lugge

So, the current thread about telescopes has inspired me to give this hobby another try. Now, when I'm new to something i start googling for hours, but as I like this forum and its users I wanna ask a few questions about astronomy: Can someone point me to some beginner guides or books? Something to read to get familiar with this topic? What equipment do I need for starting? What Would be a good beginner equipment, what is absolutely necessary? How is this all being done? You go out on the fileds, set up your equip, and then? Do you spend hours just on one object? Yeah, relly newbish questions... I really got no idea what this thing is like... Regards, lugge

Not as far as I know (OK, Eris has more mass): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EightTNOs.png Yep, exactly what I was saying, thanks for confirmation.

I guess with more pluto-sized objects out there it's getting more unlikely that pluto will be promoted a planet again. You see, with it's size Pluto is at least a little bit of special among the tiny transneptunian rocks. However, I like Pluto, planet or not, doesn't matter. Talking aobut planets... Is this rock anywhere related to the "missing" planet 9? Are there any news about planet 9?

Forgive my silly question, but what can one expect to see in detail? I owned a telescope as a kid, but I was just pointing at stars randomly, didn't know anything about the sky... Since then I was talking to some guys who where dissapointed with their telescope... they expected some fancy pictures like you are used to from wikipedia :/

What's the article about? (Hate random links with no further information)

I do agree that the planets need more love. Adding more planets is just stupid. A new planet will give you one evening of playtime, a few more if you add this new planet to your Grand Tour vessel design. We need a reason to go there. And, when we are there, we need a reason to stay there for longer then 5 minutes of reallife time. Weather, more terrain details and better atmosphere, higher texture resolution would all be good. But this alone is no reason to go there. And even if you go there to see the new shiny graphic features: you will spend 5 minutes, do your experiments, plant a flag and go back home, just as now. So, there needs to be a game mechanic overwork instead of a graphic overhaul (which would also be nice). Maybe a change in the contract system? A reason to build ground bases? A story more? Something which will force you to discover the planet. At the moment, there's no reason to send a rover. Tech tree is fully completed by the time you visit Duna and Eve/Gilly. So, just more biomes and experiments wont work. A really BIG idead I can think of would be: useful ground bases (for building and launching actual rockets) you need mining base to mine for ore for your rockets you need chemistry and raw materials for fuel and synthetics you need trails/streets/pipelines to connect your different mining operations you are forced to set up a real infrastructure However, this would be a BIG, game-changing change. Too big. Don't know what else could force a player to spend more time on existing planets.

It's obvisious that kerbiloid is joking, isn't it? Why so serious?

Landing a probe, which is not designed for landing anywhere, on a moon? Well, sounds cool, but unfortunately this is not KSP. And RL can be such a badass...

I disagree. TWR is less important in space. When in a gravity well (like on earth ground level), you need a TWR > 1 to be able to lift the craft. Once in orbit, TWR only determines the required burn-time to accelerate the craft with a given mount of dv. A 0.2 TWR craft only needs to burn half the time then a 0.1 TWR craft (assuming the mass is the same). Possible dv of a craft is determined by the wet/dry-mass ratio and engine ISP. A lower-mass craft has a better wet/dry ratio and therefore more dv.

Yeah, MaxPeck got the point. I recently started a new hard career where you get very limited amount of science and funds... in the beginning. Only "gain" is, the Mun/Minmus grind takes longer. As soon as you go interplanetary, or even manned-interplanetar, funds and science are no problem. Problem not solved :-( I think the whole science thing should be reworked. But I admit thats no easy task, it should not feel grindy. I guess the only solution is to overwork the complete career, like, introduce a storymode where you are forced to do remote exploration, one planet at a time, before you can send your big Jool-5 mothership. At the moment, the only difference between career and sandbox modes is the funds/science-grind in early-game.

