Zeiss Ikon

The cable can't be that light weight. Even if it's the size of a party ribbon at the ground, it'll be tens of meters wide and thick at GEO station, just to hold up the weight of the cable below. In fact, the thickness ratio (anchor to GEO) is one of the determining factors on whether a space elevator is even possible. If you use a material as weak as mere glass fiber, you can't make the cable thick enough to hold itself up on Earth. Carbon fiber does better, but even with carbon nanotube fibers, you'll still have thousands of tons of cable above the atmosphere by the time you can lift a useful load. The "float down gently" will turn into "thousands of kilometers of giant meteorite" by the time GEO station enters atmosphere.

I played KSP for more than a year on a Core2Quad 2.7 GHz. Even a Core2Duo at 2.1 GHz ought to give a tolerable play experience, if you have at least 4 GB RAM, a decent video card, and a willingness to turn down some graphic settings and adjust your physics step rate. There is a certain "playing on a potato" vibe if you get any slower than that, though...

Failures of a geosynchronous tether are complex. How it fails depends strongly on where it fails. If the cable comes loose from the counterweight but is still attached at the bottom, you get the "equatorial firestorm", with the cable wrapping all the way around Earth. If it breaks loose at the bottom, it will lift up (due to release of the anchoring tension) and drag through the atmosphere, or even pull right out of the atmosphere (a couple hundred km vs. the 35000+ km length of the entire cable), then remain vertical due to tidal forces as it orbits. If there's a failure condition where the (nearly complete) cable manages to wind up horizontal, it's a strictly temporary condition; horizontal is not a stable position for any slender body in any orbit.

The orbital planes will (or should, if the game's physics doesn't screw this up) remain fixed as the body's orbit carries it around its primary, so there's no general way to make an insertion burn (when coming from interplanetary space) to ensure matching planes, other than to look ahead for the plane of the satellite(s) already in place and match it. There'll be two windows per orbit (one for insertion "above" the ecliptic, one for "below") when you can insert directly to the correct plane from a Hohmann transfer -- those will be the two times when the orbit "faces the sun". More cometary transfers will have similar windows, when the orbit you're matching is at a suitable angle matching your encounter approach. Otherwise, you'll just need to capture as high/eccentric as possible in the SOI and change planes where your velocity is low near apoapsis, in order to minimize the dV required to change planes.

Kerbal Space Program doesn't correctly model tides, but if you have Principia, you can build a long, flexible object in orbit (a string of twenty or so empty FL-T800 tanks should do it) and watch it stabilize -- not like a segment of an equatorial ring, but rather radial/vertical. This is because the pull of gravity is slightly stronger on parts closer to the parent body, slightly weaker on parts further away. This means that a body with sufficient length, initially not tumbling, and no active stabilization will always stabilize in a vertical/radial position, because one end will always get a little closer than the other, and then the tidal forces (which is what this phenomenon is called) will pull it into the radial position. This has actually been done in orbit at least twice; once with a 20 km wire tether extended from a Shuttle cargo bay (the wire snarled and then broke about 10 km out). Not only was the wire radial, there was enough tension to keep it pulled straight once a couple hundred meters was unreeled.

Your two satellites are not in the same plane (even if they appear to be). If you express their planes as inclination, one is at +90 degrees, the other is at -90 degrees. The cheapest way to get them together is to boost one so the apoapsis is near the edge of the SOI, wait until the satellite reaches that point, then burn to reverse the orbit (that'll be a tiny burn, potentially a few tens of m/s). Wait again, and burn at periapsis to lower your apoapsis back to the correct figure.

