cray

Does the ISRU deplete regions of Mun or Minmus of suitable ores like asteroids (and the Kethane mod)? If so, what's the depletion zone (i.e., how far do you need to relocate to drill again)? And thank you for the primer on drilling. It's just what I was looking for.

I primarily use liquid boosters. I prefer the specific impulse and throttle control and try to stick with them. Solids have their moments - they're compact and can fit in between large liquid fuel tanks. Separation solid motors are always handy for my multi-layered, parallel-staging giants. But since I stack boosters, sometimes solids on liquids, I had to pick, "I use boosters on my boosters, for maximum boost!"

+1. I\'d be happy to pay by check rather than paypal.

I saw an interesting New York Times blog about piano virtuosos becoming increasingly common: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/arts/music/yuja-wang-and-kirill-gerstein-lead-a-new-piano-generation.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1 Among the observations were the new generation of students: 'A reason that pianists are getting technically stronger is that as in sports, teachers and students are just learning to practice the craft better, becoming better conditioned and getting better results. But as Mr. Kalish suggests, another reason is that pianists are rising to the challenges of new music that pushes boundaries. 'When the 1996 movie “Shine,†about the mentally ill pianist David Helfgott, raised curiosity about Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, Mr. Lowenthal was asked by reporters whether this piece was as formidably difficult as the movie had suggested. He said that he had two answers: “One was that this piece truly is terribly hard. Two was that all my 16-year-old students were playing it.†'Some months ago I was speaking about the issue with the pianist Gilbert Kalish, who teaches at Stony Brook University on Long Island. He said that when Gyorgy Ligeti’s études, which explore new realms of texture, sound and technique at the piano, gained attention in the 1990s, they were considered nearly impossible. Only experts like the French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard could play them, it was thought. But now, thanks to greater familiarity, Mr. Kalish said, “my students at Stony Brook play them quite comfortably.†'But audiences and critics tolerated a lot of playing that would be considered sloppy today. Listen to 1920s and ’30s recordings of the pianist Alfred Cortot, immensely respected in his day. He would probably not be admitted to Juilliard now. Despite the refinement and élan in his playing, his recording of Chopin’s 24 études from the early 1930s is, by today’s standards, littered with clinkers.' I'm wondering if this applies to programmers. In addition to more powerful computers and simplified high-level programming languages, programmers - like pianists - have several more advantages of those of the 1960s - 1980s: 1) Knowledge that's it has been done. 90% of groundbreaking science and engineering is proving something is possible. After you successfully run the Manhattan Project once, everyone else is going to have proof that, yes, you can make nukes. The rest is just repeating the engineering. The Manhattan Project was an epic undertaking for the US; 10 years later, a frosty little country of a few million people felt it was quite reasonable to make a fully automatic atomic cannon. Today, we've solved a lot of software problems - like bipedal robots - which stalled computer programmers for decades. 2) Those solutions are readily available. There are algorithms and programming techniques available with a brief internet search that weren't even conceived in the 1960s. Hell, I just learned more about sorting algorithms with a 15-minute wikipedia binge last week than I learned in a year of early 1990s high school programming (and I'm 20 years out of practice with programming). 3) Thorough dissemination of successes and availability of information sets, programmers - like pianists - have higher goals they know are achievable. There are far more programmers now than in the 1960s. You can have a dozen Java-stunted drones for every virtuoso and still have more genius programmers than in the 1960s. Today, it's a hobby for a small group of folks to produce a 64-bit GUI, web-capable OS written in assembly that fits on a single 3.5' floppy.

Way back in the days when my friends were jealous of my 2400-baud modem on my Tandy computer, I thought the name 'Cray' would indicate all sorts of super-smartness because, y'know, Cray Supercomputers were awesome and I was so super-smart. And in the subsequent 20-odd years of online interaction and despite ego-crushing grades in college that let me know I wasn't quite as smart as I thought, I stuck with 'cray.' Consistency.

Caught some of that. Interview Question 1: Did you plan to grow up to be an astronaut? Interview Question 2: Now that the shuttle program is ended, what do you want to grow up to be?

[edit] Nope, I done screwed up. They appeared in a single sub-folder under Parts, with the micro-folders under that. Got that straightened out and the game running now.

How do I install this mod? I downloaded the .zip file. I unzipped into the 'Parts' folder. Then, when booting, the game froze at the 'loading' screen (where you've got the artwork of 3 terrified Kerbals) and would not progress further. When I deleted the unzipped micro-motor folders, the game would boot fine.

