Starman4308

I strongly suspect the answer is going to be "yes"; xenon is stored as a pressurized gas instead of a liquid, thus bulky, heavy pressure tanks, and for game balance, you still get vastly better delta-V out of ion engines due to their specific impulse.

Oh, it was a reason alright. I imagine there's a good chance engines were pulled from Saturn V rockets because testing revealed defects, we just don't hear about those because "test revealed minor glitch in engine 3; replaced with identical engine" is much less newsworthy than "rocket exploded due to engine failure". While I don't have a very detailed history of the Apollo project that would make note of such incidents, I can fully imagine that Saturn V rockets could have exploded if they were not-tested in the same manner as the N1 rockets were.

And so is rescueception. Granted, these days, I don't do much of that, on account of testing every single manned platform in an unmanned test flight first, which A, discovers the problems, and B, makes sure the rescue vehicle is itself unmanned.

Well, for one, the rockets exploded. That was probably their biggest problem. Very little of it was caused directly by the engines; it was more how they were used; i.e., in an improperly tested platform with primitive control equipment and way too many at once. I wonder what would've happened had the Soviets not been so rushed, and decided to embark on a manned lunar program starting from improving the cosmodrome, and making sure they had the infrastructure to do it right.

There is no such thing as a 100% stable orbit, and real life doesn't operate on an X% recovery mechanic; all the instruments were designed to transmit 100% of their data. There is some historic significance, yes, but that was outweighed by making absolutely sure Cassini wouldn't contaminate one of Saturn's moons.

Ah. You're aware there's a config file on the KScale64 GitHub repo that multiplies the procedural tank limits? By default, the procedural tank limits closely follow stock tank sizes... which is rather limiting since stock tank sizes are balanced around WonderFuel(TM) with its amazing 5 kg/L density, and an almost toy-scale planet. Also, if you're using RealFuels, do note that service module-type tanks are actually better insulators than cryogenic, they just mass a lot per ton of contained propellant. There's the Heat Pump mod to keep cryo tanks chilled, which helps a lot with nuclear rocket-based missions. EDIT: I also like to configure the diameter small step to be 0.125, so I can line up more neatly with stock part sizes (particularly 0.625m parts).

First off: congrats, 6.4x Kerbin is quite the adjustment, but has its rewards for how much it feels like an achievement to go places. Second, are those procedural tanks, and if so, where did you get the textures? On my own end: more Eve launches, built a new vehicle to capture an E-class asteroid into Munar orbit (relying heavily on Karbonite ISRU), and seriously wishing some of my favorite mods would update to 1.2.1 so I can start a new, harder career save with all the 1.2.1 shinies.

Not a huge amount of stuff; downloaded DMagic's science mod; while initially I resisted because it added too many non-stock science parts (theoretically unabalancing the game), I've realized that A, my current save, I already have 90% of the tech tree, and B, future saves I can just knock down the science rewards to 20% or so. Otherwise, mostly just chugging along, launching stuff towards Eve, wondering why some of them explode when I switch to them just as they cross the Kerbin-Kerbol SOI interface, and launching my new outer-planets equi-Kerbin relays* *The operating hypothesis being that the amount of effort I put into making sure that there's always a relay available to Kerbin in the off chance it's behind the Sun is inversely correlated to the chance that will ever be an issue. These relays are just masses of long-range antennae pointed at every other planet, which will form a triangle with Kerbin.

Decided to design my Jool comms relays, with three large interplanetary antennas to talk to Kerbin and two relays that will maintain approximately Kerbostationary orbit (in the event Kerbin is behind the Sun or something), plus an octet of lesser antennas to maintain communications with all five moons, two to retain contact with the other Jool relays, and the last one pointed at the active vessel. My greatest regret was deciding "hey, I know solar power is very weak at Jool orbit, but why don't I try anyways; plus, unlike a reactor, it won't ever run out." Six tonnes of batteries. About the same of solar panels (nine Megalodors, nine curved static arrays, all from Near Future). Another 600 kg of capacitors. I could've gotten 30 years of life with reactors for less than 2 tonnes, plus 800 kg per full refuel, or just gone with two tonnes worth of RTGs. I'm going ahead with the solar-powered plan anyways for now, mostly because I am drowning in funds and it was kinda fun designing the solar-powered version, but to go to the OPM planets, there's no way I'll be able to do that with solar. Otherwise: captured a class D into Kerbin orbit (just low enough to avoid Minmus); took some configuring to make Karbonite drills spit out Karbonite when run an an asteroid. Some redesign will have to be contemplated for subsequent missions; I think I put the drills too close to the docking claw, meaning I couldn't really pivot all that well towards the asteroid CoM, meaning really low thrust and absurd expenditure of RCS propellant. Finally: a station crew awaiting pickup at just the right time of day:

Right now, I've got six on my lunar space stations; two scientists for the lab, and a pair of both pilots and engineers so that there's always one of each on the station, even when I send a refueling team to the ground. I'll probably keep that configuration for interplanetary missions; it also happens to be equal to the largest command capsule I have available. My primary bit of overprovisioning is in the crew accomodation; the station has 17 dedicated seats (a cupola, a science lab, a 6-man hab, an 8-man hab), plus two 1-man landers, a 2-man lander, and the two 4-man transfer/return vehicles.

