Starman4308

Spuuuuuuutnik! Spuuuuuuutnik! And all on just 3 tech tree nodes in RP-0, with the level 1 launchpad, and Test Flight not liking me. Or possibly liking me, with a bit of tough love. The final iteration of the Sputnik design, after two prior attempts, was a 7-stage monster, launched on 9/13/1953. First stage was a pair of RD-100 engines, three fins, and a 717 kg procedural avionics core to provide full control and SAS. This went as planned. The second stage was 6 early AJ-10 engines. The piloting became a little trickier, since I no longer had SAS, meaning I had to keep it stable manually. Then Test Flight decides I didn't need all six engines, and the piloting goes from "slightly annoying" to the trickiest rocket flight I've ever managed. No SAS, asymmetric thrust, still in some atmosphere, oh, and I need to keep the nose up to keep my apogee increasing. I apologize for the lack of screenshots. I was busy flying a rocket which was supposed to have six functional engines. The third stage was a trio of AJ-10s. This, at least, performed nominally, even if I had to keep the nose up (still manually!) past 30 degrees, because I think I lost more vertical velocity than planned from the engine out. The fourth stage was by far the most complicated one. The primary engine was a single AJ-10, plus a ring of 12 nitrous oxide control thrusters, plus a 600kg A4 guidance core. This carried me to an apogee of ~172 km, with a 1 minute coast to apogee. That was a very busy minute. I had only relatively weak attitude control thrusters to point the rocket at the horizon and spin it up in preparation for stages 5-7, something that probably would've been easier with a bit of SAS. Since this stage had the last active control unit (the A4 telemetry unit), I needed to be very careful to set up the next stages to get me into orbit. Once spun up: Burn, Baby, BURN! Once in orbit, Sputnik transmitted for four hours. The final rocket had cost 3197 funds and massed 39.167 tons on the pad (very close to the 40-ton limit). I also had no idea at the time you could fit the 3x-Baby Sergeant motor inside the 11x-Baby Sergeant, so I probably could've gotten away with a shorter, lighter fairing. In general, I've noticed that when launching with ridiculously primitive rockets (using just three tech nodes): Avionics are absurdly heavy. 1.377 tons of that 40-ton rocket was just avionics. Even second-generation avionics are a huge improvement: the Thor core masses just 200 kg, has SAS, and has a mass limit of 65 tons (vs. the 20 tons of each of my first-generation cores). First-generation liquid-fueled engines don't have very long rated burn times: the RD-100s were at 70 seconds, and the AJ-10s were at 115 seconds. My original, pre-Test Flight design had just two AJ-10 stages with a total of 5 engines; the burn time limits imposed by Test Flight meant I had to go with three AJ-10 stages with a total of 10 engines. One of which failed. FOR THE LAST TIME! Much like the other AJ-10s, which succeeded for the last time, because I sure didn't have any recovery system on any stage of that booster. Also, while upper stage engines don't improve that spectacularly, first-stage booster engines make a radical improvement. The RD-100 to RD-108, for example, goes from an ISP of 237 to 308, and TWR from 35 to 73. Finally, I need a bit more in the way of control thrusters than I first thought. With more advanced technology (that I've had for a while, I just wanted to get Sputnik up first), I'm now building my first proper booster, one I'm calling an R6-Able. The upper stage has an Able control unit, control thrusters, and an AJ10-104D, burning through 1.94 tons of UDMH and IRFNA-III in 150.6 seconds. The lower stage has a Thor control unit, and a first-generation RD108 engine, burning 27.5 tons of kerosene, oxygen, and HTP in 109 seconds. My estimate at this time is that this significantly cheaper booster, with two (rather than 7!) stages, will be able to lift 250 kg payloads to LEO, a vast improvement over the Sputnik launcher, that got 12 kg of non-launch-essential equipment to orbit (plus 63 kg of sounding rocket core and burned-out Baby Sergeant). My second proper booster will likely be called R6B-Able, with the sole difference being an elongated first-stage tank. The original design will be tearing off the pad at 1.8G, mostly because the 40-ton launchpad limit means I can't stuff even more propellant onboard. The third, I'm guessing, will probably be called the R7-Able, pulling off a proper Korolev cross, possibly with an option for an expanded 2-engine upper.

