IncongruousGoat

Well... you say that... But if you land on Mount Launchpad, the atmosphere isn't going to be quite as bad. I'm pretty sure that, at those altitudes, you could use a 5-way asparagus Reliant cluster (or similar) to plow through the lower atmosphere. The upper stage engines and tanks available to cavemen are more than adequate, and nothing required should be outside the capabilities of pad and orbital assembly. Obviously, nailing that landing isn't going to be an option in an NCD run since you can't take the required trial-and-error approach, but in a more conventional run it might just be possible.

Back in the day, Talc runs were scored as speedruns, so I set out to figure out if I could complete a Talc run in under one in-game day. The answer, by the way, is yes, but I found it too easy to hit that bar. So I stepped it up some, and went to find out if I could complete a Talc run in under one in-game hour. The answer, once again, is yes. The final time came out to 0h, 42m. Album is here: https://imgur.com/a/2m5AvWU It wasn't difficult to do (Talc is really easy). The main breakthrough that enabled it was never going to orbit, and using a suborbital hop to get the high space science from Kerbin. I don't think it's possible to do it much faster, since the space center doesn't give you enough science to permit avoiding high space entirely, and flying long-distance jets around Kerbin for biome-farming just takes too long.

@dvader Congratulations! Not only did you manage to complete NCD, but you did it with 300 science to spare. No mean feat indeed. I was wondering how long it would take for someone to find a better way to do this challenge, and it seems the answer is "not long at all".

I sure hope so! It would show that the economics of reuse are working out exactly as SpaceX has hoped they would, which bodes very well for the future.

@Mike` Thank you, pulling the latest one off of GitHub seems to have done it. Looks like the version of rf-v12.6.0 on CKAN isn't actually 12.6.0.

I'm also wondering about boiloff. For some reason, MLI layers aren't present as a tank option in my game. Are those included as part of RP-1, or are they provided by some other mod? I just (as in less than an hour ago) grabbed the latest development version of RP-1, so I'm led to think that they're provided by something else.

Well, the reason that Vim is often chosen is that it (or, more specifically, vi), is guaranteed by POSIX standard to be available on every Unix and Unix-like system. It's the safest choice, if someone needs to use a text editor on such a system. And, of course, it's been ported to Windows and every old mainframe OS, including weird IBM dinosaurs that still use EBCDIC as a character encoding. The only other editor with similar guaranteed availability is ed, and ed is impossible to use by modern standards.

The title says it all. So, which do you use, Vim or Emacs? Or do you use some other text editor? For anyone that's lost, Vim and Emacs are two terminal-based, scriptable, extendable text editors used most often by programmers, Linux users, and the kinds of people who want to look cool in the eyes of programmers and Linux users. Vim is much more lightweight and portable than Emacs, but isn't quite as extensible and has a steeper learning curve and more arcane interface. Emacs has a (somewhat) more conventional interface and is more extensible, but is more intensive to run and doesn't work to its fullest potential outside of the GNU/Linux software environment. I personally use Vim, since I often find myself working on minimal and unusual systems, and I can always rely on Vim, or at least vi, to be there when I need to do some text editing. Also, I find Emacs' key bindings to be even more objectionable than the standard set of escape sequences (ctrl-z, ctrl-c, ctrl-s, etc.) used in more mainstream text editors.

Apollo 13. The Martian was a fine film, but the book was honestly better - a large part of the appeal there was (for me, at least) in the technical details, and the movie had to cut a lot of that, as well as a couple of the things that went majorly wrong. Apollo 13, on the other hand, was working from a well-documented event, and other than embellishing some of the crew drama (which I can excuse, films need to sell tickets to a non-nerd audience), it did a solid job of portraying the events of the mission. Just the fact that it portrays real events makes me get much more of a kick out of it than The Martian. Then again, Apollo 13 is one of my favorite films of all time, so I'm a little biased in its favor.

Meanwhile, in the northeast, we have ourselves another heat wave. Heat index here was somewhere up around 100 today. On the bright side, it's almost certainly the last one of the season. Not because of any particular meteorological thing, but because summer is nearly over. Thank goodness. Of course, I said that about the last heat wave, and then this happened...

This isn't really the thread to be asking that question in. I recommend you take your question to the Add-on Discussion subforum.

Aw, you linked the Disturbed version? I'll bet you that there are a few people in the audience here who won't realize that it's a cover. I know I wouldn't have, a few years ago before I obsessively listened to everything recorded by S&G. Plus, I prefer the original. All that aside, though, I like it. Treachery from Layland... but on the other hand he might actually be working to cure the Whaguggle-itis. I'm starting to wonder if his ambitions are starting to stretch past simple world domination (although I'm not sure that we were ever sure that those were his ambitions in the first place...).

It'll run afterwards without a connection. If it didn't, there wouldn't be any way to change your WiFi adapter, since your computer would refuse to boot before you could install the appropriate drivers. Also, it would refuse to run on a computer that's only hooked up to an isolated VPN, which would anger a lot of the companies that make up one of Microsoft's major customer bases. No, actually. There's a relatively simple fix. It involves editing Windows internal registers, which Microsoft ships a tool with the OS for. It's just easy to screw up badly if you don't know exactly what you're doing.

@kerbalstar You may want to update the OP with the re-reboot for the Ultimate Challenge. Not that many people are going to be attempting it anyways, but I wouldn't want to cause undue confusion with a link to a now-dead thread.

I would be very surprised. Full-stage recovery with Vulcan would be far, far harder to accomplish than it is with Falcon 9, even if it had an engine arrangement that could support said recovery (which it doesn't). Again, MECO speeds for Vulcan are going to be a lot higher than Falcon 9, which makes the amount of propellant one would need to reserve for braking problematic.

