Zeiss Ikon

There's also "flow priority" which can prevent unexpected depletion of "universally shared" resources like Electric Charge and Monopropellant. It works the same way with Lf/O when crossfeed is enabled. Best of both worlds, once you have the habit of checking it in VAB -- but, BUT!!! Flow priority will get munged if you undock and redock (as for an Apollo-style transposition to put your lander and command pod nose to nose for trans-Munar passage). I've had a Mun mission command stage wind up reliant on the Mk. 1 Command Pod's reaction wheel (and tiny battery) because the RCS got used up -- and I'd undocked to discard the lander (on a burn-up orbit) before I noticed I had dry monopropellant tanks (hence couldn't redock, even if I had more than ten minutes until atmosphere).

Then again... Through no fault of my own (I lived there), I was under the totality path for the eclipse of 1979. I was sitting in Thermodynamics 101 at University of Idaho, and the professor had promised to let us go outside and watch at first darkening if there was anything to see -- but we were under 100% overcast. Hundreds of people had cameras and even telescopes set up at the golf course parking lot (and this was long before even the Sony Mavica, so there were some long-roll motor drive SLRs present), and all anyone could see was that, over the course of a few minutes, it got dim, then genuinely dark, and a couple minutes later (totality was, as I recall, around four minutes where we were) it got less dark and the went back to normal overcast spring daylight. Granted, August is less prone to that kind of weather than April, for most of the contiguous United States, but it's virtually certain that some folks who've spent their annual vacation budget (times two or three, in many cases) to get one of only twenty-four rooms in some podunk town forty miles from anywhere in the center of the totality path -- will observe nothing but atmospheric nebulae.

This is not always default behavior. Decouplers default to crossfeed off (in which setting, only tanks within a stage drain evenly). I don't recall whether docking clamps default to crossfeed on or off, but they can be set to off. All in all, draining a stage evenly without intervention is, I think, a big plus -- but I can see crossfeed as being an issue if you weren't expecting it...

Of course, in Linux, the Alt key is used for something else, so anywhere KSP instructions say to use Alt, use right-shift instead.

More like SyFy. I've wondered for years (decades, actually) how a network that produces such good series can produce such absolute stinkers of movies. The only theory I've heard that makes any sense is that they found out the bad ones were profitable, and kept doing the same thing again -- hence three or four Sharknado films, etc. Every now and then they stumble and make something watchable, usually with Ron Perlman, but generally, if it's a SyFy original film, it'll suck big time.

I remember once upon a time, being told (in print by a rocket scientist who had some reason to know: G. Harry Stine) that the full size Delta Clipper could operate globally for similar cost per passenger to what the Concorde (then in its heyday, with daily flights from London and Paris to New York) could within its operating range. This would be suborbital, with less than an hour transit time (ignoring time zone and date line changes, of course) to anywhere on Earth, it was claimed. There was even a semi-serious suggestion of using it to set up a hyper-express package delivery network -- for certain heavily used business transfer routes (Far East to Europe and especially America), it would live up to an even older SNL gag about "Temporal Express -- for when it absolutely, positively, has to be there yesterday." Launch from Tokyo early in the day, you'll either outrun midnight, or beat it by going the other way. I think most if not all of us here are convinced that SSTO without air-breathing engines, on the real Earth, is a non-starter from an economic standpoint (though it's surely possible with modern materials, if you won't mind payload fractions in the single digit percentage level) -- but a suborbital to anywhere is significantly less dV than orbit (though if it is, it's going to take a lot longer than 45 minutes to travel to the antipodes). This might have been the civilian "supersonic" travel of the mid-21st century -- 45 minutes from New York to London or LA, seat belt light on the whole trip. Flight attendants would issue Dramamine at boarding...

From what I understand, asteroids have a random, procedurally generated shape. That lets the game store the asteroid in very little data space, hence be able to simultaneously track dozens (or potentially hundreds, depending how persistent you are in hunting for them) and display the same rock the same way if (as you might do after capturing one for fuel mining) you visit it more than once. I have no genuine information, but I'd bet the only way to make an ordinary asteroid into a magic boulder would be to edit the save file after "discovering" the rock -- though it might be possible to edit the save file or change a setting to alter the frequency of occurrence of magic boulders.

Water rocket fliers have been doing two and even three stage birds for decades. Do some digging on YouTube and Google and you'll find lots of information on how they pressurize the upper stage (I believe it's done through the first stage nozzle), how they control staging, and even how they arrange parachutes to deploy at apogee rather than when the upper stage is empty. The altitude record, last time I recall, was over 2000 feet.

