Starman4308

1) Most likely, a rehash of the Voyager/Pioneer cargo. If it's not too mass-intensive, something to make it unusual, because as stated, it's hard to make a probe look like anything other than a small asteroid until you get really close. 2) It'd probably need to be a very sturdily built camera; gas giant atmospheric probes have very, very strong atmospheric deeceleration. 3) No comment. 4) Only 80 years away in my newest RP-0 career! There is, however, one crucial factor that will likely prevent this mission from happening: the ice giants. They're more scientifically interesting, they have good transfer windows at about the same time, and they'd draw from the same stock of RTG material as your proposed Haumea probe. I find it unlikely that we'd get both a Haumea probe and ice giant missions at the same time, and frankly, I suspect the ice giants are more scientifically valuable. The pre-decadal study is an excellent survey of that proposed mission. 1) That is not going to survive the harsh environment of space for hundreds of millenia. By the time it's picked up, those "energetic but stable" organic compounds will long since have been destroyed by cosmic radiation. 2) The RTG should be pretty good evidence of that. 3) Somehow, I don't think aliens have seen Star Trek. 4) So, totally unlike the Voyager golden record? That's literally forbidden by the Outer Space Treaty, not to mention that all your goals can be achieved by less inflammatory means... like the U-238 cover over the Voyager golden disk (providing an age estimate), and the fact that a space probe is already high-tech gear.

Death to all tankbutts. In seriousness, like a lot of early engine models, they're harder than they should be to cluster thanks to the upper section of the model, which represents 0% engine and 100% the bottom of the tank above.

The other balance issues with KSP are a bit off topic. As I understand, part of the initial rationale for tiny Kerbin was limitations in single precision floating point arithmetic, such that with the origin point at the center of Kerbin, it had to be fairly small. After Krakensbane, it might've been wise to scale it up a bit... but really not too far. The base game had to be somewhat accessible, and huge rockets with 10-minute ascents do not fit that bill. The current heavy parts are a compromise solution, making up for some lost difficulty caused by underscaled planets. Also, 40 kg capable of full 6-DoF control probe cores would've been amazing in the early years of spaceflight. If you play with RP-0, it takes a bit to reach the "early probe core" at 50 kg, capable of steering a whopping 200 kg.

A lot. A modern, high-performance rocket engine is basically one of the most efficient and powerful turbopumps ever produced, with some other bits attached. I'm exaggerating a bit, but turbopumps are probably the most complicated bit on a modern engine, as they have to feed low-pressure propellant into a very high-pressure combustion chamber (the higher pressure, the better), while being extremely lightweight, reliable, and sometimes throttleable and restartable... in mid-flight.

It's important not to take it as gospel that the BFR/BFS will succeed. The last time people took it as gospel that a revolutionary orbital launch vehicle would work, we got... the Space Shuttle. SpaceX have a decent chance with BFR/BFS, and there's one very important thing SpaceX have going for them: SpaceX has the opportunity to fail. It was evident fairly early on that the Space Shuttle would fail at its goals, but with the entire might of the US behind it, it wasn't allowed to fail before it took decades of NASA funding with it. I'd reserve judgement on whether we see more stainless-steel spaceships until after either SpaceX demonstrates the BFS, or some of their competitors put down a serious effort to build their own stainless-steel vehicles. That seems to be the path of the more well-positioned competitors: neither Blue Origin nor ULA are accelerating their plans to demonstrate partial reusability. They're getting the easier problem down before the much harder challenge of reusable upper stages... rather than building a shuttle upside-down, they're building their vehicles right side up... and then, presumably, looking to improve their partial reuse. If the BFS succeeds... we'll probably see some copycatting, followed by people investigating how to improve on that. I'm honestly a bit surprised it's taken this long for space launch providers to seriously pursue the ULA proposal to eject a pod containing the expensive rocket engines and avionics while leaving the relatively cheap fuel tank to plummet into the sea. Incidentally, Right Side Up is an excellent space-focused alt-history by the same guys who did "Eyes Turned Skywards", possibly the hardest sci-fi story I've ever read.

