Racescort666

I apologize for reviving an old thread but it's a great one (@Val, seriously, this is amazing). @HalcyonSon, FAR has some of what you're looking for where you can see stability for velocity sweeps and AoA sweeps. Val should be able to answer this better than me but this guide might not apply to FAR? The concept of CoP, CoL, AoI, etc. should all apply regardless of which aerodynamics model you're using (stock or FAR) but I don't know if the wings generate lift and drag the same way. Something that works in one might not work the same way in the other. It would be nice to have some kind of modeling tools to use in the SPH like RCS Build Aid except for aerodynamics.

This project certainly looks interesting. A definite step up from the Jool-5 challenge. Now the debate: sandbox or career. I was hoping for a good end goal for my next career play through but I might have to jump into sandbox. Choices...

I've spent some more time thinking about this and I think cylindrical structure would be a good way to go. Centrifugal casting is already a pretty common process and could be easily scaled up. Ships could end up looking like the ones from Children of a Dead Earth. Basically big unexciting tubes.

I think maybe the first question to ask is "what is the easiest thing to make in space?" Going from raw materials to vehicles is quite the operation. Each step would need to be carefully considered. Honestly, a good place to look would be the Rouge River industrial complex which was designed to go from raw materials like soda lime and iron ore to cars. Everything to build cars was done there except acquiring raw materials. Steel mills, foundries, machine shops, assembly line all of that was in one spot. I would assume that space manufacturing would be somewhat similar where everything would be in one spot. So then the next question is that for each one of those parts of the manufacturing chain, what is the best way of doing it? Do you grab an asteroid whole and melt it down? How do you melt it down? They already use electric arc furnaces in steel mills and foundries so that might not be a bad idea. How do you purify the ore? Normally, once it is liquid any gas would bubble out but it doesn't work like that in zero g. Hypothetically you could centrifuge it but that would be a pretty huge centrifuge. After melting down ore and purifying it into usable alloys, how do you produce the next rough shapes? 3D printing seems like a cool way of doing it but it is an incredibly slow process. Do you make structural shapes like I beams, tubes, and flat sheets? These are things that engineers are already used to working with. How are they assembled? Bolting and riveting could be done like current spacecraft. Are the fasteners made in onsite as well? Electric arc welding could be beneficial. Hypothetically in space you wouldn't need shield gas so that seems promising. There are many questions to answer about in orbit raw material to finished product manufacturing that need to be answered. To me, they are all interesting and exciting because no one has ever done it before but that doesn't mean that there aren't analogs here on the ground. As for what spacecraft would look like, they would likely be a product of "whatever is easiest" along each step of the process.

While the president certainly has the capacity and the visibility to drum up support for expanding NASA's budget, (or the opposite if that's the case) Congress still ultimately approves the budget. That being said, Obama has been pretty supportive of NASA and support in Congress has been pretty bipartisan. Unless there is a huge overhaul in Congress this election, the president will likely have little affect on NASA's budget. If I missed your point, let me know because I'm confused otherwise.

I guess first things first, NASA's budget to go to Mars has already been approved: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/09/21/senate-panel-authorizes-money-mars-mission-shuttle-replacement/90793160/ NASA has been pretty clear about asteroid redirect as being part of the trip to Mars although that could be up for debate if it looks like it will be too expensive. Regardless, Congress approves the budget anyway. Write to your congressmen and congresswomen.

I was going to suggest tail gunner until I saw this.

XKCD is what got me first interested. It turned out that I had a few friends who played and I found out about this wonderful community so I've stayed.

From that perspective (irrelevant of gameplay) Jool is the most boring planet. That's not to say that going to the Jool system isn't interested. Jool itself has no features, EVE makes the atmosphere kind of interesting as you go in, but that's literally the only feature: atmosphere.

@Shpaget this story is also worth mentioning: http://oppositelock.kinja.com/favorite-sr-71-story-1079127041

My gf can see Wallops Island from where she lives and watched the last Antares launch from her porch. I was jealous.

@DerekL1963 you seem to have a better grasp of this than I do. I totally agree that at/around 1g there's no reason cooking would be any different from what's already common here on the surface (or under it). A splatter guard would be a way to cut down on projectiles under low g. If it's too low, you might have trouble keeping stuff on the bottom of the pan though and we're back where we started. I ended up reading a bunch of articles on space food and Chris Hadfield talking about how salt had to be dissolved in water and pepper is suspended in oil to be used on the ISS. Also how they tend to use tortillas instead of bread. Then I ended up reading about the infamous roast beef sandwich which ended up getting crumbs floating all over the inside of Gemini 3.

