wumpus

Sorry, the X-43 Scramjet test. I need to google these things better. If you walk into the Smithsonian, you will see both the X-15 and Spaceship-1 hanging in the "milestones of flight" entry hall. Both are designed to use lift and both managed to get into space (but not orbit). I'd insist that using [fixed] wings for lift is a better definition of a plane than breathing air. Even the shuttle used lift to slowly land (even though it still fell like a brick. And since it was obviously mostly rocket by weight even without the fuel, I doubt it qualifies as a spaceplane). KSP is just goofy in that it allows you to get nearly to orbital velocity using jets (which is pretty much required to make jets work at all, although I'd expect conventional jets to explode around mach 1* and even supersonic jets to fail in amusing was past mach 3. It encourages an "impossible" definition of spaceplane. * I think there is at least one Boeing jetliner that has a tested Vne > mach 1. The story is that it was designed for mach .90 flight or so and FAA regulations required at least 10% over that, so it had to be tested beyond the sound barrier. Don't expect most craft to handle the stresses of transonic flight (although modifying the engines is probably the easiest part: just widen the compressor enough to slow down the air, just less than "real" supersonic engines).

Long, thin, pointy, big. Basically rocket shaped when on the pad, and probably Saturn V sized. There aren't a whole lot of options left for this type of thing. In flight (out of the atmosphere)? Pretty much whatever they want. Expect it to look a lot like the ISS and Mir, as various sections held together by a long thin "backbone" seems to be the only tested means of building structures in orbit.

The point about surface samples is that it requires a kerbal to step out and pick them up. The game kind of expects you to bring them back home. You can only store so many snacks in a capsule.

While they benefited greatly from Lilienthal, they also found out that his work wasn't good enough to get off the ground: thus the research. Yes, their patent fights were bad and show how bad patents in general are. Although now anyone can file a patent regardless of whether the thing works or not, and fight it in East Texas courts if anything is remotely similar to vaguely worded patents. Especially when their patent didn't expire until well after the "you could go down to the market and buy an engine that will make a brick fly" stage. Rudder in front: wildly popular in KSP, but almost certainly unstable. Didn't the Rutan Vari-eze do this as well? It presumably *can* be tamed, but I doubt control theory was understood at all in 1903. Rail required for start - how many runways were there in 1903? I don't think a modern plane could take off anywhere in 1903 either. wing warping: just who else understood the importance of roll control and made sufficient provisions to turn via rolling? This seems ideal for tiny planes and rudders and what not were only needed to emulate wing modification (consider the flaps used for takeoff) catapult: isn't this redundant with the rail? I'm not sure what you would use in 1903 that would be more powerful than the multi-horsepower engine on the plane. belly position: do you want aerodynamic or not? This is 1903 and you just want to get off the ground. I'd expect plenty of record-setting current vehicles to use belly position (and in 1903 "flying at all" was record setting. But yes, patents were bad for "I did it, now nobody else can do it" and worse with the "I thought of doing it, now nobody else can do it" we have now.

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From what I remember from various biographies, the Wright brothers had to do their own work on aerodynamics as the available work wasn't even good enough to predict their glider performance. Unsurprisingly, they started with kites (not sure if this was before or after realizing that they had to start from scratch). Fans of James Burke's connection series would likely claim that that the Wright Brothers invented the wind tunnel, the airplane was a "freebie" on the tech tree right after that (although in 10 years you could simply buy an engine that would make a barn door fly). I'm not sure when they figured out that the scale of the wind tunnel matters: the tiny tunnel they used meant the original Flyer was optimized to fly through molasses. Counter argument: allegedly the issues with the Langley aerodrome (the more famous rival that was dunked twice into the Potomac, and later fixed and flown in 1916) were from mechanical stresses and not botched aerodynamics. Since there was plenty of reasons to hide the modifications needed to make the thing fly, I doubt anything conclusive can be shown from this. I wonder what source of aero knowledge was used for that flight in Brazil? As long as you define "spaceplane" as "using an airbreather" for a large part of your delta-v (as you did above), spaceplanes are hard. How hard is it to make a Skylon in RO? Are the parts roughly what they should be for a "real" SABRE? I'd assume that a "spacejet" should be hard in RO, and impossible with existing jet engines. This is the point I normally plug the X-43, but I'd also have to point out that: The engine is single use (I assume there was a reason to not attempt to recover a small expensive craft that never left the atmosphere). Kind of defeats the point of an SSTO. The entire plane was critical for feeding the engine and/or providing the needed lift. You can't just splat a scramjets engine on LEGO style (of course you can't build anything else KSP/LEGO style. But scramjets are much worse).

