wumpus

I assume it is a self-maintaining loop. For anything that big, it has always made more sense to use the Panama Canal. So nobody bothers to make any road high/wide/tall enough to carry anything that can't fit on a railway. I'm reasonably sure that there is a sufficiently large route from a seaport to Spacex's factory, to KSC, and coastal Texas. I also suspect the logistics are a lot easier than a 5000km journey with oversized loads (and dealing with human drivers passing you).

If a conventional G-suit can handle 6-7 gees of acceleration, why do you want to subject humans to more? Perhaps an air launch at such force might make sense, but very few rockets (all of which were solid based) have used anywhere near such accelerations. Typically by the time you are beyond the atmosphere, your gravity losses are declining anyway, reducing the need for such acceleration. Humans aren't the only weak points in a rocket. For decellerating, such speeds imply leaning heavily on the heat shield, although since the heat shield isn't involved with decellerating the rocket (the velocity energy is turned into adiabatic heating, which mostly passes around the spacecraft) it might make more sense (if you have the tech, why are you abusing the passengers so much). This sounds more like "crimes against kerbals", like when I send Jeb to Duna in a MkI capsule. - I remember seeing the g meter buried in pre-release during a "don't bother aerobraking, just impact the planet" Mun return. The souposphere would still slow down the spacecraft (and it didn't care about reentry heating), so I think this qualified as an exploit.

KSP is said to be mac compatible, I doubt that it has any issue any other mac faces. Note that KSP is typically CPU limited, so a wimpy GPU is unlikely to disqualify the computer (although I'd recommend Linux users to dual boot to windows if they have the windows license). It would take a pretty poor potato to have issues with KSP. I know my father's old 10 year old Athlon laptop (with potato GPU) simply fails at it while my mom's more recent winbookish thing (pre-Ryzen ALU) runs fine. Granted real winbooks (which should have windows blown off and ChromeOS or Linux put in its place) probably count as potatoes (and are likely the ones mandated by educational boards). Unfortunately I don't think you can legally distribute either demo (expect this thread: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/173007-old-versions-of-ksp-revived-and-refound/ to be locked). If Squad/Take Two ever gets around to updating the demo (they were *supposed* to re-release the demo for 1.3), you should be able to allow students to download that with no issues. I understand that KSPedu (and *only* KSPedu) has DRM, likely because Squad doesn't trust schools (and concentrated potential KSP sales that schools imply).

First I've heard of it, but I remember enjoying "Have Spacesuit, will Travel" so I image there are worse things for RAH fans to do. To be honest, I'd be surprised if a significant fraction of the danger involved in riding an copenhagen suborbitals rocket would involve the spacesuit. No claim against Copenhagen Suborbitals, but space is hard and they're not well funded.

Reality Note: while wifi issues and other "RF issues" are clearly bunk, high power RF is dangerous at levels used for such long distance power such as deep space communications. You might want to put this in a link for "crimes against kerbality" as well. - PS: the other danger is when you are closer than the wavelength being transmitted, in which case the danger changes from "being cooked like a microwave oven" to "being charged like a wireless charger" and the power transfer becomes efficient and ugly fast. The reason that you *know* phones* and wifi aren't dangerous is that [A] that range of RF isn't ionizing and your phone would overheat before it could have problems "charging" you brain, and various glasses of water around the house would raise a few degrees (and burn out the wifi) if wifi could hurt you. * "EMI issues" only. Blunt trauma involving cars is another story. ** EMI isn't completely safe. Use proper care when being exposed to huge EMI emitters that emit in a broad range including UV and other dangerous ranges. As in wearing sunscreen whenever you go out into the big blue room and deal with our alleged Kerbol equivalent. This is the only real RF danger most humans will ever meet, but KSP players are an odd lot and might need to know about the weird effects in places like deep space networks...

Block 5 needed higher margins for NASA man rating, I suspect that block 5 falcon might lift a bit more than expected from block 4 information. Still, the upper stage appears to be the limiting factor.

