UmbralRaptor

Relative velocities of nearby stars seem to run from <10 to >250 km/s. Not sure what the galaxy's rotational curve as a whole is, but I assume for a retrograde star or a cross galaxy jump, up to 400-600 km/s would be possible. And in rare cases, one could have silliness from hypervelocity stars or jumping near a double-degenerate binary system to abuse gravitational slingshots.

New Horizons closest pass. So, check again in 4 weeks?

Caelus?

Physics (with an Astronomy emphasis) at University of Missouri Kansas City, projected graduation date is December 2015. Still trying to piece together grad school options. I could whine about various woes with research and my remaining distribution requirements if anyone wants!

Inclination of Minmus is 6°. Angular diameter of Kerbin at Minmus distance is 1.46°. I wouldn't be surprised if the two eclipse seasons for Minmus are almost a quarter of a Kerbin year long.

Typically specialized cameras. You essentially draw a circle around the source and add up all the pixel values inside to get brightness. Converting this into a flux may require some familiarity with the hardware through previous testing and/or having something of known brightness in the same image. I couldn't find any passes (in a cursory search) as bright as -4 magnitude (Venus gets up to about -4.5), so probably. Also, I'd expect Iridium flares to peak at brighter than ISS passes.

I guess I missed it being renamed in 1.0.Uh, and the F-1B's unlikely to happen. (IIRC, the liquid fuel boosters got cancelled)

The KS-25 bit in the Twin Boar and Mammoth are both from the RS-25. (Hence why they look like the proposed advanced liquid fuel boosters and the 4 engine core for the SLS. Though admittedly both designs have been dropped...)

I'm not sure how giving us our first closeup views of Mercury, Vesta, Ceres, Venus (surface), Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, several small asteroids, scores of moons, finding ~1000 exoplanets, landing rovers (and doing in situ analysis of samples) on Mars, mapping the entire sky in microwave, mid-IR, near-IR, UV, Xray, and gamma ray, extensive earth/sun observations, and researching forward swept wings, thrust vectoring for aircraft, post-stall aerodynamics, hypersonic flight, and aerospike nozzles counts as nothing after Apollo. And this leaves out lots of things like Hubble...

It sounds like a messed up upgrade from 1.0 (where engines used the 1.0 atm thrust in their CFG files) to 1.0.x (where engines use the vacuum thrust in their CFG files)

Senate Launch System. (It's painfully accurate) Aside from Space Transportation System, or the aforementioned Delta. Or that a bunch of Soviet rockets started out with only alphanumerics and got names from their payloads (So you get things like East or Union). Japanese rockets still have that problem (HII-A, M-V, etc)

SpaceX vs NASA makes about as much sense as Boeing vs NASA. (They're not fighting, but occupy different niches and work together) Number-wise, probably around +500. But they're stuck on some silly-low rewards setting and can't always pick/choose their contracts.