While this is certainly true, a better question is if radiators can begin to overcome it. It looks more and more like single use nerva stages are much more likely (regardless of the cost). The obvious other questions are how you cool the reactor *after* shutdown. You need to separate the rods sufficiently to shut down the reaction, and then somehow cool the rods as well. As well as [presumably slowly] cooling the entire structure. Eject before meltdown keeps looking better and better. As far as black body cooling while in operation, you might need it but don't expect significant cooling (such cooling might just stretch you to your goal, but little more).

Unfortunately, this also means losing a ton of science in career mode (Jeb and Val can do this, but only Bob can keep resetting the science experiments. The octoprobe can supply basic SAS but not "follow retrograde". But the big problem isn't "follow retrograde" (although it certainly helps) the big problem is finding a flat place to land. And making a wide-body lander is going to be penalized by the new aero-model (build it wide enough to land on the Mun and watch it flip). Just land on Minmus.

Landing on Mun is brutal. On 1.1.3 I've managed to slide for nearly a full minute on a 13 degree slope. Good luck finding anything flatter than that. You *need* Kerbal Engineer installed to find a flat piece of Mun to land on, anything else is heading to grief (I wonder how it is going for those starting on consoles). So not only do you have to fight the higher Mun gravity, you have to do it *all* *the* *time* you are hunting for that flat piece of Mun (newbie hint: the huge purple parts of Minmus are absolutely flat). The Mun I learned on didn't seem to have those issues (.2x something), but they've made Munar geography beginner unfriendly now. I'd easily recommend Minmus to any beginner, just point out to make sure the inclination is right. If you are too worried about the delta-v, I'm sure you can slingshot around Mun to make it less (total) than Mun. Not only does the slingshot increase your velocity (you only need ~100 m/s more), it should also do wonders for the capture burn (by decreasing the needed angle). Unfortunately I can't really recommend this plan for anybody who hasn't already landed on both surfaces.

They were also available on the internet, and presumably some of them were worth downloading on dialup (I'm pretty sure I had a few from then, and then a ton from when I got dsl). Oddly enough, I don't remember NOLF demos (but I do remember the game). The only game I remember being all that different from the demo was Need For Speed 3: the game never felt nor looked quite like the demo. I liked both, but they weren't the same (the demo managed to distill the feel of "hot pursuit" wildly better). Other notable demos were Baldur's Gate 1/2. Each demo took up an entire CD (each game came with 6) and included the introduction (not sure about 1, but the second game had the entire "tutorial dungeon" before entering the city). While there is some truth about demos only working for a "good game with a good demo", I can't imagine that indie gamers (without the marketing budgets of an EA or Activision to sucker people to pre-order the thing) getting the hype they need to sell a game without a good demo. Sure, KSP had Randal Monroe including it in multiple XKCD cartoons, but few games can count on that type of thing. As far as "free to play", it can be done well. I got caught up with Dungeons & Dragons Online when they went "free to play". It shouldn't be too surprising that they set it up to emulate the old Apogee/Id system of "givem about 1/3 of the game and charge for the rest": you could get about 1/3 of the way to cap playing for free, but slowly the free quests dried up. It also helped that plenty of the game's target audience remembered buying "ready to play" D&D modules in their youth. Sadly, management saw this as an opportunity to slowly add "pay to win" to the game. For most players, it took years before the "pay to win" aspects started ruining the game, but I'm sure that was true for most players (of course, from a management aspect, they had already paid as much as they were going to. But it doesn't help to log into a MMO and see few players). Last time I logged on all my inventory was labeled "String Table Error; TableDID", so I suspect they are in non-maintenance mode.

Supposedly the last mission to Skylab left it unlocked. So presumably *that* one had locks. But remember ISS has multiple hatches.

