wumpus

A single engine can't be reduced such that TWR<1.0 and they were using at least three times that (three engine burn). It most certainly was a kerbalesque suicide burn, much more than usual (unless you are comparing to only Jeb at the controls. Jeb would have all nine lit at 100%). I have to wonder how accurate the timing is in cutting the engines. It has to be good enough to cut out just before landing, so presumably you could cut out the side engines just before landing and land on the center engine (without imparting too much torque). I suspect they already checked that and the torque is too high: even a few degrees off would make it easy to miss the barge. Still, cutting two of the engines with a second or two left on the center should make the timing a lot easier. Another question about the re-entry I had (and probably can only be answered directly from spacex) is the vector of the entry burn. They had a (short) entry burn, it turned on then off. From the numbers given by the announcers, it was roughly ~300 m/s (2.3km/s on screen when MECO was called, announcers claimed 2km/s re-entry speed). I'd be curious if the re-entry burn wasn't quite vertical and the goal was to add *more* horizontal speed. In KSP, low level re-entry is all about having enough atmosphere to slow you down, but KSP has its 1/10th scale planet and other silliness. But maybe letting the vertical speed get cut by making it deal with a higher square velocity in the hypotenuse might carry over into real life.

My understanding was that the US published a timeline for launching Vanguard and when Korolev saw this he could see that Soviet rockets were ahead of the Americans and that by reducing the size of the Sputnik down to bare minimum, he could beat them into space (actually he beat them to launch. It would take a number of humiliating failures before the US launched into space). Sputnik had a twofold shock on Americans. First, it beat "American Exceptionalism" over the head with a brutal, potentially nuclear tipped weapon. We were no longer "the best at everything" and could be beaten technologically by a nation effectively prostrate by war. The second effect was to really drive home that the USSR could launch nuclear weapons into space and rain them down anywhere in the US that they choose (without the long drawn-out war that it took to get the US Navy the airfields it needed to nuke Japan). This twofold shock had two effects: the first is obvious and the point of this thread. The US became committed to the space race. Judging from the launch attempts after Sputnik it wasn't completely clear that the US would continue to make satellite attempts, and certainly wouldn't make them at the frequency that they did. Von Braun (for better or worse) would not be let near a rocket unless national security would be at stake. And finally, the whole moon shot was only necessary to prove that the US finally get a first after watching the USSR triumph again and again. The other huge effect that is often forgotten was Sputnik's effect on US science education. Science education went from an afterthought to a vital part of national security (how it managed to fall after just how critical the scientists at Los Almos were, let alone the army of technicians in four other areas were is beyond me. Human stupidity is endless). Not only that, this sudden increase kept on going at least through the space race and probably continued to the end of the cold war (my mom got a government raise for "all science jobs" in 1967, she was a computer programmer). A good proxy for determining the importance of science education is looking for creationism (and presumably climate denialism as well now), to see if the classroom considers science more important than superstition. The Apollo program required something like 50,000 employees, mostly engineers (I'm guessing. I suspect that in 1960 you might need a few draftsmen per engineer, something completely beyond my experience). Somehow you would need to train all of them (preferably without losing 50k engineers driving technology in the rest of the economy). Without the shock of Sputnik, I doubt their would be that many of them. KSP makes you think of NASA's response to the USSR's space program. But don't forget the educational side as well.

There is a reason things that are "logically valid and true by definition" can't be the basis of science. Erwin Schrödinger pointed out that a cat in a closed box in danger of death if and only if a quantum state was detected in a certain way could not be claimed to be either dead or alive. Obviously, he could set the box to either drop an apple or not, at which point saying "a dropped apple will either fall or not fall" (presumably this would require a rare combination of quantum uncertainty, chaos amplifiying the effects and a re-entry conditions defining "falling", but it is certainly conceivable). Science depends on observation of the predictions of theories and considers such preconceived ideas of truth to be a source of error. Such things might have a basis of philosophy (although the only philosophy grad student I know has a strong background in neuroscience (required by the department as far as I can tell) and the field is more rigorous and scientifically grounded than I thought) or did in roughly Greek times, but science has moved on. I don't think we are all agreeing on what "falsifiablity" means. My understanding is that there are two ways to go about falsifying things. One is to find a counter-proof. The other is to assume its negation and show find a contradiction with some other proven truth. Without this you would have equal evidence of the negation of your "true by definition" ideas and might as well call them "false by definition" (see above for a "true by definition" shown to be false). I'm not sure about this either. I've certainly read claims about them disagreeing and to accept the quantum side (at quantum sizes). This is odd since I'm also aware of a complete failure to use quantum effects to send a signals faster than light (which is typically not part of quantum theory). Do the issues occur close to massive particles not properly bending space?

