wumpus

Wiki claims that you needed 1.4km/s delta-v to win the X-prize. While this was won with a "mothership" it certainly shouldn't be too hard to add the needed engines on the spacecraft. You are unlikely to manage it just on jets, and would certainly need a both jets and rockets (unless you decided to just modify the shuttle with the fuel tank on the back and land with it or something).

For values of first stage boosters with near-zero delta-v. And significant cost. How much would it really cost to build a launch pad in Ecuador anyway? Because that would do everything an airlaunch does.

I was going to play "pre-unlocked career" (just so I could see the percent returned from recycled spacecraft) when I heard about the "leadership initiative" strategy and how it emphasized "firsts" over missions. I'm not sure it will pay (on 80%, the reputation gate is nasty), but I'm still on career (hopefully not retracting landing gears will remove my phantom torque).

While you might get away with less mass than a human (there have been a significant number of people with low-mass brains and normal intelligence*). What you won't get away with is a lower metabolic rate. I doubt you can get a human brain's metabolic load into a crow or similar sized animal. How long would a crow live that ate like a humming bird? * the old saw about using 10% of our brain isn't that far off the mark. There *have* been people with 10% of a brain (lost under 2 years of age) that have lived normally. Just nobody with "10 times the intelligence".

Wait, what? I'm taking some landing gear along for a contract and can't understand why I can't dock (turning off SAS gives me wild torqueing). I'll have to try this. I was almost ready to give up and wait for 1.1.3

This can be a pretty slow process, but if you still have your engine attached (and have fuel) you can always decrease your PE as you slow down (unless it exploded during a pass. Then you get to wait). As long as you don't see those heat bars (or you think you can stand a hotter pass), keep (slowly) decreasing PE.

MechJeb gives you the delta-V of your rocket as you make it. I think it predates Kerbal Engineer and a lot of people still use it just for that. It also might give launch windows for other planets. I'd recommend Kerbal Engineer as one of your first mods. Kerbal Alarm Clock is basically needed the moment you want to perform more than one mission simultaneously (flying local missions during the slow voyage out to Duna and beyond). Chatterer and Scatterer are great non-gameplay mods that improve audio and video respectively (no idea if they are ready for 1.1, K.E whines about my 1.1.2). Some bits are too difficult or too tedious. You can learn a bit about some procedures by watching MechJeb do it. I know I was leaning on MechJeb for docking for some time (doing the career rescue missions on my own taught me enough to dock). Watching MechJeb do a suicide burn teaches a few things about safe landing (and even more things *not* to do). I've been on more than a few "recover as much a possible" kicks (and got tired of KSP for awhile because of it). Using MechJeb to de-orbit and land my boosters would make a lot of sense (athough I expect MechJeb wants a bit more delta-v than they had). WARNING: this is yet another case where MechJeb is overpowered. If you tell MechJeb to land on the landing pad, you land on the landing pad and have 100% of your rocket returned. If you consider this cheating consider giving a (flat) location far enough away for a reasonable return.

My "obsession" was building things largely out the "hammer" SRB. Before 1.0 it was the most primitive part available. Building Munar/Minmus (and back) vehicles out of "demo only" parts and no asparagus meant adding boosters "layer cake" style (and mostly hammers). I think that explosive staging is back (some of the early 1.0.x editions made it nearly impossible), but it still isn't the same with the career restrictions on mass. I always liked to make a bigger ship out of lower-tech parts, and strongly disagreed with Squad's career mode decision to force higher-tech solutions to get around part count limitations (the artificial limitations of the VAB, not any inherent lag issues).

Which is my main gripe with career mode. It wants to keep you tied up sending an infinite number of satellites around Kerbin for 100+ hours. With KE and some sort of launch window calculator (or even just an idea of the correct angles) you should be able to get to Duna (and back) in sandbox with well under 100 hours of gameplay. But you have to be in sandbox or it isn't happening.

IMPORTANT NOTE TO NEW PLAYERS: this only works between planets (when your biggest instability issue is docking port wobble). Building a "Goddard-style" rocket with the rockets at the top is called the "pendulum fallacy" and is always less stable than putting the engine at the bottom (at least for rockets capable of achieving LKO, in space things are a bit different). Sticking a tank or two on top (and then refueling manually and jettisoning the top fuel tank) works well for early missions exploring local moons. It also saves a bit of cost for for the extra decoupler and fuel lines, which is more significant for those early flights.

