wumpus

I've heard plenty of people like Civ V (presumably after all the bells and whistles added), but I can't give up Nimoy's voicework.

I'm guessing the bug was always there and you don't touch code that works. This becomes a bit of a problem when you change other bits but never check your "working" code (Ariane 5 is the classic example).

Er, I get 8.5 months for Hohmann transfer to Mars. The idea that BFR could cut this down seems impossible (nor crew taking a longer path). https://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Smars1.htm That's just for zero-gee, although your "atrophied astronaut" would only have to deal with Mars' .375g gravity, so recovery (to Mars levels) would hopefully be quick. Expect hospitalization when returning to Earth (8 months of 0g after "normalizing" to .375g won't do well at all at full Earth gravity). Radiation is another story. I've seen plenty of work done on "building with lunar concrete" but nothing about Mars (presumably thanks to no return samples, although some meteors appear to be martian). I'd be curious if you could cover your Mars base with martian rock/dirt (or at least the sleeping quarters) in an effort to reduce radiation. Note that in zero-g, Apollo astronauts could deal with incredibly cramped quarters. If astronauts spent a significant amount of time (possibly just sleeping) in small, fixed locations then shielding them would be far easier. I'd expect that ISS data is key for this type of thing.

If you want to "mine" the Mun for all possible science (12 separate landings), you will almost certainly want to keep a fuel tank in orbit. You might even need this for Minmus (I'd plan on it), but expect only to need to dock 2-3 times. A single landing doesn't justify an Apollo-style landing (presumably it does in RO). I'm surprised that a Minmus landing wasn't suggested. A Minmus orbit was mentioned, and it is something like an additional 300m/s delta-v to the surface (and back) for a ton more science. The difficulty with Minmus (for new players) is the inclination change, something you need to get right to orbit the body. I'd recommend Minmus for all your Kerbin-SOI science needs (you can almost completely unlock the tree that way), but it sounds like OP is back on a funding grind.

A better thing to do would be to compare the feature list and see how long it takes to debug. All bets are off on a unity update, you get to count any unity features (used by KSP or not) in the mix and realize that squad can't fix them, just work around them. The sandbox felt complete after 1.0.5 (and a working aero model), but Squad added at least Kerbnet and probably a few other things. I feel that career has issues, but perhaps they feel that the DLC will provide a superior "goals handed down from above" system (if not, there are plenty of mods). Expect if "Making History" is ever released, it will take a few more point releases to get right. Don't forget the console port is in limbo, if they want to revive it expect a few tries necessary (which might be a problem considering console economics). The point is that 1.3 was mainly a language pack. While I doubt it was perfect, the flaws aren't as hard to find as software bugs (and if they are hard to find, they are unimportant because nobody sees them).

Come on, it was only announced four years ago with nary a peep for three of those years.

In 2006 Intel introduced the "core" microarchitecture. Current Intel chips strongly resemble it and it probably ran about half as fast (flat out) as current chips doing the same. 2000-2007 will probably include a fairly significant error to "just the last 10 years", but before that Moore's Law* had to be obeyed. On the other hand, if you count individual "word" actions used for 3d graphics calculations in GPUs, the last 10 years should be fine (and nearly all of them done in GPUs). Part of that is that the GPUs are that much more powerful, but also because the CPUs are simply waiting for a human to ask them to do something (typically redraw another keystroke), and games simply run the GPU (and somewhat the CPU) flat out. * Moore originally claimed in his law that the amount of transistors per ship would exponentially increase. He had to change the constants on the exponents twice, but the law outlived him as flash memory is still happily scaling away, admittedly by stacking transistors on top of each other instead of making them smaller. Don't expect computers to become more powerful merely by making silicon transistors smaller though.

In terms of raw space, relativity assumes no preferred origin so no. In terms of a "center of mass of all mass" that feels weird but appears true (you wouldn't expect the "Hubble effect" without it). Sounds like there are two obvious ways to achieve that: The universe never had a center of mass that wasn't everywhere (meaning that if all matter was gathered together, there was no empty space around it) The universe did have empty space around it, but the energy bounced around during early expansion to become homogenous. The "center of mass is everywhere" has been true ever since. I expect the truth to be far weirder.

