SinBad

Google up ' biconic lifting body ' to find out more info on the apollo style re-entry vehicle's inherent stability. besides the spacecraft application, i believe its the best way to get asteroidal ore to the surface. Foam it up with nitrogen until its at 990kg/m^3, mould it into a 100 ton biconic body, spin it up for gyroscopic stability, then just nudge it into aerocapture for ocean recovery by tug.

a scientist in britain grew meat in a lab (60 pounds per pound for beef mince), my personal nicotine vaporizer has a better hit than a cigarette, and beer just means a slightly higher load on the co2 scrubbers (from the bubbles). i dont see a problem. i think i would make a good colonist. At the very least shove me on a solo ten year round trip to the asteriod belt with only a geologists hammer for company. Plenty of time to catch up on ksp...

I just tried out factorio. I only meant to play for an hour... now its 2am and im wondering were the last 6 hours went.

Eh, its a different flavor of hypethread. Nothing wrong with that :D Speculation ftw!

Duct tape, cobwebs and rust. I had an old fj40 like that. The cobwebs gave a good enmeshing support structure to the rust and provided tensile strength, and the duct tape provided the overall framework for the cobwebs to anchor to and good reststance to shearing forces. The rust in turn gave the ducttape a solid mass to provide shape and the ability to withstand compressive loads. A rather complex composite material.

@GoldForest32 atm. Mobo is half full (wife promised me the other half for my birthday, but thats way out in november). Not that it matters in 32bit. Why? Do you think six scene changes is too often? It loads around 2.9, then creeps up to 3.5ish and crashes. i do use an active texture manager, i cant remember which one, its the one that unloads the textures until you need to use them. I also run with 1/8th texture resolution in the settings. Its ugly. But the physics still work ;)

Sol 0, reassembly, other random stuff.

At the moment im on 46. Basically the USI constellation and a few part packs so i can actually launch and use them, as well as some qol mods (i include far with those). I get six scene changes before it crashes. if i could use all of my ram i would put in RO, EL and some visual enhancements as well, and B9. I miss B9.

I realise this means a lot of work for squad, but what about multiple textures for the same parts? When you first unlock a tech node all the parts in it look a little primitive. Not rusty, but maybe more straight lines, messier and visible piping etc. Then it automatically upgrades to the next texture. Smoother curves, concealed pipework, etc. Basicaly the difference between prototypes and production models. Have the texture change over based on use. Either you unlock the next tech node, fly the part twice, or 3 in game months pass. Ships launched with prototype textures keep them, but saved crafts will use the texture available in the vab palette. maybe even one more set for when the whole tree is unlocked thats all smooth flowing curves with no visible seams, even between seperate parts.

Top left of the building window in vab or sph is an arrow. Click it and the palete moves over to reveal all sorts of new tabs, including sub assemblies.

Hope you are well again soon, Parkaboy.

As much as i dislike the DC universe, i have to say im interested to see how this movie is going to be more that 30 seconds long. I think it can go two ways though: batman: you are being a bad boy superman, im need to stop you. superman: *splats the bat, moves into wayne manner* or, because batman is a sneaky kind of anti-hero, batman: hey superman, i really dig this new bad boy kick you are on. I went through that phase in my twenties. We should hang out. Oh yeah, alfred baked you these cookies, try one. superman: thanks bruce, i just got sick of having to pretend to be such a nerd all the time. I saw how much tail you were getting with your 'sort of good guy but not really' act so i figured i'd try it. These cookies are great by the way, thank alfre- wait, do these have kryptonite in them? Im alergic to kryptoni-*gurggle* batman: *splats superman then gets angsty over killing his bff*

I build radial boosters as sub assemblies, then attach them. That way i can see the empty cot col and com and better predict how they will behave once released. If you do mods, rcs build aid is great. Instead of having to guesse how much rotation the stage will gain based on cot-com distance, it gives you a number. I also mount pairs of seperatons so their exhaust misses the main tank. if your chutes and decouplers are mounted radialy at the com (empty) they wont contribute much to any rotation you put in with seperatron thrust.

Houston, theyre here too. Looks like the rocks have been eaten... just to mess with the tinfoil hats listening in back home.

thanks for all the replies. so what it comes down to is that its not at a point in its development where the media can take pretty pictures of it. its unproven technology or technology that hasn't been used this way before. there is doubt about the financial viability of its business model. it assumes the use of hydrogen as fuel will become more common and the cost of cryogenic lh2 handling will come down in the future. is that about right?

last i checked a second hand 2 seater cessna is cheaper than a family car already. Its the licence to pilot it, the registration, insurance and maintenance that really hurts.

