DBowman

'stay in LEO until it makes economic sense to go else where' - I guess I'm saying that studies in the 70s and 80s thought that time was now ( then... ) and that they could imagine getting funding / investment for 'delivering electrical power'. I think as time goes by natural tech advances will make the 'self replicating factory' smaller and smaller and cheaper and cheaper. As you say already our economy is basically 'a big self replicating factory' (growing seemingly without limit (a or at least intending to expand to the limits)) and eventually it'll be small enough to imagine shipping one 'up stairs'. But why wait? If there is something in space worth selling now then we don't need independent moon based self replicating factories to have significant economic activity in LEO and on Luna, Mars, etc. Once you get the snowball rolling the deltaV economics & material bounty available off Earth would do the rest. Have you read Last and First Men? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men) mind blowingly published in 1930 - among other things the guy was imagining things like quantum dots & meta materials. to paraphrase Heisenberg ( BrBa ) "we are the goo"One other thing I thought of re 'what good is zero gravity'. I don't know much about the real potential contribution to alloying and crystallization / making micro structures - I suspect it's not quite as simple as 'just keep it spinning' and the material will 'think' it's zero G. But maybe one could make very large composite structures in novel ways. Kind of 'spinning' like a spider web carbon fiber & resin composite structures that start out being too weak to support themselves but are built up to the point where they have enough strength and integrity. You might be able to get much better strength per mass from a monolithic 'spun' structure vs something made from molded panels 'glued' together.

For sure that's the 'end game', even if the self replicating factories are only 'us' - but we need an 'opening game' first.

thanks Nathan - hmm so how do I ensure that the appropriate TAC or USI module gets added? is the MODULE:NEEDS[TAC] enough to ensure that it wont get run before TAC is run/present? maybe one 'core' MM.cfg to create my part and two patch MM.cfgs, one for TAC and one for USI, each using :AFTER[MOD] to controll adding the right MODULE?

The only thing I could think of (see earlier) was orbital solar power beamed back to Earth via microwaves. There is an endless and endlessly growing demand for electricity. All the basic science is established and proven. We know how to build all kinds of PV and thermal solar they've done power beaming tests. Economic modeling in the 70s or 80s showed it could be cost competitive. I imagine a 'price on carbon' is going to work in favor of the zero carbon power from space. Making the orbital power generation proposals cost effective involved resource utilization from the Moon, done today it might also involve Mars. That means the proposal creates demand for commodities in Earth orbit, because of the huge Earth deltaV tax Moon & Mars sourcing can be cost competitive. This means the proposal creates the aviation & New World models.

Thanks! I'm hearing the reverb from here.

Had a go at the Tylo SSTO challenge (single stage from orbit to surface to orbit) http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/129691-T-Prize-Single-Stage-Landing-to-Tylo-Orbit-%28SSLTO%29-Challenge-1-0-4 4 Kerbals @ 97.864 ton

I'd like to enter TYLONOL - TYLO Non-staging Orbit Lander 4 Kerbals @ 97.864 ton with MechJeb landing and ascent. Probably you could easily scale it up by 'just duct taping two (three, ...) of them together' - maybe tons per Kerbal is a good 'efficiency' measure? (or tons per score point?) Not suggesting / encouraging you to 'change the rules' but adding an 'efficiency' rank might be interesting.

I wanted to have my MM tweak applied after a couple of other optionally present mods; if they are absent apply it anytime but if either or both of the others are present do it after them. Will this get the right effect: +PART[FuelCell]:AFTER[TACLifeSupport&USILifeSupport] { ... MODULE:NEEDS[TACLifeSupport] {...} MODULE:NEEDS[uSILifeSupport] {...} ... } I searched around a little but it wasn't clear to me that AFTER would 'run' when the specified thing was absent.