I've just done a Duna flyby, with crew of 3 Kerbals, in a rather minimal upgrade of the same launcher I use to land Kerbals on Minmus. I launched in a good window, got a clean flyby of both Duna and Ike, and then cut inside Eve's orbit on the way back to get a Kerbin encounter in less than several years. Total mission duration is looking like just over 600 days, close to a Kerbin year and a half. My rocket was a Twin Boar with a 6400 tank on top and a 200 tank on top of that, six asparagus boosters, each consisting of three FL-T800 tanks, a nose cone, a Sepratron, and a Skiff, then a transfer stage, 6400 tank with a Poodle. On top of all this was a Mk. 1-3 Command pod, well decked out with science gear. The core was (as planned) about 100 m/s short of stable LKO when fuel was gone, and from there it's been just the 6400 tank and Poodle. The Mun/Minmus landing version uses only two boosters and a 3200 tank transfer/landing stage. FWIW, I'm a little concerned about my shaved heat shield (60% ablator, 480 total instead of the original 800), and I'm going to be close to bingo fuel when I finish the correction burn to fine tune my Kerbin encounter, but I'm fairly sure I'll get the Kerbonauts home intact.

Originally, the electric tether was intended to generate power independent of solar panels. You mount an electron emitter on one end, an electron collector on the other, and the motion through Earth's magnetic field makes a current that you can tap to (for instance) charge batteries. Down side is, you're lowering your orbit whenever the current is running. So, someone got the idea to force the current the other direction (using a fuel cell, solar panel, or even RTG). The longer the cable, the less current you need for a given thrust, and the better it stabilizes itself with one end pointed at Earth (which is a desirable direction to give thrust/drag more or less aligned with the equator). It'll all be tradeoffs -- longer cable, higher mass, shorter cable, more power generation required. Higher thrust requires longer cable and/or more power, more compact system is limited to lower thrust.

Fins. Up to at least 25 km, 3-4 fins at the rear end of the rocket will do wonders for keeping the nose ahead of the tail. Once you get too high for fins to work, you don't need them anyway. Fortunately, they go away the first time you separate a stage.

There's nowhere else on Kerbin you can launch from that's cheaper in dV than the Space Center, unless you can find a high mountain peak almost exactly on the equator. Starting high will save fuel, because your motors will have more thrust and higher Isp from launch. If you have 1.4.* and Making History, you should be able to use a "mission" setup to spawn a launch pad on a suitable mountain. Yep, it's a real challenge. Based on my experience, it's just barely possible with stock parts. The Japanese have done this on Earth, with a 4- or 5-stage rocket using only solid propellant -- that had no guidance other than fins and timers to control staging and ignitions. Unfortunately, the stock game doesn't include sounding rocket parts (IMO, it should, at least in MH, as well as German A-4/V-2 and A-3/Wasserfall rockets from the 1940s -- can you launch a payload into orbit with an A-4 pushing an A-3? Probably, on Kerbin, but I doubt it, on Earth -- but I bet you can launch to orbit with clusters and stages of A-4 engines burning 50% strength ethanol and liquid oxygen).

I repair power tools for a living. Brushes may cost more initially than transistors, but when you need to replace a $120 electronics unit (including the trigger switch and stator) to make your brushless drill work again, tell me how much cheaper transistors are than brushes (replacing worn out brushes might cost as little as $10 if you can unscrew the caps and swap old for new yourself). In a world where tool abuse is about as common as showing up for work, brushless tools are not (yet) cheaper than tools with brush motors, in terms of cost per year of operation. That said, brushless tools are becoming nearly universal in battery powered tools, but running brushless from (universally available) AC requires either rectifying and regulating voltage, or stepping down and rectifying to produce power that the control electronics can use, even if they're sending line voltage to the stator coils. A couple manufacturers have produced brushless AC powered tools, but so far, they are less powerful and more expensive than conventional brush-motor tools in the same class -- and, again so far, they aren't as robust. If you had high power (high voltage, or high current capacity) DC in your house, brushless might be the way to go, though most everything you already own would likely be permanent magnet brush motors, because brushless haven't been mainstream long.

If you're going BASE jumping, don't forget that only Kerbals with two or more stars have parachutes...

