Wjolcz

Here's a light STOL/VTOL aircraft I made today. Nothing sopisticated but pretty fun to fly. Press Abort to switch between horizontal and vertical modes. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/J2JDn2k. Steam workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1786988728 WARNING! This plane doesn't use any kind of reaction wheel stabilization! It's something I do with every aircraft I build. As long as you have more than 7m/s of horizontal speed you should be able to control it just fine: Check out my self-stabilizng SSTO here:

From what I can tell the small science power stations (the solar panel and the RTG) can only power nearby experiments. But what would be cool is if you could stop by one of them and recharge your vessel. So let's say there's one of those solar panels or RTGs nearby and your rover is running out of juice. You drive to one of them (let's say it has to be 20m radius) and then "Recharge" option shows on one of the batteries' tweakable panels. You click on that and the battery starts recharging. You could basically 'Martian' your way back to the base/whatever if recharging your rover wasn't an option because your solar panels broke or you never had them in the first place.

My guess is they want to figure all this out with Mars 2020 and it's cubecopter. That thing will have to be autonomous even on Mars because the delay there is significant too.

They probably won't. Unless Hyperloop is a thing. Doesn't this depend a lot on how the vessel is built? You really can't see into the future, can you? Who said every spaceport has to be that far? Only the ones which weren't approved by the nearby country/state.

What about international waters?

AFAIK a single Falcon 9 is cheaper than an airliner. Not only that but they (Elon on Twitter?) said that the Starship might be even cheaper to build. The last time I checked metholox was comparable in price to RP-1+Oxygen. That being said I'm skeptical too but at the same time I would like to fly on one of these one day. That's not bad. There are cars pricier than that. Btw:

They aren't on top though, so that might not be that big of a problem. And maybe they could actually fold them and roll towards where the upper winds are blowing to minimize any unwanted pushing forces. What if instead of using fins they kept the landing legs in the bottom section of the hull (where the engines are) and used extendable 'airbrakes' of sorts. Basically what Everyday Astronaut did in his video except more flush.

They plan to cram 1000 passengers into that!? I don't know why but I thought it would be more like 150-200 per flight. Edit: OK, so a 747 has a capacity of up to 660. Makes sense now. Sounds like a fun ride to me.

Huh. I thought the ISS was pretty much complete. Also, I'm guessing you mean Nauka?

They will probably do a couple of swan dives first. Just like the DC-X did.

Park bench chill at midnight

Baba is You is a pretty good game.

Looks pretty good

Snake sketch from moments ago Edit: so apparently there's a snake theme I wasn't aware of when posting this lol.

I'm a bit confused about that electric vs chemical propulsion comparison. Is he talking about nonoptimal transfer with electric vs optimal transfer with chemical? Other than that I agree. It makes sense to go with conventional chemical propulsion than spend more time and money on something that will be ready to go there in a decade or two.

Isn't that the booster/1st stage though?

From wikipedia: In October 2029, when it will arrive in Jupiter system, JUICE will perform first flyby of Ganymede for preparation to the orbital insertion ≈7.5 hours later. First orbit will be elongated, and first Jupiter closest approach will take place in May 2030. After that, orbits will be closer and closer to the Jupiter, and it finally will be resulted by a circular orbit. First Europa flyby will take place in October 2030. JUICE will enter the highly inclination orbit, making possible exploration of Jupiter's polar regions. JUICE will study the Jupiter's magnetosphere. Callisto flyby in April 2031 will put JUICE on normal equatorial orbit. Also, there is a transit of Europa and Io that will occur on January 27, 2032. So they want to do flybys of other moons. Equatorial makes way more sense if you want to do that. Besides, sun-synchronous orbit around Ganymede might not be stable so they will probably waste less fuel adjusting the orbit if it's equatorial.

Science gathering is silly, to say at least. I have annoyed many of the fellow forum goers with this issue many times and I am not going to do that anymore since there are mods like KerboKatz. I feel like designing your own experiments would only add more to the already existing tediousness of the whole science gathering system.

I'd think so. Since Juno is in a polar orbit. It's just a matter of setting your Ap/Pe right and getting an encounter.

I keep recreating and improving this design each time a new KSP update is released. It's, what I like to call, a Roadrunner Class SSTO. Pretty happy with the current version. Sorry for the low FPS, my laptop is not great. Earlier versions are availeble on Steam Workshop, if you want to take them for a spin. Edit: the current one is already there. Research & Developement album: https://imgur.com/a/A81OidG EDIT: Remember to check autostruts on the hinges! They really don't like cooperating with each other!

I'm pleseantly surprised. Hopefully nothing goes wrong.

So it looks like they are building the top part(s) first and will probably start building the bottom part(s) after the hopper does all the testing. Any word on when the hopper starts hopping again? Around the end of this month maybe?

Like what? Solar wind? Edit: If the answer is yes, then wouldn't it be easier to send a probe into a heliocentric orbit to stay outside of the magnetosphere for its whole mission? The Gateway would go through Earth's magnetic tail every month. Maybe they could do some radiation shielding research too, but as I said: pretty sure you can do that in a lab by bombarding tiny pieces of said materials with radiation. Seems waaaay cheaper than shielding a whole station just to test it. Or even better: Just wrap a probe with some shielding and send it way out into the heliocentric orbit. Edit 2: I'm not trying to hate the Gateway btw. I love the ISS because it makes me think about how amazing the 21st century is. A lunar station doesn't seem much of an upgrade though. It won't do much more research than that the ISS has already done. It probably won't build a Mars ship either. It's a lifeboat and I feel like BFR could work just as well while being much, much cheaper.

I have a feeling that the Gateway is supposed to be more of a 'lifeboat' than anything else. When something goes wrong on the surface you go up and dock to the station. It probably takes less time and ∆V to rendezvous with a lunar station than going back to Earth/LEO/whatever or send a rescue mission from Earth. Also rotation, as some polar regions (AFAIK) are in the shade and can't use solar power for about six months. So the crews could rotate every 6 months or so. Pretty sure that's about the same time most astronauts spend on the ISS during each rotation/mission. That being said, that's the only real uses I can see for it. Really not sure what kind of research can be done there that can't be done on the ISS, LEO or a lab.

Juno (20kN) is insanely powerful compared to the real engine it's based on which is Jumo 004 (about 8kN).