Jonfliesgoats

Ooh! That's a cool idea! Plushies in free fall (less than .5 g) = laughing, giggling sounds. Plushies under acceleration ( 1.5 - 4g) = groaning, grunting sounds Plushies st impact (excess of 10 momentary g) = screams and ouch noises

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: The British have useless, flying aircraft carriers before the avengers. Speaking of flying aircraft carriers, we (America) did that in the 30s. It was a very Kerbal solution to defending a giant, lumbering zeppelin. http://www.airshipcenter.com/viewtopic.php?t=197 Science Peeve: Time travel in the terminator universe: Organic John Connor can travel through time, but organic cotton clothing can't.

OMG air combat maneuvering in movies: physics, tactics all wrong! Cockpits are filled with glowing, blinking lights and needless bleep and hoop noises. With all that activity, you pay attention to none of it. Star Wars: Jedi can bend metal and affect people's thoughts, but they still let themselves get shot up when they are flying a spacecraft? And what about the ethics of these monsters? They will ,anipulate matter and space around them but they let people die of disease? Why not have Jedi mentally seal people's wounds or eliminate tumors. Also, the speed of light never seems to factor into long range space guns in those movies. Jupiter Ascending: a roller-skating man-dog-soldier-lover survives the vacuum of space without severe cosmetic injury. nerd rage. NERD RAGE!!!

I have already suggested Kerbal pushiest with accelerometers. They would make happy noises when thrown around. NOW I'd like to suggest a line of Kerbal toys that the happy acceleration plushies could ride! Imagine KSP themed rockets, cars, planes and other things for your Kerbal plushies to ride!

Solar sails too, but that may require too much in the way of new physics.

Perhaps I don't understand your point about TWR? Let me describe my continued skepticism and you can point out solutions to my concerns both technical and otherwise. Again, this is not an attack. It seems we are studying an elaborate play for venture capital to me. Once you put a payload on anything, you increase its mass. So unless this hybrid chemical electric drive can generate more than, say, fifteen tons of thrust (a typical payload for a heavy rocket) its TWR is less than one. On TWR: We get confused in KSP when we look at engine TWR. That refers to the thrust of the motor relative to the motor itself. For example a General Electric CF6 B1F engine generates 56500lbs of thrust (roughly 248000 newtons of thrust). The engine weights 4.5 tons. It's TWR, as seen in KSP, would be somewhere around 5. Four of these engines are used on the Boeing 747-400. Rather than having a TWR of 5 or 20, the Boeing 747 (-8, 400, 200, SP) is incapable of increasing speed while aimed straight up. This is because there is no thrust, airspeed, altitude combination, that sees a 747's TWR exceed 1. This is before we even consider various forms of drag acting on the plane, which erode performance even more. So TWR is almost irrelevant until we account for the job we want our vessel to do and the entire vessel and payload, including the motors. In our case, we want something to make stuff move really fast in the atmosphere. Low TWRs are out. If you have a flying abject in the atmosphere at any altitude, it has to interact with enough atmosphere, by buoyancy or movement to create dynamic pressure, to support itself. That means drag when the thing moves or mass and volume when the thing stops. Absent this stuff, we descend. Accelerating a bag of gas to 8km/second requires a lot of energy regardless of active drag mitigation, plasma control, boudary layer manipulation, etc. It will take force and/or energy. Energy: We haven't even talked about the energy required exceeding whatever you can get from solar panels. Are we going to suspend nuclear reactors or fuel cells from this thing? This thing either needs giant engines or giant reactors/fuel cells/batteries Also, advertised performance and true performance are radically different between proposals and prototypes. Avro went from advertising a VTOL, supersonic flying saucer in the fifties to a round, crappy hovercraft. And, once all this is addressed how is this an advantage from a BF rocket or BF rocket dropped from a jet? Technical Con-Jobs i describe my doubts in laborious detail for one reason: Venture Capital Con Aristry! People with money are no more informed about aerospace than anyone else. Lots of proposals for the next great thing, which clearly have some humongous flaws, are simple plays by a few guys to lure some funds out of excited but uninformed venture capitalists. We have seen this many times over. These projects fail in the less pubicized, dirty endings to once brilliant proposals for flying cars, autogyros for soccer moms, etc. All one needs is an exciting powerpoint presentation and a farce of a development program. With those meager investments, you can get naive billionaires to shell out vast funds. So poking holes in these ideas isn't about making someone feel silly. Truly great advances have come from people who are are dedicated to once silly ideas. What we do need to look out for is that we don't let good people become devoted to shams and waste their energy and efforts. My trouble isn't with the billionaires or con artists. My trouble is with the dedicated, young engineers and pilots who naively hang their hats on these shams. Poking holes in ideas is a way to refine good proposals the heaps of flim-flam con jobs that hit the publications and websites we all read. In short, I think this is a ploy to get money.