Was that when they learned that ground initiated escape systems were sub-optimal? That sounded like a hairy flight. Edit: Oddly enough, I was trying to quote the following: The "hairy flight" meaning one where the Cosmonauts in question were well aware that their rocket was about to explode and waiting for ground control to get the escape to work. I think they finally ejected (presumably the entire Soyuz capsule) with about a second to go before the rocket exploded.

You and what delta-v? That is a lot of mass and a lot of delta-v. I really don't think the inflatable heat shield idea is remotely possible, but it might work if somebody was looking to run a heat shield test at exactly the right time (within a few years, aerospace moves slow).

I suspect that most bad indie games are going to have enough trouble without a demo, and that good indie games still need all the advertising they can get. It is only the studios that can get away with hyping a bad game and getting millions of pre-orders. I'd seriously hope that Squad does *something* about the 1.0.0 aero model. My memory of that was that "get into space" became significantly harder than "get into orbit" as the capsule didn't provide much aerobraking at all (you tended to come down faster than the parachutes could survive). It could easily drive off future buyers.

While this is technically true, remember that the thing that matters is the *logarithm* of the mass ratios. To make up the deltaV with the terrier, you will need exponentially more fuel to match the nuke. If you don't want to be bothered with long burns/Mangallayan maneuvers, don't be afraid to add more nukes.

Pretty sure they can drop in the Pacific or Indian Ocean. Somewhere like where flight 370 was expected to wind up. When you can pretty much pick anywhere between +/- 50 degrees you have your choice. Hubble has "only" 28.5 degrees, but that shouldn't interfere with finding some ocean. The big catch is if Hubble will still be sufficiently controllable to de-orbit after they decide it can no longer continue *any* of it's mission and have to bring it down. It has a de-orbiting engine, but the reaction wheels that it needs for control are the things most likely to fail. Personally, I'd like to see another inflatable re-entry shield tests for all of the above. Sure, even landing them in the Outback/Nevada* will likely not leave big enough parts to bother saving in a museum, but it would be a great test of possible asteroid mining technique. * Hubble can't hit Nevada, nor any other mostly uninhabited part of the US.

While I know nothing of ICBMs, US Navy (anti-air/ship) missiles are programmed to explode if they deviate from course. This means that any "dud" missile has to be carefully inspected and defused, as the self-destruct mechanism is armed the moment it leaves the launching rail (presumably given to any seaman who has annoyed a chief lately). Of course, simply detonating the warhead on a small conventional warhead is different from doing the same on an ICBM. I suppose you could have an "alternative detonation mechanism" which added sufficient pauses between the starter explosives so nothing goes critical, but you would likely still have more secrets than you want to fall into enemy hands and destroying the value of the plutonium would be difficult (I expect you could attach the "wrong" isotope on the back of the plutonium, and set it up so that the "alternate" detonation mixed the isotopes to the point that separating them would be nearly as hard as building a weapon from scratch. In all likelyhood, ICBM designers were pressured to keep mass low enough that such tricks weren't possible. The US has at least one nuke missing (in an extremely locked-out swamp in the carolinas) but I still don't think there ever was enough pressure to add that mass.

Doesn't the "backburn" (out of atmosphere) slow the falcon 9 booster down to 1000m/s to 2000m/s (with 2000m/s being a "hot landing")? I'd also assume that a falcon heavy will stage significantly faster and have to backburn down to at least 2000m/s to land. PS: I'm pretty sure NASA [Goddard] lists the speed limit in imperial (miles per hour). I don't expect anything else to be in imperial. There is at least one door on that campus that says [unofficially]: "Open slowly (1rad/sec)", but that still seems pretty quick to me. I was working for a company that exclusively worked on subcontracts for Lockheed Martin when they lost the Mars Climate Observer [1999], everything was in imperial.

