wumpus

Very funny. Most "batteries" I've used over my life have been the 1.5V type (the AAA-D cell type). Is the correct terminology "voltaic pile"? Then there's always the issue of stringing capacitors in series: while you *should* get higher voltages (and thus more power, but it isn't guaranteed and can always explode on you) you will reduce the capacitance by a factor equal to the number of capacitors added (capacitance adds in series like resistance adds in parallel). I somehow don't think this type of "addition" really applies to anything you would collectively call a "battery".

If I was part of reaction systems, I would certainly want to go this route. It might be a long shot, but I'm sure it is a long shot that has a better chance than straight to SSTO. I vaguely remember a claim from rec.arts.sf-lovers (an ancient sci-fi forum to you youngin's) that suborbital flights to Australia used less power than supersonic flights to Australia. Anybody know how to do these calculations? And is it feasible to do a "bouncing in and out of the atmosphere" flight profile with only mach 5? I'm sure that SABRE can use kerosene. I'm less sure that such a plane makes sense for flights where the mass of kerosene might not be higher than the the dry mass of the plane. LH2 might make more sense. Obviously you need LH2 if you want SSTO. While the military does like "prompt global strikes" and can certainly sell the beltway on that, I'm less sure about the rest of the USA wanting to pay for "another F35 program". It seems much more likely that when (and only when) B-52s start falling out of the sky, Congress will approach Boeing and ask/tell them to make a 777 or 787 that can drop bombs. Anybody have a guess at how many seats a SABRE-powered "airplane" would fly? Certainly a lot more than Skylon...

You do realize that both the USA and Russia built the capacity to destroy each other and then bounce the rubble multiple times? And that large chunks of the forum lived through that? And that whats left of those space war systems can still basically end life as we know it (mostly through civilization collapse after the major cities get nuked and related ecological catastrophe). Once you start building such a massive part of your gross national product toward weapons systems, there isn't much incentive to build one that can lose. So you build one that will at least not lose, that at least one "super-evil Empire" began building one that could destroy the other in hopes that it would incur only "acceptable losses". We have exactly one type of spacewar that was planned, prepared for, and ready to happen if one of two men pressed a single button (actually I have no idea of the means the USSR had to launch a nuclear war. I strongly suspect that nobody was willing to follow the American system after their experience with Stalin). We have exactly one type of space war that could have happened *within minutes* of pressing those two buttons, and it lasted for *decades*. Pretending human nature is different than historical example is pretty foolish. Human leaders love to beat the drums of war. Their followers fall over each other to give them more power, and the cycle keeps going until wars happen. Then everybody wonders how it got started and pretends not to be involved.

Is it a battery or a capacitor? A battery stores electricity chemically, then reverses the chemical process to release the energy. A capacitor stores the charge on plates, then returns the electrons as the voltage changes. Note that a similar device would be an inductor, which stores current (well, flux. But in practice it stores current). Capacitors have essentially infinite lifespans (assuming you don't go anywhere near the voltage rating on the side. Plenty of computer motherboards have been repaired by replacing these things). As a better example I will point out that various wireless filters act at the tens or hundreds of megahertz range. For these things to work properly, they need to charge and discharge (admittedly tiny amounts) millions of times a second, for years at a time. For all practical purposes, they have infinite amounts of charge cycles. Note that this might not be true of "ultra-capacitors" as they tend to blend capacitor and battery and might just involve chemical reactions. Still, I'd expect to use ultra-caps anywhere I needed lots of charging and discharging (like a hybrid car, or perhaps an electric car that wants to preserve the battery).

Not dialup: talking to arbitrary nodes in a galaxy sized computer means 50k year latency. You only get hundreds of messages back and forth before the universe ends. Local messages (presumably smaller than solar systems) might still have dialup latencies but bandwidth could well be in the "FedEx 737 full of flash memory" bandwidth, with sub-sub-systems being limited by technology and quantum limits, not speed of light. Amdahl's law comes down pretty hard. Since the compute/latency is essentially infinite, *any* serial parts stop you dead. Note that even in the sub-sub-networks, you have essentially infinite compute/latency&bandwidth and need almost the same level of parallelism that the "100 messages: *ever*" parts need.

