maltesh

In the above equation, μ is the Standard Gravitational Parameter of the sun. r1 is the radial distance from the center of the sun of your origin planet. r2 is the radial distance from the center of the sun for your destination planet.

In space, there is no free atmosphere hanging around to create your pressure differential for you. So, by necessity, whatever you use to push the water out of its container into space is going to expend more energy doing so than you can recover by pushing the water through a turbine. And as such, there are more efficient ways to directly use that energy that don't lose you water (or whatever fluid you decided to use).

It's the ambient air pressure that's pushing the liquid up into your mouth, and earth's atmospheric pressure won't allow you to suck a column of water higher than about ten meters, as that's where the pressure of the extra water in the straw matches the atmospheric pressure. So (assuming that's what you're talking about) you can't run an evacuated pipe from the ocean to space and run a turbine off it.

Yep. At least in 1.0.2, parts do not cool down when the spacecraft is unloaded. I don't know if the next release will fix that; I hope that it will.

Very nice. The only thing I might recommend is to somehow indicate when a Kerbal has enough experience for another level, but will need to return to Kerbin to receive that next level. Perhaps putting a dot in the pending dark star or stars, and only filling it when the Kerbal actually has achieved the level? Might start to make things look cluttered though.

The source appears to be mystifying. I can't routinely reproduce it on the pad, or when hyperedited into space. I've taken out and put in for science and antenna range, but it is starting to look like it may only be afflicting the depicted class of craft, which is rather strange indeed. A list of mods will be forthcoming when I get back to my computer. I'll also try testing the depicted spacecraft on the pad.

I'm having it happen with science that has been loaded into pods; Once the science has been loaded, I can't have an EVAed Kerbal retrieve it. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4057920/Kerbal%20Space%20Program/v1.0/Screenshots/screenshot285.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4057920/Kerbal%20Space%20Program/v1.0/Screenshots/screenshot286.png I'm going to have to do some more experimentation and see if it might be something else.

I ultimately wound up doing three things: I installed Modular Fuels, so I could fill the stock fuel tanks with liquid fuel alone. I lowered the heat production so that they produced as much heat as a skipper. While I've seen posts that the heat production of LV-Ns is overstated in stock,I'm hard-pressed to find more reputable confirmation, and my biggest objection is that spacecraft don't cool down while unloaded, and the stock heat management capabilities leave a lot to be desired. I may wind up lowering the heat production even more. I'm also experimenting with Near Future's Heat Control parts. The LF-only tanks are Kerbpainted reddish so that I can easily tell them from LF/O tanks.Probably going to have to upgrade to the folding radiators on most of my designs, though.

Given that the RTGs mass 0.08 tons and output 0.75 EC/sec, 10 EC/sec is really, really low for a 20-ton nuclear reactor. For a buy-in at 20-tons minimum, it would need to be significantly more productive. If I'm reading my persistence files correctly, the Near Future 2.5m fission reactor outputs 2000 EC/s at maximum, at a mass of 5.4 tons, not counting any radiators you may have attached to it.

All the sources you're looking at were from before 1.0. In 1.0, the new aerodynamics lowered the delta-V to reach LKO to about 3500 m/s.

One of the things I wound up doing several years ago, was setting up something that would scrape Heavens Above for Satellite Posses over my location, and post them to my Google Calendar. As a result I'd say that days in which the ISS /is/ visible in the morning or evening are more common than days in which they aren't. I usually have several weeks of daily visible passes, followed by a week or two where it's not visible as it switches from Evening to morning, or vice versa.. The calendar pulls the next 10 days' worth of ISS sightings and Iridium Flares off Heavens Above, (and for some reason, seems to have not updated since Wednesday. I should look into that.)This is kind of typical for mid June, where there are nights with three or four sightings. Most of the year, it's either one or two visible passes per day in the evening or morning. That said, I live at about 41° N latitude, and quick futzing around with Heavens above seems to show visible passes seem a /lot/ rarer at the equator.

Personally, I put the download-and-unzip software in "C:\Program Files (Uninstalled)\" Keeps the programs I can just delete outright separate from the ones that I should be hitting up "Add/Remove Programs" for.

A couple years ago, , when I was mucking around with Google Shee'ts scripting, I wound up hacking together a script that would scrape the Heavens Above site for my location, and put the results into my Google Calendar. I had a bit more free time back then, so I'd go out and look at the ISS every time the skies were clear and Heavens Above predicted a -3.0 Magnitude pass or brighter for the ISS, or Iridium Flares brighter than -7.0. At the mid-latitudes, I'd generally say that days on which the ISS can be seen (assuming clear skies), either in the post-sunset hours, or in the pre-dawn hours, are more common than ones where it can't. I trhink I've seen Tiangong-1 once. It was nowhere near as bright as the ISS.

This suggestion gets brought up pretty much every time Lagrange points get mentioned. However, phantom spheres of influence would not even remotely accurately model the shapes of the gravity gradients around lagrange points. You get weird, elongated kidney-shaped gradients around L4 and L5, and the unstable points of L1, L2, and L3 are even more complicated.

The two-body mechanics of Kerbal Space Program does not support Lagrange points, and the weird gravity gradient contours around them would not be accurately reproduced by phantom spheres of influence.