Hello, this is my first thread in the ksp forums, but ive been lurking a while. So ive been reading and reading, and whenever the subject of ssto, cheap reuseable lifters or promising new space craft is discussed, skylon hardly gets mentioned. If it does it gets dismissed. why? The last i heard it was showing a lot of promise as a cheap, short turn around, fully reuseable moderate load lifter. Did i miss a press release or something?

have a look at gyro copters. simple to maintain, easy to fly, cheap. and lots of clubs all over the place. on the subject of personal air cars in common use: google self flying air car. the passengers dont need to know air traffic control regulations, nor do they need to know how to fly. ground traffic is bad enough. can you imagine every hoon with a tricked out aircar doing whatever they wanted? althogh, i would rather a personal jet bike

eh, Elon Musk is cool and all, and is doing cool things on a tight budget. but very little of what he is doing is new tech. yes there are rockets landing vertically and all sorts of fancy stuff, but that's control software, not revolutionary new hardware. at its heart is tried and true existing technologies that don't require large sums of money to develop from scratch like NASA has had to do with just about every single new model of lifter they have launched. not to mention the hideously expensive super computers NASA did most of its simulations with is beaten by most modern PCs for less than two thousand dollars. R+D used to be much more expensive than it is now (at one point they actually had to pay for stuff to be built before they could see if it worked) and NASA hasn't done much of it since it got cheap because they haven't been able to invest in new research infrastructure. give modern NASA money that it can spread around to R+D organizations and we would see some revolutionary technologies. on a side note, the shuttle is not a great example. it was built with air force money under the stipulation that the design be able to launch into a northerly polar orbit and land back in US territory before completing a full orbit. basically they wanted a surveillance and weapons platform to use against Russia. in its entire service history, the shuttle never flew this flight path. imagine what they could have done if they were trying to build an orbiter instead of a bomber/spy-plane.

I think china or japan (i believe japan was tech-ing up at this point?) Because they already had rockets, vrs germany because they were leading in industrialisation. That and it would be nice to see this kind of story without a 'USA vrs Someothercountry' tag line. now: For really cool stuff, edit out the 800 years of no science that the dark ages gave us. That puts the space race AnyWhen you like in the last 800 years. May i suggest the colonial expansion era that saw britain, france, spain and portugul land grabbing every island and continent they could plant a flag on?

Wissify+: relocates attachment nodes so they are at the centre of the items face. no more mirrored fuel cells with edges that don't line up. also forces all solar panels to deploy from the centre line of their housings rather than one edge, the doors of which are replaced with symetric double doors. asymetrical parts placed in mirror symetry will be inverted, not just rotated in the other direction (looking at you again, fuel cells) and other nice, relaxing symetrical graphical improvements.

Dystopic realism overhaul: you only get a limited number of manned launches, after that you can only launch probes only government contracts are allowed, they dont reward funds. You only get more funds once a year, the amount is set every 4 years based on reputation. Reputation is rewarded by new, realistc public opinion stats. New and daring missions will raise public opinion. Repetative and routine missions will lower it. Research costs funds instead of science The ratio of Government funding per reputation point will continuously degrade until you are required to use reusable launch vehicles for every launch. Launch vehicles can only be refurbished 10 times before you need to buy a new one. Late game launch strategy sees you with too few funds for research, new launch vehicles or much of anything. The requirement to 'do something cool' to raise public opinion for more government funding becomes impossible to meet. You can hire other space agencies to deliver your payloads to lko, as long as they are under 5 tons. just like a real space program!

thats a interesting idea! i read books with aliens that use base six, and the more familiar base 8, 2 and 10. i have never considered that the unit of 1 could mean one of anything. imagine an entire mathematical system built around pi=1. even better, have the orders of magnitude non-linear according to the inverse square rule... thats some alien math. i wonder what kind of world view would be required for a race to develop something like that?

the real image is so horrifying our minds substitute cute harmless water-fowl in only slightly menacing poses to preserve our sanity. without this important psychological coping mechanism filtering reality we would see the true form of the Kraken and be reduced to drooling, twitching wrecks. its the same reason why we cant see our giant alien overlords or the pillars holding up the false sky over our heads. does this forum have an accepted mechanism for conveying sarcastic or facetious intent? like a specific text color or the 'false BB code' trick?

no, i think you had it right the first time slight tangent to the topic...