NASA has a budget of 19.5 Billion (mentioned up thread as well). They have sent 3 SRS ships up this year. They are paid to develop other things, but I don't suspect that adds up to anything like CRS. They get somewhere between .5 and 1 Billion, so certainly no more than 5% (NASA + DoD is likely above 1 billion. They send up a lot and the US government doesn't make it easy to reduce costs). I *do* suspect that SpaceX puts up 75% of the tonnage for the US government in space. The SpaceX partnership has certainly paid off well for NASA, certainly better than any other high profile deal since Apollo.

It looks like they sent something up for NRO 11 flights ago by what I posted, which was typed while looking at their [spacex's] website.

It all depends on what the design is for. Five figure Isp numbers won't buy you anything significant within the solar system, but perhaps you want to get a probe elsewhere and report within the lifespan of whoever built it (unlikely). The above also doesn't look like anything that will burn for a century, not even considering the issue of plutonium's half-life (you need real patience with epsilon-level thrust) [six digit Isp might be assumed to going further afield than conventional systems. How do you shield it for going well past .1c?].

How many Spacex flights have they bought? I thought that was lost in the noise of commercial flights. ULA exists to supply the Department of Defense flights (like NRO), but Spacex would like to at least nibble at that pork. While it would be foolish to not admit Spacex was facing bankruptcy had not the CRS saved them, here is the recent missions: (http://www.spacex.com/missions) Koreasat, Echostar 105 (EU), Irridium, Air Force, NSO (Taiwan), NASA (resupply), Intelsat Iridium, Bulgariasat-1, NASA (resupply), Inmarsat, NRO (US govt), SES (commercial communications) While they certainly needed NASA incubation, the could presumably exist without NASA (+DoD. I think DoD spends more than NASA). I suspect it would still be pretty much be the end of the BFR.

Sometimes you use them with monster tanks, but leaving Kerbin you are likely having thrust supplied by kickers and don't necessarily have a monster engine cluster. You can also use drop tanks with a single terrier or NERV (this is often ideal as you can stack them on top and turn sideways and eject spent fuel tanks between Pe kicking). One other reason asparagus is not as wildly popular as it was in beta and before is that monster clusters are an option. Before you would create them out of huge asparagused groups, now you simply drag and drop a more efficient engine. For instance it might make more sense to vertically stage a twin boar with a poodle staged above (and never fired simultaneously) but give each drop tanks.

With individual kickers launching second stages, I don't think you should dial back much below 2.0. With large rockets with many kickers things might be more interesting. Also you can't stagger your burnouts without dialing back at least some rockets (you almost always want to fire them all at launch). I have to admit that I have never tried to stagger my burnouts. When you mentioned it I assumed that it was primarily a stability thing (implied) or possibly for reducing aero losses. It was only when I thought about what actually happens when a stage burns out (it produces surprisingly more delta-v at the end) that I considered the delta-v difference (you want them to burn out while carrying as few extra kickers as possible). I'll have to play with a spreadsheet and see what difference it makes there (I'll also see how many kickers/couplers I should be using) and can't believe I never thought of that.

Power is typically only a concern as an engineering problem in expelling waste heat. The energy from the nucleus might as well be unlimited (solar power scoffs, but don't expect to travel past Mars with solar). The missing parameter is time/thrust. If you have a crew, you can't take too long in the Van Allan belts nor extend your journey far past what a standard Hohmann transfer would take. This removes nearly all ion systems from consideration and leaves maybe VASIMR for electric propulsion. NTR has no such issues (the thrust is less than chemical rockets, but it will get the job done). You are left with the choice of either NTR or producing a sufficiently massive amount of power (nuclear, solar, or plain old chemical*) to use electric thrust to get beyond the Van Allan belts, and then off to your destination (which will still need tremendous amounts of power, but without the hard limits of the Van Allan belts). Remember, VASIMR trades efficiency for thrust so this burn will likely be hardest on the power source. If you have an interstellar probe, your best bet is to use as many planetary slingshots as possible until you have the highest speed possible in the right direction (obviously slingshots are limited after hitting escape velocity, they become flyby only). Once you've hit escape velocity, expect an TNG powered ion burn lasting decades. Power (and thus thrust) only serves to add dry mass, so should be minimized and traded for time. Sending a message back home becomes a tricky proposition: your TNG will have to maintain enough power (Americanium?) to at least wake up the probe and then presumably firing up a new TNG (presumably getting the mass up to criticality and producing *some* power, simple radiation is unlikely to be enough) so you will have enough power to send data back to Earth. * I'm assuming a fuel cell is out of the question. Typically these engines are lousy at energy efficiency, but energy is nowhere near as difficult to supply in space as mass. But if not, certainly a fuel cell would be on the table.