Except that this can be easily falsified by asking "how big are the computers on the top 500 list"? Answer: long enough that they are have "roughly 1us latency between nodes", but you better believe that they are running faster than 1MHz (note, in case I am wrong, I'm pretty sure it is impossible to build a top 500 compute with less than 10ns latency (a meter or two) which would give you 100MHz. They run well over 1GHz and have some heft latency). This means that our galaxy-sized "computer" is a cluster of much smaller nodes. For the last decade or so, the basic Intel i3/5/7 core has been roughly the fastest possible single core. I'd assume that there would be some similar value (but wildly different if you had a 3d computer, which would presumably involve reversible logic (for efficiency sake) and who knows whatever else. But it would still be vanishingly small and talk to all other nodes (and presumably the nearest more often). Throwing in some numbers: Size of computer: 100,000 light years (size of milky way): Number of nodes 10^100 (actually its probably a bit under 10^90, but keep the numbers round) Node to node communication: ~50,000 year latency Break the thing down into 10^50 sub-networks, each containing 10^50 computers: Node to node communications latency: millisecond? Not sure I have the calculations right. But the jump is huge. Note that millisecond latency is typically only good for "embarrassingly parallel" algorithms on modern Earth (I suspect that most of the machines with high protein folding scores have [tens of?] millisecond latency), and probably more so on a galaxy-sized computer. break each subnode down to 10^25 computers each containing 10^25 computers: Node to node communications latency is effectively zero. Probably not good enough for register to register communications, but separate threads don't notice the latency. Note that there exist calculations based on energy levels and quantum basics that will compute the bounds of power of these nodes, but they are unimaginably powerful compared to modern computers and are presumably have similar cross-sectional area (although our nodes are 3d). Note that my original 10^100 becomes an obvious problem here, I'm pretty sure that the cores become smaller than protons... It really doesn't change the overall concept that much. So the actual answer is "a galaxy sized computer can calculate anything that can be calculated in hundreds [that's roughly all the time the universe is good for] of steps via (nearly arbitrarily powerful computers) that can each calculate each step in infinitesimally small pieces (and then send arbitrarily large messages at unbearable latency between each other)". This won't be many problems, and you can expect the rest of the network to be busy serving cat videos and porn.

Admin building: how this works is that it converts cash to science. The catch is that it "rounds down", so if your mission doesn't give enough funds to supply a single "science" you still lose that amount of funds for no science. I set it to the lowest setting and forget it (I like to build on a shoestring budget, so also set the the thing to "convert cash to reputation" as well). Don't expect to get much back, and understand that you will always be losing that percentage of cash. Spamming science around KSC: Booooring. For a quick hit you can always take any new scientific instrument and test them at both the launchpad and the runway (don't forget the runway). Building a "science car" is always slow and tedious. As of 1.x, it seems the earliest way to do this is by using a jet engine and aircraft landing wheels. Not recommended. Minmus science spam: There is something like 3500 science waiting on Minmus. Obviously, this takes a ton of delta-v plus careful planning to grab it all in one go (hopefully you leave an orbiting fuel tank and dock with it). The important bit here is that Kerbal-to-1-Minmus-biome gets you ~500 science and takes ~5000 delta-v. Going from Minmus biome to Minmus biome takes a few hundred or less delta-v, and nets you ~500 science per biome. You can do similar things with the Mun, but it takes a *lot* more fuel, and most of those places aren't flat (which means you can't assume a minimum delta-v per biome). Science space station spam: Putting a MPL-LG-2 science lab in space lets you multiply the science returned from your science spam. Note these need lots of solar power (i.e. put them in high orbit) and one or two scientists (preferably leveled) on board. Suggestions: put one around the Mun if you want to grab science from orbit (of Kerbin, the Mun, possibly with a smaller craft to Minmus), or put one around Minmus if you want to land on Minmus, do science spam, and return with the bounty to orbit. Serious masochists might want to put it on the polar regions of Minmus (for "landed" bonus and 24-hour solar power): warning: finding such a spot requires some tricky searching and harder landing (I don't think I can do it without mechjeb). IMPORTANT: try not to turn this into a "total science spam" game instead of a game of exploration. There is always "one more mission" that is extra long that improves this type of thing a little bit, and will take over your game. Building a science station system pretty much burned me out of the game.

