nhnifong

AHHHHHHAhahhahahahahahahaa

It's the winglets doing that to you. They won't have any effect on the moon though. BTW, stick a docking port or a probe core on the top so you can control from there on your decent and you're navball will be oriented properly.

I think you're onto something there falofonos, maybe we could power this thig with a couple of ordinary wind turbines

About the refrigerator, A concept design for a sterling cooler has been designed for a small Venus rover. The working fluid is helium and It is capable of pumping 100 W of heat across the barrier at a cost of 240 W of electrical power. The temperature at the peak of Maxwell Montes is about 380 °C. So in order to achieve a 20° internal habitat temperature, a 360 °C differential must be maintained. The thermal conductivity and the surface area of the habitat will roughly determine the wattage of heat that will be conducted into the habitat at this temperature differential. Let's assume the habitat is a sphere with an outer diameter of 4 meters, insulated with 20 cm of silica aerogel. The thermal conductivity of aerogel is about 0.02 W/(m*K). If I'm doing the math right, then that's 0.02 W/mK * 360 °K / 0.2 m, giving 36 W/m². I believe this is the conductance per square meter. Our habitat has a surface area of 50.26 meters, we have to pump out 1806.36 W of heat. Our heat pump's efficiency is 0.44, so we need a 4112.18 W power source to drive it. I leave it up to you guys to figure out how to make a 4 kW power source on the surface of venus, (well on Maxwell Montes at least)

I'm replying to your first post here. somehow I missed it until you pointed it out. Btw, thanks for the excellent link to NASA's trajectory browser. So, you've got a balloon-suspended ascent rocket waiting at 50km, and the deep space hab waiting in LVO. Wind speeds on venus are in the range of 100 to 300 km/h (I don't know aout the 50 km alt. specifically, but it's probably close). That floating balloon is going to be long gone by the time you attempt to go back to it. You might want to wait for it to go all the way around the planet. Taking a hint from our Eve landings, we could choose a high altitude landing site to save on fuel. Maxwell Montes is 11 km high, and 63° north of the equator. At this latitude, assuming the wind just blows around the planet all the the same direction in all places at 250 km/h, the balloon would make it's way back to it's starting point in only 72 hours. But I think it's actually slower at more northern latitudes, so it might be that the wind takes up to 150 hours to make a circuit around the planet no matter the latitude, the same time it would take at the equator.

But they kept saying "yeah we like to play Kerbal" and "Kerbal is a crazy game" :cringe:

Whenever I reach a safe location, I quicksave, get a drink of water, take a leak, pet the cat, call somebody, etc.

I used to always do that, now I just put the boosters on the right sides of the ship

Me too, the burning question on my mind when 0.17 came out was what the surface of Jool looked like and whether it was liquid.

I took this little ship to Vall It's the smallest Manned ship I've seen, but unmanned could certainly be smaller.

Happy Launching!! nope Trekkete

Does anyone know the ∆V requirement of an LEO to Venus transfer burn? I'm guessing its the same as mars at about 4.5 km/s but I can't find it, also similarly to Earth, ascent to low venus orbit (without balloons) should be about 7 km/s plus 4 or 5 to gravity and drag. that's a total of at least 15 km/s. starting in LEO. We're talking about a vehicle the size of like three Saturn V rockets in orbit

Good luck with your thesis JDP

I really like many of the features of this lander! It sounds pretty heavy though, but nothing a few chemical rockets docked in orbit can't handle. I don't think an ascent engine is worth bringing. For starters we could just try a one way trip. The astronaut(s) would work on the surface until supplies ran out and then painlessly commit suicide. Sounds harsh, but there will certainly be some qualified volunteers anyways, and it offers all the same benefits of a manned mission (except sample return) The nuclear reactor is going to be heavy, and in space, it's going to require some seriously large radiators. Reactors on Earth all use water to cool them, but that's not available in space. The reactor on venus could use the atmosphere for cooling, but since it's very hot to begin with, that's still a huge challenge. I would go with solar for energy. the panels dont need to be as big because of the closeness to the sun down there. But you still need a ton of energy for your refrigerator system. You still need big radiators in space, but at least in the atmosphere of venus you can use a traditional gas exchange refrigerator, it's just going to be inefficient and eat lots of power. Whether sufficient solar energy can be gathered at the surface dictates whether the design will require another energy source. Coating the outer surface of the craft with ~50 micrometers of aluminum oxide (ruby) should be sufficient to protect it from the hot acidic atmosphere. It's clear in the absence of impurities, so you can cover the solar panels in it too. Absolutely no metal must be exposed without being coated in aluminum oxide. On the surface, rather than using an airlock and flexible suits, which introduce many weaknesses where acid can get in and corrode important equipment, ground exploration would be accomplished by driving the entire ship around. The astronauts stay inside at all times. It needs as few moving parts as possible to prevent corrosion. A solid state electrostatic hovercraft which accelerates the dense Venusian atmosphere using charged plates may be possible depending on whether the electrodes can be properly shielded from acid without impairing their functionality.