On tinkering about in the VAB with MechJeb, I am surprised to find that a trimodal LV-N running a hydrolox mixture can plausibly take off and land on Tylo without refueling. Nothing else really quite cuts it; pure hydrogen nuclear-thermal rockets have poor TWR and very low propellant density, and while the electrical engines from Near Future seemed promising, that lasted right up until I included reactors powerful enough to run those engines.

It is quite a nice feeling to be sending stuff interplanetary; the only real drawback is when you're also wasting a lot of time stage-managing things in the Kerbin system. In any case, two major bits of progress: #1, the new ISRU equipment has been landed on the Mun, with a successful round trip returning a net of about 150,000 liters of liquid hydrogen to the primary lunar space station. One of two miners landed on the Mun: One of two fuel rovers on descent to the lunar surface: The ELMSS Extended Lunar Mission Support System, a fancy way of saying "giant liquid hydrogen tank and a bit of extra munchies for trips to non-equatorial biomes", as the landers don't have the dV to both make a large plane change and land. This is my one reasonably good image of the frustrating process of loading LH2 into the lander to return to the space station; there was Fun (tm) such as realizing I hadn't added any KIS attachment points to the lander (solved via persistence file editing, though on reflection I could've grabbed a spare port from the rover), the lander springing back up into the air upon reloading, finding out that jetpacking with 400 kg of attachment ports doesn't work so well in Mun gravity, etc. A little bit to the right in the distance is the lander, this time at least only 2 km away from the miner. The other bit of progress: the Eve transfer window is arriving, and I'm launching four primary relay satellites, four Gilly sub-relays (of which only one has an interplanetary antenna, the rest relying on either that one or the primary Eve relays), one Eve lander (one-way), two scanning/orbital science satellites, one permanent Gilly lander, and three ion-powered landers which will be sent to all three of Gilly's biomes, and then plot a course back to Kerbin. Miscellaneous: resupplying my spectrometer satellite with additional impactors. Due to a botched ascent, I felt it prudent to shuck off four of eight impactors to lighten the load, while still on ascent. An attempt to redirect a D-class asteroid using Karbonite ISRU and a trimodal LH2/LOX nuclear thermal engine. Moderately experimental; I'm not even sure if asteroids have Karbonite to mine. While straight LH2 would be more efficient, by doing that I'm throwing away huge amounts of LOX mass in the process, and I suspect that'd give more overall delta-V than going with straight hydrogen.

I'd just like to point out that "got to the Mun" is already a pretty impressive thing; quite a few people never even manage to get to that stage. If you've gotten there, congratulate yourself, as you've accomplished one of the harder tasks in gaming, one that requires a non-trivial understanding of orbital mechanics and rocketry. Possibly one acquired through explosions, tipped landers, flipped launch vehicles, forgotten parachutes, forgotten antennae, forgotten batteries, forgotten solar panels, etc, but still more than most can claim*. *Every last one of these has happened to me. As to impressive things; Maccollo has some videos about absurd stunts in RSS with stock parts only. On my end... probably the most impressive thing so far is the ISRU operation I have going on the Mun; the 6.4x scale means I had to resort to nukes to be able to haul up a practical quantity of fuel*, meaning almost ludicrously large transport vehicles given the density or lack thereof of liquid hydrogen. It works, though; I just recently got my first haul of ~150,000 liters back up to the station. *6.4x Mun isn't quite as bad as stock Tylo, but it isn't too far from stock Tylo either.

I'm 99% sure the engine changes have been moved to the Advanced Jet Engine mod.

Sent the first of the new nuclear-propelled landers to the Mun. I checked; the main tank is the same size as a Kerbodyne S3-7200 tank, and when full, it masses... about as much as an empty stock S3-7200. Liquid hydrogen is very low density relative to KSP LF+O (by a factor of approximately 70); it'd be hopeless if Real Fuels didn't drastically lower tank and engine masses. As a result, that physically enormous lander masses just 6.06 tonnes when fully loaded, whereas I'm pretty sure a lander with those dimensions and stock masses would mass around that much without a drop of fuel in the tank.

