wumpus

Eh? As of now, there are two levels: f2p (demo) and paid [and last I checked there are two different demos: .18 from steam and 1.0 from Squad]. One option would be to start with the demo and buy DLC alacarte until you had paid $240 dollars for what we have now (I think there is a tweet showing train simulator w/ complete DLC for $30k during the steam sale). Not to say that freemium games can't be good, but sooner or later they will start becoming "pay to win" (I suspect management has figured a projected "end of life" of the game and scheduled a way to wring every last penny out before that happens). As an example: Dungeons and Dragons Online was probably the first MMO to "get f2p right". After a few years it seemed that every [financial] quarter they had to increase the number of ways to buy a win [the anti-beholder potions were hilariously over the top].

Note that not that many of us have reverted to 1.0.5 (although plane enthusiasts might have). Career mode should be new: watch out how parachutes have changed. Not only has re-entry become an issue (no more coming straight at Kerbin from the Mun and land while pegging the g-meter), but air resistance is less and parachutes are suddenly delicate. It shouldn't change your de-orbiting all that much (just expect to set PE at 30k or so) but career mode started out with a mission that just said "go into space" In beta (two years ago?), that wasn't that hard (nor would it have been 3 years ago if you were following a campaign). Post 1.0 it typically means going in a parabolic arc to give yourself time to slow down to the point your parachute won't be destroyed (you can also try a powered landing to parachute speed, but that also takes a bit of delta-v).

Regular core ram was woven a bit at a time the same way. Not sure why rope core was so much lighter.

I think the real problem is that both data transmission and ion drives are expected to run 24/7 over the course of months (not sure how long far horizons took to send back all the data. I suspect that the total amount of data was limited by how much storage they could bring that could survive at pluto temperatures). You wouldn't need the batteries because you would be sending slowly and steadily. I remember JPL boasting that they were tracking voyager and it was producing the power of a single candle. But candles are pretty hot and if you focused all the light that's a bit of power. On the other hand, ion thrusters tend to push all the power of the weight of a single piece of paper (KSP ion engines are a lot more powerful, largely because they aren't expected to burn for months in real time). So you are comparing fake apples to fake oranges. But the "can't send the message because you don't have the power" is the point where the fake parts intrude and start breaking the game: transmission isn't a "peaky" power draw. Also this whole idea makes me suspect the batteries are equally "lolfake": NASA developed fuel cells for a reason (Apollo used them). Presumably real batteries (and solar) weren't as up to the job as kerbal batteries (who don't discover fuel cells until near the end of the tech tree).

I've been doing this for awhile (on Kerbin, not Earth). The things I've noticed: Don't touch the throttle (including SRBs) unless you have control issues. Gravity losses (for TWR<=2.0) are worse than aero. Control issues for TWR>1.5 can get nasty. Expect your "gravity turn" to look more like beta and before than a post 1.0 gravity turn. Ignoring fairings doesn't seem to hurt that badly. No idea if they've fixed the fairing bugs* to make me want to use them. I'll have to look into keeping vertical velocity <1km/s. I've always watched my ap during ascent, and will have to think about this tool. I also haven't used mechjeb for just starting the gravity turn. It always seemed to be an "all or nothing" thing that didn't work with such high powered rockets. * the "fairing bug" I'm talking about was from 1.0.4 or so, and moved the center or pressure in front of the fairing. This made everything with a fairing less stable and made fairings much less attractive in general. Haven't heard if it has been squashed.

I see two places where I really want this. The problem is I doubt the same UI would work for both of them. I'm guessing that being able to adjust max thrust in flight would help for landing, but it wouldn't help for the orbital insertion at all. Orbital insertion via nukes and chemical rockets (let the nukes run full blast for the duration and feather the chemicals as needed). The current method tends to use action groups to fire the chemicals full bore and shut them down as needed (which is likely optimal anyway). Landers: Do a near-suicide burn to some point above the surface with max thrust, then reduce thrust for better control (this might even take the poodle off the "useless engine" list). I suspect that allowing you to change max thrust in flight would help (and also allow you to crash while fiddling with the change).

I'm pretty sure the KSP would either fix that level of stupid (presumably ignorance, you can't fix stupid), or force a ragequit. Although KSP does make inclination changes a bit too cheap, and a 3000m/s gravity well means an abundance of delta-v. I wonder how long it takes before you realize "you can't get there from here".

How do you tell? I don't think I saved the earliest update. Maybe some sort of stream log mentions the data and you have to compare against Squad's timeline?

Sounds like you haven't had the fun of an LV-N coming back down for a second pass (and hitting PE well below 70km). If circularization is considered an "orbital maneuver", there are plenty of times I'll take the poodle. Sometimes even to cut down on the burn time, but less often.

