Temstar

But then the large structures of the universe that is dependant on gravity will be radially different in the kerbal universe. Galaxies won't form the way they do as fusion in stars will work differently. If the gravitational constant is higher than fusion could be ignited with much less hydrogen and the universe will be filled with tiny dwarf stars. The larger stars will be super compressed from the higher gravity as they start to form and either be blown apart by runaway fusion reaction or collapse directly into (very small by our standards) black holes.

Actually there is. Just use the aircraft trim control in translation docking mode to set the bias to always "pedal to the metal" and just point your rover in the direction you want to go and then turn on SAS. Eve is easy driving. I let SAS drive my rover 40km to the ocean and then 50km up hills to the launch vehicle.

Oh? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SERV So clearly either Chrysler's Space Division engineers are all duds, or the drag model in Real Life is not realistic enough?

This is mostly true. Though "open air" landers are not unheard of in real life. In fact there were proposals to use the Gemini spacecraft as the mothership to take a tiny "open-air" lander to the moon as an Apollo shortcut to beat the Soviets: And then there was this: A spacecraft that could best be described as a "rocket powered witch's broom" built out of parts salvaged from taking apart the LEM in the event that the LEM ascent engine failed to ignite and the moonwalkers need a way to get back into orbit to the safety of the CSM. I agree that the most interesting part of Eve, both from a scientific and from a resource gathering point of view is the oceans. However that doesn't mean the challenge is to launch from Eve's sea level. You could just as well have a lander that can sprout wheels after landing. Drive to the beach, then drive uphill to the launch site before turning. Alternatively you could land a separate rover that serve as the transport for crew between the mountain top launch complex and the water, on the same mission as the lander if you want a challenge. Using rovers to both go to the ocean and mountain is a very clever piece of mission planning and should be encouraged instead of treated as if it was "cheating the Eve challenge" in some ways.

It gains energy from the fact that rotation of Earth is slowing down due to dissipation of Earth's angular momentum from tides. The tidal bulge on Earth caused by the moon is not exactly inline with the moon since Earth is rotating once every 24 hours and so is trying to drag that tidal bulge forward, while the moon rotates around the Earth once every 28 days or so and so lags behind the bulge. The extra gravity from the material of the bulge pulls the moon forwards and gives it a small prograde acceleration while at the same time drags against the surface of the Earth slowing the rotation down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_acceleration If giant impact hypothesis is correct and the moon is indeed formed from impact of a Mars sized proto-planet against the proto-Earth then immediately after the impact Earth would've had a day only 5 hours long and the newly forming Moon would be in a much lower orbit than now. The tidal effect has already slowed Earth's day by 19 hours and moved Moon out to its current orbit and that trend will continue, unless: http://what-if.xkcd.com/26/

It's of interest to me because aerocapture in KSP is a pretty standard maneuver in KSP for interplanetary travel but has never been performed anywhere in real life aside from Zond spacecraft coming back from the moon. I understand that aside from heat dissipation there are lots of technical challenges because upper atmosphere of planets tend to be pretty dynamic places compared to the static atmosphere in KSP and the thickness of upper atmosphere can vary by a great deal depending on solar activities and so on, so it's harder to figure out the PE required for aerocapture in real life. However, I hear the actual show stopper is this - the heat dissipation is such a big deal that the heat shield required to survive an aerocapture is around as heavy as fuel required to do capture burn to insert into orbit with rockets anyway. Since there are all these other difficulties like upper atmosphere dynamics it's not worthwhile trying to go for aerocapture, instead you're better off just using rockets since the weight is going to be the same and firing rockets outside the atmosphere is an inherently controlled process unlike atmosphere passes. It just seems that aerocapture is so gentle in KSP that you need less protection for the payload than the actual launch from Kerbin, so simple fairings (flimsier and so lighter than actual launch fairings) should be enough to survive aerocapture.

