KerbonautInTraining

But what about all of the supporting equipment? (Solar panels! I'll bet it's not cheap to run these things) Until we have accurate measurements I think it would be best to prepare for the worst and assume it produces next to no thrust. Imagine if you put it in a 150km orbit only to find that its orbit is decaying, but not as quickly as predicted. That means either there's less drag than anticipated or it's producing thrust, but you can't be sure and thus the mission provides no useful data. There are official plans to put a VASMIR Ion engine on the ISS because we know that can pump out a few hundred Newtons. I think that might be what you're referring to.

The problem is that it's very expensive to launch stuff into orbit. (Note that this thing wouldn't be small enough to be a cubesat) There is a very real possibility that it won't work at all. Until we're reasonably certain that it will, there's no sense in launching one up. You'd have to launch it into a pretty high orbit too, as the thrust could be small enough that it's overshadowed by atmospheric drag. I'm just stating why we haven't done it yet, not saying we shouldn't do it.

So we should be able to see it go up on Sunday, that's good. I'm just wondering weather or not we'll get to see it come back down. An article from earlier today said SpaceX is still silent about permission to land. (Also, here's a little mini-game that "simulates" landing the F9 booster. It's so infuriatingly hard but somehow fun. I have yet to succeed)

He just tweeted again. Static fire any second now, if not already done. Edit: Delayed. Again.

Since we're talking about amazing images, this one was taken by Apollo 11 in its parking orbit. Am I the only one who is surprised by the quality of a 1969 handheld film camera? (X)

Gee this launch should be squeaky clean by the time it's done, what with all the scrubbing that's gonna happen

Time to nitpick The Martian! The MAV ascent/rendezvous me a bit disappointed. Why on Earth did they have to take manual control? Couldn't they have computers on the Hermes fly it for them? Given that he took lots of weight out of the capsule, the acceleration would have been pretty close to nominal during the first stage and peaked during the second stage. 12 G's?! What sort of mass ratios we talking here? I'd assume a normal ascent would peak at less than 2 G's. Today's inertial guidance systems could EASILY surpass an accuracy of, what, 20m/s? Total delta v of ~5km/s means an error of about 0.04%. Even an Apollo Era IMU could do better. Why not plan for an intercept roughly a few hours after ascent? It would have given a lot of time for course corrections and velocity matching. Wouldn't have to blow the ship up, either. I refuse to believe they used up any significant portion of their RCS propellant during a burn lasting <10 seconds. Such a short burn would impart a miniscule delta V unless their RCS thrusters happen to consist entirely of Space Shuttle Main Engines. I can't bring myself to pick at the 'Iron Man' propulsion, it was just too perfect. Don't get me wrong though, I LOVED The Martian. (I got to impress a couple people by predicting they'd use a gravity assist. ) Edit: Is it just me or did the font size change a few times between paragraphs? I'm typing this on mobile so I can't actually control font size.

Using these for anything other than Dawn-like operations is kind of pointless. The website cconveniently forgets that these engines are spewing tons of microwave radiation. Obviously the best place to fire them is in a populated city, even better if you use them to pass over crowded streets in a flying car. (Note that any aggression is pointed solely towards the aforementioned website)

It's balanced for RSS or Kscale10. If I understand the OP correctly, using this in RSS will give you mass fractions that are similar to using stock parts in 64k.

Would the SpaceX RTF mission now be worthy of its own thread? 3-4 days till launch, too early?

Well, I heard a bunch of people talking about it in the re-usability thread. There's quite a few articles (most of which are weeks old) that say it's still pending. Seriously, what on Earth is it about this launch? I didn't even know it was happening in 2015 until I looked it up earlier this month, and even then it took many tries to find anything useful. (For comparison, I heard about CRS-7 without looking for it months in advance) It's like they're keeping quiet about it just in case something goes wrong... Chances are it WILL launch this Saturday so I'm not gonna be complaining for long.

I'm 95% sure they're going to attempt a stage recovery. Also first flight of the F9 v1.1. Edit: Not only are they gonna attempt recovery, say goodbye to the barge! They have permission to land on solid ground now.

