Starman4308

The cost of upgrading buildings is the one part of the system which is moddable. The No More Grind mod can reduce all building upgrades by a flat rate: I'm sure that, if you know how to write code, you can figure out how to make it a bit more specific than that*. *If you do figure that out, please send a pull request the authors' way. I really need to get Renegotiator finished, else I'd take a crack at it.

Name me one experiment astronauts could perform in Venus's atmosphere which could not be done equally well with a robotic laboratory. Pipettes? You can send the fanciest, ritziest automated pipette handling system one-way for a tiny fraction of the cost of sending a human being two ways. Changing up valves? An automated system, again, is a tiny fraction of the mass of a human and associated life support and return rocket.

No, the first step is to make an unmanned blimp, and forget about sending people, because the unmanned blimp can do everything a manned blimp could at a tiny fraction of the cost. I think you can squarely blame this one on clueless NASA administrators who took a look at some absurd Venus plan, and pitched it regardless of whether it made any sense whatsoever. NASA would be much better served coming up with a solid roadmap with practical missions with good returns on investment. I doubt you'll find any magic bullet in Venus's atmosphere. We could certainly improve our predictive models, but the solution will be here on Earth, when we finally reach a carbon-neutral or near-neutral state. And, as mentioned before, why would you ever send astronauts on this mission? A manned Mars mission kind of makes sense, even if the return-on-investment is atrocious, but there is literally nothing a manned Venus blimp could do that an unmanned Venus blimp couldn't do. EDIT: A manned Mars lander could do things that an unmanned Mars rover cannot do. It's not much, but at least people are very good for sample collection and other such tasks. A manned Venus blimp would function solely to waste money and endanger astronaut lives, because there is no task in Venus's atmosphere which requires hands or a human at the controls. Now, in terms of unmanned missions, you could make a strong case for an unmanned Venus mission being more important than another Mars rover. But, when you bring humans into the equation, Mars is a semi-valid choice, while there is no rationale whatsoever for Venus.

So then why do you imply that you have to make every component separately? If not Fischer Tropsch, then a newer set of reactions might accomplish the same thing at a lower cost. There is a huge amount of effort trying to do exactly that: come up with a chemical, biological, or hybrid synthesis to produce a petroleum-like mixture at an economical cost. Even disregarding the possibility of new chemical reactions and processes, eventually petroleum will become sufficiently expensive that Fischer Tropsch will become economical. Hopefully it's because of stiff taxes on petroleum products, rather than petroleum depletion, but eventually petroleum alternatives will become viable because petroleum has become inviable.

That really sounds like the heat shield clipping bug NathanKell mentioned. Ensure that it's a bottom-to-top connection, and not a bottom-to-bottom connection: a bottom-to-bottom confuses FAR. Also, while this isn't your problem (if it's not a clipped heat shield, it's something else wrong with FAR), you can also try a lifting reentry. If you pitch up above your surface velocity vector*, the heat shield will give you some lift, and help moderate reentry. If you pitch below, the opposite effect occurs. If your reaction wheels aren't strong enough (usually the case in RO), you can try an asymmetric mass distribution: if CoM is above the midline, drag will naturally cause you to tilt in the proper direction, allowing you to use roll instead of pitch to control lift. *Just to be 100% clear: pitch your capsule above your surface retrograde marker. In my experience, about 2-5 degrees works, dependent on how much room for error there is before surface-attached parts start frying.

Arkie, what you're trying to do is ambiguous, particularly at the cross-sectional area part. If you assume a certain orientation, you might be able to write a MM config which scales the minimum_drag and maximum_drag values so that the math works out to give you a sane drag value. This would essentially be stock aero with drag values cleverly scaled to divide out the mass and hard-coded 0.008, and instead use some default Cd*cross-section. However, if you plan to do anything like exposed cross-sectional area, or orientation-dependent cross-section, you're going to need to write a plugin. EDIT: I'm not sure how much math you can do in an MM config, so there's a good chance you would have to plug in the values into a spreadsheet, and then manually patch the drag values for each and every part. I know you can do some things using math in MM configs, but you'd need to parse out the object size out of the part config, and that's no easy task. Also, aerodynamics under such an MM config-based model would be downright weird. You've destroyed the "drag centered at mass" assumption which makes stock aero kinda work, and it's still not going to act like a realistic aerodynamics model.

Depends on payload mass. Also on RSS installation/configuration, though that is probably irrelevant to this situation. It's hard to come up with an "average cost" when I am sometimes lofting 100kg satellites, and sometimes lofting 110-tonne interplanetary vessels. Also, try to avoid faulty O-rings.

