Beamer

Looks like you were wrong, or I was late... But maybe @Vini will be next.

Docking is easy after a little practice, a lot easier than launching for sure (unless you're docking in an atmosphere that is). You only need 2 things, a proper alignment indicator mod, and patience. 99 out of a 100 times I see it go wrong on videos it's because of a lack of the latter I do all my docking by hand and barring the odd Kraken attack (which MJ doesn't prevent) I have a perfect track record. I never really trusted MJ enough to give up control of my ships beyond executing maneuver nodes. I do account for it in station design though, I always put my extendable solar panels and radiators on the opposite side of my docking pier. Ever tried the SpaceX ISS docking simulator ( https://iss-sim.spacex.com/ )? I take a strange feeling of pleasure out of knowing that if I ever get stuck in a Crew Dragon capsule without pilot, I'll be able to dock it perfectly on the first try

When you go to the grocery store for a loaf of bread, I imagine you're driving something like this

I've put a lot of hardware in space today. I've shot my Pol surface refinery and tanker to orbit, it was a heavy launch: Here's the package in orbit. I added the 4 side mounted tanks last using the 4 available regular docking ports, not thinking about needing one for refueling: Which meant I had to use one of the two free Jr docking ports on the tanker to dock to the offset inflatable docking port on the refueling station. Tight fit, in the dark, docking level extreme: I found out that for some reason I couldn't transfer fuel from the mining rig to the tanker, despite the fact that the Sr docking ports that hold them together are set to enable crossfeed. The rig contains just enough fuel to land itself on Pol but I needed a bit of extra fuel to get there, so that's a problem. I added fuel lines to the side mounted fuel tanks even though they're attached with docking ports, so I thought about moving some of those around, but then I realized I could just pack the 3 massive ore tanks with 4.5K ore and refine the extra fuel after the transfer to Jool, it is after all a refinery and refining doesn't respect crossfeed A second package is the station that will support the mining rig from Pol orbit: And finally a Kerbal transporter and lander: With all 3 refueled and crewed with a total of 7 Kerbals they'll be ready to transfer to Jool in about a month. Around the same time there is a transfer window to Duna and I have a contract to expand the station there with an extra cupola, lab and some additional living quarters. I've just taken a copy of an expansion I sent to my Ike station for a similar contract some time ago, tried and tested, no need to mess around with it: It will be accompanied by a Kerbal transporter stuffed with tourists, I could fit them in the station expansion, but they'll need a ship to get back too

I've been designing a mining rig for Pol the past days. I may have gone a bit overboard. It has... ... 18 drills with an edge radiator each, 3 refineries with a large radiator each, 24 fuel cell arrays, 6 NUKs, 4 Mk-2 lander cans, 6 Mk-1 Capsules, 3 Mk-2 Crew Cabins, 1 Sr, 1 Jr and 2 Regular top mounted docking ports, a lab and multiple antennas and ground scanners, and 3 medium thermal control systems for backup in case any of the edge panels shatter because of a clumsy EVA. Built around an S3 tank, the 3 pillars are supported by a large telescoping piston each, the center will be docked to a Sr docking port attached to a ground anchor. On the launch pad it can run around 5 and a half programs at 10% ore concentration with a 3 star engineer (limited by ore availability, not electricity), I'm expecting around 12% ore at Pol and a 4 star engineer. I'll launch it together with a custom fuel tanker: The atmospheric stages are 4 of the biggest SRBs and 1.5 times the biggest S4 tank with 4 vectors and 4 mammoths, enough to take it to 80 km Ap. The tanker will be used as kick stage, refuel in orbit and be used as transfer stage (using the rig itself as extra tank). After arrival it will serve at Pol to carry fuel to orbit. It has a Rhino and 6 Wolfhounds, and 12 of the small orange 16kN engines mounted in reverse near the front so it can land nose down on top of the Sr dock. The small engines give it a Pol surface TWR of only 1.9 when fully filled, but that's fine, it only needs to go up a few hundred meter, flip over and hit the big engines to get to orbit. That's the plan at this point anyway, tests are ongoing I'll also have to come up with a station for Jool or Pol orbit, and a crew lander, and I have a Duna transfer window coming up only a few days after the Jool transfer. Bit of a transfer window storm atm, Dres, Moho, Jool, Duna and Eeloo all coming up in a period of around 50 days,

