Starman4308

I might suggest Sounding Rockets (some nice early-game, low-tech parts), KW Rocketry (big boosters), Bon Voyage (autoroving in background), Outer Planets Mod, the JX2 Antenna (to make OPM more practical), and Smart Parts (for some launch automation). Also: no matter how many mods you have, there is always somebody with more.

As a biochemist, I can take a stab at the question "What constitutes a gene?" My answer: "Good question. Come back to me when nature stops breaking its own rules." In general, it would refer to a functional section of DNA found in approximately the same location across individuals of the same species, but things like copy number variation, psuedogenes (whose definition these days is largely "what your annotation program annotates as a pseudogene"), and other infuriating bits of biology make it hard to exactly pin down what a gene is. Also, you're probably referring to epigenetics, or the field of "what is inherited that isn't a DNA sequence", which includes mitochondria, maternal or paternal DNA marks such as methylation, histone modifications, and a thousand other things that cause biologists to throw up their hands and curse nature for being so weird.

No, but I can go to the police if it's stolen! The solilipistic "it's all just a construct, maaaaaaan" philosophy you seem to be espousing has a significant flaw in that it doesn't really permit much for the collective efforts that have so improved the state of mankind. Simply because something is artificial does not mean it is without worth or merit.

And smallpox lasted 12,000. Oh, hey, looks like modern societal constructs helped wipe that one out. Funny how that goes.

What I've seen indicates that while natural sequences are unpatentable and uncopyrightable, synthetic constructs are patentable and copyrightable. My best guess is that current transgenics, there is a copyright on the DNA construct incorporating the gene, but not the gene itself*, and there is a patent on inserting the gene into organism X for some purpose, but there is no patent on the gene itself. Those bets would be off for a wholly synthetic construct, but designing gene products de novo is still relatively difficult these days. *Unless you made modifications to the gene, e.g. to improve expression in the new host, but that would only apply to the modified transgene, not the original, from-nature gene. Also, there would be nothing forbidding you from creating a new DNA construct incorporating the original gene or a different modification thereof, but you still couldn't put it into crops and sell it until the patent expired. So long as you continue to benefit from human society, you get to play by human society's rules. Good luck being somewhere where you absolutely do not benefit in the slightest; even international waters, there is still an expectation of assistance to SOS calls. You don't like society's rules? Get on a spaceship and cut off communication with Earth.

Cherry-picking a handful of egregious cases does not a point prove; with the number of patent applications received (and high-power lawyers involved), there are going to be some absurd decisions.

After all, it's not like this sort of thing has happened in nature a billion times before, where an organism evolves to resist a poison to gain a competitive advantage, right? Anybody with the slightest understanding of the issue would have expected this to happen sooner or later. There might be a few compounds which are difficult to impossible to generate a resistance to, but those are generally virulently toxic to everything, and so are a no-go for use as an herbicide. Ergo, I'm sure you hate eating anything that's ever been sprayed with an herbicide, fungicide, pesticide, etc. The dose makes the poison, and glyphosate (Roundup) targets an enzymatic pathway completely absent in humans. Glyphosate will be one of the best herbicides we've ever produced, and it's a shame that weeds have evolved resistance to it; it'll be hard to find another herbicide that has similarly low toxicity to humans. You are getting a temporary patent on the use of a gene for a specific purpose: i.e. improving a crop. I have no qualms about this, as it is expensive to generate a transgenic crop, and exorbitantly expensive to get it approved, requiring endless rounds of testing to check for unintended side effects. If there's no way to secure a temporary monopoly on these crops, that will just about kill the further generation of transgenic crops. That is, as point of fact, blatantly false. Patents require: #1: That it be non-obvious to those practiced in the art #2: It must be novel #3: It must be useful #4: It must be of patentable subject matter (i.e. not patenting the Sun) Now, there are other forms of intellectual property such as copyright, but patents have a fairly limited domain and lifespan, being restricted to 20 years for something that is actually an invention of a process or device.

Do you have any data for that, or are you just making a bald, naked assertion based on an oversimplified, purely geometric model of what consitutes a fuel tank? If you're going to claim that a model is more realistic, well, maybe you should check to see that it is, as point of fact, actually more realistic.

You could at the very least do the research, and come back with said function that has to deal with: Pressurant tanks Structural support Strength against aerodynamic forces Fuel lines for bipropellant tanks Insulation and venting Sensors for telemetry Attachment points for radially mounted equipment such as SRBs Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. If you come back with a mathematical model that you can show is a more realistic approximation of real fuel tanks and back it up with references to real tanks for a variety of sizes and purposes, people might be willing to even code it up for you. The current model, while a hackjob approximation, has the advantages of sheer simplicity and doing a reasonable job of approximating fuel tanks over a wide range of sizes.

Which parameters to match is highly arbitrary, and for the most part, I'd agree with @regex in that it's moderately futile to directly map real solar system ideas onto the toy-scale stock system; I'd just go with "a smidge above Kerbin atmospheric boundary". However, choosing an arbitrary pair of parameters, I would insist on periapsis of 4,175,551m above surface and apoapsis of 4,182,110m above surface. This will match the ISS's orbital period of 92.65 minutes and its eccentricity of 0.000686. I'm sure you will all 100% agree with me that you cannot have an ISS replica without a period of 92.65 minutes and eccentricity of 0.000686.

