Zeiss Ikon

As far as Jeb is concerned, there is no mission that isn't improved by a little Jeb.

There's an accepted definition of the demarcation between infrared and visible deep red -- a specific wavelength of light (700 nm) that's considered "visible" and anything longer is "infrared." It's actually pretty easy to demonstrate, however that most people can see a little into the defined infrared. It's pretty easy to make an IR-pass filter that looks black to the eye in a lit room (several layers each of specific colors of filter gel sheet will do it). Install those in a pair of goggles with a good seal to your face, however, and wear them for a while, and you'll discover that you can actually see through them, especially in bright incandescent light or direct sunlight. Human eye sensitivity extends down to around 750 nm in most individuals, 780 or even a little lower for some. The sensitivity is very low in this region, however, so you need help to be able to see this light without it being covered by other light more to your eye's liking. A pair of these goggles will block out the "visible" light that would normally overwhelm this (rather low) sensitivity, and allow your eyes to adjust to the dimness (like standing in a darkroom for a few minutes, or waiting under a starry sky until you can see to walk by starlight alone). You'll then see only by light that's normally considered invisible -- and you'll see things that surprise you. Black plastics (some of them) become transparent, but will show black marker that would be invisible black-on-black by "visible" light. If it's summer, you'll see the Wood effect (foliage appearing bright against a black sky) originally discovered with infrared sensitive photographic film. Some kinds of clothing become translucent, too. All this to say, the border between IR and visible is pretty fuzzy. We normally consider near IR to be invisible, because if there's any significant amount of other light visible, it'll overwhelm even strong IR. In fact, however the ambient lighting has a strong effect on how deep into the red/IR spectrum you can see. Some IR LEDs are actually visible if your eyes are sufficiently dark adapted. Try it with your TV remote some time (some of them use a 750 nm LED, which is within the range of most humans if their eyes are fully dark adapted).

Well, would you let the guys from Fractured Fairy Tales have access to your latest tech? I don't think anything in this film was classified when it was released -- after all, Gemini was ongoing, and Apollo was already under construction when it was made. And, as you note, the RV designs they illustrated were already obsolete(ish). Things that would have flown on an Atlas or Titan missile were already being replaced by Minuteman (solid rocket), and Polaris replaced by Poseidon. Smaller warheads with bigger yield flying on rockets with enough payload to deliver MIRVs -- that was all classified in 1965. The 1958 nose cone tech illustrated in this film wasn't, any more.

I just completed a contract today that was "test a TR-38D suborbital at the Mun (between 200 and 210 km altitude)." Built it into a rocket, flew it to a crash course with the Munar surface, hit the space bar to stage it, and the contract completed. Never had a test button at any time, even when all four conditions (have a TR-38D, Mun, Suborbital, 200,000 to 210,000 m) were met. Space bar did the trick, though. I had some test buttons in early career, maybe they just don't bother with them for staging decouplers.

I doubt there will ever be a computer that can come close to running that sort of program in real time -- especially not with n-body physics. The best supercomputers we have can't handle a few thousand asteroids interacting so weakly with each other that, for the most part, only Jupiter and the Sun exist for them. Tidal drag calculations have to done at so coarse a resolution that they're barely an approximation, or they take weeks or longer to complete. Now, if we could make the game make full use of multiple cores, a server motherboard with four quad-core CPUs would be a good step -- but even a supercomputer can't do much with a single-thread engine. In fact, modern supercomputers are more like hundreds of our CPUs in parallel, than a single CPU running at 100 GHz -- and they depend entirely on parallelism in their programs to get results quickly.

I suspect most horseshoes are a ZA alloy. These are zinc-aluminum-copper die casting alloys with solidus well below the Draper Point, and they don't take well to being partially remelted (hence why much/most die cast metal is just thrown away when it fails -- can't braze or solder it, can't weld it). These are also sometimes call Zamack. The alloys are similar in strength to cast iron, but lighter, and a bit less brittle. You can do limited cold working on thick enough pieces of ZA (especially the versions with higher aluminum content), and they're cheap to produce (both zinc and aluminum are cheapish, and the low temperature and ability to die cast cut production costs). You get a shoe that costs less than a premade steel one, weighs a little less, and wears about as well. Also won't spark on rocks or pavement, a good thing if you ride in tinder-dry conditions.

If it stays high enough, long enough, yes they can.

Slightly curious -- am I correct in thinking those rings aren't made up of millions of lag-inducing particles? Are they just "no collision" objects tied to the planet, or do they have collision too? And if so, do they rotate at orbital speed for their distance? Based on the TWR displayed in the KER window (20+) I suspect this is a "High Gee Adventure" tourist contract. Only pays off if the passengers lose consciousness (but don't die) from high G force.

