Starman4308

You wouldn't even get permission to launch such a heavy vehicle with that kind of approach. There are small concerns like "flaming toxic debris raining down on the ocean" and "not colliding with anything in space" and "what, precisely, Mr. Smith, are you doing with hundreds of tons of hydrogen, hydrazine, nitric tetroxide, etc?". There is an attitude of "I can do these things for far cheaper, government and big business must just be wasteful". That can maybe sometimes work on the small scale, where the risks, technical challenges, and complexity are small. Nothing about sending men to the Moon is simple, easy, or low-risk. Even with the extraordinary efforts of NASA and the efforts of thousands of engineers and scientists, Apollo 13 still ended in near-disaster and failed in its primary mission goal of landing on the Moon, because of a small manufacturing defect in obscure parts that were nevertheless mission-critical.

Some folks might consider googling Saturn's moon, Titan. Not a whole lot of molecular oxygen to go around, not a lot of life. Of course we're aware there are some places with reasonably high-energy fuels around, and maybe places with reasonably high-energy oxidizers. Not both.

Don't be absolutely daft, and don't put words in my mouth. A smartphone CPU could probably handle the compute tasks of 1960s-era mision control. Who's Capcom? What antennae will you employ to communicate with the astronauts? Who's in charge of mission planning? Who liases with the launch site? How are you going to recover the astronauts?

Because space is hard. Based on extrapolation from ULA's RocketBuilder website, it costs about $25,000 per kilogram to have stuff sent to Earth escape (which is basically lunar injection). Even being generous and cutting that down to $15,000/kg, in order to get a 15-tonne mission to lunar injection, the boosters alone cost you nearly a quarter-billion dollars. That is before you're talking about things like mission control, how launch costs balloon once you have to man-rate your launch vehicle, etc. Space is hard.

A smartphone would barely notice the load, and would probably handle all of Mission Control while it was at it.

Graft and nepotism plague the Kerbal space program? I suppose that might also explain why probe cores are so heavy: they take away jobs from upstanding honest astronauts like Jebediah Kerman.

I'd like to expand on this point a bit. The reason why this works on Earth is fundamentally because of life. Life has, for billions of years, converted low-energy compounds plus sunlight into high-energy compounds. Fossil fuels are the remains of long-dead organisms, and the oxygen in our atmosphere has accumulated from billions of years of photosynthetic organisms seeking to use the Sun's light to convert carbon dioxide and water into the high-energy organic compounds they need to grow. I don't know of any other semi-plausible natural process that would maintain a supply of high-energy LF/O precursors on a planet without them long since having been broken down. Without an influx of energy and a process to boot low-energy compounds back into high-energy states, over billions of years, you aren't going to keep high-energy compounds around.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised. It's not the cost of the aluminum fin, it's the cost of making sure it works on spacecraft and has been inspected to within an inch of its life. There's a comment in "The Martian", where Watney gripes about how duct tape probably cost "thousands of dollars, because NASA". That's honestly not too far from the truth, because you do not want a $1 widget endangering your $100,000,000 medium launch vehicle, nevermind your so-many-billions-of-dollars manned mission to Mars, because nobody bothered to realize that your duct tape had some outgassing problems, or broke down in the extreme conditions of space, etc.

