Newt

The main way that we would have evidence for this, would be looking at the most distant possible things, and trying to understand whether the apparent chronology (assuming c is constant), versus how it would seem were c to change. This would be compared to a modeled chronology based on physical understanding. We do not entirely comprehend all of the processes going on at all times in the Universe's history, but I do not believe that there is good evidence available to support this hypothesis.

Well, I think that the point being made was that there was in the presentation a way to return to orbit. It also seems doubtful to me that NASA/ESA/Roscosms/most other people will send a mission to Venus (or anywhere else) without means of return. That is not the way things operate. Even if the video gave no evidence for such a mechanism, I think we should assume its presence on an analogous real world craft.

Mobile SAMs seem absurd for all but the most ridiculously bad situations/action movies. There is very little justification to begin for taking down an aircraft in a city deliberately. It will crash into buildings, other vehicles, people. And that would not be what most police agencies are going for even in dire situations. I mentioned before the possibility of running these on autopilot mostly, assuming that flying low in an urban area might be difficult for the average driver. If that were the case, most vehicles could be taken over by the police in a serious situation, and landed remotely. More often I think we would have things as they do now, perhaps the police radio you to land, or otherwise 'pull you over'.

It was suggested that we would do this, and there was an apparent preference to Saturday as the date for the publication of weekly updates, I am taking it upon myself to summarize the events of the week, in regard to this project. Most notably there was the shift to the new forum. This was put up by members deljr15 and LordQ, on deljr15's server. So far things there seem to be going a bit slowly, to me at least, but we have started some discussions and have twenty two members, only some of whom appear to be advertisements. We have been starting work on 3D modeling the craft, especially focusing on the moss apparatus and habitat. This experiment is the focus of the mission, and has also been the subject of some debate, especially around the ideas of how long the moss will need to survive for, and how it will survive to begin with. These questions are complicated by the fact that at present we are not precisely sure of how long we will wait on the pad before launch, how long we will wait in space before being able to properly activate, and how long it will remain before deorbit. We are looking into information about whether the moss can be dessicated and rehydrated, or whether it can be otherwise stored and activated at the time most convenient, as well as information about metabolic qualities to expect. We would like to arrange a test run of the experiment on Earth to better understand these qualities. We also have begun discussion of radio on the new forum, but I have little progress to report in that area beyond ongoing research. Cameras also were mentioned, but discussion of those has been limited at this time. That is mostly what I can think to note at present. If there is anything you would like to mention, do so, and I can add it to this post if you like. If we think this update should be done in another way, to be more helpful clear et cetera that would also be fine. If anyone, especially people from outside the KSP Cubesat Team, has any questions about what we are doing, please feel free to ask. I, or another person here should be able to provide an answer.

I hardly thank that the point is material resources. To this day, and into the foreseeable future, not a single space mission will be for materials like that. As for xenomorph, even if we were to land, we could not feasibly build or get something back to Earth, especially not if we need to carry crew, too. Ever try to take off from Venus in RSS? Venus is difficult to get out of, but we can fly around in the atmosphere. There are even layers where air as on Earth will float a spaceship easily. Especially in conjunction with teleop robots this could represent an enormous expansion in venusian exploration. I think that the point of this sort of flight would be to explore the place. Venus just is interesting and we have not figured everything about it out that is to discover. That sort of sentiment of 'well, what do we get out of it' just seems silly. We get knowledge, and understanding. I think that that alone should be enough to go to a new place. (I would go, too)

Perhaps the answer should be simple: all auto-piloted vehicles. This would not reduce the potential damage from a crash, but it would enable unskilled pilots to fly low around cities and land on extremely short runways. Legal problems might still be difficult to get around. Personally, I think we should just go with obsessive implementation of mass transit systems; you should ride the train or bus wherever you are gong in a city. Small vehicles like cars should probably just be used in remote areas without special infrastructure.

Can you check again? EDIT: Never mind, it looks like you got in.

Sorry about that difficulty. But I sent a PM, and hope you will be able to get a response soon. EDIT: LordQ says that they are looking into it.

I can send LordQ a PM on the other forum, if you would like.

Pienso que puede usar ecuaciónes muy faciles a trover. Por ejemplo, tengo, por una órbita circular, un velocidad de √(GM/r), de Wikipedia. No se nada sobre hyperedit.

