softweir

I love it! Here's a suggestion: multiples of the Pegasus Mobility Enhancers. It's a pain adding those along the longer parts, and I dislike using the extendable ladders for that sort of thing! (Having said that, I'm not sure the "ladder" data in the .mu files will play nicely when used in model{ ... } sections.)

Not just simpler, but very much lighter. If they made Big Dog light enough to compete with wheels then it would become too fragile to operate safely. The other problems are power consumption and CPU load. Wheels consume no power when parked and can go from active to stopped instantly, while Big Dog consumes significant amounts of power simply standing and takes a couple of seconds to sit down and power down. Rovers don't have tremendously powerful CPUs - they need radiation-hardened microchips which are significantly less powerful than equivalent terrestrial chips, and Big Dog needs a large, powerful processor to operate. Yes, it is possible that some sort of walker technology will become as planet-rover capable as wheels are today, but in the meantime wheel technology will also advance, and walker technology will always be playing catch-up. So, all-in-all, I doubt that walking rovers will have much significant presence on other planets. But I may be wrong - who knows?

That's a very interesting document you've found!

If you install the ISA MapSAt mod then you can use probes and satellites to map planets and asteroids: they can produce elevation maps PLUS approximate locations of several Easter Eggs put in by Squad.

Note that the game will expand as development proceeds, but if you buy over Steam then Steam will do incremental updates (only downloading new or changed files) and we should, before too long, be getting a patcher that will also only download new or changed files.

Looking at This Diagram, it appears the torque plate (labelled "Momentum Trim Tab" in the diagram) is significantly smaller than the solar array already attached to the telescope. Furthermore, it looks like it is designed to be moved so as to adjust solar radiation pressure, and may spend long intervals hardly facing the sun at all. If the main solar array was too small to power the telescope then it would be unable to rely on the additional array you suggest, and if the main solar array is large enough then the additional array is redundant. Now I, personally, am fond of redundant design. Unfortunately it is very hard to create redundant design that actually reduces the risk of failure - each additional component introduces additional ways things can go wrong, and with things like power systems those failure modes can all too easily cause other components to fail:- for instance, a short in the flexible cable leading to the Momentum Trim Tab would very likely cause a system-wide short and power-down the whole craft, and flexible cables in space are very prone to mechanical wear and electrical shorts. So the designers need to add a whole additional set of components to protect the craft from such a contingency (over and above those already needed to deal with electrical failures in the primary solar array) and since they have a small chance of failing you end up with an increased risk of major failure. Incidentally, NASA put a great many redundant systems and components in the Apollo craft. This was necessary because the engineering was considerably less reliable than it is now, and it was possible because there were so many fewer components that it was easier to isolate failures between systems. Still, they got a few things wrong: nobody in NASA or its contractors thought the Apollo crews would have to use Command Capsule CO2 scrubbers in the Lunar Module, and the incompatibility between the design of the two types of scrubber very nearly killed the APollo 13 crew when the LM scrubbers became saturated!

Game doesn't allow stuff if you have the throttle on, whether the engines are working or not. Might that have been the problem with reloading?

The game requires very little for a space-station to work - a command capsule or Probe module, some battery capacity and solar cells, and that's it. If you want to use it as a fuel store for an interplanetary cruise (a popular use for space-stations) then some fuel and RCS tanks will be needed, and you may want to add some hitchhiker cans so Kerbals can wait for their interplanetary cruise to set off. A cupola module is a nice add-on, but not essential. Anything else is role-play: communications antennae, orbit-keeping thrusters (real stations experience drag, KSP stations don't), science components such as the gravioli detector, cooling arrays, modules you pretend are living quarters etc etc. What the team may add to the game we can only speculate!

When in shadow in space, the problem is, indeed, keeping warm. When in sunlight, the problem is keeping cool - this is why the ISS needs very large cooling radiators oriented in its shadow, and the shuttles needed large cooling radiators bolted to the inside of the cargo bay doors. (The shuttle was programmed to roll so the cargo bay was in shadow when other contingencies permitted.) Apollo 13 was always on the point of overheating when in sunlight, and only suffered from cold when it had been in the moon's shadow for too long. You dismissed the heating effect of the sun, and yet go out on a bright day and you can feel its heat. The total solar energy received by an object in direct sunlight in space is 1366 watts/square metre, while an object at 25C in complete shadow will lose heat at about 400watts/square metre. (Exactly how much depends on the material.) So an object has to be a lot warmer than 25C before it will lose heat as fast as it absorbs it.

What you may be looking for is the Protractor Mod.

I would have loved to answer your poll, but you didn't include "designing and building rockets" or "long-term rocket missions". "Rocket launches and fooling around inside Kerbin's atmosphere" doesn't quite fit what I enjoy best!