Tell that to the people designing a Mars sample return mission. Fingers and hands are downright wonderful for tasks like sample collection, weird experiments like "can we plant stuff in Martian soil?", transferring samples to return rockets, and "Hey, that's funny, can you hand me the excavation chisel Bob?" There are reasons for a manned Mars mission. They are eclipsed by the costs, but at least there is some reason that a manned mission could return more science than unmanned.

Alright. We can probably make a Teflon coating or something. Now, will it stand up to a year in space, followed by reentry, and still perfectly seal your craft? Are you willing to trust human lives to that, particularly when there is no science to be gained which could not have been done unmanned? At least Mars has rocks and stuff astronauts can pick up, and the challenges are basically understood and solved problems.

No sulfuric acid atmosphere, no hurricane-level winds, no need to figure out the best way to launch a rocket from mid-atmosphere, no need to figure out how to preserve said rocket from sulfuric acid... Gee, Mars sure sounds safer than "Thou shalt not return" Venus. It also helps that the astronauts would have something to do on Mars, unlike Venus, where the crew would twiddle its thumbs and look at all the instruments that could've been sent on an unmanned mission.

Czerky: the issue which immediately suggests itself is that you are taking an extremely steep reentry path. Something like 100km x 35km is typical, but it looked like you were reentering at an almost 45 degree angle, suggesting a periapsis buried deep, deep inside Kerbin. Drogues would be destroyed just as much as main chutes if deployed at 450 m/s. FAR would make DRE unplayable if you couldn't get to ~250-300 m/s just on the capsule. Granted, I still suspect Czerky's problem is his reentry profile: he was traveling well above terminal velocity, suggesting he had carried a lot of orbital velocity along with him, instead of killing almost all his orbital velocity in mid-atmosphere. EDIT: Saw the "suborbital" bit. Suborbital reentries always freak me out because there's less control of vertical velocity. They're probably harder than orbital reentries.

My caveat with FAR: FAR itself is probably too unforgiving for new players. I hope Squad's new aerodynamics does something like "drag is now dependent on orientation, but then magically re-distributed to retain balanced drag forces on all parts". This'd let you improve efficiency with aerodynamic rockets, without forcing new players to learn how to make aerodynamically stable rockets.

I suspect the reason why this doesn't happen is because Squad wants pure LF tanks (essentially jet fuel fuselages) to remain relatively heavy, and LF/O tanks to be more in-line with space travel. If you make LV-Ns consume only liquid fuel, you either force them to use mass-inefficient fuselages (or half-empty LF/O tanks, also mass-inefficient), or destroy Squad's ability to balance jet fuel tanks separately with LF/O tanks.

I very strongly doubt NASA will try this one before a manned Mars mission. The gain from a manned mission to Venus's atmosphere is basically 0: there is nothing to be done in Venus's atmosphere which could not be done remotely. On the other hand, a Mars mission is likely to be roughly equal in cost, much safer, and actually have a point to it: people are excellent at excavating things and other tasks which might be performed on the Martian surface.

You don't need to make each component of kerosene separately. It's plenty possible to go with chemical reactions which make a variety of compounds. These reactions exist and have been known for some time, they're just not economical yet. So long as what results is roughly similar to kerosene, it should be easy enough to filter out troublesome compounds and come up with a fuel similar to RP-1. You'd probably still have to redesign the engines a bit, but it's unlikely to be a huge changeover. There is no need to hit RP-1 on the head or make each component separately: slight retools to engines can account for the first, and there's several ways to promote semi-random creation of large hydrocarbons from short hydrocarbons.

That's what happens when you replace soup with atmosphere. In stock, crazily high atmospheric drag forces low ascent speed (~terminal velocity for 10km), whereas in FAR, it's nigh-impossible to even approach terminal velocity on ascent. Speaking of, my typical advice for FAR ascents. Design: Aim for 1.2-1.6 TWR. A low TWR is probably going to waste an unusually large amount of dV on ascent, while it is very frustrating to wrestle high-TWR rockets onto a proper gravity turn. Also, fins: Have them, and have them on the bottom. They confer a lot of stability by pulling center-of-pressure (AKA center-of-lift) behind center-of-mass. Launch: Go full-throttle up until you hit about 60-100 m/s. At that point, make a 2-5 degree turn eastwards (sharper and earlier for high TWR rockets). Let your prograde marker catch up to your rocket orientation. Gravity turn: Look Ma, no hands! Assuming you have an aerodynamically stable rocket (with fins, basically), aerodynamic stability will keep you pointed prograde all the way through to upper atmosphere. Be careful here: an overly sharp correction could cause your rocket to spin out and explode: stay within ~2-5 degrees of prograde. Upper atmosphere: Once you're at 35-60 km (depending on whether you have Real Solar System installed), you can start taking more manual control of your rocket. I suggest controlling pitch to keep tAP (time to apoapsis) in the 10-30 second range: that will describe a gentle ascent which spends most of its thrust circularizing. Too high, and you'll waste dV going up too quickly, and too low, and you will spend too long in Atmosphere Town.