Short version: do what you're comfortable with. ISRU is part of the stock game, and I have no problem with it. Long version: As usual, the degree of realism in stock parts is utterly schizophrenic. The Convert-o-Trons are far heavier than would be needed for the most frequently proposed ISRU proposals, which rely on either electrolytically cracking water/ice or possibly the Sabatier reaction to produce methane. While theoretically there are some propellants that would require tons of equipment, real-world missions simply don't have tons worth of payload capacity to spare on ISRU. I will admit that an engineer on board might improve efficiency a bit. 25x, though, is more than a little stretching it. Any space agency worth its salt could probably whip up a drill much lighter than 250 kg. Thus, from a part-mass perspective, KSP ISRU is much worse than reality. Having ore convert 100% to propellant is hilariously unrealistic: there will be inefficiencies. Using fuel cells powered by converted fuel to run ISRU and drills is extremely improbable. Usually, you're taking a low-energy compound like water, and inputting energy to turn it into high-energy components such as hydrogen and oxygen. In order to see net gain from ISRU, you'd need to start with an already-high-energy compound, put in a small amount of energy to convert it to the useable fuel/oxidizer, and then break it down into low-energy exhaust products. You typically don't get high-energy compounds existing in nature like that; over the billions of years since those planets and moons formed, they probably would have converted themselves into lower-energy compounds. Thus, from a chemistry perspective, KSP ISRU is much better than reality.

That is a separate issue. While it was a very questionable decision to load everything straight to RAM, that is only tangential to GC pauses, in that it causes a relatively large heap to be made, which can force more frequent GC pauses on systems without much physical memory.

That isn't too shallow: it's way too steep. You want to come in with a periapsis of maybe 20-30 km. If you're coming in with a periapsis below the surface, that isn't reentry, that's a suicidal death plunge. EDIT: Alshain suggests 10-20 km. Seeing as how he almost certainly has more recent experience with stock than I do, I'd do what he says.

It'll do the Hohmann transfer even if your inclination is off; it'll just miss Minmus, requiring a correction maneuver later. To the OP: A, wait until you're in the correct SOI to plot a burn, and a hint. Go into the tracking station, and wait until KSC is directly beneath Minmus's orbital track. Then, launch six degrees north or south of east, and you'll be in approximately the right orbital plane for a trivial amount of delta V.

Yes, and in the 1970s, main memory was less than a megabyte. There is a reason why FORTRAN and Algol are almost nonexistent today, and why Java has largely surpassed C/C++ in popularity. Back in those days, compute time was so expensive that it was a much better tradeoff to throw programmer hours to minimize compute hours. Not so much today. KSP, not to mention its mods, would be far behind where it is today with manual memory management. Quite simply, you get less done working with lower-level languages, and Squad never really had the budget to consider writing in that sort of hyper-optimized style. Simply complaining about it is even less productive than explaining what the factors were behind the choice of using Unity/Mono, which is free and has a rich collection of built-in functions, sharply reducing the amount of development time needed. I don't think we'll ever agree on this: as I've seen things, the GC pauses are a relatively minor irritant relative to all the other stuff that can go wrong and slow down KSP, and I've had far more experience than I'd like at solving crazy issues that crop up in gigantic code bases.

Not all that much. Ran the lunar slingshot test of the Lifson prototype, and designed a Lifson transfer vehicle and the 16-tonne-payload booster it would require. I've got four paying tourists for it, though I'll probably run a abort-from-second-stage test first, because the booster itself is completely untested. Let's hope that doesn't turn into an abort-from-first-stage test. Otherwise: a friend's GPU is on the fritz, so I ordered a GTX 1070 to upgrade my rig, and I'll pass on the old GTX 960 to him. Probably wouldn't have upgraded so soon if it weren't for that friend needing a graphics card; the 960 was doing quite well for me, particularly on this KSP kick where despite all the visual mods I can throw at it, it's still heavily CPU-limited.

I have no idea whatsoever why anybody with enough RAM to consider MemGraph would be running 32-bit, but okay, granted. EDIT: There are apparently reasons why one would consider that. I still have no idea what they are, but I can only presume they are valid.

There will still be some velocity, and it is a very testable hypothesis. I wonder if there are any planets with smooth surfaces at both equator and poles.

