tater

There is no possible way a manned mission provides science per dollar gains on probes. That's a flatly rediculous claim. We all like space travel, we all like manned space efforts, but the idea of increased science per dollar is absurd. ISS has returned nearly no science at all, except for human factors in space (a circular argument, as the only reason for that is more people in space). The only good science was an instrument that didn't need humans, but the ISS solar array. Btw, 100 billion is a good benchmark for a manned Mars mission.

How many curiosity rovers could be sent for the same total expense of a manned Mars mission? Also, the man is there for a far shorter time than each rover, possibly on the job over a decade. Compare your example with equal cost spent, and mass delivered/returned but robots. There is no science that cannot be done better by robots. I'm still fine with a manned Mars mission, but any science they do is gravy, it's not about science.

This is flatly untrue, particularly in 2016. You could possibly make this argument successfully in the early 1970s, when our remote capabilities were less capable, but even then, you need to directly compare missions of identical expense. Apollo would have returned more samples unmanned, but with the same level of expense.

I'm all for stunts, my post didn't make a value judgement. None of the reasons for manned spaceflight include "science," however.

Your experience is not remotely unique, and it's not helped by Squad's refusal to give players the data they need to plan missions (though there are mods that help, KER, for example). One suggestion is to send probes. If your first lacks the dv to get the job done, send more propellant next time. In your particular case, can you use the kerbin encounter (perhaps combined with a Mun pass) to put you into a solar orbit that will allow another encounter later?

I could see using this and SSTU as my sole part mods.

Thanks, I think I was under the misunderstanding it had already started, since I am not going to be able to try it as I'm a 2d class hype train rider (non-steam) I read the initial announcement, then stopped paying attention because it doesn't do me any good.

This is looking really beautiful. Great work.

Seems like there should be a thread about how it's playing. It's an open beta (for people who happen to have steam, vs the rest of us), so shouldn't it be OK to show it, or at least talk about it on the forums?

^^^ this underlines the point that manned missions anywhere are a stunt. There is no reason to send people other than to send people.

To add to Torgo's suggestion (and OP's good post), I would suggest small scale and distance changes at the very least. Anyone who has played with rescale mods knows that you can play with everything bumped up 3.2X and easily play with just stock parts. After a short while you forget 1X was even a thing. It need not rescale the whole system, either. It could alter distances between worlds at D=1 to 4X, for example, then randomly change each world's scale by 1 to D-0.1X (this way rescaled planets will never have their SOI overlap, since the planets all scale less than or equal to distances). 4X might go as high as 6X, but I know 6.4X is hard with stock parts. Perhaps difficulty would alter the upper scale limit. Easy = a max of 2X, Normal is a max of 4X, hard is a max of 6X.

Gotcha, and again, I'm using ETT, so I was surprised it worked at all

Question about the tanks. In sandbox they work fine, but in career testing (Engineering Tech Tree) they are not able to change diameter to 3.75m even though I have unlocked a couple of those stock tanks. Presumably it will end up like PP where the tank sizes are tied to the tree.

There is. It's in the admin building as a "strategy."

I had a rover mishap (because real vehicles tumble at low speeds from their gyro all the time ), and I was a very tedious distance from my lander to walk/RCS 20km?). My engineer ended up making it a functional ti-wheel, with some mass moved as a counterweight.

Anything involving government expenditure of money is by definition political. No exceptions. Functionally, that means that even space history must be off limits (wow). In this particular place, we're at least all on the same side of the space at all, vs no space argument, so nitpicking over which particular plans we care for is sort of not a big deal (it's not like there is a vocal contingent of luddites here ).

Minus that competition, no Space Race happens at all, though.

Interesting link. It mentions Nixon's 1971 budget cutting NASA 10%... did his budget even pass? I cannot recall a budget coming out of the WH passing in a long time, so what the WH wants, and what actually happens are not remotely the same. I tried to fond a site that listed Fed budgets by year and source (Congress vs WH) to no avail. While I disagree with the whole shuttle paradigm, I think the NASA budget was bound to be cut anyway.

