Ultimate Steve

Well, it's an instrument that's played by slamming rubber paddles down on the open holes on top (see, the layout is like a piano) and each pipe is a certain distance long, and hitting it makes a certain pitched note. The longer each tube, the lower the note. (There's no way I'm getting out of telling the story now, is there?)

So, if anyone wants the full story I'll type it, but if nobody wants it, I'll just summarize (because it would take 15mins to write). The highlights of today: I broke an elevator I found out that my high school is technically 11 stories tall instead of 4 I played one of these things: If anyone wants the full story, just say so!

It would appear so. Really, just a tip to any spaceplane builders out there, on that type of spaceplane you'd probably be better off with Rapiers than Vectors. Unless of course you're building it for complete fun. Vectors, IMO, are one of the funnest engines in the game. *loads up KSP to see how far I can get on a single Vector*

Chapter Five - A Hero is Born (And almost dies... again)

@TheEpicSquared, @DarkOwl57: ^^^Welcome to the internet. As far as interesting things that happened today, 1. I had two classmates make me a new handle for my trombone case. 2. I was playing dodgeball, and it was the last few seconds of the game (Not that we have a timer or anything) and our team had one member left. In our school's version of dodgeball, when you get out you go to the other side of the gym, and if you catch a ball thrown by your teammate then you get back in. I had been out of the game for about twenty minutes at this point. She had two dodgeballs and she did her best to throw them as far as she could, and by chance I happened to catch one of them, and I got back into the game right as she got out. I chucked the ball and managed to get someone out, but I got out a few seconds later and the game ended. Also, the person who threw me the ball was also one of the two people who made me the handle. 3. We have this class, Intro to Engineering Design (IED) and it usually is the worst class ever. Over the past week, though, we got to do something cool and actually engineer-y. We got to build a sort of "Remote Control" (But not remote, as the controller had to be wired to the car) car. It actually proved to be surprisingly more difficult and more fun than I had guessed. The first day of the project, my team was mostly trying to figure out how the building blocks work. The second day I came up with this really weird way to transfer the energy of the motors we had been given to the wheels. It took me most of the whole class, because the motors end in a corkscrew and not an axle, and there are these gearbox parts that sort of do it but have the gear in a really inconvenient spot. So, I get it done, build a second one, and attach them to our car. They worked, but it was slow. Two seconds later a team member comes up with the idea of screwing a gear directly onto the motor, and I had to give my motor assemblies to another team. Today, however, we discovered that my teammates design didn't have enough torque to move the car forward, so I had to rebuild my (now improved) wheel assemblies from scratch. Also, we worked on wiring today. Who knew wiring a steerable RC car could be so complicated?

Heh. That reminds me of the infamous "Party Balloon" incident. For science class we had to do a poster showing one million of something. I chose to do party balloons. So, I do ten, get buoyancy, price, and cube side length values, and then go up by a factor of ten. Wash, rinse, repeat. I got my one million poster done early. That year I had a free period, so I went back to google and did a billion balloons. Then a trillion. Quadrillion. Quintillion. Five quintillion or so. Eventually, I got enough, that if put in a cube it would reach up to space. Then I decided to calculate how long the resulting strand would be if you placed them end to end. I got an absurdly big number of miles. So, I googled "Convert Miles to Astronomical units." still a huge number. What's bigger than a mile? Hmm... what about light years? Oh, it can't be that many, maybe 0.5 at the gre- ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY LIGHT YEARS!?!?!?!?!?!? I'm pretty sure half the school heard my scream. Also, I wrote a song about entitled "170 light years of party balloons." (Darn, now "99 Red Balloons" is stuck in my head!)