This happened yesterday, but I wasn't the most cogent last night so I forgot to post it here. Better late than never, I guess? Anyways... I was once again hiking in the Adirondack Mountains yesterday, doing a loop trail that crosses the summits of Bear Den Mountain, Dial Mountain, and the amusingly named Nippletop. The weather up there was rather overcast yesterday, and it turns out that on some days the high peaks are tall enough to stick up into the clouds. Now, Dial and Nippletop sit on the same ridgeline, and the trail followed that line for the ~1.75 miles between the peaks. The upshot of this is that, for about 2.5 miles, I was hiking through a cloud. The trees at those elevations are typically quite stunted and windblown, which when combined with the low visibility from being in a cloud made the trail feel rather otherworldly. Felt like I was walking on an island in a sea of grey, the ground dropping off to either side. Some of those aforementioned cloud-shrouded peaks: And the "view" from the peak of Dial: Nippletop, being about 600 feet taller than Dial, was even cloudier.

Yeah, I couldn't remember the exact number off of the top of my head, and so put 5 km/s per second as a conservative estimate. For heavy LEO payloads, the MECO speed is almost certainly even worse, probably up near 6.5 km/s. For anything other than light interplanetary probes, that Centaur upper stage is very underpowered.

Craziest? No-ISRU single-launch Jool 5-compliant grand tour. Not much else to say about that, really. If you want to read the report, there's an Imgur album linked somewhere in the old Ultimate Challenge thread. It took months of planning and way too many hours of flying to pull off, and I'm definitely never doing it again. It was big, it was beautiful, and it ate my life when I was doing it. Either that, or my caveman Duna/Ike expedition. Using a completely Tier 1 space center (so that's no patched conics, no maneuver nodes, no EVAs, 18-ton 30-part limit, no communications beyond Kerbin, and no tech nodes worth more than 90 science), I used way too much orbital assembly and flying via the Mk. 1 Eyeball to send Valentina all the way to the Duna/Ike system, landing on both bodies, gathering every experiment I had access to in every situation I could find, and bringing it all back for recovery on Kerbin. I was limited to just under 2.5 tons payload mass per launch, and I had to overbuild everything because of the lack of accurate navigation. It took 18 (successful) launches in all to assemble the ship, and a lot of testing to figure out how to fly an interplanetary mission without patched conics, but in the end I pulled it off. The landers were particularly fun, since each one had to carry 3 Science Jr.s, which meant I had to assemble each one over the course of 2 launches to make everything fit in the fairings I had, as well as in the part limit. Oh, and I did it without a single quicksave or revert in the main save. Some days, I think I try too hard at this game...

Well, there's suborbital, and then there's suborbital. SpaceX deliberately has MECO at a low velocity to make booster recovery easier. ULA, however, has a legacy of very high MECO speeds. IIRC, Atlas V has MECO at above 5 km/s, and we have no reason to think that Vulcan will be any different. That engine pod will be separating at high speeds that will necessitate some sort of heat shielding far beyond anything SpaceX has to use.

Heading to Jool first? Gutsy. I like it. Duna and/or Eve would be easier to get to, but Eve is hard and the science returns you can (in principle) get from the Jool system far outstrip anything you can get from a similar visit to Duna/Ike. Wonder how you're going to handle the orbit-perturbing effects of Tylo and Laythe flybys, though. Those two can easily kick you into Jool or out of the system entirely.

Well, some subset of us hardcore veteran players may want these things, but I don't think they'd enhance the experience for a new player. Well, okay, graphics, optimizations, and proper aerodynamics notwithstanding. But as for the rest... KSP is a game with a very, very steep learning curve, and adding more stuff to it will only make that curve steeper. It's already really hard for people to get into the game, and the last thing the devs want to do is to make that barrier to entry higher, because it'll mean less sales and less revenue for them. Some things are just best left to mods. That way, we who want them can have without harming the experience of the new player or (more importantly) using up precious development time. Software developers are expensive, and their time needs to be used judiciously. I personally don't think we're going to see a KSP 2.0 for a long, long time, and even then it's only going to be a re-implementation of the original KSP in an up-to-date engine with better graphics, to bring it to a new generation of very nerdy gamers. Other games using the Kerbal IP? Almost certainly. Why else would Take Two have bought it? But a KSP 2.0? Unlikely. The game is already the best at what it does. There isn't a clear way to make the game better at teaching orbital mechanics. Which, I might remind you, is what it's really about. I've seen enough new players struggle to learn the basics in today's stock KSP. The last thing they need is more complications that have nothing to do with orbital mechanics.

Yeah, that's where I thought the technology was. Although... if it's slowing down all the way from orbital speed to around Mach 1, it's going to have to deal with a lot of waste heat. Is the idea that the vehicle is separately shielded, and the inflatable thing is just a giant fancy airbrake?

Oh, Delta II 792X did something similar. 6 of the 9 boosters were optimized for sea-level flight, and were lit on the pad. The remaining 3 were optimized for vacuum flight, and were lit after the first 6 had burned out and separated. Although I admit, it's not quite as Kerbal as PSLV's booster staging sequence. Much as I'm a fan of all the recent developments in reusable rocketry, there's going to be a not-so-small part of me that's going to miss the occasionally ludicrous engineering of the disposable era.

it's been cursed by Bel-Shamharoth. You shouldn't run with ______; it's dangerous.

Well, there's always the good old PSLV. Solid boosters, solid first stage, N2O4/UDMH second stage, solid third stage, and MMH/MON (of all things) fourth stage. Oh, and by my math the third stage must pull over 2 g's when it lights. It's proven to be a reliable and capable launch vehicle, but I get the feeling that when it was designed the engineers doing the design work had exactly two liquid engines to work with, and used some solids adapted from ICBM stages to compensate.