Sean Mirrsen

The WYSIWYG editor should really become an option. Preferably one settable in the profile, so that it persists. I am much more comfortable typing in BBCode by hand. At least the double-linefeed thing has a workaround. I'd also like a way to split quotes for point-by-point responses, without having to copypaste and then edit the quote blocks.

Can the Quote 'linkbutton' be moved somewhere (top line would be fine, as would the right-hand side of the bottom line) and/or separated from the main post text visually? It looks like the poster posted a link. The "like" button (which should really be renamed in my opinion, 'like-ing' things has some rather negative connotations for me as an avoider of social networks a-la Twitter) could likewise be moved to the top block next to the 'share this' button. And can the autoformatting be turned off, perhaps optionally at the time of posting? I.e. the automatic double-linefeed between paragraphs? Something that works for 'most cases' is really annoying when you want to do something else. Like emphasize a sentence in a paragraph by moving it to the next line. It's just inflating the vertical size of the post. Either way, all in all it seems like the forums have went the way of the new Skype. At least the avatars are still rectangular. Don't know what the benefits were on the backend, but the frontend doesn't seem to look or work much better. And some content's missing. Hm. Where's the "preview post" button...

[quote name='basic.syntax']If I understand correctly... I don't understand why Squad won't preserve / transfer its own historical articles and blogs to IPS. Can't these existing forums be preserved under a different URL, in read-only mode for our search-and-linking posterity? Apparently only mods will have access for some indeterminate period, but much gnashing of teeth over lost history would be spared, if Squad's server could afford the storage.[/QUOTE] They're already erasing one part of the history, why would they care about another?

[quote name='KasperVld']A discussion of the roleplay rule is not the topic in this thread, so I kindly ask everyone to move away from that topic :)[/QUOTE] Very well then. [i]Can[/i] we have a discussion of 2.2j in a [i]different[/i] thread? On the merits, and potential reevaluation of restrictions thereof? It's a bit of an odd observation, but I find that often the longest-standing rules are the ones in the most dire need of revision.

What are people that are [i]constantly[/i] roleplaying going to have to do? I mean, am I banned too, for maintaining a fictional persona that I use to interact with [i]any[/i] online society? I'm neither Sean nor Mirrsen in actuality, I'm not a mildly helpful and (very) occasionally useful person - I'm normally a useless and callous neckbearded Russian fatguy who wouldn't save a kitten unless it happened to somehow be directly in his path to the nearest source of food or internet access. Forcing myself into a character is how I manage to [i]function[/i], and somehow that is a bannable offense here? I have no relation to Rocket Builders, by the way. If you don't like them, fine by me. If you're callous enough to wipe out a chunk of your own history that does not suit your current preference like a third-rate tyrannical oligarchy of some kind, I suppose you're free to do that, it's not like anyone here has any power to stop you (that really tends to be the case, doesn't it?) Err on the side of caution or no, the no-roleplay is too oppressive. If I can't post here as Sean Mirrsen, I guess I can't post here at all. >_>

I started a functional redesign of my renewed Space Harrier SSTO: [img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4152380/KSPSteam_Screens/KSP105/screenshot484.png[/img] As part of that redesign, I gave it an abort system. As part of the abort system, it can now drop its SSTO components and turn into a pure aircraft, should it need extra range: [img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4152380/KSPSteam_Screens/KSP105/screenshot485.png[/img] [img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4152380/KSPSteam_Screens/KSP105/screenshot486.png[/img] Yes, it's fairly silly as far as abort systems go. :P

Hmm. I think I can chalk that one up to a lot of tiny issues manifesting as one bigger one. I'm playing on a tablet, so my framerate is low with this many parts, which might lead to the flight integrator accumulating small errors. The control surfaces were not set properly, leading to some of them potentially acting against the intended controls. And the craft is aerodynamically unstable, making SAS want to correct it often, and causing lots of little movements from the poorly-setup control surfaces, which might have made the struggling physics engine show an anomaly. I any case, I appear to have fixed the problem by setting up the avionics as they were intended, and changing the shape of the rudder to provide more authority and stability. I should note that the craft is even easier to SSTO in FAR than in stock, despite having this odd aerodynamic makeup and not being a "rocket with wings" or Rapier-powered sort of SSTO. Curious.