Well, did my first lunar refueling run, and ran into one significant issue. This isn't it: For more than an hour of work, landing, driving 20 km to the lander to pick up the engineer, driving 20 km back to fuel up the transport rover, 20 km again to deposit it in the lander, 20 km back to fuel up again, 20 km back to finish fueling the lander, I get maybe half a mission's worth of hydrolox fuel back to the station. Chemical engines just aren't cutting it on 6.4x Mun; it takes ~3 km/sec to land and return to orbit, factor in maybe 400-500 m/sec for rendezvous, and that means getting to and from the station eats up the vast majority of the fuel added to the lander. There is only one reasonable solution: go nuclear, and go big. The main tank of the mining station holds over 500,000L of liquid hydrogen in an actively cooled cryogenic tank, measuring 10m long and 8.75m wide. The porter carries a "mere" 300,000L in a single go, of which approximately 150,000L can be delivered to landers (which require less than 40,000L per surface visit). I haven't designed the rover yet, but I suspect it'll be similarly monstrous.

My first Duna lander hit atmo at escape velocity. Simple little thing, but I was proud of it. The landing legs died a noble death cushioning descent at 15 km. I'll have to bear in mind for the future that even if RealChute assures me I'll touch down at 5 m/sec, that is typically 5 m/sec at reference altitude, and not 16 km up in the highlands. We do not speak of the Ike lander, nor of the new crater in an Ike mountainside. That was caused by a meteorite.

So first, an amusing result when landing a Minmus base for Sean's Cannery: I maaaay have taken this image more than once out of pure excitement: Trajectory (Ike gravity brake saves maybe 200 m/sec, costing ~10-20 m/sec to set up when just outside Kerbin orbit): Gravity brake at Ike: The insertion approaches, with my first-ever kOS script to handle the maneuver. Turns out the kOS script was completely unnecessary in the end; while Kerbin was eclipsed, one of my solar relays kept me in constant connection. RCS thrusters fire for five seconds before the burn begins, as well as two seconds into the burn, to ensure proper ullage (pressing the main engine's fuel to the bottom of the tank). Inserted into elliptical orbit: at apodune, circularized into 4,000 km orbit to serve as communication relay for subsequent missions. As of writing: one more has been circularized, the third will probably circularize at next apodune, and the fourth will be entering Duna SOI in nine hours. Ike eclipses Duna: The survey satellite, loaded with instruments, is approaching and inserting as we speak. I'll let the UI on the second image speak as to the design decision I most regret about the survey probe. EDIT: I've checked; it's been almost a month since I sent most of these craft towards Duna. Wonderful to finally have that come to fruition.

Alrighty. Thanks bunches for that, and for helping make this excellent mod.

Doesn't seem like a terrible idea. If he gets to it, I'd maybe suggest switching green to blue, to reduce issues with red-green colorblindness.

Telomeres are, again, a pecularity of linear chromosomes. DNA is an anti-parallel double helix; the convention is that bases are listed 5' (the phosphate end) to 3' (the sugar end). This is the direction DNA replication takes; it adds the 5' end of a new nucleotide to the 3' end of the growing strand So, starting with: 5'-ATAGCG-3' |||||| 3'-TATCGC-5' You then split, and can start adding bases as so: Old-5'-ATAGCG-3' |||| New-3'- TCGC-5' Old-3'-TATCGC-5' ||| New-5'-ATA-3' Now, there's an issue that arises. DNA replication typically starts mid-chain; you open up a bubble, and start replicating bidirectionally. ________________ 5'--------/ <-Replication-> \------------3' Now, there arises an issue. The DNA to the left (5') of the bubble can be replicated quite easily; you just lay down a base, and start elongating 5' to 3' 3'-----<Leading Strand-5' The other direction, though, the lagging strand, is more complicated. DNA replicases work 5' to 3', but the lagging strand looks like this: 3'-Lagging Strand>-----5' The solution for the lagging strand is Okazaki fragments. It'll jump ahead maybe 1000 bases (approximately), and start replicating "backwards" (but still 5' to 3') until it reaches the leading strand. It'll then jump ahead 2000 bases, replicate 1000 bases until it reaches the prior starting point (the prior Okazaki fragment), jump ahead 2000 bases, replicate another 1000-base Okazaki fragment, etc. 5'-Parental------------------<>--------------------------------------------------------------------------3' 3'<---Leading Strand-5'3'<------1st Fragment-5'3'<------2nd Fragment-5' 3'<---Lagging Strand-5' Now, let us jump ahead to the end of the chromosome. 5'-Parental------------------------------------------------------------3' 3'-Lagging Strand-------------------------------------5' You've got the last Okazaki fragment of the lagging strand, plus a short 3' overhang of the parental strand. Issue is, you can't jump ahead 1000 base pairs; you're almost at the end. If not for telomeres, then, the newly replicated chromosome would be clipped some number of bases. When it replicates, then, you'll get a new 5'-3' leading strand matching the shortened length of the old lagging strand. When that replicates, now you've got another clipped 3'-5' lagging strand. Progress that long enough, and eventually you clip away the entire chromosome. This is where telomeres come in. I won't go into super-detail about these, other than to say they are special DNA structures, with a repeating CCCAATCCC sequence, and telomerase can add extra CCCAATCCC to the end to replace that part of the telomere that got clipped off. Aging occurs in part because telomerase becomes less active as you age, and it stops replacing all the telomere that got lost, until your cell recognizes "I'm almost out of telomere, I'll just completely stop dividing now". The point of this all: it is a pecularity of linear DNA chromosomes. Duplicating data for an inorganic life form does not need telomeres, because telomeres are a construct to deal with a pecularity of how DNA is replicated on linear chromosomes in organic beings. As to erosion: yes, mountains erode, but we could in theory fix them by plastering down new rock material to replace the old. We don't do that because it would be silly, but by expending some energy and potentially acquiring more raw materials, a probe could repair itself and maintain data integrity almost perpetually.

