Gaarst

*record scratch* *freeze frame* Yup, that's me. You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation...

Hey I completely forgot about this thing! Happy to see it's considered a good design. I was originally planning on waiting for feedback before making an upscaled version that would meet the 40 passengers requirement... and then I forgot I even built this plane. I might get back to the drawing board for that bigger plane now...

That's the thing, as cool as a design it may be, it doesn't work: Edit: I have edited my post so that the part where it was a total failure is more obvious.

Because I know that using what is essentially an oxygen torch to cut a pizza is stupid and unreasonable, I have gone with something much more sensible in the form of a regular rolling pizza cutter... jet-powered that is. Basically the blade is a bearing, free to rotate about its position, pushed by two jet engines strapped to the arms of the thing making it rotate at extremely high, yet completely safe, speeds. I strapped it to a buggy that was lying around and set to work... (it's hard to see because screenshots don't move but it actually rotates) ...with more or less success: In unrelated news, I learnt that no matter how fast something rotates, it won't do damage to another part it touches; so the pizza is whole and my stomach empty... At least I made a good bearing for once.

This is an interesting challenge! Drawing from my non-existent experience in building ion planes, I've decided to go against what seems to be the trend and towards minimalism. I don't have a properly working plane just yet but I am working on the iKarus6000: twin-engined and weighing just over 3.2t, it can takeoff on its own on a slope at 6,000 m (I'm using a lower mountain that has nice slopes to launch from), is somewhat controllable and generates enough electricity if you launch it at noon, but cannot sustain level flight just yet: best I have done is maintaining airspeed with a -0.6 m/s vertical velocity. I've made a three-engine version that can get in a small climb but then the solar panels are not enough and I would have to add more, maybe it's the way to go? For specific entries I might end up using a launch cart to get rid of landing gears or make it unmanned, to reduce both mass and drag.

Stress-tested my new bush plane by landing it on the highest peak on Kerbin*, naturally there was only one man for the job... * 6767 m at about 61°N 46°E for those interested

Thanks to all the people that notify me of the new updates on the spreadsheet! Now that 1.5 (and 1.5.1) has been out for sufficiently long, I'll try to go through all the mods in the list to mark those that are updated (it's absolutely not because I forgot to do that earlier), probably this weekend. To address something a few people have mentioned, I will not add all the original authors or contributors to a mod by default (mostly because I cannot be bothered digging up hundreds of dead threads), however if someone wishes that I do so for a specific mod (or mods) I'll gladly do it, as I have already for a few entries. For sorting reasons, the additional authors credited are placed into the "Notes" column and not the author column: that way, a mod created by Diazo and updated by linuxgurugamer will still show up along linuxgurugamer's other mods. If someone knows a way to fill a column so that it appears when filtering only "Diazo" or only "linuxgurugamer" (as opposed to "linuxgurugamer, Diazo" as it would currently) I'm all ears.

Press F3.

С Днем рожденья Буран! (A bit late but whatever)

Buran, the only completed shuttle which did its orbital flight 30 years ago today, was destroyed in a roof collapse in 2002. The one in the picture is probably Ptichka, meant to be the second shuttle and nearly completed by 1993, stored in another hangar at Baikonur.

What do you mean by prograde burn? Real rockets do a single burn to orbit, there is no circularisation burn.

Telescopes today are limited by three things: quantity of light they can collect, atmospheric effects deforming incoming rays, and diffraction. The quantity of light collected is the easiest to solve: just observe for a longer time; if you can't, get a bigger telescope. Atmospheric effects are harder. Because the atmosphere is made of "cells" of different temperatures moving about, you get changes in the refractive index of the air; different refractive indices means refraction: light gets deviated and you end up with a blurred signal. There are two big ways to get around this, first adaptive optics which means that your mirror can detect when an incoming ray of light is deviated and deforms itself slightly to correct the deviation, a lot of telescopes already use this, but there's still room for improvement. The other way is to get rid of the atmosphere between you and your target, you do this by sticking your telescope into space. In some cases (to observe IR and beyond-UV parts of the spectrum) you have to go to space because the atmosphere absorbs these wavelengths entirely. The final limit is the one imposed by physics: diffraction. Light is a wave (and a particle, but it doesn't matter here), stick it through a thin aperture and you will observe some diffraction. Stick it through a big aperture and there will still be diffraction, you'll just won't be able to see it with the naked eye. Diffraction creates a hard limit on maximal resolution your telescope can get. The Rayleigh criterion gives a definition of the diffraction limit: you want the first maximum of one diffraction pattern to be further than the first minimum of the other diffraction pattern, then you can resolve the two and all is well. In maths this looks like: θ = 1.22*λ/D, θ is the maximal angular resolution, λ the wavelength of the incoming light and D the diameter (aperture) of your telescope. For Proxima Centauri b, sitting 4.2 ly away from us and having a radius about equal to that of the Earth, you'd need a 2 km wide telescope to resolve it: that is for it to be larger than one pixel on your screen. PCb is a relatively bright object in the sky (m=11 according to Wikipedia) so collecting a good signal shouldn't be too much of a problem, this means an array of a few smaller telescopes which will have a diameter of over 2 km would do the trick. You'll need to put these into space though, since telescopes on Earth still aren't close to the diffraction limit because of atmospheric effects. Back to the main question: none of the telescopes you mentioned, and AFAIK no planned telescope project, would be able to produce any picture of PCb. Fortunately you don't need high-res pictures to get some information about the atmosphere or composition of a celestial body (we have been doing this for stars for quite a while, and exoplanets for a few years). Starshot is such a long way from being a real thing that I wouldn't rely on it for pics; on the other hand there is basically zero interest in creating a several kilometres wide telescope array in space, so in the end who knows which will come first?

