Starman4308

This reminds me of when I bought a new gaming laptop and proceeded to press the button forcing it to stay on the CPU integrated graphics instead of its GTX 660M dedicated graphics. You might also try Ven's Stock Part Revamp for revamped stock part textures (YMMV), and there's this KS3P thing that adds Unity post-processing effects:

Mostly just a couple mass demos: the Saturn 1-Centaur with about 12 tons' payload capacity to Earth escape velocity, in this case sent to add a new crater to the Moon. Still a bit humbled that this, the largest booster yet (well, except for the Saturn 2 below), is... basically just tied with the Delta IV Heavy for GTO payload. The Saturn 2, which substitutes a pair of F-1A engines for the single F-1 and 4x RS-27 of the original Saturn 1. The S-IVB: and if you look in the distance, you can still see the first stage in the distance, almost 5 km away... I've also launched a second Arean Lunar Surveyor probe... but given the difficulties I had with the transfer to Mars, I might need to launch a third.

Unfortunately for the Ariane 6, it's not exactly a great platform to design reusability around. Propulsive retro-fire landing is right out due to the inability to throttle down to anywhere near enough to reasonably consider landing a near-empty booster. Adeline might work, but that would entail a pretty significant redesign of the Ariane 6 first stage.

The GNU GPL is one of those viral licenses. Unless the software owner incorporates the classpath exception*, anybody seeking to use a GNU GPL library must themselves license under GNU GPL. Should Take Two attempt to use a GNU GPL-licensed mod, they're forced either with a copyright violation lawsuit, or KSP becoming free for everyone. *The classpath exception, as I understand it, says "you may link to the library as a whole, but you can't modify it if you do this". Incidentally, this is why I dislike the GNU GPL: I have no problem with open-source software being utilized and expanded upon by businesses. I'd groan if somebody forked something I'd licensed under MIT/BSD and put it in a for-profit, ARR package with nothing on top to justify that ARR license... and gleefully sue them into oblivion if they tried to delete the MIT/BSD license stating where they got that software from originally. I don't buy into the fear and possessiveness that underlies GNU GPL and other anti-commercial licenses. If you tried to do that: fork open-source software, ARR it, sell it, you're pretty much hoping that your customers don't notice the license for the original software and follow it to the original distributor. What would be more realistic for them is to take an open-source software, add to it by adding elements such as a GUI, and ARR the software package while honestly giving credit to the original, open-source software that yours is based on. In any event, if Take Two doesn't want to cause a PR furor, they'll do things transparently and above-board: if they want something in a mod, they'd ask the mod developer for permission even if it's under a permissive license.

It's about Take Two changing stuff. If you want to be confident about what it means: hire a lawyer. Otherwise, I'd just wait and see: while it gives Take Two a lot of latitude, we have no idea what they plan to do with that latitude: companies tend to be very restrictive with their EULAs because people can be very creative about trying to find grey spots and loopholes in those EULAs.

Very important clarification: for contracts, you need to be going the right direction*. If you head north while passing under an orbit going southbound... you're 180 degrees off target. *This is specified by longitude of the ascending node: where your orbit passes the equator going northbound. If you launch north under the equatorial ascending node, or south under the descending node, you're golden. Mix them up, and you're 180 degrees off-target. Note that LAN (Longitude of the Ascending Node) is defined with respect to the fixed sidereal frame of reference, not the rotating frame of reference of Kerbin's surface. You'll also wind up burning slightly west of south/north to cancel out Kerbin's rotation. Personally, I'd launch south, just so I'm not launching over land. There's no in-game reason not to launch north, but I like to play with imagined azimuth restrictions that don't drop used rocket stages on peoples' heads.