Well, again, alloying matters. Pure lead melts at 700+ F, but the alloy I use for bullet casting (lead, antimony, and a little tin -- both antimony and tin melt higher than lead) melts around 600 F. Most aluminum used for things other than electrical wire contains some copper, and often a little silicon. Copper melts at the verge of orange glow, pure aluminum (at 1221 F) would be a nice cherry red -- but the alloy might well melt below 900 F, which would be cool enough you might not see the glow in a well lit work area, certainly not against the yellow glow of the forge interior. Just looked it up -- 6061 has a solidus (lower end of the partial melt range) of 582 C, still above the Draper Point, but close enough to it that lighting matters very much. Especially if you're used to heating iron or steel to yellow to give a little more working time, you might not notice the very faint glow at that temp -- and that's where it transitions to "puddle," even though the puddle would be less than fully fluid. And that 6061 melts about 80 C lower than pure aluminum, even though it's 96% or so aluminum and contains less than 1% of any single alloying element (biggest is magnesium at up to 1.25%, then copper no more than 0.4%, then zinc, not to exceed 0.25%). I found references to other aluminum alloys that have liquidus (fully melted) below 500 C, which is decidedly below the Draper Point. Edit: just occurred to me there's another factor in "glow" temperature -- emissivity. A higher emissivity will glow at a lower temperature, and generally more "silvery" a metal is, the lower its emissivity (this is why gold -- with a very low emissivity in IR -- is used as insulation against radiation cooling for stuff going to space, like the LEM descent stage). A perfect black body has the highest possible emissivity, a perfect reflector (and an aluminum coating is close-ish, hence its use on telescope mirrors) will have the lowest possible.

@Rocket In My Pocket, @StrandedonEarth, versions of the "ladder drive" and assorted landing gear/leg Kraken drives wouldn't fail if "cheated" into orbit, yet "work" if the ship was launched. The ship is the same either way. I've got a spaceplane that has a canard mounted just above the Mk. 1 Cockpit's hatch; if the pilot tries to EVA, the vessel will start spinning due to the pilot's helmet hitting the canard (an inadvertent "ladder drive" on an unstabilized ship) and the spin will rapidly get fast enough to fling the Kerbal away -- but I have no reason to expect this not to happen if I were to cheat the ship into orbit. @DAL59, I'd start by looking for anything that might have changed on the vessel during launch, in the near vicinity of the hatch your Kerbal EVAs from. Even try an EVA on the pad or runway, see if you can recreate the spin before the ship has moved. If nothing changes during launch (say, burns away in an aggressive gravity turn, or gets bumped and destroyed during staging), there's no reason the ship should spin after launching but not when cheated to orbit -- which would make this a reportable bug, IMO.

The emission bell curve includes some visible light even a hundred degrees or more colder -- but unless the surroundings are very dark, you won't be able to see it (even if you're one of those who can see deeper into infrared than most). Even if they are, until the light emitted within the wavelength sensitivity range of your eye's rods and red cones is above the sensitivity threshold for your particular eyes, you won't see anything. Hence why there's some variability in the temperature at which you can see an object start to glow. The Draper Point was established as the point at which nearly everyone can see a faint glow in a room light enough to work in. BTW, @KG3, I agree, steel that looks cold can still be around 800 F -- which is hot enough to melt any sort of tin-lead solder, even pure lead. Not quite enough for aluminum -- I just looked it up and pure aluminum melts at 1221 F. Yet, I have seen aluminum poured and it looked silvery, with no perceptible red (I presume it was an alloy with a lower melting point, or the bright fluorescent room light covered the glow). When i learned to weld, we were taught this, and taught to put any heated pieces (welded, cut, or hot bent, for instance) that hadn't been quenched on the steel work bench, draw a circle around them with a soapstone, and letter "HOT" beside the circle, to avoid surprises.

I grew up thinking it was P.T. Barnum who said "No one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American public." Just looked up the quote, to verify, and found that no only was it not Barnum, the common version is a paraphrase (though, in this case, at least faithful to the meaning of the original). It was actually H.L. Mencken, and the full quote is “No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.” A more correct paraphrase would be "No one in this world...has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses..." Regardless of source or correctness, the thrust of the quote stands: the Average Joe really has about all he can handle keeping up with the mortgage (or the rent, since home ownership has been in decline for a good while), feeding his family, and trying to figure out how to get through to next payday (if he thinks even that far ahead). Anything that saves effort and time (like accepting something exciting over something mundane, without bothering to check whether either one is correct) makes this easier, and for most humans, easier is always better.