NASA cannot use their money for what they want because congress tells them which industries have to get what part of the pork. In EU, this problem is even more present. You have more goverments involved and everyone of them tries to get money for their own industry. Nations which less industry don't spend much money on ESA because they don't get it back. Thus, ESA cannot do really big projects because they just cannot use their money as they want. Don't get me wrong, ESA has very interesting projects. But you will never see projects the size of mun landing, or manned deep space missions. NASA is only controlled by one nation, one big mind that tells them what to do. And even they only achieved mun landing because the whole nation and all spendings where controlled to achieve this goal. ESA is controlled by a number of minds with different goals. Bad situation for big projects.

Well, now, to bring an end to this discussion: The real badass space agency is SNASA. You ask why?

I think everone (well, most) around knows rebuilding the 60's Saturn V is a dumb idea, not worth discussing. So lets not open this side discussion here.

I didn't say anything about FH. What I said is: with SpaceX (or any other commercial company) you will get more rocket per R&D dollar in a shorter time. Thats a simple matter of structures and bureaucrazy, not because they have better engineers. In every country in every kind of business: a goverment agency cannot compete with private, commercial companies. NASA is great in science and exploring space, but when it comes to rocket development you should still with privates. Give SpaceX the funds NASA had for SLS and you will get... Wow, I cannot imagine what SpaceX can do with these funds...

Well, I don't want to discuss if SLS is necessary or not, there's plenty of discussion about that. What is definetly NOT necessary are two SLS-sized launcher stages. NASA is slowed down because of internal structures and goverment decisions. So let some other, more-effective company build one. And yes, there will be a competition between SpaceX and others. So SpaceX might lose this competition, yes. This aren't the 60's. There are other players. No need for NASA to do "trivial" tasks like rocket R&D. SpaceX (amongst others) have proved to be very cost-effective.

Well, thats strange. I set up my manoever as alexmoon's calculator told me. I finetuned the node until my orbit intersects Kerbin orbit. Then you get the two marks "Target destination at intersect...". And these marks told me Kerbin is on the opposite side of Kerbol at intersect (~ 180°). Thus, I thought this is due to my retrogade Duna orbit. Doesn't mean retrogade Duna also you are going retrogade Kerbol when you leave Duna SOI?

So, my Kerbals successfully planed a flag on Duna and got back to LDO. There, they abandoned their MAV and transfered to the Kerbin-Return-Stage. This stage has about 2250 dv. Launch windows for Kerbin opens up in 11 days, ejection needs about 1650dv. I have strong heatshields on my MK-2-pod, thus, I guess I don't need to get back to Kerbin orbit but can directly hit atmo from interplanetary speed. Thus, lots of spare dv. Well, that was the idea. Now I realized my return stage is in a retrogade Duna orbit...When I set up my manoever node for ejection burn, I miss Kerbin at about 180° because my craft is going in the wrong direction! Shame on me! I tried to raise my AP until Duna SOI edge. There I can reverse orbit for about 30-40ms, then circularize again. However, this will take about 50 days. My launch window is gone and I have not enough dv for Kerbin transfer left. Until I wait in high Duna orbit for about 600 days until a new window opens. I hate to fast forward the game. I don't want my Kerbals hanging in HDO for so long. Any suggestions? Is there a way to use the abcoming (11 days) window to get home? Maybe raise AP not till SOI edge but till Ike, then reverse orbit there? Any fancy space manoever?

SpaceX has done nothing in terms of space exploration. So, this point goes to NASA. NASA has messed-up internal structures (like all goverment-institutes) and wastes money because they are told to (Constellation, SLS). SpaceX gives you more spacecraft per R&D dollar. Point goes to SpaceX. => SpaceX should be the taxi driver and hardware manufacturer. NASA should drop their SLS and rely on 3rd party spacecrafts entirely. NASA should focus on science equipment, probes, basic research, mission planning. When it comes to execute a mission, go buy some SpaceX or other 3rd party craft.

Many thanks guys :-)

Wow, wow... I though I know a lot about KSP, playing for over a year now... But this is a "feature" I never encountered... OK, last question: the fuel is drained from the big tank of the transfer stage and the small and the round tanks of the probe. Simultanously. Why? When I just stack a couple of tanks, only one at a time is drained. Why is my probe drained even if the transfer stage is not empty yet?

But there's also the Terrier in my lander stage? Does my fuel also transfer "around" an engine?

