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tater

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  1. tater
    Yeah, there was a show on sat TV I saw in the schedule (I watched only a few minutes of it) last week, Impossible Engineering, about "NASA's rocket to Mars." It was about Orion/SLS. I wanted to throw the remote at the TV. The moon is doable with what we have (and what we had before) in a short time span, well within current budgets. Mars is also doable, and we could probably do it within current budget limitations if NASA could spend money as they chose, not how Congress tells them to. They'd not have built an arbitrary lifter, however (SLS), then worked to figure out how to make a Mars vehicle that fit that launcher, though. They'd have designed a Mars vehicle(s), then designed a launcher ideally suited to that vehicle (still multiple launches, obviously).
  2. tater
    So the trick is that the tank needs the interstage node, and the decoupler needs to be the same diameter as that tank's node (I think). My goal was not just the engine bell in the "hole" of the LF tank, but to make the lander stack less tall/top-heavy. What is the difference between the MFT-A and the MFT-B, aside from the texture? Why do none of the command pods or upper stage (MUS, etc) parts have SAS, and the tanks that do don't have target tracking?
  3. tater
    Yeah, that works, as I posted above. What you cannot do is do the same thing with another tank below (or a different capsule). Actually, you CAN, it's flaky, though. The image I posted of the Duna Descent/Ascent Vehicle showed it can work, but it's literally one of those keep randomly clicking the decoupler to the tank area and maybe it will attach to the tank instead of the engine bell. Whatever it is that allows this workflow: 1. place crew part 2. place engine to crew part 3. place decoupler ring to crew part even though engine is below it 4. place hollow tank to decoupler needs to also work for: 1. place crew part 2. place a tank 3. place engine to tank 4 place decoupler ring to tank (not engine) 5. place hollow tank to decoupler (not engine).
  4. tater
    Yeah, changing the cfg is not a big deal, I know, One thing that needs some work/thought is staging he LF tanks (I posted about this above a ways). So my immediate thought with the LEM engine(s) was to make a LEM. Since the LF tank wouldn't work, I made a 1.25m mono tank, and used the stock little landercan. Now I have an ascent stage. The "hollow" LF tank would fit around it, and I could make a descent stage... except staging would result in it staged high, instead of "fire in the hole."
  5. tater
    The Bigelow hab is the BA-330, the deep space variant is the -DS (they add water tiles all around, not just the sleeping quarters). Bigelow usually quotes a leased price, that's their business model.
  6. tater
    The LMDE runs on Mono, but the LC*-FL tanks are only LFO.
  7. tater
    What is the cost of a BA-330-DS? They usually quote leasing prices. I'd think it would be a bargain-basement item for SLS, as it would be dirt cheap at even a couple billion.
  8. tater
    The whole clicking to do science, then collect points paradigm is a bad one. It would be better to have better designed science, and have as much as possible actually be useful to the player. For example, a scansat-like form of mapping, and have the mapping adjust how far you can zoom in in map view. High enough res imagery, and you can zoom 1:1 in map view to plan landing sites, etc (maybe including the ability to drop markers you can target). Bodies that should have dense clouds, like Eve, could require a radar mapper. Atmospheric data gathering could unlock the ability to accurately plot your path through the atmosphere to allow more accurate landings. I'm sure we could think of others.
  9. tater
    Yeah, sending anything to the Moon (or any other planet) that is not purpose-built is sort of kooky. I think the initial conditions of many m3 of additional propellant are pretty dubious, as the vehicle would be so redesigned that it would make infinitely more sense to just design a vehicle from scratch. I could probably retrofit my Land Rover to become a small aircraft, but it would be more complicated than designing a plane from scratch (and the resultant vehicle would be better in all ways, than my "variant").
  10. tater
    Just put a Clamp-o-tron Sr. on the top of 5, and the bottom of 1 and you're good to go (as long as we are playing legos with real rockets, lol) If you were concerned about safety enough to try and bother with the complicated stack you show, you could just do an EOR/LOR hybrid. 2 launches, the 2d docks the lander to to the transfer/return vehicle. FH is 1 and 5, 2d launch (F9) is the 4 (lander with a crasher stage as the trunk?). This whole exercise is sort of backwards, and reminds me of trying to fit missions to SLS/Orion. You don't build a vehicle, then figure out how to make that work, you pick a mission, then build the best vehicle to do the mission. If you have 40 tons, and your mission would be easy with 50 tons, but incredibly hard with 40, why would you limit yourself to 40?
  11. tater
    It would have slowed things down a lot, honestly. Zond 5 spooked us, for example, so we made Apollo 8 be a circumlunar flight ahead of schedule. The CCCP wasn't anywhere near as far as we were, honestly, and they never had the cash, really. I'm not seeing a huge benefit.
  12. tater
    Musk has a little of Jobs reality distortion field to play with, I think.