I got 4 in a Mk2 cargo bay in a "X" arrangement similar to the bottom cargo bay on your pic. However because I have some 1.25m fuel tanks clipping into the bay, there is no way I can fit the two outer tanks in. Even if I could i'd have to start adding more engines and extending the wings anyway. I'm curious how are they attached to the cargo bay in that last one? I've got the 4 on 4 radial decouplers oriented to the centre: they basically form a central pylon (through which the bombs go because the attachement points left after decoupling have no collider).

I've got a new version of my B-22 bomber (probably will be called Pl-22 "Bitter"), called B-22B (imaginative I know) which because I figured a way to cramp more bombs into its bay now carries 32x 900 kg bombs (twice as much as before) for a total internal payload mass of 28.8 t. Adding 30% takeoff mass means performance has taken a bit of a hit; even though I had some margin on the thrust limited Panthers I will need to recalculate its score in some areas.

In stock, other than using symmetry or visually align the gigantic CoM and CoT markers there aren't really ways to exactly balance a spacecraft. If you are OK with mods, Kerbal Engineer Redux and RCS Build Aid both give you a thrust torque reading to help balance a craft.

Here is my entry: the B-22 bomber, no proper name yet. (Download link here) More pics here: It's a supersonic capable bomber with a loaded ferry range of 2200 km, so probably a combat radius of about 1000 km. Default loadout is 16x 900 kg bombs (full small ore tank + decoupler) for a payload mass of 14.4 t, all internal; it can probably carry more on external hardpoints but I've never tried. It has a crew of two, a takeoff mass of 48.8 t, 102 parts and can cruise at 210 m/s @ 5000 m or Mach 2.05 @ 15000 m, top speed is probably over Mach 2.5 I've never tested it. Flight instructions: 1 to toggle afterburners, 2 to toggle bay doors, pull up at 75 m/s, try not to crash. Loosely based on the Tu-22M3 "Backfire" Russian bomber. As for the scoring, here are the objectives it qualifies in: Math is not Fun: + 100 pts (math is fun) More BOOM: + 201.6 pts for 14.4 t of payload stored internally Swift payback: + 750 pts for 375 m/s top speed at 3000 m Engine maintenance: - 12 pts for 4 Panthers Part maintenance: - 2.04 pts for 102 parts Airshow manoeuvrability: + 10 pts (it can pull north of 18 gs when empty) Gentle giant: + 20 pts Feeling lucky, VAB?: + 10 pts Service ceiling: + 15 pts Inspired shape: + 2 pts ? Not sure about that one, it has swept wings and was inspired by something, but not the B-52 Total: 1092.56 points (1094.56 if inspired counts) Album with the screenshots as proofs of the objectives: https://imgur.com/a/kZhsK56

I've added it in "Modding Tools", it's the category that fits it the most IMO.

Really a fantastic mod! And works perfectly in 1.5.1 as far as I can tell. My only complaint is the inability to change the axes of the flight envelope: it's currently great for a fighter but I'd like the altitude to go a bit higher for some shuttles, or the speed range to be reduced for slower planes; similarly for AoA: the gradient is linear from 0 to 35° but in flight the 0-5° range is what you are looking at for better cruise performance and it's all pretty much the same shade of blue. I've seen that mentioned earlier in the thread and apparently you are already on it.

It actually does. Open up the AeroGUI in the cheats menu and you will see air temperature and density vary as the day progresses. I don't know how significant it would be in this experiment but it is definitely a thing (if you want to find out launch a spacecraft at noon and one at midnight and report your results).

@katateochi is the one to ask.

Think of a PID controller as controlling a deviation in the craft's trajectory. P is proportional, so a PID will apply more correction the further you deviate from your original point; I is integral, in this case integrated over time, so the PID also applies a correction proportional to how long you have been away from your stable point; D is derivative, so speed, so the PID will also act stronger the faster you are deviating from the stable point. You can also think of it as accounting for present, past and future deviations respectively: P for how far you currently are from the original path, I for how far you have been until now, and D for how far you will be in the near future. The parameters affect how much the PID responds to each individual type of deviation. It's a bit vague but basically you want them tuned properly to quickly correct a deviation without overshooting; depending on the behaviour of the controller you can guess which ones to increase or decrease to tune your PID. There are a few methods to tune a PID quicker and more accurately than manual guessing and tweaking. The Wikipedia article on PID controllers is fairly complete but you need bases in control theory to properly understand all of it. Still, there are a few graphs that can help you understand how the parameters affect the response of the PID.

Pretty much the title. You can sort threads on a forum section by a bunch of options, but I'm not sure of the difference between these two. It seems Recently Updated is the default and does what you would expect Last Reply to do. Any ideas?

It's a burden to do for all 1100 or so mods listed, but if you or someone else ask that I cite the original authors of a few mods, then it just takes 2 minutes to edit it.

I have not really made up any rules for the Authors column, only listing the active maintainer of the thread is just the most convenient for me, and it happens to be that the owner of the thread is the main maintainer of the mod in most cases. I thought about listing all active/past contributors to the mod at one point, but then I realised that for some the list of authors could get quite long (cf the RO suite for example) and I thought that only listing the owner of the thread by default was better than possibly forgetting one author. However if you wish that I list past authors for your mods, then it's no problem. I'm just adding the people you cited right now. Edit: I'll add past authors in the Notes, that way it is still possible to properly sort the Authors column. ___________________ About 1.5, I know it's there and I'll start marking mods for 1.5, eventually.

204 km/s, Mach 620, what do I win?