I'm used to thinking in Fahrenheit (I blame bad upbringing), on a real world experience basis. In a blacksmith's forge, the iron or steel (not a perfect black body, but a reasonable real-material approximation) begins to give off a barely detectable glow (in a lit smithy -- much dimmer than outdoors, but bright enough to read small print easily) at around 850 F (for verification, molten aluminum can be cool enough to have no glow, but easily gets hot enough to glow, even to cherry red for some casting operations). That converts to: (850-32)*5/9 = 454 C, plus 273 = 727 K. I'd call that entirely consistent with @tomf's answer from Wikipedia (especially given there's some variation in what you can see as a "glow" depending on the lighting and the condition of your eyes).

To simplify a lot of the math, for this specific situation, you need to reduce thrust from thruster blocks in inverse proportion to the distance of their thrust line from the COM. So, with two sets of thruster blocks, one 2 m from the COM and the other 3 m from COM, you need to reduce thrust of the latter set by 1/3 to prevent inducing rotation when you translate up/down or left/right (but not fore/aft, assuming the layout is symmetrical around the roll axis). Now, when you want to rotate, won't want to compensate this way -- say with the same layout as above, symmetrical on the roll axis but one set further aft of the COM than the other set if forward of it. If you compensate for distance when you pitch up, you'll be applying more upward thrust with the forward set than downward force with the lower set, and you'll add a translation "upward" along with your pitch up. Applying identical thrust will still rotate the craft around the COM. it just won't mix translation you hadn't commanded.

Back in 1965, the military made a short film about reentry (seemingly animated by Fred Ward, the creator of Bullwinkle). It's a useful tutorial on the same tradeoffs we meet when we reenter a command pod or spaceplace in KSP -- the twin enemies of heat and acceleration. Here's the video:

SSTO is difficult. Staging is far more efficient. Beyond that, we can't do much of anything without pictures -- a picture of your base, along with some indication of its mass, would be extremely helpful.

Simple answer: if you raise the nose from a level flight cruise and the craft loses altitude instead of climbing, you're going too slow. The old aviation rule works pretty well in KSP, too: "Elevator controls speed, throttle controls climb rate. Get it backward, and you'll find the ground rising up to smite you." If your craft can't go faster and still can't climb, it may be either the air getting too thin (my last Wheesley powered spaceplane, also hauling 900 units of Lf/O and a Reliant, had that problem around 10 km altitude), or the craft is too heavy for its power. If the former, you may get some help by adding additional intakes. If the latter, more (or better/higher tech) engines is the solution. What intake type you have also limits your speed (the lower tech ones all start losing efficiency around 300 m/s), but if you can't climb at 250 m/s, you're too high or too heavy, and you need more wing.

Just don't try to use Photobucket, unless you're already paying them their $400/yr for some other reason. Images put there can't be seen outside their site, now, unless you pay their ransom. I deleted my account instead.

I don't think it's quite that simple. Reversing your orbital direction will change your argument of periapsis (if I correctly understand that parameter), but it either won't change your ascending node position, or it'll change it by 180 degrees -- you're off by about 135 degrees. Again, good news is, you're at Minmus, in a fairly high (for Minmus) orbit, so plane changes aren't expensive. What you need to do is, first, make sure you're orbiting prograde; that's been covered. Second, reduce your inclination to zero by burning normal or anti-normal at the appropriate node. Third, set the desired inclination and nodal position by making a maneuver at the correct position in your orbit in the correct normal or anti-normal direction. Finally, correct your argument of periapsis by making a pure prograde burn at the correct position in your orbit, sufficient to make that your new periapsis, then at next apoapsis, correct your periapsis, and burn again at the new periapsis to set the correct apoapsis value. You need to do the steps in the order given (actually, the apoapsis and periapsis are interchangeable, but since you're given argument of periapsis it's easier to set that first), because adjusting inclination will change both apoapsis and periapsis height and orientation.

Glad to hear the penny finally dropped. Since my first docking, I've always just used the stock combination of external view and the nav ball markers. I used to (in sandbox or science, where I had full SAS capability) lock the "to target" mode and use RCS translation to get the "to target" and "prograde" (which is target closing velocity) to match. Not sure yet what I'll do in career, where my most experienced Kerbals can't yet hold anything other than celestial heading, prograde, and retrograde. Won't matter until I unlock docking ports, I guess (should be soon; I just researched the Mk. 1-2 Command Pod last session). One very small mod that is more useful than you'd think for docking, as well as a lot of help for landings on airless bodies and just making maneuver node burns, is "Better Burn Time" -- when you have a target set and are close enough to contemplate docking, it'll give you a running status of predicted closest approach, how long until then, and how long your burn to zero out relative velocity (it won't tell you direction, but the nav ball has that). With Better Burn Time and the standard rendezvous techniques, rendezvous and docking become a lot easier, without needing a big GUI docking alignment mod.