Telomeres aren't particularly relevant here; they are not there for information storage or maintenance; they exist purely to deal with a peculiarity of linear DNA chromosomes.upon replication (namely, that ordinary DNA replicases would otherwise chew a bit off the ends each replication). Since cp -r oldArchive/ newArchive does not trim any information off the ends, a inorganic, computer-based life-form/quasi-life-form would not need anything analogous to telomeres. I don't think we're really postulating sexual reproduction of an inorganic life-form here, just information maintenance. It'd be most analogous to a cell at G0 phase, except unlike a G0 cell, there'd be 100 copies of the information instead of two, and information repair would be a priority instead of "eh, dual-strand break, let's just clip some off and join the ends, I'm sure it's not in anything crucial like pyruvate decarboxylase or p53". Kind of relevant, except for this case, there would be active expenditure of energy to repair damage, frequently scanning 100 backups of the same data to see if any one backup may have suffered any damage. The closest biological equivalent might be a tetraploid or octoploid cell using recombination repair with some form of additional error-checking to fix any damage.

I am reminded of how much I hate GitHub; one of the terms of service is "only one account per person", and I prefer to keep professional and personal endeavors separate. I apologize, but posting to Github is something I won't do for KSP, for that reason. Otherwise; yeah, probably that RealFuels isn't using the stock engine module. My best guess is that it stores the engine config, and then looks up the Isp and thrust as needed from the part's config list.

So, has anybody found a mechanism to get the Isp and thrust of a RealFuels engine into a script? I wrote my first kOS script (basic maneuver-execution, preceded by a 5-second RCS blast to ensure ullage), and while the top part works for stock engines (or at least mis-configured RF engines), it results in a divide-by-zero error when I try to run it with most RF engines. Right now, I've got a version that passes in thrust and specific impulse as parameters, but that means I have to look them up. SET mthr TO 0. SET ispdiv TO 0.0. LIST ENGINES IN engList. FOR eng IN engList { IF eng:IGNITION { SET modList TO eng:MODULES. SET isRF to FALSE. FOR modName IN modList { if (modName = "ModuleEnginesRF") { print "RealFuels engine detected! " + eng:NAME. isRF = TRUE. return 1. break. } } if (! isRF) { SET mthr TO mthr + eng:MAXTHRUST. SET ispdiv TO ispdiv + (eng:MAXTHRUST / eng:ISP). // Divide-by-zero at this line for RF engines. } } } Otherwise, thanks for all the work you guys have put into this. I'll say, though, coming from a background of Java, Bash, and occasional Python and Groovy, the period-terminated statements have thrown me off so many times; I don't have the mental cue of working in an IDE to tell my brain "insert semicolon", not that a semicolon would work anyways, so my brain defaults to "writing script; therefore statements terminated on newline". Also: is there a general style guide for kOS scripts? I've tried to default to having most kOS syntax be capitalized, and most of my variable names in camelcase, but I've been inconsistent.

Unless one can subcontract the whole "fling probe into the distant future" thing to Aku, I'd have to agree that abusing relativity is the best way to go about it. The question is: where does one get a convenient black hole or near-lightspeed velocities to accomplish that with? When it comes to information mutation, however, one could plausibly design multiple redundant backup information copies which are actively scanned periodically; if you have 100 copies, the chance that 51/100 have had a bit flipped is almost negligible. The primary issue with DNA is that most cells retain only one or two copies, and oftentimes cells will use destructive repair mechanisms such as NHEJ (Non-Homologous End Joining). And yes, I wrote this mostly to make the Aku/Samurai Jack joke.