I think it should send automatically, Nicholander. It seemed to with me. Did you check you spam folder?

Well, the shuttle was plagued by a number of problems, funding being one of them. If you want to talk about that, start a different thread, or find an older one. Cars are mass produced vehicles, used by many people in a diverse number of situations. The same car can be designed to operate in snow, or in swamps, at high altitudes or in the Dead Sea, as a personal transport, a cargo vehicle, a police car et cetera, with very little modification. This is possible, largely because we have the leisure of adding features and capabilities that most people do not use. This is the case for, among other things, the reason that cars are both in demand. People in many places do well to have cars for all sorts of purposes, and, when mass produced, cars are viable to sell to many people the world over. Spacecraft are not like this. Spacecraft are expensive, and far from in demand. As a consequence, those who use them often make them themselves, and make them for a very particular purpose; flying to the Moon, to Mars, to visit a comet et cetera, and those spacecraft are designed, out of necessity to do only that which is required of them; every gram should be used, and no weight is spent on useless features. This means that they are usually extremely specialized, not that a Mars orbiter could not be useful at Jupiter, but that people want the instruments and abilities to do just what they want, and so when going to Mars it is prudent to design a vehicle just to ask the Mars questions The main place where this is changing perhaps is the region of LEO, where spacecraft buses can be used as a standard framework to build a satellite with. I imagine, in the future it will further change, as it is more practical to frequently visit more distant places, and more people will have the ability to send more distant probes.

Very exciting. I have been following the Skylon project for two years, and it is always nice to see progress. There are some fairly detailed explanations that I have found (not really technical, but enough to know what is going on in principle).

Saturday is fine with me. Who will do them, or how will it be organized? I would be willing to write them, at least some weeks, if everyone is fine with that.

It is generally decided that we are going to move this topic to a new forum, rather than try to clutter the Science Labs on KSP's site with our discussions on the cubesat. If people are interested to continue this conversation, I would suggest that you could head on over to this thread, on the new KSP Community Cubesat Forum, and comment there. Thanks.

That makes sense. Is there some good way we could try to communicate that shift to the rest of the KSP forum, so interested people will know to look here for updates?

Henryrasia: I have worked with stellar spectroscopy before, but mostly in the visible wavelengths. I am pretty sure that this would fall out of that band, which would mean we would need a special camera that can take images at nonstandard wavelengths. It is possible to fairly easily construct a spectroscope (I have done it at my kitchen table), but not such a camera, alas. We could do this basically by shining a light through the container, through the air we are investigating, and through a narrow slit, into a filter that would act as a prism (diffraction grating, pretty easily available), and then into the normal camera optics. This would essentially project a rainbow onto the CCD, and the absorption of the gas would be compared to the output of the lamp and the absorption of the plastic container. I note that in the arrangement I have used, in order for this to be done without too much noise, combination of many frames was required, although the files could be black and white. I would also be concerned about precision. While we could easily assert the presence of, say, nitrogen, in our samples, it would be a different matter entirely to confidently say how much nitrogen relative to CO2, to oxygen et cetera, and to differentiate between the different samples, as minor fluctuations will be fairly important. Not impossible, but difficult. If you are talking about mass spectrometry, which you may be, I will caution you that it will take far more than a fancy camera and a lamp to make it work. Deljr: Okay. That makes sense to use, as we need to make sure that we keep the torus aligned right for the other work. I am thinking though that we might could do that some other way, say a hook that punches into one of several funnel shapes on the moss torus, and slides the assembly to where we want it to be? Then again that would be possibly more complicated and difficult to set up, whereas a ratchet will work, we know. Hmm....

Regarding the cables wrapping around, sliding contacts seem a tad risky to me. More importantly, I do not think that the wire tangle will be too much of an issue if we program intelligently. It can just spin around one way once, and back again the next time. Provided there are no easy places to snag or get caught, all should be fine letting the wires drift around a bit.

Nicholander: It will probably be a bit less easy to follow everything that is going on at the same time, but it should be better organized, and probably simpler therefore to jump into a discussion that you have not been obsessively following. We could try to do some sort of weekly update for the different sections (for example), to try to keep everyone informed. We do have a relatively small group, and therefore getting everyone's input on whatever they know about, is important. Mr0nak: I would somewhat question the reliability of that company. They do not seem to really have done that much, and we would be flying on a rather unproven rocket. I suppose that is the price of cheapness? Worth looking into at least. K^2: I am not really sure. This seems to be happening rather quickly to me, which is on one hand nice, and on one hand somewhat too hasty, perhaps? I do not really imagine that LordQ will do something horrible or expensive, however, though, apart from my quick research, I am unsure of the pro's and con's of these different tools we are looking at.