I'd point you to my Twin Boar SSTO album, but it was on Photobucket, and now is gone (I wasn't willing to pay $400/year to let people see my images). I just looked, and I don't seem to have images on my HDD. I'll try to look for the craft file tomorrow. Okay, @Fraktal, I found the craft file in my Dropbox, along with my original Stock Mass Fraction Challenge post for the reusable version.. Not a single photo remains, thanks, Photobucket, but I found the original in my (preserved) 1.2.2 install. Given it's 100% stock, I think it's unlikely it would fail to work in even 1.4.3.

The few milliseconds of near-zero current during the AC cycle isn't long enough for human senses to even detect, never mind for human reflexes to react. An AC shock will lock muscles every bit as solidly as a DC shock, and is somewhat more likely to kill due to the reaction of the heart's pacing system to 60 Hz current. Home DC is impractical at present because of 120 years of AC history. Everything in your house runs on AC, and very little of it can switch to DC. Most circular saws will run about as well on 120 V DC as they do on 120 V AC, but a refrigerator, electric clock, microwave oven, fluorescent lamp (including Compact Fluorescent units that replaced incandescent bulbs), and most LED bulbs won't work on DC. The fridge and clock depend on a type of induction motor, fluorescent lighting depends on transformers to create the high voltage needed to create the arc inside the tube, and most LED lamps also use a transformer (there are probably some that use a DC-capable switching supply, but those cost more than a transformer/rectiifier setup, hence are less favored). Even your computer power supply and the charger for your cell phone most likely require AC (though they could be designed to run on DC, they generally aren't). The only equipment that works equally well on AC and DC is incandescent lights (old style bulbs with a tungsten filament inside) and "universal" series-wound motors (AC motors with brushes are this type). A power tool that has brushes and no electronics (soft-start or speed control) will probably run just fine on suitable voltage DC, though some will suffer switch damage over time. Many hair driers are in this category, though often the "low heat" setting will just be "cold" or "high heat" because they use a diode to cut off half the AC wave to the heating element to reduce its output (which you get depends on the polarity of your DC power). An older electric range will work (except that the clock will burn out almost instantly) -- resistance heating doesn't care about DC vs. AC. A modern inductive cooktop will likely be destroyed, if it doesn't just fail to even start up (I'm not familiar with the electronics in those). Radiant cooktops may or may not work -- the heating elements are probably fine, but they use electronic controls instead of simple switches like a 1970s vintage range; those controls might depend on AC input.

@Fraktal You do know, don't you, that a Twin Boar with an additional 6400 tank can SSTO on its own with 15+ T of payload -- right? Plus probe core, batteries, and enough parachutes and landing legs to recover intact on either land or sea.

I spent my playing time yesterday and today building a rocket that can send back science from LKO -- with a launch mass under 1 T. In fact, One Ton Tony 4 launches at 977 kg, and with a little care makes a 73x75 Kerbin orbit with 50+ m/s to spare (plenty to deorbit). No solar panels -- just couldn't get to orbit with the extra 5 kg -- but the battery is good for a couple orbits and three data transmissions.

I'll echo the sentiment that this is the best "fun" money I've ever spent. I bought the expansion, Making History, as well, and it's still the most play time and fun per dollar I've ever had from any game, computer or otherwise. Just today, I've been refining and testing a rocket that can put a science experiment into Kerbin orbit, transmit the data back to Kerbin, and masses less than one tonne at launch. The demo is pretty outdated (last I looked); but it's true to the general spirit of the game -- and it's a free trial. You can, with a little knowledge (such as watching the right video on YouTube) launch a rocket past the Mun in the demo. It's much easier to do so in the full game; you have many more parts choices, with higher performance, and Kerbin's atmosphere was revised to make it less like soup.

