nhnifong

I agree, two hitchhiker cans is a better value. My mistake :/

This is a stock challenge in which you build a shuttle which can do a bunch of things while trying to make it as light as possible. It is inspired by 700NitroXpress's Versatility Marathon Challenge but with different, and hopefully simpler rules. The goal is to create a single stage shuttle which can deliver a 4 ton approx 2mx2m payload to the surface of any of the following destinations, and return to kerbin Mun, Minmus, Duna, Gilly, Laythe, Bop, or Vall. The suggested payload is a hitchhiker can, or anything else that's close to 4 tons. It must be gently set down on the surface. The shuttle must return to Kerbin and soft-land. It doesn't have to look like the space shuttle and you are not restricted to vertical or horizontal take-off or landing. Do it however you like. That's it! try to demonstrate that you can deliver the payload to one of the planets of your choosing, (or all of them if you have the time). You may refuel the craft using orbital or surface fuel stations. You are encouraged to re-use the craft. Don't be pedantic.

Just for the record, it's Cmd Z on a Mac.

Next time you build a ship. Use struts to connect heavy things to the parachutes.

I had a good one called logbox back when I had an android phone. This was a while ago though. It would generate CSV files and had no limits. It also didn't do any fancy stuff though. You're left to your own ingenuity for that.

Alt-space people have always been a bunch of loonies. As long as they're still a eccentric nerdy billionaires they can be as weird as they want fine with me!

Perhaps the right wing pundits mentioned by OP are actually trying to elicit counter-productive action from the airline industry

The elements formed in a main sequence star are these, H (1) He (2) C (6) O (8) Ne (10) Si (14) Fe (26) What I don't understand is why are they restricted to these? Why don't the elements in between these get formed accidently? And for the elements past Iron, I know that they cannot be formed exothermically, but there's no shortage of energy around, they should be getting formed accidently as well in a heavy star, even if they don't contribute to it's energy production. Why are they not in a simple pattern, such as the Integers, powers of two, or the Fibonacci sequence?

The dv savings of taking off to the east is about 200 m/s I think. That's a nice savings if you do everything perfectly, but it can still be dwarfed by leaving at the wrong time, or having to do an orbital inclination change.

Why can't the black box data just piggyback on the plane's existing satellite link used for the customer wifi connection in low-priority packets?

I would get rid of the speed of light. Hyper-dense states of matter are really interesting, but when you get to a certain density, bam, black hole, party's over.

When I don't understand the point of a mathematical topic, I tend to forget it. So I like to go back and try to understand why the idea was invented and what the context was at the time. Why was it puzzling to the first people who tried to solve it and what was their mathematical background? Doing this has helped to cement many interesting mathematical relationships in my mind. Math is more like history that mathematicians would like to admit. Especially their friggin symbols.

While smaller is better, and you don't want to kill your framerate, there are still a ton of use-cases for struts that I think are under-appreciated. Bracing the ends of your wings to your fuselage makes your plane more responsive (if the control surfaces are connected to the wings), and makes it fly more predictably even when the center of mass moves too far away from the center of lift, because you don't have as much positive feedback in the angle of attack. If you want to see what I mean, try it on the ravenspear mk3. Connecting 3 to 6 struts from a 2m tank directly to the mainsail that is stack-attached to it's bottom allows the forces from the thrust-vectoring feature of the engine to be communicated directly into what is likely one of the most massive single objects on the ship, the center 1st stage fuel tank. Adding these inter-stack struts between every tank in the center stack until no single stack-joint is supporting more than about 10 tons allows you to use a TWR far greater than 3 Gs which is the point at which a lot of non-reinforced stack joints fail for 20 to 50 ton payloads, especially with perturbations from a vectoring engine. Connecting struts from heavy parts directly to any force-bearing docking rings, (for example, in an orbital tug or it's payload) greatly mitigates the instability in a burn for those big ships assembled in orbit. This usually allows you to turn 2x to 4x phys warp back on with no worry. Strutting your parachute to the most massive parts on your craft, including the part it is stack attached to, even if they only weight 0.5t, almost eliminates the risk of parachute-deceleration joint failure. You can now just bring one parachute for most craft, and that's a nice savings considering that they weigh 0.22t and they will be on your payload the whole mission.

I would feel like I'd "mastered" docking when I could hockey stop at the space station and dock in a few seconds.

For the impatient...

It seems that you can already see MAVEN in Eyes On The Solar System. 0_o I wonder how long it's been there. EDIT. the trajectory began at the precise moment MAVEN seperated from centaur. Good Job NASA! Staying on top of your software!

ULA was in charge of that stream, they are focusing on their own vehicle.

Maybe some of our entrepreneuring programmers could write a mod for that which pulls live telemetry data from some nasa page.

Why is the centaur pulsing it's forward translational attitude thrusters?

I wish they'd show us the map view on NASA TV

A Slower Speed Of Light, A game written by the MIT media lab where relativisitc effects form the basis of the gameplay. Algodoo, An awesome little 2D physics game, try to build a high-throughput water pump, it's not as easy as you think. Attack of the Paper Zombies is a nice free game where you try to capture areas and build turrets. If you're up for some even better games, check out the history of the Humble Indie Bundle.

I have played KSP probably 20 hours a week since version 0.13. Here are my 10 commandments for beginners. 1. Work backwards from your final stage to your launcher. This is how they did in the past, and you should do it too. 2. Correct your staging before you launch. 3. Struts are the solution to stability problems, not SAS modules. Add struts all over the place, even between stages and between things that are directly connected to one-another. Seriously, a large ship should be about half struts. 4. Liquid fueled boosters which crossfeed fuel into the main stack are always better than solid boosters. 5. Do not forget batteries, solar panels, rcs fuel, and rcs thrusters. 6. Don't bring more fuel than you need, But especially don't bring less fuel than you need. 7. put a docking port on it, you never know what might happen. 8. Do not point thrusters into other parts, and sepatrons should point mostly upwards and a little bit inwards. 9. Do not be afraid to muck around with the cfg files. 10. Create your own fun Bonus Commandment: Back up EVERYTHING

Burning vertical until the desired altitude and then turning horizontal is the least optimal way to do it. The best way to reach GEO is to perform an ordinary gravity turn, but don't let off the gas until your apoapsis is at 3468.75 km. circularize at apo like any other orbit. The one catch is that if you are launching your first satellite with remotetech, you can't let it get out of view of mission control. So, a slightly suboptimal ascent is needed. Basically you want a compromise between the fully horizontal burn, and the vully vertical burn such that your apoapsis is just above the eastern horizon from the point of view of KSC. That way, you can raise your apo while you have control of the rocket. If you need to fine-tune the phase of the orbit, don't circularize completely, leave your peri down lower so your orbital period is shorter than a kerbin day, then go around a few times until the apo is where you want it and circularize. Or if you want to do the math, figure out exactly what orbital period you need to place your apo correctly in one orbit

The launcher is unnecessary. You can just run the KSP executable.

It's pretty difficult to make a plane without the landing gear part. This was the first plane I made in career mode, right after getting the landing gear part.