Game tapers off after Duna... Sounds like the problem is more KSP than your playstyle. My suggestions: Plan a game where you have to reach Duna [with kerbals and return] without NERVs. This means once you unlock NERVs you have a reason to go to Jul. Go to Eve (and return), after Jul. Obviously a much bigger issue than Duna. After that, I'm not sure how to help you. My plan is that once stock KSP has no real goals to switch to Realism Overhaul and try to do things with rockets based on real parts to get the delta-v you need on Earth. The most important suggestion I can give you is "don't grind". Skip every boring contract there is and stick to milestones. Try to avoid "science spam" as well. If this means cranking down the difficulty slider, then so be it. Grinding isn't "hard". Grinding just drives you away from KSP.

I figured out how to do this for 1.0.x a ways back and gave up as I didn't feel it was worth it. As mentioned: You have to get your SRBs back to the ground before the main ship exceeds 25km (technically, you *could* drop them on the mountains behind KSC, but I've never been interested). This means using Thumpers and Hammers, not Kickers. You need to reverse the course of your SRBs fast: probably the best way is to put flea/hammers on top of them (hopefully your main rocket is long enough so that the combined thumper+flea can have fins on top). So now your "drop SRB stage": drops the SRB fires the "retro SRB flea stage" release the drogue chute [optional: drogue chutes are only recommended if the flea isn't working right. Also they are pretty late on the tech tree for this type of silliness.] releases the parachute (with pressure adjusted to not release until the flea is done). Note, for best effect the chute should open just late enough to stop the booster before landing. You can hit 25km pretty fast while an SRB is slowly wafting down. At this point I just grab a mod (typically flight manager [the SVN-style one] or stage recovery [the one that recovers for you]).

Wouldn't you start with wind? I'm fairly sure that any Space-X employees trying to land boosters in KSP consider lack of winds as much of a cheat as the indifference to peak pressure, [previous] ISP/thrust inversions due to atmosphere, etc.

Usually either "we come in peace for all kerbals" or "My planet! MINE". I suppose I could go for "one small step for kerbal, one tiny bump in XP" for all those "plant a flag for 1xp" trips. Haven't had a "another flag another contract" for a flag colonist. Actually the xp flags rarely get comments as they are taken down and replaced by the next kerbal.

It also might depend on being in "astro/cosmonaut" shape. I think the Soyuz has had plenty of fairly hard landings (or at least off course) and that some US astronauts have experienced such.

How does an engineer not understand that an infinite series (which allows a steadily decreasing finite amount to be "discovered" infinitely often) does not necessarily add up to an infinite amount (and can actually be quite small)? I'm pretty sure I thought about putting oil in toothpaste containers (because you can always squeeze a little more out), but that was right before I took calculus (also it was between OPEC oil concerns and global warming concerns, so running out of oil was a fear of the time).

To a certain degree this is true of the 1.0 demo as well. No idea how many bugfixes and aero tweaks (they went from 1.0.0 to 1.0.3 in roughly a week, and later to 1.0.5 relatively quickly. There was even a "unpointed" release that only changed the build number). In any event, the extremely limited number of parts forces a certain amount of "old-school" kerbal design. I'm pretty sure using *lots* of asparagus staging is critical, where current players would simply grab larger parts without thinking about it (also there is a certain requirement to overbuild as you can't install mods to tell you delta-v*). The part limitations are enough to make this feel like an entirely different game (I like the released edition better, but the demo is closer to what I fell in love with back when I bought it (well before beta)). * I'm assuming this. While demos are unfortunately less popular than they used to be, I've never heard of an unpaid demo that allowed mods.

