Jovus

@NathanKell I can't like a post twice.

@The Rocketeer I'm really tempted to reply with a Pulp Fiction reference, but it wouldn't be appropriate for the forum. (In a good way.)

Are we talking about paper rockets, rockets for a 'real' launch company, or rockets for your backyard? It makes a difference. For example, if we're talking about you personally funding a rocket to go to LEO, cost scales are...quite different. (Also, good luck.)

In real life it definitely depends on the shape of the craft and the placement of the antennae; for example, the Shuttle ceased experiencing comms blackout during reentry after the deployment of the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System because the sat was able to contact it from behind based on the Shuttle's shape leaving a hole in the envelope. However, for the game, I'd probably just assume the envelope covers the entire craft. It's part of managing expectations; while it may not be the most realistic, it's easy to communicate to the player and for the player and game to agree on the effect. Or, split the difference: assume the bow shock covers the front 270 degrees of the spacecraft, and if a sat's in the right position, communication can still happen. (Where 'front' is defined by the velocity vector, not spacecraft orientation.) Eyeballing it, I'd go with the former, based on gut feeling, this thread on the Orbiter forums, and the formula roughly half-way down this (rather simplistic) web-page. If it gets to be actually important, I can trawl through scientific journals to see if I can find an answer, but it's not my specialty. Or we could just assume Kerbals have figured out the trick to communicating through the bow shock. (Or, my favorite option, make that a late-tier upgrade.)

I see, I misread. Then my vote's for 'no'.

I'm a little confused why Hubble repair is being thrown around as a case where it would be economical to keep a crew on orbit. Regarding replacement vs. repair, for Hubble, NASA found it economical to devote an astronaut with multiple PhDs to being Hubble's operational and quality assurance expert full-time for ten years (maybe longer; it's been a while since I talked with him). They also found it economical to send this man up to fix the telescope when it had problems, instead of keeping him on-station. (Now that I've put it like that, it highlights another part of why ground instead of orbit: you can't keep people in orbit forever. They need crew rotations, and overlapping expertise. This means more launches and more training than if you just dedicate one guy to it on the ground and send him up if there's a problem.)

Thanks. That's what I thought might be the case, but there was hope to the contrary. I suppose my RSS install will, per usual, be my serious install, and the base will have MKS/NFT for screwing around with.

How well does RO support the Near Future Technologies pack? I've heard conflicting things, all old, but I'd be interested in including NFT in my next run if it's compatible.

Oops, so it is. This is why I usually leave these kinds of threads to the professionals.

Disappointing. Still, better a scrub than an explosion. (Even if the explosion is prettier.)

Well, yeah. I wouldn't be posting for the actual launch only 11 minutes in advance; I'd figure I was too late. But yes, well taken about the phrasing.

Very surprised someone else hasn't beaten me to it. Launch begins in 11 minutes: http://www.ulalaunch.com/webcast.aspx UPDATE: Sept. 16, 2016, 5 p.m. PDT – The launch of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V carrying the WorldView-4 satellite is scheduled for Sunday, Sept. 18 to allow the team additional time to evaluate the cause of the ground leak anomaly experienced during propellant tanking. The launch window opens at 11:30 a.m. PDT.

@Starwaster My understanding of the entomology of the phrase goes through here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oebalus_pugnax That's a joke, not a mistake

Indeed. There are a few ways this might not be a problem, though: The ingredients are inert until combined Atmospheric transmission isn't a vector The thing came from space in the first place In the second case, you still get the problem of your MacGuffin surviving the crash and being introduced to the local environment for X minutes/hours until the cleanup crew can contain it - if they even can.

@linuxgurugamer You should check out the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program and why it was cancelled. Long story short, for large, complex, vital-to-function satellites it's still cheaper to send up an engineer or a spare satellite if there are problems than to keep an engineer on orbit just in case.

