Zeiss Ikon

I went to my sandbox save to let Valentina play around in @SuicidalInsanity's autogyro. After about ten crashes on takeoff, I more or less got the hang of flying the thing -- control altitude with throttle, direction with roll, keep yer bloomin' fingers off the yaw keys, and use pitch only in short taps, generally to raise the nose if you get into a dive (usually from letting roll go too far). Flew about 15 km out to sea toward the Island Airfield, realized I probably didn't have enough fuel to get there, turned around, and flew back to KSC. Almost managed to land the thing on the grass alongside the runway -- a half dozen more flights and I might manage it. The whole time I was trying and failing, as well as flying the thing pretty successfully there at the end, it seemed as if the rotor was spinning much too slowly; the receding blades were actually flying backward relative to the air (in a real world autogyro, the forward speed is limited by the need for the receding blade to still have enough "forward" motion relative to the airfoil shape to produce lift). Possibly related, I'm used to seeing autogyros built with negative pitch on the entire length of each blade; this gives similar effect to the washed out tips on this one, but without the excessive drag of the positive pitch inner sections of the blade. I haven't tried any other autogyros in KSP (because they all seem to need mods), but I'm tempted to pull this one apart and mount one rotor on each wing of a conventional-ish airplane (might have to build the second rotor to rotate the other way to avoid excessive gyroscopic effects).

This, to me, is the killer for multiplayer KSP. Just going to the Mun (really, even an LKO rendezvous, if you didn't launch into a close orbit match) requires time warp to avoid taking up huge amounts of time (typically Munar intercept time from transfer burn is in excess of 4 hours, and LKO rendezvous from random positions is likely to require several orbits, i.e. multiple hours, to get an encounter without expending huge amounts of dV). But if Player One warps while Player Two is still setting up his transfer burn node, what happens? I don't think this problem can have a solution that will be widely satisfactory. I'd prefer to keep KSP one of the few games that can be fully enjoyed without even an internet connection -- I can install on my laptop, and (providing I have an external cooler or don't mind intermittent maddening slowdowns as the machine throttles clock speed for cooling) play for months in the boonies, as long as I have electric power (even a low power inverter for a car's 12V outlets -- need not match the 90W suppy it takes to run and charge simultaneously) to charge the machine's batteries. Very few other games I've enjoyed over the past thirty years have combined this quality with the engagement and replay ability that KSP offers. I think the last ones that came close were Doom, Heretic, and Hexen (very similar low-graphic DOS FPS), which all had optional LAN multiplayer capability. I don't see any reason to entertain the possibility of ruining KSP by trying to force it into the multiplayer mold.

This kind of link? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576517308111 BTW, I appear to have misread or misremembered the thrust levels tha thave been replicated; it's 2 microNewton not 2 mN.

Yep. This kind of thing (along with its general versatility -- give countdowns for leaving and reentering atmosphere, for braking burns when making rendezvous, as well as better burn timing for common maneuver nodes) is why BBT is my one and only mod and the one I'm most likely to say "won't play without it." Fortunately, it doesn't seem to require an update every time KSP updates, probably because it's tied into pretty mature, long-tested code inside the game, so I don't have to wait for it to be updated when there's a new KSP to download. I don't generally fly with sufficiently close fuel margins to care about doing perfect suicide burns, so I'm not holding my breath for a BBT upgrade to cover them, and for the same reason, I usually use 70% of burn time (rather than 60%) to start my landing burn. I'd rather reach a dead stop at some altitude, and do a "much less suicidal" burn after free falling from there, than try to save a few dozen units of Lf/O. At this point, my landers are direct-launch with drop tanks/legs. This also makes landing easier; I can just keep retrograde hold on, or turn it back on after dropping a bit if SAS has automatically switched to "heading hold" when velocity got too low, and then (now that I have some level 2 pilots in my career) switch to "radial out surface" when I get close to ground.

I don't have anything like that on file, because I've never built a propeller, but there is at least one tutorial video on YouTube on how to build a stock propeller (based on reaction wheels). If you find multiples, view the newest one; KSP has changed significantly over time, and while things that worked in 1.2 probably still work, stuff that worked in 1.0 or older versions are likely to fail in spectacular ways at this late date.

