Zeiss Ikon

Well, my career save's new four passenger Munar orbit tourist bus, Taxicab IV, is, um, a little marginal on aerodynamic stability at launch (it ought to be okay on reentry, with empty tanks, it's just got multiple big wings up front on the orbiter, and heavy boosters in back). More so than Taxicab III (two passenger LKO carrier) or Taxicab IIIm (the two passenger Munar orbit bus). The first couple launch attempts did amazing flips when I let the nose get a little too far off the center of the prograde marker. I got it into orbit on the third try, after adding elevons to the Swept Wings serving as fins on the boosters (but even with that added pitch authority, it's squirrely -- clearly I need to come up with a better way to launch and recover tourists in quantities > 2).

I see a second AP marker in that plot (trying to view the full size image doesn't work, there seems to be a glitch in the imgur embed). It looks like you're on a capture trajectory, and the game is displaying the pre-capture AP as well as the post-capture marker. This is probably because you have a Munar encounter on that orbit.

Aside from bug fixes, there's really only one thing I'd like to see changed in the stock game (if only because I can't afford a computer with enough horsepower to run major mods, and including them into the game would make it unplayable on my computers). I'd like to see a more realistically ordered tech tree progression (wings and jets before rocket parts, RCS before reaction wheels, etc.) (yes, I know, there are mutliple mods for that), with the ability to research single parts. That is to say, if I need a retractable landing gear, but don't have the 90 science on tap to research that entire node, for, say, 20 or 30 science, I could unlock just the retractable gear. That is all.

That looks like a NASA dV budget...

What? I once sent Val to Duna in a Mk. 1 Command Pod, took seven years to get her back.

Actually, I believe the EVA packs are good for 500 m/s -- at least they used to be (with the slightest bit of help, they could make orbit around the Mun). That orbit ought to get you close to Kerbin every few years; that's the time for a rescue mission. If you set Kerbin as "target" for the command pod, even though you have no maneuvering capability left, you'll be able to see when and how close your next couple intersections of Kerbin's orbit will be. I think there's even a way to look more than an orbit or two ahead.

No photos today; all vessels were the reliable Taxicab III. Over the weekend (when I had a half hour or an hour at a time to play), Jeb and Val performed the world's first orbital rendezvous. With tourists aboard both vessels. Didn't quite get close enough for the tourists to see each other waving through the cabin windows (but the two spacecraft are still close together and have bunches of fuel and monopropellant, so that may yet happen). I was reminded why it's annoying to try to rendezvous with a vessel in near-minimum orbit; at one point, Val got a warning about "reentry in XXXX" while matching velocity...

D'oh! Missed the quote...

(career game) Val went off the reservation, but some folks who had reservations got more than they bargained for. Val made a secret deal with someone in Mission Control to turn a tourist excursion (two Kerbals into space, one with orbit) into a vessel test. No VAB shot, sorry. The new, "fixed" Taxicab III, built as an orbital tourist transport, turned out to be capable of making orbit with a lot of fuel in the tanks. Val was pretty sure that translated into being able to fly by the Mun, which would make it THE tourist transport for the foreseeable future (tourists will surely start demanding Munar flyby excursions soon). Parts rearranged to better manage COM travel. Never mind Adeny in the pilot's seat, that was a simulation. He lacks the experience to fly this craft, which likes to flip ends if you get the slightest bit off the prograde marker. Here we go. Val in the hot seat, tourist having second thoughts, and gravity turn under way. Orbit achieved, with better than 10% remaining in the booster core. Attention, passengers, there's been a slight change in your scheduled excursion: we're going to the Mun! Because it was intended as a test flight of the orbiter, Val staged away the booster before burning for the Mun -- in actual Munar tourist service, that fuel would have been used for insertion. You can never have too much remaining delta-V. Almost on node marker, plenty of time. And away we go! Under your seats each of you will find an extra bag of snacks. Please don't eat them all at once; this will be about a three day trip. Forward and to starboard you can see the Mun. It'll get a lot bigger over the next couple days. See? Told you the Mun was going to grow. And not the way it grows from a sliver crescent to full. If you want photos of the Mun, now's the time. We're about as close as we're going to get. And look, there's Kerbin. We haven't lost it -- in fact, we'll be back there in about a day and a half. Wow, Kerbin's getting big in the windows again. But the snack bag is getting pretty small. Are we almost home? Make sure you're strapped in, we're about to make a burn to slow down, then we'll make one more orbit before we land. Partial eclipse out the port side windows, for those who are interested. A tiny adjustment here, and we'll come back into atmosphere low enough to brake for landing. Once again, make sure your seat straps are snug and hang onto your cameras, snack bags, and eyeballs. We're going to slow down a little now. Sorry, not much to see, but this is the boring part of the flight. Our rocket ship has become a glider, and we just have to wait until we get down to the ocean. Once again, please make sure you have everything secured and your seat belts snug; the landing will be a little rough.