Throttling a rocket down almost never makes that stage more efficient, but having one set at full power and another set throttled down might let you add more kickbacks (and thus more cheap thrust). You are sacrificing efficiency of the kickback to use it instead of a more expensive twin boar (so try to have as many at full thrust so you can drop them early). Lots of variables to consider with these things. Also that "runaway train acceleration" sometimes comes in handy to stabilize otherwise noodly rockets (if a rocket insists on being unstable where SRBs take off: try "more boosters"). While at least one real life model rocket engine maker suggests TWR>=5 for stability, I'm not sure it works with real-sized rockets in real life. If I had 16 kickers at 80% thrust, I would at least experiment with breaking it into groups of 14 SRBs at 92% and reserve the remaining two for a second stage (don't ignore the use of putting drop tanks on both stages of kickbacks). This may not leave you with a remotely circular orbit, but it should be more efficient in theory.

Attach two to side couplers on either side, then keep attaching kickbacks in pairs to them (don't pay for more than one side decoupler). Setting on the launch clamps with a tiny angle to the East goes a long way. Control is done by attaching two AV-R8 winglets North-South (for control up and down while heading East). Optionally a liquid rocket in the center for control (sometimes you just want a vacuum rocket in the center). If it is an option (career mode may get in the way), you should attach liquid fuel tanks above the kickers to supply any center rocket. I'll have to try out the 7BACCS system. I suspect that a single kicker + BACC will do the job better (although the height may interfere with career limitations). Part of my love for kickbacks comes from previous editions where I'm reasonably certain they wildly outperformed (for money and mass) BACCS and Hammers (if they did, it's certainly fixed now).

I've done worse: hauling spent SRBs until dropping a larger stage (typically thumpers attached to kickers). I try to limit side decouplers to two and attaching as many SRBs as possible to a single decoupler (and don't bother sticking nosecones on anything smaller than a kicker [assuming I bother to add decouplers. Presumably decoupling it would make more sense than a nosecone and no decoupler]. One favorite trick is attaching fuel tanks to SRBs and filling the tanks to run out along with the SRB (and detached together). Current KSP doesn't even require the fuel pipe (although you might attach it to let KE compute the right amount of fuel then delete it before launch).

So it looks like the choices for dealing with post-burn heat are: * Open-cycle cooling: send propellent through the system, possibly into a smaller bell to act efficiently at 6-10% propellant mass, possibly switching to a non-propellant with either higher thermal mass/mass ratio or would suck heat better during a phase change (or two if using a solid). Ideally this can be ISRU ice, but still it involves mass. * Closed cycle cooling: This is highly complex and has most of the issues PB666 just described. Expect *lots* of dry mass needed to do this. * Dumping the fuel: obviously you need all the fuel mass each burn, but expect it not to be much more massive than the cooling mass needed in open-cycle designs. Just don't count on any ISRU uranium (unlike the ice example). The major advantage here for dumping fuel is simplicity (it probably requires less total mass than closed cycle cooling as well). If you have a meltdown (and I'd expect it to happen when leaving Earth or possibly leaving for Earth with failing ISRU material) you aren't going to be doing a capture burn and can expect to be lost in space in some sort of transfer orbit oscillating between Earth orbit and some other orbit. Trying to move the fuel into a graveyard orbit might be avoided simply to avoid failure: for some reason people will object if you try to avoid a .001% chance of Earth being hit by radioactive slag and fail vs. simply assume that "it is all right" and ignore it.