(Science save) Last night, I brought both Gilly landing crews safely home to Kerbin. Sigemy, Luory, and Dottie had launched and were already committed (transfer burn done, would have taken the same dV again, at least, to return to Kerbin) before it was noted that the vessel they occupied had no science experiments mounted -- not so much as a thermometer or barometer, never mind goo canister. A hasty upgrade to an otherwise identical ship, then, and a second crew, Sherny, Lagerlyn, and Jonbus was sent after them, laden with experiments. After both crews had landed (some twenty-five days apart), both elected to leave Eve's orbit immediately, rather than wait for an opportune launch window. From Sigemy, we expect such cowboy decisions -- Sherny has a better record, but later said "Sigemy was already gone -- I just wanted to keep up." Both crews had to enter phasing orbits slower than Kerbin, after arriving at Kerbin's orbit more than a quarter orbit ahead of the planet. After a long, long wait, Sigemy and crew were able to reenter and land safely with total mission elapsed a little over four and a half years, while Sherny's slightly different choice of phasing orbit parameters required a little longer wait, and a total mission time of close to five and a quarter years. It was (mostly) worth the wait, however; between the two crews (the first brought back multiple crew and EVA reports, and surface samples, despite lack of proper experiments) enough data was returned to allow R&D to finish the design of technology that will allow a properly equipped vessel to refuel on the surface of a body, providing there's sufficient concentrate of "ore" and enough electrical energy to operate the equipment. The ammonia smell was hardly evaporated from the blueprints for that hardware before the VAB team was hard at work, fitting the new equipment to the mostly-completed Miner Master, designed to be a self-contained fuel depot. Its destination, not surprisingly, was the captured asteroid Valentina 1, which initial scans showed to have a concentration of about 83% ore. Put another way, there's more than 800 t of LF/O to be had from that one space rock. Once completed and some basic tests done, Miner Master launched, with Valentina commanding the liftoff (assisted by engineer Neelle), while the fuel depot's lander can was crewed by pilot Maltry and engineer Magcella. In order to lighten the craft for launch, Valentina's command/service module was launched with empty LF/O tanks, only RCS on board -- plan was to transfer enough fuel from the refinery's tanks for her return to Kerbin. Once the combined vessel reached orbit, however, Val changed plan; in order to give the refinery (to be rechristened Fuel Station Valentina) the most margin for maneuvering to reach the highly inclined orbit of Valentina 1, Val decoupled in LKO and left Maltry on his own for the outward journey. It was only after Maltry had burned to intercept the asteroid that Val remembered that she had empty main tanks. Fortunately, the vessel she was left with had a huge inline RCS tank, which provided plenty of dV to deorbit (though the task took a long time, with only six RCS quads mounted). With Val and Neele safely on their way back to Kerbin, Maltry belatedly reported that the refinery-only section of Miner Master was something of a pig to fly -- it hadn't been noticeable during launch and LKO insertion, probably because of the length and mass of the complete vehicle (not to mention the pitch and yaw authority of the huge gimballed engines), but the mass wasn't well balanced along the craft's centerline (likely due to VAB crew working too much overtime trying to fit the fuel converter, ore holding tanks, drill unit, and radiators, along with multiple additional fuel cells, to the already-constructed transfer stage that was to become the refinery). Once Maltry began his transfer burn, with only four Poodle engines and a greatly truncated vessel, it had a very strong tendency to pitch and yaw, with a little roll coupling (likely due to the interaction of thrust vectoring and reaction wheels). Worse, the RCS (using the newly developed, and not previously flight tested, Vernor engines instead of monopropellant based RCS) was even more unbalanced (though that was likely also due to the unbalanced mass with ungimballed motors, as the Vernors are symmetrically mounted). With all that, Maltry was able (with the assistance of SAS) to keep the vessel on course through the burn, and will intercept Valentina 1 in a few days. How well he'll do trying to claw-dock to the virtually gravity-free space rock is yet to be determined -- he's a good pilot, but he's not Jeb.

