Kerbol Macrosystems

When you read that last part in Scott Manley's voice. But cars have such terrible fuel fractions. They're a shuttle-hater's worst nightmare!

Careful. That usually results in weird physics errors and then things get....explodey.

I'll bring the snacks!

NASA installed Part Welder during Gemini, so they could fuse the tanks and the engines. The remaining strut work is hidden under fairings, which you can kind of see from their old Hull cam shots (some of which were posted by this orbiter player).

There should be a little box on the top left of the part selector for the advanced menu. This menu has the kind of details you are looking for. The most recent devnote also gave us a teaser of a fantastic new search function coming out in 1.1.

Get the ISRUs out to the magic boulder. Our hype fuel reserves were never properly restored after the trip to 1.0

The wiki page on atmosphere has the equation that is used. http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Atmosphere p is the pressure at a given altitude p0 is the pressure at an altitude fo 0 meters H is the scale height P0 and H can be found on the wiki pages for each body in the Kerbol system. It's on the right hand side of the page, under the Atmospheric Characteristics section. EDIT: I haven't visited the wiki in a while. Apparently Kerbin has a modified pressure curve to mirror that of the Earth's. It's up on Kerbin's wiki page.

It's interesting, and appears to be well coded. I find the subway maps to still be more convenient.

I would love if there actually was a souposphere. A part of the atmosphere/planet where that layer was prominently made of delicious soup. Do you think the magic boulder was actually a giant bouillon cube? And it went away when someone used it?

At least they had the good sense to copy the image to their own servers. A lot of people have stolen Cracked articles, and Cracked will just redirect the images to mess with the plagiarists. Please give us videos of this magnificent beast.

Why does everyone want to petition the US government to name things? They don't have authority over the IAU.

There's all sorts of great ways to seal a rotating shaft. This is the same problem as keeping the rotor on a pump from leaking. If we can keep water in the pump, we can keep air in a space station. Mechanical Seals come in all sorts of arrangements, depending on the pressure difference you need to hold, the reactivity or corrosivity of the materials you need to hold back, and other considerations. If you dig through the websites of Flowserve or John Crane you'll find drawings of their seals. You'll get different drawings and section views depending if you look into the catalog, bulletin, or IOM (Installation and Operation Manual, sometimes Installation, Operation, and Maintenance).

"SpaceX’s Elon Musk is optimistic that 2016 will hold more landings, and fewer explosions,tweeting, “My best guess for 2016: !70% landing success rate (so still a few more RUDs to go), then hopefully improving to ~90% in 2017.” Rocket explosions are discretely referred to as Rapid Unscheduled Disassemblies, or RUDs, in the industry." http://gizmodo.com/check-out-the-wreckage-of-spacexs-almost-landed-rocket-1753894327

I would love to see how this setup flies.

I can't get onto Curse at work, but I believe there's a mod called "Recoverable Boosters" that let's you pilot items individually. You do this by basically making a save point at seperation, then flying your main stage to orbit, and saving again. You then do a revert to stage sep, control your booster to landing and recover it. You then merge the saves to have a recovered booster and orbital craft.

Does your asteroid happen to be kind of a glowing green and cause your ship to explode?

I remember reading somewhere there is a hot key to force physics warp instead of time warp. You can still only warp up to ×4, but it would save all the re-rescuing of the kerbals. Unfortunately I forget what that key is.

Where was that? I missed it. RP-1 and LOX aren't hypergolic, which means they won't just light by mixing them together. You need an ignitor sitting in a cloud of RP-1 and oxygen at the same time to start the engine fire. When you're on the ground you have a little bit of leeway because even if you get bad mixing the RP-1 will light against air, then when the LOX finds the flame it will join in and you get full thrust. In vacuum you must get a good RP-1/LOX Cloud around the ignitor to start the engine. Otherwise you're just venting unburnt gases. To complicate this further getting a good flow of liquids in microgravity is tricky, and it's tougher on a near empty tank . There's a lot that has go right to re-light a rocket in space. Awesome! Air Force Space and Missile History Center https://goo.gl/maps/XJsZwWjnutT2 You can see on Google maps that there isn't any land to the east, and there aren't any launch complexes to the west. There's also a lot of population to the west that we don't want to launch over.

Being able to brute force an engineering problem is actually quite realistic. In real life engineering sometimes you just use a bigger hammer and be done with it instead of finding an elegant solution. Like real life this does have some draw backs. Watch any video of a giant KSP rocket and see how many times it has balance or RUD issues until it's tweaked into behaving. Like everything in KSP the risk/reward is tweaked to a point that getting that brute force solution isn't easy, but it is fun.

The videos from Scott Manley are a great way to learn anything in KSP. I haven't figured out how to rendezvous in Simple Rockets. I can't get it to work with out having something to tell me my relative speed to target.

Save the rocket as a sub-assembly, then load your probe, then bring your rocket assembly out.

He's talking about inertial vs. Non-inertial reference frames. Your coordinate system moves with the local group, making it a non-inertial reference frame. In order to predict where things will be we would need to invent some imaginary forces to counter-act the motion of your coordinate frame. This is similar to what happens if I try to do calculations centered on a spacecraft in orbit. I need to invent centrifugal force to explain why the spacecraft doesn't fall down to the ground. We typically prefer inertial reference frames because it simplifies the physics calculations. This is a coordinate system that doesn't move. It's easier to account for the motion of all bodies in the inertial system.

My problem with Starkiller Base was that it looked like it might be big enough for gravity to round it, collapsing any and all trenches. I was really excited to see that it was just trenches upon trenches upon trenches. But I would like to point out we're complaining about the physics of a weapon that shoots faster-than-light projectiles/energy.

Applying gravity at the center of mass is just a simplification that makes physics problems easier to solve. All of the mass-energy still sits out at the physical elements of the Dyson sphere. The only case where you would end up in trouble is of you managed to rapidly collapse your sphere into its star.

I started testing a concept for completing tourist contracts. I stacked a Mk 1-2 pod over a decoupler set to 0% impulse. There was a Mk 1 crew cabin under this, a regular decoupler and an RT-10 under that. I set the parachutes on the capsule regularly so Jeb was safe, but the crew cabin had a different configuration. The parachutes were set to semi-deploy at 0.70 atm (2000 m on Kerbin) so that they would pop automatically. This quick test only went up to 30,000 m, but so far it's working, and all of the crewed parts are coming down safely. The next step is to take it orbital and see if I can keep the components within 22.5 km from each other.