Because you are harming another person, that's why. My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins. This applies just as much to speech as to physical actions. Not all speech is protected. You cannot shout fire in a crowded theater. You cannot incite to immediate violence. You cannot defame somebody with untrue statements. So yes, we can tell you how you should go about certain things.

Have you ever heard of "innocent until proven guilty"? The way this thread was opened was essentially libel if you are incorrect, making a false statement that harms the reputation of the defamed party. You do not accuse people and drum up a call to arms until you are very certain. You can ask for an investigation, preferably in private, without publicly denouncing somebody.

This did not seem to be the tone of the thread you created. You could have either PMed a Squad team member (or asked a moderator to do it for you), or opened a thread titled something like "Flyout video game appears similar to KSP: anybody know more?" Instead, you jumped straight to accusing the game's developers, and called for "everybody to report".

I don't think this should be turned into a witch-hunt against one person's bookmarks. Otherwise, while it's possible Flyout is engaging in underhanded marketing tactics, I still see a lot of subtle differences that suggest a fair chunk of work that could not have come from KSP. First, the custom jet engine editor: KSP has nothing like that. KSP has parts called jet engines that operate on pre-determined altitude and speed curves. Flyout looks like it'll have full thermodynamic modeling of jet engine performance, allowing for reasonably accurate reproduction of performance even in bizarre environments. Second, there's clearly been a lot more focus on procedural parts such as wings. While they might have taken inspiration from some of the procedural part mods for KSP, one thing to note is that these mods are coded to work with KSP API, not the Flyout game. I also haven't seen any sort of orbital planning map, and in the short rocket segment, I don't think I saw a specific staging button or a lot of the other UI elements that would be required for an effective rocketry simulator. I do, however, see a lot of UI elements for aircraft. Honestly, this seems to me more to be a BD Armory player's dream, with a heavy focus on aircraft, some weaponry built into the game, and rockets as maybe an afterthought.

500 kg for the escape tower and oh wait. I do not find it plausible that you could safely launch a man to orbit with a 500 kg payload limit. The Mercury capsule was 1355 kg, of which 272 kg was just the heat shield. You can't really make a capsule smaller than Mercury; you might make it somewhat lighter with higher-performance thrusters and miniaturized electronics, but you're not going to make the heatshield much lighter than that.

One thing to be entirely clear on here. It can play virtually identically without infringing a single copyright. So long as they can show they wrote all their own code, and generated all their own assets, without copying anything from KSP, they're in the clear. Copyright only deals with outright copying or creation of derivative works, and says absolutely nothing about creation of similar works. Nothing in these videos demonstrates any direct copying of code or assets. While in theory they might have copied KSP code, that would be rather easy to show the moment Take Two sued them. Nothing I've seen is something they could not have just done themselves. The similarities I have seen also would not fall under: Patents. While "is kind of similar" would infringe on a patent, "space sim" is not a patentable idea. Trademark: Unless the developers put a Squad/KSP/Take Two logo into their game, it would not fall under this either. Trade dress: Does not appear to be applicable, not unless they designed packaging to be similar to KSP packaging, which would raise the question of "who even distributes physical discs anymore?" Trade secret: If any of Squad's trade secrets were violated, this would also violate copyright, since they would have to be copying KSP code or assets.

On the original Kraken, the bugfix (coordinate system recentering) was publicly announced, and you can't exactly copyright an idea. There's also the issue that you don't even know if they made the same changes Squad made. For example, they might still be running a global coordinate system, and hiding the issues via double precision until they implement their own fix. There is no credible evidence I've seen to suggest they stole more than ideas.

Yes. A new game running on Unity. So very suspicious. It's not like Unity is a wildly popular free game engine or anything. And the second step should be "look into it, maybe ask around", not "make a public accusation with the most hysteria-inducing title you can find".

If you can show code or assets were directly copied or derived from KSP or mods with non-permitting licenses, then it is copyright infringement. I doubt this is the case, since either Squad, Take Two, or possibly Valve would have sent a cease and desist by now. I'll have to look into that game anyways, since mention of elements like double precision coordinates suggest they're doing some things right straight out of the gate.

