Jeice

Can confirm. I just dropped Bob from an upper-atmosphere jet going 800m/s at 20km. Jetpack brought him down to 42m/s at the ground and he happily bounced down a mountainside after a feet-first landing. Still didn't manage to store that sweet, sweet upper atmo science though. Dammit, if Tom Cruise can do it, my original 4 should be able to conduct complex tasks while hanging onto the side of a plane!

On the one hand you can try to estimate its speed against a meter ruler at the bottom or some such. Otherwise I suggest you use V=2d/t (d is distance along ramp, t is time from release to distance d, V is velocity at bottom). This works since the acceleration of the ball down the slope is constant - you should prove this.

Do you have to *do* the experiment, or just design it? In theory it's pretty simple but it might rely on some quick stopwatch-fu. The most basic way is to measure its time taken to roll down a ramp. In general, objects with a higher moment of inertia relative to their mass (eg. hollow tubes) will accelerate more slowly down the ramp than objects with a low one (eg. spheres). This is because it takes more torque to make them spin, and the speed of their spin is directly related to the speed they roll down the ramp. At a first look, I = (m*r^2*t^2/2d)*(g*sin (p)-2*d/t^2) where r is the radius of the object, p is the angle of the ramp, t is the time taken to roll a distance d along the ramp. You should be able to check this for yourself with a force balance on a ball on a ramp, taking into account a force from the ramp on the sphere pointing up the ramp which induces the angular acceleration. DISCLAIMER I haven't checked this so thoroughly - the principle is right but no guarantees on the math. EDIT with better maths. Other experiments to measure this will generally involve the same principle - applying a force which causes the object to both spin and accelerate in a direction, then measuring its linear acceleration and using it to calculate the angular.

Hi all, not sure if this counts as a necro or just a late revival- I'd been planning to try this challenge for some time and figured it was better than holding my breath for 1.0.5. Highlights included unmanned Mun/Minmus landers and returning Mun/Minmus flyby probes. I never did manage to get a Kerbal further than LKO, although I'm sure it can be done with canny design and piloting. I use some visual/audio mods but all stock parts, physics and info.