Might have been a little Kraken influence -- one of the components (crew cabin, I think) jumped out of the water and flew some distance after the water parachute landing.

I started with parachutes. Three, then four. Landing in water with four parachutes on this craft resulted in killing everyone on board as the craft broke up on impact. Apparently, 6+ m/s is too hard, and it takes a lot of parachutes to get a 10+ T craft to fall slower than that -- and given the craft is long and slender (at least compared to things like a command pod) I think it'll tend to break at the joints even at slower speeds. Ditching apparently works better. It was a little puzzling: after the ditch, I couldn't recover the craft. Tried to switch to Tracking to do it from there, and was warned that switching away with the craft "moving on the surface" would result in resetting to the last save point. Finally realized that, most of two minutes after setting down in water, the orbiter was still moving forward at around 3 m/s. Fortunately, I had enough RCS fuel left to use the thrusters to stop the forward motion, allowing me to recover. I might still be waiting for the vessel to stop otherwise. Here's the final version, lifting off (I apparently forgot to take another VAB photo after finishing the mods).

@bewing's method worked well, but requires having enough delta-V available to kill roundly half the reentry velocity. Last night, I tried @Spricigo's recommendation, combined with @invision's multi-pass aerobrake method. Since this is a career game, the test flight once again carried tourists, and since I "forgot" to nearly empty the main engine's tank before launch, I made it a test of future "Munar flyby" tourist launches. I did swap the main tank as far forward as possible (directly behind the crew cabin), then adjusted the wing and canard positions to get nearly neutral COM/COL balance with the empty tank. As previously, I launched on a near-optimum profile, reaching orbit with ~10% remaining in the booster core tanks. In operational tourism launches to the Mun or Minmus, that fuel would normally have been used during insertion, but for the test, I staged away the booster core, leaving the orbiter on its own, with full tanks. I then burned for the Mun, setting up a free return orbit that required only a minor periapsis adjustment. After passing the Mun, I adjusted my Kerbin periapsis to about 60 km (a tiny burn, a few m/s only, could have been done with RCS). On the first pass, I burned most of the fuel left from the Munar flyby to lower apoapsis, then turned belly-forward, but got little braking effect (too high). Next pass, I lowered my periapsis to (iirc) 48 km, burned the last bit of fuel retrograde at about 62 km, then turned belly forward once more. I was able to easily maintain an attitude near "radial out" using only aero controls and reaction wheel(s) until I was well below orbital speed and around 40 km altitude, and with RCS turned on, down to 30 km. The only thermometer bars appeared intermittently on the Crew Cabin when I let the nose come down too much, and raising AoA above 60 degrees kept it from getting excessive. At the end of flight, with main tanks empty and RCS tank nearly so, I was able to slow the glide below 75 m/s during final flare; a little better flare timing might have gotten me below 60 m/s, but this velocity worked okay. I thought I saw two parts shed just as the vessel got into full water contact, but I couldn't spot anything missing later; it might just have been splash pattern from the join between the wing and tank/service bay.