Based on my understanding of IP law (and no, I'm not a lawyer), Take Two could: Use screenshots, KSP videos, and other media generated in the KSP program in their own materials, unless you informed Take Two that you rejected the new EULA and then cease to ever again play KSP. This is because the EULA grants them an implicit license to content made with KSP. Ban the use of mods. However, in practice, this would be incredibly difficult to enforce, and I don't think Take Two would try it. Note the precise language: ban the use of mods. KSP is their sandbox; Blender, Visual Studio, etc, are not their sandbox. Depending on license, incorporate mods into KSP or a DLC. Take Two cannot: Seize your mod. Ever. The copyright belongs to you. They cannot stop you from distributing the material. Sure, they could forbid end users from using it via EULA, but you would continue to own and have permission to distribute source code and other media that you generated, so long as you didn't use KSP or other Squad/Take Two tools to generate or distribute that material. Force you to sell the copyright. Now, let me expand a bit on mods and licenses. If a mod is licensed ARR (All Rights Reserved), Take Two cannot touch it. They cannot create derivative works, they cannot incorporate it into their product, etc. They could produce something similar and incorporate it, but they would need to start from scratch. If a mod is licensed with GNU GPL or similar non-commercialization-friendly open-source licenses, they cannot incorporate it into their product without your express permission. If a mod is licensed with MIT, BSD, LGPL, or similar commercialization-friendly open-source licenses, they can incorporate it into their product, distribute it, fork it and sell the fork under ARR, BUT: They would have to incorporate a copy of the MIT/BSD/LGPL license with their product, and they still couldn't forbid you from distributing your mod under that open-source license. So, if tomorrow, they released the Not-Trajectories DLC forked from Trajectories and charged $10 for it, that Not-Trajectories DLC would incorporate a copy of your MIT license, and they would have no right to forbid you distributing Trajectories under MIT. Granted, if they added some feature to Not-Trajectories and licensed it ARR, you wouldn't be able to take Not-Trajectories, put it into Trajectories, and license it MIT; you would have to do your own clean-sheet implementation of that feature.

So, after the success of Apollo 5, two more Apollo missions were planned on the Gimel 2-Apollo stack: Apollo 6, which was to carry veteran engineer Craig Lane, with rookie pilot Joan Hill and scientist Vasily Tsvetnov, and Apollo 7, with veteran scientist Yana Gagarina, rookie pilot Anthony Alvarez, and engineer Stanislav Boyarov. Everything was nominal until this happened: There was no way the other LR-87 was going to last 2 minutes past its rated burn time consuming propellant for both engines, so the decision was made to abort within seconds of LR-87 cutout. This was very disappointing for the brave crew of Apollo 6, but fortunately, the Apollo 7 vehicle was ready, and it took just a week to put them onboard Apollo 7. Within twenty seconds, one of the LR-87 engines on Apollo 7 suffered a loss of performance, and the decision was made to abort. Apollo 8 was intended to be an unmanned test of the higher-performance Apollo-Saturn 1 stack, but with sponsorship deals* on the line, the decision was made to put the Apollo 6 crew onto Apollo 8. It took two months to finish the Apollo 8 hardware, with no realistic opportunity for Apollo 9 before the sponsorship deadlines. *Contracts. In the meantime, however, a Reality Upgrade ensued, and our scientists whispered of things such as "Scatterer" and "RSSVE". A routine communications satellite was the first launch in this new world, launching at dawn from Vandenburg Air Force Base. After that, Apollo 8 was ready. It was found from this mission that the Saturn 1-Apollo stack might just barely be enough for the lunar slingshot for which it was designed, if the launch profile was highly optimized and margins shorn to the bone. Since we do not needlessly risk our astronauts with foolhardy stunts like, say, putting them back into a spacecraft less than a week after a 14G suborbital abort reentry, it was decided that we needed more booster. Where the Saturn 1 uses a single F-1 plus four RS-27 engines, the Saturn 2 uses a pair of upgraded F-1A engines, with an estimated payload of fully 49 tonnes to LEO. As of now, the original Saturn 1-Apollo stack is Apollo B, which will probably not be used for much. Apollo A is intended for operations relatively close to Earth, deleting the RS-27 engines and shortening the F-1 propellant tank to compensate. Still, this is more than enough for low Earth orbit operations. Apollo C will use the Saturn 2 booster, and will be capable of a lunar slingshot. Apollo D will likely use a Centaur third stage to give Apollo enough delta-V for lunar orbital operations. Apollo E is the tentative codename for a lunar lander: design work has not yet started on Apollo E, though it is thought the S-IVB upper stage common to all prior Apollo models can be used for trans-Lunar injection. Voyager IV, very distant from the Sun, also performed a minor course correction maneuver. A multispectral imager has been sent to the Moon on an Agena-E with a STAR SRB for final lunar injection. This 1 tonne SRM is quite high performance for a solid rocket with 290 s-1 of vacuum specific impulse, and is likely to be used on many further small probe launches on the Agena E and Soyuz platforms, so as to avoid requiring the development of a liquid-propellant third stage.

This is intended behavior for MechJeb in career mode. When looking at a tech tree node, you may see a MechJeb upgrade mixed in between the parts. I can't remember offhand which nodes give MechJeb function upgrades.