Considering the propensities of humanity throughout the ages and assuming that these aliens would not be entirely different (if they were, the probably wouldn't evolve/develop along a similar path as us), my guess would be that if you approached such a planet, you would instantly be nuked into oblivion by automated systems, without warning. I'm pretty sure there was a Star Trek episode along those lines Alternatively, part or all of the simulation could be augmented reality where the people in the simulation would be able to respond to external events - perhaps through an augmented reality layer, so they might not be fully aware that they're repelling an invading alien force, in their 'reality' they might be playing an important sports match or game. In any case I'm pretty sure no civilization would go that route unless they had some pretty sturdy defense (and probably stealth) technology in place to prevent any accidental or intentional stepping on by some alien boot. Let's not forget the example you name (The Matrix) is run by a civilization that is arguably more powerful than humans. I also don't think any civilization would go that way if they were still restricted to a single planet, this is a plan that begs for some redundancy As an aside, we quite likely already live in what is effectively a simulated reality, the one created by one of the most powerful computers known to mankind, the human brain. People commonly like to think that our senses detect "reality as it is", however to the best of our current knowledge, detecting reality is not in any way, shape or form part of the theory of evolution. What we detect is fitness, not reality, and simulations where creatures that detect reality are matched against creatures that detect fitness in a competitive environment invariably end up with the extinction of the creatures that detect "reality as it is" (see "the interface theory of perception" by Hoffman, Singh & Prakash).

Zeno's Arrow... It's performing as designed, because movement is just an illusion.

There is a max number of contracts. So if you did not want to take those contracts, you would eventually (and inevitably) end up with a list consisting entirely of offered contracts you did not want and which would never expire. I.o.w. it would effectively force you to either complete or fail those contracts. You already get the milestone rewards for those 'firsts', which is separate from the commercial contracts.

Dres transfer window coming up. I have a few tourists lined up and I'm sending 9 crew to relieve the 7 I have currently stationed there. None of them deserved the punishment of a second tour at Dres. I'm using a KerBus Mk-3 for the trip, 4 Wolfhounds, 19 seats total, it can do around 3.8K deltaV. The tourists were already in my orbital hotel, so first I headed there to pick them up: Like sardines in a can, only 1 empty seat, such efficiency: Plenty of snacks aboard, they won't go hungry. Finally a swing by my refueling station to fill up the tanks: I also found some time to check out an anomaly I marked on the Mun a while ago. I was expecting a Mun Arch but it turned out to be one of these:

Anyone who wants to think/theorize/fantasize about space combat at relativistic speeds I would recommend to read "Protector" by Larry Niven. Without going into the plot, there is a chapter or 2 where the protagonists are basically in a race to reach a destination first while being chased by aliens, and along the way they take a lot of potshots at each other using missiles and lasers. I'm not going to say it's all scientifically accurate (for one, it's been quite a while since I last read it) but he definitely put some thought in all the strange effects you have to deal with when trying to hit an enemy ship while both traveling at a significant fraction of light speed (and how to avoid being hit). It was quite an exhilarating read as I recall. In this particular story they use Bussard Ramjets to reach these speeds which means that they will typically be under acceleration, at which point using any sort of 'cannon' is really quite pointless. All you have to do is put some matter at the right place and time. If the enemy ship runs into it it's game over. He also put some work into the whole question of how you detect (or don't detect) an incoming projectile when everything is blue-shifted into X-ray territory.

