Starman4308

And not just in the size of the booster! In honesty, I am incredibly skeptical of the ITS, not because I think the physics doesn't work, but because the economics doesn't work; there's just no need for a booster that size unless you're doing something ridiculous like sending men to Mars, and I just don't see that happening, not without an incredibly dramatic reduction in launch costs, beyond what even SpaceX has been able to achieve.

I've finished reading the report. A few things jump out at me. First, these missions would be so easy to afford were NASA not constrained to waste billions of dollars annually for the Senate Launch System and the Multi-Purposeless Crew Vehicle. A couple years of the SLS budget, and we could launch full payload missions to both ice giants on DIVH, Falcon Heavy, or New Glenn boosters. I'm thoroughly of the opinion that NASA should focus on building spacecraft and operating the ISS and it's successor, not launch vehicles. I really don't think we'll put astronauts on Mars anytime soon; the challenges are immense, and the scientific payback not hugely greater than vastly cheaper unmanned missions. Back to the ice giant mission proposal: if the poorly characterized nature of their atmospheres makes aerocapture dangerous, well... they'll be a lot better characterized when we send a second mission to these planets. That might not be for decades after the first mission, but we'll have a mass efficient method to capture into Uranus/Neptune orbit. It's curious how solar electric propulsion mostly just makes these missions more problematic and expensive. The more time we try to save in transit, the more costly orbital insertion becomes, which almost has to be done on MMH/NTO, as ion propulsion requires more RTGs than is practical, and cryogenic chemical/nuclear is not well proven or developed for long duration missions. If we understood their atmospheres better, I'd be strongly tempted to suggest an SEP with aerocapture profile, but with conventional MMH/NTO being the most practical capture method, we really need a fairly long coast phase so we don't just blow straight past these planets, and that is achievable via slingshots and chemical propulsion.

RCS all the time, even when I have the opportunity to just point two vessels together and go. It's probably influenced by a few factors: #1, with Real Fuels, you need RCS anyways for ullage. If ullage is all I need, I'll use linear RCS thrusters, but a set of docking thrusters works perfectly well for ullage as ell. #2, I am a wee bit of a perfectionist; straight on to the destination docking port, with the final closing velocity (before the magnets kick in) of 0.1-0.25 m/sec. #3, on approach, I like to go very slow to conserve RCS propellant*, usually a top speed of 1 m/sec total. A small lateral drift can become a large miss if not corrected. *As to which propellant: if the craft has a hypergolic bipropellant, I just use that, else I use hydrazine. EDIT: #4, Real Fuels makes RCS ports lighter anyways, 29 kg for the stock 4-way blocks, and 14.6 kg for the extra lightweight blocks added by KW Rocketry. With four of the latter, I can get full 6-DoF control for barely more mass than a single stock RCS quad.

Bear with me here. Just for a second. This won't take long. Maybe, just maybe, corporations like Take Two are not out to kick puppies, ruin your game, destroy promises, and twirl their moustaches. And consider, just for a moment, the possibility that the number of people for whom this promise actually applies is miniscule relative to the PR backlash they stand to face if they go back on the word of the original owner of their IP, not to mention irritating said original IP owner. I find it entirely possible that Squad required Take Two to honor that promise in the contract transferring ownership of the KSP IP. Also, if this derail goes on much farther, it should probably be taken to the appropriate thread.

I honestly rather doubt the majority of KSP players use mods. Many people in the forums, yes, but I'm pretty sure most KSP players aren't hardcore, forum-going mod-users, and wouldn't even know that happened. Extremely improbable. With OpenIV, they had both legal justification (breaking into protected content) and a business motive (encouraging people to go online and purchase microtransaction content). With Module Manager, it does not, to my knowledge, conflict with KSP's TOU/EULA, nor does it conflict with the KSP business model. There is no DRM or microtransaction content, and somehow I doubt Sarbian would put much effort into cracking any DRM machinery Take Two adds.

The free content was stolen. Let's say I'm a preacher for religion X, distributing tickets to some event on the condition that they accept a copy of the unnamed holy book. If you start distributing bootleg tickets to that event, or take a ticket behind my back, that is still bootlegging/theft, because you are subverting the conditions of getting that ticket. A software example might be a company including a GPL-licensed open-source library in their proprietary ARR-licensed software, or re-distributing that library under a more permissive license like MIT/BSD. While that's "making free content available for all", it's still in violation of the original license. As a side note: I thoroughly despise the GPL license. If somebody can make a profit off my non-for-profit, open-source work? Good. Just because something is free does not mean it cannot be stolen or bootlegged.

I'm still unclear on how this doesn't constitute piracy. Take Two has the right to enforce whatever restrictions they like. You might disagree with them, but they have the right to say "this content is only available online", and if OpenIV subverts that policy, Take Two had every right to shut it down. The amount of effort spent on cracking secure code does not have anything to do with how legal the cracking was. As to sending C&Ds out... you have the issue that there are a lot of those mods and modders, and I don't blame Take Two for going after the root of the problem, a mod that makes cracking monetized content much easier.

My understanding of Module Manager is that it could only break really, really sloppily written DRM. It modifies part configuration at runtime, and given that part configurations are ordinarily stored in plain text files, any DRM enforcement worth its salt would not use the part configuration to lock proprietary assets down. DRMed assets would not be in GameData with nice .cfg, .mu, and .dds files describing them and a "please don't steal me" sticker, you'd almost certainly see them tucked away in some locked-down, encrypted binary file with an obscure name and obscure format.

