

That...might be your case fan. I can't think of any sound in the editor other than the music, part selection, attachment, and part deletion.

You do know you could've turned comms off for that save and tried out the system in a new one, right? At least it must've made for an interesting challenge at first?

HEH, is that from Jean-Paul Kerman's No Exit?

Back in the days when the Mainsail was the mightiest engine, it had a nasty habit of overheating and exploding if placed directly under an orange tank. A trick for this was to put the smallest size 2 "Rockomax" tank between them, and then stitch the tanks together with struts 'lest a lack of joint strength cause a violent gimbal dance with SAS. Aerospikes also got very hot, and would explode if placed together on a coupler (all engines' heat would be funneled right into the same part), so Eve landers would need to either use mainsails or buffer their quadcouplers from their aerospikes with small fuel tanks.

Life support mods.

Mods don't like that. Brace for merging. I should really get a screenshot of when one of my xenon monstrosities fails near the pad. Such a carpet-bombing.

I have to wonder, just how ionized do ion engines make their remass gas? Do they just rip off a shell or two, or do they strip the atoms bare to the nucleus? If the latter, things grow interesting. Keep in mind that Isp comes from exhaust velocity, not directly from molecular -- or in the case of noble gases, atomic -- mass. If we rip an argon atom's electrons clean off, we've got 18 protons worth of electropositvity in nearly 40 AMU, we yank that towards the the electronegative exhaust grid and out it goes, nice and fast. 'Same for xenon, but with a whopping 54 protons worth of charge in 131.3 AMU. That does admittedly give argon a better electromotive force to mass ratio of .45 to xenon's .41, but not by very much at all. For some reason argon's a bit neutron-heavy on average. So, we wind up with Argon ions accelerating about 10% faster, thus for the same engine we get that much more Isp over Xenon, but a lot less thrust, around a third (30% the mass, but with the benefit of 10% more velocity, so probably around 34%). Or, we can slightly lengthen the cavity for the xenon engine and get the same Isp by just giving the ions more time to speed up. To make matters weirder, there's a practical limit to how much either particle can be accelerated in a given space, so for long engine cavities, the Isp approaches equivalence and Xenon maintains the thrust advantage. Of course, that's all if ion engines tear every last electron (or at least most of them) off the poor atoms.

That kerbal balance scale is the best thing I've seen this week.

Number 14 will make you want to commence orbital strikes on the Buzzfeed server farm!

This seems kinda easy to test on Gilly -- just pick a speed a goodly chunk over its escape velocity (which is tiny so no need to go too fast), pick your desired orbital distance (from Giliy's centre), calculate the mass of a body you can orbit at the target height and speed, then find the gravitational acceleration of the body at that distance. Next, tune your engines to give that exact accleration, fly towards Gilly, making sure you rampage past a point at the target altitude at your target speed, hit the hold radial-in button, wait for periapse, then punch the throttle and watch the fun!

Cool, that answers my question--sounds like all one needs to use EVA struts is KAS. Which is good, as KIS feels a mite cheesey to me, but I love the idea of designing missions around semi-complex ships "flatpacked" into a fairing with a micro-tug for assembly and KAS strut points for the crew to EVA and connect up to provide rigidity. It would also increase the re-usabiltiy of interplanetary drive modules by letting narrow drives be used on wide payloads without excess derping.

Some apes have escaped, and you have to catch them with nets and stun batons. In later levels, they can be heavily armed, making re-capture difficult.

10k? Easily done as long as you have nukes, ions, and at that distance, fuel cells. 'Could do it with nukes alone, but that'd get chunky.

Not gonna lie, I misread that patch as 17th Derp Space.

...Yes, yes I do.

Er, not quite, no. Fuel flow is dictated by throttle alone. Isp relates to efficiency in that it specifies how much thrust a rocket gets per unit fuel by way of exhaust velocity (with another unit canceled out to put it in seconds and make it easier for teams using different unit systems to share design info) For a car, the Isp analogue would probably be something weird like acceleration per ml of fuel. TWR needs to have gravity built-in, so you probably want pounds involved, that or kg-gees or some such. Maybe horsepower per (non-metric) ton? Max range is much closer to delta-v. Though actual delta-v would be a stranger thing based on total acceleration potential (consumed by wind/rolling resistance as well as simply speeding up). Payload to LEO would be more like the max amount of crap you can load it up with and still get some distance on a tank.

With the amount I revert while testing things -- Experimental Propulsion Simulation Program. @panzer1b There's also Children of a Dead Earth, which lets you design your modules, including thrusters, weapons, and armour (can you say silicon carbide and spider silk?). Just look out for the missile AI, it is dumb.