There's the MemGraph mod, which lets you forcibly allocate more memory to the heap, but that's only viable if you have plenty of spare RAM. This should result in the GC running fewer, bigger pauses, with less time wasted scanning over memory that is in active use. The ideal solution is to write a game engine that resembles high performance computing code written for use on a supercomputer, but having helped write HPC code for a supercomputer, it is a gigantic pain in the neck. It's easy to say "replace Unity" if you've never had to deal with a program containing a half million lines of code. EDIT: Though, if Mono can implement a real time garbage collector like Java, that could help a bit. Those consume more CPU cycles than a simple stop-the-world GC, but can give a smoother user experience.

You're sounding amazingly entitled there. Coding projects on that scale are not cheap and they are not easy. Manual memory management is a pain in the neck to deal with. Coder productivity drops like a stone when you have to deal with that nonsense, and KSP is at a minimum hundreds of thousands of lines of code, quite possibly over a million at this point, built on top of Unity and its built-in rigid-body physics integrator, which is itself a non-insubstantial amount of code. It's easy to say "Squad should deal with the GC collection pauses" when you're not the one who will have to go through hundreds of thousands to over a million lines of code and de-allocate every scrap of memory yourself.

So, recently I've been focusing on A, playing the game, and B, updating my mission report. It's past time to post a bit in this thread. The two primary advances since last time are completion of the Theseus-Ariadne project, and launch of the Lifson prototype. The Theseus project was a pair of robotic landers for Iota and Ceti, loaded with every scientific instrument I could cram aboard, and enough propellant to get themselves back to orbit after landing. The Ariadne project was by far my most ambitious (and also precisely my third) manned mission to date. Sent to Iota and Ceti with one copy of all the experiments available, and crewed by a scientist, there were three main objectives. 1: Farm science on the way in and out of these moons, using a scientist (Bob for Iota, Sally for Ceti) to both reset the goo/materials bay and move the science into either one of five experiment storage units or the capsule itself. 2: Rendezvous with the Theseus landers and collect their science, stuffing that also into the experiment storage units. 3: Get crew and EVA reports from space around these moons. The Lifson prototype was to test reentry for my new 4-man capsule (the Lithobrake 4K made by @NecroBones), that will be my workhorse for the foreseeable future.

Ariadne 2: Destination Ceti Year 304, Day 178 Following on the heels of Bob's mission to Iota, Sally Kerman was selected for the significantly longer mission to Ceti. Two modifications were made to the vehicle: a third life support tank was added to give Sally Kerman's vehicle a 32-day duration (with a 20-day estimated mission time, 2 would have left almost no margin), and two of the second-stage engine pods were removed to save mass. In a striking coincidence, Sally docked a Gael rose over the limb of Ceti, much as Bob docked as Gael fell beneath the limb of Iota. Sally returned to Gael on day 198 of year 4, with the record of longest crewed mission. Her flight was noted for not just for this long duration and the first Kerbal around Ceti, but also for the truly awful singing of a Kerbonaut locked into a tiny one-Kerbal capsule for 240 hours with only occasional EVAs. Lifson Advanced Crew Vehicle Prototyping During Sally Kerman's voyage to Ceti, another step forwards was taken by the GSP, with the first test of the Lifson Advanced Crew Vehicle, capable of seating four. The first prototype tested reentry from low Gael orbit; the second prototype will be sent on a free return around Iota. The Lifson prototype is the first payload to use one of GSC's new standardized launch vehicles, the Laythe booster capable of sending ten tonnes of payload to lunar injection.

I'm going to put a resounding "maybe" to this concept. Engineering will not doom this plane, economics will; they would be catering to relatively niche markets who've developed habits to work around subsonic travel, such as sleeping on the plane for long flights. That said, I wish them the best of luck; it would be something for us to once more have supersonic civilian flight. No Mr. President, you hitching a ride on an F-22 doesn't count.

As a small aside: while the delta-V difference is really not that large, you could in theory save a sliver of delta-V going to Kerbin escape by slingshotting around the Mun. For that, you would want a very basic cislunar transfer* to the Mun, except you just don't brake into Mun orbit, and keep on going to escape Kerbin SOI. *Translation: your trajectory has you get captured in front of the Mun, you pass behind it, and get slingshotted back out in front of the Mun.