Thus the Clipper. If we can find a thin spot, it may not be too ridiculous to drill down into Europa's subsurface ocean. If it's hundreds of kilometers thick, good luck. If you see signs protesting that the Earth Clipper doesn't have a lander, it's time to get some sleep.

Let me make this explicitly clear in multiple ways. First, finding life is not the only reason for planetary science. It's just the flashiest. There is a tremendous amount to be learned by studying Europa that has nothing to do about whether or not it has life. Second, the chance of life on Europa is utterly miniscule. The planet's bombarded with radiation, and it's hard to see how fragile early life could have formed without immediately getting blasted to pieces by high-energy radiation from Jupiter. Third, if there is life, it won't be on Europa's surface: it will be deep, deep, deep inside in the hypothesized sub-surface ocean. Fourth, it is not a strict requirement to land to detect life. Methinks you could detect life on Earth from orbit perfectly well. The signs would be much more subtle for the hypothesized and likely microbial life on Europa, but scientists have plenty of experience establishing that certain things they can't see exist. Fifth, we still don't know some very vital things about Europa to support such a landing. How thick the crustal ice is, where good landing sites are, etc. If it's deemed worthwhile to have a followup lander, it will benefit hugely from data from the Europa Clipper.

There's two categories of missions involving parts. The first is a "haul part to X situation" contract, in which case all you need is to have it onboard. What you likely have is the "test part in X situation" contract. For this, you either need to right-click and click "test part", or use staging to activate the engine, mostly likely the latter for engines. And yes, this means hauling the Twin Boar, an engine clearly intended for booster work, all the way to orbit before activating it.

Because it'd be an amazingly expensive thing to try when we don't yet know much about the surface of Europa. You'd need something to propulsively land on Europa's surface, since there's no atmosphere of note, that means Good Old Chemical Rocket Propulsion, which would again be expensive. All on a moon we haven't characterized all that well yet. It does not help that Jupiter's gravity well is enormous, and just braking to match Europa's velocity takes a hefty chunk of delta-V. I agree with the current mission profile: multiple flybys (which helps reduce time spent in Jupiter's tremendous probe-killing magnetosphere), and then consider sending a lander separately, using the data obtained from the Europa Clipper to be much more confident about how to design the lander. Also, you're ignoring everything else the Clipper will be doing in favor of chasing after the utterly minute chance it might have life (and if so, it's probably buried deep inside the ice, where you'd need a really, really capable lander to get at!).

To be fair, KSP's Eve does not model Venus's "oh god sulfuric acid hurricanes" quite properly. Eve is not nearly as bad as the real Venus for probe-murderizing capabilities. It continually amuses me how, back before we measured the temperature of Venus, people thought it might be this awesome beach planet with balmy temperatures... versus now when we know the surface is basically a high-pressure, high-temperature, anoxic incinerator.

