Sean Mirrsen

It's been a while since I had this, so I'd like to ask a question. Is there a way to completely remove all presence of this mod from the ingame interface, leaving just the modified aerodynamics and whatever changes it does to control surface tweakables? (i.e. controlling the deflection angle, etc, but no aerodynamic data in the panel) With stock aero being a grossly simplified attempt at the same thing, and without half an engineer's degree's worth of aerodynamics data onscreen, I feel like I could appreciate this mod FAR better if it didn't attempt to put its physics in my face, both at design and flight time.

As said by the chief engineer of a spindly, city-sized superluminal spaceship.

Center of lift and drag way towards the back helps keep stability as your fuel drains and your center of mass moves back. It's in the basics of spaceplane building.

What astronauts though? It'd never get put as a main thruster for anything manned until the whether question is answered, and bringing it to the ISS would be about the worst idea you could have, safety-wise. So most likely it'll be hocked up into space on its own, as its own mini-satellite. And it can be done as soon as the drive is shown to generate thrust in a vacuum, because all any other tests will try to answer is the how.

I, on the other hand, never gave much thought to these numbers. Even when I had KER installed, I never used any of its in-flight functions, only making sure, at design time, that the total dV budget and TWR on the pad were correct. That... never really stopped me from achieving things. I got eyeballing rendezvous down to an art. I can land next to another object on a planet's surface with a reasonable dV overhead. I'm just not treating the game's rocket science as rocket science. I'll never pilot an actual spacecraft (especially since it's all automated anyway), and I'll never need to use all the numbers that are required for it IRL, so why bother with them? The analog feedback from the trajectory on the map view, and generous overengineering to dampen the efficiency problems that approach entails, are enough to make flying spacecraft in KSP a much more enjoyable, much less by-the-numbers affair.

I'm having trouble understanding that line of thought. What experiments can be performed on the ground that, if they do not outright disprove the drive as a working device, will either not have the same consequences, or have consequences that could be prevented or accounted for, as the experiment performed in orbit would have? Sure, you can test it in hard vacuum. Is it going to be tested while bombarded by the specific mix of radiation and trace particles present in LEO? Is it going to be tested under the reduced force of gravity? Or in freefall? The problem is, no tests that outright fail the drive as a concept on the ground, are going to prevent its being sent into space while largely untested under the specific circumstances present there. And the tests that fail the drive as a concept on the ground, could very much fail it for entirely unrelated reasons that will not apply once it's in space. So one way or another, it needs to be sent into space to see if it works as a space thruster - the only thing the lab experiments are doing is trying to find out why or how the drive works. It has no applications on the ground, as a drive, so those experiments are pointless to answer the "whether" question.

Actually, I think the 1.0 release being a huge one is a big positive thing, from a developer perspective. It feels like a release. Not "just another version" as the community has come to expect and accept them over the years, but an actual release, the release, of the game. It feels like a whole new game over the 0.90 version, and damn right it should. Not just a tickbox that the game has reached a "released" state, but something fittingly grand, that both experienced players and new ones can experience - and review! - at the same time.

Uh. This is from a hypersonic egress through the atmosphere, and burning for six minutes straight with two LV-Ns at full throttle. No alterations or hacks. Barely past orange, nowhere near overheat temperatures. You just need proper design. (On that note, can we have some Mk2 nosecones without oxidizer storage? The extra line in the resources bar is annoying me, it's never meant to be filled on this design.)

A different benefit of the new LV-N is that it uses LiquidFuel only, the same as the regular air-breathing jet engines. This theoretically allows you to have an SSTO spaceplane that only uses, and has the tankage for, one type of fuel. With a refueling station in orbit, such a design could theoretically go pretty far, compared to a conventional rocket-powered craft that would need to carry extra mass in now-useless oxidizer. The catch, of course, being that a turbojet/nuclear SSTO is hilariously inefficient when it comes to getting to orbit. edit: and ninja'd.

I've made an SSTO spaceplane that works on nothing but LiquidFuel, using turbojets and an LV-N. For the first time since I forget when, an SSTO spaceplane feels like an accomplishment. That poor front wheel though. XD I think the current version of KSP is much better than it was. It strikes a much closer balance between realism and fun, keeping both. It adds challenge, both in design and piloting, that livens the game up where there was nothing interesting happening before.