Yep, there's a mod for that, and it honestly should be stock. Many make claims about all kinds of mods needing to be stock, but KIS/KAS actually allows the kerbals that Squad went to all the trouble to create/animate actually useful, instead of click EVA, click report, click board.

Kennedy would not have gone joint on the Space Race, and the war was his creation. Honestly the proxy war via space is the whole Space Race in a nutshell. Lose that competition, and you lose that funding level. I think that in a real sense JFK's death might have been critical to the program going forward. The country was so shocked by his assassination that the legacy Apollo would provide in no small way helped it along (remember, too, that his assassin was a fellow traveller with the Soviets). As counterfactuals go, JFK not getting killed might actually result in the program ceasing sooner as war costs increase, and then the Apollo 1 fire... As for Shuttle during the Nixon Admin, wasn't it internal NASA pitching it for post-Apollo efforts? The real STS, of course included the nuclear ferry, and space tug, not just shuttle, it was after all supposed to be a system, not a single vehicle. Had the whole thing been done, we might have a different take on what became the Shuttle program.

Munroe is basically stating a proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox. Another would be summed up by... "Don't answer! Don't answer! Don't answer!"

The stuff about the Space Race creating industries that are now "self-sufficient" is in fact nonsense. The contractors for Apollo were---and remain---defense contractors. They have one important customer, the US government. Their next most important customers? Other governments they are allowed to sell stuff to by the biggest customer. Space companies could be self-sufficient, BTW, but the major players are bloated with pork money, they'd be leaner, meaner businesses with just commercial launches to pay the bills---they'd have no choice). As for the other stuff about debt, 2/3 of US federal spending (and a lot of State as well) is "programmatic" spending---the so-called "entitlements." Social programs and direct wealth transfers to any of you outside the US (Social Security (mostly old people retirement), Medicare (old people healthcare), and Medicaid (healthcare for the poor)). So the national debt is a function almost entirely of social programs, not discretionary spending (defense, NASA, etc). Note that the "programmatic" spending is automatic, and bears no relation at all to how much revenue the taxes that exist supposedly to pay for them provide (they would be called a ponzi-scheme if not run by government). Space colonies have no possible net positive return on investment over any meaningful time horizon (if ever). Another rationale needs to be there if someone is gong to do it.

Yeah, I figured since I already had the patch to up the maxablator to 750 for the SC-A-CM, I might as well test it for you. I tried a steep reentry with your SC-A-CM as-is (450), and it made it to 34km (82km circular start, braked to a -600,000 km periapsis). I can mess with the other values as suggested, clearly, but then the stock heat shields will be unaffected. If you add a procedural shield, then that will be fine, as I can build Duna or Eve lander shields using that (vs sticking a stock one on and knowing it is magically bulletproof).

This is again 365 (no SMURFF) with The SC-A-CMX with a stock 2.5 heat shield on the bottom reenters fine from bare LKO with 140 ablator left. From the Mun (~5800 m/s) it (SC-A-CMX with a STOCK heat shield) actually survives with 464 remaining (same periapsis, but it doesn't dwell as long in the atmosphere, hence not as extreme, in stock it's all about dwell time). The SC-A-CM as is, with ablation set to 675 reenters from the Mun just fine. The pod overheats to near destruction with hundreds of ablation left, and ends up safe with 99 ablator left. So right now, current build, upping ablator totally works. I was only seeing the problem with an incredibly shallow entry (82,000m circular to a 20,000m periapsis). A steeper entry might well work fine from LKO. (my testing was to set bare LKO in hyper edit, then reenter using the RCS to move periapsis. I did the same from munar orbit distance).

I had been using stock parts with SMURFF, and had no difficulty with default reentry heat as the stock 2.5m heat shield has 800 ablation (overkill). In previous SSTU versions, all I needed was slightly higher ablator values. Setting reentry heat lower globally means that the stock shields are even more grossly overpowered. I want entry parameters to matter, ideally.