IncongruousGoat

Huzzah! I've been rooting for this to be selected ever since I heard about the proposal, back when it was just one of 12 proposed missions. Titan is definitely worthy of a detailed investigation. It's especially good that this was picked considering that the alternative (a proposal called CAESAR) was lame and unoriginal in the extreme: sample return from where else but our old friend 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Yeah, sample return from a comet's nucleus would be nice in a general sense, but when you compare that with the chance to send a freakin' quadcopter to Titan, well...

Ouch... rest in peace, center core. EDIT: For the record, landing burn failed & center core ploughed into the ocean.

We have music!

I moved into a new apartment on Saturday. This has mostly been an enormous hassle, and a chaotic and unpleasant process, but there is one notable bright spot: My apartment has an induction stove. Today, I got to finally use it to make dinner, and it was amazing. Seriously. Induction stoves are awesome. They're as responsive as a gas stove, as user-friendly as an electric stove, trivial to clean (the stovetop is completely flat), and completely safe if you accidentally leave one on, since they don't produce any heat on their own. Plus, they just look so futuristic. Modern culinary technology is so cool.

Guess I picked the right time to move to the west coast . 11:30 for me, and I would be up that late on a weeknight anyways. With all the interesting stuff going up on this one, and the crazy landing, and the fact that it's a launch of the biggest rocket in the world... It's one heck of a bright spot in what has otherwise been thus far a chaotic and exhausting week.

I've been playing a bunch of Subnautica recently, and it's making me want to listen to nautical songs. Well, making me want to more than usual. I've got a strange fascination with the sea for someone who gets queasy just looking at a boat.

I wasn't criticizing your choice of language. I knew perfectly well what you mean. But, to be pedantic, an 80% alcohol, 20% water mixture is precisely what 160-proof vodka would be, if anyone were crazy enough to make vodka that strong. It's to this that I was referring - I was actually making a (small) joke about how boring vodka is.

Wow, yeah, those are Mach diamonds. What's the expansion ratio on the nozzle you've got fitted? Mach diamonds are indicative of over-expansion (i.e. the pressure at nozzle exit is lower than ambient pressure), which may or may not be significant. Also, it's interesting to see the history of propellant chemistry play out in small here with the switch from gasoline to 160-proof vodka. Von Braun would have been proud.

Title says it all. Does anyone know of a good RO-compatible mod that adds the Rolls-Royce RZ.2 engine?

I was reading through the stuff that's going to launch on STP-2 and noticed among the manifest GPIM, or the Green Propellant Infusion Mission. For those who don't know, GPIM is a mission intended to test HAN (hydroxylammonium nitrate), a "green" monopropellant that's expected to get around 250s Isp (compared to straight hydrazine's ~200s). Does anyone here know the history of this stuff? It isn't mentioned by name in Ignition!, though it seems to be related to a collection of monopropellants investigated by Clark's team that all consisted of the nitrate salt of an amine, dissolved in WFNA. Clark does offhandedly mention running across some liquid salts while making the nitrate salt of every amine he could get his hands on, and presumably HAN is one of those, but it seems like Clark gave up on those when he couldn't get them to crystallize & dissolve in the acid. Interest must have picked up again at some point, but my Google-fu is failing me as to when and under whom that happened. I have found this DOE report: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1374990 from 1998, but it's just a summary of what HAN is used for. It does mention a plutonium reclamation plant using the stuff starting in 1964, so knowledge about it is nothing new, and it seems odd that monopropellant research would have passed it over until very recently.

Sadness! Not Paul Simon's best work, but then again, this isn't the "favorite songs" thread.

Second-favorite movie is a really hard one. I don't think I could reasonably choose. Heck, I have a hard time choosing favorites for most things. But first, most favorite movie? That one's easy. Apollo 13.

Except the rigid-body physics KSP does can't be parallelized. It's strictly single-thread. Trying to run it on a GPU is going to make things slower (a lot slower), not faster. Not to mention the fact that using CUDA for anything is a huge pain, as well as only working on newer Nvidia chips. To address the OP: We do not need KSP 2.0. There are plenty of things we would all like to see in the game, but it's fun as it is. I know I've certainly sunk untold thousands of hours into it, going all the way back to 0.23.5. Plus, it wouldn't sell very well. We already have KSP, after all, and it's hard to see a way to improve it enough to get millions of people to buy a sequel that would end up boiling down to a more polished version of the base game. Except it wouldn't be, because development is hard even when you're not abusing the engine. There's no reason to think that KSP 2.0 will be any less buggy or any more polished than KSP 1.0. So let's all stop griping about all the things we wish KSP did or had and get back to enjoying the game, alright? And if you're really dissatisfied with the way things are, there are always mods. No, I'm not being flippant; I'm dead serious. That's what they're there for. Unless you're a console player. In that case, complain away. You've got legitimate grievances, not this "oh, it doesn't look as perfectly shiny as it could, boo hoo" nonsense. For pity's sake, people.

Looking through the relevant NSF thread, it looks like the landing will be RTLS based on A: the FCC permits SpaceX have filed, and B: the roadblocks that are slated to go up.

Ah heck, why not? @The Minmus Derp?

Nope! @The_Cat_In_Space?

I never joined in the first place. Initially because I spent my childhood somewhat behind the times, technologically speaking, then because I couldn't see the point (I didn't have many friends in high school), and now because A: I still can't see the point, and B: it seems to cause a lot of people a lot of grief. Good to know that my decision was justified. On topic... yep, this forum is pretty amazing. Also amazing are the moderating team, without whom the forum wouldn't be the wonderful place it is. You all rock.

@HebaruSan You might want to put that in a spoiler.

You mean, something like a touch sensor? I don't think those work for wind, especially for picking up lateral wind in an environment where there's already going to be a lot of vertical wind.

If wind is hitting the rocket? What kind of sensor, specifically, were you planning to use for this? As for a digital gyroscope, any gyroscope you buy is going to contain some digital hardware, but you're going to be hard-pressed to find one that produces a digital reading.

Do you want me to restore it? I can try to restore the original text, if you really think it's that valuable.

What you're going to have to do there is, every time your program loops, read values off the sensors, and then determine whether or not you have to take some cation based on the values read from the sensors. Gyroscopes (or magnetometers, if you want to orient yourself off of Earth's magnetic field) aren't digital, on/off sensors. They're analog, and output readings continuously. They aren't "triggered", in the way something like a limit switch is triggered.

How about Mink?

You think linker errors are bad? Try template errors sometime. I just love it when my compiler decides that what I really need is a single error message that's 500 lines long. But, for Arduino, you avoid both linker errors and template errors. Linker errors because the Arduino IDE handles all the stuff that could cause linker errors for you behind the scenes, and template errors because... well... if you're using templates in code for a microcontroller, something has gone horribly wrong.