So I managed to land some kerbals on Duna. Also, my transfer stage had an unmanned probe attached which is going to Ike to get some science. Well, at least, that was the idea... My kerbals are on Duna surface now, happy gathering science. My probe is still on low Duna orbit, waiting for command. Now, I switched to my probe, wanted to go for Ike... when I saw my probe had almost no fuel left. So I checked a few quicksaves. I found a savefile where my transfer stage, my lander stage and my probe are still assembled in Duna orbit, you can see it here: The part on top is, well, my probe. And as you can see, my probe is already missing some fuel. There are three possibilities: - transfer staged burned my probe's fuel. Thats not possible because of the landing can between my probe and the transfer and lander engines. - my probe accidentally activated its engines. Well, unlikely. I checked the engines, they are deactivated. Didn't activate them. - Boiloff? Kraken? Anyone encountered a similar issue? Oh, I checked some older saves when my craft was still in LKO. My probe had all its fuel left. So, no way I accidently reduced the fuel in the VAB.

Well, we don't know if life is rare. Maybe it is, maybe it is not. At the moment, we think its rare. Now imagine, we would detect some kind of life on Mars (maybe gone long ago). Some simple stupid cells. Would we still think life is rare? No. We would think "hey, 2 planets with life in our own solar system, life cannot be as rare as we thought". Now imagine we would detect life in Jupiter's atmosphere or in Europa's ice ocean. We would think "wow, seems that life forms nearly everywhere." If this would be the case we would assume life everytime we discover a new exoplanet. At the moment, no one can say if life is rare or not. But the question can be answered by discovering our own solar system instead of some rocks many lightyears away. If we find life in only one more world in our system, we can assume life is not as rare as we thought and if we find it on two or more worlds we can assume life is pretty common. However, sentient life is another story...

OK, a question that bothered me for some time: am I the only one skipping every single one of these kind of contracts? You know, the contracts where you have to visit 3 specific spots on Kerbin/Mun/whereveryouwant and perform a temperature scan or something? I mean, really, whats the sense with these? OK, maybe I am the newb (which I am, I still consider myself a noob after one year of KSP). But I find these contracts very difficult, considering you get these right from the start of your career. When I started KSP, I didn't know how difficult they are and tried to finish some. Because airplanes are also difficult as a beginner (and due the lack of parts in early career) I tried to visit the spots with suborbital flights, trying to eyeball for the spot in map view. This took a veeerrryyy long time till I even visit one of the 3, and then I finally decided to not do these kind of contracts anymore. Pain-in-the-ass without airplanes, pain-in-the-ass with airplanes when you are a beginner. Now lets talk about visiting specific spots on Mun/Minmus, which I imagine is even harder. Targeted landing is a huge feat, like docking. I finally managed to be good at taget landing, this was necessary to send ships to my Minmus colony (which is not on the equator!). However, visiting spots needs you not only to hit a ground target, you have to manipulate your trajectory to go through a specific spot, not only one time, no, you usually have to visit 3 of them! I mean, really, who does this? To make it short: I don't get the purpose of these contracts. To hard for a beginner, to grindy for veterans. Or, maybe, I am doing something VERY wrong and they are easy-as-pie in reality. Don't know. Regards, lugge

Hi folks, I'm working on my small science hopper for Gilly, and maybe other low-grav-moons. I've never used the command seat, however, this seems like a good time to give it a try :-) From what I've read, this part has a few surprises, and I don't like surprises (not when in Eve orbit, millions of km from home...). You cannot crew an external seat in the VAB. Thats no problem because my crew goes in a comfortable transfer stage. But, when I board a pilot in a seat, does my hopper get SAS capability or do I need an additional SAS probe core? Now, because it's a science hopper, some questions regarding science... You cannot do crew reports from the seat. That is bad because I lose some science. However, there's lot of science out there so these points do not really hurt. But, you cannot store science data in a seat. Thus, I can only take one EVA-report. Am I getting it right? Or is there a way to store experiments so I can do another EVA-report on a different biome? That would be bad :/ Any other surprises that come with the seat? Regards, lugge