Orbital solar + microwaving it down won't contribute to global warming and would allow taking carbon power stations offline, it's a actually a huge win against climate change - remote 'zero impact' renewables. The idea is that the microwaves are not tuned to heat water and are received by an antenna array that outputs electrical power. The microwave transmissions they have in mind would be 'safe enough' to walk around in. The Bond-ian death ray potential is there though, but I imagine it could be 'designed out'. I don't really follow your reasoning. You could replace an existing coal power plant with a microwave receiver array, no need to ship the power via Siberia, or to beam sunlight onto installations - except maybe for some winter solstice 'take that mother nature' demo/festival. A hydrogen economy is a whole separate issue, but it could only be easier with 'too cheap to meter' ( ) space power raining down on us.Also I forgot to add in my OP. Once you have 'something big' going on in earth / lunar space - for example lunar mining/manufacturing & orbital assembly of thousands of square kilometers of mirrors / PV cells etc. then it can be worth taking advantage of deltaV economics. It's deltaV cheaper to get to LEO from Mars or Luna than from Earth. There might be enough convenient water on Luna for shipping to LEO, but maybe not. If you 'exclude setup costs & supply chain length/time' then you can ship water & carbon feed-stocks for plastics - mylar mirrors etc to LEO from Mars cheaper than you can from Earth. Shipping Methane that was converted to plastic in earth orbit would leave hydrogen as a by-product for use as fuel for nuclear thermal rockets. The asteroids might be even better but I've not done any math on them. I recently read about 'light hydrogen gas guns', you could shoot 1000 kg projectiles from Mars to Earth, it actually has heaps of excess deltaV and so could operate way outside of the ideal Hohmann transfer windows. I'm not sure how you'd stop it at the other end... I guess the main thrust is that we know we want and will pay for electrical power, you can make it in orbit, the cheapest way to do that is bringing resources from Luna/Mars/Asteroids. So space solar fills a real immediate need and can motivate a lot of far flung activity.

Orbital Solar Power Stations - avoids 50% losses through atmospheric absorption & 'cosine' / tracking in exchange for have to microwave / laser the power down. Maybe you can avoid a lot of 'night' also. Gerard O'Neill (and others) proposed constructing with lunar sources materials to minimize setup costs.

I did have the intention to also support other LS including USI. I've just not acted on it yet, avoiding thinking about the module manager HAS clauses etc. For USI it looks simple enough - make the super critical water oxidation unit do Mulch -> Slurry and algae arrays -> Supplies. Though I'd want to be careful to preserve USI 'game balance'. Do you know is USI LS part of MKS/OSK? or is it an optional 'mixin'?

Sterile Organic Slurry needs only Waste Water, Waste, & electricity - so it sounds like you are not missing an input. Is it all producing O2, H2O, & food okay? Are the wastes building, or just 'steady but higher than I thought they'd be'? The production is like a pipeline, if you algae array consumption of slurry outpaces the oxidiser unit's output you'd never see much slurry. You could try shutting down your arrays and warping a little to see if slurry builds up. I usually add an extra algae array and oxidiser unit so I can control which part of the pipeline dominates, this lets me 'catch up' after I've spent some days with the arrays folded while escaping an SOI / capturing at a planet. - - - Updated - - - Red represents a system based on an optimistic view of micro-biome productivity; X liters of micro-biome to 'close the cycle'. Green represents a system based on more conservative view; about 10X liters of micro-biome required. Both Red and Green then use their required liters of micro-biome to drive the mass for water and structure to support it in the arrays. I pulled the optimistic/realistic from various sources and I think the reasons underlying them are pretty much what you say plus differing opinions about how much of the resulting bio-mass is 'usable' as food. Apparently various kinds of algae have constituent parts that 'have undesirable effects on the digestive system', and tend to make more protein & fats than we'd want in a diet. The idea is you just pick the one that suits your appetite for 'technical optimism', sort of an easy-mode / hard-mode choice.

thanks Crzyrndm & NathaKell - argh... mach density adjusted thrust

I can see how to get the maxThrust from a ModuleEngines (me.maxThrust), does anyone know how to get 'max thrust at current atmospheric pressure'? I figure I could use the atmosphere curve - I checked that for LV-T45 ASLThurst = maxThrust * curve@1 / curve@0 - so I guess that's one way to do it. Only issue is that ME has atmCurve and atmosphereCurve - and I was kinda hoping there was some utility that already did the work...

