Tarrow

Every year they'd release a new KSP version (KSP 2014!) which'd consist of last years game with some new character skins, some name changes and nothing else. After all it worked for the forty eight separate releases they did for The Sims. And pretty much their entire range of sports games. On the upside EA would have their first product that's actually worth buying since the days of system shock II.

.rar is a compressed file format like a zip file.... 7zip is your best bet for free multi-format file compressor / decompressor.

Depends very much on how large the colony is. And whether you're dropping habitats or building underground. A bit of lateral thinking can drop the launch masses a lot. Dropping habs is in itself very inefficient. As a example you'd need a 100m x 100m area to grow 9 tonnes of wheat per 6 months (based on current worldbank stats of wheat yields per hectare). If you did that as a hab 3m high with the same wall construction as the iss (about 5mm aluminum on average) you'd have to haul 171 tonnes of metal per hectare just to build the shell structures. More mass required for fitting out etc. So say around 200 tonnes per hectare. So for 10 hectares you'd need about 2000 tonnes of materials and fittings. At 90 tonnes total yield per 6 months you'd break even in 11 years or so (and have a crew thoroughly fed up of eating toast by the pound for every meal) Of course you could reenginneer the entire system so that rather than dropping habs you're digging underground to make space to grow food. One person with a single 30 tonne JCB excavator can dig a 100m x 100m x 3m hole in just over a month. Five of them and you'd be down to a week. Dig out ten spaces, seal the inner walls, roof and ceiling with high strength airtight resin and fit the same 30 tonnes of supporting equipment per space. Total launch mass would be ((5*30)+30)+(9x30) 450 tonnes with breakeven @ 2.5 years. Plus you still have 150 tonnes of excavating gear you can use however you want, even if only to take your mind off the darn toast. I'm rather fond of the second option

That link makes interesting reading, hadn't spotted it earlier nice one. It'd be interesting to see a breakdown of that data though. I'd be willing to bet a large proportion of that weight is effectively "luxury items" that are in no real way needed. Lemonade for example. Astronauts do not need lemonade to survive. Nutritionally it's the same as recycled water that's had a splash of sugar and some flavourings added. 43 tons of MRE's for example (three a day, max of 0.74kg per MRE, about 1200 calories per) would feed a crew of 18 for three years. Or a 4 person crew for just over 13 years. They'd just hate the taste after a while. You can pack significantly more nutrients into much less mass but the resulting taste is somewhat.. uninspiring [but enough off topic lol]

Oh indeed, that's how it should work. However unless the recycling and regrowth cycle is 100% materials efficient (i.e. every single atom of waste is sorted and converted to a storable reuseable form, and is reused with perfect efficiency) there will be losses through the system and those losses require material replacement either from stock (which means you had to lift more mass to begin with) or from a resupply mission. The old rule of thumb for hikinng and other high-calorie activities used to be about 2lb of food per person per day (about 900g) - totaling about 331kg per person per year*. So your average 4-person ISS crew uses just over 1.3 tonnes of food per year (18 people would use just short of 6 tonnes). Unless you can pack a reliable recycling system, growth system for multiple plant types, working space plus the required materials to actually grow the food into that same mass allowance then it's not worth considering. That's before you get to "hey look another piece of tech to maintain and carry spares for" Simplicity counts for a lot. * short of eating nothing but peanut butter there's not much vegetarian that'd pack that many calories into the same mass.

[apologies if slightly off-topic maybe] Plants appear green precisely because they do not absorb green light, they reflect it. Peak absorption for chlorophyll is at the blue and red end of the spectrum (about 420 & 680nm for chlorophyll A and 470 & 620nm for chlorophyll . [back on topic] if you're looking for a food that can be grown with great efficiency, growth rate and simple feedstock materials, mycoprotein meat substitute is about the easiest. It can double its mass every 24 hours with appropriate levels of nutrients so a 1kg starter colony could weigh about 60kg by the end of the first week and be pushing well up 8-9 tonnes by the end of the second week. Downside would be (and this applies to anything you're trying to grow inside a closed-loop system without 100% perfect recycling) that the mass of nutrients, water etc required to reach that growth would weigh more than you'd get out of it. Meaning you'd have been better off in terms of fuel efficiency from launch in just packing a really big packed lunch

I found fairly recently that mining on minmus is better for return than mun. Gravity is massively reduced and orbital speeds are much lower, making landing and takeoff much more leisurely Downside is that the surface of minmus can be a lil craggy in places.

