IncongruousGoat

Eeeh... sort of. What the ./ actually does is tell bash where the binary you want to run is located by giving it a (relative) path. '.' is the current directory, so './<file>' is a relative path from the current directory to a file named <file> in the current directory. If you just give bash the name of a binary without a path, it looks for said binary in all the directories listed in $PATH; by giving it a path, you tell it to look for the binary somewhere other than $PATH. Also, 'sudo' does more than run things as root. It's actually the "run as some other user" program - but if you don't specify a user, it defaults to root.

Receives a slightly sticky EVA helmet. Inserts a tea-stained KSP mug.

Here's the Encyclopedia Astronautica article on it: http://astronautix.com/s/saturnv-b.html It's a stage-and-a-half design (a la SM-65 Atlas) built off of the Saturn 1C stage. The four outer F-1 engines detach early in flight and (in principle) are recovered, with the fifth, center sustainer F-1 carrying the vehicle the rest of the way to orbit. Payload estimates put it at somewhere around ~22,000 kg to 28-degree 200x200 km LEO, which is comparable with Shuttle. You can find lots of "cancelled" Saturn family rockets out there. Various contractors and organizations did a ton of design studies in the 60's and early 70's, trying to work out what could be done with the tech after Apollo. The silliness of the proposals ranged all over the place, from "we strapped some solid boosters onto it" (e.g. Saturn IB-D) to things like the Saturn V-B.

You're probably right; I was making my recommendations only on a heuristic of ease of use of distro.

@The_Cat_In_Space To expand on this, since it might not be obvious to someone who isn't a veteran Linux user: What Geonovast is suggesting is installing what's called a "live image" of a Linux distribution (Ubuntu or Mint are probably the best choices in this case) onto a flash drive (Ubuntu should provide instructions for how to do this), and booting your computer off of that by selecting your flash drive as the boot disk in the BIOS. Since the operating system you're booting is running entirely off of this flash drive it'll be slow, but it will boot and work regardless of what condition your hard drive is in. Once you've booted into your live environment, you can use it to check what condition the disk is in using various tools.

Was either docking port offset at all into the part it's attached to? Because it might be an issue with part occlusion.

That, and infrastructure. Rockets require lots of expensive infrastructure that's often very sensitive to small changes in the design of said rockets. Tooling, test stands, transportation infrastructure, integration facilities, tracking systems, launch facilities, range support...

Actually, it's got very little to do with handling, and a lot to do with chemistry, the nature of warfare in Siberia, and technological inertia. RFNA is a pain to handle in the field, and it has worse performance than N2O4, but it has a much lower freezing point than N2O4, which freezes at -9.8 C. This high freezing point eliminated N2O4 from use in missile systems, which needed to work without warming up in cold conditions. Like, say, Russia. Or Alaska. Since early space launch tech had substantial missile heritage (where it wasn't just a re-purposed ICBM), it's no surprise that many early space launch vehicles found themselves using RFNA as an oxidizer somewhere. The switch to N2O4 in space vehicles (and Titan II) was motivated by specific impulse, since temperature wasn't a concern for such systems in the same way it was in a missile. The reason for early use of WFNA in the AJ-10 can be attributed to historical weirdness. There's no reason to use WFNA over IRFNA-III, but IRFNA-III had only been somewhat decided as the superior acid in 1957, and the engineer in charge of that choice was probably either A: a bit weird, or B: not as well informed as they should have been. Or both. Oh, and N2O4 is also nasty to handle in the field. Those clouds of NO2 fumes that RFNA produces come from the N2O4 that it contains. N2O4 forms an equilibrium with NO2 at room temperature, so you get a lot of NO2 vapor. It wins over early RFNA on handling not because it's easier to handle, but because it doesn't corrode the tanks it's put in, and therefore can be loaded at the factory. Or at least, it won this until 1951, when IRFNA was invented and the whole issue became moot.

SSTU & Bluedog Design Bureau for the American stuff. Soviet Engines should do you pretty well for the Soviet stuff, though you might get a few textures courtesy of SSTU. As far as European, Chinese, Indian, etc. goes... I honestly have no idea.

Well, if you left your SAS on, you have the auto-point assist, and you have coarse control over the throttle (so z and x work, but not shift and ctrl). Which is all you really need to get where you're going. Of course, this requires a very finely calibrated Mk. 1 Eyeball and/or many, many spreadsheets, but since when has that kind of limit stopped anyone? Cavemen have been flying interplanetary transfers without patched conics for years now - a mere lack of fine-grained control & maneuvers is a slap on the wrist by comparison.

Go for it! The worst thing that could happen is that they turn you down, and it's been my finding that the list of required qualifications on a job posting are often more a wishlist than an actual list of requirements. Although maybe that's just the software industry...

Hmmm. Just looking at the first page of the survey, a lot of the boxes are going to change for me in the next few months (I'm graduating, turning 20, moving 3,000 miles, and starting a job in May/June). So should I answer with what I am now, or with what I will be for the next few years?

3/10: Interesting, but not particularly confusing unless you're forced to read it. People often ask me what monads are. It's very simple, you see: a monad is an endofunctor in the category of monoids.

I can confirm it works out to Minmus/low escape, and it will probably work for direct return from Duna/Eve. I'm not so sure about further destinations; further investigation is required. As for the mass limited thing, that 0.2 tons of heatshield is 0.2 tons of fuel you're not burning, and if you're not doing something that feels wrong, you're not doing the challenge correctly.

I'm a bit late on this (sorry), but if you've got a service bay, you don't need a heat shield. The service bay's heat tolerance is so high you can use it as a heat sink type heat shield. It's also just plain lighter than a full heat shield, and the same weight as an empty heat shield.

I cannot remember the last time I got a song this stuck in my head. I've been singing it to myself All. Flarping. Day. I mean, I like the song, but enough is enough.

We're making those here on Friday (which means I get to go and get more propane for the grill because we ran out today making beer brats). But I'm not craving a steak fajita. I'm craving a good strawberry rhubarb pie. Unfortunately, rhubarb is not yet in season, so I have to wait a few weeks/months until it starts showing up on the shelves before I can finally make one.

I can't stand Bob Dylan's music... but I really like covers of his songs. Funny how that works.

I'll have to bake a pie this weekend (I didn't have time during the week). Now, to figure out where I can buy rhubarb...

A simple tanking test is more likely, IMO. Test that the tanks won't explode when you fill them with LOX, then see if they explode if filled with pressurized LOX.

This design is somewhat old (I don't remember when I made it), but it should still work: It's a crewed flags-and-footprints Moho mission, under 5 tons and powered (outside of the rapier) solely by a single ion engine. They really are miraculous. For the curious, here's a link to the full mission album: https://imgur.com/a/PbVRX

To get the ball rolling, here's a submission I threw together in an evening (11.6 tons, Duna and back): https://imgur.com/a/WbqLLhA You can tell I threw it together hastily because of the several stupid mistakes I made (like forgetting about controlling from docking ports, and forgetting about partial vs. full pilot control), as well as the overall low quality of my launch vehicle, and the whole craft. I made little effort to optimize this beyond the obvious stuff, and it's definitely possible to do better than this. I'm just trying to set the bar for ultra-low-mass submissions. I do think, however, that command chairs should be allowed. It makes the challenge so much more fun, and allows for things like <5 ton submissions. Which are always fun.

Well, RP-0 (or is it officially RP-1 now?) is still fine. Raptor comes at the end of the tech tree, after all.

Nope, I didn't. The only time I've ever used MJ was very briefly in an RSS/RO/RP-0 save for some testing for something ultimately unrelated to KSP.