My general impressions are as such: Translunar (in front of the Mun) costs slightly more on injection (initial burn from LKO), and a bit more on landing and ascent due to the retrograde orbit you end up in. However, translunar is preferred for flybys and missions where you want a return-to-Kerbin abort mode. A free-return trajectory is a special case of translunar injection where, if you don't maneuver, you end up just crossing back into Kerbin atmosphere for reentry. This was what was used by the Apollo missions, since if the service module engine failed to fire properly, they would simply just return to Earth. It's also widely used for flybys, as then it's very cheap to get your flyby mission back to Kerbin for recovery. In my experience, it's hard to exactly nail a free-return trajectory (particularly if you want a low perilune), but even if you don't exactly nail it, you can at least get something close, where only a small adjustment (possibly with RCS or the lander engine) will correct you to a proper reentry profile. In general, though, you want to at least get something close, which means burning earlier than normal, and with a bit more delta-V than normal.

You know, this is the first entry to the Osumi challenge that is capable of taking Kerbals to space, which I think is kinda neat. You also might want to update the leaderboard; in particular, you're #2 on the efficiency board, as well as #5 of precision and #4 on Pee-Wee.

Roger! The title is now a hyperlink to the craft. Sorry about forgetting it.

Now presenting, the Testifier VI. Designed after complaints that "your new booster literally just takes a random assortment of parts to low Kerbin orbit", E-Z Rockets Inc. presents a new booster. Features: 9.13t to orbit A docking port Full RCS control 1000% more monopropellant A Terrier engine Two relay antennae Even more fins in space! Self-damping Anti-Wobble-Cage technology The same, familiar, "so easy my cat could do it" launch procedures! Vital stats: Apogee 435,382m Perigee: 71,377m 166.933t on the pad Eccentricity (please let me have done this right this time): 0.213 Payload fraction: 5.47% "Useful" payload (now including ballast on account of non-imaginary RCS thrusters!): 4.39t "Useful" payload fraction: 2.63% I'll be completely honest, this was done because I was bugged that my original "payload" was more or less just a randomish assortment of parts to match an approximate target mass. That it scores better was irrelevant to me; I just wanted to put something useful-if-you-squint up there, ergo the docking port (for something approximating a fuel depot), RCS for maneuvering/docking, relay antennas (because who doesn't want more relays), etc. The one downside appears to be that it's a bit more wobbly than the Mk. V, leading to less consistent results; whereas I'm 5/5 on launching the v5, the second trial run of the Mk. VI had a perigee around 66 km. Maybe it just needs slightly more off-center ballast and/or lower 2'nd stage thrust. Satellite deployed and ready for operations:

Since it got nuked along with the moderated posts, I'll repeat this question: @Snark, what precisely counts as "payload"? I hadn't included the mass of the expended second stage, as it wasn't "useful payload". The expended stage would mass in at 4.698 tonnes, with an empty Kickback SRB, four fins, and a 1.25m decoupler. If that counts, that'd bring my payload-to-orbit fraction up to 4.8%. Still execrable relative to certain homonid-consuming primates (@ManEatingApe), but the goal of my entry was to prove that A, it was possible in stock (ninja'd by said primate), and that B, staging doesn't technically require staging equipment or even the staging button, just sufficient creativity and the fine Kerbal traditions of "moar boosters and moar struts".

What I've been doing recently for ejections to hard-to-hit targets is to use an extra kicker stage to get me another ~1.5 km/sec (on top of the booster, which usually gets me just barely out of Kerbin SOI); by that point, inaccuracy caused by additional, low-thrust, Oberth-hates-your-guts burns tends not to be very high, and can always be corrected later with a MechJeb fine-tune rendezvous maneuver. If you're planning on super-fast, very high-dV maneuvers, I suppose you could pick a likely-seeming spot on the porkchop plot, attempt to match that vector reasonably well on your ejection, and then hit "rendezvous with target at X time" once you're past Kerbin SOI. If you don't use MJ, well, there's always "fiddle with maneuver nodes until something sticks".

This is why my asteroid mining expeditions went with a LOX-assisted, trimodal NTR instead of a pure LH2 NTR. Granted, even then I badly underestimated how much delta-V I would get out and wound up converting 90% of the asteroid mass into either H2O or discarded waste product and barely got it into lunar orbit. In the future, if I know ahead of time that it's a carbonaceous asteroid, I might try for a methalox engine, which will have even less Isp, but be able to use more of the rock. EDIT: Also: gravity braking off the Moon. It's a wonderful thing.

It really shines for expanded-scale systems, like 6.4x, where delta-V requirements can be absurdly higher than stock (such as roughly 7-10 km/sec to capture into elliptical Moho orbit). It helps to have loooots of patience (and a second screen to do other things like post on the KSP forums), though, as even at 4x physical timewarp, burns can take a long time.