So, as far as I know, launch escape systems have only been used on crewed rockets so far (I mean, and the ones carrying chimps and stuff, but you get my point). A while back, I got to thinking about the James Webb Space Telescope and how it has taken over ten billion dollars to develop. It is one of those payloads that cannot fail no matter what. So, my question is, do you think it would be beneficial if, for super-valuable payloads like the JWST to use some sort of a launch escape system? For the JWST, I can see a few obstacles. 1. The only place to mount an LES would be above or below the fairing. Above means significant fairing reinforcement would be required, below would mean it would stand a significantly higher chance of being destroyed by the explosion. 2. The JWST may not be able to withstand the high acceleration of a launch abort. 3. It would require significant time put into designing a recovery system. JWST is big and bulky, and might be one of the biggest things we've ever tried to land under parachute - not to mention that it was never designed for recovery in the first place. So, for the JWST, this late in development, my guess would be "no." At this point, with a ~2% chance of launch failure, it probably wouldn't be worth it. But, for future $10bn+ payloads, should they be designed with that capability in mind? Thoughts?

AAAAH I can't stop! My personal favorite so far: EDIT: I will stop! I promise! EDIT2: I lied.

Already? Wow, time flies. Me when I try to reference popular sci-fi shows: Funny: EDIT: A few more

New liftoff time is in ten minutes! Edit: And, liftoff!

I think I've lost count of how many last minute launch threads I've done. -SpaceFlightNow http://www.arianespace.com/mission/ariane-flight-va236/ ^^^Link to Arianespace Livestream. At last, the long awaited launch! It has been delayed for a long time, mostly due to labor strikes. Note: If you're planning to synchronize music to the liftoff (like me, or maybe it's just me), then remember that Ariane 5's take off at T+7, not T-0. Enjoy the launch! Launch has been postponed to the 5th. Misread end of window time. There is an issue with a ground sensor, it may still launch today. EDIT: Launch will be in ten minutes!

This reminds me of this.

Note 1: Some of this is copy-pasted from google drive, so the formatting is a bit weird for some of it. Note 2: This chapter doesn't have much to do with KSP, so bear with me for a while. It will become an actual mission report soon, I promise! Chapter Four - Dusty, Old, Out of Tune Spinet Special thanks to the reddit user Wisear, as that is his sheet music. I was originally going to write it out myself, but this chapter had already taken long enough, so, thanks, Wisear! Also, thanks to the owners of all the videos I linked, as well as all of the stuff I referenced. No copyright infringement intended.

I've been lucky enough to be placed in a school system that is not terrible. Fortunately. No bullies, no idiot teachers, no overly strict rules. I can guarantee you that at any stereotypical school I would immediately be singled out as that one nerd and wouldn't make it a week. Fortunately, I don't have to worry about that. Also, there was that one "confetti cannon" incident, and that one "final countdown" incident that both sort of upgraded my social status from "total nerd" to "cool nerd." But the one thing that really stinks about my school? THE INTERNET. Just for example, I'm at my house right now and my isp is having problems. I have to refresh each page twice to get it to load, it drops out completely every ten minutes, and these problems happen somewhat more often than I'd like. My school's internet is worse. Our school had the absolutely brilliant idea to split their one working wifi network into three smaller ones that didn't have the capacity to service hundreds of devices at a time. You get on-and-off access, changing every few minutes, and it frequently takes more than thirty seconds to load my email page. At our school, we have these things called chromebooks - they are, to say the least, not very fast. In math class, we often use Kahoot to do review stuff. Today, the lag was so bad that I literally got the message "Your network connection is too slow to play Kahoot." Which stunk, because I had to start over and I was in first place! That, and the fact that the middle school library is way better than the high school library. /end rant I wish you all luck in solving your school problems!

I'll admit, the solution in my head was much lower tech and less cool than yours, so if it's alright with you, this is my new explanation. Way cooler than "solid iron parts with embedded copper coils." Coming soon! I wanted to get chapter four out yesterday, but life happened. It's about half-ish done. I probably would be farther along, but I subconsciously went off on a five page tangent that has nothing to do with space exploration whatsoever. Also, I realize that it's more of a fanwork than a mission report at this point, but I promise, that will change really soon! (Around part 6 or 7, if I don't go off on another long tangent. So, it should be done by the end of today, unless something else comes up again! EDIT: I have to mow the lawn. Drat!

