Leszek

I just went to a full Tantares install for the first time the day before yesterday, (Before then I culled some parts folders, but since Tantares doesn't use all that much memory I thought what the heck.) this core is now my go to core as well. I use it for upper trans stage's. Really nice core and actually really nice parts in general.

On a related note, I was thinking about the barge and its stability, and it occurred to me that it is located in the horse latitudes. (That is near 30, 60, 90 degrees north and south.) That should make things a bit easier, I wonder why it wasn't noted before. (Or did I miss it?) Update: Wikipedia and NOAA says it is just 30 - 35 north and south but my point still stands.

New launch time: EDT 4:10:40 Tomorrow. Dang weather.

Youtube streaming is up.

From the wrong part of the war, those were later. And yes they used weather balloons in the area. Not used heavily is not the same as not used.

Yes they were. Like I said, the photo was retouched. Source: Scott Harrison The Battle of L.A., 1942 updated latimes.com, March 10, 2011 My Source: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Battle_of_Los_Angeles Though I just pulled this up now, I originally read other articles when I made my post.

After reading about the incident, it seems that a weather balloon is in fact the most likely cause. The balloon itself just started the whole mess, the first aircraft spotted was a balloon. After things erupted it was all just confused from there. The OP's original statement that "that's one tough weather balloon", is misleading as the balloon itself was almost never the target and only the spark that set things off. After that shots were fired at almost anything in the sky including smoke from previous anti aircraft bursts. Reports of groups of planes (not one) were common. The photo linked to is just one incident at one target. The picture itself was retouched by the news paper to improve contrast. (Not that it matters that picture doesn't really show anything.) The OP leaves the impression that it was one object that was the focus of multiple search lights for some time when in fact it was many transient objects spread out over hours.

Lets consult the Air Force Identification chart: Hmm, looks like a weather balloon. Case closed. In reality I can't see anything from that picture. But Americans in WWII were known to be quick on the trigger. Latter in the day after Pearl Harbor, American defenses shot at American Navy planes. In the battle over Europe, US fighter pilots escorting US bombers learned to stay away, once things started heating up American Bombers were notorious for shooting at their own fighter cover. During D-Day, the Allies used the P-38 lightning almost exclusively over the beach landings because the shape was so distinctive. They made sure every gunner in the fleet knew what one looked like. They painted the planes with "D-Day" stripes that were conspicuous. They still lost planes to friendly fire. When war broke out people reported German periscopes all over the place in areas a uboat just wont go. By the time the first 5 German Uboats arrived in operation Drum Beat, US intelligence was swamped with hundreds of false reports every day. (They also had reliable reports but chose to ignore those. Long story.) In this environment, it is not hard to imagine that something as simple as a cloud (mentioned above) or a flock of birds would set the guns a blazen. Disclaimer, I am not bashing Americans here, ALL the combatants during WWII were known for some not so flattering stuff. The British for example liked to bomb their own submarines. At least some of those P-38's during D-Day were probably not shot down by American Friendly fire but someone else's friendly fire. My point is however that Americans where known to be trigger happy, more so than others.

Ever since that experiment my mind has been attuned to gorillas. If you don't understand why this comment exists, that is ok, it just means you are not attuned to gorillas.

There is a bug in KSP where in some rockets on some launch pads get stuck and will not lift off. I normally get around this bug in the very early game by sticking a decoupler under the main engine. This holds the rocket off the pad and the bug is solved. Now you can't do that with the Redstone rocket because it doesn't have a node under the engine. I am not making a feedback suggestion to fix this in the pack because the engine shouldn't need that and when V1.0 comes out it might not be needed at all. Instead I am going to point out how to fix this for those that have this issue. (Like I did.) In the cfg file (make a backup.) there are a lot of lines near the top that start with node_stack... Copy paste this line in there somewhere. node_stack_bottom = 0.0, -1.079288, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1 Here is how mine looked when I finished: node_stack_top = 0.0, 1.079288, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1 node_stack_bottom = 0.0, -1.079288, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1 node_stack_side1 = -1.421125, -0.6045233, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0 node_stack_side2 = 1.421125, -0.6045233, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0 node_stack_side3 = 0.0, -0.6045233, -1.421125, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0 node_stack_side4 = 0.0, -0.6045233, 1.421125, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0 node_symmetry = 4

Heat is just energy. Not wasted energy, just energy. All the big power stations we have are heat engines. Nuclear pile is a source of heat. Burning coal is a source of heat. We already capture and use that heat to make power. A car engine is a heat engine, so why the radiator? That energy that goes into the engine block is waste energy as it doesn't power the motor at all. Can we collect that waste energy? Yes, there have been 6 stroke car engines that inject water into the cylinder. The "waste" heat from the previous combustion cycle turns the water into steam and this expands and pushes the piston down for more energy. Also you can put a Stirling engine on the gas engine block and use the "waste" heat there to power a generator. There are ways to do it. And there are costs associated with those ways and more downsides and other downers in general. Nature is such a pain.

