Ultimate Steve

For some reason the school wifi is letting me watch deployment (!) but I misses the second burn of the second stage by five seconds and its not letting me rewind the livestream. EDIT: Our school wifi is so great! It's almost letting me watch the deployment in glorious 144p!

One minute to go!

Oh. I'm stupid. I'm in the CST time zone and to convert from EST (which the times are always in on SFN) you subtract an hour, but I read the California time instead of the Florida time. Time to go back to bed...

Unfortunately my school doesn't let out tomorrow.

4:30 in the morning? Ugh... I'd love to, but I don't think my parents are going to like that with me being late to school basically all of last week (even if it was only by about ten seconds).

Coding is not simple. In fact, depending on who you ask, it might be more difficult than even rocket science. And, especially in the video game industry, you don't want to rush out code, because of all the possible bugs that could occur. The last time that KSP for consoles was rushed, we got the broken mess of bugs we have now. Because of that rush, and the decision to hire Flying Tiger to port the game, KSP for consoles now has to be completely redone from the ground up.

This is also the first time an Atlas V has been scrubbed more than 2 times, if my source was correct.

Paging @Kuzzter... Atmosferikdipperkraft! BetyoufivebucksIspelledthatwrong

Ouch. Those things have got to hurt, I saw a lot of them today at the competition... Speaking of which, we won first in 2A! Yay! There was also this one trombone from another school who managed to drop her hat...

Yes, actually! Also a few days ago I found this weird state ranking website and I had some fun looking around. Apparently, Iowa is #8 overall, and #1 in healthcare affordability. Unfortunately, we're ranked #48 in "bridge quality..."

Trombone Club! Yay! Our big marching band competition is tomorrow, actually...

Maybe you've had different experiences, but when I tried to take a rover to Minmus I found that there was insufficient gravity to actually get traction. If I managed to get going fast, it took forever to brake due to the low friction. But then again, that was several versions ago so things may have changed.

Another thing to note is that rovers tend to not work well on Minmus. I'm not you, but if I was I'd build a little flying hopper that could get to the waypoints.

Oh, so I've basically done everything wrong? Okay, then. You might want to flesh out the rules a bit more, in my opinion they are pretty confusing. You're the boss here, but I'm a bit curious as to why you want to limit payloads...

I haven't fooled around much in sandbox RO, but in career I have a few medium sized lifters. Gravity I - 63t to orbit. Gravity III - 30t to low lunar orbit (not sure about LEO numbers). Gravity IV - about 100t to orbit. (Unfortunately I don't have access to pictures right now) So, nothing really impressive, but this is still 1970 in that career game... In 1971-72 I plan to debut Gravity V which will have a capacity of 200-300t to LEO. Still nothing next to these, but I thought I'd mention them for the sake of comparison.

Warning: This post is technically off topic relative to this thread but it's not really worth starting its own thread for (yet). I've decided to switch to either a resistojet or an arcjet for the mission I planned (like a nuclear thermal rocket except using electricity rather than radioactive material to heat the fuel). Long story: Basically what I've been trying to design is a spacecraft that weighs 50kg or less in LEO that can impact the moon (50kg because it would be able to launch on CloudOne, a smallsat launcher that will hopefully be cheaper than anything else out there). The first stage is a solid fuel kick motor (44kg) which does about 3km/s of work, and the second stage is 6kg and provides the course corrections. It will have cold gas thrusters as RCS and a standard control unit, etc... However, the main propulsion system gave me trouble. I considered five ideas (in order): Monopropellant. I settled on H2O2 because it was dense, almost safe (safer than hydrazine at least) and had decent efficiency (161s). Ultimately dropped because it was unsafe and you can't buy the pure stuff easily. Cold gas main engine using compressed N2 - Low cost and easily attainable. The only problems are that even at 3000PSI the nitrogen is still 10x less dense than pretty much anything else. The container will also weigh 4-5x the mass of the propellant, and N2 has an isp of optimistically 75s, leading to a total spacecraft Delta-V of about 50m/s... not good. The H2O2 model had 600. Any sort of bipropellant - the only suitable non-toxic one I could find was kerolox. This presents on orbit boiloff and freezing problems, as I need the stage to last three days. It's also hard to fit fuel, pumps, a pressurization system, a combustion chamber, and an ignition system in only 3kg... Ion engines - probably hard to make yourself and expensive if you buy them. Also, I'd need special tanks as well as lots of solar panels. Electric thermal (arcjet/resistojet) - low thrust and electricity demands that are pretty high, but the fuel can be basically anything (I'm leaning towards an Ammonia/Water mix) and efficiency ranges from decent (290s) to astronomical (many thousands of newton-seconds) leading to the need for less propellant, freeing up mass for the extra solar panels. Not still sure how much I need, but I'm pretty sure this is the option I'm going to go for. Also, waste heat might be a bit of a problem. Thanks for your help in me realizing that H2O2 was somewhat of a bad idea. Carry on with the thread! Wait, did some research and resistojets have waaaay lower thrust than I expected... Current design has the TWR at around 0.005 or something like that... Back to the drawing board! Again!

