Archgeek

Ah, the 4 AM curse. 'Doesn't matter when I fire up the game -- "just gotta make sure the probe can re-enter, and save the lifter for later" ... 4 AM. Every time.

Special limited-edition easter bugs~!

Last I checked a few years back there was hope for more serious shenanigans. If there were any control over the states at one point, though, you'd think there'd be a way to say, set a message packet of a few hundred entangled particles and T/R bit at point a, prior to an agreed-upon time t, and then check the T/R bit at point b come time t, grabbing the message if its been set and setting it back to R, with notable gains so long as the t interval is less than the time it'd take light to make the distance between a and b. However, inconveniently, it seems that there is no control of the state at point a, only a guarantee that the a and b will have predictably related states. So yeah, no information teleportation, but sweet for encryption.

You can also single-tap 'F' (which reverses SAS on/off state as long as it's held) to do it one motion.

It amuses me immensely that you've put that in terms of ping numbers there. 'Seems future online games will need seperate Earth, Luna, and Mars servers. You'd think they'd be able to abuse entanglement states to get around that, but recent research implies that it doesn't actually work that way -- I forget if it causes the particles to disentangle, or if the "spooky action at a distance" has a delay commensurate with light speed, but either way, get set for some serious lag if you decide to connect to a lunar CoD 12: This Time It's Actually Fish server.

Will you dorks stop making me laugh? I'm gonna hit my daily rep limit at this rate. Just be glad we're not on Nightmare -- I hear that involves using staged, full-thrust Flea SRBs for reaction control, a la @Whackjob.

Welcome! And congratulations on your quite rapid progress. Also, since you asked via those question marks: Canonically: The Kerbals live on the planet Kerbin orbiting their sun. Apocryphally: Some call the kerbals hired as astronauts by the program kerbonauts, and some call the sun Kerbin orbits Kerbol.

144 kerbals? Gross. I think you mean joy-ride. XD

That invokes an interesting question -- can a bunch of direct antennae boost the range of a relay antenna on the same commsat?

...whence taco? That is clearly a frosted toaster pastry, cherry flavour from the look of it.

Yeah, if you read the post above, you'll note I'm abandoning the coasting idea, as the omission of a '6' had me off by an order of magnitude. 5m/s allows one to squeeze in too much delta-v for a stock craft, but 2 should be manageable (note that only the braking phase, post turn-around will be ions -- the accelerating phase is planed to be a nuke monstrosity, so if I need 120km/s, that's just a 23 tonne 60km/s ion ship, and a nuclear monstrosity to propel it 60km/s), and there may be further shenanigans involving Kerbin's orbital motion reducing the amount of apparent motion Eve can pull off while underway. Ship accelleration will be kept in check by shedding engines and droptanks as needed, aiming for a target average. Also of note, it seems my intial question was already answered elsewhere: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/torchships.php#brachistochrone (scroll down to "The Equations") "Timothy Charters worked out the following equation. It is the above transit time equation for weaker spacecraft that have to coast during the midpoint T = ((D - (A * t^2)) / (A * t)) + (2*t)"

Ooof, it seems I made a mess of this one, starting with my stretching the definition of "torchship" a bit with my plan of a nuke burn and ion brake, as well as by omission of some math I'd done earlier still:Eve's got an orbital period of 261 d 5 h 39 m 21s, or 5,657,961s. This period can be expressed in degrees, minutes, and seconds of arc. This breaks down to 15,717s per degree, 262s per minute, and 4.366s per second of arc. ...and looking at these numbers again, with Eve pulling a degree for every 4hrs 22min, I can see that my initial tack of a 1m/s average acceleration is a bit low for a trip time of 33.65 hours. Eve would scuttle off by nearly 7 degrees, which is a bit much. Relatedly, I just found I'd dropped a '6' from the 3,668,900km distance figure, messing that up by an order of magnitude, hence my oddly low trip time earlier. Still, a few degrees is hard even aim an ejection, so 3 to 4 degrees wouldn't be too hard to correct for as the burn progressed... just aim a little ahead of where Eve is, preferably so that you're intercepting it at its closest approach to Kerbin, and even a low-ish TWR craft can get the job done. With 5m/s, the trip's barely over 15 hours, but the dv gets right out of hand. If I just double it, it's only reduced to 23.8hrs, but 5.45 degrees isn't two hard to roughly lead the target by, and the dv comes to 171.3km/s. I can easily get 85.6km/s out of an ion probe, but it won't be near as light as the 60.7km/s version. Still, long story short, I was off by an order of magnitude (which is why I considered coasting at all, I thought sacrificing some portion of the max possible speed could save me some real-life time), my biggest constraint is Eve's orbital movement, and our good friends the brachistochrone equations still rule the day: total trip t = 2*sqrt(d/a), total dv = 2*sqrt(da) Though, I get the sense that I may have to correct for Kerbin's orbital movement, as that'll induce some drift that could well reduce the synodic motion from the probe's perspective. Should I go with Eve's synodic period of 14,686,947s (11.33 hours per degree) instead?