JCSAT-14 MECO ~2.3km/s (from eyeballing 8348km/h on the screen when MECO was called) EntryburnCO ~2.0km/s from spacex announcers explaining why this was expected to crash. Unless spacex has significantly changed the upper booster for the Falcon Heavy (and that doesn't appear possible. They are pretty much stuck with the Falcon 9 upper stage plus possible reinforcement for a 25 ton greater load), this is nothing compared to what the center booster of a Falcon Heavy has to deal with. From previous data from expendable loads, we can assume that the Falcon 9 with max (expendable) load of 22.8 tons will be going ~4km/s at 1st stage MECO. Since they have [nearly] the same upper stages, the Falcon Heavy will have to provide exactly that. Of course, JCSAT-14 just proved that it is possible to land after burning "only" 2km/s of delta-v afterwards instead of 3km/s, so presumably Falcon Heavy will need only twice the reserves of Falcon 9. Getting to 30-40 tons make me expect they will lose the center booster. At this point the economics get interesting. With 30% of the [recoverable price of] $62M we might guess that the center booster costs $18M (or more accurately, not recovering adds to the cost). A lot depends on how much leaving the landing reserve of the side tanks matters. Presumably, they will need much less than 10% reserve (less than a Falcon 9 for landing). If trying to recover the side boosters drops the Falcon Heavy cargo from 54.4 to ~40 tons while trying to recover all boosters drops the tonnage to ~22 tons, the cost delta hits $1000/ton: a no-brainer to expend the booster (assuming you somehow have a manifest to deliver some sort of arbitrary cargo in multiple trips, say a Mars spacecraft). A lot depends on just how fast they can get the center booster [plus upper stage] going and still slow the thing down and land it, vs. how much delta-v they lose when just returning the side boosters. And of course, the whole exercise is moot unless they manage to talk customers in the ~20 ton range into buying a "twofer" launch instead of individual launches.

My point wasn't so much where we were, but were the guys who made the decisions thought they were (although the problems they had doing things similar to Gemini must have been blindingly obvious). The explosion you mentioned also didn't happen until 1969, well after the go/no-go date for any negotiations on a joint trip to the moon. I'd imagine that the US would have been equally underwhelmed by a suggestion that the US and Russians jointly work on an artificial satellite in 1956.

Check out how Wallops Island got walloped (by Orbital-ATK). You need to be farther away than anything that was damaged.

I'd have to wonder if the Soviets had any reason to expect that they would lose the race to the moon after several earlier victories. In 1964 I'm reasonably certain they were still ahead, but I have no idea how much longer that would be. Don't forget that the USSR changed from Khrushchev to Brezhnev roughly at that time, so presumably the non-historical Kennedy would be negotiating with a different USSR than the one history records him dealing with. While such an agreement would certainly avoid the post-Apollo spending cuts that were such a disaster for NASA, it certainly isn't quite clear that a cooperative venture with the Soviets would get sufficient funding (from either side) to actually go to the moon. Certainly the negotiations for such a project would certainly end any plans of doing such before January 1, 1970, and delaying the build up of such things could doom the NASA budget especially in the face of the Viet Nam war (would Kennedy spend on "guns, butter, *and* spaceships"?). Also remember that we are talking about 1964. In those days ICBMs weren't exactly a "solved problem" (even for the superpowers) and much of the parts and even the capabilities were top secret. Even in the 1980s, US citizens (well, myself as a young space enthusiast) tended to believe that "the Russians" didn't have the extremely accurate guidance systems such as the Apollo missions had and made it up with really powerful H-bombs (close counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and nuclear weapons). Both nations were willing to do Apollo-Soyuz in 1975, I doubt they would have agreed in 1965. Finally, count me in as one who is underwhelmed by Kennedy. He may have talked up a great story, but I can't see that much that he got done. Johnson seems to have been the one who "walked the walk" (for good and ill) that Kennedy talked about. Without Johnson, I'm not sure the money would have been spent nor would any American had set foot on the moon. PS. Consider Buzz Aldrin's endless whine about not being first on the Moon. Would we need two hatches so both sides could have their men exit (and touch down) at the same time? Would we need men of both nations circling the moon in the command module? Would the plan include the N1 engines? Avoiding the 70's budget cuts seems the only advantage to working with the Russians (we had done so with Apollo-Soyuz even closer to when Reagan announced "Congress had outlawed Russia and he was bombing immediately"). All the other aspects seem to increase the danger that we would simply never get there.