If it's NVIDIA Optimus technology, I think the NVIDIA Prime package (not 100% sure on the name) lets you set GPU vs. onboard, though that involves a restart. Trying to get it back to working the way it should is a giant headache: I know the Bumblebee package is supposed to do that, but I was utterly unsuccessful in getting that to work the way it should. I'm quite sure you could get KSP to run on other Linux installations, but I can also confirm that it is relatively easy to install Ubuntu and run KSP. If you're new to Linux, it is what I would currently suggest.

We probably get more net flux of resources through tectonic action than from space. EDIT: Slightly misunderstood the post. Still, for the most part, what we have is what we have, and what we send to space is an utterly negligible fraction of what we have.

Oh, it's almost certainly possible to get a petroleum-like mixture out of cellulose: you would just need to use bacteria, catalysts, or enzymes which promote hydrocarbon chain formation. It wouldn't matter exactly what you get, so long as it's got roughly the same chemical distribution as the fuel of choice. I also disagree with the implication that it must be more expensive than crude oil distillates. If cellulose extraction, transport, conversion, and transport back to distribution centers can be done more cheaply than petroleum extraction, refinement, and transport, it should be cheaper in the end. Problem being, of course, that right now, it's really hard to devise chemical processes which are cheaper than petroleum extraction. It's like the old joke with lignin: you can make anything from lignin but money. If we can move to all biofuels, nuclear, and renewable, we can go to a net-carbon-neutral situation where each year's carbon production is taken up by the next year's crops, but that isn't going to happen soon for several unfortunate reasons.

It's not like we're going to run out of petroleum tomorrow. We'll have a huge amount of lead time to move to something like hydrolox. There's an expression I like for this scenario: "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic". There are a million more pressing problems than what fuel the space industry uses, and the fuel of choice for the space industry is not going to have any effect on the final outcome.

In the extreme long term, petroleum will become so expensive that RP-1 will become uneconomical. At that point, either we've developed effective large-scale alternative energy sources (such as effective biofuels), or humanity is in a bad spot. Until that point, however, there is really no point in replacing RP-1, unless propalox or methalox become more economically viable than RP-1. Even in terms of carbon emissions, the increased expense of hydrolox fuel tanks and engines strongly suggests to me that, even ignoring the carbon cost of splitting the water, you'd probably emit more net carbon with a hydrolox stage than a kerolox stage. I might be wrong, but cost tends to be correlated with carbon expenditure, and hydrolox tanks and engines are really expensive.

No. There's a good chance you might increase overall carbon emissions: you probably burn much more carbon just making the rocket parts, making other fuels costs carbon (where do you think the electricity to split water comes from), and employees often spend their wages on things which cause carbon emissions, like vacations. On top of that, as mentioned, rocket launches count for an utterly minute fraction of carbon emissions.

Issue with a stackable 1-man is that allows you to put up as many as you want. A conical 2-man is more limiting, and forces you to continue to choose which Kerbals to send.

The primary point is that, for a typical ascent, a 1.4 TWR rocket is going to find it much easier to make a proper gravity turn without flipping out, whereas a 2.0 TWR rocket is going to go shooting off for some silly apoapsis (200km, say) and waste a lot of its dV in the process: this is because the overpowered rocket would flip out if you tried to make it follow the same gravity turn. This is in addition to the fact that, in rocket design, going with a lower TWR design is going to help your overall dV, because less TWR needs less engine mass, and less engine mass means more dV. It's inapplicable to this scenario, since we're given a rather overpowered, mostly SRB-driven rocket, but to sane designs, adding engine mass is going to hurt.

Are there any plans to allow setting different multipliers for different buildings/levels? I'm of a mind to make certain upgrades (such as patched conics and maneuver nodes) very easy to get*, but not touch the rest of it. Limiting launch capabilities makes sense: as your program grows, you can launch more ambitious missions. Removing stuff like patched conics and targeting was, in my opinion, one of the worst decisions Squad has ever made. *Sadly, things like patched conics are now hardcoded to building level, so this is the best solution.