Jovus

My proudest moment in KSP was when I docked some OKS parts together by lining them up, then undocking my maneuvering tug off the front and letting them glide together. (I'd forgotten the second docking port on the piece I wanted to add.) So yes. I've done this. However, I don't usually feel it's worth the trouble. Delta V is so easy to come by in KSP.

Can this be used to created the 'roundified' radial tanks that xenon or monoprop come in with stock parts? Or the shapes of the Mk 2 and Mk 3 tanks? If so, can I ask how? I did a cursory check of the thread as well as trying it out in-game and couldn't figure out how. Note that I'm not using Tweakscale. Is that part of the problem?

QA note closed: product working as designed

The answer isn't quite as simple, but it does exist. On the static analysis page of the FAR analysis screen, in the section above all the green (or red) numbers, there are a bunch of readouts. One of them is AoA for level flight (or something like that). You want this to be a reasonable angle instead of an extreme one for all planned flight envelopes. (Reasonable is a broad term that requires judgment and testing, because you just ain't gonna make a plane that requires only 3 degrees while going Mach 2 at 30km.) At a bare minimum you must have this angle lower than the stalling angle as shown in the first screen.

As an attempt to put the political side of things to bed in this thread, I'll point out that Iran already has orbital payload capabilities, albeit not in a manned class. Abstractly, I think it's very cool that Iran has managed to come this far despite all the political and economic pressure to do otherwise. And I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with this launch. (Maybe when I finally get around to an RSS install, I'll use Kerbinside to play as the Iranian Space Agency and see if I can't beat them at the game!) As an aside, do we have any news about the rocket they plan to lift this with?

The easiest way that hasn't been covered so far is to use Hyperedit. Wow. Those things get really hot.

If, in addition to needing to know how much dV you need to get somewhere, you want to know 'how much dV this much fuel is', I recommend downloading and installing Kerbal Engineer Redux, which, among the many other potential functions it has, will give you a dV readout for the craft both in the VAB and in flight.

Eh. Similar effect, but the gradient is disjointed. Oh well. I figured not.

Does Procedural Wings support wings with washout?

Ferram, your mod is turning me into an aerodynamics nut. Shame on you. One question brought up by finding out new things: does FAR model lifting surface interaction like close coupling canards to deflect airflow onto the wing? If so, would I be correct in assuming that the proper way to set this up would be to give the canards some -%AoA? Or am I misunderstanding how that would work? Thanks again for all your help and this truly wonderful mod.

We're not actually disagreeing here. But my question still stands.

Unless I'm grievously wrong, yes you can. You're correct that technically the spacecraft considered as a closed system conserves angular momentum, but if we break it down to the (classical) particle level, that momentum is conserved by spinning up the particles on the brake pads, no? Kinetic energy and momentum in collisions are the same phenomenon considered as a scalar and as a vector respectively. (For proof, read Huygens; he treats mv as a scalar and it is not conserved in all collisions.) Then you dump the excess heat to space using radiators. No doubt you can (classically) model this as imparting momentum to particles in the void. After all, angular momentum and linear momentum can be exchanged; that's how cars work.

One possibility I've been mulling over is desaturation through thermal dumping, i.e. using mild friction to dump angular momentum. Yes, this would inevitably impart some back to the craft, but then you spin the wheel up again. Is this possible, and simply not done because it's not worth the extra weight in brake pads, or because thermal management would be too much of a problem? Or am I missing something?

Aside, what is that truck doing in the background on the crawlerway? Are they normally there?

Nah, see, Kerbals are like sea turtles (cf. green-ness) so they have pinpoint accuracy locators and speedometers in their heads. But they haven't invented books, so their engineers have to re-derive the rocket equation from basic counting every single time they design something to go to space.

My thought when terminating, especially when it comes to sats I put up for contracts, is that I'm handing off control and tracking to someone else. Alright, Kerbodyne; there's your third munar COMSat, now you're responsible for it.

ULX is an acronym for UltraLuminous X-ray source, i.e. an X-ray source that emits with luminosities higher than 10^39 ergs/sec. One of the possible explanations for them is intermediate-mass black holes (black holes with greater than about 500 solar masses but less than 10^5 solar masses, which fits Gargantua). No. Either it's still a hot accretion disk - which, for an IMBH (intermediate mass black hole) means shining in the high-ultraviolet falling off to the low radio at the edges - or it's a cool one, which means frequencies below visible light. The system is illuminated, ergo it is the former. (There will almost certainly be no useful middle ground - see below.) You would be right to point out that high UV wouldn't be that dangerous, but the primary mechanism for X-ray pumping for ULXs that host IMBHs is going to be inverse Compton scattering, which will promote the UV source into hard X-rays. This would continue happening until the disk cooled enough to pass out of the UV/high visible spectrum, after which it dramatically falls off because of the complementary wavelengths of hydrogen. The long and short of it is, if there's enough light from the accretion disk (or a nearby star) to see by, there's enough radiation to turn you to ash.

You're still all missing the biggest problem in the science of the movie, which is that they would have all been dead of radiation the second they popped through the wormhole. Gargantua is quite obviously a ULX.

I happen to agree. Separation of data and code and all that. I'm very glad you did this; I was toying with whitelisting as mentioned above for my personal use with RSS, but never got around to downloading the software that would allow me to compile C#.

Everyone interested in the topic of time in rocket building, whether pro or con, should really just go give KCT a try. Every single difficulty in this thread has been addressed by that mod with a more elegant solution than most of those I've seen proposed here. I'm not saying KCT should be stock, or that you should like it. I'm just saying that everyone who has a stake in whether or not construction time is part of KSP should get some experience of what a well-designed system with that in mind looks like.

Whoa. I just saw this now, and it's exactly what I've always wanted from RemoteTech. Out of curiosity, is the change simply putting 'activate antenna' and 'select target' on the whitelist?

Whoa. Wings so small. How does it lift off? Lifting body effect on the fuselage?

...wow, I'm surprised that people in the field don't know this. The whole creation of special relativity was to give an elegant explanation that negates the need to encrust the laws of electromagnetics with the Lorenze Force Law. ETA: Though I wouldn't say that magnetic fields are in any way nothing but electrical fields themselves. They're definitely caused by the movement of electrical fields, but the movement of a thing is different from the thing itself. (The velocity of your car is not your car.) This is a physically important difference as well in this case, given as magnetic fields do no work.

Ferromagnets are magical. Explanations using classical electrodynamics don't work.

Almost certainly. Real life has even larger problems with part clipping than KSP - it tends to make things explode very violently.