This should have been obvious from early simulations that Falcon wasn't strong enough to support super heavy loads (whether or not they ever got asparagus working). Falcon Heavy was also made because BFR is still being developed in "Elon Time" and it is hard to know when (or if) it will be ready. Falcon Heavy presumably can't lift anything significantly heavier than Falcon 9 (although this may have changed with block 5, it needed extra margins), but can presumably lift anything that Falcon 9 expendable lifted to orbit and recover, or send same to LEO/escape by sacrificing only the center stage.

Part of the problem is that an ideal balance for sandbox isn't remotely the same as career. Game design implies that career mode should unlock superior engines with more capability, but historical evidence says this simply didn't happen (sure, some engines have advantages to RL-10 and F-1 engines, but RL-10 are still used and I'd expect F-1B/mark whatever to be used had we wanted to maintain heavy lift capability (I'm still impressed by NASA's printed F-1 revival). The LV-N is certainly a major change in career mode, and it certainly helps to unlock some of the larger engines. But altering the capability of lifters mangles the sandbox and leaving it the same makes career mode boring (or forces you into "unearthly" SSTOs). I have to admit that Squad's stance on "don't break old rockets" makes more sense than playing sandbox players against career mode players. They might adjust cost, but that is about the only thing they can touch without a forum war breaking out (mostly against Squad).

Of course, the replacement rockets are being built on Elon time. Better build a few more as 100 flights seems pretty high (may have been simply increased to match Bezos spectacular claim. He's probably confident that his rockets are more reliable).

Presumably with 23 posts you don't know the history of that section of the forum. It is there for a reason. If you want to role play kerbals, I'm fairly sure rredit allows such.

The only successful uses of chuted recovery have been: huge steel tubes hitting the water 23 m/s (50mph). capsule return film return from spy satellites (snatched by aircraft in the US, not sure how the USSR did it) at least one civilian unmanned spacecraft snatched in the air I don't think Spacex got anywhere with parachutes and Falcon 1 (which presumably was a major design goal). Assuming "parallel staged" implies snatching *two* "first stages" out of the air, I can't imagine getting FAA permission to do such a thing (military organizations might get away with it).

Zeus/Jupiter was obviously one of the children. Surprisingly enough, he was the youngest (considering he wound up on top) and the only one not devoured by Cronus.

First of all, computing the Fourier transform for what is detected in a gravity wave is going to be pretty sketchy (have some pretty big error bars). I can't imagine trying to compute the "expected frequencies from said gravity wave": it would presumably require multiple sources of data on what event caused the gravity wave (presumably two black holes slamming together, but why that frequency?). Hubble did his research in the 1920s using light from observed stars (obviously easily available using 17th century methods). I think something like 2 or so gravity waves have been detected, it is far to early to know what a "gravity redshift" is supposed to look like.

Also not a sexist. Only female mosquitoes suck blood.

Note that while her history appears great, her grasp of the science side can be a bit more spotty. This one is just plain wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnXdEMtU_DE But I certainly have her subscribed for the history stuff.

Sorry. Only Scott Manley and a few other professionals are allowed a selfie stick. That is all.

It generally helps if most parts are reasonably priced and players have a wide selection of good parts. The catch is that such cost analysis is pretty silly with the game set on regular, but some people like to set the game on "grindy" (if you want "hard", try RO:RSS, or possibly just adjust kerbin's size/orbital velocity). There's no way that gimballing is cheaper than control fins. One possible exception is using multiple combustion chambers/nozzles and venting the fuel/air mixture for offset thrust (this wastes a little fuel, but you shouldn't need that many adjustments. I've learned to mount just a pair of AV-R8s (do tail fins work better? The wiki parts lists implies it) North-South to control my pitchover, and that seems to give enough control.

But Yuri Gargin had a parachute and everything! Just like modern kerbals, oh wait...

I thought it was the Soyuz T-10-a that had the exciting use of an abort tower (the crew had to wait to long [with 2 seconds to spare] for the abort rockets to fire).