While I've never checked to see precisely when each parameter completes, I accomplish both by popping into and out of Sun SOI. My weak guess is that you get a "Sun flyby" by having an intercept with a planet, as opposed to just regular solar orbit for "orbit the Sun".

Generally speaking, if things aren't done in a certain way, there's a reason for it. Genius often does not lie in proposing "how about we do X", it lies in "how do we change the underlying factors to make X possible and favorable?" The example my dad loves the most is the very high sortie ratio achieved by the Israeli Air Force during the early part of the Six-Day War; the genius wasn't saying "have our pilots fly five or six sorties each day!", but rather "Let's give each bird a dedicated ground crew, let's get into the practice of briefing pilots still in the cockpit from the prior sortie, let's ...". For something like BWB jetliners, I've heard the primary issues have more to do with boarding and deboarding the plane; so for that, you're probably looking at trying to figure out "how can we redesign airports to be more compatible with BWB designs, preferably without sacrificing compatibility with traditional designs, definitely without costing us more than we saved on fuel".

The correlation proves nothing. The presence of a conflict of interest does not imply the study was paid for by the corporation of interest, it means one or more of their employees was involved with the study. There may be the potential for dishonesty, but it does not imply anything shady occurred, simply that one of the authors had a financial tie to the subject of interest. Meanwhile, over in Organics Happy-Fun-Land, there is probably even worse corruption going on, as many of the studies and anecdotes published are coming from people with a direct financial tie to organic crops. The clearest-cut cases of this sort of anti-intellectual, hypocritical dishonesty come from alternative medicine, where your typical M.D. does not stand to gain a penny from prescribing you a drug (that's why you go to a separate pharmacy), whereas oftentimes in alternative medicine, the person recommending a treatment has direct financial stake in said treatment. I have not seen any good, third-party evidence suggesting transgenic crops (GMOs) are unsafe to humans; while I do have concerns about the business practices of some of the companies involved, there's really no evidence to suggest transgenic crops are anything but safe, effective, and sometimes sold using bad, abusive business practices. Yeah, and the first agriculturalists disrupted a process that has kept humans and animals fed for hundreds of millions of years: i.e. hunting/gathering. The changes introduced by typical transgenic methods are miniscule compared to what's happened over millenia of selectively breeding crops; you have things like hexaploid wheat, infertile bannanas that have to be propagated via cuttings, etc.

Blessing and a curse at times. If you start modding, with Steam, you're going to want to copy your KSP folder so Steam doesn't auto-update and break your mods to tiny little twigs.

This took way too much effort. Stock only, probably mostly because people said it couldn't be done in stock. 2-stage, because people said you couldn't stage in stock without the spacebar. It may or may not take a couple tries to get to stable orbit; it's a slightly wobbly craft and periapsis narrowly misses the atmosphere. To be fair, though, I just did it a second time and again successfully missed the atmosphere... by less than a kilometer, yes, but it still 100% counts. EDIT: Oh, and to be 100% super-duper-clear, the second stage in the staging order would only release the payload; the decoupler separating the two rocket stages is on the first stage. I just realized having a second stage in the staging order may make it look cheaty (note: rocket stage != "stage" here). The "genius" comes in two parts. The staging occurs by staging all the decouplers at launch, and using shenanigans (a cage of struts and I-beams that violates all sound principles of engineering) to keep the first stage at 100% throttle attached to the second stage at roughly 40% throttle. How it manages to circularize is via the monopropellant tanks at the top: the westwards tank is empty, while the eastwards tank is 10% full. This slight off-center mass induces off-center thrust that, in the final stages of flight, pulls the nose down enough for circularization. Craft file: http://kerbalx.com/Starman4308/TestifierV Periapsis: 72,682m Apoapsis: 1,119,017m Eccentricity: 0.306882 0.10463 (EDIT: goofed on my spreadsheet calculating eccentricity). Mass at launch: 165.728t Second-stage mass: 31.693t EDIT (SO MANY EDITS): Nominal payload mass: 7.91t including spent second stage. "Payload" mass: 3.265t. Change at your own risk; the craft is a finely tuned precision instrument of quasi-usefulness. Payload mass minus monopropellant tanks for off-centering the mass: 2.905t The strut-cage-of-doom: Extended launch clamp system: On the pad: EDIT: On closer inspection, I'm 99% certain this screenshot came from earlier in the design process.

A question that is becoming increasingly relevant for the most... interesting booster I have designed: is a hyperbolic escape orbit of Kerbin acceptable so long as periapsis is > 70 km?

You are being extraordinarily combative. Also, it's "skewed", not "skewered". Two comments here: #1, Sepratrons are a bad idea for providing main thrust in this challenge (poor specific impulse), and #2, stock games can stage, you just have to be creative about it. I'm imagining, for example, a ring of SRBs around a central core, held in by creative abuse of struts and their own thrust. Will illustrate later, need to go to work now. See #1 about being needlessly combative. Yes, it's a challenge in 100% stock due to Mr. Tsiolkovsky and the inability to conventionally stage, but all Smart Parts does is reduce the necessary strut/other-creativity abuse.