I haven't played career mode yet (I got into KSP at 1.2.2, just about six months ago). I've been playing a Science game, however, built around the idea that space exploration is more about individual heroism than about saving money by sending machines everywhere. I have a couple simple "rules" I abide by -- first, no crewed missions with solid boosters, starting as soon as I had a Swivel engine (had to let Jeb fly on a solid a couple times to get the science to unlock that -- but he was a volunteer!). Second, no automatic pilots. Every mission, everywhere, has a crew, with a pilot (and, now that I have larger pods, sometimes engineers and scientists). It makes the rockets bigger (takes a pretty big booster to launch a two-stage lander with enough dV to get the crew home to Gilly or Ike), but there's no worry about communication limitations -- Tracking can always tell where a ship is, even if Ground Control can't talk to the crew, and the ship always has full crew control, even if it's in a comms shadow or out of range. All science is brought back to KSC (unless the experiment burns up on reentry, which happened a couple times during the early Mun/Minmus phase). My final self-imposed rule is no nukes. Personally, I don't have a problem with launching nuclear hardware into space, but the Kerbin of my current space game doesn't like the idea of an accident contaminating their tiny planet. If we can't get there with chemical rockets, we'll consider ion propulsion -- or we won't go. Perhaps in the future I'll do something similar with a life support mod (which will make for even larger ships on interplanetary missions), more crew space than a 3-Kerbal command pod, and so forth. For now, though, by the time I've done an Ike landing, and possibly a Duna surface mission, I'll be close to filling out all of the stock tech tree (except parts I'm not using anyway). That's looking like another ten Kerbin years yet (I'm currently in Year 7, after a one year asteroid retrieval, and a five year Gilly mission -- bad return window, probably would have saved time to wait in Eve orbit for a better one, since that would have taken a maximum of two years or so for the round trip). FWIW, there hasn't yet been a Kerbal killed or abandoned/stranded, though Duna landing and return will be the real test of that.

Venture Star was to have a linear aerospike main engine, so wouldn't need vacuum optimization. And there were a bunch of smart people who thought they could make it fly to orbit on its own, though they admitted it wouldn't have much in the way of payload fraction.

Just for future reference, I've seen (in a post somewhere on this KSP forum) that you can put a Jr. inside a Sr. and both will work -- you can even offset the Jr. (don't recall what that was for, but it was done and worked). I've tried putting a Jr. inside a standard, and it doesn't seem to function, but there's enough clearance inside the Sr.

Yep, that's about it. The excess velocity (above the minimum for Munar escape) from Mun's SOI to get an in-atmosphere periapsis is going to be something close to Mun's orbital velocity -- your "ejection velocity" which is your residual orbital velocity (for a highly elliptical Kerbin orbit). You have to reverse that orbit to reenter retrograde. Now, that's not a bunch of extra dV on a Mun return, and less from Minimus, but it's still unnecessary, and the retrograde orbit it creates gives you, in effect, around 600 m/s additional velocity at atmospheric interface. Do this from Minimus and it's about the harshest reentry you can make from within Kerbin's SOI.

The resulting orbit could not be long-term stable, however -- if it had a high enough apoapsis for Mun (or moreso Minmus) to pull periapsis up out of the atmosphere, the apoapsis would stay high enough to guarantee another encounter in the future (and if it's going out to Minmus orbit, there's also a likelihood of a Mun encounter along the way, if it's got low enough inclination for the Mun/Minmus encounter to result in stabilizing what ought to have been a decaying orbit). Never mind that aerobraking in KSP is Heisenbergian (i.e. nothing happens if it's not observed) and that asteroids don't seem to get low enough to aerobrake without being on a hard-surface collision course; even if it happened, it couldn't produce a "new Mun" in KSP as the game exists now. Now, asteroids making a close approach at relatively low velocity do often read as "orbiting Kerbin" for periods of up to several tens of Kerbin days. The first two I tried to intercept showed that way, including an orbit plot that was elliptical, rather than parabolic or hyperbolic, despite also showing "Kerbin escape" after some period of time. The one I finally went out into "orbiting the sun" territory to intercept and managed to bring back is really in orbit; it's got a period of about 4 days and never gets close enough to Mun to enter SOI.

The other advantage of orbiting posigrade is that you'll have less heating during reentry or aerobraking, because your velocity relative to the atmsophere is by twice that magic figure (Kerbin equatorial rotation speed is about 300 m/s). Enter atmosphere with the rotation, you get to subtract that 300 m/s from the speed your ablator or other heat management has to deal with; enter against rotation, and you have to add that figure. With a Mk. 1 pod and standard heat shield, returning from Mun, it makes the difference between an easy reentry and one that gets close enough to burning through the ablator to leave you weak in the knees (with the same periapsis height). Return retrograde from Minimus, and you'd better set a higher periapsis than you normally would. Beyond that, you're generally burning more dV before you even consider landing, if you set up retrograde, vs. posigrade. Talking about a Mun return again, making a retrograde reentry means you've burned more than you needed to by twice your posigrade Munar ejection velocity for the same periapsis.