As a kid, I remember the model rocket engines I would strap to my model planes had an ignition system that was basically a match head connected to a couple electrodes and some AA batteries. Often I would simply replace the electric ignition with fuse or some improvised ignition source (red hot wires heated with a torch). KSP themed model rockets could have the ignition system built into the modules and covered with paraffin wax. The individual modules could be modeled on the Flea, Thumper, etc. If people go nuts for Kerbal plushies, they'd go Gaga for flying Kerbal modules. I guess whoever brought this to market would have to make sure whatever toys are still listed as DOT C fireworks. Also, you couldn't ship the engine modules by air, which would make overnight delivery for a kid's birthday difficult, but no more so than current model rockets.

How cool would it be for KSP to develop a modular system of construction for Estes model rockets? The engineering challenges for these projects are smaller than they would have been just a few years ago. Aerodynamic or exhaust vectoring modules could be purchased with cheap laser gyro systems (available for RC planes at low cost). A parachute recovery system and data bus could allow for rudimentary on board programming from a flight control module (also KSP themed). Estes SRB motors would be installed in KSP themed modules sans parachute ejection charges. Basically it is entirely feasible for KSP nerds to play with a system of modular model rocket construction IRL and for rocket-nerd-kids to play with their ideas in KSP. The technalready exists at consumer-friendly prices at your local or online hobby shop. KSP just needs to package and market the stuff. Low budget model rockets would have low "tech" modules consisting of motors, parachutes and standard toy rocket stuff. Higher budgets would buy gyro accelerometers, servo/vane modules for aerodynamics and TVC. A flight computer module could interact with a crummy app that allows users to set the ballistic timing, parachute deployment, etc. via smart phones. This way you could watch everything from a twenty dollar to three hundred dollar modular rocket break. Also the flight computer module could send flight data to a kid's iPad.

Yeah. It may be more feasible than I originally thought. If the process can be sufficiently simplified to reduce points of failure, it could be good.

Max makes a good point. We already have a softball, scaled down planet with a lower atmospheric scale height to deal with. Too bad RSS isn't an option for Xbox.

There are a lot of good points made here, and I wore out my thumbs liking everyone's posts. Seriously, I really like the discussion here and if I didn't hit the like button on your post, it's because I missed it with my thumb. Personally, I get something from the challenges posed by KSP. Having easy performance or wildly optimistic engines makes the game more accessible but a little less fun. That's just my take. Along those lines the Rapier is a stretch to provide acessibility it seems. When I use them, it feels like I am cheating on an exam and thus receiving an easy pathway to fake spaceflight which would otherwise be reserved for slow children. I am not impartial, however. In the game I really favor simple, rocket launch systems, I am probably being over critical and yielding to my own bias. Also, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the US.

It seems you are upset. I get it. It's exciting to think that some compromise of buoyancy, speed and high technology will lead to great advances. This is why it's natural and understandable to have an emotional reaction to skepticism regarding any given proposal. Plus, any idea that is submitted for consideration is open for criticism. It's easy to see this as an attack on you rather than a discussion of your suggestion. I get that too. I've been there more than I care to admit. I have been the guy walking out of meetings thinking "Who was that jerk who told me I was chasing my tail, and how do I ruin his lunch?". I get it. Beyond the obvious problems with drag, we have to look at the resources involved with active plasma manipulation, maintaining a large craft that can ascend to this environment to support the desired payloads. By the time you look at the engineering challenges. It seeme like it's easier just to launch a big, old rocket. There are lots of parallels in aerospace history. Active boundary layer control, wing warping, parasite fighters from dirigibles, parasite fighters from fixed wing bombers, ornithopters, orotary rockets, VTOL, tilt-rotors (Slaughter the sacred cows!). BUT: Good science requires an open mind. Submarine launched ballistic missiles are complicated, but successful, for example. Helicopters are crazy complicated in comparison to STOL airplanes, but have undeniably made their mark. Maybe I am missing something? I have researched this proposal more and it still seems unnecessarily complicated. What are you seeing about this that I am not? Also what advantage does this offer that other proposed launch systems don't offer? To me it still seems like a complicated, technowhale in the sky.

