softweir

The limit of current PC computing power. At that level of detail, even with as much of the load thrown on to the GPU as possible, the CPU is still pretty much wacked-out generating data for the GPU to render. Those demos were restricted to limited maps with a lot of map data loaded into ram, but to render world-sized maps of that quality you need a heck of a lot of algorithmic detail generation, and that takes CPU power. Top-end CPUs with 8 cores or so may well be able to cope, but there aren't enough of them out there to justify making the code to achieve that. Another problem is that the system would still need to have a lot of pre-computed data to ensure that every player's planets looked the same. KSP needs coarse-detail heightmaps and biome maps for each world (with smaller details filled in algorithmically) to ensure consistent world-appearance. (Different CPU brands and models tend to have slight numerical inconsistencies that can cause bizarre differences in algorithmic world generation, and even operating systems can cause inconsistencies!) As the developers add more facets to the world-generation, so they have to add further levels of data to the world-maps. This amplifies the effort required in creating the world maps during development, and expands the distribution size. The PC also has to do more fetching of map-data from disk as the player's vehicles move about, increasing the lag problems which are already an issue even with the existing levels of detail. I think it quite likely that as KSP matures and Squad start to think of maybe a KSP 2, so they will work on increasing the detail levels to create more eye-candy for aviators and buggy-drivers, but they will always have an eye on CPU load and ensuring that the physics engine is doing its job, which in this game is the priority!

Be ironic if a Mars launch ran into one of Elon Musk's comsats.

I think the main reason for not building a shorter Falcon, may be economic: if you build a shorter booster for lighter payloads, then that is all it can carry. You lose flexibility. Boosters take months to manufacture and you have to budget to build a booster well in advance. If you have a portfolio of short and long boosters then you find yourself having to second-guess how many of each to build, which multiplies the complexity of your advance planning, budgeting, marketing and sales. Get it wrong and you lose out big time; go to the effort to make sure you get it right adds hugely to the management and budgeting expenses. Those additional expenses would greatly exceed the cost saved (if any!) through building the smaller, "more economical" boosters. On the other hand, if you build a large number of identical boosters then all you need do is be prepared to put a bit less fuel in any booster that is launching a smaller payload. Yes, using the larger booster wastes fuel and if you fail to recover it then you waste a booster, but the fuel used in a launch is the least expensive item in the cost, and the saving from failing to recover a smaller booster would be offset by the additional costs of deciding when you need to build a new one to replace it. With their one-size-fits-all Falcons, SpaceX have flexibility and economy of scale. They can launch all but the heaviest of payloads without having to worry about which size of booster to use next.

Same in UK and a few other European nations.

Well, that could be "Kerbal", but Heaven only knows what that first consonant is, because I couldn't make it out! For all I could hear it could just as easily have been "Terbal". I'll go with "Kerbal".

I prefer prograde, though apparently we are using it wrong - a satellite is moving prograde if it orbits a body in the same direction as the parent body is rotating. Retrograde means it is orbiting in the opposite direction. Usually, "thrusting prograde" means the same as "thrusting posigrade" because we usually launch rockets prograde, but in theory we could launch a satellite retrograde (east to west), in which case "thrusting prograde" would be ambiguous - do we mean in the direction the satellite is orbiting, or do we mean thrusting to take it from west to east? Regardless, I voted "prograde" because I am used to it.

It's always a good idea to upload logs even if *you* can't see anything wrong: the developer may well be able to see that something that shouldn't be happening. In any case, as per the OP - "No logs => No support." A video showing the behaviour and links to craft affected are also useful: developers can't always reproduce bugs like this without that data. And finally, Are you running mechjeb alongside any other logs? If so, how about a list of your mods? It may be that another mod is changing objects that Mechjeb assumes won't change, and this interaction is causing the bug. Bugs caused this way are impossible to fix without that data!

