MaxwellsDemon

Heh! But does it crystallize? (Re the "invention" of dilithium... that comes right from World of Star Trek, I believe, so the writers were trying to invent a fictional substance. Guess they didn't know about the real dilithium any more than I did!)

Understood. I guess the thing is that I'm picky and if they're going to be 80% realistic, why stop at 80%?

hm. Is it possible to enable the Vernors by action group without toggling RCS? Or do I need to add a "suppressive" action group for all other RCS systems?

Do I need to toggle RCS on at launch to enable my Vernors? And if so, what's to stop the monoprop RCS farther up the stack from firing if I don't want them to?

Reminds me of when I first started fiddling with 'Orbiter' some years back, and began thinking of all motion in terms of orbits, interrupted orbits, or potential orbits.

Well, I didn't get to Kerbal last evening *quite* as long as I'd hoped, but I did have some quality time in the VAB creating a more standardized set of launch vehicles, saved as subassemblies and rated by approximate tons to LKO (right now I have a range from 1 tonne to 55 tonnes, with not a lot of gaps in coverage between), and did a bit of redesign on my Mir-analogue station modules using Nertea's new station parts "Redux" package.

Well, that just makes sense. They poured a lot of concrete for those N-1 pads... why not put them to another use? (I can't see the third image at the moment, but I'm betting it's Buran/Energiya.) Someone ought to do a biography of Barmin. He seems rather under-represented for the work he did, and I'd like to see more of his plans for "Barmingrad" (lunar base)....

Or, if you're particularly Kerbal-- sideways. And see what happens.

I agree, they did get a lot of things right. Which just makes me irritated that they went 80%-90% of the way and stopped. I mean, at least throw something in there to explain how the Hubble, the ISS, and a Tiangong-somethingth are all in virtually the same orbit. Or... you get the idea. Not going to continue to batter the deceased equine. But that's what makes it jarring to me. ETA: As I go along, I find more and more that fiction is not half as interesting as nonfiction. So there's that factor, too... There's a long tradition in the Star Trek franchise of this sort of technobabble, going right back to the beginning... in the early days, they mentioned "lithium crystals." The problem is that lithium is a real substance with known properties. Ergo, "dilithium" was born, that could do whatever the writer wanted it to do.

Precisely. I like seeing the design lineage.

RE Trek... which, I must state up front, I love, especially TOS... I once saw an extended discussion of the impossibility of the transporter. I can't recall it all at this moment, but it came down to violation of conservation of the baryon number. Not that I actually understand what that means without some re-study... David Gerrold (one of TOS writers, among other roles) wrote that from his point of view, the technology of the transporter was inconsistent with the technology shown in the rest of the series. Why, he asks, would you have 2-dimensional viewscreens and transporters on the same ship? It just didn't "feel" right. Of course, the real reason was that the original production didn't have enough money to build a "shuttle rocket" set, which was the original thought. So they had to do some fancy footwork to get the show made, and voila... a legend is born from financial necessity. ETA: It's a common problem. On the old 60s-70s Doctor Who, they had to get by with a ridiculously small budget... caution: if you read the rest of this, you will always notice it whenever it happens:

Sigh... wish I had that memory. I wasn't quite 2 and although my parents got me up to watch it, I don't have an actual memory of it. I do remember some of the later landings, though.

Yeah. It's a point that Heinlein also made in one of his other books-- I think it was the commentary in 'Expanded Universe.' Basically, why not limit the franchise to people who have shown that they are invested in the system. He also speculated on limiting it to mothers, as they have a proven interest in the future.

You can definitely see the influence of Baikonur pad #1 (Gagarin's Start) in the design of that flame trench!

People's tastes are different. I as well might have enjoyed Starship Troopers more if I'd never read Heinlein. Unfortunately, the book is far more than a sci-fi action story. (I wonder why nobody's ever tried to do a movie of Moon is a Harsh Mistress? Perhaps it's better that they don't try.) And they spent so much money on the Bugs cgi that they had nothing left for the really interesting stuff, like the combat suits... When it comes to 'realism,' it's far better not to even try than to try and fail, I think. That goes for historical fiction, too. If you're going to tell a historical story, you have an obligation to make the story have some recognizable resemblance to the history-- if you're going to bill a SF movie as science-based, you have an obligation to have some concept of the science. Asimov had a good essay about this sort of thing once. He simply noted that there were certain technologies (FTL travel and communication, for instance) that, scientifically speaking, he couldn't accept as valid-- yet they were necessary from a storytelling point of view. (If your plot depends on a person starting on one planet in one star system and ending up in another, a multigenerational colony ship is not the correct way to do it, however much more physically possible it is.) I might be mixing up my essays, but he basically said that a SF starship is a plot vehicle, a dramatic convention, rather than a physically possible vehicle. Once one realizes that, then one can mitigate in in ways that ease the necessary suspension of disbelief. Thinking back to Edgar Rice Burroughs... the way he got John Carter to Mars was by some sort of psychic transference. The way he got Carson Napier to Venus was a rocket ship that was aimed at Mars but missed and landed on Venus instead. Which one is more 'realistic'? Neither one, really-- the point was that he needed his hero to be on Mars (or Venus) and needed some quick explanation to put him there. I admit I prefer the Carson of Venus method because it seems less fantastical... but looking closely, it's not really all that much more realistic. Anyway... things like 'Star Wars' and 'Star Trek' work for me because they're so obviously divorced from reality that I don't even feel the need to make them fit into reality. It's when somebody gets it close but wrong that things are really jarring (such as the losing-the-grip thing in Gravity. Why couldn't they simply have had Clooney fly by, miss the grab, and then play out the scene as he's coasting irreversibly away? Would have worked dramatically just as well). Part of it is what the viewer brings along in terms of prior knowledge and expectations, too, such as me and Starship Troopers (you just can't rewrite Heinlein and expect a Heinlein fan to like it, bottom line) or when I watch a WW2 movie like Midway and get annoyed when they're talking about one sort of plane (like a F4F Wildcat) and showing a different one (like a TBF Avenger), where either the filmmaker doesn't know the difference, or thinks that the audience won't know it. In another vein, American Civil War scholars are highly divided on the movie Gettysburg, because it gets so much right and also so much wrong... or, on another tack, I really enjoy the movie Stargate for the fact they went to some trouble to reasonably reconstruct the ancient Egyptian language-- no matter that the plot itself is firmly in the realm of fantasy (so much so, I can ignore the vast chasm between it and reality). So, to bring this ramble to a close, better a wide gulf between the movie and reality than a narrow crack, IMHO. ETA: For instance, it bothers me that in Hidden Figures, they magically transported Mercury Control to Langley. It wasn't necessary. They could perfectly well have had Katherine Goble Johnson fly to Florida if they really wanted her in Mercury Control. What the what? In a better vein... try listening to the commentary by Jim and Marilyn Lovell on the Apollo 13 DVD. It's quite interesting. For instance, Marilyn notes how many of Jim's mannerisms Tom Hanks picked up for the movie, or Jim noted that the characterization of Jack Swigert wasn't right-- he was in fact a Command Module control systems expert, so there was no question at all that he knew his stuff, but they wanted to have a 'rookie earns his stripes' theme in the movie.

