IncongruousGoat

Not enough ordnance has been set off at this point for that to be a problem. Nuclear winter only sets in when you get thousands of detonations over a very short timespan - it's caused by all the debris that gets thrown into the atmosphere. Sort of a reverse greenhouse effect, where all the soot blocks the sunlight. If it were possible to start it with a few dozen bombs, we would've had one on Earth already, considering all the testing that went on during the 50's and 60's. @CatastrophicFailure Great chapter as always. Considering that the name of the next chapter is already in the table of contents, I get the feeling that it's already in the works...

I've long been an advocate of colonizing Mars first, mostly because of the ISRU potential. People forget how close Mars is to Earth in terms of chemical composition. All the raw materials we need to build more or less anything are there in sufficient quantity to be useful, which reduces the problem to extraction and processing. Mars has enough ice in the poles, in the regolith, and in subsurface glaciers to fill an ocean or two, and enough carbon for at least a decently sized biospehere. Compare this to the Moon, which has no carbon, at least as far as we've found, and a very small amount of highly inaccessible water ice near the poles. Space itself, of course, is even more useless, since it (by definition) has no usable resources other than constant sunlight. Oh, that's another thing about the Moon. Its day is 28 Earth days long. Compare to Mars, whose day is 24h 38m 35s, a figure that's conveniently quite compatible with the human sleep cycle and also solar panels and temperature regulation. Mars is as benign a habitat as we're likely to find in the solar system outside of Earth itself, while the Moon is an airless rock floating in the void. Lots of people are suggesting a colony in LEO, but that's going to be a constant drain on resources. In principle, it's possible to build a completely closed-loop life support system, but everything wears out with time, and in space there's nowhere to go for replacement parts, other than back to Earth. With Mars, there's at least the faintest possibility (however remote it may seem) for self-sufficiency. Mars, at least, has real potential for independent growth, once sufficiently established. And make no mistake, self-sufficiency is something to strive for. A settlement that depends on constant supply will have a very hard time growing, and will amount to little more than a flashy show of technology. I'm actually of the opinion that we won't see large permanent deep-space (including LEO/GEO) habitats for a long, long time. They just don't make any sense for anything other than research - in a sense, they're a less practical alternative to building a city in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Mars isn't much better, but there's just something about that red rock in the sky that appeals to people (for whatever reason), and it's the least bad option.

Not only that, but Soviet avionics were notoriously poor. U.S. computing hardware was barely up to the task of what it was used for during Project Apollo, and it was on the bleeding edge of computing technology when it was designed. Soviet hardware was nowhere near as sophisticated. The Soviet design bureaus also had an unfortunate tendency towards over-complicated designs that tried to automate as much as possible, sacrificing redundancy and robustness along the way. There's another reason why the N1 couldn't test-fired - no hold-down mechanism. The booster just kinda sat on top of the flame trench, and lifted off the moment the TWR exceeded 1.0. They had no way to hold the booster down on the pad for a launch, and insufficient means to build a dedicated test site. The Soviet space program was in pretty dire financial (insofar as that term applies to the Soviet economy) straits at the time.

This... we do not speak of. Another great installment as always.

Well, there's the Order of the Trilobite, which is given for anything above and beyond, interplanetary travel included. The thing is, for most Caveman runs, there isn't a good reason to go to another planet, other than it being really impressive. The only difficulty level where it's strictly necessary to go interplanetary is Nanocrystalline Diamond, but I don't think that's quite what you're looking for.

'Tis a strange thing indeed, to be able to afford designing for something other than maximal science return. Chapter 8: Nose to the Grindstone II - Electric Boogaloo Not much for a penultimate chapter. Eh, it's okay. The next one should make for a nice grand finale.

Granted, but now all of your windows have been decorated with gingham curtains, and your visitors aren't able to interpret the patterns. I wish for less wishing and more doing.

I'm getting a very schizo tech vibe out of this chapter, to be honest. Core rope memory, C# source files, and AI in the same machine? Eh, I nitpick too much. It'll be interesting to see where this goes, though. I have a distinct memory of the something unfortunate happening to the Kommissar during Whispers. Looks like I have to go back and re-read that before the next chapter comes out...

The solid booster you've got on top of there isn't an RT-5 Flea. It's an RT-10 Hammer. So even if you do reach the target altitude and speed, you won't be able to complete the contract because you don't have the necessary part on your ship. The Flea is something like half the weight of the Hammer, so that should make things substantially easier.

