Hunting.Targ

I feel that Scott Manley's tutorial is all you need to get started (Reaver has posted plenty of links already, so I won't steal his thunder). Look it up on YouTube if you want. Also, reaver, I find it interesting that you describe tutorials as spoilers. Do they spoil some game features, or do you think that a tutorial itself is a spoiler?

I can't help but be quite bemused on how such a simple, otherwise boring item as test launch video footage can spark such -um, er- impressively passionate discussion. And since we're here talking (or ranting) about it, I might as well put some chips on the table. NASA is a gov't. agency. SpaceX is a private contractor meeting certain specific requirements set forth by NASA and specific legislation. There are pros and cons to each operational scenario. As a gov't. agency, NASA has to work with whatever money and directives they're given from Capitol Hill (determined by the Congressional budget and appropriations legislation and committee decisions), which is sometimes a little, sometimes a lot (of either/or or both). They are also subject to the disease that plagues every gov't. body: Bureaucracy. If you read the official documentation (or even the Wikipedia summaries, which is far less tedious and boring), you will find out that both space shuttle disasters were caused or contributed to by the 'bureaucratic mentality' of business-as-usual and "that will never happen. Get back to work." It was so bad, that as Richard Feynman pointed out, it spread from NASA to (some of) its contractors, namely Morton-Thiokol, manufacturer of the Space Shuttle Launch System SRBs. Now look at SpaceX. Operating missions with far less overhead and administrative oversight than NASA, and also less systems and flight engineering testing. Proven, practical, but by no means perfectly safe yet, E.M. is blazing a trail for private contractors to make a profit from gov't. funds in a rather slick and attractive way - taking crews and cargo into space and back. Until some enterprising venture manages to bring back a rare-earth asteroid and start mining it for nickel, silver, and titanium ore, there will be no true 'profit' in going into space. I also don't see why Elon Musk gets targeted when Virgin Galactic has become responsible for the first commercial space program fatality. Richard Branson has been funding and overseeing an effort to provide tourist flights on suborbital trajectories, with the goal of taking non-astronaut passengers to low earth orbit and possibly the I.S.S. The SpaceShipTwo incident has been a wake-up call for Virgin Enterprises, who already runs an unconventional but successful commercial airline operation. This has the potential to bring in profit only in the sense that some people are willing to part with significant sums of money just to be part of 'space fever'. And as for the early Mercury and Apollo incidents - we (I can hardly help but speak as an American at this point; the space race was rather nationalistic) were learning, and we were learning fast and hard. Most of the lessons we got were technical, and I am fond of saying the laws of physics are merciless and uncompassionate. The last few decades have shown that the lessons facing spaceflight now are less technical and more leadership- and organization-oriented. From Challenger and Atlantis, to Mars Climate Orbiter, to the (recent) Project Orion debacle; the real question becomes not 'do we trust this technology?', but 'do we trust the people behind (and in) this technology?'

Yup, go here. Make sure your system is clean before getting on with your cyberlife. Best free tech support I ever got. Great community. Be polite and respectful, and you will likely get expert help.

Congrats. You asked, you received, and now you can have a chance to do something some of us didn't get or didn't take. Respect it, enjoy it, cherish it. If I may: -Be formal (as in dress formal, whatever you can reasonably afford) -Be civil -Be gracious, not adventurous -Be yourself. If you are honest and genuine, the memory will be far better in your future than if you put on a show. And be sure to have fun!

First off; there's a related thread here. - - - Updated - - - Secondly; About the debug mode thermal color code; there's two ways do to it, true color and false color. In true color, as aforementioned, the visual emission spectrum for most metals is black (cool - relatively), red, orange, yellow, yellow-white, then white (some show blue before or after white), by which point most metals are soft enough to melt or break apart like warm cookies. The color order some have mentioned (the 'shower-head' model) is an artificial false-color model based on the most common instinctive associations between colors and temperatures. If there were simply an option to pick between the two schemes ('false-color' and 'true-color'), I think that that would solve the issue. - - - Updated - - - Also, while I totally agree with Brotoro and Regex about the whole balance/realism issue, that sounds like a separate thread topic. No one (Squad!) has to explain fission thermodynamics to model it accurately (or even approximately); yet knowing what design type the Nerv is would help clear up some things in the area of expected behaviors. - - - Updated - - - Aaaanndd... one more thing. What if we had thermocouples that could be attatched as struts or maybe radiator-like components. They would convert waste heat into electrical charge. Probably not enough by themselves, but with radiators?...