Obviously G force is closely related to temperatures, but is that relationship liner? Say if you're experiencing 2G deceleration over Duna/Mars, does that mean the air around your spacecraft is heated to the same temperature as it would during Earth re-entry when deceleration is 2G? I'm curious because in my previous experiences all the interplanetary aerocapture manoeuvres were relatively benign with deceleration under 2G, even for big ones like Jool. Eve aerocapture seems to generate the most powerful deceleration. The Apollo capsule can survive what, 9-10G of deceleration/heating? I'm interested in to know roughly how many Gs an unprotected but robustly built Kerbal spacecraft can endure when performing aerocapture.

Actually it's more likely than you think. Decades later that idea was attempted again, this time not for going to the moon quickly but to bring down launch cost by mass production. And no I don't mean the whole Sea Dragon Big Dumb Booster thing, I'm talking MASS mass production. Building common components in the hundreds of thousand or millions per year and then assembling them into rockets. Obviously you can't possibly expect to sell million of individual rockets per year, hence OTRAG: So the idea was to develop a very simple Common Rocket Propulsion Unit which could be bundled in different quantities to produce any sized booster you want. The CRPU would be so simple as to be built out of ordinary steel, pressure feed so no expensive turbopumps, ablatively cooled engine rather than the more elaborate regeneratively cooling, no gimbling (steering the whole rocket will be done via varying the thrust of CRPUs on different sides of the booster) and flat bulkheads rather than the complex domed bulkheads of bigger rockets. Since each individual CRPU is simple and a single complete rocket will require a large number of them, the CRPU factories will be expected to mass produce a huge number of CRPU per year. Mass production of simple machines on this scale has been proven to drive down cost and increase reliability (eg, Merlin engine production during WW2) so OTRAG rockets are projected to reduce launch vehicle cost by a factor of ten compared to conventional rockets. The unit cost of CRPUs will be so cheap that recovering them for reuse will be pointless as the cost of recovery and refurbishment will be greater than just building a new CRPU. The idea was so revolutionary that OTRAG (which was a German company) managed to get Wernher von Braun interested and he became their scientific adviser. Von Braun however came to the company with a warning that rocketry is inherently a political process and he did not believe Germany provided a stable enough political environment for rocket development. Technical wise the project proved to be quite workable and OTRAG managed 14 suborbital launches with a four CRPU sounding rocket design. But the politics got in the way. The USSR and France were not interested in Germany achieving an indigenous long-range rocket activity. American rocket makers were not interested in having a low-cost competitor. A propaganda campaign began, alleging OTRAG was a cover for German and South African nuclear cruise missile development. Crude Soviet-source disinformation was eagerly picked up and given credibility by the American mainstream media. The government of the Congo (were OTRAG's testing facility was located) was pressured by the Russians to withdraw permission to use the site. OTRAG left the country in April 1979. OTRAG moved their testing to Libya but in 1983 the Libyan Government unlawfully confiscated all of OTRAG's rocket manufacturing and test equipment in the country for their own end and never returned them despite personal promises by Gaddafi. The company gave up and shutdown after those two set backs.

You can switch focus with the [ or ] key. I have a new version with seats instead of ladders if you are interested. That version of MOLAB also comes with a cupola in front for driving.

Could be the docking bug. Open up your persistence file and do a search for the word "Acquire" If you do find it it will look should look something like this: MODULE { name = ModuleDockingNode isEnabled = True [b]state = Acquire[/b] [b]dockUId = 8927489127[/b] dockNodeIdx = 0 Make a back up of that file and then change that bit of code to this: MODULE { name = ModuleDockingNode isEnabled = True [b]state = Ready[/b] [b]dockUId = 0[/b] dockNodeIdx = 0 Then it should work.

The technical name for them is mascon - mass concentration. We still don't have any good idea why mascon on the moon are so massively lumpy compared to unevenness on Earth. Mascon was actually discovered during the Lunar Orbiter program. The main reason why Apollo 11 ended up landing downrange to the original landing site was because mascon where still not well understood at the time and it perturbed Eagle's flight path. A fix was added to Apollo 12 and later navigation computers to account for mascon, hence why they were able to do pin point landing afterwards.