Aha. Okay, apparently I needed to click on "more" several times to actually get the angle I select. And it's slow. Hmm. You know, maybe it's not a bug, but I think it's unwanted behavior. The speed at which the surface adjusts into the selected deflection angle (or rather, the selected percentage of the selected deflection angle) is set based on the selected deflection angle. This creates a situation where you can't adjust the selection angle from a large number to a small number, or especially to zero, without making the control surface essentially stuck. I.e. if you set the deflection to 30 degrees and click "deflect more" twice, then select 5 degrees, the surface will track towards the five-degree deflection at a glacial pace. Not sure how you would effectively fix that, but it's a thing I just found poking around the interface, so reporting. No, see, lack of stability I understand. It's the preference in instability that I find odd. I.e. looking at the aerodynamics overlay (I don't know if it's adjusted for FAR or not), there is a noticeably increased drag on the left side of the craft, which persists regardless of which side of the craft leans into the airstream. Among other things, from the two spokes in the middle over the aerospikes, it looks like the swept wing on the left gets more drag than the one on the right, even as the plane is slightly veering left, which makes no sense to my feeble understanding of aerodynamics. Isn't a swept-back wing supposed to get less drag as it is swept further back, and more as it is swept forward - i.e. a "shuttlecock" effect? I think I'll just toss in the craft file as well, so that you can try it out if you want and maybe spot what I'm missing here. (If not, well... it's a pretty craft, at least I think so. Maybe other people would like to fly it around. )

With the advent of the new version I felt like trying FAR again, and of course first thing I did was try it on the most unlikely to work correctly craft I could pick, the recreation of my old "Space Harrier" SSTO from way back in 18.1: Surprisingly, the test run proved successful, for a given, very generous definition of "success". The craft actually made it to space, and back down to earth, gently touching down for a landing, where it was swiftly consumed by a sudden bump in the terrain. The test, however, had some results that made me want to ask a few questions. 1. What arcane ritual must be performed to make the flap/spoiler functionality work on control surfaces? The switch to FAR completely shot all the control surface setups I had on the craft (which I found out only already in flight), but I made do until I had to land, whereupon I could not make the tail elevators trim to compensate for the shift in CoM, as I could do in stock KSP, which made the flight unnecessarily loopy. 2. Maybe it's just the sort of designs I make, but whatever version I try to "try FAR again" with, I keep getting weird asymmetric forces acting on the plane. In this case it kept pulling and rolling left, even with SAS trying to compensate. Sideslip issues is one thing, the weird (to put it mildly) M-shaped vertical stabilizer and rudder can and did cause a few control problems, but those were easily identified as such. A constant pull to one side, however, is as annoying as it is mysterious. It wouldn't surprise me if these were entirely my fault, but I have to ask just in case it's a known issue or a possible fixable bug of some kind. Craft is completely stock, besides whatever changes FAR itself makes.

Recreated my "Space Harrier" SSTO from way back in 0.18.1 with new parts. The name is non-indicative - it isn't VTOL. But it is SSTO.

Non-(gate)crash entry for 1.0.5! It is possible that you may remember the Space Harrier spaceplane I made long ago. It had a lot of versions and upgrades, but the changes to parts and physics have over time completely killed the original craft. I decided that it was good enough for a remake. Introducing, the Space Harrier 3.0: Found a very good use for the "flaps" mechanic, solving a problem that plagued the old design. By adding an inverted "flap" mode to the tail elevators, you can now compensate for the CoM shift when the fuel has all run out. The craft is docking-capable, although carrying payloads is difficult to do without further modifications.

In thrust we trust! Also, thrust-reversing engines are silly.

Not quite. Perfect bearings on the wheels, perfectly round and solid wheels, and perfectly smooth conveyor surface that still has proper friction with the wheels. There are ways the wheels resist being rotated other than the bearings. And really, I said it many times before, the idea itself is not so outlandish. The exact method is, yes, for various reasons, but a seaplane in a moving water stream can easily be prevented from lifting off, without destroying its pontoons. A typical "flying boat" design can plow through water easily enough that it may as well be a speedboat if you take away its wings. But it still has a maximum speed, on water, that isn't determined by air resistance. Make the water move against it at that speed, and even with wings it will not lift off. All I'm saying is that there is a fringe case where the principle works.

Well, we don't exactly have experimental data on that, do we? If gravitons alter the curvature of space-time, or however gravity works, they may have different efficiency simply by working perpendicular to the three dimensions. However, I meant more along the lines of a "massive aether". I don't know how gravitons are theoretically supposed to work (so feel free to provide exposition, I am actually rather curious ), but if they are particles, and they (evidently) interact with matter somehow, could they not, then, provide the reaction mass for the drive if it somehow interacts with them? We could notice the difference in thrust with direction if there was a difference to be noticed, but here on Earth, this close to Earth especially, gravity points down, and the influence of stellar bodies around Earth is so minute as to be barely noticeable on a regular scale, let alone a thruster that achieves so little thrust as to be potentially confused with measurement error.

Well, there's the gravitons, if they are a thing. It's about the only thing that exists everywhere and uniformly moves along with the Earth, and is capable of interacting with matter - its gravity well. Unfortunately the only means of testing against it directly is sending the thing into interplanetary space.