I would normally stay up for anything but unfortunately it's a school night and I'm actually feeling tired enough that I feel like I should go to sleep.

For a payload you design? Or overall? I'm guessing the latter, in which case... Aww. I guess I'll just do PP then. But wait... *Emphasis mine. Not trying to be mean or anything here, just curious as to which one is correct. Anyway, here's the first 10 craft of my career as a Payload Provider: At least, that's what I think I'm supposed to do...

Two things: 1. DO NOT ROLEPLAY!!! I can already see so many ways this can go wrong. If we keep it to "people exchanging and launching various crafts" we should be fine, but "businisses providing and launching crafts" is not. I'd like to see this go far, but as a reminder, no roleplay. 2. Sign me up as both a launch provider and a payload provider. I'm going to make five payloads, I think? We're free to submit what we want, right? And we an go ahead and fly what payloads we want, right? EDIT: What constitutes each of the mission classes? I can't seem to design a unique payload below 5000 funds, so you might want to rejigger the costs. EDIT: I built ten payloads (unfortunately most of them aren't on the mission list but I'm not sure if it matters or not, payloads are payloads) but I don't have time to upload them right now, I'll do it when I get back from musical practice. Eight of them are 5000 fund payloads and two of them (space telescope and Ike orbiter) are 20000 fund payloads.

If I have time (dubious) and motivation (also dubious) I may try to contribute something when I get home.

@Snark Leave it to dalymail to pull a random joke image off the internet... Leave it to the KSP community to combine the Saturn V, the SLS, the STS, the Delta IV, the Falcon Heavy, and who knows what else...

I think the N1 beats the H-IIA for struts, though.

I have absolutely no idea, but I do love a good mystery... I wish you luck! I'll be watching this!

The H-IIA. I mean, come on! Does it not scream "JUMBO 64" and "RT-10" to you? And the Delta IV Heavy while we're at it. Jumbo 64's, Mainsail engines (with cool shrouds), those weird nosecones, and the LES. Ariane 5! The whole "Giant booster" and "sideways nose cone" thing. Long March 7 just screams Kerbal in so many ways. Come to think of it, so does Long March 5. To a certain extent, Proton, because of the engine layout. Ares I (although it only flew once and that was a boilerplate second stage)! This might as well just be a KSP blueprint! I mean, come on! We've got J64's, the giant booster, the MK1-2 pod, a Skipper, and an LES! Actually, the entire Ariane series (but Ariane 5 is way closer). But as far as the most Kerbal idea? I'd have to go with Shtil'. What is Shtil', you ask? Nobody has really heard of it.. Three liquid fueled stages, standard control systems, modified ICBM, low payload to orbit... It seems pretty normal, until you learn that it was launched from a submarine!

Oh, boy. OVERALL: More things to do on the planets. Dramatic terrain in places, procedural terrain like the Mun has. Clouds. Realistic looking oceans. KERBOL: Nothing really to change. Maybe make it a bit smaller? ABLATE: Small body waaay closer to the sun than Moho for a challenge. MOHO: I'd give it rock geysers, because why not? I'd also turn up the procedural craters to the extreme, and I'd make the moholes go all the way through the planet, because why not? I'd also add a small asteroid moon. EVE: I'd bring back the crystal moon. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then you must look at these. I'd make Eve slightly more red. GILLY: A big crater, I guess. KERBIN: Kerbin is amazing just the way it is. MUN: Mun is also fine. MINMUS: Random crystals sticking out from the surface in places. DUNA: Make the poles less of a pain to look at. If you've been to Duna's poles, you'll know what I'm talking about. I'd also give it 2 more moons, a small captured asteroid in elliptical orbit and a lava moon. IKE: Bring back the magic boulder! I'd also make a few deep pits to make it worth exploring. DRES: A few on rails moonlets. Also, an actual asteroid belt. JOOL: A big spot and a polar hexagon. And rings. Many more moonlets, including elliptical and retrograde moonlets. LAYTHE: A bit more icy. Slightly more appealing color on the beaches. Bluer oceans. A good landing site on the Jool facing side (again, if you've tried to land there, you know what I'm talking about). VALL: More dramatic cliffs, like straight up and stuff. I'd also make the terrain more slippery than usual (maybe). TYLO: Thin, barely noticeable atmosphere. More craters. BOP: Make the big crater more pronounced. POL: make everything 1.5x taller and more dramatic. Reduce gravity just a tad. Shorten day length. GAS PLANET TWO: If we could have GP2 and GP3, I'd say a Saturn and a Neptune. However, if I could have only one, I'd say an ice giant because I'd already added Saturn's features to Jool. It would have a wide array of strange moons, like a Titan analog, one with its own submoon, and one with a mountain that exceeded the height of the atmosphere. EELOO: Give it a Charon analog. Maybe have a barycenter. Also, a few more tiny sub-Gilly moons. WERNHER'S COMET: Self explanatory.