The Big Bad Wolf of Phobos, Chapter 2: The Big Bad Wolf of Phobos came to the first little piglet's house. He drew a big breath from his oxygen tank, and then he huffed and he puffed and he blew himself to escape velocity. End of story. And with that: the Arean Lunar Surveyor has reached Phobos with plenty of delta-V: about 2494 m/sec for its AJ10-118F main engine. The AJ-10 is ludicrous overkill in terms of thrust, but 315 s-1 of specific impulse can't be matched by the generic 1 kN thrusters. The Arean Lunar Surveyor's task is not only to observe Phobos and Deimos, however. The HG-55 high-gain antenna used for most Martian missions is insufficient to reach Earth orbit: therefore, it's equipped with not just an HG-55, but also a Pioneer 10/11-class HGA with 20 Gm of range (and 160 W of power draw). And as of typing this, that extended goal has been replaced by a new goal: utilize the 15.2 MJ of battery life and 2485 m/sec of delta-V onboard the probe to manage a Deimos flyby, with solar panels having been removed by the edge of the Stickney crater in a 7 m/sec scrape along the surface. First task is to eject myself from Phobos orbit, where navigation will be easier: I should also be able to extend battery life significantly once the main Pioneer 10/11 20 Gm antenna shuts off and is replaced by the lower-power, 25W HG-55 HGA I'd intended to use to talk to other vessels. As-we're-speaking: I now have almost 6 days of battery remaining after shutting down the high-power HGA. Plenty for a Hohmann transfer and non-trivial studies of Deimos. Approaching Deimos. I think I had something of a bug while approaching: if I wasn't in timewarp, I would be sliding out of position and my approach would dramatically change. It seems to have mostly disappeared after switching back to the space center scene for a bit, though MechJeb is still being... strange. Going to try to land this probe. Wrote an incredibly last-second kOS script, which... failed for some reason or another, so now I'm just going down at 3 m/sec. And, uh, she bounced. Other than that: got a backlog of stuff to catch up on posting. The Mercurial probe made a close pass of Mercury, approaching to within 80 km at 16 km/sec. This one was fairly minimalist: a Ranger 1 core (limiting the probe to 300 kg) with a tiny little hydrazine supply good for about 300 m/sec of correction burns. As you can probably guess, not enough for Mercury orbit insertion. Voyager V made its Moon-Earth flyby, and is now on course to reach Jupiter in a little under three years. The Saturn 1 rocket flew in its full glory, mighty F1 engine and its four consort RS-27 engines at full throttle (not that they can be throttled...). The J-2 engine on the S-IVB upper stage took over, providing the vast bulk of the delta-V for the 33 ton payload. More than the historical Saturn 1 by about 50%, which I think is on account of me throwing an F-1 engine at the problem instead of the historical Cluster's Last Stand of 8 H-1 engines (which evolved into the RS-27 engines I'm using for a bit of extra thrust). Launched Apollo V, with veteran pilot Natalya Tsedleryina in command (who was hired 40 years ago!), along with rookie engineer Thomas Hudson and scientist Valentina Korablyova. I should hire more American astronauts. It's a pain trying to correctly spell these cosmonaut names. A moment before a revert-to-launch, as for some reason my steering went wonky. Most of my controls were unresponsive: I'm wondering if I needed to clear my input locks. Since it appeared to be a bug, I felt it was A-OK to revert. I tried again, and rediscovered just how awful the Apollo C/SM is as a rocket upper stage. The TWR is around 0.4, such that even with a lot of lofting from the Gimel-2 core (to an apogee of 300 km), I needed to pitch up above 30 degrees to circularize. They did, however, complete two contracts, two crew size records, and three crew duration records on their weeklong stay in LEO, with final apogee of around 1000 km. Return was largely uneventful, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean just east of South America. Also got a biome scan of Earth done, completing a pair of sun-synchronous satellite contracts while I was at it.

Guys, I don't think this thread is supposed to be about the cruise missile, but rather the possibility of using a nuclear turbo/ramjet on Venus. I will point out that, to the best of my understanding, chemical turbines could be used on Venus, you'd just need to bring both fuel and oxidizer. You'd lose the free oxidizer that Earth's atmosphere provides, but you still have Venus's atmosphere for inert working fluid, raising specific impulse far beyond what a rocket engine is capable of. You still have to deal with Venus, unfortunately. At low altitude, you have crushing pressure and high temperatures that reduce the effectiveness of rockets and turbines, whereas at high altitudes, you have sulfuric acid hurricanes to deal with. On the upside: you have a nuclear reactor for power, letting you work independent of the Sun, as well as high cruising speeds. Conventional turbojets running on something like MMH/NTO wouldn't have the endurance of a nuclear turbojet, and balloons, even with something like a solar-electric propeller, wouldn't have the speed or night-side capacities of a nuclear-propelled Venus craft.

Is it $2 billion "not-easy"? SpaceX can literally afford to send up multiple Dragons for the sole purpose of testing autonomous rendezvous and docking for the price differential between a pair of Falcon Heavy launches and a single SLS. And that's ignoring the option I'd favor, which is to simply abandon the direct Hohmann transfer and launch it on an EVJ trajectory. Sure, it takes a few more years, but it's an unmanned mission: mission costs don't go up a huge deal because of that.

For all currently finalized payloads that aren't makework for the SLS? They certainly are interchangeable. There's two things that will use the SLS: EM-1 and EM-2, both of which are essentially makework. The third thing that might use the SLS is the Europa Clipper, and the only reason to use an SLS for the Europa Clipper is for a direct Hohmann transfer instead of using a Venus slingshot. Nothing else is funded, and I remain to be convinced that you could come up with some sort of payload that absolutely has to be launched on SLS, instead of (possibly in multiple trips) a much more economical commercial launch vehicle. While orbital assembly is a pain... so is a rocket that costs more than $2 billion to launch, and can maintain an operational tempo of 1 launch/year at absolute best. It's not like the current Orion design is a paragon of extensive capabilities. Too much to waste on LEO, not enough for anything except high lunar orbits which are, once again, makework for SLS/Orion. Were Congress/NASA to get serious about an ambitious manned program that actually does something useful, the capsule might be usable, but they'd have to return to the drawing board for the service module. Were there an actual program to do something useful for which designs have been finalized, payloads constructed, etc, I might agree with just biting the bullet and funding SLS. Right now, however, there is basically only makework at that stage, plus some vague plans that smack of standard Congressional "fund it to keep jobs in my district and then cancel it the moment it'd start to get really expensive".

