Archgeek

I for one delighted in learning the math. 'Main problem is I can never remember the vis-viva equation so I'm always having to use that dang subway map. But the rocket equation? Used and abused. I used to plan missions on paper or in a text editor at work, doing the math with little more than calc.exe. Eventually that did get tedious and I switched to KER and a spreadsheet, but I still sometimes will do things like use current vessel mass to find remaining delta-v on the fly if I don't have KER up. There's no need to do it all yourself, but it's worthwhile to gain the power to do so, in part for the utility of having the ability, and in part because it makes you more than you were before.

How many is too many? I use keyboard, so I'd say 102-108 buttons should be fine. 128 might be a little much.

*Looks upon towering collection of 1.76 to 3.3 GB KSP game folders from previous versions* *looks back up at post* ... *Looks upon terabyte HD with 330 gigs free* ... HEH. The future is silly.

Yeah, I don't see an option for things I do, like machines for dispersal of dancing I-beam "spiders".

Don't forget Mad Libs, and those trivia game cards arranged around a plastic pivot that'd swiftly get depleted and accidentally memorized.

He could have, but remember, this was a test payload on a machine with a predicted 50% chance of blowing up on the pad (they even took out insurance for the historic launch pad in question) that would typically be just a big chunk of something heavy like a big block of reinforced concrete. I'd be sad to be the student whose lovingly crafted cubesat blew up on the launchpad with an experimental vehicle configuration. An old car with a test space suit and some cameras was just for the lulz.

Oooh, a high-velocity runway, I like it! Does it go careening off the static runway on sep or does it use some chutes to stop itself?

So... no more modding? Because that is literally what modding means. And I find no article or provision anywhere that makes an explicit exception for modding. Curiously enough, most KSP mods don't actually modify the software, per se. The software as-written has a number of little hooks that go out and look for stuff like module manager and other external configs that override or add to some of its own default settings and assets. Mods happen because KSP goes and looks in that happy little magic folder we all drop our mods in and does a bunch of stuff based on what it finds in there. Now if we did stuff like slice parts out of the SQUAD folder and/or plop in our own, or mess with the stock craft, then after that re-distrute the modified folders to others, that'd be modification of the software. I'll admit I'm pretty perplexed by the third and fourth verbs, there, though. Display is weird, and perform?? That's just confusing.

Curses, it seems I utterly missed this. What can be done to invoke that delightful effect manually, short of derping my system calendar? Also, if you think yesterday was bad, I expect Feb 22 2222 to be completely out of hand. Cats everywhere, or possibly ninjas (nin ninnin, ninninninnin), or likely both.

Hey, at least it's not obstructed. Then you couldn't get out to fetch the surface sample mail.

Having watched a stream where it was under test, can confirm that debug menu usage does indeed disable trophies on the PS4 version, save for a few that slipped through (which were bugs, and a dev was watching the stream, so they've likely been patched). I'm not sure access alone is enough to trigger it, and I also don't know if the lock is by craft, save, or some combination of save, craft and state (vehicle operated at any point with any cheat active, any career resources manipulated). It'd be annoying if bringing up aero or thermo data one one craft made the whole save ineligible. I also wonder if reverts or loads to before a cheat was employed might clear the achievement lock by loading a state where it wasn't invoked.

Pah, that's nothing. I can do 1023 on two hands only using base 2!

Nope, the vessels were allowed to drift arbitrarilly, though Set Orbit did seem to set them all at the same starting longitude, so they followed about the same curve of solar exposure. Also, I did check on that, thinking I might need to control for it in some way, but before firing the engines, incoming rad flux was negligable each time. Yup. My old 1.1 thermo test post had an embed, and it is sad and broken.

They used to have a passive radiator module on the "back" surface, before they gave us active radiators. In 1.0 a pair of gigantors could cool a single-nuke ship (probe core, battery, mk1 fuselage, nuke) on infinite fuel to equilibrium. ...I see imgur still doesn't like these forums. Should I present those as a great stonking list of images in a spoiler tag?

Indeed, the test rig is designed to provide an upper limit. If someone has a ship going somewhere, they know the dV, and probably have their TWR, from which they can get their burn time. They compare the number of engines they're using and the burn time in question with the experiment, and find they need an amount of radiative capacity somewhere less than the radiators used in the experiment that came closest to their calculated burn time. I'd agree that, ignoring radiators, or pushing radiators to their limits, a higher TWR is safer -- high burn times let the nukes get really hot, which increases their ability to cool themselves and thus the rest of the ship, but with the internal flux number having doubled, it's not enough to make up for the low-grade heat having time to work its way around the ship and build up in dangerous places. However, when radiators aren't overpowered, the case gets more interesting -- what's superior, more engines at 3 tonnes ea. for lower burn time, or say a large radiator panel three parts up the tree from each engine, letting the engine and the tank its attached to get hot to produce more rad flux, but pulling out heat that gets any further? Or perhaps a medium TCS or two anywhere you like, which will prioritize just about cryogenically cooling sensitive parts followed by making sure nothing explodes (until its overwhelmed, if you don't have enough combined passive and active radiation capacity across the ship)? Or if you're feeling cheeky, popping a couple of Big-S spaceplane tails on the tanks the nukes are attached to, letting them get as hot as they can to passively cool enough for an 11min+ burn? It seems to me the use case is to allow lower-TWR designs to not explode, saving the mass of more engines and thus giving similarly-designed craft more range.