Just finished testing @bewing's suggestion -- if I have a lot of fuel on board, I can just about stop the orbiter -- with careful piloting on the test flight (which carried tourists -- this is a career game, after all), I was able to get to orbit with ~10% remaining in the core booster, then used a fraction of that fuel to deorbit after a couple trips around; that left the orbiter's tank full (and I could have done another burn of 100 m/s or so with the booster core to slow things down in the upper atmosphere). At about 61 km, I burned about 2/3 of the orbiter's fuel retrograde, leaving me just about 1500 m/s (forgot to change the ball to surface, so that was actually 1200 m/s surface). Had I burned all the fuel, rather than saving some to stretch my glide once I was low and (relatively) slow, I could have gotten below 1000 m/s, possibly as slow as 800 m/s. Since I have a second contract active for two more Kerbals (one suborbital, one orbital -- somebody gets a bonus) I'll try flying with the 800 tank almost empty to simulate a Mun flyby return and see whether the high angle of attack gets me what I need. @Spricigo, you're correct, I don't have enough pitch authority (even with RCS on) to keep the nose in a deep stall attitude in dense air; I'm not sure I really need that as long as I can kill my speed up high where the air is thin. I'd be delighted if Taxicab III is able to keep carrying tourists to Munar flyby and even Munar orbit destinations. Every space program needs a cash cow. BTW, this orbiter will maintain a controllable glide at least down to 140 m/s, which is plenty slow for parachute recovery (though the vessel broke up behind the reaction wheel on water impact; I've added another parachute to reduce descent rate). The COM is a little far forward for easy flying when the 800 tank is empty (ship wants to nose down, more so as it slows and the canard loses authority); I may rearrange the tank, service bay, and reaction wheel to reduce the COM travel as the fuel burns off. Then again, I may not; until I have retractable landing gear, this is perfectly adequate. Updated pictures of the as-flown version coming up, probably tomorrow. Bedtime now...

Ah, nice. Now I'm going to fill the tank back up. With a full 800 tank and a Swivel, I should be able to almost stop a 10 T orbiter. Tourists, queue up on the left.

Okay, so in pursuit of orbital tourism contracts in my first career game, I designed my first spaceplane. Not a HOTOL SSTO, just a fancy-looking Dynasoar equivalent -- boosted vertically, maneuvers in orbit with a rocket motor on the aft end, reenters and lands more or less like a Space Shuttle (except parachute recovery at the very end, because my R&D hasn't produced retractable landing gear yet -- hey, give me a minute!). A little "simulation" testing (launch and revert) verified that the orbiter handles well enough in both boost and glide, and even reentry -- and a little tweaking on the booster got it under control during the early parts of boost, when there's a lot of aero force available on those wings (swivel engines and fins on the boosters FTW). Everything was great until I'd been reentering for five minutes or so -- starting from a 75 km orbit, I set up a periapsis of 48 km. I held approximately 30 degrees above prograde through reentry, though that tended to drift in a pitch-positive direction (because I was using heading hold while flying around Kerbin). When I was getting down a bit, I started to run low on battery, and since I had way too much fuel on board anyway, I ran the main (Swivel) engine at low throttle to get some power from the alternator, but I don't think the thrust was enough to contribute to the heating issue (well below what was needed for level flight in earlier atmospheric testing) -- but by the time I was down to 39 km, both the Mk. 1 Cockpit and the RCS sphere in the chin position were very close to their temperature limit (but the Crew Cabin, main wing, canard, and 800 fuel tank weren't even showing thermometers). That's the point at which I reverted the flight, hoping the problem was simply one of reentry profile. I'm aware that reentering too high will burn away an ablator with little braking effect, while going too low will overheat things and/or kill Kerbals due to excessive G loads; I'm sure there's a similar tradeoff in reentering a spaceplane. I just don't know what it is. Here's a VAB image of the vessel as flown. I've since pulled half the Lf/O out of the 800 tank (might replace it with a 400 tank, if that proves helpful, though I really need the length to keep the COM from moving too much as main fuel burns off), moved the monopropellant sphere inside a service bay (between the crew cabin and reaction wheel) and mounted a pair of batteries inside the service bay as well -- but I doubt that'll have much effect, other than improving my ability to make a couple orbits and still have electricity to operate the SAS and reaction wheels. Booster has Swivels on the core and the two boosters that also have fins, Reliants on the other boosters. Asparagus staging dumps the Reliants first, keeping the Swivel boosters until atmosphere is thin enough the wing doesn't want to make the stack flip end over end. The 10+ T orbiter reaches orbit with a full tank, if flown optimally, which means if I can lick the reentry this Taxicab generation could also fly tourists on Munar flyby missions. Would I be ahead to reenter higher, lower, or at a higher or lower angle of attack, or am I just approaching the whole spaceplane thing wrong?