When you slingshot around a planet or moon prograde, the momentum of the planet/moon adds a certain velocity to your craft, depending on how wide of a angle you are deflected by. Likewise a retrograde sling means you slow down your craft relative to your primary and make that planet/moon orbit the primary a tiny tiny bit faster. The higher the gravity of the planet/moon that's deflecting you the wider your deflection angle is, hence why Jool/Jupiter is used for interstellar probes as they can add a huge amount of velocity to your craft for free. If we spin that same logic around 180 degrees, it means we are able to tell if your slingshot is prograde or retrograde by looking at the effect it has on your orbit. Assuming you have a low PE around your target so that gravitational slingshot effects come into play, look at the new orbit that you will enter into after you leave your target's SOI: If your new orbit has a higher AP than your current orbit, then you are slinging around the target prograde If your new orbit has a lower PE than your current orbit, then you are slinging around the target retrograde

Sometimes I have a specific goal in mind and the creation process is goal orientated, eg: "I can't be bothered sending manned return missions to Moho and the two dwarf planets, let's send robotic rovers instead to explores. Let's see, it needs to be carry one of each scientific instruments, have a flash looking dish antenna, have infinite cruise range in the sun and very long range in the shade, need good cross country ability and needs to have chairs/ladders to carry two Kerbals and be used as a surface taxi should I ever decide to land manned mission in the future." So the rover gets built and I go onto figure out a way to build a lander that can lower it onto the surface and have enough delta-V for the toughest target Moho: And then a launch vehicle with enough muscle for the payload gets picked out and attached via Subassembly Manager and off I go. Other times I don't really have a clear goal in mind. Instead I get inspired with ideas, something like say "let's see what's the largest radio antenna I can make", and I go into the VAB and the process could be best described as "fervidly painting with cryogenic fuel, big rocket engines and bits of structural metal" to trying to capture the inspiration and I end up with something like this: Then finally there are ideas that start off much like the second method ("Hey! If I use ladders to hold Kerbals, I could build a very lightweight Eve return vehicle!"), but because the project is too large scale to wing it I actually sit down to list all the engineering stuff that needs to be done, so then the idea morphs into the first type of methodical design process. I find this mix of inspiration and logic problem solving the most endearing of the three methods.

Did you have SAS on while re-entry? If you do it will fight the aerodynamic forces and result in shakes. After the SAS drains all available power in your pod you will lose all altitude control.

Eve, because it's a challenge to come back from and therefore encourages creative engineering. Also the whole "Blutonium rich sea water" thing brings up some good possibilities for career mode as it will become a case of "it's a hell hole for mining and returning the sources, but the product is so useful it's done anyway" like Pandora.

Supposedly refining the kethane into fuel and then lifting them offworld is slightly more efficient than lifting crude kethane. The cost is of course raw kethane is more flexible since if the fuel is produced at the "point of sale" at orbital depots you can choose exactly how much bipropellant and monopropellant to make. I went for the "surface refinery" approach back in 0.20: First I established a surface kethane refinary/propellant depot, complete with a launch complex serviced by two crawler transports capable of handling compatible landed spacecrafts. When a spacecraft lands near the depot the crawlers sally forth and dock with the spacecraft, then carry it back to the depot for refuelling. Shown above is a crew shuttle for transportation of workers, but the crawlers can of course handle larger crafts as well, such as this tanker designed to lift the refined product back into orbit: Anyway with the depot established, next I established a wellhead at a nearby gas field and landed two tanker rovers to transport the crude kethane to the refinery: Here we see two full tanker rovers approach the depot after a 50km drive across the Mun surface. The tankers dock with the depot to offload the kethane then go back to the gas field... The depot then go onto refining the crude kethane into fuel to refill its reservoirs.