  13. tater
    The AF was liquided that ULA did not submit that bid. They pay 800 M$ for on-demand launches, and they expect that ULA at least bid on other stuff, otherwise they'd be paying 800 M$ a year for possibly zero launches, which is absurd. They could buy 2 F9 vehicles every year, "just in case," and have them waiting in a hanger, and pocket nearly 700M/yr. The guy was basically saying their business was a bad investment in a public place, he should of course be expected to leave.
  14. tater
    I could see having a "variant" of a tank part that is in fact a habitat, but that button should only exist in the VAB, and would then make the part purely structural, with no fuel (some volume could be reserved for EC/monoprop/supplies, however). So you'd make Skylab from a tank in the VAB, you'd not use the fuel, then turn it to a habitat.
  15. tater
    Yeah, so D2 lunar has no redundancy at all. Apollo 13 did need to do a burn, but that accident could just as well have happened during a much longer phase of transit, where the return was indeed free. With no secondary or tertiary engines, most any failures would be fatal. NASA certainly wouldn't go for it, that's for sure.
  16. tater
    Good thing they never needed that inefficient mission prof... oh, wait, Apollo 13. Seems like the suggested FH profile is needlessly dangerous, though it looks to be substantially lower in dv requirement (almost half). I suppose as a private venture they could risk whatever they'd like.
  17. tater
    Seems goofy with even a cursory examination. Saturn V delivered 2.6X as much mass to LEO (140,000kg) as Falcon Heavy is supposed to. Pretty much all that mass was sent to the moon, and mass was a huge concern, even with 140 tons to play with. Why would we expect SpaceX to need vastly less mass than Apollo to do the same thing, much less a direct approach instead of LOR?
  18. tater
    The odd thing about the above DDAV vehicle I made was that I could not replicate the decoupler attachment. One UI issue is some of the toggles, IMO. On the engines, you toggle the interstage node, and there it is when you grab a part to attach. The tanks also have this option... and I cannot see if it does anything. In addition, some of the "enable" buttons are confusing. If I see an "enable" button as active/clickable, I assume that whatever it is is disabled right now, and I would hit the button to enable it. If I see the disable button, I assume it is activated, and might need to be disabled. If things are in fact the opposite, then I think the button should not say "enable," but "enabled," and if you click it it then says "disabled." BTW, it might be nice to have a flat-bottomed version of the MUS tank (or at least a non-green texture option for the minimal mount).
  19. tater
    Yeah, the problem is the decoupler, though. On the LC2 and 3, you can mount an engine to the crew compartment, then still attach the decoupler to the pod, instead of the engine. That doesn't work reliably otherwise. The one I got to work (was worried about the buried RCS at the decoupler, and forgot that on rendezvous, that part of the craft would be gone, so later dumped the stock RCS): Ascent:
  20. tater
    I had limited time to test last night, but I was working on a staged lander for Duna using the SC-A capsule as the crew compartment. I've managed to get the LC2/3 parts to work as ascent stages pretty easily, but attaching a decoupler to a tank, leaving an engine also attached to the tank is non-trivial. This is presumably part of the point of the LC*-FL hollow variants, right? I've tried interstage nodes on and off, but I can only seem to get it to work randomly. It's easy with the LC2/3 if you attach the engine to the lander pod, then place a decoupler and that attaches to the pod, not the engine, allowing a single engine, but staged tanks. I've been trying to use the MUS-CB (shortened, and widened, with a fairing to connect), attached to a SC-A-CM as the ascent portion. I was trying for a RD-107X engine cluster attached to that, then a hollow FL part with legs for the descent and landing (alternately also a first ascent stage). What's odd is that I got it to work---once. And cannot replicate it
  21. tater
    The lander is more Altair like.
  22. tater
    I'd go with a close, airless moon of Jupiter or Saturn assuming radiation wasn't an issue, otherwise a distant moon if that would work.
  23. tater
    Mars would be cool to send people to... just because. I'm fine with that. Any science they do is gravy. My only point here is that going to Mars "for science!" isn't a thing. If science is the goal, people are not the tool. If sending people is the goal, then by all means, grab science while they are there, just don't argue that the point is to get more/better science. (I'm not saying you're arguing this, others are).
  24. tater
    He suggests using the mass in the cfg as the multiplier, so it's not even actually using the mass, the part author enters it in the cfg. For USILS compatibility, I'd go with his suggestions, people with issues (like me) can always use different values .
  25. tater
    No. Again, you need to compare apples to apples, not a 3 billion $ rover probe to a 120 B$ manned mission. Include time, as well. A huge new Mars Rover could go much faster, with a sample return mission taking more planning/cost. We could send a few every 2 years for the same budget as a manned program. Sure, people would work faster around a landing site than a rover. But they also leave. If they are equipped with a rover able to travel large distances, that rover could just as well be a robot with extra capability in place of the life support systems and crew, and Mars rovers have managed to substantially outlast their planned lifetimes. You really can't compare extant robot probes to what we could have with the resources required to land even a single geologist on the surface, the budget difference is huge.
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