Carl

Said Bob, unconvincingly.

Not that kind of hard.

What was the projectile?

Ahhh Newtons first law, the devil of every big craft.

If your gonna use a vector, just go mammoth, it's better. To be fair i was also thinking upper stage on a 2 stage design, where you'll ignite low enough down you need good low altitude efficiency, but will be spending enough time high the good upper efficiency is desirable.

If you have auto strut on you shouldn't be seeing such issues, or is this an old version of KSP?

I'd say EVE missions the ISP curve is the best of any engine AFAIK, so it will lose much less thrust low down.

It's still got some solid properties, it's just unless you flat need that ISP curve the part count of using it in numbers sufficient for major payloads is too high even with the performance improvements.

The SSME which NASA looks to be using for the next who knows how long uses the same setup too i think.

In emergencies troops have supposedly used it for fire fuel, the stuff is incredibly stable. Also i'm aware of the technical difference, i just simplified the point. Namely that rocket engines are all about controlling how the energy is released. Incidentally, maybe i'm off base but i though MH was a liquid metal like mercury, (the element, not the planet space heads).

Exactly. As far as exploding, technically with the right engine design you could use little pellets of C4 as fuel if you wanted. It wouldn't be worth it to do so, but you could. A rocket is really a controlled explosion on the most basic level. Big balls of debris and shrapnel and flame are what happens when the explosion becomes uncontrolled.

1.41 on eve @ 7.5km Also thanks will have to look into hyper edit.

Got 4.168kps of dv using that configuration. (on eve surface at 7.5km altitude). p.s you don't have a tutorial on how to place stuff on that mountaintop with the debug menu do you? That menu confuses me.

Sweet, any chance of a craft file? Would like to drop MJ on it and find out how much dv it had, (i could hand calculate it but i don't recognise one of the nosecones so, uh, yeah). EDIT: Managed to rebuild it in Sandbox, (i think), MJ says 5kps of dv.

Who's a cute lizard. *tickle, tickle* Use the labs onboard level crew function, getting them to out there should have earned them some nice xp.

True, though where unlikely to get an incident like the one that got the "worst things you've done in DF thread" deleted... Note, for the uninitiated, farming sentient mermaids for their bones to sell for money was amongst the mid-grade evil things people gleefully do in DF. It gets worse from there. This got a thread deletion, a ban on further such thread and a complete community consensus without any discussion to never speak of the details or the offender ever again.

That is exactly what would happen if we could have a KSP version of DF.

That depends on the exact properties, but heating it is a definite possibility.

There's probably MJ's hidden in them, do that and you can turn kill RoT on and as long as they're within x meters of each other the kill rot continues to function even if they're not being flown.

Yeah but the thing about MSMH is it doesn't have anywhere near as bad a set of problems in achieving high TWR as most similar or higher ISP options. And it doesn't have the issues in terms of radiation or whatever of various nuke proposals that could do high ISP + High Thrust. IMO i suspect MH won;t be MS, though i wouldn't rule out it being possible to make it so in some fashion. But thats likely a long, long time away.

There's not a lot of options out there that offer what metastable metallic hydrogen would in terms of engine performance.

Even then it has the advantage of being storable, so you can do the compressing when you have lots of energy but little need for thrust and release it when the opposite is true.

That sounds fun. In the DF sense of the word...

Nice article. His argument of using lightsails bothers me for one simple reason. It doesn't look workable for large payload sizes. You can talk about continuous small accelerations all you want but eventually you reach a point of having issues of scale, either in flight time or numbers. I'm also not sure how they're supposed to get out of mars SOI, (yes i know it's n body physics IRL, shorthand ok), or brake at earth SOI, the earth braking burn in particular would need quite a sudden braking. That said as a huge solar sail fan i heartily approve of this concept :). I'm just not sure it would be as cheap as he proposes, and i have severe doubts about it's ability to handle large amounts, (it also probably wouldn't be viable with a mass catcher style system, a lightsail tug big enough to handle the inertia of the rock catching would be too heavy to be practical IMO), but dang is it cool. Have a like :). EDIT: I ran his numbers through the Dollar tiems converter, about $0.93 a KG which is a good bit higher, though he was converting to 2009 dollars. As a p.s. If i seem to be taking the book i linked a bit seriously bear in mind i'm aware it has some flaws within, some are quite obvious, a few bits are based on theoretical science and in those cases, science has in some area's marched on. But at the same time you will see other authors time and time again re-using their work or bits thereof. The fact that it's so much a gold standard on the actual colonies end, (even if the moon mining to actually build it is so often forgotten), makes me take it seriously in a general sense because others take it seriously who are academics and supposed experts of one kind or another in the field.

I'll go over that article in a moment, (enjoying some chem articles again atm :p), but as far as the dv, again your ignoring the problem that moon mining puts the rock on a lunar escape trajectory with a mass driver, per your own dv map that removes a huge chunk of the dv cost. it drop from 3.23kps of transfer velocity to Geosync to just 0.68. Thus it's just 0.68kps. Deimos is still 2.17kps if you assume same launch method off deimos surface to near mars space.