For me, the simplest way to visualize a Hohmann transfer (minimum energy transfer) is that it will leave the original orbit on the opposite side of the primary from where the target body will be when it gets there. And that's the tricky part. You can get the orbital period, roughly, by picking any osculating orbit (one that just touches both origin and destination orbits); then you need a way to see where your target will be in half that time (because you're only going to ride the osculating orbit from one kiss to the other, not all the way around). You can visualize this, nearly enough, by knowing the period of the target body as well as that of the osculating orbit. This lets you determine how much of an orbit the target will traverse while you're coasting up or down the gravity well. Then you find your launch windows by looking for times when the target is the right fraction of an orbit ahead of or behind the original body. For instance, if you're transferring from LKO to Mun, you want to make your burn close to orbital Munrise -- that will extend your orbit approximately at right angles to the Mun's current direction, but the time you take to get out to Mun's orbit is close to a quarter of Mun's period. Doing this between planets is a little trickier, because neither the origin nor the target orbit can be treated as almost zero time (as can a thirty-ish minute orbit compared to Mun's 36 hours or so) -- but the idea of burning on the opposite side of the orbit from where the target will be when you get there always holds. I don't think there are tools in the stock game that can let you set up gravity assists other than by trial and error (and you may need hyperedit, or even to start a new save and warp to a particular range of dates, to even attempt to set up a maneuver node).

Well, I'm a relative noob here, so my furthest distance afield from Kerbin has been a Duna flyby (in a ship originally built for Mun/Minmus missions, but with the lander stages deleted), and a tandem pair of Gilly landings (because I forgot to put science instruments on the first vessel, and still had the transfer window -- the two launches were a couple days apart, the landings were just over ten days apart, and now the vessels are in phasing orbits, returning to Kerbin without a transfer window -- not enough dV left to try for a high velocity intercept; been out more than a year, likely be another couple years before they can get an encounter).

There are a number of those large dishes scattered around Kerbin. The one you found is Crater Rim Station. When you have a mission in space, at least within Minmus orbit (likely much further if you have better antennae on your spacecraft), and have communications enabled in settings, the comm status display (right end of the mission clock) will tell you which ground station you're connected to when you hover over the middle icon. KSC has one (presumably the array of dishes at the Tracking Station), there's one at Crater Rim, one at Nye Island (where I once accidentally landed a tandem pair of command pods straddling the island), something-or-other Massif, and possibly one or two more.

I'm pretty sure the second stage of the Falcon 9 isn't capable of 1 G with a near-maximum payload and intact fairing (it's the Vacuum Merlin engine, which is nearly useless at sea level -- and because of regenerative cooling, you can't just use an explosive shaped charge to shorten the nozzle bell to "convert" to a sea level expansion ratio), never mind the roughly 3 G needed for the F9 booster landing profile (a better suicide burn I've never seen). Even after burning off its fuel, there's just too much mass there to slow down enough. Carrying landing legs on the second stage isn't likely to happen soon, as every gram of legs, as well as the hydraulics to extend them and operate grid fins, plus the cold gas attitude jet system, comes directly off the allowable payload. Landing the second stage like the booster would require a ground-up redesign of the second stage (and hence the booster, because of mass gains) to retain existing payload capacity.

I'm going to go with "No way in hell!" In reality, it may be "Long, long, LONG odds, but not impossible." It's a big universe. The big trouble is the red giant phase that all stars less than 3.5 solar masses pass through when their main sequence lifespan is expended. For our sun, that red giant phase would extend the sun's photosphere to about the distance of Earth's orbit, after which the Earth would deorbit in a few hundred years (at most) from the drag of the solar atmosphere (the red giant phase lasts, as I recall, a billion years or so). So, to get an Earth-sized planet in the white dwarf's Goldilocks zone, it would have to start in a Mars-equivalent orbit, roughly (or colder), to avoid being deorbited. Then, as or after the star finishes expelling its outer layers in the form of a planetary nebula, the planet would have to make a rather precise orbital adjustment over a fairly precise time schedule -- can't come in too fast, or it'll get blasted/burnt and lose all its volatiles (gases for the most part, though anything that vaporizes at red heat would follow after the oxygen was driven off, at least from the crust), can't come in too slow or it'll lose the ejecting layers that are braking its orbit. Finally, it has to finish in the very narrow (and constantly shrinking, though that's on the scale of millions of years) liquid-water zone around the very hot, but very small white dwarf -- that zone will, at the beginning of the white dwarf phase, be a good bit bigger than the one around M class red dwarves, but still far smaller (and narrower) than that of F, G and K class yellow dwarves like our sun, Alpha Centauri, etc. So, for our own solar system, we'd have to have Mars migrate after the peak of the red giant phase to an orbit inside that of Venus, likely closer to that of Mercury (six of the seven planets of Trappist I are closer than Mercury is to our sun, and the outer one is frozen, but the white dwarf Sol's Goldilocks zone would start larger than that because it's hotter). Then, the planet must somehow (no known mechanism available) migrate inward over time to remain habitable as the white dwarf, no longer generating heat but just radiating away what's left over from its collapse, cools. And all of this has to start with a planet that hung onto its water and atmosphere through the prior three to ten billion years (main sequence lifespan of F, G, and K stars) -- Mars likely doesn't have enough water left, even if it could regenerate a useful atmsophere; you'd probably need a bigger planet, closer to the mass of Earth or Venus.