When you already have a thing that seems to work, why wonder how it works before wondering whether it will work as the thing you want it to work as? If someone back in history accidentally mixed together the components for black powder and ignited it, them taking years to deliberate on the exact processes that allow the reaction to happen instead of going straight to fireworks and mining charges would be the exact same thing that's being done with the EMDrive today.I appreciate being thorough. But ultimately we, the public and the engineers, are much more interested in whether the thing works up in space where we'd be using it, than in how exactly it works. The how will be useful later, so we know how to build it bigger and better. But for now the whether, the first step, is more important. Put it to the real test, then use the result of that as a data point and go from there. The problem is that the world doesn't have mad scientists or mad engineers anymore. It's all mad economists and mad politicians.

I have a question in regards to the challenge rules. With the new aerodynamics and heating, it's become hard to make SSTO spaceplanes that go places beyond orbit, without some form of refuelling. But, refuelling breaks the rules of the challenge. However, would it be fair to use composite SSTO missions? For instance, an SSTO spaceplane dedicated to going to Laythe, launching into orbit, expending its fuel. Another SSTO spaceplane, dedicated to bringing up fuel, supplies the Laythe craft with fuel, then returns. The first craft then goes to Laythe and completes its mission. Would that break the rules, since there is refueling, or would all craft involved being single-stage-to-orbit spaceplanes make it compliant?

I agree. However, if I had been given any power to pursue my own goals, I would have been a mad scientist - or rather, as the case usually is, a mad engineer. I don't care much for theory and the "how", except as a followup to "whether". Putting the EMDrive in orbit and turning it on would make a definitive test for its usefulness as a low-Earth-orbit maneuvering engine, however it would say nothing of its usefulness as an interplanetary transfer engine, much less interstellar, so even more tests would have to follow - and setting the device up to perform those tests is much more involved and complicated. Plus, with the variable and uncertain nature of the EMDrive, various changes in configuration would have to be performed to make sure that it works or doesn't work, which is extra effort and extra things that would have to be planned for. The basic test would have been simple, but any actual testing would need a lot of time and effort. And, accordingly, money. Nobody wants to waste money on a single experiment that isn't going to prove anything but "this particular configuration works/doesn't work in this particular circumstance". As long as it's simpler and cheaper to keep running tests on the ground, tests will be run on the ground. Sure, it's slower, it lacks the immediate answer capacity, and all it really is is a lot of filler between the drive and a proper test in orbit, but it provides more accurate data, is easier to manage, and doesn't cost much money. Once/if it's been determined that total lack of intervening gases is not an obstacle to the EMDrive, and the produced effect is (reasonably) beyond doubt not an instrument error or a product of some other odd interaction, the whole thing will be sent into orbit. There's no point rushing it along with insufficient data and risk running a definitive test in suboptimal circumstances. If it works, a definitive test must be a definitive success, otherwise it's better to keep it low-key.

Likewise, they probably thought of the limits of detection as well. While I agree that it's impossible to account for everything without knowing everything - that's even the point I'm making to K^2 in regards to how the drive might operate in violation of known physics, however well-established - you should still probably give the Eagleworks team some credit. Even if they're NASA, they probably ruled out the obvious suspects by now at least. The comment about the power supply acting on the walls of the chamber made me want to comment that they already tested an "RF load" with the same power supply and nothing happened, but at the same time it made me remember that the drive is a weird electromagnetic device that uses a vaguely thruster-shaped chamber. While the walls of the testing chamber are probably insulating the device from outside interference, could it be creating a "shaped" magnetic field that extends primarily in one direction, pushing off one side of the chamber but not the other? Is that theoretically possible (cue K^2 answering "sure is more possible that reactionless thrust"), and how would one test for/against it?

[humorouscomment] I wonder if K^2 will explode if it's found that the EMDrive achieves above-photon-drive-power propellantless thrust via generating FTL neutrinos. [/humorouscomment]

I think you're underestimating the capacity of a system as complex as the Universe for having distinct recognizable patterns. If the exact same things couldn't be explained in several different ways, we would never have competing theories. And no matter what goes on with the EMDrive, you're a bad scientist if you exclude even the slightest chance of any of the things you know being wrong.