I wound up writing up a procedure for determining the mass and radius of unknown bodies using two elliptical orbits around said bodies a couple years ago. It requires tywo, because you've got two unknowns (mass and radius), therefore you need two equations, and doesn't rely on the orbits being absolutely circular. You'll need to know the altitudes of apoapses, altitudes of periapses, and the periods of both orbits, all of which can be obtained from the map screen (or at least, could be obtained once the map screen showed up, and began giving apoapse and periapse times. That was...0.11, if I recall correctly?) At any rate, the procedure can be found here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/16177-Analytically-Solving-for-Gravitational-Parameter-and-Body-Diameter?p=229143&viewfull=1#post229143

Also, orbital scanning isn't the only thing you have to do if you want to get an accurate read of what the Ore is like in the region. The orbital scan is /very/ coarse, and can be quite wrong about what conditions are on the ground. You actually have to land something in the biome with the Surface Scanner to get a truly accurate picture of what things are like dirtside. The difference between what the Mun's Farside Crater looked like on the scanning map before and after I put a Surface scanner on site was quite large. Before, yeah, it looked like a place I might want to drop a miner. After...heck no. Ore was way too sparse there.

It's an unavoidable consequence of the way KSP calculates orbits when you're off rails. When you're on-rails, KSP takes your velocity and distance from the central body, and solves the Keplerian equations as a function of time for the position your spacecraft will be in. As a result, your spacecraft effectively travels a perfect Keplerian orbit, and the parameters that describe your orbit's shape and orientation do not change. When you're off rails, things work differently. The game takes the position of your Root Part, its distance and direction from the center of the body you're orbiting, and its current velocity, and projects what the Keplerian orbit would be if it went on-rails at that very instant. Then it assumes that the acceleration due to gravity would be the constant over the next timestep, calculates where your spacecraft would be based on that constant gravity magnitude and direction, and moves your spacecraft to where it would be based on that timestep. And then, it recalculates the orbit. Since your spacecraft is not /actually/ travelling a Perfect Keplerian Orbit, but instead making a large number of tiny jumps that /approximate/ one, the orbital parameters are going to change after each timestep. Is this a big deal? On the whole...No. Yes, your orbital parameters are changing when you're in normal time. They're not changing much over the typical play time, and if you decide to kick back into timewarp, they'll stop changing. Yes, your Argument of Periapsis (The parameter the persistence file labels LPE ) changes. With an orbit as circular as the one you're using, the minor perturbations introduced by the timestep method are going to shift your line of apsides /because/ the orbit is so nearly circular.

The Second Hohmann Transfer Window to Dres after a New Game (Using Kerbal Alarm Clock's Model option, or Alexmoon's Calculator) is almost too perfect to miss. Dres is passing through the plane of Kerbin's orbit on your arrival, so mid-course corrections can be quite minimal. The last time I threw a fleet to Dres during that window, the largest mid-course correction any of the spacecraft needed to make was about 30 m/s. And the return window was about 10 days after arrival. The window occurs about 244 Earth Days after the beginning of a new game.

Escape Velocity from Sirius at 8 LY is not about 80 km/s. It's about 80 m/s. 32 km/s is 400 times faster than escape velocity from Sirius at 8 LY.

According to the Wikipedia article, Sirius is approaching the solar system at about 7.6 km/s. The Escape velocity of Sirius at a distance of 8 LY is about 83 m/s. The Sun is not orbiting Sirius.

While the Kerbal is already there, so you might as well plant the flag...you don't have to do so to hit Level 3. "Landed" experience counts even if the Kerbal never leaves his seat. As such, Orbit,Kerbin (2) + Land,Minmus (5.75) + Orbit,Sun (6) + Orbit,Mun (3) = 16.75 XP. Level 3 requires 16 XP. Planting a flag on Minmus would be 6.25 XP instead of 5.75, for a total of 17.25 XP instead. Still, every bit helps if you want to reach for that Level 4 (32 XP), I guess.

Ever since I started using Kethane back in 0.18, and eventually, upon switching to Karbonite, I'd almost invariably refine on the surface, and shipped the finished products to orbit. There were a number of reasons for this, but the primary one was always that 99% of what I needed in orbit was liquid fuel and oxidizer. I almost never ran out of monoprop on anything I built, even if the only monoprop on board was what came free with the capsule. Ion drives and Monoprop engines were reserved for small probe craft that were going on one-way trips. Also, when I mined on solar power, refueling was never sufficiently time-critical that I /couldn't/ wait for the next morning if need be, and surface mining/refining gave the option of running the refinery off whatever it was I was mining. That, and all the solutions were /much/ simpler when everything ran off of liquid fuel and oxidizer. I know Kethane wasn't purchasable in the VAB when I stopped using it, no idea if it still isn't now, but that definitely added an extra level of annoyance to designing surface-to-orbit Kethane tankers. Now that the LV-Ns only use liquid fuel, it will be interesting to see exactly how my infrastructure changes; I haven't yet gotten to the point where I'm mining in my Career Save.

There is also Option 6.

If you're not averse to using mechjeb's autopilots, my general "quicjkand-dirty" approach was to use the Landing Guidance to attempt to land on the spot, and cancel its action after it made the plane change.