Curiouser and curiouser - I was, through some trial and error, able to "unstick" the sticky docking port between the tug and the hub. At the time of my previous post edit it was welded to the lower arm of an x shaped hub, jamming after I docked the kethane processing rig to the opposing side of the hub. After shuffing the other modules I ended up with a habitat on each side arm though the tug was at this point still stuck. This evening I undocked the kethane processing rig from the hub to rotate it a bit to look tidier as part of the station, redocked it, and the stuck docking port between the hub and the tug suddenly unstuck. Overall on both occasions undocking and redocking a different pair of docking nodes somewhere on the vessel has caused the stuck docking nodes to unstick. Fairly bizzare behaviour tbh - unless undocking that specific pair of nodes causes the game engine to rethink the ship structure (maybe another part becomes the root part?) and somehow catch the error in the bugged docking node set?

No worries MBobrik, I've misplaced a 0 plenty of times myself Cooling's the issue for sure but all any of it'll take is some creative thinking. A 2500m3 bubble of air enclosed in a 1cm titanium shell (would give a mass of about 40 tonnes I think, and a near 19m diameter) would generate a hilarious amount of lift, if it could withstand the pressure. It'd be like flying a bathysphere zepplin with a 100 tonne cargo capacity. It'd need ballast tanks Daft as it sounds it does bring one thing to mind - habitat design is going to have to take into account that human-habitable structures of any significant volume are going to be bouyant to some extent. Something the size and weight of a shipping container could conceivably float away.

There's a fairly important issue in that 93 MPa as Venus' quoted surface pressure is incorrect by an order of magnitude. Most resources (from wikipedia up to more reliable, printed, sources) have the surface pressure at around 9000 kPa (9 MPa) - or 93 bar. That's only thee times the pressure at which scuba divers have operated using conventional compressed-gas respiration. secondary random thought (nuclear reactors) - make the fuel self moderating. The fuel assemblies proposed for a pebble bed style reactor become less energetic as temperature increases, with a peak self-heating temperature below the failure temperature of their own structure. Remove the control rods completely from the equation - they're just another failure point where human error can cause problems.

I've encountered it myself, and actually managed to get out of the situation with some weird tinkering about. It occured with me when I put four station modules inline (three modules, one tugboat) each with a clamp-o-tron senior at each end. Dock tugboat to one module (using front docking port) - no problem, all cot snr's still work. Dock tugboat to second module (using rear docking port) - no problem, all cot snr's still work. Dock either the first or second module to either of the docking ports on the third module - all cot snr's fail to undock, with the exception of the one attaching module 1/2 to module 3. Undock the third module and all clamp-o-tron seniors on the module 1 / tug / module 2 assembly start working again as normal. I worked around the issue by dumping a module off the tug a few hundred meters away, docking the one the tug was still carrying then going to retrieve the last module. It was fine as long as the tug didn't have an object on each end at once. I accidentally did something vile to the ship whilst attempting to edit the savegame (don't forget people - backups are good) but could probably try to recreate it if it's any help? edit: well, inadvertently recreated it with the 2nd attempt at building the minmus station. Built three of the previous modules inline, brought up an x-adaptor to spread them out a bit and inadvertently ended up with a situation where the tugboat has welded itself to the x-adaptor. Surprisingly the same docking port playing up as last time. Other modules were able to undock from each other and manouver onto the other arms of the adaptor but tugboat will be functioning as a drive module until I pluck up the courage to delve into the save file. I've yet to send up the mining ship so looks like I'll hold off for a bit. Would be silly if it got welded to a docking port itself

Randomish thought for EVA's - would it be possible to offset the heavy atmospheric pressure by shifting to a liquid based breathing apparatus such as has been proposed for deep diving (as used in "The Abyss")? Would also provide a fairly sizable body contact area for thermoregulation. iirc the biggest issue to using it at the moment is that the required flow rate for perfluorocarbons is fairly high (about 10l a minute) but that'd be solvable surgically. Ok so it's more complex than a hardsuit, but it'd weigh little more than the equivalent of a hazmat suit and rebreather and there'd be no need for exoskeleton assist. Containment / storage of liquid plutonium is fairly easy tbh. It's melting point of around 640c is about half that of stainless steel. Boron carbide (melting point 2678c) could be used as a neutron absorber quite nicely I would think.

Sorry for the late reply, been in work all day. By "less thrust" I mean a combined output, of every single engine on the ship combined (excluding payload) of less than a set of four mainsails. Its the asparagus setup - these rely on dumping excess weight during the climb and use just one set of engines for the entire trip up. There is no carrying weight of engines or fuel tanks that aren't in use so it's very weight efficient. This is a nice vid explaining how they work Give it a shot, tis awesome And good luck http://i110.photobucket.com/albums/n92/tychocaine/screenshot37_zpsee280332.png is what I use for 50t loads to the stations I have at 100km