So, I think I'll snipe the leaderboard whilst I can. I fully expect to be displaced. The Sputnik-4 costed 3,196.47 funds. The payload placed into orbit masses 78 kilograms of which 12 kg (antenna, extra battery, thermometer, barometer) was not needed for ascent. The first stage is a pair of RD-100 engines, plus 767kg of procedural avionics. The second stage is 6x early AJ-10s, of which one suffered a Test Flight-induced malfunction. Third stage is 3x early AJ-10s. The fourth stage is the last controlled stage, with a single AJ-10, an A-4 guidance unit (600 kg, no SAS, which made the second stage failure really interesting to fly with), and 12 44.8N nitrous oxide thrusters with 26.48 kg of nitrous oxide to play with. Shamelessly stealing a good idea from the Juno 1 launcher, after 4'th stage burnout, during coast to apoapsis, I lined up with the horizon, span up on the nitrous oxide thrusters, and fired 3 Baby Sergeant stages, also shamelessly stolen from the Juno 1. While my score will likely turn out to be atrocious, I'm still proud of this rocket: my first* orbital launch in RP-0, with a 40-ton mass limit, and only three** tech tree nodes used: Start, Early Orbital Rocketry, and Early Construction. *There was a prior, similar launch before I had Test Flight installed, that was in an unstable 132x1100 km orbit. That one had one fewer AJ-10 stage, but burned many stages longer than rated burn time. **I also had Supersonic Flight researched at the time of design, but I didn't use any parts from it. I think the preliminary design didn't even use the default-type fuel tanks from Early Construction. Score: Either 40.980 funds/kilogram (full orbital payload) or 266.3725 funds/kilogram (only parts unnecessary for ascent)

First off: welcome to Rocket Science: The Video Game. Second, the very quick version: Find the vessels' ORBIT nodes. SMA should be identical. This is the most important thing, since orbital period (how long it takes to complete one orbit) is a function only of SMA. ECC should be very low but preferably not exactly zero. INC should be either identical or close to identical, close to 0 for equatorial, close to 90 for polar. LPE should be identical. LAN should be identical. MNA should be: 0 for one relay, 2.0944 for the second, and 4.1888 for the third EPH should be identical. REF should be identical, and presumably refers to Duna. Third, the rocket scientist's version. A typical orbit, such as the Moon around the Earth, is just one kind of orbit, called an elliptical orbit. There are also circular orbits (a special case of elliptical), hyperbolic (an escape trajectory), and parabolic (a special case of an escape trajectory). An elliptical orbit is an ellipse (an oval), in a plane, with one focus of the ellipse at the body that you are orbiting around. The oval is defined by the semi-major axis (which specifies 1/2 of its length along its long axis), and its eccentricity (how oval vs. circular it is). Semi-major axis is equal to (1/2 * (Pe + Ap)), where periapsis and apoapsis are measured from the center of the orbited body, not its surface. This, by the way, is the only orbital element necessary to calculate orbital period (how long each orbit takes). Eccentricity is equal to ((Ap - Pe) / (Ap + Pe)) for an elliptical orbit. A perfectly circular orbit has an eccentricity of 0, though that might give KSP a fit because of the other orbital elements that depend on periapsis. The plane of the orbit is defined by inclination (how tilted it is with respect to the orbited body's equator) and longitude of the ascending node (at what point it crosses the equator going up). Inclination varies from 0 to 180 degrees, with 0 being an equatorial prograde orbit, 90 being exactly polar, and 180 being retrograde equatorial. Longitude of the ascending node is defined with respect to the First Point of Aries, which for KSP, is an arbitrarily chosen point in the skybox. How the oval is oriented with respect to the plane of the orbit is defined by the longitude of periapsis (in the save file) or argument of periapsis (if using Hyperedit). Longitude of periapsis is where your periapsis is with respect to the First Point of Aries, while argument of periapsis is the angle from the ascending node to periapsis. If you're wondering what that means: you could imagine an orbit where periapsis is close to the equator, close to the poles, etc: this is what LPE/AOP represent. These five define the track of the orbit... but not where a vessel is in that orbit. That is usually defined with two parameters: epoch (an arbitrary point in time), and mean anomaly at epoch. Mean anomaly is related to the angle between periapsis and your current point in the orbit, and mean anomaly at epoch is "what was the value of mean anomaly at that arbitrary point in time". Incidentally, the exact angle between periapsis and your current point in the orbit is true anomaly, and is exactly equal to mean anomaly for a circular orbit, but is more complicated to deal with for elliptical orbits.