Graveyard orbits are the best option. You don't want to risk spent fuel reentering Earth's atmosphere. By the time an MEO/HEO orbit decays, the fuel will be pretty much safe, with all the short and mid-duration fission products having decayed. And no, it will not create a new radiation belt. A few puny reactors will not noticeably irradiate the enormous volume of mid to upper Earth orbit. Finally, again, this is about a reactor for power generation, not an NTR. You'd need to completely redesign this reactor for propulsion, since I'm pretty sure it's a Stirling generator design, not a liquid loop.

If I'm recalling Ignition correctly, it was considered, but is just too unstable to deal with for very marginal improvement over standard liquid oxygen.

I recently read an article saying that the Starliner's thrusters have just arrived: am I correct in guessing that these are RCS thrusters for the reentry module, and are mostly intended for attitude control during reentry? http://www.spaceflightinsider.com/organizations/aerojet-rocketdyne/cst-100-starliner-reentry-thrusters-delivered/ It's a dozen MR-104J engines, each of which burns hydrazine producing 440N of thrust; small satellites might use such an engine as their main thruster, whereas for Orion, it's attitude-control thrusters. Probably the biggest use during reentry would be to keep the roll aligned for a lifting reentry.

The list of space-related games is almost without end. Freelancer, Starlancer, Surviving Mars, Astroneer, Elite: Dangerous, Orbiter, No Man's Sky, Homeworld, Mass Effect, Rogue System, Children of a Dead Earth, Tharsis, Interplanetary... all sorts of games in all sorts of genres have a space theme to them. You're going to have to clarify.

So long as you work within legal and ethical limits, you can do whatever research you want. Once you're a tenured professor, you can't even be evicted from your university. You're not guaranteed to get funded, and if you use money from another grant, you may find yourself not getting any new grants from that organization, but in theory, you can study whatever you want so long as there are no ethics rules being broken.

First, what are the issues you're experiencing? The more information, and the more specific information, the easier it is to help you. Second, the two usual culprits when designing your own are: 1) Unstable craft, caused by center-of-pressure (lift and drag) being ahead of center of mass. In this case, add aerodynamic surfaces towards the rear of the craft. 2) Landing gear causing swerving on the runway. Similar thing: enable advanced tweakables, and reduce the friction on forwards gear while increasing friction on rearwards gear.

A few things. First, a bit of nit-picking about this: First, The AI algorithm used to guess whether or not a face corresponds with a homosexual person is a technology, not strictly science. The finding "this AI can identify such" would be the science involved. Second, there's always been at least some responsible censoring in science. Patient data is always scrubbed of names and partially randomized to make it difficult to identify the patient involved. Some scientific papers and presentations released by drug companies are scrubbed of molecular structures if it's to be done before the patent is approved. Third, best guess is their AI would fail pretty spectacularly once applied to "people who don't attend MIT".

Those don't work cleanly with custom tank widths. Though, to some extent, the "dial-a-width" feature is a tad unrealistic, as it's expensive to develop tooling for a given tank diameter.

In addition to the "procedural fairing base", there should be a "procedural interstage fairing": that has a top node of arbitrary height above the center. You hook that up to a central node, either the bare tank bottom or an engine. "Extra Height" specifies the height that the attached fairings should extend above that top node. If you have it attached to the tank's bottom node, usually you can leave this at 0; otherwise, you often have to add extra height equal to the height of the engine. If you're not seeing it in a bit, I'll take a screenshot in the VAB: right now, I'm launching a rocket.