Actually, prior to Apollo 13 (where the LM Descent Engine was used for orbital maneuvering after the SM anomaly), the manufacturer of the LM Descent Engine had never admitted that the engine could be depended on to ignite a second time, despite it using pressurized hypergolics where all you had to do was open the valves to start the engine. After Apollo 13 (when a restart was actually done after the manufacturer reluctantly admitted there was no known reason a cold engine couldn't be started again, provided tank pressure hadn't decayed), restarting the Descent Engine became an option, but as noted, for a reliable restart the engine had to be cold -- which, in the radiation-only cooling environment of space, required several hours of shutdown time even after a short burn. One of the advantages we have in KSP over 1960s technology NASA hardware is unlimited restarts, hot or cold, with "forever storable" propellants. Along with the tiny/dense/closely spaced bodies, this makes it a more playable game, as many who've played through the early years of the space age in RSS/RO will attest.

FWIW, a "tundra orbit" is a special kind of synchronous orbit. It has the same orbital period as the host body (24 hours for Earth, 6 hours for Kerbin), but is neither circular nor equatorial. The satellite will spend a significant fraction of its time close to zenith for the same point on Kerbin's surface, but won't remain fixed in the sky continuously like a geostationary position would. They're used mainly to provide "most of the time" satellite services to high latitude markets (Canada, Alaska, Russia, New Zealand, Argentina/Chile, South Africa, etc.). Sirius Radio used three satellites in tundra orbit to provide service to North America from 2000 to 2016, before changing to geostationary broadcast. This allowed them to broadcast with lower transmitter power to the non-directional (broadly upward, but no more selective than that) antennae mounted on cars. FWIW, I avoid "place a satellite in orbit X" contracts. Not just because of the "which direction" question, but because it's easy to wind up making three or four launches trying to get the right orbit with limited maneuvering fuel in a reasonably compact probe/relay body. IMO, tourist and rescue contracts give better payoff for the effort.

If you open the message box (in the center of the screen) and hold your mouse cursor over the trash can icon, you should be able to get rid of 300 messages in less than two minutes. Other than that, have you looked at the setting for "advanced message app"? I haven't checked it, but turning it off might get you the old version...

There's a semi-famous quote found on atomicrockets.com: "Friends don't let friends write reactionless drives." This is because a reactionless drive overthrows "the tyranny of the rocket equation." Given enough energy and time, a reactionless drive can reach relativistic velocity with a relatively small ship, one that isn't 99.99999999% reaction mass. Singleships become a possibility -- starships crewed by a single person. Interstellar exploration and colonization is limited only by the relativistic speed limit and the availability of a suitably powerful and durable energy source: you can go in less than a human lifetime aboard the ship (assuming you find a way to shield against space junk at relative velocity of .9 c or higher), but if you come back you'll be centuries or millennia in the future. That quote may need to be retracted soon. Humanity apparently already has a reactionless thruster that has been shown to work, has a theoretical basis that holds up to peer review, and appears to be scalable to a level that would, at the minimum, support generation type colony ships traveling at above .1 c and probes traveling at .4 c. This article, despite being headed with photo of a test article of an EM drive that hasn't be conclusively demonstrated to produce thrust, details a different design of partially mechanical thruster that depends on something called the Mach Effect, in which a mass that is both changing velocity and changing energy (the latter, for instance, due to changing electrical charge) changes (inertial) mass. Given this (long predicted by theory and well tested, by this point) phenomenon, one need merely "push while the mass is heavy, and pull while it's light" at a reasonably high frequency to obtain a time averaged net thrust. Even if your individual drive units only give net thrust of a few millinewtons (at present, 2 mN is the tested value), the fact they don't throw mass overboard means they can, if run for long enough, accelerate a large ship to arbitrary rapidity (rapidity is a linear measure of internal-apparent velocity, taking Lorentz contractions into account -- unlike velocity, which is limited to the speed of light, rapidity can be arbitrarily large). Whether it will make sense to launch generation ships to plant colonies will depend on a lot of factors -- whether we can confirm habitable planets at interstellar distances, and how rapidly we expect travel rates to increase (and especially if we believe a warp-based FTL is possible) -- but the capability to do so may exist before the end of this century. Or sufficient scaling of Mach effect thrusters may become like hydrogen fusion -- ten to twenty years away for the past half century. I suspect we'll know before there are enough people living on Mars to fill a small town. Edit to add: No, this isn't an April Fool, either. I just found it today, but the article linked is dated from last October.

That's pretty much a textbook definition of a "flare" in landing. Raise the nose to bleed off speed while cutting sink rate. Ideally done without "ballooning" into a temporary climb, as that can lead to a "drop" landing.