Is it, again, not true for everything? Relativity works both ways. Drop the EMDrive, and use the other way we have of converting electricity to kinetic energy directly - a Gauss rail. Set the Gauss rail to deliver 500 joules of energy to its payload - you'll have the same paradox in regards to how much acceleration it should result in. A reactionless drive, even if reaction-less, still provides the action. It produces a force with no counterforce, but in the context of differing frames of reference, all it does is convert one type of energy to another.A different kind of reactionless drive would not create a force, instead directly affecting velocity - however such a drive would cease affecting its velocity the moment it ceased operating, it cannot "coast" - lacking both reaction and action, it supplies no force. (if you ever played Star Control, the Arilou Skiff has this kind of drive) Therefore you wouldn't be able to use such a drive to build up a high velocity - unlike a merely reactionless drive, it would require greater energy input for a greater total "deviation" from normal conditions. This one you could, perhaps, theoretically use to create infinite energy, but since such an effect even I have trouble wrapping my mind around the logistics of, I suspect that what its limits would be is completely unknown. If the conservation laws are indeed all-important in the universe, the effect would be limited in such a way as to prevent it ever threatening them. I don't know what that would take, though. edit: Hm. Now that I think about it, perhaps the problem is that the latter device could still alter its velocity if it were moved by something else - the lack of preferential reference frames would create that exact kind of situation, with a direct change in velocity rather than constant thrust. The drive accelerating itself to 10 m/s relative to its "at rest" position could impart its momentum to a different object via collision (for instance), which would allow it to accelerate again... although wait, no, it would just mean that the object and the drive would eventually start moving in the same direction with the same speed, because the drive can't cease operating without the object imparting its momentum right back at the drive. Hm. Me is confuse. Gonna have to think about it some more later.

The inventor, however, could be both right and wrong. (Suffice to say I never read the original proposal here, I'm just talking hypotheticals as usual) There could, in fact, be a net imbalance of forces within the device - if the forces within the device act on an unknown medium, the device does not experience whichever forces "disappear" into that medium. It would be a side effect of the interaction, rather than its cause, a case of "swaying trees cause wind", stupid in its own way, but possible. Wouldn't the same thing happen with a photon drive? Yes, not reactionless, not exhaust-less, but with an exhaust velocity that equals c it has a functionally infinite ISP, and can do basically all the same things, it just converts electricity to thrust at a much lower rate.Or how about an electric motor? I think you could replace that pair of EMDrives at any point with an electric motor of arbitrary size, that would generate more torque for the same electricity input, just because their rate of conversion of electricity to motive force is higher. The drive would still create no energy in the rotor-generator system, at best it would mitigate the generator's conversion losses. A perfect generator powered by a perfect EMDrive on its rotor would just spin forever, balanced at the point where the rotor resistance from the generator converting rotation to electricity equals the torque generated by the EMDrive. Same as with a perfect generator and a perfect electric motor, no matter the gear ratio between them. Not really saying you're in the wrong there, just honestly curious as I thought that'd be the case.

How exactly is that Emdrive-esque? The clip would have certainly been helped by some manner of description. It doesn't look like anything particular.

Propellers don't. To a scientist, maybe. To an engineer, an engine that ablates itself is significantly inferior to an engine that uses reaction mass, because it cannot be easily "refueled", and if the dimensions of the engine are constrained for a given optimal performance level, you have to basically carry spare engines along if you want to extend the dV reserve.

Basically, this. All these efforts to answer the questions of "how" and "why" are taking resources better directed at answering the question "whether". If it works, it works, and proper amounts of resources can be directed to the "how" and "why". If it doesn't, it doesn't, and scientists can keep taking their sweet time searching for what it was that made the anomalous thrust in testing.

He means using the Mk4 Cargo Bay as a space station component, i.e. a hangar/shuttlebay. In the current lineup, there's no way to "cap off" the sides of a Mk4 cargo bay (or even a Mk2/Mk3 cargo bay, for that matter) without resorting to using huge and massive adapter tanks or other spaceplane compartments, which may be entirely extraneous on a space station like that. Flat, relatively lightweight and non-resource-holding adapter pieces would help in that regard, as well as with certain other configurations of spacecraft, such as NFP engine arrays that don't need LFO anywhere on the craft.

I don't think it's supposed to be pressurized, and a cargo compartment door should open outward to avoid being blocked by the cargo.

As far as adapters go, I think a Mk3+2x1.25m (or maybe 6x1.25m, depending on whether you can fit a triangle of 1.25m nodes on either side of the Mk3) would be needed, because a transition through the 3.5m adapter wouldn't look as good. I can't think of any other potentially useful ones, but since the Mk4 fuselage isn't vertically symmetric and the adapter layout could have multiple uses (i.e. as a front or a tail piece), maybe have two versions of the Mk3+2x1.25m (or, again, however many 1.25m), with the Mk3 node aligned with the top, and the bottom of the Mk4 profile?

Would a single part that can open both ways (individually, not always both) be too terribly realism-breaking?

Aha. Okay then. This hadn't used to be the case, the mod kept a status window in flight and dumped aerodynamic data into the right-click menus. Was probably a long while ago.