After spending far too long coming to grips with the WISE photometric system, I've come to the conclusion that not only can you see every burn, but you can easily spot hulls in the light-second range, and any radiator that isn't edge-on out to a light-hour or so with a clone of it. A 283 K blackbody 2 m in radius at the distance of the moon (well, 374000 km) is not only bright enough for WISE to spot, but to give you a rough idea of what its hull is made out of. In the warm phase. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxef3KjILrVrMUtXeFRnaEw1cFk/view?usp=sharing WISE is a 0.4 m IR telescope in a sun-synchronous orbit that ran out of coolant back in 2010. The NEOWISE program uses the W1 (3.4 μm) and W2 (4.6 μm) passbands only. It uses passive cooling (sunshield plus pointing away from both the sun and earth) to get down to around 73-77 K. The W1 and W2 bands use 7.7 second exposures, though the system as a whole has an 11 second cycle for imaging. Images appear to be 1024x1024 at 2.75"/pix (47 arcminutes wide), with a resolution of ~6". (Confusingly, Atlas files are listed as 1.375"/pixel.) The limited field of view is actually the biggest problem, as it suggests that getting all-sky coverage will take at least 8.58 days with no overlap and 103 days with each point imaged 12 times as initially planned. Not that WISE entirely pulled that off... The NEOWISE Single-exposure photometric measurements of point sources in unconfused regions have SNR=10 at W1=15.0 and W2=13.5 mag. If you just want detections, 90% completeness is achieved for NEOWISE Single-exposure detections in unconfused regions at W1=15.9 mag and W2=14.4 mag. (combined W1 and W2 SNR>3). (The spreadsheet defaults to assuming you want the photometry values, but that is easily changed.) The largest problems are bright backgrounds (being in the ecliptic and especially in the galactic plane hurt sensitivity. Ditto being near bright stars/planets)! Relevant bits for breaking out of WISE's Vega magnitudes to Jy*Hz: http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/allsky/expsup/sec4_4h.html http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/allsky/expsup/figures/sec4_4ht2.gif http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/allsky/expsup/figures/sec4_4ht9.gif I ended up getting object emissions for those temperatures (assuming 4800 K for K2V and 5780 K for G2K) via integrating Planck's Law with the bandwidth figures centered on 3.4 and 4.6 μm respectively. This may have been overly narrow. Assuming spherical cows emitters, lots of things cancel so at the detection limit, object radius is directly proportional to its distance. See the attached spreadsheet for my calculations. Incidentally, WISE's catalog of astronomical objects is over half a billion, and NEOWISE detected over 10 thousand objects in its first year. But all of this analysis is for a semi-broken spacecraft on a distinctly limited budget. Your space navy may well face HST/KH-11 class telescopes (2.4 m) with better detector band choices and lack WISE's bugs. So all those numbers can easily go 100x fainter. WISE can't see craft (aside from larger exhaust plumes) at Jupiter, but these would. And if you can get good enough detections of a craft's hull, you can do photometry to spot the difference between whatever its using and a rock. Which makes playing asteroid that much more problematic.

60 km (The linked page lists all of the relevant boundaries)

Was 9.82, but as of 1.0 changed to 9.80665. (The page will probably require an extensive rewrite, given the way engines also changed.)

Isp *is* specified (at 0 atm, 1 atm, and some higher amount where it hits 0.001 s) in the CFG files. eg: atmosphereCurve { key = 0 250 key = 1 120 key = 4 0.001 } 250 s at 0 atm, 120 s at 1 atm, 0.001 s at 4 atm. Interpolation is messy.

"Ratio" of that propellant supply over the sum of all other "ratios." Things should only get messy if you have multiple propellants of varying densities. Since the engine still only burns monopropellant, that's 0.93/0.93 == 1 mass flow == thrust/(g0*Isp) == 50/(9.80665*250) == 0.0020394 tonnes/s "volumetric flow" == mass flow/density * proportion == 0.0020394/0.004*1 == 5.0986 units/second

The ratio isn't an actual ratio, but a weighting factor. As best I can tell, KSP adds them all up, then uses the ratio value over the sum. (A notable example is the ion engine) I was also asking, because I was wondering about the details of your modded engine (eg: is it the O-10 just with that number changed, or...?).

Could you post the entire CFG file (say, on pastebin), and what the engine is doing? (And if there are any mods, this should probably be moved to gameplay questions)

Cubic Hermite polynomials. Mind that KSP automagically picks some interesting slopes.

The launcher is b0rked. If you have the store copy of KSP, I would suggest downloading 1.0.2 from there.

KSP physics are Newtonian, not Einsteinian; skip the tensors. Well, actually it's a bit odder than that... gravitational forces in are a vector field, and at least some coordinate systems are absolute. (There's also some weird juggling with relative coordinate systems based around a craft's current location, but still...)

We always knew Kerbin's surface gravity and radius because the devs talked about them. Similarly, discussions about the Mun meant that we had a good idea of that before 0.12 came out. I used a method much like ajburges's to find the mass of Minmus in 0.15 and when it changed in 0.17, and much like maltesh's to get initial planet masses in 0.17. (It's much easier with circular orbits, though). That said, getting planet masses out of the API is much more accurate.

Uh, also to expand a bit, mind the ratios -- you can do the same with LF/Oxidizer engines (0.005 tonnes/l), but keep in mind that they run 55% oxidizer, 45% liquid fuel.

There's an extra conversion -- units of LF/Oxidizer/Mono are "volumetric", rather than mass. 20 kN /(250 s *9.80665m/s²) == 0.0081577 tonnes per second Note that the "density" of monoprop is 0.004 tonnes/l 0.0081577/0.004 == 2.0394324 units/s