I guess I was a bit myopic, I didn't see the response that I expected and didn't consider all that many reasons why that would be. Still I might just go for a fourth if I can find a way to say the same thing slightly differently again. There are some. I can't remember the name so I can't find the youtube video but there is one that all you need to do is leave it out in the sun and it drives a piston. Just from thermal expansion of the air inside. The problem is, the less temperature differential the less usable heat, the less usable heat the less power available to convert to electricity. Look what I found while trying to find it though. Update: found it, a Stiling Engine

Well you can see the dragon logo in that picture, and you can see the old one in the youtube video above. I didn't notice until you said something. Hmm I like it. vs

And with that I realized that I was using the wrong spelling for brakes. ROFL. oops. Lemme go fix that...

Allow me to be more explicit. Power generators are another name for brakes. (Not really but they can and are used this way in some conditions. See regenerative braing.) Like the brakes on your car. The ones that make you stop. The power output of a generator comes directly from the the kinetic energy that keeps the generator moving. If you take energy out of the system, you have to put that much energy back in to keep the system going. The coils in orbit will be constantly breaking and trying to stop. Any power you put into getting it moving will be at least (actually more that due to imperfect efficiency.) as much as what was generated. You might as well connect this kinetic energy source directly to a generator on earth and save a bunch of steps and power. Any question about sources of power MUST ABSOLUTELY start with where this kinetic energy comes from. The coils in the generator are part of the step after the next step. (The next step is the transmission to the generator.)

That will not work. The power generated comes out of the motion of the rings. You generate 500 mega watts of power you take 500 mega watts of kinetic motion from the ring. (Never mind inefficiencies that just make things worse.) If you have enough solar panels in orbit to generate that kind of power to keep the ring going, then you should just forget the ring and beam the solar power directly to earth. There is no free lunch. Any power generated has to come from somewhere. The ring proposal skips a step. It starts with the power generator, but the power generator doesn't actually create power. It converts kinetic power to electrical power. It is where this kinetic power comes from that is the issue.

The magnets and the coils have to move relative to each other. So you would have to have coils move around the earth. The generation of power will try to slow those coils down so you will need to put energy into moving them. The power you get out of the coils will be less than the energy you need to move them. At that point you might as well have a traditional power station. The reason why we worry about energy in the first place is because it isn't easy to come up with solutions. Everything we have on the table has drawbacks, fossil fuels pollute and have limited supply, nuclear energy is potentially dangerous, wind and solar are sporadic, fusion is still 20 years off for the 4th decade in a row, etc, etc...

I vote for Delta II, the other Delta II mod that I know of has dependencies, and those dependencies have dependencies and I don't have any of them, nor the memory for too many more mods. Atlas SRMs, I have been using the KW rocketry ones, they are the right size and shape and look good on this Atlas. I know that isn't a perfect solution for many people but for what it is worth I am throwing that out there. I think before Atlas SRM's though, the Atlas 1, verniers would be nice. I have been using Beale's waykeeper engines from Tantares LV, they do the job but don't look quite right.

If you have kerbal engineer (Or Mechjeb), you can put more stuff on the top until you have a DV of 4500. This is the required DV for getting into LKO stock. The only gotcha is make sure you have decent TWR. The total tonnage of what you put on top while still having a 1.25 TWR and 4500 DV is the max tonnage to LKO for that lifter.

It has been released, for about 2 weeks now or so.

Telekinesis is the ability to move things with your mind. I think the word being looked for here is telepathic. There is nothing inherently supernatural about telepathy, it is just that we aren't and any claim to the contrary has to run from science and hide in the we can't detect world. (Or quantum world or anything else that the pseudo-scientists think they can hide the notion in.) But if ET's could detect radio waves and use them to communicate they would be telepathic in the spirit of the term. If the goal is to come up with something plausible for telepathy in particular instead of communication by radio waves, then I would go with EM fields. Animals can already detect other animal EM fields, that is how some sharks (IE Hammerhead) hunt. All an animal would have to do is moderate their own EM field for the purpose of communicating.

Having lots of fun. The Atlas V is one of my favorite rockets. I have a model of it on my desktop and I have been building rockets called Atlas V since I got the game last August. It is good to have an Atlas V that actually looks like an Atlas V. More feedback for you: -Main engine gimble. The alpha didn't have it and a look at the config suggest the the release doesn't either. (Haven't had a chance to try it yet, middle of career with alpha's flying all over the place.) I have found that a gibmble of 0.5 works great with this model. Too much more and KSP over corrects and the rocket wobbles when it gets light. -Radial attachment. I can attach radial decouplers to the tank just fine, but I can't stick a second tank on the decoupler. Because of this I can't make an Atlas V heavy. It would be nice if I could.

The effect in general is called autorotation and it is how an autogyro flies. I would Google it for more info. I imagine Wikipedia and youtube would have lots on it as well.

Well if you have the up to date KJR, you can install it again and it shouldn't happen again.

I forgot to mention, make sure it is a new docking or at least not a docking you already tried to undock. I think once you clicked undock with the old KJR you are done. I am not 100% sure as my space station was in many pieces due to this bug and I just restarted my career. If you had KJR and you did update (As opposed to overwriting the latest with another copy of the latest) it then the odds that KJR is the source of the issue is pretty dang close to 100%