Also "hello world" projects for future satellite designers. When Orbcomm launched a bunch of satellites (the one the Falcon9 landed first), there was at least one "ballast satellite". Since nobody is making off-the-shelf satellites that fill all the cargo, there is often room for deadheading. Weirdly, you could probably make a pretty good communication system with nothing but femtosats (pretty much a packet-switching network similar to the original internet). The catch is, such a system would never play well with others (no avoidance systems means loosing them low enough for an early death, and you would need thousands of them). I also have to wonder how you send such a system up: My guess is that you randomly toss them out, spin stablize them, then light a solid rocket to get them to go to different orbits. Had Sputnik happened in 2007, we might be communicating with such a system. Not a chance for such a thing nowadays.

After a little googling it looks like you could probably get low dialup speeds (maybe *early* dialup speeds, like 110 baud). Hopefully you wouldn't need fancy tracking antennas on the ground side (without which you might wind up on the low side). Note that it will only be overhead of any one location for 1/500th or so of an orbit and depending on the inclination will go multiple orbits per time it goes overhead (and note that 1/500th assumes it is passing *directly* overhead. Not the typical orbit.) What would you be measuring, such that it could send everything back over the course of 10 or so seconds every few orbits? Back in the day, I thought that some sort of relayer/chatterer (relay everything transmitted for an orbit) would be cool, but had no idea how limited it would be. Still might be fun for a femtosat, but largely impractical. I also suspect you would need some custom protocol/ECC/modulation so it wouldn't be just a "tune in and listen" for HAMs to hear, but maybe software defined radio (especially through your GPU) might change that. What advantage would spin stablization have? It makes sense during launch, but there doesn't appear for any need for this thing to be stable. On the other hand if spinning it needs solar panels in all directions (since it doesn't know where the Sun is) and radiator panels won't work (the Sun will likely shine on them as not, defeating the purpose). Anyone know if you had a larger solar panel "sticking out" and a larger radiator at right angles, would it ever (i.e. before it burns up) orient itself with the solar panels to the sun (due to the pressure of the light spinning it towards that direction)? If you could (slightly) angle any of the panels, would it help? Note that the Sun's position + clock + software should tell you the location to point the antenna, so it might be worth having something that can rotate and have directional gain, but I suspect that stiction would probably send you back to "just make it even more simple".

A: The article makes a lot of assumptions assuming the existence of mass produced carbon nanotubes. If and only if carbon nanotube production gets to the point of silicon wafers can you expect the best case scenario described in the article. It might happen, but it sounds like decades in advance (although a better bet than fusion). B: Moore's law is all about making things smaller (twice the number of transistors on a chip every x years). Solar power is all about needing larger and larger surfaces. Moore's law tells us nothing about solar panels.

The Devils in the details. The obvious details from someone who has never built a [non-KSP] satellite: How big is the antenna? How far do you need to broadcast and what is your bandwidth, power, and s/n? Is it directional? If so, how do you maintain attitude* (or do you not even choose the direction of broadcast)? How much power does it take to produce the above (I'll assume that other power requirements are *small*). How much efficiency does your output amplifier, your power supply, and your solar cell have? What are you doing with the waste heat? (i.e. how big are your radiators?) * if you need to maintain attitude, don't count on any of the "other" requirements being *small*. If you don't, remember that the ground is several hundred km away, and you aren't going to be talking to anything that isn't in a nearby orbit. What is the antenna used to communicate with, anyway?

I'm really wondering where you think you can sell gear that you replaced due to being "too old" for what you originally paid for it. Of course ATK is looking for a steep discount, but I suspect that they would be willing to bid against ULA if necessary. ULA simply wants to block competition from existing by only lobbying (lobbying DoD/Congress is their primary skill. Space-X and Soyuz might try to block them as well, but their lobbying [in the US] is pretty much a joke).