DQ1: Not stock. The Damned Robotics mod has such a part, though the mod doesn't work with KSP 0.20.x (There is a hacked patch, but the "official" developer hasn't released a fixc yet.) DQ2: There are two ways. 1) EVA your crew while the ship is on the launchpad, and get them to climb down the ship (or jump - they have a cartoonish ability to survive falls). 2) Try the Crew Manifest mod, which allows you to empty your ship, fill all non-command-pod spaces (such as in the Hitchhiker module) and move them from module to module - especially useful when crewing space stations!

Moho - Mohicant Eve - Evangelino Gilly - Gillygan Kerbin - Kerbo Mun - Munificent Minmus - Minnian Duna - Dunderhead Ike - Ikee Dres - Dresser Jool - Joolian Laythe - Slothful Vall - Valiant Tylo - Tylorean Bop - Bopper Pol - Politician Eeloo - Eeloomentarist

Hello and welcome! The poodle makes an ideal engine for Mun landers - a wee bit too heavy and overpowered, but it can do the job just fine. One 909 is a bit too weak: you could arrange a few using the BZ-52 Radial Attachment Points (the ones described as badly-built docking ports) on the bottom of the fuel tank. My personal preference for Munar landers has three Rockomax X200-32 Fuel Tanks, each with one LV-909 Liquid Fuel Engine, one tank and as a core stage, the other two attached with radial decouplers, with fuel pipes carrying fuel IN to the core stage. Attach your landing gear to the radial tanks. Arrange the staging of the engines so all three are in use to start with, so all three are available to take you down. ONly the radial tanks are drained during descent. Then for ascent, you fire up the engines, ascend until the radial tanks are empty and drop them, their engines and the landing gear all in one. You now have enough juice to get you back into orbit and (if you got your landing right) enough to get home.

Are you remembering to calculate A=F/m where A is the acceleration due to gravity, F is the gravitational force and m is the mass of the spaceship? You don't add force to velocity, you add acceleration to velocity! Another way is to calculate A directly as: Acc = Gcon*5.9*10^24 / (distance_to_point(earth.x,earth.y)*50)^2 .... in other words, just leave out the mass of the spaceship.

I got to watch Neil Armstrong's first steps, live, at the age of seven! Of course I hardly understood all the implications, but I knew how important and amazing it was even if the whys and wherefores were beyond me. One of my most treasured memories.

Apes are sapient, but if a human were as low-IQ as an ape then most courts in developed nations would rule that person was incapable of giving consent. One can argue by extension that apes can't give consent at a human level. The logic of that may be very shaky, but at a gut level I would agree with the conclusion. Getting back to the biology, there are far too many things that can differ between species from different planets for the idea of interplanetary breeding to be anything but ridiculous. We can't even breed with apes (gorillas and orangutans have the wrong number of chromosomes and there are two inversions within chromosomes that make us incompatible with chimpanzees) and we share the same essential biochemistry; DNA code; DNA structure and chemistry; DNA, protein and sugar chirality and general environmental requirements. Heck: we can't even guarantee that other lifeforms will have DNA, nor that their metabolisms will process energy in any way even slightly compatible with ours - their secretions may be violently toxic to us and vice versa! So: no, there is no way Star Trek interbreeding can be considered as hard science fiction, let alone scientifically plausible.

Hello and welcome to the forums! The planets are locked in orbit: this makes calculations very much simpler to code and a bit lighter on the CPU, and it doesn't really detract from the game because even the smallest moons would require more rocket than is feasible. Have fun!

Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_survey_(archaeology) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistance_survey_(archaeology)

I like to "solve" non-existent engineering issues. Your example of RCS obstruction is one, though I don't remember any of my canards being inline with air intakes; I must watch out for that! When it comes to space stations I make sure mine have some form of thruster to combat non-existent drag, and connect all pressurised areas with other pressurised areas to ensure "realistic" crew access.

This is the right place, and it is amazing!

Or, indeed, would pre-stone-age hunting groups have benefitted from handed preference?

That's a tempting hypothesis.... But I fear handedness probably predates writing by a very long interval. In any case, ink and paper were very late inventions, and media such as stone-scratching and clay-marking are very much less susceptible to smudging than ink-on-paper! In any case, for writing to drive handedness, having the "right" or "wrong" hand would have to exert a very powerful influence on survival to have had such an effect in such a very short space of time (in evolutionary timescales), and smudging your work is most unlikely to cause sterility or death!

Equally, one could say "it's random chance the heart and stomach are on the left". Yet in that case there is a lot of detailed genetics and biology that ensure consistent chirality. Yes, it is random chance that all that hard-wired genetics came to "choose" the left, but it is not random chance that a preferred position came about. In the case of handedness, the very high bias towards right-handedness strongly suggests that there is some powerful advantage to humans having consistent handedness. We don't know what that advantage is and nor do we know the mechanisms involved, but to say there is no advantage and no mechanisms is possibly going to far.

Somewhat O.T., the word "sentient" has changed meanings sharply over the last 50 years or so. It used to mean "capable of sensing".