They probably won't need to dogleg. They'll likely launch due-west at the right time of day so that their velocity vector is favorable (and they don't need to have much normal/anti-normal component) when it comes time for the Mars injection burn. Launching into a retrograde orbit means extra delta-V spent getting into orbit, but apparently they did so well keeping the mass low that they can launch from a retrograde parking orbit even with the 401 configuration. EDIT: If they do it even remotely like I do in RSS, they're likely going to be launching in night-time (atypical for transfers outwards) and burning towards Mars on the day side of the planet ~45 minutes later.

On one hand, I'd like to say "This will be the 47'th thread on the same subject, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it"... and point out it's non-trivial to make an effective delta-V calculator. On the other hand, I still disagree with the "vision" of pure trial-and-error gameplay, and think it would be a great addition to have at least a works-most-of-the-time delta-V calculator.

I suspect that unless you are either silly rich or forgiven by SpaceX, you'd wind up filing for bankruptcy and having your pay garnished until the day you die. Though really, there's probably a whole convoy to prevent collisions.

Depends, I think. For certain very common orbits, it may be possible to sweep out several satellites without much delta-V. For sun-synchronous, for example, one might be able to clear out a few, deliberately break into a precessing orbit, sweep some more, etc. While final rendezvous would probably be done on chemical engines, I suspect some high delta-V maneuvers could be done on ions, such as the plane changes/precession maneuvers necessary to hit multiple sun-synchronous orbit planes.

Nukes in space don't work that way. Even if they did work the same as in atmosphere, there's simply too much of space to feasibly nuke it. Anyways, the harpoon thingy seems like a decent proposal to deorbit some of the larger defunct satellites in LEO/MEO (I'm a bit fuzzy on where the boundary between low and middle Earth orbit is). There's some stuff that would otherwise stay up there for centuries to millenia, but which need only a touch of delta-V to put into a swiftly-decaying orbit. The smaller stuff hopefully just decays on its own, or is in a high enough orbit that it's unlikely to pose a navigation hazard.

We're arguing past each other here. You're arguing "a 5 meter stack is unnecessary for an EAV", I'm arguing "that argument about drag makes no sense for something big enough to need a 5m stack", and that it might not be the EAV itself: it might be the booster to get that EAV off Kerbin

The proper comparison is not 1 1.25m part to 1 5m part. The proper comparison is a 5m part to enough 1.25m parts to contain the same amount of propellant. My gut instinct is that unless you're trying a 5 meter pancake, it should help. If you replaced a 5m stack with a quartet of 2.5m stacks of identical height, your cross section is the same... but you have more wetted surface area. If you replaced a 5m stack with a 2.5m stack that is 4x taller, it depends. At supersonic velocities in particular, cross section becomes more important than total wetted surface area, so the reduced surface area of a 5m stack (so long as it's not a pancake) might be less important than its increased cross section. All of this, of course, is subject to the whims of the stock aero model that I don't fully understand.