The electron rocket isn't very useful for NASA (although I think they still launch sounding rockets, so don't entirely count them out). The Rutherford engine on the other hand could very well be the next landing motor. I'd certainly expect an electric motor to be more reliable on the restart than any turbine powered turbopump, although it will have a harder road beating pressurized hypergolics (especially with fancy new carbon pressurized fuel tanks). Of course, this being a spacex thread, I have no idea if that would be a sufficient reason for spacex to buy them: I'd expect them to want to use Raptor engines to land on Mars, rutherfords seem more geared to lunar use. I thought there was a company built around pressurized motors that went into bankruptcy (or at least didn't successfully launch rockets). If they had the pressurized tanks (cheap), they might be an acquisition target (again, more for lunar missions. So I wouldn't expect Musk to buy them without an Moon landing contract in hand).

Can we do the same with creationists and anti-vaxers? We'll give the creationists all the penicillin they want, then allow bacteria evolve that thrive in penicillin. Anti-vaxers simply need to be concentrated in their own reserves.

Reality check: Passenger jets fly somewhere between mach .8 and mach .9, after that you get the nasty transonic region with the high drag levels. Drag won't go below those levels, which is why nothing has replaced the concorde flying at its high drag levels. If you are launching rockets, you aren't interested in flying at passenger jet speeds (SSTO might hang around there for quite some time as they gain altitude) so it is less relevant. this may have lead to the confusion, but KSP is modeling things accurately (it is only when you get into spaceplanes that KSP's aero modeling starts to lie: you might want to install the Feram mod if that is a problem for you, and probably RSS:RO [the fundamental issue is that jet engines can't go fast enough to get into orbit on Earth, but they can on the much smaller planet of Kerbal]). My understanding is that the most efficient speed is always going to be your terminal velocity. Back in the pre-release souposphere version, this was equal to TWR=2.0. Unfortunately, this little tip appears to have been forgotten as the terminal velocity has largely been corrected. The important point is that it is almost impossible to hit your terminal velocity (at least while packing enough delta-v for orbit), so once you leave the transonic region (that bewing was talking about, at ~500m/s) you should hit the "Z" button to completely open up the throttle. PS: this means that you should never set the throttle limit on the engine during launch (only for delicate maneuvers) so you can max thrust when needed, just use the main throttle. You probably shouldn't set the throttle on SRBs (more thrust is mostly the point of the things, just stop adding them if TWR=2).

Fortunately without the two cosmonauts inside.

KSP will certainly hit one core hard, especially if you have a lot of parts flying around. Anything past that is pretty questionable (this means an equally clocked i3 and i9 do equally well at KSP, but you might want a bit beyond an i3 while streaming). I'd suggest an i5 8600K (and then cranked to ~5GHz) for hitting the asymptote of performance (this processor is unlikely to be limited by anything else for quite some time). You might want an i7 (or Ryzen) on the odd chance that KSP and streaming might compete for cores, but I suspect that a 6 core i5 will get both jobs done. Both the 1080GTX and 32G are extra expensive thanks to shortages. The 1080 is dropping fast, both thanks to mining no longer being profitable and expectations of a next generation this summer. 32G seems extremely extravagant for KSP, considering that all mods needed to fit in 2G up until 1.1 (so most mods had to be designed with sane memory use in mind). The graphics card is up to you, but KSP is typically only limited by how much CPU power you can get out of a single core/thread (i.e. an i9 isn't any more powerful at KSP than a similarly clocked i3), I'm not sure how many mods it takes to change this. Certainly such a beast needs an SSD, but it also needs a spinning drive if you want to save your streams. You want to keep windows, KSP, your streaming software, and anything else you use a lot on the SSD and keep your streams and anything else that is huge (and/or accessed slowly in sequence, like video) on the spinning drive.

I think it's a little odd to put so many people under Buran (which flew no cosmonauts, and never will) but none under any Falcons (which are still flying and block 5 is counting down flights to qualify). The N-1 is even worse, the Buran at least made its flight.