I didn't realize that your question was in regards to "on the surface" rather than "in transit". Hypothetically, the atmosphere of whatever colony would be standard pressure so water boiling would be the same temperature. Primarily, cooking is for 2 reasons, killing food-borne pathogens and increasing the caloric value of the food you're cooking. Also taste but that's not too hard to get around. For actual cooking techniques, microwave for sure but water bath cooking (sous vide) might not be a bad idea either. You'd probably want to eliminate hot oils as well so no deep frying. Hypothetically, a soup could be heated in an induction cooker like some of the newer stoves. I suspect that dishes in liquid or semi-liquid form would be the best for cooking and consumption. It would probably be a good idea to limit particulate seasonings so basically every type of seasoning would have to be liquid or gel. Hot sauce is already popular but there are many other types of sauces that could be easily implemented. Too bad that dried spices would probably be a problem but fresh spices wouldn't be bad. They'd have to find a way of making them into gels to preserve them. The more I think about it, the more that preserving spices seems like a problem. I've never tried to cook anything without dried spices so I've got no idea how flavor would be affected. Taste would be an interesting one to experiment with because much of your sense of taste comes from smell as well. In lower gravity (on the moon or Mars as you suggest) VOCs would behave differently and could affect how your nose collects them. This is already evident on the ISS as has been reported. Thinking out loud: what do they do on submarines?

Dang. Pretty funny though.

I realized that after I wrote this post, I found out that this exists already in the form of pulsed plasma thrusters. Rather than deleting the post, what does everyone think about pulsed plasma thrusters? I was thinking about laser ablation as a means of propulsion since it's basically one of the proposals for asteroid redirect when I started to think about it for spacecraft propulsion. Laser ablation by itself probably has pretty terrible ISP so why not accelerate the gasses via electromagnetic propulsion? The propellant could be literally anything but probably an inexpensive inert metal would work the best (maybe?). Please excuse the crudeness of this, I literally spent 5 minutes in SolidWorks drawing it. So the 3 parts to it are the fuel which gets fed into one end of the engine, the laser that ablates the fuel, and an electromagnetic accelerator to eject the fuel at high velocity. Hypothetically, you'd like it to be adjustable because as you ablate it away it would need to be repositioned closer to the laser. There would probably need to be a shroud of some kind to keep the molten metal contained which I didn't draw. Then the accelerator accelerates said ablated material out the back as reaction mass. Exit of the engine is at the right of the picture. I really have no idea if something like this would even work much less work well enough as a propulsion system so what's everyone else think? Someone may have thought of this already and there's something that I'm missing that makes this a dumb idea. I don't know, I'm not really that involved in novel spacecraft propulsion. A drawback of this design would be the power consumption. I don't know how much power this would require to be feasible or if it would even be on par with existing ion/hall effect thrusters. I would think that a benefit would be having an inexpensive, easy to store fuel. You wouldn't need a high pressure gas tank on the spacecraft or really a tank of any kind. Hypothetically, it would be easy to refuel if it came back to Earth, just add a new chunk of metal to the engine. Fuel package space would be considerably less than existing ion/hall effect thrusters Maybe I'm not thinking about this right but at a high level, it's this: ablate solid with laser, accelerate ablated products. Would this work or not? What would you have to look out for if it hypothetically worked?

This describes so many aspects of my life...

I found out that one of my buddies plays KSP. We also happen to go to the bar together regularly so we end up discussing orbital mechanics, mission planning, "what if" hypothetical historical missions with different payloads, etc. All of this at a hillbilly dive bar. We had to explain to the waitress that there is a space station in orbit of the earth right now because she overheard us talking about various crew transfers and resupply missions.

I threw together a spreadsheet to see what the hypothetical difference would be. The dV hit for the lower ISP isn't too bad. For 2 craft of the same mass (same fuel fraction as well) it's about 8.6% (the ISP percentage increase). I was looking at a payload mass (since this is an upper stage) of 0.745 t and you get 2190 m/s with 4 spiders and 2379 m/s with a new hypothetical engine that's identical except improved ISP. I'm sure that there are other people who run much smaller dV margins than I do that could use that extra 189 m/s, maybe it would be nice for additional maneuvering once in orbit, I don't know. The way I envision this probe is as the return portion of an Eve lander and I'm not going to know if the 189 m/s is going to make the difference until I'm flying the mission. Maybe I play sloppy but I generally leave a wide margin for that kind of thing.