The problem with cork, wood and other natural materials is that they are prone to having internal flaws such as splits and inclusions of more volatile materials. Splits and similar flaws can potentially conduct heat deep into the material, seriously damaging its insulating capability, and inclusions of more volatile materials can potentially expand explosively, seriously compromising the integrity of the heat shield. At their worst, natural materials under such extremes of heat can fail catastrophically leaving the re-entry vehicle unprotected. There are techniques for getting around this, such as using large numbers of very fine layers of material that have been carefully inspected and tested for flaws. However the cost of doing this starts to approach the cost of using completely artificial materials, so the motivation for using natural materials is reduced.

Indeed! We need an @sal_vager's Travels thread in The Lounge!

Presumably the usual happened - they lost signal during the landing. But they keep on-board recordings to distribute later.

This sounds like a sure-fire recipe for inducing pilot error - and we have more than enough of that at the moment. Pilot confuses the angle of roll needed to land on the centre-line: one set of wheels takes all the impact, high probability of a tyre burst and subsequent loss of directional control, leading to the plane running off the outside or inside of the curve. Pilot lands slightly too far to one side of the other of the centre line: again, the angle of roll fails to match the banking of the runway, tyres bursts, plane runs off the runway. Pilot fails to line up with a constantly curving centre line and ends up running off the runway. Pilot becomes disoriented by the curve and misjudges his descent slope. He either overshoots, or hits the runway too hard. Pilot becomes disoriented by the curve and misjudges his flare, either overshooting or landing too hard. We've got the M25 around London. Maybe some of it could be repurposed!

The difficult as I see it is the location of the water: most of it is at the poles, where sunlight is least available. It is true that Mars' thin atmosphere means that atmospheric attenuation of sunlight is much reduced compared to on Earth, but the angle of the sun above the horizon is very low, which would make collecting it technically difficult. And if they intend to use water and sunlight to produce fuel then they will need lots of sunlight!

The idea is that the ceramic skin of Skylon would be fabricated in a very few, very large parts, and would attach to the frame with a large number of sprung connectors. The connectors would reduce the demand on high tolerances between the two, and would allow the skin and airframe to expand and contract independently. Comments by Reaction Engines Limited suggest that Scaled Composites propose to manufacture the skin using "carbon-carbon composite", with a structure not unlike corrugated cardboard for lightness and strength. Just how much research has been done into this novel material and construction is anybody's guess!

They don't have to make wafers in space. All they need to do is make crystals, which are large, solid lumps which would be quite able to survive reentry. Then, once returned to Earth, they can be shipped to a wafer fabrication plant and sawn into wafers, which would be mounted on supports that would stop them snapping under their own weight. At present, silicon crystals are made by a process of "drawing". Silicon is melted in a crucible and a crystal is dipped into it and then slowly raised out. As the crystal is lifted, fresh silicon solidifies onto the crystal. The crystal has to be kept just cool enough that fresh silicon can solidify on it, and the crucible has to be kept just hot enough that the silicon doesn't solidify too fast so that as the seed crystal is drawn out, a column of the exact diameter can be formed. If the silicon hardens too fast or too slow then that can create flaws in its structure that would ruin any chips made from the flawed areas of silicon. Tiny fluctuations in temperature can make it very difficult to control the process. Even vibrations can have untoward effects. Once the silicon crystal has been made, it is then sawn into thin sheets (the wafers) which are checked for detectable flaws, polished and surfaced. The sheets are mounted on supports to protect them during further processing. a big problem in the drawing process is the effect that convection in the silicon melt has on the crystal. A convection current can force silicon melt against the growing-surface of the crystal in such a way that a new crystal with different alignment can form, thus creating a flaw. The flaw may be small, thus causing a few dozen chips to fail, or it may be large enough that it extends the length of the crystal effectively splitting it into two crystals, and making it useless. It is believed that growing silicon crystals in microgravity will prevent convection, thus making it easier to create one, large, unflawed crystal. It would require a different crystallization technology to operate, as thew drawing process is fundamentally dependant on gravity stopping the melt sticking to the crystal in one big lump as it is drawn out. What that technology will turn out to be is anybody's guess, though I am sure a lot of academics have their own ideas about that! Another technology which would benefit from microgravity crystallization is the creation of single-crystal turbine blades for gas turbine engines such as used in high-performance jet engines. Here the crystal is formed out of a different metal, but convection in the melt can create unwanted flaws that can either be expensive (the flaw is detected by X-ray and the blade trashed) or dangerous when the flaw goes undetected and the blade disintegrates in flight. The economics are the sticking point: manufacturers wouldn't want to pay 100 million of any currency to get a larger, purer crystal, they need the cost per unit to be only a few thousand more. For space fabrication to make sense, launches and retrieval have to get a lot cheaper. SpaceX and other companies could make a lot of money if they can get their costs down, and if the assumptions about the benefits of microgravity fabrication turn out to be correct!