Please note the time of the last post before posting. The post before yours was almost two years ago. It was topical and relevant at least, but it's generally frowned upon to post in really old threads. On my end: LES, all the time, tested on the pad and in flight before I ever put a Kerbal onboard. I take crew safety seriously.

That... seems contradictory to me. You say "capsule based crew system and separate heavy lift cargo system", but that's not what SLS is: SLS combines the capsule with the heavy lift cargo system to loop back around to one of the Shuttle's problems. It costs money to crew-rate a vehicle, and construction winds up being more expensive because of all the inspections that need to be made. At least in hindsight, what should have been done was a conventional capsule on a medium lift vehicle, ala the Commercial Crew Program, and then if they needed anything fancy like a space station, send that up separately on non-crew-rated and presumably more economically viable HLVs/SHLVs. What really should have been done IMO was to replace the manned space program with much more scientifically valuable and economically efficient unmanned programs, but it's all too often heresy to suggest that maybe we don't need to put astronauts on Mars.

You... could have just looked at engine performance statistics. The KS-25 has better specific impulse from sea level to vacuum, almost identical to slightly better TWR over the same range, and more gimbal: in terms of pure performance, a cluster of 3 KS-25 Vectors will always outperform a pair of Mainsails for the same mass. The primary disadvantage of the KS-25 is that it costs over twice as much per unit mass/thrust: it's not a cheap engine. Because of that, I would prefer Mainsails for first and probably even second stages, with Vectors used for scenarios like Eve ascent, and Space Shuttle analogues that need the Vector's large gimbal range. Or, for that matter, science/sandbox mode where cost is no object.

Ah, good old asparagus pancakes, just the way Mom used to make them. I remember when I was a wee little boy, maintaining a 2.0 TWR for the first 10 km of atmosphere, impatient to get out of the soup. One thing I'd warn people about is that clipping does not protect you from aerodynamic consequences. If you place a fuel tank on the side of your payload and then clip it into the stack, KSP still treats it as though that fuel tank was attached to the side of your payload, with spectacular consequences on drag. Still, with enough delta-V, you can brute-force your way past high drag losses and other inefficiencies caused by not protecting unaerodynamic payloads with a fairing.

First step is to host the screenshot on a 3'rd party website: I personally use Imgur. Then, paste the hyperlink with IMG tags here. The KSP forum doesn't directly host images, mostly because of people like me who post an absurd number of screenshots.

Man. I know what it's like being the "horrible terrifying bug magnet". Some of those bugs originated from when I was still in high school, nevermind working on my PhD. Anyways, on my end: designed my "Saturn 1" rocket to carry the Apollo capsule to a lunar slingshot trajectory. It uses an S-IVB analogous upper stage, and underneath that is an F-1 engine plus four H-1 engines, which should be enough to get the Apollo C/SM into LEO and ready for TLI. Curiously, despite being heavier than the Gimel-6 (which was just barely not enough), the Saturn 1 is cheaper than the Gimel-4: there's a good chance the Saturn 1 will replace the Gimel series as my HLV of choice. It took some doing, but I got Voyager V en-route to Jupiter. I'd severely underestimated the difficulty of an EEJ (Earth-Earth-Jupiter) tranectory, and how crucial the deep-space maneuvers are. It took me two tries to get it right. Very key to all this is that you don't re-encounter Earth two years later: you eject slightly inwards of pure-prograde, and burn retrograde at apohelion to encounter Earth about two years and two months into the mission. If you don't do this, you're not going to get favorable slingshot geometry: you need to be approaching from the Sun, not almost parallel to Earth's orbital track. Curiously, I'm going to get a lunar slingshot when making my Earth slingshot. Not quite this exact geometry: I have a correction burn to make, but still amusing to have gotten the timing so perfect on accident.

The KSP devs would likely appreciate a proper bug report. The more information people have, the easier it is to diagnose issues.