Sounds like that is what you are trying to measure. I'm guessing you need to drastically lower your TWR (if you are using "multiple orders of magnitude", I cut them in half (i.e. a square root of TWR) and see if that blows up. Keep lowering it until you find something that will survive. Some basics: I know kerbal engineer claims that many of my craft have a max TWR (i.e. just before empty) of nearly 5. That should certainly be a possibility, and I'm sure some "max speed rockets" have had some pretty high values at some points of another. I doubt it is possible to have unsurvivable acceleration with stock parts. Note this doesn't include atmospheric effects. I've managed to blow up kickers (the biggest SRBs) with simply a TWR of 2.1 (as measured from the launchpad. They were probably over 5 when they exploded). You might to try launching from Tylo and seeing if you are destroyed by atmospheric damage instead of excessive weight.

If you are really feeling nasty (and have the time or are building a MAD-based insurance policy) you can have your "Navy" out in the Oort cloud. Killer asteroids are something you can detect (assuming all the asteroid detectors in Venus orbit or so haven't been blown up yet) and play tug-of-war with. Killer comets come in with only one orbit and are much harder to deflect (and break up easily if you hit them hard enough to divert). Space war: The only winning move is not to play, since 1957. Seriously, since it appears possible to build "terminator"-type probes that will eliminate any detectable life, it seems unlikely that any single species can survive a space war (it can be assumed that a second species can be sufficiently advanced to trivially wipe out the first as part of terraforming process). Anybody who remembers life before 1989 understands that people *will* build systems where the "only winning move is not to play", and that they [both the weapons and the people] still exist on Earth.

Certainly the nomenclature needs to be refined. I don't think you can call something an independent "galaxy" if it is orbiting something else (that is also a galaxy). Can they measure any sort of Barycenter? If not, it isn't an orbit and might account for why it wasn't noticed (and throw further confusion on the nomenclature).

[note: this is only about the fission rocket. Don't make a nuclear plane. Note that after the plane dropped the bombs the plane was expected to "buzz Russia" and spread nuclear waste. It was as much a destructive weapon (ok, to much less a degree) than the bombs it contained. You don't want one taking off, flying, or landing near you.] If you can hold fission in a magnetic bottle like that, I'd assume you can do the same to fusion. On the other hand, tokamaks *do* work to some degree (they just can't get net positive energy for any economic value of "net positive), so the basic idea may be possible with our present understanding of fusion. I just really, really, don't believe this is going to be ready for prime time any time soon. Note the shielding shouldn't be that big a deal. And you hardly need lead, water works just as well https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/ . In a normal rocket, the fuel tanks would work fine, but with enormous ISPs you will probably want an asteroid or something lodged in between the engine and the living quarters as shielding. Hopefully this time the engineers will be on the right side of the "firewall".

The whole point of an onion configuration is TWR. It had engines on the bottoms of each tank, and as the fuel burned out the TWR would increase (and go higher than asparagus) until the stages around the final tank ran out of fuel and were discarded. It wasn't commonly used (thus nobody bothered to point out the obvious flaw), but I did need it for one design challenge: launching a rocket (well before beta) with the parachutes open. This challenge was interesting in that Scott Manley did it as a live stream: at the time you could challenge yourself to see if you could do it faster than Scott. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY6xjCKsIMk (I think I got into space with the same parts roughly as fast (I didn't start at the same time), but I really don't think I ever played with a version that old). The onion configuration helped blast through the souposphere when the SRBs ran out (I think that at the time mainsails and 2.5m tanks were the best, so there was little point of not having a single engine at the bottom of each tank). This experience lead me to try different configurations, understanding that the "one true means of asparagus" wasn't the only way to go.