The point with working on the insects at the "hive" level removes the size restrictions (you just make a bigger hive). The maximum size of a bug is pretty big: I thought there were dragonflies with near-meter wingspans before the dinosaurs (and smaller reptiles that were more efficient than meter long bugs). Of course, you would avoid expanding your insects (unless you couldn't make a hive iguana, or similar) for the same reason that they died out. I'm not saying there is a real advantage to uplifting a hive vs. a whale. Chimps, whales, and even octopii are likely a better source (ars apparently claimed birds are better than we thought. Any chance the KT layer was asteroid mining gone wrong, act or war/terrorism?). I am saying that they are a reasonably close match to the hardware available to build an AI and could easily negate the "can't uplift a bug" claim.

One search term is "Mike". Your choices are Mike, and swarms of drones. And Mike only made sense in a specific context of an invasion of Earth. The "real" answer is an ICBM. Yes, they are designed to fly through space. They are unstoppable weapons (the only winning move is not to have a nuclear war). And they have yet to be superseded (nobody plans on building Mike). The USSR built some sort of orbiting armed space station, but it never appeared effective. But thousands of ICBMs were built (I think, although all nations together might not have cracked 2000 boosters), making it a very real "space battleship" compared to paper designs that were never seriously budget for even during Reagan's "Star Wars" fantasy, much less what pops up in these threads.

If you have chemical plants, they will likely need lots of methane delivered. I can't see LNG leaving LA.

Wiki claims that Pegasus hasn't flown since 2013 (two flights since 2008, with single flights in 2016 and 2017 scheduled). It doesn't look all that good for air-launched rockets. This is one of those things that "it works in KSP" (assuming you have the flight manager mod) but not so much in real life. Although I really think the X-43 has potential (which, unlike the stratolaunch, should supply meaningful delta-v). I'm guessing this roc is laying an egg.

Never mind encryption, efficient coding makes things indistinguishable from noise. Typically this involves compression (either lossless or lossy) but also efficient coding means your receiver is just barely getting the signal/noise ratio needed to decode the signal and anyone (from outside that solar system) is getting uncoverable garbage. Roughly 100 years after first creating radio, I'd expect any "off planet" signal to be roughly at the limit for Shannon coding (older probes excepted, but Voyager was one of the first to be re-programmed with (then) advanced coding). This means that *barely* losing a few dB of signal means it is *impossible* to recover (perfectly, anyway) the signal and is likely to be completely indiscernible from background noise. Note that such techniques are quite possible for terrestrial use: the catch is they often take a lot of computation which introduces lag. Of course when you have the speed of light lag from Mars (or even GSO) this isn't a big deal. Don't really expect to find radio use on a planet as anything other than a slightly higher (if that) emission of EM radiation. And even then it will likely be uneconomical and replaced by something else.

Except that Dragon (the bit for live crew inside) splashes down after a parachute descent. No idea if that changes with the crewed variety (they do that with the cargo variety (1.0), the manned 2.0 should have small changes), but I doubt it. SpaceX only seems to use powered landings for the unmanned booster.

This basically assumes that an interstellar travelling civilization wouldn't mistake us for roaches infesting an otherwise livable planet. The idea of trade, knowledge, or pretty much anything else we could do for such beings is fairly laughable. My guess is that that an "invasion" would involve a single probe dropping by a few millenia before they planed on showing up, dropping life forms designed to terraform the planet. If we somehow survivved *that*, they might at least consider talking to us, but don't count on it. If you don't want to think of us as roaches, consider the whales of the nineteenth century. Of course the whalers weren't *trying* to kill all the whales (with the possible exception of press-ganged slaves who figured it would at least get them back to shore), but it would be a similar situation. One problem with movies like "Independence Day" was that a "space war" had already been on moments notice for decades, ready and able to kill most of humanity in under 30 minutes. Nevermind how dangerous an interstellar civilization would be, it couldn't correctly model the menence that humanity is to itself (which *still* appeared to be an optimal solution to game theory, in a nod back to the thread).