I think they're down to just two parts right now. The RF emitter and the resonance chamber. And they already tested the RF emitter on its lonesome, I believe. (Assuming the "RF Load" test back during the slits/no-slits experiment series was that) It didn't produce thrust.

Okay. But what of the next step? Eagleworks would have went "huh", and tried to determine what creates the thrust, since thrust is a thing you can measure, and they had been measuring it. If the tampered-with, beyond-a-shadow-of-doubt nonfunctional test article still produces measurable thrust, something is going on. That is, as I said, the one area where Eagleworks is at an advantage. They were not aiming to prove the existence of thrust as a concept. They already know that thrust is a thing that exists, so when their results show that there is thrust, they know that something is happening. Blondlot had to prove that he wasn't, as it were, "seeing things" first. Like I said, I don't know if anyone tried to do any follow-up experiments to determine what, if anything, the experiments were actually detecting before. But unless the creator of the concept of N-Rays admitted that he made the whole thing up, I think it was a thing that could have been looked into - at the very least so that whatever that factor was does not interfere with any future experiments.

So it was. So was Wood's change to the N-Ray experiments. The obvious difference being that Wood was running his experiments separately from the N-Ray experimenters, and the hypothesis he was testing, was that the N-Ray experimenters' experiment was hogwash. Wasn't the Eagleworks test likewise definitive? It was testing for the alleged operating principle of the device. That operating principle was definitively proven to be false, because thrust was still observed with a key component of that operating principle removed. I have no idea of the details of the N-Ray experiments, I just saw familiar elements in their description in the quote I posted.In both cases, an experiment is performed, and is then modified via removal of a key component of the experiment, with no change to the observed result. With N-Rays the change was discreet, and the result was used to disprove the whole concept of N-Rays, rather than the experimental setup involved, but the similarities are there. I read the article, but only the article, not any of its ancillary documents. I was mildly curious, not enraptured with the concept, to go that far. As such, I'm not aware of any 'problems' in the N-Ray experiments, only that they were performed, tampered with, and consequently invalidated along with the thing they were supposed to detect.My only criticism of that whole affair, is that unlike the Eagleworks today - who admittedly are working with a known and detectable concept, i.e. thrust - as far as I know so far, back then nobody thought to ask "okay, so their experiment is not what they say it is, but what are these people detecting, if it's not what they claim?" and look further into it. Just to clarify, I have no stance on N-Rays, and I've no idea what all was actually done about them, but the above was my impression from reading the Wiki article on them.

/me looks up N-Rays on the Wiki. Heh, this sounds familiar: If Eagleworks gave in to the same sort of thinking, they would have abandoned the project after the first experiment with the removed slits. A proper scientist aims to find out what is happening, rather than disprove a specific claim and leave it there.

The Theory of Universal Gravitation, assuming it was ever named such before being coined as a Law, was, from the outset, that any two bodies are drawn together by a force proportional to their masses, and inversely proportional to the square of distance between them. Theories often contain at least as much math as laws do. The word you're looking for is "concept".

EMDrive would make for a terrible KSP part. Just as it would revolutionize space travel IRL, so it would utterly break any semblance of fairness and balance in KSP. Infinite dV at less power cost than an Ion Thruster - because that's what the EMDrive as-proposed puts out. It would be a boring cheat engine, about the same as you'd get if you took a PB-ION powered craft and turned on infinite fuel. I really want the EMDrive to work as advertized IRL, for the exact same reason I really don't want it to become a part of KSP.

The thrust you'd be looking for might consist of particles that don't interact with matter reliably. It would have to be leaving the resonance chamber, for one thing. Or wait, is that thing sealed or not? I really ought to read some of the technical specs of the thing I'm arguing about sometime.

You forgot the explanation where a minute slope in spacetime curvature allows a tiny fragment of matter inside of it to "fall" forward, pushing on the rest of the device. It would need no reaction mass, no energy to carry away by any particles, virtual or otherwise. Just a very unlikely effect created by very specific circumstances.

I think you'll easily notice that the numbers aren't a mistake if you look at the vacuum thrust of the engines the ISP of which you've modified. Currently, the thrust value in the .cfg is given for the sea-level pressure. If you change the sea-level ISP without changing the thrust or the vacuum ISP, the engines' thrust in vacuum will drop dramatically, and will no longer be those neat round numbers you get currently.