Okay, there was mention of payload, so I went back to the VAB and put a payload on One Ton Tony. Version 4, at this point. Pretty much the same rocket as One Ton Tony 3, but with a 2 Hot and Communotron 16 (on the far side). Same propulsion, but a different flight profile due to the 6 kg of additional launch mass. I must have launched fifty time with a solar panel that would have made this a permanent science vessel (barring leaving the panel pointed the wrong way for too long), but couldn't find a profile that would lift another 5 kg. I was rather surprised to find that the Communotron, sticking straight out from the side of the control section, didn't break or burn off during launch. Once again, the launch support is angled to start the gravity turn immediately -- but now, it's a full 15 degrees. The launch profile that works is to switch SAS to prograde hold immediately after start, stage off the booster as soon as the Sepratrons burn out, and cut the Spark as soon as apoapsis reaches 73 km. During coast, set up a maneuver node (I was never able to make a manual burn precisely enough to get a stable orbit), and with care in setting up and executing the node, you can carry 50+ m/s into a 73x75 orbit. The battery will last through two orbits in a fixed attitude and three data transmissions, and still leave enough power for a deorbit maneuver (for those who like to keep their LKO clean). On my test flight, the entire vessel survived reentry (even the antenna!) down to the surface (where, of course, it was destroyed). Here's One Ton Tony 4 coasting to the orbit insertion burn. Sorry about the night launch... And here's a science observation ready to transmit, with the deorbit maneuver already set up in the background. Transmission complete, mission accomplished! This was done with 100% stock parts; not even anything from Making History -- albeit on Kerbin, not Earth.

Okay, here we are. I'm pretty certain it's not possible to go beyond this level with stock/MH parts. This is One Ton Tony 3. As you can see, he's 62 kg overweight, but he's going to stay that way. I launch at an angle, so I don't waste time starting my gravity turn, and get the same turn every time. This is approximately 5 degrees -- with a stock game, the only way to read this appears to be looking at the nav ball with the rocket on the launch pad. Start with SAS enabled and throttle up (T and Z keys), then switch SAS to prograde hold as soon as possible after staging to launch. Stage as soon as the Separatrons burn out. Coast to 3000-3100 m, then stage to start the Spark. Watch Ap display in map view, and cut off thrust when Ap reaches 75 km. I set a maneuver node at Ap, but you can also just keep prograde hold and burn appr. 9 sec before Ap. You'll have just a whisper of fuel left when Pe comes up out of the atmosphere; if you're very careful, it might be enough to deorbit; otherwise, if you burn the tanks dry, you'll get an Ap close to 180 km with Pe around 75 km. Vessel has only the built-in antenna on the Okto 2, and no science instruments. It might be possible to add a thermometer or barometer, though it would require also adding an antenna to transmit the data -- and even a few kg additional mass would prevent circularizing, unless you're a better pilot than I am.

Hmmm. Now I'm going to have to try this. I run stock with Making History, so good news is I need a LOT less dV, but bad news is, I don't have procedural parts.

Actually, the absolute R/C speed record belongs to gliders flying dynamic lift (wind shear) -- and it's well above 400 mph. One of those gliders (heavy fiberglass or carbon fiber airframes) might indeed survive the wind, perhaps even the shear (150 m/s change over less than 100 m), but the turbulence inside the funnel can greatly exceed even that level of force. Even if the turbulence doesn't just break the airframe, it would tend to upset the craft, when it's already in conditions where the operator would have trouble maintaining visual contact and orientation.

Exactly true. The magnetic fields involved are pretty weak (lots of Tesla, but not many Gauss), and there's a limit to how much current you can run through the tether, because you can only collect and pump so many electrons through the system.

That thread pretty much agrees with what I've posted above -- you can get 3-phase in America if you're willing to pay for it, but it's rare in residential. It's fairly common in commercial and industrial settings, because they use enough power that 3-phase makes sense (three times the power with only 50% more wire/connection). The trend in residential is to use less power, rather than more (I get a conservation-oriented letter from my power company every month, reminding me that I use a lot more than the average power consumption for my neighborhood -- which surely has a lot do do with a couple aquariums and half a dozen computers that run 24/7, and a partner who gets cold easily but can't take excessive heat, either).