I'll see your David Brin and raise you a Douglas Hofstadter*. Assuming you built an AI around multi-core processors, understood it thoroughly (to the degree that AI is possible to understand), and could build it across a high-latency (and noisy) network, you could presumably uplift an insect hive (with a ton of direct genetic modification). Obviously, this is only true if certain types of AIs eventually get created, although nVidia specifically designed the Pascal (many, many cores) to work well with certain AI tricks (neural networking) to the point that they might have crippled what is typically thought of their "main market" by removing parts that *should* be useful for their graphics cards (fp16 operations) to be a "Pascal Exclusive". But if you somehow built an AI out of these cards, building an intelligent ant hive is a lot closer than you would think. * David Brin is a Science Fiction writer/fully qualified scientist (well, he has a PhD. Not sure how much he has published on that side) who wrote the "Uplift series" (in the 1980s?). Douglas Hofstadter is a AI researcher/writer who inherited Martin Gardner's Scientific American column (as Metamagical Themas) and wrote "Godel, Escher, Bach" a brilliant if light-hearted work that hardly argued strongly for the existence of intelligent ant hills.

??? If it isn't energy positive then you are creating fusion for the sake of fusion (which makes sense for researchers with tokomaks, but not spacecraft), and just slowing your spacecraft down. Fission works. Fission is old-school when it comes to space (Voyager used NTGs). And whatever delta-v limits you have aren't dictated by fission (but typically by how low you are willing to keep your thrust for the efficiency you want).

Unless things have drastically changed, they only land on a single engine. Had they failed to shut two down due to starvation (and insufficient thrust), that may have been the reason that three starving engines were still firing. After a string of soft landings, it looks like they have wave issues mostly under control (everyone involved in Navy aviation is laughing at me, but boosters are more expendable then Navy aircraft & flight crews). Still, this one looks like it was doomed in the air, even if the Sea is certain to take its share of boosters.

A big red flag is that falcon 9 shouldn't be *able* to hover. If it actually hovered, that meant that an engine was throttled way out of spec (more likely it wasn't see below). To hover above the pad like that takes a bunch of failures: braking too hard with the three engines to stop the booster too high, followed by a single engine suddenly trying to throttle "too hard" (while merlins can restart, I'm reasonably sure they can't stop and restart with the millisecond timing required to land once the rocket stopped 10-20 m off the deck). I'm also pretty sure that it didn't "hover". What I suspect is what we are seeing and our eyes insist that it is "hovering" because they assume that anything "hovering" isn't 10 stories tall and falling at 9.8m/s**2). It came to a stop (or near stop, to the point that the TWR of a single merlin wouldn't let it land), and then a landing just wasn't going to happen.

To be only semi-on topic, did Mun landers really slide at 14 degrees (according to KE) until things flattened out in 1.0.4? Most of my Mun experience was in pre-beta, so I can't be quite sure (back in the days when the Mun was flat and kerbals had it easy). I suspect that non-aircraft landing gear could use some help as well.

Didn't NASA just announce the contract (or completion of plans, it was hard to tell) of the X-57 (all electric plane)? Of course with no other X-planes for awhile, it is easy to forget they occasionally produce one. As far as "done internally", NASA (and largely the US government) doesn't do *anything* internally. Almost everyone hired to work "for NASA" are actually contractors.

I All I know about Henri Poincare is that he was well down the path to Special Relativity but conceded Einstein had precedence, can I call him a physicist instead? He also comes up in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" as "producing the same philosophy, but coming from the other direction", so can I claim him as a philosopher? Note that the proven lack of solution remains for "algebraic and integral" solutions, so it doesn't ignore other solutions. As far as the "why aren't my inertia wheels working", I wouldn't say that KSP has a tendency to pull the punches of rocket science (past the obvious issues of planetary scaling and related docking assistance). The early posts on the orbiter forum show that HarvesteR had no intention of exposing the KSP community to the full blast of [COTS/LEGO] rocket science and [SOI based] orbital mechanics. Making inertial wheels a bit more accurate would be one more thing to learn, but I don't expect it to break the donkey's back.

I wouldn't put too many hopes on that bump. It looks like it started earlier with Star Wars, and stopped when the Berlin Wall fell. Not sure what to make of it coinciding with Dan Quayle being "put in charge of" NASA. Presumably GHW Bush had a higher opinion of Mr. Quayle than common perception (if he didn't, I'd assume the budget would go the opposite way). Or maybe it was just the costs of the Challenger safety program and maybe other missions making hay from Hubble PR.