A couple potential reasons that fall roughly into the realm of 'economic', though with some overlap elsewhere. We've already mentioned tourism, which is the most plausible to date. Another use: Aldrin cyclers. These aren't strictly stations per se, but they're permanent space-borne installations. Of course, this requires some method of matching velocities which we couldn't just use to plot an intercept, so it sounds like we're in Space Elevator territory here...but there might be a more plausible interface that I'm just not thinking of at the moment. Or maybe this allows us to front-load food/water/space/comfort and only send up tiny rockets to intercept, because they don't have to be man-rated all the way to Mars. More serious suggestion: quarantine. Some disease/device/phenomenon needs study, but it's just too dangerous to study it anywhere on Earth, despite strict quarantine procedures, because the potential downside of a quarantine break is too high. You locate the lab on a space station, and if a containment breach happens the whatever-it-is has to both survive re-entry and have the delta-V to pull it off.

Fair enough, I suppose. That extra work seems a little silly to me, but if that's where your fun is, then go after it.

There's Heat Pumps, by @Starwaster, which has been doing this for a while now. Be aware that it doesn't work if you warp above 100x with the vessel in focus. (Sadly this is a bit of a deal-breaker for me, but if he ever figures out how to remove that limitation, I'll be on this mod faster than stink on rice.)

I'm sure such a mod could be made. If you're using Kerbal Construction Time, what exactly is the benefit you're getting from not recovering the engine, having it in your part inventory, and then re-using it in building another rocket? Depending on your settings it costs some, but that seems right to me: re-usable stages do require some refurbishment.

There was a guy with a cool idea to reform the R&D system with prototyping and gathering flight data; I want to hear more from him.

I actually wouldn't call it cynical, exactly. There are very good reasons to want to retain jobs for aerospace-related fields in your own country rather than letting them drift off and, say, work for the Soviets. But we're skirting the line of the political here. One statistic I've heard from a guy who worked on the STS program, though I can't find his source right at the moment, was that for each Shuttle launch, there were enough people with PhDs working on it that they took up enough floor area to support three Shuttles, and you could have piled them four high. That might be a little off, or even a fair bit off, but the fact that we're even in the same ballpark of magnitude illustrates my point.

The Shuttle was very good at its job. It's job wasn't delivering payloads to space on the cheap; it's job was pretending to deliver payloads to space on the cheap while actually being a jobs retention program for people with aerospace-related degrees. You can tell this, for example, by the fact that the staffing and support requirements were way overstuffed. (Which, incidentally, is actually where most of the expense came in.)

One wonders if this is perhaps a reflection of Roscosmos' funding scheme.

So, funnily enough, it's been noted that enterprise software and gaming software aren't the same. This is true. If a spreadsheet program does math wrong, or a health record program crashes or returns wrong data, it gets fixed and fast, because there are potentially millions or billions of dollars on the line, and part of the agreement of buying a product line is also buying support for that product line. Always is, always has been, always will be. This is why, for example, until IBM picked up Red Hat, Linux was having serious trouble breaking into the corporate market: because if your OS broke, there was nobody's neck on the line for the damage. Fortunately, entertainment software does not follow the same paradigm. I say this is fortunate because we'd never get any if it did. We'd still be playing things volunteers hacked together and disseminated through back channels, explicitly with no claims of support. Games we all know and love are too complicated for that production model, KSP being a prime example. That said, looked at objectively, we do know that often, for games from reputable companies with a list of titles under their belt, there is some expectation of support. If you bought a game from Ubisoft and you simply couldn't play it at all on release day, you'd be up in arms. People would refuse to pay for the game and demand their money back. Complaining that people are doing the same with KSP is counterproductive. Maybe Squad isn't a AAA developer like EA or Ubisoft. But they released on the same platforms, with a game of similar complexity and similar price. Maybe you think holding Squad to the standards of aforementioned large game development companies is unfair. That's fine; that's a perfectly valid viewpoint. I'm partially of that viewpoint myself, frankly. But then, complaining that other people have buyer's remorse and/or plan to vote with their wallets is counterproductive. These people have already had an experience they consider unacceptable, and telling them they're wrong isn't going to fix it. Saying, "You shouldn't feel like that," is the equivalent of saying, "You're playing the game wrong," with the added presumption of putting your hand in the other guy's wallet.

Elon Kerman. For all the obvious reasons. In my save, he was generated without the BadS flag. Soon fixed that mistake.