I'm still willing to help, yes. A lot of what you've said would probably make more sense if I had a schematic in front of me, but for now it sounds fairly reasonable. It's also worth noting that, as far as microcontroller performance goes, the major bottleneck is likely to be transmission speed from the computer running KSP to whatever embedded controllers you end up using. If, say, you end up using 3 Ardunios, you're going to be limited to a baud rate of 115200 over serial. At the clock speeds used by the ATMega chip in the Adruino, that's something like 1000 instructions executed per byte received (if I'm remembering correctly). So processing power on the microcontrollers is probably not too big a concern, even if there does end up being some relatively heavy-duty floating point math going on. As far as rotating the numbers goes, at that point it might be time for some vector mathematics, using some transform (rotate & reflect) matrices to make the coordinate systems line up (probably on the computer end). For driving the FDAI's motors, you might want to look into some way to avoid having to have the microcontrollers output raw waveforms directly, because that incurs a good amount of overhead. There are hardware solutions for that kind of problem (for example, I2C-controlled LED driver, which can be used as an ESC controller), although these may require some rejiggering of the microcontroller setup, due to requirements of various communications protocols regarding the number of permissible master devices. There are other things I could add as well, but I'm going to hold off for now until I have a better idea of what the hardware looks like.

It's entirely possible the engines physically can't run on non-densified propellants anymore. Rocket engines are finicky things when it comes to fuel.

Segmentation fault line (Core demolished in earthquake)

I know I'm a bit late to the party, but here's a photo of sunset over Troy, NY: Not nearly as good as the sunsets you all have found, but nice nonetheless. Taken in late January. On a completely different note, here are a couple of pictures I took on the trail up Giant Mountain in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate NY: These were taken two weeks ago.

It varies. Sometimes it's classical (anywhere from Renaissance to Romantic, although mostly Baroque), sometimes it's TSFH, sometimes it's Simon & Garfunkel, sometimes it's something else entirely. Depends on how I'm feeling that day, what I'm doing, and whether or not I've found anything novel and interesting to listen to.

So, it turns out orbital assembly is very tedious when you don't have maneuver nodes or proper patched conics. Chapter 7: Some Assembly Required The next chapter is probably going to take a while. I've got a fair deal going on on my end right now, and also the next phase is going to involve a ton of launches. I intend to have this whole thing done by July, but I don't know if that's going to happen or not.

@richfiles Have you gotten the C programming worked out? Because if not, I'd be more than happy to lend a hand.

And there was much rejoicing. Welcome back to the land of the living, @Kuzzter! May your stay be long and fruitful.

This probably doesn't have a good answer, but... Does anybody know what Blue Origin's plan for developing landing capability for New Glenn is? Considering their general approach, it seems like they're going to try and land boosters from the get-go. On the other hand, it took years of launching and testing for SpaceX to get landing technology to work, and years more to use what they had learned to build a properly re-usable booster. Does BO plan a similar iterative approach, or are they going to try and design the whole thing up front? The latter seems more likely, based on their company philosophy, but it also doesn't jibe with what we've seen of reusable vehicle development so far.

Airplan!: A documentary about the history of aircraft navigation, covering everything from early long-distance flights, done by map and compass, to modern GPS-driven navigation.

No, not really, for a few reasons. First off, the propellant is problematic. Kerolox is hard to store over long periods of time, and harder to start on-demand, which is not what you want in a landing engine. More importantly, though, Rutherford doesn't have any throttling or restart capability, much less the kinds of deep throttling one would want for a lander. Sure, with good (read: pin-point accurate) guidance it's possible to try and do a perfect suicide burn, but doing so would be rather dangerous with engines that can only start once and have no throttling capability at all, even if you're landing in a well-characterized location (which is by no means guaranteed). And, before anyone suggests it, adding deep throttling to an engine that wasn't designed for it from the beginning is akin to redesigning the engine completely. SpaceX only managed to get Merlin throttling down to 40% due to careful planning and massive increases in engine performance over its development.

I've had this running in and out and all around my head for a couple days or so. Listening to it a lot has just made the "problem" worse.

I can't really speak to stock or a lightly modded install, but in RP-0 at least Kerbal Construction Time alleviates this problem almost completely. I've actually had a couple of times when I've launched a fleet of probes to Mars, and then warped all the way to their arrival date waiting for something big (i.e. lunar mission) to finish building. Inserting that delay between launches, especially big launches, really helps pace the whole thing out. Also, it makes the rocket assembly/recovery process feel less magical.

Chapter 6: Deja Vu All over Again On a completely different note, how do you fine folk feel about the use of Distant Object Enhancement? Non-cavemen might say it's purely visual, but being able to see things from much further away than normal could very well help docking and/or interplanetary travel. Do you all feel that disqualifies it from use?

It seems to be working fine for me, although it may take a bit of fiddling (it seems there are a few issues with visor reflections on Windows).

Should is a strong word. I said that a couple of chapters back, and ended up riding a ladder into orbit. My math says I should be fine, but that's assuming I can pull off a Minmus landing in a single launch. The numbers say it should be possible, but I haven't actually tested it out yet. As far as I'm concerned, I'm only definitively over the hump once I have both docking ports and a usable probe core. At that point, it just becomes a question of orbital assembly. As to your question, I'm running 1.4.2. I'm not actually quite sure where I got the skybox from originally, since for this install I copied the files from an older (1.3.1) install. The best place to start looking would be the old Texture Replacer thread; it had a long list of available textures, which I think includes Poodmund's skyboxes.