Blue

I just have a simple question: Is there a recommended texture size, or maximum? I'm planning on going with 1024x and hoping that no one will yell at me for using too many resources for a large solar panel.

Mortimer makes me think of Mortimer Green, the Financial Advisor from Sim City 3000. But he looks like the G-Man from Half-Life 2. I wonder if that's another reference....

I guess I just wanted to juxtapose different capsule shapes, rather than rigorously presenting all models of human-rated spacecraft.

Not enough people compare the space cars astronauts fly, because we're all so interested in the loud noises and flashy bits from rocket lifters. I did a bit of digging and I was actually pretty surprised at the amount of variation in capsule design. And it looks like there will be no shortage in coming years due to commercial enterprises.

You're posting imgur albums like this: www.imgur.com/a/ABCDE[/url] They should look like this: [imgur]ABCDE[/imgur] (Don't use the above as an example through quoting to see how I got the BB code for these: they're mixed with (color) tags so that you can see them without quoting. Just copy and past the tags I just provided. A (URL) tag is for hyperlinking text to webpages. The admins of our gracious forum have implemented specific (imgur) tags so that you only need the 5-character identification string for your image or album, not the whole URL of the album's page. I would highly advise you modify your opening post accordingly. Day 3:

To post imgur albums, post the tags [imgur]ABCDE[/imgur] where ABCDE indicates the 5-character identification string in the URL of the Album you want to post. I am looking forward to when this is complete. Though it will take Manley skills to land an aircraft on board it while it is flying.

These are the issues people think about in anticipation of future updates? Huh. I guess I don't care about ballutes or lithobraking enough. Or planes or star drives. Or mining. Or boats.

Okay your response finally got me on track. Spider silk weighs 1.31g/cm3. If we have 1 cubic centimeter uniformly spread out over a sheet 1 micron thick, it comes out to exactly 1 square meter. (100cm * 100cm * 1 micron = 1cm3.) 0.5*1.31 grams * 2500 m/s 2 is 4.094kJ of kinetic energy.

It would probably cause a pretty serious injury to be hit by a feather traveling at 2.5km/s. I'm thinking about low mass collisions for a pretty weird reason, and I can't actually think of how the physics would work very well for some reason. Would it be survivable for a human to be hit by the broadside of a solar sail or other extremely thin sheet of material traveling at a high speed like the one I suggested; is spider-silk insubstantial enough? Or would it depend on the tensile strength of the impacting material, more than its mass?

No one's found the easter eggs on Jool....

The most annoying thing for me is how Docking Ports are not targeted when selected as targets; only the Center of Mass of other vessels will be used as the target origin. In addition, one can't navigate using the navball to dock if in IVA unless the docking port is mounted in the same direction as the IVA'd crew part.

Very impressive for a single launch. I've done my own on a similar scale but each component of the landing assembly needs a redesign. I like your version with the large round tanks.

Speak of the devil, some of the modifications and improvements to the Stock-integration of Spaceplane Plus includes supplying Mk3 fuselages.

Spaceplane Plus was made by Porkjet to improve and supplement the mk2 fuselage. It probably won't be long until the mk3 is improved as well-- though we should all hope that the modification would come with increasing the cross-section size so it can accommodate 2.5m parts inside.

The spaceplane plus parts once made vanilla should prove indispensable in making reliable and simple cargo bays with a part cost of 1-4 rather than 20-60. Which is great for everyone but sort of makes your guy's designs look dated :V Oh well, such is the venture of OSCTA when higher performance comes out with updates. Even though I am on a video game hiatus, I expect you all to get your homework done and come up with clever ways to employ the new SP+ parts or integrate them with existing techniques.

What is its purpose? All I can see for its payload is 3 kerbals and some spare fuel.

If you can fire the engine you can have an unpowered landing, or at least a hard landing. Worst comes to worst you can angle your vehicle fully retrograde and use the entire vehicle as a hard cushion, letting parts below the probe act like a crumple zone.

I am not sure I can rig my model to joints or bones. I am planning on making a fordable part not unlike origami, not just moving parts. Collapsible tessellation doesn't exactly lend itself to joints without some terrifying skin deformation.

It's been a long time since I attempted creating a custom game asset, and never before have I tried making an animated object-- with moving parts, or blendshapes. I use Maya 2011. Right now I'm seriously considering making a solar panel, which would probably not work very well if it was separate polygons animated in the same scene. It would work best using Blend Shapes, like in facial animation. I was just wondering if this method would still be viable for a part.

I've just remembered that I'm an idiot! Helpful! I guess I could've replaced (v0t + 0.5*a*ta²) + ... + (v0t + 0.5*(-a)*ta²) with just 2(v0t + 0.5*a*ta²) + ... D'oh

Thanks in great part to Atomic Rockets, I've been doodling and dabbling with the numbers for making a spaceship that could travel up to 0.5c for a story I'm making. However I can't seem to get the math right for figuring out it's travel time, acceleration time, or grade of acceleration. I want the vessel to accelerate somewhere between 0.5G and 1.5G. Using my *cough* knowledge of physics, I know that d = (v0t + 0.5*a*t²) to solve for distance if acceleration, time and initial velocity are known and d = v*t to solve for distance if velocity is known and is constant, and time is known So basically I just needed to plug these numbers together, or so I thought. T = time total = 2ta + tt //(where ta means time spent accelerating, and tt means time spent traveling at a constant velocity.) v0 = 0 m/s //(effectively, in comparison to...) vt = 0.5c = 1.49896229*108 m/s //(traveling speed) (0.5 * 9.80665m/s²) ≤ a ≤ (1.5 * 9.80665m/s²) //(possible acceleration values) d = 1.12365412 Lightyears = 1.06303617*1016 meters //(distance to be covered in my story) So I thought the solution for time to accelerate, time spent coasting at half-light speed and acceleration values could be shown in a three-variable equation, which could result in a 3D graph showing a peak. d = (v0t + 0.5*a*ta²) + (vt * tt) + (vtt + 0.5*(-a)*ta²) (The reason why the second acceleration value would be because the vessel must decelerate approaching the destination. For the second part of accelerated motion, the velocity initial would inherit from the travel velocity of 0.5c.) So, 1.06303617*1016 = (0.5*a*ta²) + (1.49896229*108 * tt) + (1.49896229*108*ta + 0.5*(-a)*ta²) , 4.903325 ≤ a ≤ 14.709975 Resulting in a three variable problem, solving for a, ta and tt, where a would be answered in meters per second, and the time would be solved in seconds. However when I tried it out on Wolfram Alpha, a (acceleration) cancelled out and it gave me a linear function of ta and tt, which made no sense to me. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

Neat idea. I probably would've just figured out a way to use parachutes. By the by, "closed cycle" in rocketry usually refers to cycling exhaust gases directly into the combustion chamber, which produces more thrust at the expense of design complexity and weight, over "open cycle", which vents fuel pump turbine exhaust. Open cycle is less efficient and usually 15% less powerful, but is much easier to design and build (cheaper) and they weigh less. The word you're probably meaning is 'fully reusable'.

Having a blowoff panel probably would cause the booster to structurally fail if it was ever used while the booster was at speed due to the change in its aerodynamic profile. Unless the area surrounding the panel was extremely strong, which would cost a great deal of booster mass. I don't think such a thing would be justified, rather than having perhaps some kind of cutoff system mounted above or inside the nozzle, to stop solid fuel flow.

If I wasn't on a video game hiatus, I'd try building that myself.

Scott Manley gets an award for being Scott Manley. That isn't fair D: