Starman4308

So, to be clear: you were in reentry at the time? Also, backspace returns you to focusing on the ship, and you can back-track with shift-tab (caution: shift also used for throttle). If you were in reentry, it's entirely possible the vessel just got deleted when they got outside physics range of the current vessel. If it was just the Kerbals inside the vessel... that's basically the Kraken telling you you can't have nice things.

Humanitarian airlift is necessary in 3 situations: 1) As a quick-reaction force 2) For particularly remote and inaccessible locations 3) When the pesky Commies have blocked off the railroads to Berlin 4) When the Chair Force pilots have been slacking off on their flight hours and need to get some stick time in Otherwise, I don't really see why anybody would use airlift for humanitarian aid; it is absurdly expensive.

Neither is really terribly realistic; neutron stars don't sneak up on you, and Interstellar's Magic Blight Of Doom (seriously: pathogens have been trying to kill plants and take their stuff for hundreds of millions of years, why would it only work now) could have been vastly more easily dealt with by tightly regulated underground shelters. I do like Interstellar, but for the life of me, I can't figure out how going to space was supposed to solve their problems any moreso than just building a good shelter here on Earth would have. As to "what if", well, if something did happen, our best bet is aforementioned Orion drives, with an eventual pick-one-of-three destination; Mars (has basically all the elements needed for life), asteroids, or some gigantic generation ship intended for self-sufficiency. None of these have, mind you: A helpful set of Van Allen belts to deal with radiation Oxygen Liquid water in abundance Tectonic activity to refresh the crust An incredibly complicated, pre-existing biosphere A handy-dandy atmosphere and moon to deal with meteorites Known and mapped deposits of valuable resources 99.9999999% of the current human population (how precisely are you going to get these people off Earth?)

The timescales for any reasonable threat to the solar system (i.e. the evolution of the Sun into a red giant) are so far out that they're not worth worrying about; we need to fix up our situation here before worrying about going interstellar. I don't know of anything that could even pose a threat to the solar system before the Sun becomes too hot to sustain life on Earth. Even a supernova has to be within about 3 parsecs to threaten Earth's biosphere, and the thing about space? Space is really, really, really, really, really big, and really, really, really, really empty. No satisfactory technology exists to permit large-scale colonization of any world other than Earth; the closest there is is Orion drive, and that comes with the wee side effect of irradiating the planet on which (optimistically) 99.99% of humanity still resides. It might get a little uncomfortable here, and while certain people aren't helping, we can get through; biofuels and other renewables are becoming more economical by the day, recycling is becoming increasingly popular, and birthrates have plummeted, at least in developed countries. One moderately funny thing that gave me a bit of hope: a presentation by a classmate on a biocatalytic process to synthesize a petroleum product that wasn't viable now... but which would be once the price of petroleum went up. There will be some pain, no doubt, but life can and will carry on here.

What are you using for the rescale? What I'm using (KScale64 with Sigma Dimensions) rescales the surface to 3.2x; while that still reduces the slopes by a factor of 50% relative to stock, you still get relatively steep terrain. On my end: more so-very-tedious ion burns to capture probes into Eve orbit.

RealChute has: A nosecone parachute A double-nosecone parachute (with space for drogue + main) A stack-mounted double parachute A radial chute. All of these can be configured as drogue, main, or drag, and can be tweaked to give you exactly as much parachute as you want*. *Disclaimer: this is not always the amount of parachute you need: see, for example, hitting the Duna highlands at 16 m/sec because the parachutes were configured for 5 m/sec at 0 altitude.

I doubt it's ever 100% necessary, but it does help quite a bit, particularly for Tylo and Eve as mentioned. The advantage of having a separate lander is that you get to leave all the return fuel in orbit, whereas a direct-ascent profile requires that you beef up the lander to carry that fuel down to the surface and back up again. The more delta-V you need to get down and back up again, and the more landings you plan to make, the more it favors having a separate lander. Granted, if you're trying to land on Gilly, the delta-V requirement to land is so trivial that it's a waste, as you're spending a lot of mass on duplicate command modules, engines, docking ports, etc. It more or less comes down to the question of "what's worse: duplicating components for a separate lander, or hauling your return fuel to and from the surface?".