Let's see. With such a rocket set-up and - thanks to version 0.9 - you can make somewhat larger vehicles thanks to 'struts' (aka 'rocket duct tape.') A rocket set-up I've been playing with is: parachute capsule decoupler ('separator') SAS module liquid fuel tank (x1 or x2) engine decoupler solid fuel 3x radial couplers 18x liquid fuel tanks (6 per radial coupler) 3x tri-couplers ('3-way separator') 9x engines Throw some struts in there to hold together the wobbly columns of fuel tanks and you'll be good. You can grow that stack quite a bit. You might also look into the thread about ludicrous super-sized rockets: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=1835.0

I picked 'Cray' because when I was a teenager and brimming with self-confidence about my brillianceness (<--- so smart I just invented that word) and in possession of an awesome 2400-baud modem that was cooler than anyone on the BBS, I thought, 'Wow, 'cray' would indicate I was cool and smart, like the supercomputer.' Despite having any semblance of self-confidence destroyed along with my grades in college, I stuck with 'cray' as a matter of consistency. For 20 years now I've used 'cray' as a BBS, chat, or email handle.

Well, actually, capsule landings became quite precise in the Gemini and Apollo programs. After Gemini 5, most US splashdowns - even Apollo 13 - were within a few kilometers of their targets. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splashdown_(spacecraft_landing)#Locations_of_splashdowns Kerbal Space Program? Not so much. I'm lucky to hit the same hemisphere twice running.

Excellent movie. Own it. I like the attention to detail in this alternate world: the uniforms, the currency, the religion, the politics. Every time I watch it, there's something new to find there - and the utterly awesome launch scene in the middle of a battlefield.

The N1 had a good idea to try that plug nozzle design (which the West never really took off the drawing board), though it wasn't as good as Energia, but Soviet quality control was crap and the Soviet space program...well, it wasn't a space program. From Sputnik to Neil Armstrong's, 'One Small Step,' the US had something the USSR did not: a clear, focused space program. One program: The US was going to the MOON. It built an organization to accomplish this, then gave the organization several fire hoses filled with money, manpower, and political willpower to drown any fires that might interfere with success of the program. (There were other space projects at the time: spy satellites, Dynasoar, etc., but they were sideshows addressing the needs of specific customers, not the whole nation.) The Soviets had no such central space organization. The USSR had separate engineering groups (US'd call those 'corporations') pushing different rockets on their potential customers. The USSR's space customers were various military branches that needed some nukes and spy satellites, and a government that could stand a few PR victories. When there was a charismatic, connected engineering group leader who could win contracts, the Soviets pushed a space program. When he died on the operating table, the program went away because the customers - military, mostly - didn't give a shit about the moon. So the Soviets got big ICBMs and a series of space stations that started as manned spy satellites. Once the US won the space race, it shifted to exactly the same mode of behavior as the USSR's programs. Mars: too expensive. Power satellites and mega-stations: too expensive. To buy off aerospace corporations, the US paid for the shuttle and dinky ISS over a period of decades. Dynasoar was burned on the alter of the shuttle, MOL was rendered useless by Keyhole, which answered most military and intel needs for spy satellites, private companies got their cashcow communication satellites, and NASA survived on an IV dripline of modest scientific projects. The N1 was a racehorse for a race that the USSR didn't care about. Had it worked, the N1 probably would've been used to launch bigger Salyut stations rather than go to the moon. Maybe if the N1 had worked early enough - on its first test flight - the Soviets might've continued to race for the moon. But they probably would've dropped it after getting there ahead of the Americans, if they could put the moon lander and return system together. The N1 wasn't as capable as the Saturn V and the Rooskies' lunar stack was dicier than Apollo - the Americans still probably would've won had the N1 worked on the first flight.

Basically, semantics: the 'exhaust velocity' (or 'specific impulse') is relatively limited on the scale of 'fast' interstellar flight. Believe it or not, raging plutonium or uranium explosions are not the hottest, fastest things in the universe, and to maximize the amount of velocity you get for a given mass of fuel, you want high specific impulses. The solution is to shift to fusion. Peak speeds of 3-10% of light-speed are considered possible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)#Interstellar_missions It's not speedy on human timescales, but fusion Orion ships do have some advantages over other fairly viable propulsion methods: acceleration and thrust are awesome, and the ships scale up great. You don't need to maintain mega-scale boost/brake lasers at Earth, but can instead just scale up nuclear bombs. After the first few kilograms of plutonium, you can just pile in the lithium deuteride and scale up arbitrarily. Reliable and simple.