The point about Russel's teapot is that while it satisfies all available data and does indeed make a prediction ("there's a teapot out there if you can find it"). The two reasons it doesn't count are: It isn't falsifieable: it is not possible to completely survey the universe and declare the teapot non-existent. It fails Occam's Razor. The probability of adding a teapot should always be less than a teapot. Russel's point was likely more theological than scientific. Claiming the nonexistence of the teapot (and further generalization) is scientifically trivial. Avoiding generalization issues theologically is more difficult. Schrödinger's cat is a more interesting story. The way I learned it, Schrödinger posited his cat in an effort to "fix" quantum mechanics (presumably on the side of the EPR article). Quantum mechanics was working absolutely fine until you were required to make a prediction on the state of an unobserved system. Unfortunately, both A and ~A (live cat and dead cat) were equally valid answers for certain (carefully contrived) systems. Schrödinger effectively wanted his cat dead or alive. If that were the end of it, I'd have to assume that science would simply expect the cat to be dead or alive. However, any other time quantum mechanics (or later quantum refinements) would make predictions of unobserved states it would show that they made more sense to be understood as a superposition of states ordinarily thought of as separate. The famous example is the 2 slit electron experiment, where unobserved electrons appear to travel through multiple paths simultaneously (i.e. act as waves). The ability to predict all observed data is sufficiently strong to accept otherwise absurd (but strictly following the known good equations and not adding more due to Occam's Razor) answers for the unobserved states. * snide comment: Someone recently managed to get a water molecule trapped inside a buckyball. Any discussion of Russel's Teapot now has to include the disclaimer "of sufficient size for tea for [at least] two, a flat surface for contact with a stove, and a spout to pour the tea". It would be quite easy to believe the random formation of a buckyball trapping a water molecule existing somewhere out there.

Depends how you feel about that guy with the boat for a recent Falcon launch. I voted for expendable.

I'm not sure if it works formally, but the argument goes like this: You have a theory: A and it's falsification ~A. If A is not falsifiable, both A and ~A explain all existing data and there are no known conditions (or experiments) that would show either A or ~A false. Should a "scientist" write a paper claiming A was true, you could equally write a paper claiming ~A was true. Should the "scientist" claim ~A you could claim A. At that point A=~A, which is a sufficient contradiction to throw the both of them out and declare them "unscientific".

First artificially produced fusion was at the bikini atol in 1954 (first H-bomb test). This produced a ton of power in ways that weren't obvious how to harness it. Basically the problem is that fusion requires extreme amounts of heat and pressure (the pressure is likely the killer. Especially considering it can't be applied by any form of matter). You spend x amounts of watts providing the heat and pressure to produce enough fusion to generate y amounts of energy. My understanding was that for sufficiently generous accounting, this had been done in a net positive (googling implies that might not be true), but only counting "energy in" in terms of energy directly received by the plasma (i.e. ignoring all the losses in the devices providing said energy. Be really glad if it is over 5% from power generator to plasma) and energy out in terms of actual heat produced. Although this end is largely a solved problem (because it is critical to all electricity production) and is largely limited by that pesky Carnot efficiency (which defines the most power you can get out of heat under any conditions). In the end you will probably need a few orders of magnitude of improvement before there is sufficient economic justification to build a fusion power plant (for production and not research purposes). Also expect to have pesky neutrons irradiating plenty of the plant (fusion *always* makes neutrons. Lack of neutrons was the giveaway that "cold fusion" wasn't fusing). In the end, you might wonder why you didn't just do a little research on how to make safer fission plants.

My copy is stuck on pre-release. I have to decide if I want to go back to my career on 1.0.5 (because what I was doing won't work in 1.1.x) or dump it. I'll probably dump it (and start over?) for the same reason I haven't done anything for months with it: I was stuck doing an incredibly pointless science spam that included multiple science stations and took vastly too much work just to start to get returns. The science labs appear to have been fixed in 1.1

Sure that was Newton? My understanding that most of his work went into alchemy. I'd be fairly surprised if many alchemists accepted conservation of mass. I'd further guess that it really didn't get established until after phlogiston was dethroned and that chemistry was shown to work with equal masses. Von Neumann used to say he could come out before people who went into a revolving door ahead of him. Newton was likely a master of this (and gets credit for things long after his death). There's little fault in getting your predictions wrong. If anything, I would chide Einstein for his blaise attitude that God owed him to have built the Universe in a way pleasing to Einstein. I think he later understood that he was lucky to get so many predictions right (especially since God seemed dead set on "rolling dice").