[TL:DR forget about aspargus and onion staging and just use drop tanks.] First, "pure asparagus" has a lot of hype thanks to fitting well with KSP's pre-1.0 broken aero-model. I'd expect drop tanks to make more sense for modern usage. Note that "onion staging" is strictly inferior to using drop tanks, assuming you can upgrade/spam engines on the last 'stage'. Changing from 6 tanks dropped at once to 3 stages dropping two tanks each (you will need to put 3 times the engine on the last stage, but the Poodle/terrier ratio is close enough) will always work better (assuming you can hit the space bar remotely fast enough). Don't expect to use "pure asparagus" outside of Eve. Drop tanks nearly always are a great idea (KSP uses unrealistically heavy tanks to compensate for the scale of Kerbal), but asparagus only makes sense when you need to carefully manage TWR (which was a thing in the souposphere, now likely confined to Eve). It shouldn't be hard to make a better "onion" with pairs of droptanks and vertical staging (presumably putting a large central engine that could then be vertically staged) than a "pure onion", so I'd recommend thinking in terms of drop tanks than any type of classical KSP staging tricks. [in the pre-1.0 game it made sense to maintain TWR=2.0 from 0-10km elevation than hard right as fast as you could. You should only consider throttling down if you velocity is approaching terminal velocity (this should be nearly impossible for KSP>=1.0, before that you hit it if your TWR>2.0). Asparagus was useful for maintaining exactly TWR=2.0].

The Feram changelog doesn't include the word "ground" or "ground effects", I don't expect it to model such things but does anybody know for sure?

Probably the kicker, with a mention that I used hammers all but exclusively before beta (nearly all delta-v came from hammers). Also a huge fan of NERV and terriers. Having "favorites" interferes with design, although for things like terriers/poodles they have wide enough use to justify using them enough to be a "goto" use. I suspect mamouths and twinboar for heavy lifts play a similar role, but you shouldn't pick an engine just because it is your favorite (when your second stage is a kicker you know you have an SRB problem*). * this isn't to say that it might not be the "right" design. But such things are so unlikely that you shouldn't have considered it or wasted the time checking.

You're looking at the wrong numbers. The mark 1 capsule + crew cabin weighs 1.84 tons. The mark 1-2 capsule weighs 4.12 tons. It would make sense to pay thousands more for the mark 1+crew cabin for the chance to cut your payload mass by more than half. Expect the resulting rocket (made by the mark1+crew cabin) to cost easily less than half the final cost of the mark1-2 based system. And the other players aren't kidding about not sweating this too hard. You can miss too much of the game [guilty] if you burn out by trying to make ideal recovery systems (if you must recover, add the mods to make it take less time).

It should, but remember the orbit still has to intersect where it was originally dumped. In both escape and capture burns, that will put it in an orbit that intersects with a planetary orbit. Eventually it will come down. I really can't tell if that puts the fuel in "depleted uranium levels" or "turned to lead levels" before it is finally captured by the planet, but it is still an embarrassing place to leave a slug of melting radioactive metal.

Er yes. Dumping the fuel (rods/pebbles/whatever) after each burn removes a massive cooling issue. Not only will the unit remain "hot" for "hours to days", but the reaction will be going close to full speed for several minutes. This becomes a huge problem as efficient burns should be done in minutes at a time (for Oberth. You also need to get out of the Van Allan belts quickly, but I suspect that can work with the isotope-fed overtime), so using propellant to cool the fuel becomes wildly inefficient. Unfortunately this leaves you with a radioactive mass of molten metal (regardless of the container you ejected). You probably want to send a "fuel wrangler" probe to follow the molten radioactive melal and guide it through a slingshot maneuver into a "graveyard [solar] orbit". This would obviously be trickiest for capture burns (presumably the burn wouldn't fully capture and you would still need aerocapture for the spacecraft and a quick maneuver with the fuel pad elsewhere).