But in the book, Jack Ryan and the crew of Dallas concluded that Red October's "caterpillar" drive wasn't MHD (though you could build an MHD pump/drive using sea water as the working fluid -- in the book they decided the superconducting magnets needed were impractical for a submarine), but rather sound-baffled mechanical pumps (like a jet boat's drive, only REALLY BIG and with slower flow). In the movie, they kept it as MHD because it was easier to hand-wave a new technology than to explain how the economically strapped Soviet navy could have deployed something Americans knew about, but considered impractically expensive). The movie also completely deleted everything about Cardinal, the spy inside the Soviet apparat who had already given information about Red October -- including photographs during construction -- to the CIA. The reason MHD won't work for a sea drive is that it's impractical to make a magnetic field large enough and dense enough, at the same time, so you wind up needing to pass enough electric current through the water to virtually boil it in order to get enough pumping action to use the thing as propulsion. When pumping liquid metal, as with reactor cooling, it's a lot easier, because the metal is a good conductor, and you can pump in the throat of a venturi and keep the magnetic field compact, so less current is needed. Look on YouTube for "NaK fountain" to see an example using the eutectic alloy of sodium and potassium, which is liquid at room temperature but far lighter than mercury -- it's used for certain cooling applications, because it stays liquid over a very wide temperature range, can be pumped without contact except the conduction plates, and has very high conductivity compared to water-based coolants.

The only real problem with the parachutes is landing them, and I recently flew one (for the very first time) and landed Jeb with a little tumble, but no explosion. The key is, just as in any deadstick landing, the flare. You have to pitch up slightly just before touchdown; this will trade off forward speed to reduce sink rate -- both of which you want to reduce. If you hold level or barely below level heading on the nav ball, you can confirm the sink rate gets below 5 m/s, and if you can keep that figure while the forward speed also bleeds off to 5 m/s or so, you'll get a safe landing. Once again, I did it my first time ever using a Kerbal parachute, so it can't be that difficult. There does seem to be some interaction between your camera view and the "steady state" glide angle of the parachute -- if you set the camera lower relative to your Kerbal, you'll see the nav ball's prograde marker rise (it'll generally be a little below your view angle -- put the Kerbal on the horizon and the prograde marker will be a few degrees below). This will let you control the steady state speed, which makes it much easier to reduce both forward speed and sink rate in the flare.

If you want to invent them yourself, you'll need to know that they almost always involve using clusters of "place anywhere RCS" balls as bearings, and (for electric power) use reaction wheels for drive (the turboprops use two or more jet engines blowing on structures attached to the shaft to power the propeller). How the power gets from the main craft to the reaction wheel, I don't know, because they're built with a docking port or decoupler holding everything, and you have to decouple to allow the motor/shaft to rotate (this will disconnect any crossfeed that provides power from the main craft; it'll also render the engine a separate "craft" and you'll need to use [ or ] to switch from the airplane to the engine to change power settings). The propeller itself is just some lifting or control surfaces, symmetrically arranged around the shaft and angled to provide thrust -- if they're control surfaces, like elevons, you may be able to switch craft to the propeller and use trim (Alt key, or right shift on Linux, plus S or W, E or Q, depending whether the decoupled "craft" that is the motor and propeller sees them as roll or pitch control) to change blade pitch in flight (you'd switch craft to the "engine" and use roll trim for throttle with an electric propeller).

Forget something?

I'll second that. Learning to fly docking on the nav ball saved me having to choose which docking alignment mod was going to bog down my old (thermal limited) computer. The nav ball helps me launch, both to the usual zero inclination and to polar orbit (which I haven't done yet in my career, because I don't take "put a satellite in orbit X" contracts). If we didn't have the nav ball, someone would have to make a mod to create it...

Wow. Now, where's that guy in the powered suit?

Well, this wasn't today. Wasn't even yesterday; but I did get to play some since last weekend. Tridin and Monie were picked for the first Minmus landing mission (in this career); both are rescuees, both pilots (working on promoting pilots to two stars along with everything else). They took along Kenton, a rescued scientist, in hopes his presence would boost science recovery. Launch and transfer to Minmus were routine; the Explorer VI direct launch craft is now a well-proven design, recently upgraded with the lighter Mk. 1-3 command pod and the addition of a set of drop tanks (four 6-stacks of Oscar B tanks without engines) which also held the landing legs to provide ground clearance for the Poodle engine. They carried three each of Goo canisters, thermometers, and barometers, plus a Science Jr. Landing wasn't a big deal, and Tridin (who had gained experience enough on orbiting Minmus to be able to hold radial in/out and normal/antinormal as well as prograde and retrograde) set the lander down without any more than a slight bounce, despite a sloped landing site (the trajectory to the "flats" landing site chosen was apparently low enough that a "midlands" location got in the way). All three Kerbals left the lander; the two pilots planted flags, the scientist collected a surface sample, EVA reports were made, and then everyone went back inside the lander and, with a puff from the Poodle, lift high enough to decouple the drop tanks and landing legs before setting up and eastward course to boost into orbit once more. It wasn't until after the return burn, about an hour from Minmus escape, that anyone remembered all that science gear mounted on the outside of the command pod. Even so, the recovered science ("low above" crew reports for two biomes, plus the landing EVA science and the command pod that had landed on Minmus), added to that from the previous Minmus orbit mission, gave enough data to finish researching the rest of the 90-point tech tier. Including the Klaw, which is important because: Tridin and Monie were sent right back up. Their orders? Rescue Billybobbert from Munar orbit, as well as capture and deorbit at least one piece of debris with the newly installed Klaw on the Rescue 1g craft. And try not to forget Billybobbert?!