I've continued testing the use of the space plane to do crew trips to and from my LKO station. I've sent it up to fetch another batch of 7 recent recruits who just came back from a team building trip to the Mun and Minmus. Getting more comfortable with the landing approach, I haven't crashed it yet and only had to do one go-around when I came in too high. Here's a nice night launch: Docking at the station, carefully... On the way back I concentrated on keeping the crew alive so I didn't make any snaps. However at the same time I've been testing a slight variation on the model. The 2 nuke engines give it a very low TWR in orbit so I've been testing a model that replaces them with 2 aerospikes. I had to rebalance the Lx/Ox mix a bit and change the configuration of the engines, but it can still carry more than enough fuel for LKO operations, orbital adjustments are much nicer, and the reduction in weight doesn't hurt the handling either. Here's some shots of the tests. Catching thin air: And thick air... Approach to KSC with a good view of the engine configuration. I have the upper and lower Rapiers set up in action groups, I find the square configuration makes it handle quite nicely. Using only the bottom 2 engines on approach makes it easier to keep the nose from tipping down at low speeds. The Aerospikes also help getting to orbit, once the Rapiers run out of breathable air I can stage them and get an extra boost to get my Ap out of the atmosphere quicker. And as a bonus, it gets rid of the tank and engine part clipping: I need quite a bit of runway but I haven't gone off the end yet I want to try to make a version with 3 Mk-2 cabins, I currently have a small cargo hold with some extra monoprop and 2 medium reaction wheels in front of the cabins, but I can incorporate the reaction wheels in the side tanks and don't really need the extra monoprop, so I can replace the hold with another cabin without changing the length of the craft. 12 luxury seats makes it better for tourist transports. I had brought my old pre-SSTO method down to a cost of 3.5K per tourist (return trip). With just the fuel costs for a return trip in this thing, assuming 12 or 13 tourists per trip I can get that down to less than 1000 Kreds per tourist. The rest of the trip is 100% re-usable and sustainable (and all investment have long been earned back). 1000 Kreds, total costs per person, to visit all planets and moons up to Dres. Eat your heart out SpaceX!

Oh I certainly don't fault him for it, the fact that he could keep his composure at all is remarkable enough. If it had been me in his seat I would have sounded like a British footy commentator after seeing the winning goal in the World Championship finals. Which is probably about as long ago come to think of it

"T minus 15 seconds, guidance is internal... twelve, eleven, ten..." Most of you will instantly recognize the quote as being from the audio feed of the Apollo 11 launch. Or maybe from the many times it was sampled and used in music pieces. But did you ever wonder what it really means? And even if you did and have some idea as to what it pertains to, did you ever realize it was... well... wrong? When the Apollo rockets were on the launch pad, the gyroscopes for its inertial guidance system were locked in position. An inertial guidance system is used to determine your orientation in space relative to some fixed baseline orientation. Coupled with information from accelerometers this allows you to calculate your current position in space. Of course when you're standing on the launch pad, and that launch pad is attached to a medium sized planet which is constantly rotating around its axis and in orbit of a star that is in orbit around a galactic center, your orientation in space is constantly changing. Just before the launch, these gyroscopes were finally unlocked and from that point forward, the guidance computer would start keeping track of the rocket's actual orientation in space (as opposed to it's orientation on Earth, which if everything goes according to plan should be roughly 'upright' since some time before launch). Internally this event is typically referred to as "Guidance Reference Release". So why did he say "guidance is internal"? This seems to imply that there is some sort of external guidance system and that around T minus 15 they switched from this external to the internal guidance system. This is not the case. The fact of the matter is that the announcer (Jack King I believe his name was) misread the script, or perhaps he read it right but simply misspoke. At T minus 17 the gyroscopes of the guidance system were unlocked, and what the script called for was the announcement that "Guidance is inertial". Some time after Apollo 11 (for the Apollo 16 launch) this announcement was changed to read "Guidance release". Whether that was the result of this misreading of the Apollo 11 script I do not know, but it doesn't seem entirely implausible. By the time Apollo 16 launched, 2 years and 9 months (to the day) after Apollo 11, that quote would have been broadcast thousands of times around the world. It would have been used in the opening leader of virtually every slightly space or science related TV show and documentary that had been produced since then. I can well imagine that some people at NASA were really annoyed with constantly hearing that and decided to change it to something that made more sense, and had less chance of being misread or misspoken.

