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PnDB

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Everything posted by PnDB

  1. And, to add to Snark's concise answer, consider the special case similar to the original poster's where you have three identical engines burning at the same time. Engine 1: thrust of 100 kN and Isp of 350 s Engine 2: thrust of 100 kN and Isp of 350 s Engine 3: thrust of 100 kN and Isp of 350 s Total thrust = 100 + 100 + 100 = 300 kN Thrust/Isp for Engine 1 = 100 / 350 = 0.2857 kN/s Thrust/Isp for Engine 2 = 100 / 350 = 0.2857 kN/s Thrust/Isp for Engine 3 = 100 / 350 = 0.2857 kN/s Putting it all together, total Isp = 300 / (0.2857+0.2857+0.2857) = 350 s This can be extended to N identical engines; Isp is the same as if you had one of that engine. Putting it all together for N identical engines, total Isp = N * (thrust of one engine) / (N * thrust of one engine/Isp of one engine) ... the Ns cancel out , the thrusts cancel out, and you end up with just the Isp remaining.
  2. Hate to answer a question with questions, but... Can you describe your rocket for the SRB test? What does your ascent profile look like (straight up to 200k and straight back down? a near-orbital-but-not-quite arc?) If you can get up to 200km in a graceful arc that puts your perapsis around 20-30km, you may reenter in a more friendly and less hot manner, losing sufficient speed in the upper atmosphere before you get too low and hot. What does your separator "craft" look like? Is it just the separator sitting on the pad?
  3. Steadler Engineering Corps approached us with a real challenge a couple of days ago... "Explore the Mün", they said. Nevermind that we'd only put a single satellite into orbit (almost, not quite 70 km Pe). Werner got right on developing the new parts necessary, while Gene rustled up a crew to upgrade the launchpad and VAB so it could handle a little larger rocket. On a cool evening, P-003 stood ready on the launchpad. Launch went well, though making a decent gravity turn was challenging with only the OKTO providing any torque. Gene didn't have time to upgrade the tracking station controls; so with no orbit planning capability, Jeb (sitting in Ground Control) waited until the Mün rose above the horizon and remotely gunned the LV-909 for all its worth. P-003 was on its way! In flight, it assumed an anti-normal orientation to maximize solar panel exposure. A few hours later, P-003 was in orbit around the Mün. Lots of science-y data were taken, and it was time to return. But there wasn't enough fuel left for a safe LKO circularization burn upon return from the Mün! Determined to recover the data rather than have lots of it lost in transmission, the ground crew decided to make a zillion passes through Kerbin's upper atmosphere to bleed off speed. Several days later, P-003 used the remaining bits of fuel to dip deep into the atmosphere for a final, fiery descent. Jeb took a page from the late-night rotisserie grill advertisements and rolled P-003 as it came down to keep all sides equally toasty. With the fiery descent complete and the LV-909 and empty fuel tank now jettisoned (bye-bye, poor-man's heat shield!), the remains of P-003 floated down (upside-down) on three parachutes... ...almost landing in a tree. And of course now someone else wants us to do it again, but this time with Minmus (and no tree)... no rest for the weary, I suppose.
  4. Space tourism is really becoming popular. Rockomax sent a disgruntled VIP to KSC, determined to prove that some Kerbals seem to enjoy things that terrify others. The VIP enjoyed the entire flight, including threading a needle between two mountain peaks on the final descent. Moving Parts Expert Group sent a disheveled engineer to KSC to find out whether brave Kerbals regain their nerve faster than not-so-brave ones. Winter Owl Aircraft Emporium jumped on the bandwagon and sent four Kinuea Pigs... er... tourists to also participate in the nerve-regaining experiment. Jeb and Val had a great time sending them into orbit and back. Every one of them was scared during the initial ascent, but regained their composure after passing about 2,500 meters. They all enjoyed the weightlessness of orbit as well as the initial firey reentry, but each one instantly transitioned from thrilled to terrified once the flames died down and the supersonic shockwaves appeared. Each one remained terrified until the chutes deployed, at which point they regained their composure. Firey reentry towards the sunrise. Tamda Kerman from Winter Owl seems to be enjoying herself.
  5. Just another day of tourist joyrides. This time, Reaction Systems wanted to see if all Kerbals enjoy weightlessness, so they sent Maxbella and Anwise Kerman over to each take an orbital trip around Kerbin. Maxbella Kerman had a great time on orbit, though she didn't like the ascent or final part of the descent. Anwise Kerman was terrified on the way up, and only slightly amused while in zero G. I think he just wanted the whole thing to be over. It probably didn't help that the two trips were remotely piloted using a probe core. "What do you mean, Jeb's going to stay on the ground? He's not riding with me?" "Um, yeah... Jeb's got more sense than that. Have fun up there!" Another tourist... another reentry... this time with Mun and Minmus in the background.