Here's a bunch of things I've learned for vanilla KSP (I stink with FAR) Construction Center of lift must be around 1 meter behind the center of mass. If you want to attach the rear wheels at the midline leve of the plane, stick them on the sides, then rotate them with one of the wasdqe keys. You can attach the front wheel at the same height by sticking it on the back of the pod in the center and rotating it (clipping turned on obviously) the upshot of this is that it will be completely hidden when it's folded up. Always attach wheels to the most massive objects you can, the extra inertia helps reduce speed wobble on the runway. You almost never need more than two small control surfaces for elevators. place them at the vertical midline of the ship, somewhere at the back. You can place your rudder in the vertical midline of the ship as well if you have two engines by sticking it right between them at the back. It doesn't actually have to be in the airstream. Place control surfaces towards the middle to minimize their force if two is still too much. always use the "turbo" jet and the "ram" intake. The more intakes you have per engine the faster you can go. 1:1 will get you to about 10 km and 500 m/s but 10:1 will get you to 24 km and 2000 m/s. How many intakes you have on your ship just depends on how willing you are to clip them all together or somehow make them all look cool. You can attach anything anywhere by just sticking a cubic octogonal strut on first and them attaching the thing to that. Since intakes create drag, place them behind the center of mass, but not too far or you won't be able to steer at all over 1000 m/s Piloting Take off and climb as steeply as your plane can handle until you see the intake air start dropping off (you should have your resource tab open) unless of course you have fuel to spare and you can't stand how stupid it looks. When your intake air starts dropping, just point 10° over the horizon and hold full throttle until the intake air is around 0.10 per engine (0.07 is the flameout point) You should be going around 1600 m/s now and have an angle of attack less than about 15° from prograde. if not, you're too heavy and you need more wings. At this point throttle down to keep the engines on. For example, if you have 0.04 intake air and two engines, your throttle level should be about 2/7 or about 28%. You will still be accelerating at this point, and if you do it right, you can get your apoapsis out of the atmosphere without using rockets at all. Best to practice this on a one-engine plane. The idea is just nurse the throttle down so it's always just under the flameout point.

I would call this coming close to perfection

Build a profitable kethane mining operation on Duna!

Wow, this changes everything! If I have the name of some star that you found in space engine, and I go to that star on my own computer, it looks the same and has all the same planets Now I just need to figure out how to copy paste in space engine

Thanks for the balancing advice Odin But no Ki term? that leaves you with the avionics nosecone basically, and it can drift off target slowly. definitely not good for planes which need to hold a heading for a while with no attention, or a ship that needs to perform a very long burn.

Suppose two objects enter the SOI of a system from opposite sides. They're moving at just slightly over the escape velocity of the system, but now that these two objects have been added, the mass of the system has increased just enough that the escape velocity has increased above the velocity of the entering objects. They both end up in orbit right?

My greatest achievement was most definitely this

It's tough to orbit lower than about 3km on minimus because of the mountains, but I have performed a maneuver in a hyperbolic orbit over one of the ice lakes at only around 50m I could see my shadow at some points.

It's possible, but not easy, and there is no good reason for you to do it. (besides crashing things, embedding viruses in emails, and setting off alarms lol)

A while ago, there was a thread on the science labs here asking what the deepest possible ocean was, and If I recall somebody worked it out to about 220 km on the surface of any planet with 1G of surface gravity and 1 atmosphere of pressure on top of the water. As the depth increases linearly, the temperature needed to keep it liquid increases exponentially. So, there is an asymtote at about 220 km. Now, if the planet was composed entirely of water, it would obviously have a different depth. A ball of water with a diameter of 440 meters would have considerably less gravity than earth, but without sufficient gravity at the surface, the water would evaporate into space. Furthermore, higher temperatures can support liquid at greater pressures, but would also contribute to evaporation at the surface. Needless to say it's a pretty complex problem to solve.

It's pretty effing hard the first time. bring plenty of rcs fuel and use a nice solid ship with a large pod or two so you can spin it easily. dont try docking some crazy spidery thing the first time, you'd never be able to do it.