Actually, 0.7 g is more like the mass of a pinch of salt. A teaspoon of sugar is about 5 g. And beyond that, I think there's a calculation error there somewhere; seems to me I recall a figure for 20 kt nuclear explosion of a few tens of milligrams.

This is what I was referring to as "acceptably steep" above. Unless you're landing on a mountain top, you need a certain descent angle to be sure you don't intersect terrain before you finish killing your velocity -- and if your descent stage has something like a single Terrier (as my early ones have had -- why bring a heavy engine with a lot of thrust to land on Mun, or moreso Minmus?) dodging terrain isn't always possible. And in my opinion, dodging terrain winds up costing more fuel than a steeper descent, plus it really puts you off your planned landing location (you're certain to overshoot, possibly by as much as halfway around Mun, if you have to maneuver upward late in your suborbital trajectory). I try to make my deorbit burn late enough and hard enough that my prograde is around 15 degrees below horizon if I'm landing on higher ground, and may go as high as 20 degrees for a lowlands landing site. I've made few enough Mun landings that I might still modify this rule of thumb -- Mun has some steep terrain in spots. Minmus has such a low orbital velocity that you can pretty much kill your orbit and drop straight down if need be, unless you're flying with near-zero dV margin. And when you get to landing on Gilly (which I did for the first time a couple days ago), bring a good book -- you'll spend a lot of time waiting to get to the surface. It's almost like docking with an asteroid, except there is enough gravity to hold your ship in place once you get all the legs planted (10 km orbit is something like 25 m/s).

Important to note (from personal experience): if you start too low, you have to make a much larger deorbit burn to get an acceptably steep descent; otherwise, there's a hazard of flying into terrain (especially if your landing site is in a deep crater). That is to say, if your final descent trajectory is too shallow, mountains and crater rims may rise above your trajectory before you get close enough to ground for your terminal landing burn, and taking that into account, there's actually little difference in delta-V between, say, a 25 km orbit and a 10 km orbit.

For myself, as long as my multi-year transfer from Kerbin to Jool (via gravity assist at Eve) doesn't require me to burn a bunch of delta-V at correction time because the calendar is off (as opposed to because I couldn't set the transfer accurately enough), I don't much care about Kerbin's calendar...

One simple method to give limited unmanned launch capability to, for instance, the Mk. 1 Command Pod (equivalent to the first Mercury test flights on Little Joe solid rockets, where they tested the parachutes and Launch Escape System) would be a simple event timer. Something like action groups, only available from Day 1 in a career or science game: Set an event to occur at a specific time (decoupling, parachute arm, heat shield jettison), in a sequence that can't be changed after the vessel is moved to the pad (and a single timer should be able to control a large number of events over its run time -- at least a dozen -- because it's just a matter of adding switches along the single cam's track). Timer starts at the first (ground controlled) staging event (which usually is used to ignited the first stage -- no launch clamps yet at this stage) and then runs without possibility of external intervention other than ground destruct signals. This emulates a simple device that goes all the way back to V-2 days (the world's first ballistic missile used a simple timer to gradually tip over the gyro platform to provide the pitch maneuver that sent the missile downrange rather than having it fly straight up and fall straight back down on the launch site), and beyond (there were similar devices used in model airplanes and larger "drones" to provide pre-programmed sequences of turns, climbs, descents, etc. after takeoff, going back at least to the 1920s). This could also be used to launch very simple probes (equivalent to Sputnik, perhaps, just orbits and transmits a "beep" signal until its onboard batteries run down) with a launcher that uses aerodynamics, initial tilt, and gravity turn to establish orbit (like the first Japanese satellite launcher, which had no active guidance onboard) -- thus making orbital craft, of a limited sort, available, virtually from the beginning of career or science games. Hey, @Space_taco, at that distance, you might as well be on the Mun!