In my current career (my first -- I don't get to play tens of hours a week like some people), my naming has been two "series" of craft. Explorer series carries pilots (and eventually scientists and engineers -- just unlocked the Mk. 1-2 command pod last session) on exploratory and scientific missions. Explorers with p suffix are modified to carry a (single) passenger. Explorer II was the first to make orbit, and was retrofitted with a Stayputnik (as Explorer IIp) to permit ground control when it carried the first orbital VIP tourist (alone in a Mk. 1 command pod with all controls disabled). Explorer IVp made the second Mun landing, carrying the first VIP tourist to land on the Mun. Taxicab series are made to carry plural tourists, and in general have been spaceplane orbiters (for the early suborbital flights, they used a spaceplane crew cabin). Taxicab III vessels recorded the first on-orbit rendezvous, and the first Munar flyby and Munar orbit, all with tourist passengers aboard (and all before retractable landing gear became available; recovery was by parachute after gliding to a low/slow enough position for deployment. Taxicab IV, an ill-advised attempt to stretch the design to carry four tourists, resulted in the first death in my career; Adeny Kerman's Mk. 1 cockpit exploded during reentry, though the rest of the vessel was recovered intact with all tourist passengers unharmed. So far, that covers my career -- two Mun landings so far, one with a VIP tourist, haven't been to Minmus yet (yes, I know, it's easier than the Mun, but the contracts haven't come up yet). I envision building a series of Pathfinder craft when it's time to visit Eve, Duna, and Dres. So far, these are all single launch (or, in Pathfinder series, once I have docking parts unlocked, may be two launches, a transfer vehicle and a hab or lander). I expect Pathfinder I will strongly resemble Explorer VI

If this is a career, the player almost certainly doesn't yet have a fairing large enough to cover that lander. With those side tanks, it's 3.75 m across, and the biggest a 1.25 m base fairing can expand is 2.5 m diameter. Still, if there is a 2.5 m fairing available, that's a very good option (though with the landing legs on the outside of the tanks, you may still have a Kraken problem where they clip through the fairing).

First thing I'd recommend is to take those fins off the (I presume) second stage; move them down to the base of the booster core. With all that side area up front from the lander's side tanks your aerodynamics are overcoming your reaction wheel(s) and gimbals when you get up close to the speed of sound (300-350 m/s). With the fins at the bottom of the core, they'll improve things instead of adding to the problem. If your center engine is a Reliant (as the liquid fuel booster engines seem to be), swap it out for a Swivel -- the steering force from the gimballed engine is many times that of your reaction wheel(s). Also, if you're not already, start your gravity turn about 100 m/s at 5 to 10 degrees (the exact figure depends heavily on your thrust to weight ratio), and once it's started, use SAS set to Prograde -- that'll keep your nose from getting far enough off your velocity vector to turn your ship over (and following the gravity turn will also save you fuel, building up horizontal velocity as you climb). If you can get to Mun orbit without using any of the lander fuel, that lander should have plenty to get down and back up to Munar orbit, but you'll do better to put an FL-T400 tank in the center, set flow priority so the side tanks drain first, and drop them when they're empty. That will give you plenty of fuel to get back to Kerbin, maybe even enough to circularize. That lander isn't going to stand up to reentry, though, especially not at Munar return velocity. You may need to make multiple high aerobrake passes, and you're likely to still have trouble with the lander can -- those things are made of cardboard and aluminum foil.

The angles of those drag vectors suggests another problem: your heading is too far from your prograde vector. Are you still following the old-atmosphere launch profile, boost vertically to near 15 km, then turn east to be at 45 degrees when you hit 20 km? The atmosphere changes from 1.0 forward make it more efficient (and safer) to start a little turn -- 5 to 10 degrees -- around 100 m/s, then follow the prograde marker all the way to MECO (which you do when your apoapsis is high enough, then set up your circularizing maneuver). The small, early turn has you building up the horizontal velocity you need for orbit right from the start, and following prograde while you do it can let you keep even a pretty unstable vessel headed where it needs to be.

The eye-on-a-stalk is looking right at the camera, so you only see the eye. The shooty-zappy thing is out of frame. The plunger thing is out of frame, too (this is just the top of the Dalek we're seeing).