Ten Key

I'd also rather it not stay out over the water and then hook into Tampa Bay. The shape of the bay and the direction of the water could amplify the storm surge significantly. My parents and my brother live in the Riverview area, and my in-laws live across the bay in St Pete. It's going to be a rough weekend. Stay safe all, and good luck.

My Dad has a story about being chased by a typhoon that seemed hell bent on following them no matter what they did. They had to submerge to get away from it, and supposedly the ride is pretty smooth once you're away from the surface, but unfortunately my Dad's boat was a diesel-electric. Trying to use the snorkel was. . .unpleasant. Maybe impossible. . .the story was a little vague on that.

For Eastern Florida perhaps. Those of you on the West coast need to take another look at the latest track. Going back and forth with a researcher now. . .it may be Saturday afternoon before they have a good feel for where exactly it's going to go. Interactions with Cuba are going to dictate where and how it turns. EDIT: It's worth noting that southwestern Florida is mostly swamp land, and may not weaken the storm as quickly after landfall as might otherwise be expected.

http://news.wisc.edu/curiosities-why-does-the-sky-turn-green-before-a-tornado-2/ HWRF (Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting) uses a nested grid system with a relatively high resolution in each grid. This allows it to model the finer detail inside a developing storm. However, since the regional atmospheric conditions span multiple grids the boundaries between the grids make it harder for the model to get a "big picture" of the overall environment. HMON (Hurricanes in a Multi-scale Ocean-coupled Non-hydrostatic model) is brand new (it went live on or around August 15th) and as you can see, it is having some teething issues. I wouldn't trust it. All other storms before it. . .for this season. For the record, I asked some people who do this for a living, and no one had heard of these "Ventusky" models before. I wouldn't put any stock in their forecasts, no matter how slick their webpage might be. And I certainly wouldn't bet my life on them. That image is from Monday night. Those tracks are old.

I can think of one off the top of my head. . . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Carbon_Observatory#Original_launch There were a lot of people on the ground that morning who didn't think that was hilarious. Not even a little bit.

Sandy had sustained winds of about 80 mph at landfall-- the change in the color of the track on that map you linked denotes a transition to an extratropical cyclone, not a downgrade to a tropical depression. The problem with Sandy was its large wind field and high rate of speed leading up to landfall. The position markers on the image below are at six hour intervals. You can see how the storm picked up speed in the 24 hours prior to landfall. This, combined with landfall coming near high tide, produced significant storm surge across a wide area of coast line.

This is incorrect. FEMA has had a director since June, and it does look like he knows what he's doing. https://www.fema.gov/brock-long

My naming conventions are all over the place, and tend to be a mash up of form, function, and whatever happens to be floating around in my brain at the moment. Because appearance plays a role, I don't normally name things until after the design is finalized. I occasionally become enamored with acronyms. Examples in the spoiler tab below.

Those are great shots.

Fantastic pictures as always, but I have to ask. . . How did you manage to find a freeway in Tampa with no traffic on it? Is that the upper deck of the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway (aka, The Crosstown)?

Best reference I can find is an orbital mechanics textbook published in 1998.

There really aren't any short cuts. . .trying to learn math by rote memorization alone won't get you very far. I will say that dimensional analysis has saved my bacon on more than one occasion. It's not going to give you the right answer, but it's very good at highlighting mistakes.

They likely could. But if you have the time to spare, why not take it?

Huzzah!

In my experience Shadowplay works very well, but I stopped using it when Nvidia decided I needed an account to access that feature. I should not have to log into my video card in order to use it.

Uh oh.

Looks like it works for me.

But not too energetically.

You can't upload images directly to the forum. You'll need to upload your images to a third party site and then link them back here. Imgur is a popular choice. You can then add your images to a post by clicking on the "insert other media" button in the bottom right of the post window, and then clicking the "insert image from URL" option. I'm running a modded install, but I think the basic design philosophy I'm using will still apply. You can reduce your launch weight by only using the fuel you need to get into low Kerbin orbit. Any fuel you need beyond that can be sent up on subsequent launches. This is my Matryoshka launcher. It weighs 1,000 tons on the pad, but the two upper fuel tanks on the central core are empty. The first stage consists of five Mainsail engines and eight solid rocket boosters. I start my pitch over as soon as the SRBs burn out and fall away. Since the central mainsail is drawing from one fuel tank and the four outboard engines are drawing from two, the central engine cuts off at some point during the ascent. Everything besides the SRBs and the central nose cone makes it into low Kerbin orbit. Once in orbit I send up fuel tankers and put fuel in all eleven tanks. Then I set the thrust limiter on the central Mainsail to 50%. . .this cuts the fuel draw on that engine in half, meaning all five engines will now run out of fuel at the same time. I do this to avoid problems with my transfer burn calculations. The five Mainsails get me out of Kerbin orbit and on my way in a single burn, because while I enjoy docking, periapsis kicking drives me nuts. Once the Mainsails are empty, the central core detaches and proceeds with the mission. With two of the really big fuel tanks feeding a single Poodle engine, it has enough dV to go just about anywhere.

Welcome to the forums Spaceman. I'm running 0.23.5, and yes, that's very much before the aerodynamics adjustment (that was 0.90 I think?) so Kerbin's atmosphere is still very draggy. Even so, I usually start my pitch over between 5-10 km, and my rockets are usually horizontal somewhere between 35 and 40 km. What exactly is going wrong? Is the rocket catching up to its apoapsis and falling back into the atmosphere? Are you losing control of the rocket at some point? Are you getting out of the atmosphere but are just running out of fuel? I've launched a few fairly large payloads (100 ton range I think) and one thing that's very helpful is on orbit refueling. You say your Jool ship is roughly 60 tons. . .how much of that is propellant? What happens if you launch it with the fuel tanks empty and then fuel it up once it's in orbit? Alternatively, can you figure a way to let the rocket use the propellant in the probe ship's tanks on the way up, and then refuel it after you've reached orbit?

The graphics are (very) dated, but Race Into Space was derived from a board game so the game design is pretty tight and there's a lot of replayability. The game has been rereleased under the GPL license and is currently a free download. http://www.raceintospace.org/

It was okay until the above line. That line is legible. . .but completely ridiculous.