Maybe the lack of a 4th leg is why they were such scaredy-cats though . I love Niven, but as useful as a 3-legged design is for a picnic table, it is a pretty bad layout for an ambulatory creature, and assuming growth by cell division probably extremely unlikely to evolve without 'help' by some designer of sorts. It was on Earth anyway. Even the artist of that picture seems to have had trouble with it, as that hind leg looks like it has a double femur, suggesting it started off as a 4-legged creature where the hind legs fused together during its development.

Thanks! I used exclusively blue and green lights on the craft to make sure that I would notice anything red as soon as it showed up (I have significantly diminished red/green colour vision and for a star-diver, it's rather important to see those temp gauges quickly :D). The craft is entirely stock (as is everything I build really) but I think you need to max out some science trees for the Ion engines and the Thermoelectric Generators it gets its electricity from when near its periapsis. This close to the sun, anything I stick out from behind that shield will instantly evaporate so it can't run on solar. Of course it has solar panels for orbital adjustments when it's further from Kerbol, those Ion engines slurp a lot of electricity. This is what it looks like when it's 'unfolded', the cooling radiators are all on hinges so they can fold in behind the shield but are moved out of the way when I need the solar panels: Tagging me is no problem

Sending a new facility to my Minmus settlement. This is an expansion of Jeb's Junkyard business: Landing... Deploying... The main Jeb's Junkyard tower in the background with its 2 rovers parked outside. In the far background you can see my mobile refinery. The 2 Sepratrons at the top of the new facility only contain 20% of their fuel, firing for about half a second as the building separates from the booster: Still deploying... Pfew, that took a full minute to reach the ground: After getting rid of the booster and unloading the contents of the garage, we're open for business. Experience Minmus by bike like a true pioneer! The view on the inside. Of course a proper garage/workshop needs some good pin-up posters on the wall:

Good point, if you can live for thousands of years, a few decades probably seems like a short vacation I used 19 Ion engines (and 28 large Xenon tanks) to power my Kerbol station. It doesn't make for a very nimble craft but it has enough deltaV to get down to Kerbol's surface twice and still make it back to Kerbin. It was definitely worth the views:

I made my first successful space plane. Well, to be precise, I have made space planes before and flown them to space. I have even landed a few in the vicinity of the KSC, but only by attaching a whole load of parachutes to them. Today I actually took off, docked to my LKO space station, loaded 9 crew members that had just returned from a group flag-planting trip and landed safely back on KSC runway 09. Sweat was dripping in places I don't want to talk about, I REALLY suck at landing stuff that isn't pointy end up flamey end down, consequently I don't have any action pics. Here's a shot on the runway, wing and engine configuration are blatantly stolen from a Lowne Aerospace design (according to my lead designers "it's only illegal if you get caught"), but I converted it from a cargo to a crew transporter, added a docking port, RCS thrusters/fuel and reaction wheels, a second nuke engine, a bunch of air brakes and a few drogue chutes. I've also reached 92% reputation. Not a very remarkable number but considering how long it takes to get even a single percent over 90, I think it warrants a small celebration

My guess would be they can only die from acute trauma and are otherwise immortal. I know people have timewarped thousands of years into the future but I haven't heard reports of Kerbals dying from old age. Are you sure about the mental health thing though? Could you tell the difference between a sane and insane Kerbal? I have killed very few Kerbals in my life, I always play in career mode so I do my best to keep them alive. I do know that extreme heat makes them explode in a puff of... something. I found that out when I took one on an EVA while being 99999 km from Kerbol. He was snugly behind my station's heat shield, but when you take a Kerbal on an EVA it effectively becomes its own 'vessel'. A vessel without active cooling. A vessel with a max skin temperature of 800K. Yeah... that didn't end well, it took less time to reach that temperature than it took for the 'grabbing the ladder' animation to finish playing Being a few meter from a 3200K inflatable heat shield is not healthy, doesn't really matter if you're on the shady side or not.

