IncongruousGoat

I'm currently on my first car. It's a 2002 Subaru Legacy with a manual transmission and duct tape holding the rear right fender to the rear right quarter panel. It drives okay, except that the clutch sticks when it's hot and humid, or when it's really cold, and the key won't turn if you rotate the steering wheel while the engine isn't running, and if you leave the parking brake engaged for more than 2 days it gets stuck. Oh, and the trunk latch is finicky. And it may be slowly burning oil. And the AC and cruise control are both broken. And the rear left tire slowly loses air and needs to be refilled about once a month. But it gets me from point A to point B with decent gas mileage, which is all I care about. Plus, there's no way it'll ever get stolen. The subset of car thieves stupid enough to steal such a worthless car and who could actually drive the darn thing is very, very small.

I've got a few ideas. Satellites/probes as pawns Mun landers as knights Space stations for rooks The king and queen are both boosters on the pad ready to launch As for the bishops... aircraft?

Hmmm. Do you know how hot those coolant channels get? I'm wondering if you could just epoxy the rods in place, or if you'd need something more resilient.

We do know some stuff about the heat shield, actually. The current plan is to use PICA-X, since that stuff has turned out to hold up to LEO re-entry surprisingly well. Also because SpaceX have been iterating on it and improving its heat shielding capacity over the years. The idea is to leave the heatshield more or less untouched between LEO missions, and only refurbish it after a Mars mission (or maybe several Mars missions, if it can last that long).

The website (dearmoon.earth) is already live. No need to wait until the end of the presentation.

Whoa, that's actual BFS flight hardware right there. Confirmed that the first BFS is currently under construction.

@The Dunatian Except that Corundum, Diamond, and Nano-Diamond are all impossible without contracts, because you start off without enough money to launch anything. You need the initial advance from the first couple contracts just to get something on the pad. The other difficulty levels should be possible without contracts though.

6/10 Kerbals are all well and good, but the lighting isn't great

7/10, I see you occasionally but we frequent different parts of the forums.

I've got a few games I play on top of KSP. Right now, it's mostly Dark Souls and Dark Souls III with some Factorio thrown in now and then, but there have been other games I've played to various degrees of obsessiveness in the past. Minecraft, notably, used to be the only game I played, and I still come back to it every now and then.

Well, they could be optimized for a regime somewhere in the middle, like the LR-105 was, or they could have a funky nozzle geometry that allows them to operate well at all altitudes, like the RS-25. I suspect it's the former, though, given how much of a mess the development of the RS-25 was. This seems more likely. That and TPS for the engines during re-entry.

I went and consulted a friend of mine who's studying fluid dynamics as to the whole meta-nozzle thing, and got back an answer of "That wouldn't work at all". If it have a central protrusion of some sort it could act as an aerospike, but that's not what's going on here. It could be that SpaceX decided that they didn't need the extra specific impulse, but I find that to be unlikely given the number of times they've emphasized that BFR/BFS isn't a big, dumb booster.

I'm of the opinion that Elon is just messing with us at this point. That render doesn't make much sense as a new version of BFR for a number of reasons, not least of which that it lacks any sea-level-optimized nozzles, which makes it incapable of landing on Earth. This is Elon Musk's Twitter account, people. It's not exactly a reputable news source. Hopefully this will all be cleared up in the stream on Monday.

No, but Hans Konigsmann, the SpaceX VP of Build and Flight Reusability, is going to be giving a talk on reusability. I for one am excited - we'll get to hear how Block 5 has been working out so far.

It looks like someone took the old 7-engine design for ITS and drew it on a BFS airframe, and then added a Shuttle-style tailfin for good measure. I highly suspect it was produced by a third party that's been out of the loop for a couple of years. Oh, wait. Now that you've pointed that out... This is very strange.

This one's been in my head for a few days now:

Hmmm. My main objection would be that, with the exception of life support, mods that can be said to make the challenge harder change the game too much to be easily judged (i.e. Realism Overhaul, Principia), don't add anything to make the caveman challenge more difficult from an engineering and piloting perspective (i.e. BARIS), or may just change something in a way that doesn't necessarily make things more difficult (i.e. FAR). Life support is a tricky one, although I can't see it catching on too much since it prohibits long-distance ladder riding, as well as adding even more of a mass penalty to interplanetary missions.

Huntsville, Alabama

The music has started

5/10 I get the feeling that it's an in-joke that I'm not in on, which lessens its effectiveness.

Sounds about right, yes. Although I'd say it's half showing off, and half trying to not be bored.

@tater Do you have a more up-to-date link for the livestream? The one you posted doesn't seem to point to the stream.

The Caveman challenge isn't all that hard on the lower difficulties. It definitely doesn't require going interplanetary - the only reason you're seeing that is because the recent posts have, for the most part, either been people pushing the limits of caveman capabilities, or people doing one of the higher difficulty levels. Also, I can't imagine that life support would be any impediment if you didn't have to go interplanetary. The Mun isn't very far away.

@JacobJHC Congratulations on completing the challenge and then some! Not only did you land on every body in the stock system without ISRU, a feat in and of itself, but you went on to knock out something like twice again as many planets and moons, courtesy of lots of planet packs. With most of your reserve fuel to spare. This is easily one of the most ridiculous missions I've seen anyone fly in KSP, and you have more than earned your place in the hall of fame. You may pick up the badge at your leisure. Just one point of bookkeeping: Could you provide the names of all the planet packs you used so I can list them in your entry in the hall of fame? OPM I recognize, but the others are new to me.

The inverse of 96 would be .0104167. Did you mean reverse? 0x46