IncongruousGoat

I got these things: These are the fruit of vaccinium deliciosum, a.k.a. the Cascade blueberry, a.k.a. blueleaf huckleberry. Folks around here just call them huckleberries. And they're awesome. They taste mostly like blueberries, except much juicier, sweeter, and more flavorful - basically, better in every way except size (they're a bit smaller). And, unfortunately, accessibility, since the bushes that produce these berries are A: tiny, and B: only grow high on the slopes of the Cascades. The only way to get them is to pick them by hand from the mountains where they grow, and to make matters worse the season for them is only about a month long. Needless to say, I'm very excited to have acquired some.

"How do you get to Mars Carnegie Hall?" "Practice, practice, practice!" They've shown that they can fly a single 150m hop. What's less clear is whether or not they can reliably perform 150m hops with their current methods and technology, and given how many test articles blew up due to pad procedure problems, this is an important thing to determine.

I didn't know I needed a metal cover of Northwest Passage. Heck, I didn't know there even existed a metal cover of that song. And yet, here we are.

Unfortunately, I think that would be in violation of the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty. Plus, Antarctica is a pretty bad Mars simulator. About the only thing the two locations have in common is air temperature (some of the time) and Antarctica poses some challenges which are completely orthogonal to what one would encounter on Mars.

I'm now wondering about the timing of the landing burn. Usually, the landing burn happens almost at the same time as SECO, but it was much earlier than that on this launch. Anyone have any ideas?

About a week ago, I got a second degree burn on my dominant hand while making breakfast. Left me with a 1/4" blister on my palm, a bit below my pinkie. For most things it's not so bad (proper moleskin bandage, etc., etc.), but it makes doing dishes a pain in the neck since I have to do all the washing with the bandage off, since otherwise the water & soap destroy the glue on the medical tape holding the bandage down and soak through the moleskin. Keeping pressure and heat off an un-bandaged blister in that particular spot while trying to do something that involves both hands and hot water is not exactly fun. Especially given that I cook a lot, which means there are always lots of dishes to do...

For now, I think they're sticking to LEO (so, within the inner Van Allen belt). Good point for future LEO->MEO or LEO->GEO stuff though.

It looks like the thruster design they're using (plasma, not ion) has a lower Isp than a typical ion thruster (~1000s vs. 3000-5000s), but also a lower power requirement per kN of thrust. Also, they're only trying to get 1 km/s out of their first model, which gives them some margin for heavy solar panels.

More like provide a temporary propulsion bus for a bunch of rideshare smallsats for final orbital placement purposes. So, LV dumps smallsat dispenser + tug into LEO somewhere, tug then moves dispenser around dispensing smallsats into target orbits.

It doesn't look like there's a thread for these folks yet, so here goes: https://momentus.space Basically, they're working on electric-propulsion space tugs (microwave electrothermal propulsion with water as the propellant) for use on rideshare missions, to deliver the launched satellites to various destination orbits beyond whatever the launch vehicle would have been capable of. They seem pretty legit too, given that they've managed to get contracts from actual satellite manufacturers for launches with slots on actual launch manifests. Thoughts? Personally I'm very excited, but I'm curious to see what you all think about this.

Went out hiking near Stevens Pass on Monday. The snowpack's been melting slowly this year, and there are still snow patches and snowfields everywhere in the Cascades. The actual hike ended up being more of an adventure than I'd bargained for (I lost the trail in a snowfield on the way back down, ended up on the wrong side of a ridge, and had to bushwhack my way up and over to get back on the trail), but the view from the summit was beyond gorgeous. There's that snow I mentioned. Needless to say I kept well away from those nasty-looking cornices. Got a nice view of Glacier Peak, which I was quite pleased about given how isolated and remote it is. Definitely not something I get to see every day.

Suggestion for "less cruft/bloat than Ubuntu, but also kinda similar to Ubuntu": Debian, with something lightweight like XFCE or LXDE for the desktop environment.

I haven't seen it, so I wouldn't know.