You mean to say I might have missed a moon (or more) because of random chance and amazingly mediocre capacity to point telescopes at things? Say it ain't so. I've got Electronics under research, though, which means the third orbital telescope is going to have better zoom than the first two. It'll also mean basic interplanetary antennae, which means Tellumo is on the menu. It's the SD-01 Radial Engine Pod from Near Future Spacecraft. In a related note: I have 48,322 lines worth of config file in GameData to grep through each time I want to figure out exactly which mod added a given part.

Pu-238 also decays primarily via alpha decay, meaning it's pretty easy to shield and relatively safe to work with.

As a note: I'm going to start putting images in spoilers so the page loads aren't quite so brutal; I put a lot of full-up 1080p images on here. The Ariadne-Theseus Project: Lunar Surface Return Year 304 The Ariadne-Theseus project was a 2-part mission to return samples from the surface of Gael's moons and return home, as well as to put Kerbals in orbit of the moons to make visual observations. By far the boldest mission planned to date, Ariadne-Theseus has been proclaimed the "first big mission" of the Kerbals of Gael. Project Theseus: The Landers A long-ago myth tells of Theseus, who ventured into a deep labyrinth to slay a ferocious monster. Massing 52 tonnes at launch, with a 3.9 tonne lander (1.427 tonnes dry), Theseus is one of the last missions propelled by custom-designed boosters with hypergolic upper stages. Equipped with a plethora of scientific instruments, Theseus's mission was to land on Iota and Ceti, and then return to low orbit over those moons, to later rendezvous with Ariadne. To lighten the Theseus landers, it was decided that they would not have full 6-DoF control, just a pair of linear RCS thrusters to provide ullage; Ariadne would be the active participant in docking. Images in below spoiler: Project Ariadne: The Return Vessels The same myth tells also of Ariadne, who gifted Theseus with a light, and a cord of string, that he might find his way back out of the labyrinth after slaying the monster. Thus is named Ariadne, which carried back the scientific results from the Theseus landers to Gael. Project Ariadne began with the Ariadne prototype, intended to test the reentry vehicle after a free-return from Iota, without the unnecessary mass that would be a part of the main vessels. The reentry vehicle was a modification of the Kerbin-project vehicle, with a quincunx of experiment storage units beneath the capsule proper, with a custom-build heat shield beneath those. The Ariadne prototype was successful in the goal of testing the reentry vehicle, which had a smooth reentry with no crispy edges on the experiment storage units. Another image spoiler Ariadne 1: Return from Iota Launch: Year 304, Day 154 Ariadne 1, piloted by the scientist Bob Kerman, launched from GSC aboard the custom-designed Ariadne booster, massing 130 tonnes at launch, down to 31.5 tonnes after MECO, with 9.9 tonnes of Command/Service Module. Bob's job, in addition to rendezvous with Theseus 1, was to make observations on the way into and out of Iota orbit, with a set of tools to reset the experiments carried onboard Ariadne 1 for re-use. While the first stage was a highly conventional kerolox core with solid boosters, the second stage was somewhat unusual, a cryogenic hydrolox stage with four radially attached Rockomax 56-8U engines to supplement the central Poodle engine during ascent. While it was initially intended that the 56-8Us would be discarded upon achieving orbit, in practice, they were discarded earlier, when it was apparent that the central Poodle would be sufficient without undue gravity losses. Image spoiler: During docking with Theseus 1, Bob took a stunning image of Gael disappearing just over the horizon of Iota. After taking observations of Iota, Bob then departed back for home, with an uneventful reentry peaking at 3.6G of deceleration, splashing down at sea. The return party at GSC was well-remembered for cameraderie, plans for the future, and GSC staff having the cost of an entire Neutron-1 booster taken collectively out of their next paychecks.