On thing I'd recommend doing before tying up the computer for a week or so trying to get to some distant star is to try hyperediting (or manually editing a save) yourself up to 100km/s or whatever delta-v your goal is. While the kraken is mostly dead, this is exactly the type of thing that can awaken it. While the forum often uses "the kraken" for any ship killing bug, the specific bug by that name was traced to [single precision] floating point uncertainty when the ship was moving so fast that it was lost due to single precision uncertainty (presumably parts overlapping or similar). While it was slain by moving the center of reference to center on the spacecraft (and thus gaining maximum precision), a 100k+m/s spacecraft will be wildly attempting to escape that center of reference. While I don't expect it to awaken the kraken, I'd still want to test it before committing to such a course. That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.

No, not really. Not compared to the amount of liquid oxygen every rocket carries. Don't ask what is in the monopropellant, that stuffs probably worse than plutonium gram for gram. And if something is breaking an RTG in flight: Jeb, Bob, and Bill have bigger problems than a small plutonium leak (the rocket is likely coming apart as well). The Proton is what a serious hazard looks like.

Don't forget you can add a ton of asparagused ion engines in there, and it will barely add mass (just be careful in the last few stages), this should cut the burn time to "leave the thing on for awhile". Absolutely nothing can be done about the transit time (c is 300,000,000m/s), except that I'd have to assume that the nearest star would be 10x closer in the Kerbalverse the way everything else is scaled down.

Very stable. I've only had issues with pre 1.1 64-bit windows and Linux (I'm blaming nVidia drivers). Crashing isn't the problem: everything else is. Expect phantom torques to make docking anywhere from difficult to impossible (it turns out retracting the landing wheels (due to a stupid contract) removed plenty of phantom torque). Struts still mysteriously disappear and are shown radiating out from the rocket on the pad. Weirder bugs like quickload loading with the engines off, once physics goes online the engines fire. Sometimes the rocket will destroy itself thanks to those sudden forces (and continue doing so on every reload). If you like smaller vessels and didn't need multi-threading, I'd recommend 1.0.4

Do you think there really never was hope for cross-feeding the Falcon-Heavy (note that I never really believed they intended to return the upper stage of falcon-9, although that was likely on the table for longer than cross-feeding)? There have been plenty of explody liquid fuel rockets lately, and the only deaths due to SRBs was more of an issue due lack of an escape system. I may have to download a mod with 500t solids (kickers are 24t). While LV-Ns would be rather hazardous in flight (although not so much while a few full fuel tanks are between them and the crew), RTGs are pretty harmless (as in NASA techs can walk right up to them). I remember that a few RTGs went up in the shuttle.

I had trouble following the reasoning (it may have been coming through multiple marketing/PR types), but it sounded like inefficiency was part of the goal (they needed high temperature exhaust, or possibly just a heat source). Typically the benefit of an IC engine over a turbine is wider levels of semi-efficient power levels, not sure if they care about it here.

I can't vouch for the accuracy, but in his monumental Apollo 11 KSP-recreation, Bob Fitch has a lot to say about this computer crashing a few times before landing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4GG_ZyXvJw Note that this was apparently due to a switch being in the wrong position. The poor computer simply didn't have the RAM (which wasn't the typical "core" ram but something much lighter. DRAM had just been invented and way too unproven, and I suspect that SRAM-on-a-chip wasn't ready either).

I've heard this strategy works well with combining thuds with LV-N nervs/nukes. I haven't had the chance to try it out much, but it sounds solid (I've had a few hairy experiences watching my nuke upper stages go through a ~60km perigee before getting a second chance to circularize). Actually SRBs are perfectly fine for getting the first couple thousand delta-v (see this thread for examples of cheap rockets with SRB first stages) The reason they work well with a terrible ISP is that the upper stages count as dry mass, so you pay a roughly linear penalty instead of the full logarithmic one. Kickbacks are typically the cheapest way to supply delta-v off the launch pad. In practice, there is still the effect of "use them to add TWR" since you should keep adding them till you get the right TWR (and accept the delta-v you get, throttling rockets isn't very efficient, especially at low altitude). The biggest catch for all solid stages is that they don't supply any control (AV-R8 winglets come in handy for full-solid stages. Sometimes you can get away with just a pair of them N-S to allow control over the gravity turn and let the capsule/gyros control the rest). The Flea (RT-5): Typically only used for the first mission. Possibly used where seperatrons aren't quite enough. Try explosive staging for extreme first missions. The Hammer (RT-10): often set aside for the liquid engine in the few career missions it might make sense. I'm pretty sure that using this in the second or so mission works better, but it takes more time to design right and probably isn't worth it to most players. The Thumper (BACC): Don't underestimate this one. Great for getting a mk1 into orbit, remains useful for those small satellite jobs. Pair it with a terrier and be surprised how cheaply the delta-v comes. The Kickback (tolong): The cheapest TWR/delta-v off the pad. Only really obsoleted by SSTO craft.