My usual go-to... not as elegant as linuxgurugamer's solutions, but practical... is to create a "ship" in both the VAB and SPH that's just a Mk1 command pod (I usually save it as 'Command Pod Mockup' or something like that), and boom! Kerbal on the loose! Take them EVA from either the pad to the runway or the runway to the pad, wherever your other contraption is starting. There's also a mod called "Walkabout" that lets a Kerbal start from the doorway of one of KSC's buildings.

Tough to avoid doing that, some days!

Figured out which part was giving me trouble in the changeover from Station Parts to Redux, and it wasn't the one I was expecting... it was the "Intercedor" station core. I moved that part and its associated files in by itself-- since I have a station currently on orbit that uses it it's not disposable. Been having a lot of IRL stuff getting in the way... car repairs, taking stuff over to my parents', kids' play practices, yadda yadda... looking forward to this evening when (after cooking supper) I can settle in for a nice long KSP session. My wife doesn't quite get it-- but hey, she's got her Pokemon Go and I've got my Kerbals!

Has anyone seen any other cosmonaut autobiographies or diaries in English? Lebedev's is great, but I want more... * ...maybe I'll have to break down and learn some русский язык... (not entirely joking there, I used to know a fair smattering of Serbian... obviously a different language, but many cognates and the grammar structure are similar and while the Cyrillic is a bit different I at least have a little bit of a head start...) * As an example, Vladimir Shatalov wrote one or several that look like they might be interesting, but Google, etc. are very coy on what language they're in, so I suspect it's not in English.

It's (Gerovitch) a good book, but ridiculously overpriced ($85-$95), particularly as it seems to have been done with at least some government support. I was expecting a larger volume for that price. Nevertheless, it's a very interesting collection of interviews with a variety of individuals, including one of the unflown woman cosmonauts selected along with Valentina Tereshkova. I think I'd recommend waiting to see if there's a re-issue at a lower price-- or maybe even a government-printed version, which might be significantly cheaper. It's a good 'un, but they need to price it more realistically!

Didn't have much time for KSP yesterday other than going through my current space station module designs to make sure they were compatible with swapping out Nertea's wonderful refreshed station parts mod: I seem to be okay, though there's one part I still need to double-check-- think it might actually be coming in from a different mod, in which case I'm golden.

When you dream about adding moar struts.

Love it! Just going to have toe be careful to swap out the old Station Parts from my designs before I nuke the old package... fortunately, other than the Salyut analogue, I hadn't got much on orbit yet, so it will mostly be VAB design work.

Late to the party... but it does depend on how "hard-science" you're planning to get, and how much verisimilitude you want. The way *I'd* approach it is to look at the functions that need to be handled on board, and decide how many of those functions will need to be manual (=crew) or automatic, and let the decisions flow from there. Putting a crew on board comes with all sorts of overhead like life-support systems and quality-of-life factors, so they need to be fully optimized; there's no spare resources for slackers and fitting-polishers. By the same token, though, you have to make sure you have enough. To take an unrelated example, when an automatic loading system replaced the loader position on a tank and the crew was therefore reduced from five to four, it was found that this increased the amount of routine maintenance work that needed to be done by the remaining four because of the lack of another person to do it. Unintended consequences... (Of course, that itself could be a story point-- perhaps your crew is overworked all the time; or perhaps they have too much time on their hands and are getting a bit space-happy...) To my mind, the most recent SF series that has handled this best is David Drake's RCN (Leary/Mundy) series, which makes a reasonable case for having a relatively large crew, based on the technology in use. (And it's a darn good series as well...)

Good old Roton. Bizarre machine, with a name that sounds like the villain on a kids' cartoon show.