A quick point of clarification: what did you mean by disposal orbit? I was including "orbit that ends inside a gas giant", and not just graveyard orbits that would theoretically be stable for a long time... but are hard to achieve sometimes without a lot of delta V.

The question is, what's going to give out first: The power supply The antenna The hydrazine supply (to keep the antenna oriented at Earth) The attitude thrusters (again, pointing the antenna at Earth) The electronics Funding for the mission crew You don't want any of those to happen before you've put the probe into a disposal orbit to avoid even the slightest chance of contaminating possible life-bearing moons. Mission extensions such as the multiple reprieves Cassini got were because the equipment was still in good condition and there was still enough maneuvering fuel. Juno isn't going to get that luxury: each time it passes by Jupiter, its electronics get more and more fried by Jupiter's immense magnetic field.

Regardless of whether you're going suborbital or fully orbital, you still want to make a gravity turn to minimize aerodynamic and gravity losses, turning slightly towards your destination soon after launch and just following your prograde marker. For suborbital trips, you probably want a relatively steep profile, meaning a small, relatively late gravity turn, giving you a fairly high arc. While in practice you're probably going to need to make at least small corrections, ideally from launch to burnout is one smooth arc placing you where you want to go.

In theory, it could be that you're trying to go retrograde and getting hit by the loss of rotation from KSC. In practice, I suspect you were just first time lucky with the ascent profile, hitting it dead-on while not quite managing it the second time around. There are a few things you can try: Refine your gravity turn: try turning more or less steeply until you have a good handle on what maximizes distance. Add more delta-V: once you can hit orbit, you can hit any biome fairly easily on the deorbit. Add some aerodynamic control surfaces to glide to the target, instead of a purely ballistic trajectory.

I'm not sure that's necessarily practical. Launch vehicles are used for a short time and recovered, with refurbishment and repair fairly frequently. Probes are out there often for decades. Their RTGs decay, their electronics and sensors decay; after a typical mission is complete after 10-20 years of active use, there's not really much that would be worth salvaging. There are cars here on Earth that aren't kept running that long.

So, many achievements in space in the span mid-1951 to my current game clock of November 1952. Previous record of 1.16 Mm was surpassed at 5.6 km/sec by Shockwave VI, to a total altitude of 4.4 Mm! To propel this massive 40 ton rocket to space, for the first time we utilized radial staging, with a pair of RD-100 engines flanking the core A-4 engine. The second stage uses a full 7 Aerobee sustainers, with the final stage carrying a single Aerobee. Engineers responsible for under-engined Shockwave V have been sent to Alaska to attend remedial courses on rocket science and the Oberth effect, funded out of their paychecks. We subsequently sent Kerbals into space on the Bad Idea Terrific Spaceship I, propelled first by a cluster of SRMs and then the throttleable XLR11 motor: This was additionally evolved into the Bad Idea II Awesomer Spaceship II, which sent brave Valentina to 200 km above Earth's surface. Rumors that the manned space program are on hold for "unacceptably high G-forces sending Valentina to the ER on recovery" are patently false. Now smile for the cameras Valentina! The greatest achievement has been the Sputnik I satellite, which orbited the Earth several times before decaying to a too-low perigee of 132 km. Sputnik II will use a higher launch trajectory and stronger RCS thrusters to permit more closely aligning with the horizon before firing the SRM stages; setup prior to the initial attempt was rushed, and no course corrections were possible with the unguided final SRM stages. Rumors that this has been delayed due to a recent Reality Upgrade are utterly unfounded. Now, out of psuedo-RP land: to help out practicing launch profiles, I downloaded the flight simulation mod Test Flight. Those familiar with Test Flight are probably either scratching their heads, or are seeing exactly where this is going. To fulfill a sounding rocket contract, I launched another Shockwave VI out of a secondary base in Palmach instead of KSC. It suddenly veered to one side, and then semi-stabilized, and I was scratching my head, and then the core A-4 went out, so I checked the F3 log. It was at this point that I discovered Test Flight is a part failure simulation mod, not a mod to simulate test flights. Basically every one of my designs up to this point had liquid engines running sometimes beyond twice their rated duration, leading to inability to replicate my prior efforts. My second launch of my original Sputnik design was the one that tipped me off to not just the random part failures, but also the rated burn time issues. I still want to get a satellite to orbit on equipment from the first three nodes only, so Sputnik II is being redesigned with the rated burn lengths in mind... which has converted the already-6-stage launcher into a 7-stage monster, with 2 RD-100 engines on the first stage, 10x AJ-10 engines in stages 2-4, and 15x Baby Sergeant motors in stages 5-7.