Not today, but a few days ago (didn't have time to upload the photos and write up the mission) in my career game, Jeb orbited the Mun for the first time in history (and by the time he got back, there was a rescue contract for a Kerbal marooned in Munar orbit). Explorer III-bis is a slight upgrade of the Explorer III Val flew for her historic Munar flyby. The contract hardware deleted, fuel tankage was expanded and the Reliant engine replaced with a Terrier -- the combination to provide some reserve of delta-V for Munar orbit capture and trans-Kerbin insertion. Just as with the original Explorer III, the boosters are in progressively throttled pairs; one pair at full thrust, one pair at 60%, and the last pair at 40%. The core has a Swivel to provide control authority during boost, limited to 50% as with the original Explorer III. Night launch. Because that's when the vessel was ready (windows to the Mun are pretty much any time, if you don't mind a variable amount of time in parking orbit awaiting your insertion window). The space program, at this stage, is just over five days old; when Kerbals decide to do something, they get it done. And, of course, the Munar insertion burn was in the dark as well. Take my word that launch and circularization were routine, though this Explorer still can't quite put the pod and transfer stage into orbit with full tanks. Might be able to get the job done without the extra transfer fuel, but we may never know -- VAB is already hard at work on Explorer III Mod. 2, with liquid fuel boosters (including fuel transfer ducts) replacing the Thumpers; even the Taxicab series is changing over as the efficiencies of in-flight fuel transfer are realized. A Terrier burn is a lot less spectacular than a Reliant, but you get almost 20% more impulse from your fuel. Of course, it takes longer, and without an alternator, you can't charge your batteries. The Explorer III vessels to date carry extra batteries anyway, so that's not such a big deal (right?). And that's Jeb, bound for the Mun -- but to orbit, EVA, and take science in orbit, unlike Val who just flew by. Jeb will never know the level of uncertainty that Val had on her historic flight. Upgrades to Mission Control mean he's able to plan his transfer burns to the second, and see the results even past the next encounter. Recent upgrades to the Kerbal Space Network allow maintenance of voice comm connection as far out as the Mun, but the connection gets scratchy and faint that far out. Improved antennae, promised "real soon now" by R&D, will probably help, but it's virtually certain further upgrades will be needed for future missions to and beyond Minmus. Now into Munar SOI, altimeter reading from Mun instead of from Kerbin, counting down toward Munar orbit capture burn. Almost there. In just a few minutes, Jeb will be the first Kerbal ever to orbit the Mun. Crew report, EVA and report, goo observations, thermometer and barometer readings locked in -- little burn and Jeb's on the way home. What did you do, Jeb? Forgot to turn off the SAS while you waited a day and a half to get back to Kerbin, didn't you? Now you've got a dead battery, no way to point your vessel to make corrections, and you're stuck with the periapsis you set up from Munar orbit. Fortunately, it's within atmosphere. Well, let's see how you come out... Okay, well, at least the command pod is aerodynamically stable with the heat shield forward, even with the service bay attached. Down side is, with all the oscilation around the retrograde point, enough plasma washed up the side of the command pod to burn off both thermometers and both barometers. Well, good thing the goo canisters are inside the service bay, protected by the heat shield. Oh, and by the way, because you couldn't correct your periapsis, you're a little high and you're going to have to go around one more time. See you in an hour or so... Wave all you want, Jeb. No one on the ground can see anything but a fireball. Okay, coming down for realz this time. Forty km, and below orbital velocity. Ablator still holding up just fine. Down to 26 km and Mach 4. Looking good. Too bad about the barometers and thermometers, but at least you still have the goo canisters. Good thing parachutes don't require an external battery to deploy. Don't forget to dump the heat shield after your parachute is fully open; it makes a significant difference in descent rate. Count the trees, you're almost down. What's that? There was an explosion on landing impact? Did you forget to dump the heat shield? They'll do that if they're still attached. Oh, no heat shield. What do you mean, there's goo spread all over the inside of the service bay? Well, yes, the canister brackets do go through the bay's after bulkhead. Dagnabbit. Don't spill anything on your crew and EVA reports; they're the only science we have left to fulfill the "science from Munar orbit" contract...