After the failure of the first mission to put an E-class asteroid into orbit around the Mun (not enough delta-V to match the target asteroid), KSC controllers went a-hunting for other E-class asteroids due to cross into Kerbin SOI. We found one, with an eventual Kerbin periapsis of... The mission suddenly became one of the highest priority. The largest booster ever constructed was used to propel 60 tonnes of mining equipment and oxygen-boosted NTR to rendezvous with the 900-tonne impactor. After burning through a scary amount of delta-V, rendezvous and attachment was successful, and drilling began for suspiciously more ice than a carbonaceous asteroid is likely to have. Kerbin's safety is now largely assured, and the craft is now engaged in rather tediously setting up Mun slingshots to try to bring it into a prograde orbit so I have a ghost of a chance of successfully capturing it into lunar orbit. Further experiments with the new-fangled "plane" have been more successful than the first, this time attempting to explore an anomaly 15 km up in the mountains. Proponents of the program insist this is much more successful than the first attempt, and state that regulations will prohibit further attempts to land the aircraft in the mountains, where the air is very, very thin. There are disadvantages to the default 64k config scaling terrain by 3.2x but atmosphere only by 1.33x. It was all I could do to maintain level flight at over 200 m/sec with all three turboprops at full speed. The Moho probes are coming up on their 1 km/sec correction burns for proper Moho encounter; rather tedious at 1.25 m/s^2. At least this close to the Sun, I'm getting good returns on solar power. And pre-emptive apologies if this comes out as a double-post; my browser is being weird.

Thanks for this explanation; I think I finally understand the difference between prompt-critical and supercritical. In normal reactor operation, you never quite get to a self-sustaining reaction using just the prompt neutrons; you use the delayed neutrons (from the decay products of the original fission event), which have slower timescales for release, to go critical/supercritical. Because of the much slower timescales there, the machinery has seconds instead of microseconds to adjust the control rods and bring the reaction either subcritical or supercritical as necessary. Prompt-critcal is when you do have a self-sustaining reaction on just the prompt neutrons, and because those neutrons are released at the moment of fission (which is itself a very fast process), the reactor quickly goes runaway and melts down because the scale of the reaction goes from a relative handful of nuclei to "way too many" in milliseconds or less. Bombs, of course, are when you induce a prompt-critical reaction deliberately, and so suddenly that a good fraction of the nuclei react before your fissile material goes from "bomb" to "rapidly expanding cloud of plasma". It can't really happen in a reactor because they melt down/explode long before most of the nuclei have had a chance to react.

I assume you mean "not just rearranging bits of the SPH"? This is just how it came out as installed for me. I suspect part of it may be that KSC is pinned at a certain latitude/longitude, one that makes the easternmost border close to the water at stock scale, but which is pretty far from the shoreline at 6.4x scale.

Flew an unmanned test of an experimental "aircraft" with the novel and unusual goal of never actually leaving Kerbin's atmosphere, and using "wings" to travel about. Critics decry this as a waste of funds. These critics have recently gained a lot of traction in public opinion.

The training missions, I carry 16 at a time. That minimizes the number of launches I have to make. For science; I usually have 6 at an orbital station (2 pilots, 2 engineers, 2 scientists), with the scientists stuck in a lab, sending down pilots one at a time to harvest science. For next time, though, A, no labs (too cheaty), and B, I'm thinking two-man landers, with a pilot and a scientist to reset any experiments onboard, so that I can just spam the goo cans and materials bays until they no longer transmit any science. The engineers are there mainly for KAS-driven ISRU operations on the surface; while the miners are unmanned, I use KAS parts to attach the miners to the refueling vessel. Those, too, are 2-man (1 pilot, 1 engineer).