The monopropellant is probably the thixotropic VLM (Viscous Liquid Monopropellant) monopropellant they've helped develop with DARPA and ONR. From skimming the patent, it looks like it's a APCP-like solid suspended in a silicone carrier fluid*. If they did get that to work anywhere near the performance of solid APCP, it's a pretty spectacular monopropellant. Relative to hydrazine, it would have high density, high specific impulse, and low toxicity. *Quoted from the patent: "The VLM mixture of claim 1 comprising 28.4% by mass polydimethylsiloxane, 0.6% by mass castor oil derivative, 1% by mass Amidomethicone, 10% by mass aluminium powder, and 60% by mass ammonium perchlorate" https://www.google.com/patents/US20120234196 The major question is how much they may have lost formulating VLM. I don't know what silicon tends to go out as, but that's got to be killer on the mean exhaust molecular mass. I believe research into thixotropics and other suspensions has been going for a very long time (it's old enough to be mentioned in Ignition!), with issues including the solids falling out of suspension, gels solidifying, etc. Kudos to Rocket Lab helping turn this into a reality. Other possible "green" monopropellants: nitrous oxide, hydrogen peroxide, and AF-M315E, though AF-M315E is unlikely (too recent a development). I'm not surprised that they would have gone this route for Electron. They don't have much payload capacity to spare, which tends to militate against bipropellants, and hydrazine is awfully toxic, not something you want to be working with if you want to launch rockets at a mere $5 million a pop. I'd love to get some information on the specific impulse available.

In some cases, particularly Jool, you can also use repeated slingshots to bleed off velocity.

First, in my 3.2x GPP save, I imagine a certain Kerbal is very thankful my rescue vehicles are stupidly over-engineered... because I went to the wrong moon, only realizing my mistake as I was refining my Ceti intercept. That Ceti intercept was changed to a trans-lunar slingshot to remain within Gael SOI, followed by some finagling to get a relatively cheap Iota intercept. Unfortunately I didn't take many screenshots of it, but because of it being stupidly overengineered, I still got home with probably ~1500 m/sec of delta-V. Second, tonight has been mostly RP-0, and I do not regret it. While my initial efforts were less impressive than hoped for (I didn't realize just how terrible the full:empty ratio is on those early SRMs), Shockwave III with an Aerobee sustainer cracked into upper atmosphere: Shockwave 4 breached the Karman line (if not the 140 km space limit) with a stupidly overbuilt Aerobee/V-4 sounding rocket. It had the delta-V to hit space easily, but I tilted it 5 degrees east on the pad, underestimating how much that would depress the trajectory. Breaching the 140 km space boundary was supposed to be the job of a second Shockwave IV that was pointed straight up, but that job got sniped by a secondary mission that was supposed to carry a biological sample... to high atmosphere... not into space. This, of course, required building a second copy of that mission to get the biological sample from high atmosphere research. The second Shockwave IV very thoroughly breached the Karman line, hitting 1140 km above Earth's surface at apogee I was very surprised to see the payload (sounding rocket core, parachute, thermometer, barometer, small battery) survived reentry, with deceleration peaking at 59.3G. After the disastrous attempt to hit an X-plane contract with a conventional, HTHL aircraft (which was never able to take off and hit some severe runway glitches), I think I'll just give up on conventional HTHL aircraft and wait until I can do the Scott Manley thing, launch them on SRBs, and recover them under parachute. This... will have to wait. Despite having 41.1 science, I'm waiting for a 15.5 sci/year R&D lab to finish researching other tech tree nodes just to spend that science. Past that, the only other major item on my to-do list is to launch the Shockwave V, with a slightly stripped-down payload (even smaller battery, clipped science parts with nosecone instead of payload fairing), and a 3-stage design, where a 3-Aerobee second stage has been placed between the V4 stage and the original upper stage. This will be necessary to hit a 2.2 Mm sounding rocket contract.

