forsaken1111

Woo science!

Very nice! What will this do to saves which have already performed a few impact experiments?

Ahh. I don't know if there is an upper limit to the amount of power the transceivers can pump out honestly.

One would assume that you'd make more power WITH the 2 reactor/generators than without... what makes you doubt this?

That does indeed shed some light on what is happening, and not at all how I expected the chutes to behave. I expected that, once staged, the chute would activate when the deployment conditions were met as do stock chutes. I'm honestly not sure how much I like that.

While that makes sense, that is not at all what I wrote or have observed. At least with this craft, if I stage to the final stage (which contains only the deorbit engines and parachute) the craft will happily slam into the ground without ever deploying the parachutes. This is on Kerbin, and without me having tweaked anything in the chutes.If i right click and arm the chute manually it works fine with the drogue chute deploying, automatically cutting itself, main chute deploying and gentle touchdown. I'll record this behavior if you like.

I have no idea what you mean by this, can you explain? When I include a parachute in a stage I expect it to then OPEN. What is happening is when I activate the stage the chute is in (droge+main 1.25m cone) it doesn't open. I have to manually right click and arm the chute cone for it to work.

If we're talking realism here then presumably one could just ask the transmitting ship not to transmit quite so much. I mean is that really so hard? We do this in real life.Kerbals obviously have radio communication and remote control. Turn down the damn transmitter = receive less power.

My apologies. Perhaps you found a bug then. I didn't mean to impugn your expertise in the art of sailing, I'm sure it is entirely applicable to fictional spacecraft.

You will gain velocity in the direction the sunlight will be reflected off of the sail. Its hard to wrap your head around but once you get it they're fairly easy to use.

You don't have to mine directly on a hotspot. Plenty of people are using them. I've used them quite a bit.

By small quantities he likely is referencing the intake value, or how much you get over time, rather than a finite quantity. So in some locations you get only a little over time, other locations you get more quantity of water for the same time spent mining.

Just want to verify that impact experiments do indeed work just fine. I just did two impacts on the Mun, 500 science for the first and 303 for the second. Both times I had two detectors on the Mun for the impact. Thanks Fractal!

"I'm taking my spaceships and going home!" -JeffreyCor

If you're trying to do an impact experiment you need the seismic accelerometer, not the gravity detector. And earlier someone mentioned how to get back the original stock device, so you can just do that. Its more productive than whining about the change. Mod author has shown that he doesn't really give a **** what you or any of us think about him changing stock systems. (Remember the outcry over his unilateral change of the solar cells to make them produce waste heat?) Sure it's a terrible practice to change mechanics for stock equipment but he doesn't seem to care. Really, either accept the changes or don't use the mod.

Remember that once the ship is unloaded the part count doesn't matter. If you have the patience though and need to keep the part count down, just use a lot of smaller craft.

I am planning a few missions to Duna, one of which is a series of impactor probes so I just want to make sure I have this right. To perform an impactor experiment you need at least one craft on the planet's surface with an accelerometer. You get more science if you have more than one craft. Now I saw fractal mention that it works best if the receiving craft are on opposite sides of the body. If I place 3 or more craft equidistantly around Duna will this be more beneficial than just having the same 3+ craft in a single landing area? The plan right now is to send a Mars Direct style mission landing a small refinery setup and return vehicle. The refinery lower section will remain behind as a fueling station receiving power from an orbital reactor while the return vehicle will be used to (obviously) return the first explorers to kerbin from launch #2. To manufacture methane on Duna all I need is power, right? The CO2 and water can be mined right there on planet?

Yes, and he was replying to me suggesting boiling water to jet from said spacecraft. In any case I was just saying that the working fluid need not be water specifically. Its just convenient.

That depends entirely on how much water you have. And it doesn't have to be water.

I'm amused that you're arguing against something on the grounds of safety considering the things in your mod. There are materials which could safely contain the steam without corroding I am sure... a plasma/ion based RCS is interesting to me as well though. Will we get an endgame vaccuum plasma upgrade for it as well?

I can't imagine that the superheated steam would cool appreciably as it blasts its way through the abstracted pipes to the RCS block... have a central 'boiler' attached to the reactor which boils the fluid. Have water tanks on the craft which the fluid is drawn from. Water becomes steam with the input of thermal energy (and stays steam through an ongoing input of said energy) and steam is removed as RCS fires.

In point of fact, superheated gas is what the thermal rocket ALREADY does. There is no practical reason I can think of which would prevent the same principle from being used for an RCS-like system with insulated pipes and nozzles all over the craft. Boiling water is likely a byproduct of cooling the reactor. Sure these reactors use a closed coolant loop but open cycle cooling (ie thermal rockets) is already in the mod.

Ah, well the suggestion was for a mod so I was confused by the abiguous response.

Scrapped by whom? I never saw the mod author echo your sentiments. Can you provide a source or are you just assuming he agrees?

You could eject it with a small amount of force from two points on opposite sides of the craft to avoid imparting any momentum to the ship. Really though the force of ejecting the fluid wouldn't be worth modeling it woul dbe so low and you're right that both effects can be safely ignored for gameplay considerations.