The problem is to actually extract the CO2 out of the spacecraft's atmosphere is no easy job. For short term use like Apollo spacecraft lithium hydroxide is used. Lithium hydroxide absorbs CO2, turns into lithium carbonate and releases water so the process is non-regenerative, but the system itself is pretty simple and compact. For long term solution on board space stations a more elaborate system using molecular sieves is used where dried air is forced through the sieves and the sieves stop the bigger CO2 molecules from getting through while the smaller O2 and N2 are able to fit pass the gaps. When the sieves become saturated with CO2 it's moved to the outside of the spacecraft and into the sun where CO2 is then allowed to leak away. The regenerative system is complex enough that the two systems on ISS called Vozdukh and CDRA that use this method often break down, sometimes even together! When that happens the crew switch to back up lithium hydroxide system and go about fixing them. Considering that this system is responsible for keeping the crew alive I think it would be a bad idea to make it even more complex just to get a tiny bit of delta-V out of it.

Surely not? It's just a matter of figuring out what the payload weighs and then building an appropriately sized asparagus staging rocket underneath: Here we have the launch of a 110 ton, 132 Kerbal space colony into LKO. Here we have the launch of a 160ton, 16 Kerbal Mun surface propellant depot into LKO. After being lofted into LKO by its booster rocket, the depot then fires up its own engines for trans-Munar injection and landing. Final mass on the Mun is around 100 tons I think. Several more launches later... So yes it's certainly possible. Any launcher that can put payload into LKO should be able to deliver about 60% of its LKO rated payload capacity to the surface of the Mun, as long as the payload is able to complete at least the final landing under its own power. For the above two, you can find the launch vehicles here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/33381-0-20-2-Zenith-rocket-family-%28modernised-for-0-20-x-with-perfect-subassembly%29

Water is tricky to use, at those temperatures water molecule will be cracked apart into oxygen and hydrogen atom by the high temperate. This is good for Isp because the resulting gas is greatly expanded in volume but it's very hard on the engine because super high temperature oxygen ion is going to, well, oxidise anything it comes in contact with, it be the next hydrogen it runs into or the metal walls of your engine.

I think it was Harvester who said something along the lines of "the parts and capability of KSP over the versions tend to reflect the natural progression of real space programs" and that his is what he want to replicate with career mode. Since I've always been a docking advocate I got to see the development in this area first hand. Let's see what happened over the versions and how it mirrors real life: In the beginning - there was no persistence or tracking station, so you're stuck with just the active flight you're running. The closet thing to rendezvous you could do in those bad old days where to just turn around the capsule after separation from the booster rocket and track the spent booster behind you. This is exactly what happened during NASA's Mercury program. The Mercury spacecraft was primitive and didn't have the ability to translate, only row pitch and yaw. So one of the thing that Mercury flights did was spin the spacecraft around and look at the booster behind it. Version 0.11 - RCS system introduced to allow translation control, spacecraft control system greatly improved with the introduction of ASAS and orbital view. This mirrors the Gemini 3 flight with the introduction of a much improved spacecraft with both translation and rotation control, paving the way for fine manoeuvres on orbit Version 0.14 - major break through with introduction of spacecraft persistence and tracking station, allowing multiple flights at once, thus first opening up the theoretical possibility of rendezvous. However there is very little experience with rendezvous in the community at that time and little guide available, so most players are in the dark as to how to do this. This mirror's the situation on Gemini 4 where the spacecraft attempted to rendezvous with its spent booster but failed because simply pointing the nose at the target and thrusting didn't work. Like KSP players around this time NASA staff have not worked out all the nuances of orbital mechanics yet. Version 0.14.4 - when this thread was first posted. No technical improvement in the game but people have played with persistence long enough that the first rendezvous guide started showing up on youtube. Rendezvous was still very difficult because there was no select target or closest approach. And in any case where you get there there was no way to dock. Yours truly cut his teeth on rendezvous around this time and as you can see tried to come up with primitive ways to connect the spacecrafts. This mirrors the situation with the Gemini 6A and Gemini 7 rendezvous where two spacecrafts launched separately where able to meet up to as close as 30cm. However lack of docking port mean that Gemini 6A and Gemini 7 couldn't actually physically join as one craft. Even without working docking ports, the fact that I managed to briefly get two spacecrafts to grab each other fired my imagination and filled my head with ideas of propellant depots and tanker rockets and colossal interplanetary motherships: Version 0.17 - around this time the first docking mods became available. I remember back there the two were ORDA and warp claws, each with their strength and weaknesses. They didn't actually merge two crafts like modern docking, but rather the parts would pull on each other with massive force once they are close enough. Me, being Dr Rendezvous was busy promoting the possibilities opened up by docking and came up with a system that used both ORDA and warp claws at the same time on the same craft and performed the first big "mothership style" interplanetary mission with my Duna/Ike double landing and return: This mirrors Gemini 10, where primitive docking ports where first introduced and used to dock Gemini 10 with an Agena Target Vehicle. Test shows that it's possible to use engines on one spacecraft to boost the combination to other orbits. Thereby paving the way for Apollo's lunar orbit rendezvous mission plan. Version 0.18 - stock docking, much joy all around from the community. Stock docking turns out to be much more reliable than the mods and all the rage at the time was Apollo-style lunar landing mission. I was also caught up and shared one such craft: This mirrors the Apollo fights, where docking became mature technology and allowed much more delta-V efficient mission profiles. Version 0.19 - rovers where introduced, introducing theoretical possibility of docking on the surface of a body. At the time I was working on docking with multiple ports at once to allow heavy duty space construction which resulted in this: Orbital Propellant Depot Olympus II. Of course this then become obsolete with the release of large docking port in 0.20. But I wasn't too bothered since wide spread heavy docking meant the explosion of heavy construction in orbit. This mirrors the development of modular space stations such as Mir and ISS. Version 0.21 - After a long break I came back to KSP to continue to work on the modular surface base idea. All the tricks have been worked out and it's almost ready to be shared: Real life space program haven't advanced to surface base construction yet