That's pretty much what your average refrigerator does; it's a heat pump that expends electricity to reduce temperature. The main problem is that heat pumps use Convection cooling, where radiative panels use radiative cooling, which is what Angel-125 and Red Iron Crown are discussing, and is ultimately the only principle to remove waste heat from a spacecraft in vacuum. The thing about a heat pump is it can imbalance the heat distribution of a craft, at the cost of electricity as you suggested. Run the heat pump and you can force the waste energy out of your spaceframe and into the radiators - this of course raises their temperature. The rub is that if this is taken too far you can wreck the heat pump if it is overworked or the radiators if they get too hot. Sounds like a neat idea though. - - - Updated - - - Venting coolant seems almost a pyrric proposition, since there is only a finite amount of coolant that can be carried. Passive systems work indefinitely; active systems, especially ones that use up a fluid or other resource, can only operate as long as the resource lasts. We've all seen what happened in stock .24-.90 when you turned on SAS for attitude control; it burned up monopropellant and did nothing you couldn't do yourself with a little careful attention; something you might do in a pinch, but not all the time. Same here. Venting coolant could be something that is done either only manually or under specific conditions (like with Smart Parts!); if you've ever played with a thermostat or digital climate control panel, it should work pretty much the same way. Your spaceframe gets dangerously hot, so you vent some reserve coolant to get out of the emergency and then close the valve. - - - Updated - - - I would have to point out that a combo radiator/solar panel part would be interesting; a part that was a solar panel on one side and a radiative heat sink on the other. This is mainly because the solar panel would absorb a large swath of solar radiation, creating a 'blue shadow' zone where a radiator could function reasonably well. It could potentially be equally or even more efficient than an equivalent radiator edge-on to solar radiation, because it would be radiating into a space with lower energy density than the ambient environment. It would just have to flip 180° each time the craft moved from shadow to Kerbolight (two-sided panels don't have this problem). So if a craft ran out of electric charge during a night cycle, it would be out of luck until about late morning-midday. Small risk to take for a 2-in-1 part, I think.

I think the second option makes more sense in terms of game complexity/playability. That would simplify choices as far as fuel loading and not require a lot of tweaking of fuel ratios. Then all you need to do is choose tank sizes (no 2.5m LF-only tanks is a big oversight, Squad!)

You could both be right. Maybe. Two things; 1) Does anyone know if the Procedural Parts mod still works in 1.0? 2) Does anyone think it would be better to use separate LF and OXidizer tanks in 'atomic-age'-style designs? Haven't tried it yet, just an informal survey question.

Or you could use this. How's that for an alarm clock? (sound is from ST:TOS ; was originally an American Destroyer battle stations siren). - - - Updated - - - I honestly think that the most informative solution for those who want acutal per-part data is to use something similar to (or even just like!) the flight dynamics data overlays in Farham Aerospace. It would display part temperatures in a color-coded wireframe in either absolute temperature or as a percentage of each part's maximum thermal tolerance. Then as re-entry occurs one could get a visually aggregate picture of how the spaceframe heats up; which parts heat up fastest, which parts heat up nearest their tolerances, etc. And then that knowledge can be taken back to the design. Trying to work with specific engineering data points in realtime during a mission I think is (most of the time) too distracting from the task of actually running the mission.

Being a newbie and an outsider to actual gameplay, I should say that integrating mod concepts into the final release is quite in the spirit of an open-dev community-driven game. However as far as polish goes, 'I suspect y'all are raight.' There should be extensive platform and play testing, not this LastMinuteRushToAddContentOhAndThankYouSoMuchCommunityYou'reAwesome. I trust that whatever they get wrong will be made right, but this just seems a little whacked to me.

Today, I hope. You see, I Do want the free upgrades, IdoIdoIdoIdoIdo. Today I'll get .90 if ever they finish the server migration. Not the greatest timing. I also would like the opportunity to play with mods on the off-chance that I like a mod and it gets broken by 1.0 and not updated (not likely, but plausible). I freely confess that I haven't done any hard coding in many many moons - but I would totally be willing if the occasion presents itself. THX very much for the advice. [*goes back to machinating over new machine]

Very interesting piece of commercial history. Of course, such a situation comes about when an industry explodes and inventors and engineers are driving pell-mell to get their ideas protected against intellectual plagiarism. When companies hold ideas selfishly instead of co-operatively licensing them, it serves to stifle rather than stimulate growth, as you pointed out. Thank you for the insightful commentary. If the automotive industry hasn't solved this problem, where patents abound, I rather doubt that the aerospace industry will. And since there's no war to fight, it seems unlikely and unnecessary for the gov't. to start mandating certain behaviors. Sooner or later a few heads will decide that competition and cooperation are not mutually exclusive, and at least some sharing will take place.

Greetings Kerblings! Hunting.Targ signing on. I have been following this project since I discovered it quite by accident last fall while doing some technical research. I would like to say that while I don't have a machine (yet) quite worthy of running this nifty and enthralling project, I have quite enjoyed the story so far. I very much like Scott Manley's videos (is he on the forum?!) and Nassault's productions as well (now about that 2.2b...) . For now I'm grabbing .90 on the last possible day and planning to get a better 'puter. It's exciting to be aboard. Here's to many more versions. And mods. And mod revisions. And threads. And...