I've wondered about this since I first tried the demo -- in terms of "making it work", RCS is far simpler than reaction wheels, and coupling an inertial sensor suite (gyros and accelerometers) and simple controller (Apollo-level stuff) would allow things like "hold heading" with pretty much the behavior we see now when SAS is coupled to active RCS. Simple RCS was present in the X15 spaceplane, and Mercury capsule (Mercury used cold-gas systems; X15 had peroxide thrusters; hydrazine RCS was introduced in, IIRC, Gemini). This was years before reaction wheels were practical for flight hardware. Not really related to the thread subject, but it seems to me the Mk. 1 Command Pod ought to have a low-efficiency RCS, and reaction wheels should be up the tech tree at the level where the non-integrated ones appear.

Unless you're trying to completely break down some of the largest 1% of rocks in the Belt or the Trojans in a single shot, you don't need anything like the power of even a straight fission explosive, never mind a fusion-boosted type that would require lithium deuteride or tritium injection. Liquid oxygen and any combustible material form a nice binary explosive that can be pumped into cracks or voids (or boreholes), diluted with liquid nitrogen if needed (for loading density control), and capable of breaking more rock than you'll want floating loose at any one time. Don't forget that the vast bulk of asteroids are essentially gravel piles held together by (extremely weak) gravity and a little bit of vacuum welding. The smallest practical fission device, as I recall, is around 2 kT yield, and while it's a lot more portable than 2000 T of TNT (or LOX/anything), it can't be divided up to provide controlled breaking -- it's like trying to mine when the only charge you have is a full truckload of loose ANFO, and you're can't pump or pour it into individual holes, but can only detonate it still in the trailer. I hate to say it, but unless space has a more libertarian model than anything we've seen to date, there won't be any private space travel. The weapon potential, based solely on kinetic energy, of a spaceship is something no government will ever willingly allow in individual hands (not even the equivalent of an airline pilot). Never mind nuclear engines and high tech stuff, a Hohmann orbit from Mars to Earth with a ship big enough to carry a family on a nine-month orbit is a city-wrecker if you don't bother to brake into orbit at the end -- and even if you're suspicious, you won't be able to tell with confidence until it's inside the Moon's orbit (and only a few hours away) that it's not just a much more massive rock with a dummy comms unit and similar radar signature to the Winnebago. And this goes equally for solar sails, VASIMR, or solar/ion as it does for a fantasy torchship capable of burn/flip/burn constant boost travel anywhere in the system.

One could make a case that EULAs exist primarily to allow any software publisher, at any time, to invalidate any or all licenses, or even claim that all of their users were never licensed and therefore subject to legal remedies. Even more so than the law in general, EULAs frequently contain clauses with which one cannot comply (like the "one copy" clause that's worded so you can't even install the software without violating), or which contradict within a single document. Combine that with their writing style and length, and no EULA will ever stand up to a determined, well funded court attack (IMO). In other words, they've made themselves obsolete, even as they've taken on a life of their own. I wonder if they'll continue to evolve long enough to come into harmony with their environment?

A solar sail (which is what I stated that about) requires no reaction mass. An electrostatic charge or a little spin can open the sail, lines finer than sewing thread can carry the thrust and steer the sail. A sail big enough to take a Winnebago-sized hab from Earth to Mars faster than a Hohmann orbit ought to be about the size of two to eight football/soccer fields, and (once mass produced) cost less than the hab. Coming back down, it's hard to beat a Hohmann transfer, because you can't thrust toward the Sun, but going out, you can get going like blazes if you time your departure to optimize the sailing. You can beat a Hohmann orbit from Earth to Mars with a milligee, as long as you can keep it up the whole way. I don't see solar sails as being worth much for moving people beyond the Belt -- too little thrust available with the light down to 1/4 or less of what Earth's orbit gets (1/100 when you get out to Saturn's neighborhood). I bet they'll carry the heavy stuff to the Outer Colonies, though, possibly with some other means of braking down into orbit at the end (likely some combination of aerobraking and chemical or NTR). I'm pretty sure we'll still be colonizing planets (or at least larger moons) for millennia to come; humans need gravity, and spin gravity has issues (you don't fall down if something fails, you fall away. A structural failure won't be a search for survivors, so much as a race to catch up with survivors before they run out of air).