Some corrections of "Einstein proved Newton wrong"... The issue starts with the Maxwell equations. They show that radio waves are emitted at the speed of light (they work fine with relativity. It's quantum mechanics that replaces them. Presumably even QEM doesn't play well with relativity, though). Michelson-Morley came along and showed that the above speed of light was constant in all directions (and frames of reference). PS: The recent discovery of gravity waves was basically an update of their apparatus looking for roughly the same thing. Only this time the answer wasn't exactly zero. Lentz works out the math trying to figure out why the speed of light adjusts for a given frame of reference. I likely have this wrong, but there is a reason Einstein always gave credit for the transformations he has since received all the credit for (i.e. showing why instead of how. Because just how didn't make much sense at all). Finally Einstein came along and showed just why the speed of light is the way it is. Also, don't forget that in one important detail he proved Newton right in a way almost completely forgotten: there was little explanation to why the mass in F=ma and F=G*(m1*m2*/r**2) were the same, until Einstein based general relativity on the assumption and worked out the math showing that the universe does work that way. PS. PS. Any guesses what level of precision you would need to get Moho to process around Kerbol? KSP uses double precision for "on rails" calculation (like the planets), but since Kerbol is roughly Jupiter sized, I doubt that Moho is really going to process in any measurable way with infinite precision, let along double. This was one of the big kickers that Einstein used to show that General Relativity was on the right track (as crazy as it looked), and the gravitational lens checking was done soon afterwards.

You're sure enough about the dry weight to calculate the cargo to 10kg? In a rocket with 90 tons of fuel? How many struts did you use?

An important thing to remember is that to a KSP-level approximation: rocket engines are turbopumps. They already have their fuel lines dealing with large changes in acceleration, extreme vibration (less clear about that, airplanes are notorious for vibration issues but over longer periods of time. Rockets certainly shake a lot, and turbopumps aren't going to be happy). The catch with rocket science is that it rarely can afford the margins you might otherwise want. None of the space-x people have found a way to reliably switch from one fuel source to another (or possibly some other issue is holding it up), and I'd tend to believe that a Merlin-(D) engine can only tolerate the fuel inconsistencies of its own fuel tank and can't handle a second one. Considering the smoke and mirrors used to compare prices with recovery and cargo to LEO without recovery (source: Scott Manley tweet. But the non-recovered cargo mass is right on the page) I'd hardly claim that "they don't need it. The claim of $1000/kg has been batted around long enough, but that doesn't include the apples/oranges factor of price_without_recovery/price_with_recovery. To recover the center stage requires plenty of fuel remaining in that stage, and crossfeeding is a great way to keep it in there. I'll wait until some explanations of recovery are mentioned (or costs and willingness to sacrifice boosters. So far Musk has insisted sacrificing boosters is admitting failure). Personally, I think that the upper stage needs some COTS (or otherwise) SRBs strapped to the sides. It might violate a cardinal rule of KSP rocket design, but it would allow all the recoverable stages to stop at lower velocities and provide more delta-v where it is needed (getting the upper stage to 4km/s or more before it has to do the rest on its own). No idea how much Musk and Space-X hate SRBs (it was too late change to this years ago).

The new [and much less functional to the end user than the old one] forum software appears to be able to sticky threads (as is done for thread of the month). Shouldn't we at least sticky "what is delta-v" in the tutorials section along with a few others? I think the last time somebody asked it was roughly a day after the last one dropped off the front page (ok, I was guilty of posting the SMBC answer for "what is delta-v", but that was after it had been correctly answered). The often repeated SSTO thread at least has the problem that you can get good at KSP without understanding why SSTOs are unlikely to ever be used on Earth, it is pretty much a matter of downloading RSS and discovering why. Threads about the Shuttle, SLS, and ULA are pretty much threads about US politics and how Congress spreads around money (even if the user answering the question didn't know that this is essentially the answer). This is a bit of a problem in that they tend to appear to be burning questions (at least to newbies) that appear to fall specifically in the "real space forum" arena but the answers tend to be in the forbidden "politics arena". Presumably the same is true for Russian programs, but there don't seem to be enough posters making a fuss over that. The space-x recovery thread does not appear to need to be stickied, it just keeps managing to stay on the front page and going on well over 100 pages.

Is there an ingame way to test this? Back before 1.0, I would test my kerbals (and promote them to level 1) for the BadsS flag by launching them into orbit on a pile of hammers using explosive staging. I figured if they could handle explosive staging, they could handle anything. Devs, bring back explosive staging! There have few things more kerbal in the entire game.