But I ordered an Earth-shattering BOOOM!

Don't get hung up on the high-speed performance of the engines. Scaled Composites didn't choose them for their high speed capability. They chose them for their power at takeoff, their capability at high altitude, their fuel efficiency, and the fact that they were already bolted to the fuselages they purchased. There are two main challenges facing the Stratolauncher. The first is its requirement for very high power at takeoff - two large fuselages, the orbital vehicle and payload will make it amongst the heaviest aircraft ever to be launched, and the wing it needs for high altitude flight will create a large amount of drag. To get that moving on the runway without silly bolt-ons like JATOs demands a heck of a lot of low-speed power, and that is something those engines provide. The other problem is altitude. They intend to take the orbiter up to near stratospheric altitudes before launch. The engines they have chosen are proven high-altitude engines. They might have ended up with other engines, had the 747s they purchased been fitted differently. But the two they bought happened to have Pratt and Whitney 4056 engines - they might have ended up with engines from General Electric or Rolls Royce. It doesn't really matter - they all have similar power on takeoff, efficiency and high-altitude capability.

Or (more likely) they have added it to a list of things to think about in years to come once hard design work starts. (Disclaimer: List may or may not exist in a concrete, physical sense. Elon Musk may or may not be able to put his hands on said list if asked "where did you put it? You were the last one who had it!" Accuracy of said list can not be guaranteed. Do not burn, staple, fold or mutilate list!)

Thanks for that! I've been annoyed about this ever since I got Windows 10 and my old solutions no longer worked. I've bookmarked this thread and will come back to it when i have time to play with KSP!

As ferram4 explained not long ago:

Just two posts above you... (My emphasis.) I don't want to be unfriendly, but I would like to point out the value of reading the last few pages of a thread before posting questions of that nature. As for the "beta version" there is a dev version. Read enough posts and get your tech-savvy in gear and you can download it. However, ferram4 would like people to refrain from "giving it a try" unless they are good at reporting bugs; this is a dev version, being released for the purposes of bug-tracking. That is why we are being somewhat... cryptic... as regards where to find the dev version.

Instructions on bug reporting are to be found in the Gameplay and Technical Support section of this forum. There are several sub-sections - one for people who install mods (Technical Support, PC Modded), one for those who don't (Technical Support, PC Unmodded), and a third for consoles. Go to the right one! Then scroll down to below the Explore Questions boxes and read the thread marked!!! please read before posting !!!

No, KSP does not represent the wing-in-ground effect. Nor, for that matter, does FAR - though Ferram has at times burnt his brains trying to work out a way to achieve that!

Hello and welcome to the forums! Unfortunately I can't help. Are these English usages? If they are translations from another language then you may need to find out what the English equivalents are. Perhaps if you were to quote a few short passages using these terms then that would help people to help you. Also, it would be a good idea to edit your post and change the title to start with "Semiconductors: " so as to attract the people who would have any sort of idea. In its present form, your title could refer to anything. Good luck!

It tries. Doesn't mean it is good enough for aerodynamic purists, but it tries. And the stock aerodynamics improve continually!

It's a hangover from before MV4 had the code to draw the circular torque arrow. It can still be useful occasionally when, for whatever reason, the circular arrow is hard to interpret or doesn't draw.