We really need more threads like this IMO. Side note: SpaceX return to flight is aiming to launch this Saturday. Am I the only one who is underwhelmed by the amount of hype?

How so? Unless I'm missing something (I probably am) Soyuz was only ever used for LEO rendezvous. You may be thinking of the "Zond". I don't know much about the Russian space race so feel free to correct me.

Apollo CSM. I love it how it just worked. Want to go to the moon with it? Fine! Want to use it as a crew ferry? Sure, just take a bit of the fuel out. (World's first multi purpose spacecraft?) Also, how can you not adore the look of it? It's just so shiny and wonderful.

I'll have to do more testing but it appears the ISP boost SRB's get causes KW solids to explode before burning out. Without the patch the boosters are designed to come really close to overheating (for whatever reason) and the increase in burn time just manages to tip them over the edge. Of course, the fix is just a matter of going into the cfg's and taking a 0 out of the "heatproduction" value, so this isn't anything game breaking. Did I mention how awesome this mod is? Because it's pretty awesome.

After getting the hang of KSP, I gave Orbiter a try and holy moly it was awesome. Possibly the hardest thing I managed to do was successfully dock a Soyuz to the ISS using this addon. Like, it was probably a couple times more difficult than flying to a base on the Moon. On my first try, I ran out of fuel ~5km from the ISS. It took probably 6 before I got to the point where I could reliably dock. After a (quite) few more, and I could get there with ~65% fuel remaining. The point? Doing things like this in Orbiter completely changed the way I played KSP. Basically, everything was more precise. I realized that you don't need 2G's of acceleration to land on the Mun, or that an OMS only needs a TWR of ~0.2. Lots of little things like that wiggled their way into KSP. Is this Necroposting? Or does that only apply to thread bumps?

Yeah, this should be on the "Gameplay questions/tutorials" board. There are a ton of people willing to help with SSTO's.

Thanks. Now, I need to go figure out how to use module manager. (Who needs wiki pages when you can just repeatedly break everything?)

So did you do that by editing each battery, capsule, and solar panel individually or did you add some sort of patch that applied a multiplier to each one? I would like to do something similar but I'm trying to avoid the tedium of changing tons of config files. Thanks for the reply! Edit: To clarify: I'm talking about modifying the applicable parts as a group (Multipling their default capacity by x) when I say "patch".

Do you think you could give a basic explanation as to how you overhauled the default electrical system? I.e. what CFG's were changed/added, and if the changes you made could still apply to 1.0.x? I've combed through the github but can't find anything on it.

As anyone who has played RO knows, it completely re balances the way electricity is generated, stored, and used. I REALLY prefer this system. It keeps you from getting away with things like powering a 100t space station with a single solar panel, and generally makes electrical requirements a more interesting challenge to overcome. Is there a way to implement this change into a stock or otherwise non-RO install? Has anyone done it? Is it possible to simply take the config(s) that RO uses? I understand this is an extremely small niche I'm trying to fill, so I'd be fine with doing it myself as long as somebody can point me in the right direction. Edit: I should probably say that I was partially inspired by project Odyssey and what Bob did to the EC system.

The only thing I can think of is to widen the wheel base, maybe have two wheels in front of each other at each corner. I'd recommend infernal robotics so you can make wider vehicles without needing a hilariously large faring. (Assuming IR doesn't completely break everything) As for the terrain errors themselves, it's due to inaccuracies being amplified when the bodies are scaled up. From what I've heard, it's not avoidable ATM. Also, a lunar base in RP-0? That's pretty amazing.

Given that most in game structural failures are aero related, would it be possible to grab FAR's "Aerodynamic failure!" warning and use that to trigger the abort sequence? I say that because, typically, going off course won't cause a break up with the stock aero model.

Just took a peek at it. I don't think I can accurately describe how blown away I am by the insane amount of detail. The pictures with their original ID numbers shown as they were taken? If I wasn't told otherwise I would have assumed this came straight from NASA's PR department! Slightly off topic: I wonder if my computer can run Realism Overhaul for a couple days straight, if you know what I mean