I suspect that the biggest change you will see out of your new rig is scene loading time improvements with the SSD. Hopefully 1.1 will show a few more improvements with the new CPU. Don't expect too much: going from single threaded to four threads will typically use up most of the improvements, going to 8 won't show nearly as many. Also the AMD "8 core" CPUs share only 4 floating point units. Since the new "multi-threaded code" is entirely about physics (which is typically all floating point), don't expect all 8 cores to play nicely with each other in the cases when you have 8 threads running. Still, I've been running an AMD 8320 and found it working well on 1.0.5 and before (for not overly-large vessels) and even better for 1.1 and beyond (although I haven't made anything big yet). I suspect that if your GPU can render it, your CPU will be able to do its side of the physics. Put it this way: I have a AMD 8320, a nvidia 560i, and an "all in one" water cooler for the CPU (there was this sale...). Nothing in KSP has made me want to see just how far I can overclock the CPU.

Have you landed on Minmus? It is vastly easier and lets you practice many of the steps needed for the Mun (just make sure you get your inclination changed before trying to plot a course for Minmus). If you do have experience on Minmus, then you probably need more engines because you are trying something that works on Minmus (with next to no gravity) that doesn't work on the Mun (which definitely does have gravity). If you are using spark engines swap them out for terriers (and higher ISPs as well). Do you have Kerbal Engineer/Flight Engineer installed? It tells you surface elevation (the thing at the top is for "sea level", which you will have a hard time finding on the Mun) and I'd hate to have to look in the cockpit to figure that out. Don't take the "suicide burn" at face value: it doesn't seem to include sideways velocity. You can use it if you want after killing your sideways velocity (4-8km up, as noted above), but no before. And make sure you have enough fuel! You will need nearly 1000m/s to get home (leaving a few hundred m/s in orbit is an option, but learning to dock is probably harder than learning to land on the moon without docking).

Er, what? The only major "feature" that is obviously missing is the ability to create maneuver nodes from the launchpad. I haven't played with the "rocket building" UI to find out if that was sufficiently re-vamped (it is probably the biggest reason for rage-quitting in the game) along with the rest of the UI (while I admit that not having to hit a spinning UI clickie is huge, the spacecraft assembly is my biggest UI peeve). Even if they changed the game however it would take to allow maneuver nodes from the launchpad, I wouldn't expect it to really be in the game, more likely a dev-designed mod. Squad's vision of KSP tends to be one of "trial and explosion" instead of the more engineering style who like knowing their delta-v in advance. With a maneuver node tied to a countdown (big UI change to do that, especially to change the T=0 time) you could plan the entire mission in advance, presumably making mechjeb following a pre-programmed flight, and eventually taking the player completely out of the pilot's chair. It might be NASA, but it wouldn't be [Squad's vision of] kerbal. But I would download and play that way (possibly without mechjeb, but with the pre-planned burns).

Early manned flight (and most later manned flight for that matter) was all about propaganda. You better believe looks mattered (but don't let it interfere with getting there first).

The SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engines) are famous for running at "110%" of rated power. That rating was from the 1970s as designed, and either manufacturing improvements or testing showed that they could run at the new rating. Also remember that Falcon9 (1.1 FT) takes off with a TWR of 1.3, a 10% increase of power would mean a TWR of 1.4 or a 33% increase in delta-v (at take-off, which would have to be toned down after awhile due to max-Q issues, but would at least get the thing going a lot faster).

The center has to support everything the Falcon9 booster does, plus an additional 25 or more tons of cargo. The sides do not (not even the upper stage). I suspect some of those struts in the rocket will either be removed ("Munzted in EE terms") or made smaller/lighter (because they can be weaker). Or possibly the side boosters contain extra fuel roughly equal to what the upper stage carries (I suspect this makes more sense). Keeping costs low by maintaining a single parts bin is important. But dry mass is likely more critical.

It doesn't change my point at all. There's no point in launching a non-recoverable Falcon9 if a Falcon Heavy can lift such a mass *and* recover all three boosters. The assumption follows that a fully-recoverable Falcon Heavy will deliver less than 22.8 tons to LEO. No idea if the prices change depending if you allow for recovery or not (I'd assume they do, but it is *amazing* that they make pricing public at all). I also suspect that a "two out of three recovery" Heavy Falcon will get you closer to 50 tons than 22.8 tons and destroy roughly the same amount of equipment as the Falcon 9 single-use.