  6. My greatest moment thus far was back in 0.90 which took place almost one year ago today. It was when a Kerbal first set foot on another celestial body (Minmus). It was strange to get that strong a feeling of accomplishment... gave me goose bumps. I sat there and stared for quite a while at this amazing world around Jeb. (As you can see, I didn't know much about building short, wide landers at the time... that thing was hard to keep upright during touchdown). The next great moment was when I returned to Minmus shortly thereafter for a second landing. ... and then snapped the following picture. It really captured the awe of the moment, viewing Kerbol from another world. And finally, my first multi-Kerbal landing... again, on Minmus. Note the much shorter, wider lander.
  7. The old version of the forums used to have a setting for the number of posts displayed per page, and I had it set to 100. The current forum version defaults to 25. I cannot seem to locate any option to change this, and I didn't see any mention of the phrase "posts per page" in this thread (except for the mention of 25 posts being the default). Is there some place to set this default to a different value? I really don't like having to keep clicking "next" when reading through a discussion. Also (probably asked a zillion times), is there some place to set the default sorting for the Gameplay Questions forum to "Sort by Date" instead of "Best Answer First"?
  8. Back in version 0.90, there was something similar where the borders between two biomes occasionally would include other, unrelated biomes. It was attributed to an issue with the way adjacent textures are blended together when sampling the biome data map. For example, if two adjacent areas were, say, biome #2 and biome #10, the blended area between them might end up as biome #6. From what I recall, it sounded like they were using an averaging of the two biomes, instead of a nearest-neighbor method.
  9. I have downloaded the correct version of Unity and copied the relevant files over into the appropriate locations in KSP, as described in the initial post in this thread. How can I tell if it is running as a 64-bit application? When I tried to list all the applications on my Mac, every version of KSP still showed up in the list as 32-bit, not 64. Is simply running KSP for a long time, going back and forth between the VAB and craft in orbit, and then checking the memory usage the only way to tell whether the changes are having the desired effect?
  10. Sent my first 1.0.5 probe into orbit around Kerbin (almost... Pe of about 67 km). And then deorbited some spent stages that were cluttering up LKO.
  11. There's an audio segment (~13 minutes) associated with the article. I could not listen to the entire thing, as I found the audio quite boring, and the audio engineer (if there was one) really needs to work on cleaning things up... some pretty muddy voices from interviewed people.
  12. I can't see M31 from my house with direct vision at all, but I can occasionally make it out with averted vision. Sometimes I can detect it without being able to make out the Milky way; however the opposite is usually true. If Andromeda were bright enough, it would appear about six times the apparent diameter of the Moon (~3 degrees vs. ~0.5 degrees).
  13. I always liked that map. The stark contrast between eastern China, North Korea, and South Korea was something that fascinated me. I can make out the Milky Way at my house on a clear night (I'm listed on the map as "bright yellow"). When I was several hours northwest of Las Vegas once, the night sky was absolutely spectacular, and it put my view from home to shame.
  14. This thread from 2014 is from a challenge for an earlier version of KSP, but it shows what one can do with enough patience and many gravity assists. Back then, metaphor launched from Kerbin, transferred to Moho, and landed using a mere 7217 m/s dV. This challenge might be worth revisiting under KSP 1.0.5.
  15. Let's do some more mental gymnastics. Consider the following geometry: The two tanks hold fuel, with the bottom tank feeding an engine. The top tank feeds the bottom tank by pumping fuel through two helical pipes. When the engine is burning fuel, what happens? Does this thing spin on its axis?
  16. I finally got logged back into the forums, and started a new 1.0.5 career.
  17. My signature says it all... sadly I have not been very far. I do have a couple of craft in orbit, waiting for Eve/Gilly and Duna/Ike transfer windows to open up.
  18. Screenshots in OSX are saved under /Applications/KSP/Screenshots and are numbered sequentially.
  19. Bob's poor little Kerbal bones were weakened by the low gravity and long stay on Minmus, and when he fell to the ground on Kerbin, he simply shattered!
  20. Well, it wasn't today, but it was a couple of days ago... does that count? Landed on Minmus for the first time in this career. Bob and his lander managed to touch down in six biomes before running low on fuel, partly because the last biome he landed in had to be done in the dark... who forgot to install the lights on the lander? Bob is currently on his way back to Kerbin with tons of science on board.
  21. So when is the Vectrex port coming out again?
  22. Probably a dumb question, but here 'goes... Have you tried focusing on Kerbin in these situations? It might force a re-display of the patched conics.
  23. The light! It burns us! Anyone know how to repair a permanently burned spot on my monitor?
  24. Were there any changes to the checklist as a result of transitioning from 0.9 to 1.0.x?
  25. ... and here we all thought you were just going to fix it sometime later.
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