First, Venera 1 was the first probe to enter Venus's atmosphere... without burning to a crisp, anyways. Even the lunar reentry-rated heatshield got toasty, approaching its heat limits as it slammed into Venus's upper atmosphere at > 10 km/sec. And yes, I had to quickload a few times to get the kOS script (basically: lock to retrograde and retract antenna until speed drops to 190 m/sec). Max G-loading reached 25G. I had a curious effect I've never had with Earth/Kerbin/Gael reentries, where bled speed like mad in upper atmosphere, until velocity dropped so far that G-loading went below 0.5G for a couple minutes until I dipped further into Venus's atmosphere. Kind of a double-reentry thing. The antenna burned off at some point as I hit hotter atmosphere close to Venus's surface. I was more concerned at the time with the fact that I didn't have line-of-sight to Earth... not only meaning no science transferred, but the atmospheric probe contract wasn't fulfilled. The probe body survived down to hit the surface at about 20 m/sec. Without a parachute. Venus's atmosphere is that thick. Second, I launched what I call the He-2 booster (the Hebrew letter He, not helium!) with a customary mass simulator. This is basically an F-1A stuck underneath a closed-cycle NK-43 engine. The NK-43 is one of very few engines I've used that can throttle, in this case all the way down to 50% thrust... which is nice for the last few seconds of its burn, since TWR at SECO is very, very high. I do have a design I called the "Dalet" which looks a bit hilarious: it's the He-2 upper stage flanked by a pair of large SRBs. Unfortunately, non-procedural SRBs seem to be rather expensive in RP-0: the mighty F-1A is cheaper than a 180-ton SRB. Haven't tried the procedural SRBs yet. Voyager 5 flew by the last of the Galilean moons, Europa. Fun facts: NASA plans to send the Europa Clipper mission on multiple flybys of Europa. An orbiter was considered, but it'd actually likely return less valuable data than the planned multiple-flyby. Europa's close enough to Jupiter's colossal magnetosphere to have orbiters fried in short order. This is an issue when even a powerful antenna transmitting to the gigantic radio telescopes of the Deep Space Network have pretty limited bandwidth. Instead, NASA plans to have the Clipper spend most of its time in a distant Jovian apoapsis, transmitting back data from many flybys. It's also what I would consider the smallest of the large moons. Europa is larger than the combined sum of all other known bodies smaller than it: it seems like there's a pretty big gap between Europa and the next largest known body. Also: probable subsurface ocean, possible subterranean life, etc. Europa is a very interesting moon! Voyager III, in orbit of Saturn, flew by another very interesting moon, Titan! This is the only other known body to have liquid oceans (composed of hydrocarbons such as ethane). Additionally, it has a very thick atmosphere: between its low gravity and high atmospheric density, aerodynamic flight should be quite easy. While it looks... boring from orbit due to atmosphere obscuring surface details, it is a very peculiar moon. The Cassini mission deposited the Huygens lander on its surface: as far as I know, this is the only mission to land on a moon not our own. NASA has also recently green-lighted an RTG-powered quadcopter to study Titan's surface. I don't know if it has a laser instrument, but if so, it'll surpass the Curiosity rover in terror: not only a nuclear-powered laser-wielding death robot, but a flying nuclear-powered laser-wielding death robot. At least Curiosity you can outrun! I also unintentionally flew inside the narrow gap between the A and F rings. I generally try to avoid flying through rings, because I'm pretty sure that's realistically instant-probe-death due to all the dust, but I didn't pay close enough attention to the inbound leg of this 55 Mm pass over Saturn. I also noticed near periapsis that Saturn's rings cast shadows on Saturn itself and vice-versa. I should've set HGA to RAM before the A-F gap pass, now that I think about it. One final image, this time near apoapsis: Saturn eclipsing the Sun. Only 15 years until I can see a similar eclipse at periapsis! Other than that: at the next Venus transfer window, I have a lot of stuff ready to go to be absolutely sure I get that atmospheric probe contract. Four copies of Venera 1, a set of 3 relays (launched on the same vehicle), and a biome scanner. Might be a few days, though: tomorrow I'll be installing "Surviving Mars" and trying that game out.

To be fair to Air Force procurement, they're putting the less replaceable and likely more expensive payloads on the rocket with the better reliability record. There may also be other factors such as additional overhead dealing with military and probably-classified payloads, that would expand the cost of the SpaceX launches as well. Cost of the rocket isn't the only factor going into these decisions.

Are you sure? Under a realistic aero model, they should be quite effective due to a low surface area/mass ratio. I haven't played with the stock aero model in a long time: do 5 meter parts just have absurdly large drag cubes out-of-proportion to their actual size or something?

It goes back to the early 20'th century. People in the US were using feet/second for their exhaust velocities, and people using reasonable units were using meters/second. To simplify things, the decided to divide exhaust velocity by the standard gravitational acceleration at Earth's surface, about 32 ft/sec^2 or 9.81 m/sec^2, and instead discuss specific impulse, which is in seconds. So, if you have an engine with a specific impulse of 315 seconds, exhaust velocity is either 10080 ft/sec or 3090 m/sec.