Oh wow, someone dug that up? I still remember doing that "docking", took me something like 2 hours to achieve that. Aside from no maneuver node and closest approach indicators, back than KSP didn't track ASAS status when you switch crafts so those two would constantly drift out of alignment so I had to constantly switch between the two to keep them pointed in the right orientation. The game sure has come a long way since then,that old docking test to today's KSP feels just like looking back at the old Gemini flights with our modern eyes

It's funny you picked the 450 ton number since that just happens to be the weight of the ISS. No real life rocket past present or planned for the foreseeable future will be able to lift the 450 ton ISS into orbit in one go, but structures that big still get built in via on orbit assembly. Similarly to build a 450 ton craft in orbit in KSP is completely possible (and without CPU melting launch vehicles) using the same on orbit assembly as in real life. Even if said vehicle need good structural integrity to survive strong acceleration it will be possible via multi-docking. It's all a matter of engineering. I have a 200 ton modular surface base nearly completed on the Mun. This represent an even greater demand on total lift capacity than 450 tons in LKO, yet it could be done all stock using more than 20 heavy lift launch vehicle launches. There are limits with stock parts in the game, but 450 ton station is well within that limit. If you want to use mods to lift a 450 ton station that's fine, but it's not a matter of "I have no choice but to use mods because stock is limiting me" in this case.

You can stage the empty stage below, then instead of stage again to fire up the LV-N, leave them be with the fairing attached. Go back to the tracking station then to back to your vehicle. The fairings will be gone then.

Basically three ways that I know of: 1. Build the launch vehicle around the payload with LV-N engines 2. Build some kind of inter-stage structure on the centre node and put the payload onto of a regular booster rocket 3. Leave the top node of the payload clear and load it onto the booster rocket upside down

Here is the upgraded Nova: Assuming no surprised in terms of ASAS weight, all Zenith rockets after the upgrade will have identical guidance package at the front. It consists of 2.5m guidance unit, 2.5m battery, 2.5m ASAS and two built in RTGs for power. The small solar panels in the above picture are also gone. For deorbiting, here are the two retrograde engines in action. In theory you could of course flip the rocket around and use the main engines. But without RCS to back away from the payload after release I feel that it's probably a bit unrealistic to fire the main engines right in the face of the payload. Hence these small engines. Yeah that's what's holding me back right now. I'll wait till 0.22 to see what the changes are and then release the update.