By 1850 you could presumably get a steam engine into a reasonably remote location and build a significant mine. You would have to use black powder as your explosive, but steel tools would be common. There really isn't a way that you would miss a human society at mid-victorian levels. For the hypothetical dinosaur society, it gets even worse. There is no justification to putting at the exact end of the dinosaurs (they wouldn't be able to take the rest of the planet's ecology with them), so you can expect the huge changes in planetary ecology to be reflected in the fossil record. Any such instance would have to be confined to a landmass that is now underwater. You would also expect the mining issue to show up as well (unless it was all underwater). You can hide a fairly high tech civilization in a rainforest and watch the vegetation quickly tear up the ruins. But once the people start re-arranging the geography, it becomes pretty obvious.

I'm not sure how much of the "ease" is due to simply being able to spam engines onto a wing. I'm sure no Boeing engineer would last if tried to build a plane that way. The blackbird's engines were capable of launching the wing from standstill and eventually reaching full ramjet mode at mach 3. No idea if kerbal "ramjets" are supposed to be those engines (and how they managed to use stock fuel. Even the fuel the blackbird used was "unobtanium" and said to cost as much as a "fine scotch"). I've heard normal ramjets start working around mach .9, but hardly go to orbital velocity (the X-43 can go full orbital >3.00km/s on Kerbol, assuming somebody supplies circularization. I'm also pretty sure it was accelerated by rocket over mach 4).

[tl:dr - having mining areas reasonably close to the KT line (and dinosaur bones) pretty much kills the idea of a dinosaur civilization. While you are unlikely to detect a 65 million year mine (not only will the shaft will collapse, but I'd expect the rock to fuse itself together given a few million years), but I wouldn't expect new ore to pop up. Those "civilized dinosaurs" would presumably mine at least a measurable amount of ore.] My assumption was that a possible dinosaur civilization rose roughly as fast as our own and caused the KT layer roughly as soon as possible (similar to ourselves nuking humanity to death during the Cold War). 1. All effects on ecology would be wiped out by the rest of the effects in the KT layer. I'll have to learn just how long the "dinosaur extinction" actually took, but I'd assume the civilization would immediately collapse. Being able to determine that sudden changes after the asteroid were caused by a "dinosaur civilization" would be mostly impossible. 2. This is the biggest problem with a dinosaur civilization. I was thinking the continents mostly moved by forming new land and subsuming the old, but obviously there exist dinosaur bones on land. I suppose that any coincidence with low (or smaller) resource deposits coinciding where the KT layer was near ground level would be a published and widely known. 3. Largely irrelevant. The average human population for the last 20,000 years has been less than a million. We just won't show up in the fossil record unless we manage to live for a few more millennia at current rates. Even our food supplies are unlikely to fossilize unless jello suddenly becomes unpopular. 4. We can't even be sure of what caused the KT event, how in the world do you think dams, mines, and buildings are going to survive. If a crater of that size erodes to the point of disappearance, you aren't going to find any roads. 5. So no birds have brains. Tell it to the crows. And the same forces that smoothed over the largest crater in the last hundred million years will leave the tiny evidence of intelligence for us to find. 6. All the isotope issues will be simply *in* the KT layer for well inside any error of measurement (within a century or so), good luck showing the error on that one. I'm guessing the existence of usable mines within striking distance of the KT boundry is the only reason to believe that a dinosaur civilization appears impossible. Even the existence shouldn't be a problem, but there should be a measurable lack of resources with at least a measurably smaller percentage of mines that follows roughly that line (and always seems to disappear below it, no effect on anything above). The other arguments could easily be covered up assuming they coincided with the KT event or simply disappeared after 65 million years. I'm fairly sure that a dinosaur civilization couldn't disappear under "natural" conditions. It either did itself in with the KT event (and such covered up any other evidence they existed) or never existed at all. The fact that both plentiful mining and dinosaur bones exist in Montana* implies that unless such areas otherwise become inhospitable to the dominant dinosaurs (perhaps a lakebed or something) these dinosaurs didn't cause a technologically-created extinction event. * That's pretty much the limit of my knowledge of mining and where to find dinosaur bones (my eight-year old self is kicking me right now. I was *really* into both paleontology and geology). Anybody know of the overlaps between mining areas and dinosaur bones?

Actually the jet engines are only a little more advance than our own (the Isp might be bit too high, but real jets are sufficiently efficient not to care so much). The big issue is the unobtanium that makes up Kerbol gives it a delta-v to orbit of ~3km/s vs. Earth's 9km/s. Kerbals have much weaker rockets and embarrassingly poor fuel tanks. Their saving grace is their asparagus tech. That would allow them to build 9km/s rockets with just 1.25m parts (similar to Vostok/Mercury, but vastly more complicated). Not sure about solar panels (I suppose Kerbol has to get a similar amount of light/m**2 from Kerbin as Earth does from the Sun), but the RTGs are impressive. Don't ask about the magic of reaction wheels.