Thrust is thrust. Apply pulses centered on, say, 200 km perigee, thereby raising apogee until the last thrust gives you an escape trajectory. Just like using an ion engine or solar sail. And the EDT should still work in Solar-orbit space, since the Sun's magnetic field pervades the entire Solar System (that field is a great deal weaker than Earth's, but you can go to continuous thrust once you're past Earth's magnetopause or on an escape orbit). One practical limit on this is that you have to collect enough electrons on the negative end of the tether to offset the electron gun that keeps the positive end positive, and thus avoid building up a huge positive charge on the spacecraft (which, if large enough, may cause your electronics to malfunction). There are electrons in the solar wind, of course; in fact, it may be more practical to collect electrons outside Earth's influence than it is inside the Van Allen belts. The other limitation is that you need a magnetic field to react against -- get outside the Solar System and you're dependent on the galactic field, which is much, much weaker than the Sun's field (even at the edge of the Oort Cloud). Then there's the problem of keeping the tether stretched. In LEO, the tidal effects of Earth's gravity can do that job. Get out in Solar orbit, and the available tides won't be enough to keep the positive end of the tether from attracting the negative end. You'd have to make the "tether" rigid enough to resist this attraction, which adds mass to the "engine".

This has been wildly incorrect for at least the fifty years or so I've been interested in aircraft and flight, at least in the USA. If you build the aircraft yourself, you must still have it inspected by a qualified/licensed Airframe and Powerplant inspector before you'll be issued a tail number, even as an "experimental" type. And even with an experimental aircraft (which includes all homebuilt craft, even if they're a model that has hundreds flying -- because no two builders work exactly alike), you need to register the aircraft and have the appropriate license (Light Sport if it's below a certain weight and has no more than two seats, or General otherwise for fixed wing, or helicopter etc. to match the aircraft type). The only exception to the licensing requirement for flight is an Ultralight -- by USA definition, this aircraft must weigh less than 254 lb dry (no pilot, no fuel), have only a single seat, carry no more than five US gallons of fuel, and have a level flight speed not exceeding (IIRC) 55 kt (about 62 mph). No registration of the aircraft is then needed, and no license for the pilot (though instruction is VERY STRONGLY recommended; you can kill yourself just as dead in a fabric-and-tube airplane as you can in a Cessna). There are also restrictions on where you can fly an ultralight, for the protection of the public -- generally, you can't fly over densely populated land or into controlled airspace (near airports with towers, above a graduated set of altitudes at various distances), and you may only fly them in day VFR conditions (5,000 ft or higher ceiling, 5 miles visibility, daylight). To the OP: tornado conditions are specifically "no-fly" by FAA regulations (I'll stick with USA here, because most tornadoes over land occur in North America), so manned flight into a tornado (or even during a tornado warning) would require an FAA waiver, which is unlikely to be granted. Weather conditions during a tornado are often such that remote control would be prone to interference (lightning, heavy rain, etc.), and the entire area is hazardous; it's unlikely anyone by storm chasers would tke the risk of trying to control a drone or R/C airplane/sailplane into a tornado. Then there's turbulence; generally, anything light enough to fly will be prone to being torn apart by the turbulence in the funnel of a tornado (this region is the one that breaks hardwood trees into fragments, lifts cars and destroys houses, as well as occasionally implanting hundreds of pieces of straw -- grass stems! -- into a power pole or similar). There was a science fiction story published in Analog magazine in the 1980s, as I recall, about flying a custom built aircraft into "tornado watch" conditions, and accidentally triggering the formation of a tornado, then getting caught in the funnel. This was fiction, and I think it's unlikely any actual aircraft (even one overbuilt from carbon fiber, the way the one in the story was) could survive conditions inside a tornado funnel -- or that a pilot could maintain consciousness due to the G forces once caught in the winds there.