The standard Arduino might not have enough pins, but the Arduino Mega has 54, which oughta be more than enough.

Re. the legacy software thing: Not immediately. Like Apple did the last time they switched architectures, they're providing an emulation layer to allow running of old x64 apps on the new (ARM64) hardware. They're going to take it away eventually (like they did with the PPC->x86 transition), but at least it postpones the problem for a few years. For the apps that can be run under emulation, which won't be all of them. EDIT: Oh, I see you were around for the PPC->x86 transition. Welp. Anyways, it'll be like that except maybe worse, since JIT compilation is really popular nowadays and is going to tank the performance of their emulator.

I might fly one or two of the assembly missions, but no more than that. The original caveman Jool 5 was fun, but I've got other projects I'm working on right now and, like others here, my interest in KSP is currently in a waning phase.

Looks good! Just 2 questions before I write up the hall of fame entry: What version did you do it in, and do you have a list of all the planet packs you used?

I think the OP was asking about RAM requirements, not size on disk.

We could just build vertically. Alternatively, a couple of SRBs on top of the construction scaffold would work to move the rocket from horizontal to vertical.

That one. The second docking port also provides a place to attach a nosecone, for when we're using this thing as a Laythe lander.

Some commentary: 1. Not necessarily. See earlier commentary re. Jool 5 rules allowing rescue from LKO. 2. Probably more like 3000. Drag losses on Laythe are brutal. 3. Duplicating the Tylo lander worked last time. I don't see why the delta-V requirements would be any different this time around. 4. Not really. Engine-only dockings aren't that hard, and can be done with whatever's left of whichever lander module is currently docked to the lander can. 5. Aerobrake when possible, otherwise just another transfer stage. Tanks + engine + docking port. 6. Nah. See earlier comment re. engine-only rendezvous. Not being able to orient the target makes things harder, but not impossible. 7. Not optional. Jool 5 challenge rules require footprints on every moon.We've got the whole long-distance ladder-riding thing down pretty well at this point though. I'm not too worried about it. 8. Caveman navigation is pretty good these days, thanks to the work done by @Muetdhiver. It''ll be a bit sloppy, but I'd be surprised if we ended up needing more than 3 km/s to go from LKO to whatever parking orbit we end up in at Jool. 9. Pad assembly will probably end up being critical, due to the need to launch heavy payloads (like a Tylo lander) in one launch. It's been done before, though, and while difficult it's by no means impossible to get working. The problem with lots of orbital assembly is that docking ports don't have zero weight, and are also quite wobbly once you end up assembling a vessel that has a lot of them. Rocket wobble is something we want to avoid here. In general, a big enabler for this whole thing would be a reliable, easy to set up pad-assembled rocket. Being able to consistently launch heavier payloads really opens up the space of potential designs.

Not from any capsule available to cavemen, unfortunately. We'd need a Mk1-3 command pod or a Mk2 lander can, both of which are too high tech.

Not necessarily. The rules allow for one launch at the end to retrieve the crew from LKO. Yep, I expected my estimate to be a bit fishy. I was going off of mass of lander can / mass of Kerbal, which is overly simplistic. One thing to account for, however, is that we can save mass by just bringing one lander can and docking lander modules to the bottom as needed, which means that even 3.2x is an over-estimate, for the airless moons at any rate. Getting a good estimate for Laythe is somewhat more problematic. Well, given that we've already started I'd say there's implicit approval for brainstorming.

I don't think it's very feasible, TBH. All of our landers would need to have crew capsules for control (CommNet on -> no probe control out at Jool), which just by the rocket equation would give us a minimum of ~7x overall vehicle mass (.60t for a lander can vs. .09t for a Kerbal on a ladder). It's certainly possible to design a ship that would work, but it would be an absolute mess of pad and orbital assembly to put together, and it would probably end up being painful to fly due to low control authority, wobbly joints, and low-tech solar panels. I'd love to be proven wrong on that though.

Nice K-1 replica! I take it the OV handles re-entry OK?