IncongruousGoat

Wait, what? I think I must have mis-read something. I thought they were planning on using bipropellant gaseous methane and gaseous LOX thrusters, fed from the tank boiloff. At those small scales spark ignition works, so it's not too much more complicated than a hypergolic thruster.

I think it's been mentioned at at least one of the IACs, and maybe also the DearMoon announcement. In any case, it's been the definitive plan (along with autogeneous pressurization) for a while now.

42 engines. If you still don't get it, go read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's well worth your time.

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with that one. Arranging gravity assists in KSP is often more an art than a science (at least for me), but it's always been worth it. There's just something about going places without having to burn any fuel. To answer the general question: The best way to practice gravity assists is... Jool, conveniently. Send a ship with a pile of delta-V there via a conventional transfer, then start messing around with orbits. It's really easy to get assists off of Laythe, Tylo, and Vall - my recommendation is to just play around until you get a feel for how gravity assists work. As for how to get to Jool via gravity assists, it's as @Xurkitree said: Kerbin->Eve->Kerbin->Kerbin->Jool is the way to go. The orbital periods work out really nicely, and it's usually possible to pull off without having to wait multiple orbits for an encounter. Although, it's also possible (though less efficient) to do it with a single Kerbin assist using a deep-space maneuver. That way is simpler, but the fuel savings aren't nearly as high.

I've still got a 1.3.1 install since (as far as I know) RP-1 still isn't stable on 1.4.x. As soon as it is stable, though, I'm switching, and my stock install(s) are either at 1.6 or will be migrated to 1.6 as soon as I get back home from the holidays.

Right Shift does seem to work. Do you know how to rebind that? It's a bit awkward, compared to Left Alt. EDIT: Never mind, I found it. For future reference, the modifier key can be re-bound by editing settings.cfg

Copying single parts or vessel subcomponents in the editor via Alt-left click isn't working, even after Alt is unbound in the window manager settings (by default it's the window resize modifier key). The issue has been experienced across multiple machines and multiple versions of KSP (RO/RP-0 1.3.1 and pure stock 1.6). Log files/other information will be provided upon request, if anyone thinks it's necessary.

Yeah, but nuclear accidents look really dramatic and scary. It's like aircraft - flying is, statistically, by a very large margin, the safest way to travel. People still fear it a lot more than travel by car, or train, because when a plane crashes it's really dramatic, and there are lots of movies about airplane disasters. The availability heuristic is what people use for risk assessment, and it's coincidentally really bad for risk assessment. So our fundamental problem is that people don't understand statistics or risk assessment. But we knew that.

We did have one back in the day, in the form of Agena. It was originally developed in the 50's for the WS-117 spysat program, but got co-opted into launching all sorts of other things, including the early Mariner and Ranger probes, and the Agena Target Vehicle used to develop docking tech during Project Gemini. Got used a few hundred times up through the late 80's, mostly for DoD payloads, before getting phased out in favor of various Delta upper stages and the Centaur/Star-(insert number here) combination. There was some talk in the early 2000's of building a new Agena variant as an upper stage for Atlas V for the EELV program, but nothing came of it. Shame, too - it was a nice upper stage.

I see you've been discovering the joys of landing on Mt. Whatsitsname, bane of budget Eve missions everywhere. I like the Eve lander. Eyeballing the mass, I'm going to guess that you're somewhere in the ~20 ton range, which is a very respectable number for an Eve lander. It's possible to go lower if you're wicked good and/or use stock electric propellers, but I personally haven't gotten anything below ~25 tons.

I've used Mint and Ubuntu at several points in the past, but for now both my desktop and laptop are running Debian (dual-booted with Windows 10). I might be switching to Kubuntu at some point, though, since I've been having problems with just how conservative the Debian apt repository maintainers are. Either that, or move to Testing (though I'm wary to do that since it could break things).

Software 'should' be built in a reasonable way, but it often isn't, and things that seem like they'd be simple often turn out to be messy and complex under the hood. Don't ever assume something is easy to add unless A: the devs have explicitly said so, or B: you've looked at the source code yourself.

I'm liking the look of it already. I admit, I have a serious soft spot for the no-ISRU grand tour - it's a less common approach, for obvious reasons, and (I feel, anyways) that the missions one gets from that approach are more interesting than ISRU-based ones. I wish you the very best of luck in your attempt, and look forward to seeing it flown to completion. EDIT: in the interest of transparency, I freely admit I read the start of your report with a big ole smile on my face. The sort of mission you're flying is exactly the kind of thing I took up administering this challenge to see.

Wait, Lake Placid? Did... someone just mention a place in New York State that isn't in New York City? I... uh... wow. Someone remembered that we exist. I'm not sure what to say. I wish I had more than one like to give.

131 I've been studying cryptography this semester, so I've had to deal with a LOT of prime numbers. It seems only fitting that there's now a forum thread for them.

And, as a plus, you don't even need paint. Titanium can be turned all sorts of fun colors just by anodizing it.

@Delay Other than the return type of MorseCoder, it looks fine to me. I like the switch, by the way. It's exactly the right way to do the thing you're using it for.

Probably, yes. I'll take a look at it when I have a minute and let you know if I see anything. EDIT: That was exactly the idea. Just saying "That's wrong, don't do it" doesn't do anyone any good, especially in a language like C.

You can use = here (as in, it'll compile and probably act like it does what you want), but you shouldn't. Since C strings are character arrays, and since C arrays are fancy pointers (the type of a string is char *), the = operator for strings doesn't overwrite the left-hand string with the right-hand one. Instead, it assigns the right-hand string's pointer to the left-hand string. The region allocated for the left-hand string still exists, but you've now forgotten where it is (because your pointer to it has been overwritten), and you can't free it up - which means the effective amount of memory you have to work with is smaller by the size of that string (plus some heap metadata). This is called a memory leak, and they are to be avoided.

There's also all the non-medical research that can only be done in an extended microgravity environment. Let's not forget that. Obviously there's all the crystal growth stuff being done, but did you know that there's an experiment on the ISS called the Cold Atom Laboratory that allows us to do long-term studies of Bose-Einstein condensates? They're much more stable in microgravity than then are down here. There's also all the private experiments that are flying to the ISS, enabled in no small part by cheaper launch prices due to COTS.

I sincerely hope there won't be a delay. I'm going to be in Florida within driving distance of the Cape on the 7th, but I'm flying home the next day.

That's promising. I had been wondering why they weren't doing that previously. Saltwater corrosion is a problem for boosters, with all their steel fittings, but the fairings are composite and should be much more saltwater-tolerant.

Shame on your professor then. Strings do exist in C, and there are plenty of functions to handle them. It just so happens that they're also null-terminated character arrays.

C strings are literally (null-terminated) character arrays, so of course they'd be treated that way. There are a few special string-handling functions in libc (strcat(), strlen(), etc.) but they're all just operations over character arrays.