But that's exactly how it works of course. the ones that failed to attract a mate didn't breed and their genes for making imperfect structures weren't passed along. They didn't learn to make perfect structures (in a single lifetime), they evolved to do so instinctively (over many generations). At one point there were a lot that made 'imperfect' ones but the ones that were slightly better were more successful and over time the entire population became really good at it. The real mystery isn't that they make these perfect structures, if it increases the chance of procreation then given enough time and generations that is almost inevitable. The thing that is much harder to explain is how and why the other half of the species decided that this represented a sign of fitness, and a perfect square or triangle or an oval with the golden ratio did not. The commentary is a bit hyperbole/poetic mind you. "Nowhere else in nature does an animal construct something as complex and perfect as this"... hmm, I think there are quite a few spider, bird, bee, wasp, ant and termite species who'd like to dispute that claim, and that's just the first few that come to mind. I think what Sir Attenburough really meant was "something as beautiful as this", but of course that's a subjective human idea and while most female puffer fish might agree, no bird of paradise would.

I have a bit of a lull between activities, ships are underway but it will be two months before anything happens. So I did some rescues, I'm starting to get close to 100 crew, currently at 93 with 4 more rescue contracts lined up: Keeping close track like a proper nerd of course. Gimme ordered tables with filter options! Meanwhile some of the crew is fooling around the grounds testing out some light weight concept vehicles. Here's a nice bike, 2 wheel drive, rear wheel steering, self-balancing with training wheels to prevent damage in sharp corners: Here's a chopper trike variant, rear wheel drive, front wheel steering. It not nearly as stable as it looks but it's more fun with the buddy seat: I'm a bit worried about how these might fare on a body with low gravity... oh well, no risk no reward.

Since this is posted in the Science & Space section rather than a rocket building section I'm going to say it... It's worth noting that most scientific exploration of space has been done from the Earth's surface. By a huge margin. There is very little science that was done in space that hasn't been replicated or even improved on Earth's surface, except of course for the narrow field of science that actually involves putting humans in space, which you don't need for exploration from the surface. Point in case, the upcoming ELT is expected to offer 16 times better imaging than Hubble, and that will be done in a few years (and yes, that does stand for "Extremely Large Telescope" ). Sure, the various rovers, landers and planetary orbiters have taught us some things we might not have been able to conclusively measure from Earth, but those tend to be very local and directly related to the geographic features of the relevant body and generally fit more in the fields of geography and climate rather than astronomy and cosmology. In the grander scheme of things, sending up rockets in the pursuit of science and exploration of space is like taking a stroll through your back garden and studying the spider webs you find there. It's interesting and not entirely useless and it prepares you for a possible future trip to the neighbour's lot, but it doesn't tell you all that much about what's "out there".

I don't think the robotic parts will operate properly until you are within 200 meter (assuming you are in control of the landing ship). You may actually be able to use that as a timing mechanism but you'd need some sort of precise automated approach control to reliably repeat those final 200 meter. There's no way you could pull that off consistently by hand (I'd be happy to be proven wrong on that though). Use a KAL controller on the tower to operate the robotics, set loop mode to "Repeat-reset" and it should start playing its program automatically as soon as you hit 200m distance, if you time the program right and your approach is consistent, it should be possible in theory. Clearly someone will have to build one in KSP at some point I would suggest you start with a tiny one, just as a proof of concept to see if you can actually make the mechanics and approach work. You're probably just trying to move far too much weight on a single hinge or servo. You can use the KAL controller to lock your hinges, rotors and servos whenever they're not moving. If you can make a small one work, see how far you can scale it up.

Although 3 fixed legs are inherently stable on an uneven surface, springs/dampeners can adjust for that, and 4 legs give you a greater distance between center of gravity and turning point which means you can stand on steeper inclines without tipping over - and perhaps crucially, land with a greater horizontal speed without tipping over. To prevent tipping, assuming a circular limited space (like a rocket fairing) the more legs the better, but there are diminishing returns w.r.t. tipping the more legs you add, and of course there are weight considerations. Even though more legs mean each leg can be lighter, presumably there is some overhead that adds up (although being able to design legs to specification rather than having to choose between a couple of prefab models like in KSP helps ). The tipping point difference between 3 and 4 is quite big though so I guess 4 was the acceptable trade-off they came up with between those considerations.

I am very confused... do I feel a disturbance in the force, or are my dilithium crystals out of alignment??