Again, thank you all for the kind words! I wasn't expecting such a response! For your first question, yeah. Someone should. Either that, or everyone will think someone else did, and nobody will! As for your second question, I suppose if the rocket gets Krakened or something (Hmm, I wonder how the humans will explain that!) then they would get another try if it's truly a freak of the universe. But, otherwise, nope. They will have "simulators," though. If at any time I offend anyone, please let me know and I can change the story. I promise that my intent is not to offend anyone. Chapter Three - Follow the Leader

Well, I don't have actual math right this second, or links to sources, but here's me: If you want to build a bigger rocket for reusability, you need to do a few things: Make a longer fuel tank and uprate the thrust of the engines. That, and the landing gear. Lengthening the fuel tank by a few meters is probably at most 3-4 million dollars of aluminum, composites, and electronics. In order to uprate the engines, if you're lucky all you need to do is make the turbopumps spin faster. If you do this too many times you may need to build a bigger pump, a longer nozzle, and maybe wider propellant pipes. I'm probably missing a few things, but that probably covers most of it. That is a lot of money, let's say a high estimate of 20 million dollars per flight. Let's say, for example, the Falcon 9 with the upgrade costs 62 million dollars (which is what it costs today) and that it would cost 42 million without the upgrade. The reusable first stage costs 35 million dollars (number I saw somewhere, + or - 7 million), let's assume that an unupgraded one would be about 20 million dollars (with 15mil of the upgrade going to the first stage, and 5mil to the second stage). So, in an unupgraded expendable flight you would spend 42 million dollars launching a rocket and not get anything back. On an upgraded flight, you would spend 62 million dollars and get back a 35 million dollar first stage. Even if it costs 5 million dollars to refurbish, that's still a net cost of 32 million dollars, ten million dollars less than without the upgrade. Also, the Falcon 9 is already one of the cheapest rockets on the market, even without reusability. Another point, Falcon 9 can theoretically launch 22mt to LEO (in expendable. The max for reusable is something like 12-ish mt), but it has never had the need to do so. The most it has ever launched in one shot is 9600kg, which was the Iridium NEXT 1 mission to LEO. That's less than half of the maximum payload. There isn't really that many super heavy satellites out there (yet), so that leaves SpaceX with plenty of margin to experiment with reusability. I mean, there's also the R&D costs to factor in, but reusability should pay off in the long term provided SpaceX can get the stage one refurbishment price below 15 million dollars per stage, which I'm pretty sure they can. There's also other benefits to reuse other than cost: you get data on hypersonic retropropulsion, you can (in theory) achieve very short turnarounds, and it's just plain awesome to see one of those things landing. As @Steel has said, you could just as easily argue for the other side.

There is a known bug in the game where if you mount landing gear on your root part the plane will turn left. If you have done this, try to mount it somewhere else.

I'm going to be completely honest, I hope it will be delayed a few days. I am going on vacation to Florida sometime in early June, and an RTLS would be sooooo cool to see!

IIRC this happened by accident once upon a time due to a steam update. The user in question reported that the game worked fine, but using the glasses gave him a headache after a while. EDIT: Another pic.

"You are only allowed to give 25 likes per day. You cannot give any more likes today. "

Yeah, same! Also, LANDING!!!!!!!!!!! It's really weird: I'm an American but because I play KSP so much I prefer when they do the metric sidebar.

That ground based boostback coverage was really cool!

HAHAHAHAHA! Cake is great, unless there is more frosting than cake. Eww. The poster below me has less than twenty subscribers on YouTube.

Bendy and the nk machine - You must try not to be killed by Bendy while building NK 15 engines to be used on the N1. Also, you win by making it to the moon before the Americans do.