I remember when America On Line access cost $1/hr. That was down from (when I started getting online) $1/min for some services, and $20/hr for AOL when it opened up for PC (it started as a Mac-only service). I'm inclined to think this level of cloud computing is on the opposite side of the pricing curve -- that is, it's as cheap now as it'll ever be, and prices will go nowhere but up from here.

Wow, cool. Two questions -- do you have a means to pre-rotate (start the rotor before you begin your takeoff roll)? And where is the craft file? Re: prerotation, some higher-end autogyros have either a takeoff shaft from the main engine or a small auxiliary engine to spin up the rotor before takeoff -- in the extreme, this allows "jump" takeoffs, where the rotor is spun up with flat pitch, and then collective (to use the helicopter term) added to jump off the ground with zero ground roll. The rotor is immediately disengaged from the prerotator after the jump, to avoid torque effects, but the flywheel effect of the rotor gives enough "air time" for the forward propulsion to gain speed, which then keeps the rotor spinning. Even a very mild prerotation, however (even just the pilot reaching up and starting the rotor spinning by hand), shortens the takeoff run considerably.

I just started a new Science game in 1.4.1/MH to test who has parachutes. I found no setting for parachutes in Custom Difficulty, and (with Kerbal Experience enabled) no-stars Jeb did not have a parachute when EVA from a Jumping Flea (at the pad, or in flight at 125 m/s). I haven't thought to look for parachutes on EVA Kerbals (ranging from 1 to 2 stars) in my ongoing career save (with fully upgraded launch complex, except admin building).

In my opinion, any Kerbal qualified to climb into a command pod ought to be able to use a parachute. At the VERY LEAST, any Kerbal who can EVA (that's all of them except tourists, after the Astronaut Complex is upgraded once) ought to be able to pull the D-ring to release the parachute on his maneuvering pack. Say! Has anyone tried enabling RCS while a Kerbal is under parachute? If so, will W give enough forward impulse to climb (like a parasail motor)?

As I recall, the Rockomax is 3.75 (when it was introduced, it was the MAXimun ROCKet size). The TR-XL may be the new 5 m size -- I don't have the game open at the moment, so I'm not certain. Pull one out of the bin in VAB and you'll be able to tell immediately if it's the same as the Rockomax or bigger.

This was literally the first issue I noticed when I installed 1.4.0 -- and I (briefly) expected it to be fixed in 1.4.1. This is only in the "parts bin", not after parts are selected and brought out to the VAB floor. I think the parts bin has the same problem in SPH, though I spend a lot less time there than in VAB because I'm not much of a spaceplane guy. As far as controllers, I've never even connected one to my PC since PC joysticks had 9-pin serial connectors (hint: I needed a DOS driver for the joystick then).

I'll risk a little controversy with those who don't read the whole reply, by saying that virtually every gay man and lesbian I know/have known would have made a terrible astronaut. That said, virtually every straight person (of either gender) and the one or two "other" (trans, etc.), would also have made terrible astronauts. Many of them were plenty smart, but most had vastly insufficient education in math, science, and engineering (even a pilot has to be a better scientist and engineer than most folks to be an astronaut/cosmonaut). Further, most people (of whatever sexual identity) just don't have the personality to be an astronaut -- the ability to keep calm in an emergency, to take the job seriously but unwind when off duty (to avoid burnout), to want their job more than absolutely anything else. Would LGBTQIA folks make better or worse astronauts than "straight"? Probably no real difference. Straight males might feel threatened by either a gay male crew member or a lesbian, however; the sexuality of a "hot pilot" seems to be the kind that has to be demonstrated over an over, which my (trans man) partner would say suggests they're insecure in their own sexuality. Feel threatened or not, however, part of their persona is to hide that kind of feeling, so they'd likely profess to be completely okay with it.

And if it's one of the parts that can't be "root" part, place one that can, note the length, then place the one you're trying to measure and subtract the part you attached it to.