What I've generally done is: I'll place a reference satellite with an MJ core in an equatorial Gael orbit. When a transfer window approaches, I'll create a transfer maneuver, and look to see whether it ejects north or south of the plane. If it ejects north, I'll launch from 270 degrees before the transfer node, if south, I'll launch from 90 degrees before, such that the normal component of my parking orbit is in the same direction as the normal component of the transfer orbit. I have no idea if this is optimal, but it's a simple rule to deal with non-equatorial launches.

So, for my 3.2x GPP career, I've been focusing on getting probes out to nearby planets. Niven is pretty well tackled from orbit, and I think I'm sending a lander at the next transfer window. Thalia is proving a bit of an issue: the delta-V requirements are high and heat builds up fast even for conventional engines. I only have biome/altimetry maps for the southern hemisphere because I was unable to circularize the scansat's orbit. To get a heavy-duty science orbiter to Thalia, I'm resorting to the biggest launcher yet of this career: a 5-meter monster designed to sling 50 tons to Gael escape. I forget where the first-stage engine (which masses 10 tons) comes from, but the upper is a pair of Penguin hydrolox engines from SpaceY. Otherwise, I have landers en route to Niven and Tellumo, probes to Gratian and Geminus, and I'm planning a Tellumo->Gauss slingshot as soon as I can figure out how to translate KSP-TOT multiflyby results into a practical maneuver set. If anybody has a kOS script to estimate the time where you will be at a certain true anomaly, I would appreciate having a reference. Gratian and Geminus are, once again, about the limit of me using solar panels: I need a pair of Gigantors just for the 3.75 EC/sec consumption of relay satellites (1 high-gain back to Gael, 2 medium-gain to communicate with the other relays, 1 medium-gain to communicate with an active vessel). I've also been messing around with small jet planes, though I have a bit of an issue getting them off the runway intact, often resorting to flagrant revert-to-launch abuse. I never knew Gael had a volcano biome, though, until I flew these missions. Finally, as of a couple hours ago, I've started an RP-0 campaign. I'm a little bit surprised about how much it takes just to get used to the new part selection, though I did get a sounding rocket into low atmosphere, powered by a quartet of Tiny Tims and an upper stage of a Aerojet X103C10 SRM. Definitely got it to above 600 m/sec, and I'm already planning the successor: smaller battery, no despin package (that didn't seem to do anything), and preferably a lighter parachute.

I think it's more of "non-essential in the short run". In the short run, you don't need advertising personnel, recruitment staff, most of R&D (except those maintaining certain projects), etc. In the long run, things go very downhill if you don't have those personnel. Fortunately for businesses, they generally don't have squabbles between the CEO and CFO resulting in shutting down non-essential operations, and can continue to operate year-round. Regardless, I suspect it's a relatively case-by-case basis for what parts of NASA stop operating. I'm not privy to exactly what gets shut down, but I suspect most current operations stay running, while planning and research staff might be told to go home unless there's something that absolutely must be kept running.

To be fair, the effect of swinging by Ike will be reduced thanks to the tremendous velocity he's approaching Duna at, and the phasing is more of an issue thanks to the short travel time. It's still probably worth it, but the bulk of the braking will still be done at Duna itself. This is hardly a standard Hohmann transfer.