Hey, KSP folks. How come we have untested engines like the Rapier, but we don't have PDE engines or VASIMIR engines? While I'd like to ditch the Rapier until the SABRE at least does some bench tests, I know that's not feasible. Can we at least get more engines that have actually been tested?

Airlaunch from planes faces a similar problem. To get an orbital flight out of a rocket, even one launched from a plane, the rocket has got to be big. Big rockets need bigger, special planes. Bigger, special planes combined with big rockets come with big engineering and maintenance challenges. Does this mean air-launch to space is dumb? No. It means some scales of launch favor vertical rockets, while smaller launches may favor stratolaunch types of programs.

Airships don't make cargo mass irrelevant. Far from it, actually. The higher we go in the atmosphere the larger our envelope has to be to support a given mass. So to lift, say, twenty tons of vessel and cargo at sea level, you need a given volume. At higher altitudes that volume gets much bigger, which is why weather balloons look like floppy jellyfish at launch. They have extra material at sea level allowing them to expand and displace more air at altitude. Also, remember going a little higher in the atmosphere causes a big loss in pressure and density. The problem is that current and foreseeable materials all have a measurable mass per square inch or square meter or whatever unit electrifies your toilet seat. So at some point the weight of extra envelope per square meter is greater than the buoyancy you gain for the extra volume. This is compounded by the fact that balloons don't expand like neat little spheres, but are somewhat less efficient with their mass. Balloons and airships are cool, but they are subject to limitations like anything else we build in this universe. Until we have a revolution in materials, today's balloons will perform only marginally better than the high altitude balloons of the late fifties and sixties. Lifting a rocket to a given altitude by balloon may have some advantages, and has been done before. I don't want to burst everyone's bubbles (Get it? I entertain myself so much!) about balloon launch systems. Balloon launch may be viable for lightweight payloads, using smaller rockets to launch micro satellites, etc.

1000km across the earth, not vertically.

Also, a lot of intelligent people got excited over pseudo-science, like extra-sensory perception. The KGB funded studies where they murdered kittens and measured the vital signs of mother cats. The US spent lots of money trying to have people spot specific targets. Trained investigators hire psychics to look for bodies. Whenever we desperately want something like free thrust, the ability to see our enemy's weapons or find a lost kid, we set ourselves up for confirmation bias.

The exciting thing about this is that we will either improve instrumentation, improve propulsion or improve our methods. Great claims require great evidence, but, a good scientist keeps an open mind. If this thing is generating thrust (which I doubt), perhaps something is happening that we aren't observing? If the most boring outcomes occur, we still move forward with techniques to isolate propulsion testing from magnetic interference, orientation etc. Thr ultimate test of this thing would be to fly it, and I think something like that is scheduled to happen.

John Oliver did a bit about this.

1.2 for Xbox?

Try a shallower reentry. Here's a document with some handy formulae if you want to anticipate max acceleration and the altitude you expect to reach it. https://www.faa.gov/other_visit/aviation_industry/designees_delegations/designee_types/ame/media/Section III.4.1.7 Returning from Space.pdf

I find big projects justify disposable lifters. If you want to pick up satellite deployment contracts, you can accrue projects until you launch a cluster of payloads on a disposable lifter. That said cost per payload- ton to orbit is something I take some pride in. Disposing of lifters, I can't seem to get below about 3000/payload ton to orbit. With recoverable boosters and only pushing for accuracy of .95 ship value on recovery, I can easily stay below 700/payload ton to orbit. I will say my recoverable lifters can only get 20t to orbit economically. My disposable monsters can get nearly unlimited mass to orbit.

Agreed. At some point, pilots should be able to do pilot stuff.

The same thing happens on Xbox. Dpad throttle controls scroll the staging info. So far it hasn't been worth complaining about since I have my resources window open during launch. Still, it is a bug.

On PC I could target specific docking ports. With the klaw on Xbox it seems I can only target a vessel's COM. It would be nice to target specific parts with the Klaw on Xbox.