Yup, it's all about getting enough radiative surface area (including the engines themselves) to dissipate the internal heat flux from all of the engines. I remember that having the first thing connected to an engine be a size larger (mk2 tanks for instance) helps deal with immediate effects as well.

Erm, TWR isn't that important, save for needing longer burns. Exhaust gases definitely aren't involved...that 800s Isp means they're ripping out the nozzle at 7848m/s, and no where near your craft's delicate bits for any amount of time. For a heavy, low TWR ship, you're going to burn longer, letting the engines get hotter and make everything else get hotter. A decent time, that. You'd be surprised what kind of passive cooling you can pull off, especially if there's a sizable heat sink to keep it from flowing to sensitive components. Incidentally, I've completed the LV-N portion of those tests!:

After some related discussion earlier this week, I've seen fit to re-do my old 1.1 thermal extremis testing for 1.3.1! This time I've built a fun little testbed of a nuclear engine, an NCS adapter with only 8 units of LF in it, a z200 battery, an OKTO core, another z200 battery, another NCS adapter with minimal fuel, and another LV-N NTR engine; and once again attached various cooling structures to it. I've saved those as new craft, and to save time this time, used the in-game hyperedit to toss them into an 88km orbit. Methodology was again to turn on infinite fuel, burn to an internal temp of 1100K in the probe core, record burn time by comparing MET to MET at start of burn, then cut throttle to see if it can coast cool before the core hits 1200 and explodes. No need to angle burns to avoid escape or anything this time, thanks to the opposing engines. Tested where a two pairs each of Gigantor solar arrays, structural girders, radial intakes, airbrakes, wing strakes, tail fins, delta-deluxe winglets, and Big-S spaceplane tails. As well as a pair of structural fuselages, and Kerbodyne adapters. Getting more serious, I also tested two pairs each of Large, Small, and Edge static radiator panels, and of course small and medium thermal control systems, ending with a pair of large TCS, and as a bonus, a single large TCS. On to the results! Keep in mind these are tests of a tiny, mostly-engine flame satellite with tanks perpetually almost out of fuel, and thus terrible heat sinks. As such, the given times are to be regarded as impossibly extreme lower bounds. Of interest, the total internal flux the LV-N produces seems to've doubled since 1.1. (Also, to explain the odd numbers to any flux-accountants, the active radiators would steal internal flux from the engine. It was indeed producing 14942.53kW for all tests, though.)

Blatantly this. I run on a 9 year old box with a 10 year old 3.1 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and only 4 gigs of RAM. KSP is very forgiving if you've got decent single-core performance. I'd get more than 4 gigs o' ram, though -- I often have to close browsers and things to give it more headroom so windows doesn't start murdering performance paging stuff out to disk.

Thermal analysis forthcoming tonight -- I've already updated the methodology (using stock hyperedit this time to save some time) and whipped up the test designs (stationary opposing nukes). I've thrown in some very stupid passive options this time around, like the kerbodyne adapter, and some girders. As a curious bit of preliminary data, I've noted that the internal flux has gone up a lot from the old value, but I think thermal mass must've gone up along with it, as heating seems...slower.

Indeed, Ions can crack the 100k barrier, if you're patient; and they can crack 60k for under 130 tonnes, or 50k for less than 50 tonnes.

Curiously, it's rather not, relative to what they've already got. Back when they fixed the aero and made nukes LF-only, they also fixed Isp -- Isp used to modify fuel flow, with engines producing constant thrust at any pressure. That was more than a bit wrong. Now, fuel flow is constant, and engine thrust varies with ISp, which varies with pressure, hitting full thrust in Vacuum. So when a nuke's still in atmo and not getting it's full rated 900s, that's actualized by it not getting its full rated 60kN of thrust for the same amount of LF burned. So it turns out if you're running your NTR suboptimally, you'd actually apply less impulse for the same burn time|fuel cost. So since they're already got a system that varies Isp by a pressure curve, we can hook the same code to vary it with NTR core temp. Just have an internal temp that ramps up when you turn the reactor on, have an internal flux that rises alongside it, and have Isp vary from zero to max based on that temperature. The internal flux will blow things up if not dealt with, so there's your need for radiators, and you can set the internal flux to vary from its calculated amount based on core temp to zero as fuel flow varies from 0 to 100% I suppose you would still need to respect the pressure curve, though...perhaps tell that bit that your max Isp is the current core-temp-based one?

I think that was at some point adjusted so that neighbor parts one connection out are also cooled. I'm utterly curious about the skin/internal bit, though. I knew about it, but I hadn't thought about which pool fixed radiators grab heat from. [...] Yup, radiative heat flux goes up with surface area and the fourth power of the temperature in Kelvins. (I remember this made the Rhino nozzle surprisingly capable as a passive radiator -- the whole ship would develop a dull glow, but nothing would explode.) [...] Yeah, it would've been much cooler if we had NTRs where you could switch the core on and off, and had to have radiators to cool the core while it spins up (or hit the throttle and get lower ISp (and thus thrust) from the reduced core temp until it finishes) and when a burn ends (or you could turn the core off and let the fuel chill it down, again at the cost of reduced ISp while the burn tails off). I just love the image of a nuke craft floating placidly in orbit, extending its radiators like sails that start to glow angrily, then doing its burn, after which the radiators flare again before cooling enough to retract.

Maybe, but permanent spells cost XP. And no one wants to give up precious experience points. Especially for something so frivolous as a quickened, silent, stilled, repeatedly-extended-until-about-city-size force cage. You could train an army to at least level 10 with all that exp.

I'd throw stock RealPlume in there under prettification mods, to boot. That exhaust expansion, though.