Materials engineering, bachelors and masters.

I currently cycle through a couple dozen pictures using the Win7 slideshow option. Some are extraterrestrial landscapes from Terragen software, some are shuttle pictures, some are weirdness found on line.

Antimatter by itself has a high energy density (about 100x better than fusion or 1000x better than fission), but that's a misleading idea unless you wave in magical forcefields. When you start factoring in the mass of its storage units - particularly with current technology - the energy density goes to crap. I mean, right now you get a few thousand free-floating positrons or anti-protons stuck in electromagnetic traps, and it's even harder hard to trap neutral anti-hydrogen atoms at all. Using 100kg of magnetic trap for 1000 positrons is a very poor energy-to-weight ratio. Something on the order of multi-Avogadro's numbers. And there's leakage: the particles don't stay trapped, but rather it's only minutes or hours until they're gone. On the other hand, fusion (which gets about 1% of the energy out of matter) or fission (at 0.1%) need much less in the way of tankage. Hydrogen (deuterium or tritium) doesn't store densely in terms of mass-of-hydrogen to mass of tankage, not by liquid fuel standards, but having 1 ton of tankage per 3 to 10 tons of hydrogen is much better than having kilograms per picogram (or nanojoule). Now, if you figure out some way to carry big blocks of anti-iron in a simple magnetic field, then you can think about your 90% light-speed. Well, more to the point, 'unless you can build a workable protium fusion reactor.' It does no good to scoop up hydrogen that will only be inert reaction mass (and a drag, since you're accelerating it from 0 to your cruising speed - conservation of momentum). A highly recommended book on the subject of realistic space flight is 'The Starflight Handbook: A Pioneer's Guide to Interstellar Travel,' by Mallove and Matloff. It's a collection of engineering studies on the difficulties, challenges, and solutions to realistic interstellar travel.

Yep, though the upwards radio shots are only possible because of the shuttle's size. Its 'wake' is fairly plasma-free, which is otherwise a great radio shield. Capsules, being smaller, do not have the open wake to fire a signal to TDRSs. Or so I've heard.

Well, my simplest orbiter (thus far) is not the simplest here, but it's adequate for my limited skills: Parachute Command Capsule Decouple SAS 4 LFT 1 LFE 6 SRBs wrapped around the tail And the LFE configured to ignite together with the solid motors, on the ground, so it can carry its own fat butt and burn off some liquid before being cast free. I like it because with a simple core and 6 solid strap-on boosters it almost looks like a realistic rocket design, and it gives enough margin in the fuel for correcting my hamhanded piloting and de-orbit burns. My second trial run seems to have it in orbit but, if not, I know its got the delta-V to handle it.

Ooo, I hadn't tried deliberately spinning for stabilization. Most my spins are accompanied by terrified screams and four-letter words. About how fast do you spin your ship during launch? Noted. I'm not at the 'good' level yet - I've been trying the designs of this thread and mostly exhausting fuel at around 1600m/s.

Tim, how do you keep that stable in flight without a SAS module?

No, they haven't actually been built, but the Delta IV got pretty close by using a H2/O2 first stage with a small cryogenic kick stage and (on some payloads) a solid third stage. A strong case can be made that a shuttle external tank with 6 SSMEs can make an SSTO ascent with 20-25 tons payload. And since solid motors are popular in third stages as 'kick motors,' the design isn't all that weird.

You manually write (or copy-and-paste) 'node_attach = 0.0, 0.0, -5, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1' into the part.cfg file in the directory *\Parts\fuelTank\ I look forward to it. Cross-feeding is a useful feature for two-stage-to-orbit configurations. I don't suppose toggling the cross-feeding on/off (or using connectors with and without cross-feeding) will be possible?

Hello. I've been using the following part modification from this website: In order to make liquid fuel tanks attachable: open the part.cfg in *\Parts\fuelTank\ with notepad and add node_attach = 0.0, 0.0, -5, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1 under node definitions and change the attachment rules to attachRules = 1,1,1,1,0 With version 0.8.5, fuel now flows across stage couplers. However, I've found that this means that a central tank feeds boosters. As a result, when the boosters drop off, the core is dry. The general idea I've seen in aerospace literature is rather the opposite: liquid boosters feed the core engines so that the core can carry its own mass but, once staged, the core has a full tank of gas. How do I reverse the fuel flow from boosters to the core? Is there a part file modification to make?