My crowning acheivement for the day. My thanks to the developers of ScanSat and MechJeb, without which it would've been much more difficult getting a good, close landing. And no, I didn't use MechJeb's landing guidance; it doesn't play well with RealFuel's ullage simulation. I mostly just used the distance-to-landing-target function, combined with a very quick-and-dirty calculation of how much distance I'd travel while landing (about 240 km). And yes, I tried to fly through the arch on the way home. The less said about that attempt, the better. Started playing about with spaceplanes for the first time in forever; it is hard at 6.4x scale. This one didn't quite make it to orbit; my current line of thought is a two-stage aerospike-powered vehicle which dumps a fuel tank midway through ascent. I totally did not expect to land this one safely, but somehow I managed. And yes, the boulders can be collided with. Two flotillas of probes, about half headed to Jool, the other half to Moho. Probably the most interesting one of the bunch is a a Galileo-like "fly past the everything" probe, which has a ludicrous excess of delta-V courtesy of using an ion engine. My first-generation Jool communication relays (powered by a mildly absurd 6 tonnes of batteries and 6 tonnes of solar panels) have a much tighter dV budget, with about 3.5 km/sec remaining in a liquid methane LV-N; getting these to their destination orbits will almost certainly require playing gravitational ping-pong with the Jovian moons. The transfer stage for my new Minmus biome hopper may have had a bit more delta-V than strictly necessary. I also ran a polar Minmus mission, sending along both of the landers just in case dV got tight. In the final accounting, I had about 300 m/sec left at return-to-station; I probably saved a little bit by carrying only just enough propellant to land in the first lander while leaving the rest of the propellant back in orbit. DMagic wasn't kidding about the oversized radio telescopes being, well, oversized. They also made this burn extraordinarily tedious; I needed to complete 700 m/sec of my Moho transfer burn on ion (with a grand 0.07 TWR), and for the first part of the burn, the solar panels were blocked by that giant array, so I had to keep a tight eye on my electricity and discharge capacitors as I began to run out of charge. Even when the solar panels weren't occluded I was still running a net loss of about 80 EC/sec, meaning I had to throttle down to ~50% at the end of the 20-minute ion burn (estimated roughly a quarter-million electric charge used).

Well that's because stock treats Kerbals as slightly-heavier and more lucrative probes. It isn't the tech tree's fault that you can stick a Kerbal in a lawnchair in a can and send him on a 100-year multi-slingshot expediton around the solar system; it's the fault of there being no life support and precious little reason to bother with unmanned missions when the game goes out of its way to encourage manned missions. I have no idea what you would even consider to be the early game if you cut out exploring the Mun and Minmus (and a token bit of getting to Kerbin orbit), so count me confused as to what you're trying to get at. From what I can tell of your no-science modlist, it is "I want to be able to unlock everything by sending octabajillion tourists to orbit and converting the cash to science". Not interested-I want to be forced to do new things to progress, and while unfortunately there is too much science available on the Mun/Minmus (see suggestion on decaying returns for visiting multiple biomes), I don't really see how your modlist fixes that; instead of grinding biomes, you're grinding funds/reputation. Click on it and hit the backspace/delete key, assuming you're on a desktop. Not sure about mobile.

I think the magnitude of the Pioneer anomaly and NASA's new micro-thrusters adequately sum up the amount of insanity NASA, the ESA, Roscosmos, etc. have to deal with. Fortunately for these agencies' states of mind, usually correction burns aren't too onerous.

A, you're only on-rails if you're timewarping or not the active vessel. Without being on-rails, there'll be very small perturbations caused by both micro-stutters in the vessel parts and imperfect calculation of the force of gravity. There has been efforts to try to reduce these effects, but nothing is perfect. It doesn't help that most of this math is being calculated with single-precision floating point numbers, which are only accurate to about 1 part in 10 million. B, even when on-rails, there's slight stutters caused by machine precision and the patched-conics solver; the double-precision floating point math used for on-rails calculations is still only accurate to about 1 part in 10^14. Granted, this is more accuracy than NASA expects*, so the on-rails calculations are rather good. *NASA's biggest issue isn't the accuracy of its floating-point math, it's experimental uncertainty in measuring the positions, velocities, and masses of all the very, very many objects in the Solar System (plus solar wind, etc).

It's pronounced "lay-they/lay-thay". On my own end, I initially pronounced it "lathe", but at some uncertain point in the past, I started inserting that 'y' in the middle, and ending with another y-ish sound. I'm sure I'd find this fascinating were I a linguist.

That sounds about right. An extreme-case idealization of transfer duration is to consider a Hohmann transfer from 0 to a circular orbit of radius 1. Thus, in the extreme that you start from very close to the parent body relative to the destination, transfer period will be 18% of the destination's orbital period (and it works in the other way too). 18% of Eeloo's period is about 3 years; give or take a fudge factor for starting from Kerbin instead of the center of the sun, plus Eeloo possibly being near its apohelion, plus or minus a bit for transfer not being a perfect idealized Hohmann transfer, and 4 years is very reasonable for a Kerbin-Eeloo transfer.