"Family car" might be something equivalent to what the Stone family bought (used) when they decided to leave Luna (The Rolling Stones, Robert A. Heinlein). Heinlein apparently believed (well, everyone did in the 1950s when this was written) that NTR was the only way to go to the Moon or further -- then he decided stabilized monatomic hydrogen (he called it "Single-H") was the best reaction mass (never mind density/tank mass concerns -- the Rolling Stone would have resembled a party balloon more than a 1950s Ley/Bonestell rocket ship). Still, a fission reactor has most of the advantages Heinlein called out -- long working life, low moving part count (control rods, and a pump), and doesn't require any really exotic materials, especially if you use water instead of Single-H for reactant. Safety might be improved by taking a page from Rocket Ship Galileo and building these as thorium breeders rather than uranium/plutonium cycle. Of course, there'll be yacht clubs, and they'll race and pleasure-sail from planet to planet, set "classes" by sail area and control method, and complain to each other than a yacht is a hole in space you throw money into. A fairly modest solar sail can beat a NASA launch from Earth to Mars, and the further you're going, the bigger the advantage the sail has. Let someone invent some sort of suspended animation, and you'll see these guys sailing all the way out to Neptune and there'll probably be a few who disappear trying to "single hand" to Proxima.

I learned to rendezvous and dock without tutorials, and without ever seeing the training scenarios. I knew, from reading (and living through the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era, when a kid wasn't a kid if they didn't want to grow up to be an astronaut), how a rendezvous worked, how orbital mechanics pushes you in different directions (the rule from Larry Niven's The Integral Trees is "Forward takes you out, out takes you back, back takes you in, in takes you forward; port and starboard bring you back." -- which has stuck in my memory since first reading that book, just weeks after it came out). I also didn't know anything about how the nav ball relates to docking (I was a pretty deep noob, trying to fly a rescue mission around the Mun, no less). None the less, I got it done, and did it in less than two hours. The second time took less effort. The third even less, and by the time I mounted an asteroid capture/redirect mission, docking was just part of the job. If you haven't already, mount RCS and learn to fly the "right hand" controls -- the ijklhn keys work like the wasd shift-ctl set, only in translation and with the RCS rather than whatever attitude controls you have and the main engine. Don't forget to set cap-lock when you get close; that puts the RCS into a "slow" mode, and saves a lot of monopropellant by reducing overcorrection. Do some practice flying with those; you'll have to be close to something to see any effect. Once you get within visual range of your target, you can use RCS instead of "turn and burn" -- it's MUCH simpler. IMO, you don't need any of those fancy docking alignment widgets (though Better Burn time is very helpful for finishing up the rendezvous). Take a look at an Apollo CSM stack to see where the RCS can/should be mounted.

I very seriously doubt that a judge ruling that a EULA isn't and can't be a contract would invalidate all EULAs. License to use intellectual property is never a contract -- your license to listen to music you've purchased isn't a contract and no one expects it to be; it's set forth in copyright law and music publishers don't expect to alter or add to it. EULAs came about because copyright law wasn't restrictive enough to suit the lawyers once software grew enough zeroes in its annual income. The lawyers wanted to restrict everything because the technology didn't exist (in the 1980s, when EULAs started to grow) to reliably prevent or even track unsanctioned copying. And once the lawyers get their hands on something, it takes Congress to pry them loose. Problem is, Congress is mostly made up of lawyers, so we get a situation where Congress passes something like DMCA (which was mostly designed to incorporate all the restrictions in European copyright law, when the ink was barely dry on the European Union agreement). Now most of the bad/stupid things in EULAs are part of copyright law. Worse, the Patent and Trademark Office (and foreign versions of same) started issuing software patents around the late 1980s, allowing a company to protect its property until it becomes hopelessly obsolete (the patent for Stacker's hardware-assisted whole-disk compression expired around 2004 -- when was the last time you saw a Stacker board or Stacker software? Hint: the boards were 8-bit ISA).

One simple way to get bunches of tanks in place with the correct decoupler attachment is to attach one -- heck, build the whole booster in "one only" symmetry mode -- then duplicate the decoupler (which will duplicate everything depending on it) and put it aside in the bay, once for each additional pair of boosters you'll have (i.e. stash two dupes for a six-booster setup). Then pick the single one off the core, change to 2x symmetry, stick it back on, attach your fuel pipes to the core, and (watching the staging order for the radial decouplers) put each of the duplicates on in 2x symmetry as well, and attach their fuel pipes. This will ensure it's actually the decoupler you're sticking to the core tank/booster.