New algae strain - high protein, more nutritious than kale, tastes like bacon! http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2015/jul/osu-researchers-discover-unicorn-%E2%80%93-seaweed-tastes-bacon

This one is a real Russian plane: if only they'd combined it with Project Pluto nuclear ramjets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto)

nice! I'd love to know what tools you used and how you did things like panning past the ISS in orbit. I've never made a cinematic, I'd be interesting to hear the perspective of a first timer.

I'm just thinking with all the ingenuity etc that went into stock/regolith (all the integration with scanners etc) it seems a shame if one cannot hook into that. For my example 'water ice in regolith on Duna/Mars' it looks like stock but with a 'modulation' by latitude. Ideally one would want to 'hook in'/'wrap with' a 'modulator' over whatever code object delivers 'resource abundance at lat/lon' - so the rest of the system would think it's using stock but it's using 'modulated stock'. The alternatives look like either build a parallel infrastructure ( regolith redux + scanning etc ) or hack a 'carbuncle' on the side (a 'magic' resource gatherer).

Does anyone know of a good reference for how regolith/stock code works - something that could help figure out how to interoperate / extend it? I was thinking specifically about how to approach latitude dependant resources. I can see how to interrogate the vessel for lat / lon and could sure 'hack' something stand alone, but it would be at least an improvement to have the lat modulate whatever comes out of the regolith/stock 'lookups'. Does the stock resources suck in the Community Resources also and 'present' them via the same api?

After some testing (adding something to stage to 'really activate') it seems OnUpdate() is called always and OnFixedUpdate() only after it's staged.

Here are some numbers for a few of the Hooligan 'inflatable' Envelopes. The envelope GUI shows you (buoyancy - mass) in (what looks to me) 100s of kg. These are approximate kg of lift/buoyancy at Kerbin sea level: 290,000 Cirrus - this managed to lift about 24 ton to 30 km on Eve __7,300 Cirrus 'real lift' _41,800 Una large __5,200 Una small The Unas pack pretty small - small enough to surface mount a string of them along the 'back' of a vehicle. Thats more like what NASA had in mind than my version.

help... I'm just getting to grips with coding a PartModule using Visual Studio Express. I see OnUpdate() getting called but not OnFixedUpdate(). I have 'the same' code in both overridden functions (take some timestamps & a bool 'I've been called'). Another function puts em in a window. I see OnUpdate() being called with a delta time of 0.039-ish, like 25/sec which fits in with GUI update. The OnFixedUpdate 'I've been called' flag stays false, I made the window also show module.isActiveAndEnabled and I see it's true. My part .cfg had physicsSignificance=1, but I also tried 0 and commented out with no 'improvement' - the .cfg has no other Modules in it. The doc I've read seems to say both functions should only be called for 'active' Modules, since OnUpdate() is called I'd expect OnFixedUpdate() to get called also. Any ideas what I'm misunderstanding?

I'd read LV as 'landing vehicle' - but 'launch vehicle' make just as much - or more sense. If you have doubts then maybe it's a good idea to post your plans for the first few launches (day, mass, payload description) so it's clear what you intend.

The way I read the rules that would be fine - as long as you fit into the Kerbin launch constraints (you can put whatever you like on the launcher) and remember the scoring counts 'Kerbal days on Duna'.

Sarbian - a bit off topic - but how impossible/hard/easy is it for another plugin/part module to call some behavior in Mechjeb? e.g. the 'panic' or 'land anywhere'? I'm a developer but only recently started C# and looking at other mode code.