Which (in the USA in the 1980s) meant you could only "do" physics on paper. Sure, all your calculations and (hopefully) all your measurements will be in metric*, but don't count on being able to buy parts defined by metric figures. US commerce is typically imperial. Oddly enough, even printed circuit boards are typically manufactured to mills (thousandths of inches) instead of metric even though there don't exist any imperial electric units so *everything* else on the board *has* to be metric, and the designers are presumably more used to metric than mils. Presumably the housing the thing fits into is defined by imperial, so all length units are defined by imperial. * The place I was an intern had a french engineer pointing out that calculating imperial is easy: just convert to metric, calculate, and convert back. Even the pro-imperial mechanic admitted that such was exactly how even pro-imperial americans did it.

A planet by the new definition must 'clear its orbit'. Sounds like if you aren't capturing a certain percentage of your path, you don't qualify as a planet.

Romulan ale ought to be available. But perhaps No Tea as well. On a long Hohmann transfer, solar wind in my hair warm smell of spaceship, lingering in the air Up ahead in the distance, I saw a purple light My delta-v was getting low, I had to land tonight There she stood in the doorway; I heard the mission bell And I was thinking to myself, "This could be Heaven or this could be Hell*" Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way There were voices down the corridor, I thought I heard them say... Welcome to the Eve Atmosphere... * A clear shout out to Carl Sagan's Cosmos.

You will get a better cache hit rate with 32 bit (maybe). If you are playing pure stock it should run ever so slightly better. For some reason I've been playing it in 32 bit mode (my icon was set to "ksp.exe" not ksp_64.exe". It *might* have been responsible for a few bugs, but I doubt it.

Would they evolve into Kerbals?

This is the problem of sci-fi, once you change the science you change the tech. And you have to account for the tech. If you don't have an ansible (a magic box that sends information instantly - oh-oh, major relativity violation that goes beyond casaulity) or other sub-space network you could presumably send a probe with arbitrary amounts of data ("the bandwidth of a FedEx truck full of SDHC memory cards is relatively infinite"). Although I think the Alcubierre solutions require an impossibly huge "bubble", and presumably ship to go with it so it is unlikely that anyone would build a communication drone. This tends to lead to the same issues about how cellphones obsolete a ton of old TV plots: if the various star systems can't communicate, there has to be a reason nobody bothered to just tell them. Best solution if you need that: the absolute minimum for a warp drive is *huge* (no invading armadas being swallowed by a small dog here). The *really* nasty issue: even if you can prevent planets from *instant* communications, how do you prevent simply sending a message back in time? One possible solution: entering the Alcubierre "bubble" frees you from a specific timestream (change history and you go to a different planet: the original is still there). To maintain coherency (and presumably enforced by laws, possibly by unknown "cops") all planets emit radio waves with frequent "station identification" this lets the helmsmen find the right planet that is uncorrupted by acasual "facts". I suspect this *still* has a ton of issues (the information keeps corrupting planets and they keep losing coherence with every landing) but there should still be an illusion of causality.

Anyone part of an industry sponsored program who's business plan is proven dangerous to the general population by scientific fact. In reality, he's almost certainly not: the unpaid voices are likely loud enough to drown out any "paid shill" attempts to make it not worth bothering about. 'It has long been known that I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"'(Uptown Sinclair, 1935. So the meat of the quote predates that). There are also effects of mental illness that seem to help cause this. I had a coworker who believed a large swath of weird beliefs: he was mainly passionate about the idea that cancer was cured in the 1970s [maybe 1980s] (mainly by vaccinations after the fact). The existence of a single book was sufficient to throw him over the edge. In most things, he seemed to do ok, but he was the type who needed to check snopes but didn't. Eventually I figured that what was happening was that somehow the "BS detector" in his brain either occasionally failed, or for some reason the signal was ignored/missed by the part of the brain that sorts fact from fiction and the tails of the mis-sorts didn't really depend on how believable the original statement was. There are a few other reasons people might have a passionate hatred for facts and science: the most obvious is religion (note that religion doesn't have quite the same source: religious belief typically stands on zero evidence while flat earthers and other anti-science types uprightly stand on negative evidence). The few who give reasoned arguments (better than this guy) and likely to drag out the Michelson-Morley results are probably failed and frustrated scientists (way more grad school openings that openings in academia). Finally the paid shills could well be fully qualified scientists who simply can't get funding (although there's plenty more money to be made in climate denialism and creationism), as well as PR flacks and other marketing types who professionally mislead the public.