Welcome! I have had troubles with airplanes, too. But if you try (and try) they seem eventually to work. And then you have to land.

Could we get Endersmen to put up a site on deljr15's sever? Otherwise a separate forum might be a good idea. I agree about not wanting to clutter up the KSP page with all our project work.The nuts and bolts of online forum management are not really something I know much about, but I would gladly help setting up either a vBulletin Reddit, or Zetaboards page for us, if that is the decision. While I was aware vaguely of the website's development, I was not aware how far it had progressed (or if it was at all past a mere suggestion). Getting Endersmen's input on that would be good, so we can actually see whether that would be possible.

Wow. You are doing these faster than I anticipated, and I still have not had time to watch the first video. Argh, and good luck with the Gemini.

HenryRasia brought up a good point. Navigation in this thread, I am sure we can all agree, is difficult. Topics switch unpredictably, overlap with each other, and restart multiple times over the course of 189 pages of discussion. This makes it very difficult for newcomers like myself to figure out quite what is going on, and I am sure that it is also difficult for those who have been here longer too. We are not providing a welcoming place for interested newcomers, and yet we should be and we want to be. We just got a comment from another person who does professional designs using Solidworks (page 185), offering to help in a way that seemed more like a resumé than a mere statement of willingness to help. We, well, we greeted him. That does not keep most people interested, and that person has not posted on the forum again (sorry for making you an example). If establishing a website is impractical for the members of this team, that is fine. Setting up a good website takes effort, time and resources that not all of us can provide at the drop of a hat. What we have now, this forum, while not ideal for our purposes, has more potential than we are tapping. I would move that we start additional threads on this forum. Different threads for major design topics: Experiment, Comm Systems, Computer Operation, et cetera, as well as a thread that serves as basic introductions, and questions and answers, for newcomers and interested community members. These could be linked in signatures, and at the OP's here and on all the others, that they may easily be found by those browsing the forum. The Q/A forum we would assign a moderator, from our ranks, who would either answer questions directly, or refer another team member to answer it. This is not the best structure. But I think that we all can agree that our current arrangement is far worse. We must recognize that that is alright. The project is growing, which is a good thing we can all agree. It is understandable to continue using a tool that has been useful in the past, but it would be a mistake to continue using that tool forever, even after we have exhausted its ability, and are no longer aiming at the same goal anyway. This thread was originally to gauge interest in a hypothetical project and discuss vague possibilities for it. That project has developed into a plan, a project with dedicated supporters and extensive research, design, and critique. This thread has served a valuable purpose. It is time that we not only acknowledged its limits, but did something about them. -Newt

Mirrors and other optic systems also make me nervous. A single mirror, is not too much, but we should bear in mind that this thing is going to be horribly shaken and bounced around before the experiment can start. There is a possibility that the mirrors will be knocked out of alignment then, and we need to be sure that cannot happen if we go that route. This could even happen with the glue, if we do not fix the mirror down well enough. I will look for that data constraint page, thanks MBobrik.

Many posts indeed. Does putting the camera on the ring directly really make sense? The issue of how exactly to arrange the camera system seems to have been discussed at length already, and it seems that that really does not make much sense at all. The ring should rotate so the camera can view the samples one by one, and directly into their viewers. There was also mention of using several cameras, rather than one. As I saw this, it could be a backup measure--not a means of getting more data-- as if we have one camera only, and that gets damage or fails to connect, or whatever else, the mission becomes, well, pointless. Down link speed is rather important too, but more for the question of image size and number. This seems to vary quite a good deal by the radio we get (i.e. how much money we spend on a transmitter). Do we really need to talk back up to the satellite very much? It does not seem like we need more than maybe to ping it it get it to send down the images. If that is the case we could probably set up a much simpler comm system than otherwise. Tomorrow I plan to read some more into exactly how fast we may be able to gather data from the sat, and how to talk to it generally, so I may be able to talk more about this then (if I have access to the forum). Thanks for the 3D work, that really helps. I will be sure to get that viewer so I can look at the models myself more closely.