The real question is if you could miss the required order of "sauroprimates". My take is that it would be hard enough to find evidence of great apes in 65 million years, let alone the rest of the primates. Humans have only really exploded across this planet in 10k+ years, so are unlikely to be all that fossilized (and how many cultures build cemeteries in places that fossilize)? We could miss the effects of technology from 65 million years ago (although a geologist might point out widespread mines that were reasonably shallow back then, suggesting that they never exploited available wealth). Even the continents from that era are gone. The only real question is that if we could miss a small offshoot of dinosaurs that had runaway sexual selection for power brains*. Judging from the upheavals that I've seen in this science since I was a boy playing with dinosaur toys (hint: pretty much everything I learned then was wrong) I'd find it easy to believe we haven't found all species of dinosaur. Note that this assumes that such a technologically advanced society suddenly dominated the ecology for a very short duration (and thus barely entered the fossil record) and then destroyed itself (presumably the KT layer). If it was capable of such a widespread disaster, I'd expect some sort of flotsam floating around the solar system (especially if they moved a comet). I'd go so far as to call it (slowly) falsifieable (discovery** or complete lack of such flotsam). And yes, there is sufficiently complete observation of the Earth to be aware that no "super high tech" civilization existed (although there may have been those higher tech than the previously suspecting top-banana, vegatiative growth can destroy a lot). Mining records are also conclusive: there never was a [human] civilization capable of widespread mining/oil-drilling/etc. that we don't know about. I suppose there could have been such a civilization right *after* the KT event. But that would require the ancestors of the civilization being in the "lucky few" surviving species (and this would likely require them to be widespread enough to be in the fossil record). Presumably they would get swallowed up as the new dominant species stabilized. Such a civilization wouldn't require getting to the point of being capable of destroying itself, the surrounding ecology would likely finish it off. I just don't think it is at all likely. It certainly was an era of rapid evolution. * while not always accepted as how humans evolved, it would at least form the basis for another intelligent species*** ** if you think NASA has enough denialists loudly barking around them, imagine what happens if they find a dinosaur-built spacecraft. Perhaps you could create a meta-hoax "they really found it, but had to cover it up to avoid offending the creationists and other denialists controlling the NASA budget***". *** enough to question if there has been a single intelligent species on Earth.

I suspect you could avoid most of the excess "draggyness", but I suspect that jet engines are closely designed for a specific amount of drag and that expecting them to be able to handle odd amounts of drag seems a problem. It is a solution in search of a problem. Ocean freighters can easily eat the mass and shape of a shipping container. To a lesser (but still profitable) extent, so can rail and trucking. Not so much for air travel (although using pallets isn't an issue). There are a ton of other ways to optimize a plane for cargo/passengers that isn't quite as extreme. I'm fairly surprised it isn't possible to replace the engines of an old 747 with prop engines and build a cargo plane that moves at ~200-300mph and use a quarter of the fuel it would with jets. I'm guessing that the lift is too optimized for the 30,000ft ceiling and that going slower really wouldn't fit the flight envelope all that well.

While this thread comments on an how to get an efficient gravity turn, I'd like to point out that I've had some success with rockets that leave the pad with TWR between 1.5 and 2.0. With rockets this powerful, typically anyway you can wrangle them to roughly 45 degrees before transonic effects lock your controls is an effective means of getting to orbit. It often looks more like a pre-1.0 KSP turn than a proper gravity turn. While I have no idea how it really works in real life and not sure how effectively KSP models aero (especially here), the reason capsules have those flattish bottoms is that the heat isn't coming from friction. It is all generated by compressing the gasses as the capsule rushes through the atmosphere. Also the point of maximum temperature isn't touching the capsule, it is a ways in front of the capsule and the overheated air slides around a pocket of slower-moving air near the capsule. I suspect that at lower altitudes, the point of maximum temperature might be further away, but also suspect that Squad isn't overthinking re-entry heat. Using a pe of 50km might work for aerobraking from Minmus/Mun (with multiple passes - don't drop your engines so you can still move your pe to 30km when needed), especially if you want to leave part of your craft in Kerbol orbit. Warning: this is slow and tedious and not nearly as good as simply bringing more fuel along for the ride.

Remember, any kerbalnaut (not tourists, but pilots and engineers as well as scientists) can EVA and "take data" from the science jr. (typically you want a scientist so you can run the experiment in the upper atmosphere, take the data, reset the experiment, run it, take the data again). After this you can let the science jr. burn up. Of course, if you have a scientist on board and you reset the experiment, you can run it again in the lower atmosphere for all the science (and reset it and run it again if you haven't recorded the landing biome).