A screenshot of your lifter would be useful (KSP creates a screenshot directory when you take the first screenshot). I suspect you're using too much thrust if you're using multiple quad-mainsail stages (plus solid rockets) for a 50 tonne load. You're likely carrying a lot of excess fuel too which only makes things worse. Check out vids of "asparagus staging" to get an idea of one rather good way of doing it. You can put 50t in orbit using 7 of the orange tanks and less thrust total than a quad-mainsail stage. No solid rockets required

You're bang on the money there. The power required to overcome drag increases with the cube of your velocity - so too much too soon and you can waste a lot of fuel just fighting the air. Becomes less of an issue as altitude rises and air density drops so you can afford to throttle up a bit later on. In RL it's a factor at surprisingly low speeds, being the single largest factor determining the top speed of cars, motorbikes etc. edit: that lil asymmetric launcher got to a 75km orbit and managed reentry with a bit of tweaking. I might have to experiment further (for laughs)

It's doable yes, but not the easiest of things. What starts as the heavy side (full of fuel) ends up getting progressively lighter, throwing off the thrust vector of the spacecraft. It can be overcome somewhat by creative use of the lil liquid fuel engines and action groups so you can add extra thrust on the upper / lower side as required. Rockomax 24-77s were used for pitch up / down extra thrust. Three in group one (one on the bottom of each booster / external tank, to keep the nose up during initial liftoff when tanks are heavy) and two groups of two (the ones on top of the final stage) to help keep the nose down as the drop tanks empty. Mechjeb's handling the steering and throttle limiter while I'm toggling action groups keeping it in a straight line Almost got it into a proper orbit just needs to carry a little more fuel up there.

Read the kethane thread for workarounds for 0.2 issues. Expect some issues until it has been updated to KSP 0.20.

Works fine with mechjeb. There's a post somewhere further back in the thread (if I recall correctly) with some info about missing icons. Have a quick look where you have it all installed, should be in a subfolder of gamedata.

tbh I've always thought that on the smaller ship end of the scale the MAC cannon makes no sense at all as a combat weapon. The energy output of the slug is listed as 64.53 kilotons TNT equivalent, but to get that output you have to accelerate 600 tonnes to 30km/s. 50 years ago we could get 57 Megaton TNT equivalent in a 30,000kg package (the Tsar Bomba half power test detonation in 1961). Throwing that at someone at 30km/s would use 1/20th of the energy of launching a 600 tonne MAC round and be vastly more damaging on target.

Looking good so far, seems to have smoothed out the lag on launch nicely and off to plant flags tomorrow Has there been a slight tweak to the aerodynamics? I'm sure some of my stock lifters are using a whole lot more fuel to get to my 125km parking orbit. My lil satellite launcher used to reach orbit happily with one stage remaining to help the satellite on it's way - now it needs the whole lot (plus some delta v from the satellite payload) to make it's way up there.

Hmmm - I've just realised I'm on the -39 dev build from the link in the mechjeb thread not the main release. In that release the node burn timings do correctly take into account the acceleration limiter set in the ascent pilot panel. Just relocated the option to be on my delta v display (I tend to always have this one open). I've been putting it to good use with high power-to-unladen-weight tugboat ships.

Never needed to use it for launches but the setting carries over to the other orbital maneuvers. Asking mechjeb to do a 70m/s delta burn when he's only got a mainsail can be tricky because he'll overshoot - lock it to a max acceleration of about 10m/s2 and it's much more precise.

Quick question - is there any way of slowing down the reel-in rate of the cable? I've been trying to use the KAS setup to grab a kethane harvesting unit from Kerbal orbit behind my towing ship - the issue I'm having is that the cable pulls in so rapidly that it's smashing parts off the harvester, when it's not flailing the whole lot around like.... well a flail Also having a bit of an issue where the attached harvester isn't sitting straight compared to the towing rig, instead locking at about a 15 degree angle from straight which throws the whole center of balance of the ship off. I'm sure it's just me doing something wrong but it's proving much more difficult to use than just docking the parts together with docking ports, which is kind of what I was trying to avoid. Tow-ropes are much cooler and better for multipurpose stuff I'm using winch + connector on the towing rig, with a stack connector port on top of the kethane harvesting rig if that helps at all. I can probably post pics sometime tomorrow when I relaunch everything.

Hmmmm interesting. Doing that seems to break the plugin, with the UI failing to show up. Might have to have a tinker around and see what's going on there. edit: it's just me being an idiot lol put in Eeloo:-500;3500 instead of Eeloo;-500;3500. Working fine now cheers buddy

Epic mod - much practice gained at throwing probes about like a loony Currently having a bit of a glitch with 3.3.4 when mapping eeloo. The whole map is rendering as pure white with no topographic features visible Looking at the map colour key it looks like both the purple (low) end and the white (high) end are both set to 0 meters, which would kind of make sense of why everything is white if every alltitude above 0 meters is white. Is that something I can adjust with an edit myself somewhere?