I think part of what makes science gridy is that science is basically a currency for unlocking the tech tree. I don't have the answer to make science more balanced and less gridy, I've played with 20% science reduction and it has added it's own challenge but it still doesn't feel like the solution. Having milestones that need to be accomplished before certain nodes can be unlocked would be cool but it takes away from the "play the game however you want" attitude that it currently has.

If the word "kerbal" ever makes it into the dictionary, this would be an excellent citation. My interpretation is that Elon Musk used "Kerbal" as a shortened version of "Kerbal Space Program". I tend to do this in conversation so maybe the regularity of it makes it seem not so weird. Thinking about it though, it's pretty common to shorten multiple names into the first one. For example, I refer to my car as "The Alfa" rather than "The Alfa Romeo" but maybe this is one of those things that's acceptable in spoken English rather than written English. Your comment reminded me of this video:

I find that I use the Thud in some niche roles. Example: I need more thrust than a Swivel can provide but I also need thrust vectoring: Reliant and 2 Thuds do the trick nicely without having to bump up to a Skipper. Either that or the design doesn't allow for enough space for a Skipper but I need thrust vectoring. I guess the biggest benefit is bolt on thrust vectoring because sometimes you need just a little bit extra control. Regarding the Spark, I think it's an awesome engine and sometimes have a tough time justifying an Ant when building a tiny sized probe. It's like your options are absurdly overpowered but requires a big booster or miserably underpowered but the optimal payload mass. It would be nice if there was something between them that had maybe 8 kN of thrust and was in the 0.05 t ballpark.

UGH! that's still a bug? If I remember right, the small drills didn't have that problem but if it got fixed, then un-fixed, it could affect the small drills as well. The only workaround was to extend your heat shields way past the drills but that lead to a bunch of new problems for me. I like the look of your ship though. @eagle92lightning My thoughts from past experience: If you want to use 1 pod, use the Mk3 cockpit, it's the lightest, best performing single pod. Alternatively, Mk2 Crew Cabin with a probe core and reaction wheels would work and be lighter than a lot of other options. (I think I might try this) If you want to use pods (not lawn chairs) but don't care, use 4 Mk1 Lander Cans, they are a good way to go with Kerbals as pilots. Lawn Chairs in a cargo bay/service bay is the absolute lightest way to go. Asparagus staging is your friend, use it liberally. The higher you launch from the better. I've done a few missions from low in Eve's atmosphere (1500 m or so) and as your launch altitude goes down, the amount of rocket you need goes up exponentially. IIRC, you need about 7km/s of dV. This varies a bit depending on where you launch from (altitude) You need to get very high before beginning your gravity turn. Other people have probably worked it out better than me, I don't think I started it until 20 km - 30 km. You basically go straight up at some absurdly slow speed, 100 m/s -125 m/s, for what feels like forever. Then you pick up speed really fast in the upper atmosphere and run out of fuel. Use MechJeb or KER if for nothing else but dV and TWR readout when you're building your ascent vehicle. They include TWR adjustments for the performance hit that the engines take. Don't worry too much about having a high initial TWR on your upper stage, it's mostly just for raising your Pe and circularizing. Landing isn't terrible but it's harder than it looks, especially with a big ship. Drogue chutes and big chutes work pretty well. Ditching your heatshields at the right time is tricky.

This would probably be better as a mod IMO but I could probably be convinced otherwise in the name of aesthetics.

Even if it were a belt or a smooth area or something right at the equator. Landing spaceplanes in reverse on Minmus is one of my favorite hot shot maneuvers but it's a little tricky getting down below the mountains without slamming into the ground. ETA: it could be its own biome like "North KSC Field" or some other fun kerbaly name.

My gf gives me a hard time about stranding kerbals in various locale. Like landing a ship on Mün but not having enough dV to get back to orbit I get, "what would their families think that you just left them there?!" So then I end up staging an elaborate sub-orbital docking maneuver trying to rescue the poor kerbals. Some of the best flying I've ever done was skimming just a few hundred meters off of the surface of the Mün.