It seems to work. I wasn't able to give it a full workout (testing that connection is lost when the antenna moves out of range) because of weirdnesses, but at least when sitting on the pad and playing with the RT menu (where the antenna is pointing), it seems to work as anticipated, with the correct cone widths, ranges, energy consumption, etc. It's also now the contents of my jx2_RemoteTech.cfg unless you guys come out with another update I like*. *I tend to be slightly paranoid updating stuff that isn't broke when my installation has dozens of mods. Those new antenna, though, were just too amazing to pass up.

There's also an aspect that typical rigid-body dynamics engines like the one Unity/KSP uses scale worse than O(N); the computational workload increases faster than number of parts. And it's still only running on a single thread per vessel. Hooray!

To be fair, a rocket-powered spaceplane has one of the advantages of SSTO spaceplanes on Kerbin: you can get away with low TWRs because wings help eliminate gravity losses, generally at the cost of much higher drag losses (more time spent in atmo) and additional deadweight (wings). I don't think that balance comes out in favor of a HTHL rocket-powered craft, but I don't know of any theoretical way to absolutely disprove that you might not gain more advantage from having wings (allowing low TWR and reduced gravity losses) than not having them. Also, there are concepts such as air-augmented rockets, where you can use inert atmosphere as a working fluid for jet propulsion. It's not as efficient as a regular turbojet/turbofan/ramjet, because you don't get free oxidizer from the air, but you can still get significantly better Isp than a pure rocket. Granted, none exist in stock KSP, or other possible technologies for using local atmosphere as working fluid, such as nuclear turbines. Well, at least after you ignore the incredible temperature/pressure near the surface, and the sulfuric acid hurricanes above cloud level. Those would make it difficult, just a bit.

Bachelor's of Science in Biology as of 2013. Currently pursuing a PhD in Biochemistry*, expected graduation 2018. *With a focus on simulations of biological macromolecules: to those who know what this means, basically molecular dynamics and extensions of the concept such as alchemical free energy simulations.

Not a problem; I haven't even researched the JX antennae in my career yet, I was just wondering why your RT config specified 1 Tm for the new antennae as well. I think there might be a way with complicated MM-foo (since the RT power should == the CommNet power, and then you might make a mathematical function to specify dish angle and power consumption based on that range), but to be completely honest, it's probably simpler just to manually specify the appropriate parameters for all three.

Either use RO-rated heatshields (and even those might need buffing), expend 15-17 km/sec of delta-V to bring your reentry velocity down, or use similar techniques as you used to get to Burbarry to flip your orbit again (i.e: gravitational assists, bi-elliptic transfers, etc). It's all just part of the challenge: not only do you need to make incredible velocity changes on the way to Burbarry, you also need to make incredible velocity changes on the way back.

Does hydrazine count? In practice: I'll occasionally slap a couple linear RCS ports onto a capsule to give it a tiny bit of just-in-case terminal maneuver capacity.

Yes and yes, at least with mine, that's a few years old. Might take some fiddling to make it work how you like.

By the way Snark, I've noticed that your RT patch just lumps the two new antenna in with the original JX2; should those two maybe be separated out and given reduced range (300 Gm, like the stock config) and increased angle? For my own use, I've also set the power usage down to 3 EC/sec. I continue to prefer RemoteTech to CommNet mostly because it forces me to think about how I'm going to power my distant probes, and maybe a little bit for having directional antennae, though I do like some things about CommNet (like having effects that scale with connection strength).

Essentially: a photo. Most likely two photos, showing planet X moving against the stellar background. I continue to insist that this means "tenth planet". Despite the evidence showing that Pluto does not fit the IAU's definition of a planet, dangit, I grew up with Pluto as our ninth planet. My very excellent mother just served us nine pancakes forever.

Operation of a drone on Venus would be very difficult, because Venus. Either you have insane temperature and pressure, or sulfuric acid hurricanes. Mars is likely a no go, unless maybe you have a large wingspan and a powerful engine, thanks to the very thin atmosphere. The natives of Earth are fond of shooting down drones, so that's a bad idea too. Jupiter's magnetic field and radiation would probably kill a drone before it returned much data. Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, maybe with a full up fission reactor for power and heating. RTGs don't have the power density and you can forget solar. Titan, you'd probably have to run some numbers to see if an RTG drone works. It has thick atmosphere and weak gravity, but not only is power a challenge, so is heating.

If I remember right: wasn't that eventually traced back to the procedural fairings plugin not correctly implementing the API for procedural parts? Regardless: yes, do be careful that your config does not wind up causing procedural parts to have negative costs and masses

No, because your situation is "Flying". You go too fast in atmosphere, you get shock heating, end of story.

Squad is now a developer working on contract to develop the KSP IP, which is property of Take Two. In theory, Take Two can do anything it wants, including removing Squad from developing KSP. On the other hand, most of this is scaremongering based on a quite different situation in GTA.

I think the long cruise time can be explained by the fact that the ice giants are all really, really, really far from Earth. A standard Hohmann transfer to Uranus takes 16 years, to Neptune 30 years. That's a pretty significant fraction of the expected lifespan of an RTG; it's no wonder they're looking at ways to cut down the transfer time. What I've found interesting so far scanning this article is that there's plans to use aerobraking at the ice giants, using a cutting-edge heat shield to not fry the probe on the way through. It could certainly save a lot of mass; out at the ice giants, you can forget about using solar-powered ion engines to slow down, and chemical engines are... chemical engines.

Are you already close to top speed? I'm pretty sure that how KSP handles top speed on wheels is that it throttles your motors back when you start going too fast, such that you're only accelerating enough to keep up with any friction or slope.

That is marketing hype. There is a reason it is called hype: because it is exaggerated to get people to use it.