I suspect that it is easier to learn KE than to learn rocket science by trial and error. The important catch to know is that KE will lie to you about delta-v if you don't fix the altitude component (upper stages should have *huge* delta-v/fuel but will show almost none if set to sea level). Delta-V: Moved to the top because this is the most important reason to download KE. Delta-v determines how fast you can accelerate your spacecraft and thus where you can go. There are plenty of "what is delta-v" threads (including one recent that should still be on the fora) that explain it (sorry about the 17,000 other hits, but most of them in this fora should be good). IMPORTANT: As far as I know, KE insists on computing all engine power at sea level. Since upper stages tend to only work in vacuum, this tends to give you bad results. Try switching the "atmospheric slider" (top line, second button) all the way to 70km (after 10k should be enough) to find the delta-v of your upper stages. This should be a good enough approximation for your lower stages as well, and it always helps to be carrying the (pretty small) extra delta-v lost due to the approximation. [back to the start of kerbal engineer: moving from left to right] Parts: same as the stock report. Note that career has some limitations on this. Cost: How many kerbucks it will cost. Stock tells you this as well. Mass: how much each stage weighs. Stock tells you this as well. The biggest problems in rocket science are mass, mass, and mass. ISP: how much [mass] efficiency your fuel will have. Stock tells you per part, but KE figures it out when you have a bunch of engines firing at once. Thrust: note that stock hands these to you the same as ISP. You probably won't bother looking at this one as TWR is right next to it. Torque: Should be zero, unless you are building something like the space shuttle. If it is non-zero, you have unbalanced/asymmetrical spacecraft and need to get it as close to zero as possible. TWR: how fast you will accelerate. Note that you want to have KE set to Kerbin (the top line should read BODY:KERBIN, if not click it and change it to Kerbin). If this is less than 1.0 you won't be going to space today. If it is higher than 2.0, expect nasty aero effects as you go up, and possible explosions due to heating. Of course, if you are already trying to land on the Mun, you might want to switch to body:Mun to check the TWR (note, taking off with TWR>>1 makes sense without an atmosphere. You really don't want it near 1 unless you are specifically limiting your engine for easier control). Delta-v: moved to the top. Burn: how long it takes to burn each stage. Mostly a sanity check. If the burn time of the top stage is long, and you know that the lower booster only takes about a minute left to apoapsis when it burns out, you know you will need a more powerful (higher TWR after cranking atmospheric up) upper stage. Flight Engineer: (note in career mode you typically need to unlock it and attach one to your ship). All these are things it will tell you when flying the rocket. Apoapsis Height: [AP] how high your rocket will go (obviously make it over 70km for orbit). [only available in stock from the map mode] Periapsis Height: [PE] how high is the lowest part of the orbit (needs to be 70km, again. Time to Apoapsis: Pretty much how long you have to get into orbit. Basically, getting to orbit means launching and following your "gravity turn" while watching AP get to the desired height. Then set up a burn (centered on AP) to get your PE to the desired height as well. Note that as you burn before apoapsis, your it will get further away from you and hopefully you will see the "time to apoapsis" stop or increase (that's my cue to stop thrusting and wait until time-to-apoapsis decreases some and start the whole process again until PE is high enough). Other important numbers: Altitude (terrain): critical for landing on the Mun and other planets (the flat parts of Minmus are at sea level, so you land when the altimeter at the top reads zero). In stock, this is buried in the cockpit view. The other way of determining altitude involves looking for your shadow and noting how fast it is approaching. Surface slope: Often tells you go/no-go for landing zones before you can see them. [surface] biome: useful for science spam. Excessive science spam is not recommended for continual enjoyment of the game. Suicide burn (distance/time): Note, as far as I can tell this assumes you are dropping vertical (going sideways is more efficient). A dangerous way to land, but can be used with a "soft floor" to suicide burn to 1000m, and manually land the rest of the way. delta-v (per stage) useful to figure out if you will have to stage before completing a maneuver node (the delta-v needed for the maneuver pops up to the right of the navball). Also good for realizing you don't have enough fuel for the mission and turning back.