So, for reasons, I'm trying to get a probe to Eve as quickly as I reasonably can, for certain definitions of "reasonable" -- and decided the way to figure this out was to start with the basic kinematics equation of .5at2+vt+d and do a lot of algebra starting with the conceit that we want the acceleration portion to equal d. This resulted in just deriving the brachistochrone equation like a doof: (total trip t = 2*sqrt(d/a), total dv = 2*sqrt(da)) Throw in the min distance from Kerbin to Eve being 3,668,900km, pick a comfortable acceleration, and there's the dv and burn time. However, that's assuming crazy things like instant re-orientation, and for a = 1m/s, leads to a 22 tonne ion craft I already have around but also a pair of 16.8hr burns. I could just make everything bigger to burn harder for less time, but that could make the lower stages get a bit out of hand. So, we come to realm of having a coasting phase, which highlights the fact that the brachistochrone equation is a special case of a more general equation, and we've just set coast time to zero. As such, instead of d being just a*t2/2, which was convenient, now it's a*ta2/2 + vmaxtcoast where ttotal = ta+tcoast and vmax= roughly(a*ta). I think I can maybe constrain it with a chosen ta -- say, 10hrs (I can handle a pair of 5 hour burns over a weekend), and a vaguely acceptable acceleration rate, say, 1m/s again, for ease. So to solve for the times, we substitute a*ta for vmax and ttotal-ta for tcoast a*ta2/2 + a*ta * (ttotal-ta) = d => (d-a*ta2/2)/a*ta = ttotal-ta => d/a*ta-ta/2 = ttotal - ta => ttotal = d/a*ta + ta/2 This gives us 1m/s2*(36ks)2/2 + 36km/s*(ttotal-36ks) = 648Mm + 36km/s*(ttotal-36ks) = 3668.9Mm => 3020.9Mm/36km/s = ttotal-36ks = 83913.89ks => ttotal = not much more...that kinda gets overwhelmed by coast time...of over 23 thousand hours. I might not've done that right. I blame it being after 2:30. Any thoughts/corrections?

Pop rocks, I'd say. They explode when you eat them. For me it's generally diet dew and whatever munchable is to hand, unless I just had a meal within the last couple of hours.

Hmm, I may have to revamp a certain design, then.

...A 4-way decoupler?

I think there's an EasyMode solution for this involving contracts keeping a list of candidate fulfillers -- contract says get 17 tonnes of ore from Gilly to Duna => once contract's active, check each ship to recieve focus for being on Gilly and having 17+ tonnes of on-board ore => add the ship's craft ID to a datastructure belonging to the contract, and keep a tally of every mining craft on Gilly that does this, as we don't know which one the player will use. => If a mining craft docks with something, those two crafts become one, with a new ID. Update the contract list accordingly. => when a craft on the contract undocks something, that makes a new craft. Check if it has 17+ tonnes of ore and add it to the contract's list. Remove the parent craft from the list if it no longer has enough ore, otherwise, the player could use either one. => As soon as something on the contract's craft list makes Duna orbit, make sure it still has 17+ tonnes of ore on board (no fair converting the supply to get there) and remove the craft from the list or award payout and deactivate the contract as appropriate.

Pretty sure the structural plate wasn't intended for this kind of abuse: Likewise this is a completely unreasonable use case for the little tail fins: Finally, drained mk0 fuel tanks make the lightest structure per unit length, so I've taken to using them in place of girders.

An opportunity was missed to use the back rocket to make that thing run over water like the lizard it resembles.

Nope. I for one like both as well. I'm butt-deep designing a ship meant to brachistochrone from Kerbin to Eve and get a probe safely to the surface as fast as possible, which is both serious planning, a lot of math, and also silly fun. Plus I've at least one craft titled "SPIDERS~!" that dispenses dancing I-beam spiders due to the problems with attaching several of those things to one endpoint.

Yup, by all rights, nukes should have an-off switch for their reactors, a spool-up period where their Isp wanders up from crap to 800, during which you either need radiators to prevent the tank above it from exploding, a trickle of low-efficiency thrust to cool the engine with its fuel. They should be self-cooling while burning, but have a spin-down time after turning the reactors off where you either keep burning at decreasing efficiency to keep them cool, or cut throttle and give some radiators a nice workout. Doesn't one of the interstellar mods do just that? As things stand though, 2 small static radiator panels will cool a nuke on a nearly empty nose adapter tank with infinite fuel to allow an unrealistically long burn to equilibrium without anything exploding.

That's RNG. I'm guessing "Robots Now, Dorothy."

Pics or it doesn't happen regularly.

Subtract 273.16.

I cannot help but read that as "I don't know -- debris?"