I'm still not seeing it. You are complaining that going interplanetary is difficult when long-range relay antennas are just 160 science points away from basic solar panels. It is a grand total of 320 points from the start. So far as I can tell, your complaint is "I wish I could go interplanetary after barely touching the Mun and Minmus". While I would agree that there is too much science at those moons (and that there should be diminishing returns after the first few biomes), you are still complaining that interplanetary antennae are located at a 160-point node just following the node that gives you the solar panels and halfway-decent probe core you'd need anyways. The 160-point nodes are generally where you start to get into advanced mission equipment-and guess what? Interplanetary probes count as an advanced mission! The tech tree has to be designed around some assumption of how players will progress, and "player will at least visit the Mun/Minmus with a full set of experiments before going interplanetary" is a pretty good one. Getting one 160-point node is, quite frankly, trivial. If you don't have the patience to "do that every single game"; give yourself 320 points at start; nobody is going to blame you for saying "I've been to the Mun and Minmus a million times, and I'd rather just skip to going interplanetary". The stock tech tree is designed with new players in mind, because Squad makes the entirely reasonable assumption that advanced players who want to skip the early game will be able to undertake the Herculean effort of sliding the "starting science" slider a bit to the right. EDIT: In short, while yes, it's annoying that you can spend hours and hours farming lunar biomes to unlock a large fraction of the tech tree, 160 point nodes are not very deep in, and there are plenty of very-skippable 90-point and 45-point nodes.

Maybe the most efficient thing is to throttle back and maintain terminal velocity, much like the bad old days of the souposphere where you had a solid minute of going up at 2.0 TWR, crawling through low atmosphere at 100 m/sec?

So your complaint is not "it is too hard to get these antennae", it is "the tech tree is hard when I ignore one of the major science mechanics". Here's the thing about KSP: you can determine your own difficulty. If you're going to make things more difficult by ignoring biomes, you can also make things easier by increasing science returns and possibly starting with some extra science points. It is flat-out impossible to make everybody happy, which is part of why Squad included those toggles.

Did you knock your science reward multiplier down? It should be trivial to get a 160-point tech with just Mun/Minmus science. Just by transmitting (not even recovering!) thermometer and barometer measurements from all the surface biomes of the Mun and Minmus, you can get 1,130 science. Once you start to recover, and start to bring in other experiments like the materials bay, goo pod, crew reports and EVA reports, you can unlock a pretty sizable fraction of the tech tree, and it's even easier now that there's the little science canister to store experiments in. Some of my typical shenanigans: send a manned mission on a free return trajectory around the Moon; you can pick up EVA reports from space just above quite a few of the Moon's biomes that way, send a crew capsule into a polar orbit of Kerbin to pick up EVA reports from over Kerbin's biomes, etc. There's also DMagic's mod; the magnetometer unlocks very early and has biome-dependent readings from both low orbit and on the surface (more free-return shenanigans!). EDIT: Also, not too hard to launch a mission to just barely escape Kerbin's SOI into solar orbit, collect science, and immediately return to Kerbin.

The biggest suggestion is to have the 2.5m converter with a high-ranking engineer. The 1.25m converter throws away 80% of the ore used, and it's quite possible you'll get into a situation where you're running a net deficit of LF+O trying to keep your drills and converter running on fuel cells. Combine that with the (frankly insane) bonus that high-level engineers give, and it becomes clear that the best approach is a 2.5m converter with at least a three-star engineer running it. Between the 17x engineer bonus and the 5x efficiency improvement of using the 2.5m part, you're getting 85x more LF+O for your time and electricity. The only use case I see for the 1.25m converter in stock is for missions where you have an external power supply (solar or RTGs) and a great deal of time to refuel a relatively small probe. Squad doesn't make lightweight ISRU easy, which probably makes sense for stock (with its tiny planets and minimal dV requirements), but, well, for 6.4x, I long since decided to write some configs to mod them into being much more mass-efficient.

My point is that for any gas lighter than argon, the ratio should (in theory) be worse, because given fixed pressure/temperature/volume, you can carry a fixed number of mols of gas, and xenon has an advantage in being heavy per mol of gas. And yes, 1/2 is absurd, but so is the 1/9 ratio for stock LF+O tanks.

By comparison, I think the Space Shuttle main tank had a ratio of 1/50, so pressurized gas tanks are still significantly behind conventional liquid propellant tanks. Plus, I'm pretty sure the ratios get worse for lighter gases*, as each mol of gas inside your tank has less overall mass. *Xenon is expensive.