azazel1024

I would say no, they aren't required. I would say yes, you do want them for a fuller experience of the game. Some mod parts "cheat" or are "unbalanced". I personally go with the ones that are balanced with the existing parts. Even though I have Claira's add-on (I actually don't have all of the parts installed) I am glad a number of those parts are being added as "stock" in the game. It makes sense. Personaly hope is single kerbal landing can, space station hub part as well as the "weaker" 2.5m engines and smaller RCS tank. I am very interested to see what else she is working on. I can't imagine that all she has done or is doing is adding a bunch of her existing stuff as stock resources. I'd imagine that would be a one day job, if that, to add it to the resources files. Though I know she is working on the UI as well, but I am curious what her wonderful mind is coming up with (Nova too...well, supposing he is working on any new parts).

Yeah, I am kind of curious about the no weekly update as well...especially since now it is two in a row missed...though I'd certainly give a pass for missing last weeks with the several day long effort to restore the forums.

Dunno. I never did the math or paid super close attention, but, yeah, it seemed to be in the 2km/sec dV range for proper capture once I got there. I did change my orbital inclination in advance though and hit it at its AP. I also had reduced my orbit somewhat, so my AP was not still at Kerbin. My AP was maybe, roughly somewhere in the region of Eve's orbit with my PE at Moho's PE. If I had to take a WAG I'd say my dV to get to Moho was more in the 3-3.5km/sec range and proper capture and 150km circular orbit was in the 2km/sec dV range. I am pretty sure my overall design did not generate more than about 5km/sec of dV.

The two pieces of rebalancing I'd like to see are, as someone mentioned, slightly higher TWR for SRBs. Not a huge amount more, but maybe 15-25% higher thrust, roughly the same Isp. So yeah, they'd burn faster, but harder. They are best for first stage lift off, which means you want the maximum thrust you can possibly get. As it stands, their heavy weight means that the thrust they do provide only helps "a smidge" for very heavy lifters and are much less efficient than a liquid fueled booster + engine...which I understand is the true reality, but it would be nice to either reduce the weight slightly, or increase the thrust slightly. The other is, it would be nice if fuel tanks did not scale perfectly linearly. Since within reason, a fuel tank's weight is closer to the square of its size, but the volume it can hold is a cubed function (yes, I know, as you grow larger you also need thicker walls, but the wall and fuel vessel thickness does NOT scale linearly, probably closer to a square root function)...basically very large tanks are going to weigh less for the volume of fuel they can hold than small tanks. I wouldn't want to see a huge scaling change in this, otherwise there would never be a reason to use small tanks if this scaling caused a big mass penalty for small tanks. However, if for instance the jumbo 1.5m tank held maybe 20% more fuel compared to its mass than the smallest 1.5m tank and the jumbo rockomax tank held maybe 20% more fuel compared to its mass than the smallest rockomax tank and more or less scale everything in between, I think it would add a scooche of realism as well as making very large rocket designs just a small amount easier. I don't want "an easy button", but sometimes it can be rather time consuming and require rather intricate designs and/or massive designs to do something that shouldn't need to be quite so large and/or complex (like say, building a kerpollo style mission, which is not possible with stock pieces and resembling anything like the Saturn 5 or CSM/LM).

Missed entry really just meant bouncing too high and dying from asphixiation as your oxygen ran out waiting for another reentry. There really wasn't a "skip in to outer space and never coming back" issue with Apollo or any other. The issue is, once seperated from the service module, the command module as a very, very finite amount of breathable air and power. It isn't minutes long, but it is only a couple of hours. You bounce off the atmosphere to a higher orbit and you can't hold your breath for the hour or two it might take for you to reach apogee start descending and hit reentry again, let alone where you will be when you reenter (lets keep in mind all US manned capsules were designed for water spalsh down, NOT solid earth landing). In either case, too steep or too shallow was fatal. I just don't like the misconception of "skip right off the atmosphere" end sentence. When it should be "skip right off the atmosphere and run out of air and power before we hit it on the way down again"

Sorry...I probably should have read that the way it was intended. I am having a literal day today. See the sun is out, it is literally day!

It is impossible to armor a ship sufficient to stop anything but a micrometeriote sized impact. So, yeah, you can stop things like paint flecks, slivers, etc, maybe even a bolt if sufficiently designed. It will NOT stop a space craft on space craft collision, nor with any kind of even moderate sized debris (maybe something under 1cm). The ISS actually has something like this. It is a thin metal shield placed some distance from the actual hull (a few cm? a meter? Not sure actual distance). To stop something the size and weight of a human fist moving at orbital velocities would likely take something stronger than the glacis plate of an M1A1 Abrams tank. A seperate stand off shield will cause most debris to vaporize due to the collision velocities involved and then you need your hull or secondard armor to be sufficiently strong to absorb the micro-debris and/or gas/plasma cloud generated by the collision. Even with a stand off shield a super thick hull is not likely to stop even small debris (micro sized sure). This ignores completely the issues with trying to loft satellites or space stations with hulls composed of a foot or more of steel armor.

Ya don't, do you? Cause orbital collisions have occured several times, including disabling/destroying satellites in the past. Part of the issue is that the orbits choosen all tend to be in roughly the same spots for reasons of Earth coverage. So it isn't simply 30,000 objects orbiting in 30,000 different orbits. It is more like 30,000 objects orbiting in 500 orbits, of which dozens of those intersect/cross within dozens to hunderds of meters of each other...and a little orbital decay nudging, or solar radiation push and an orbit crosses and disaster. I actually had an orbital collision in KSP and I have debris set to non-permemnant. I accidently had a booster I dettached strike a satellite about a minute after seperation. Since the satellite was going a lot faster, both blew up (satellite in 200km orbit, booster had an AP of 230km and a PE of 10km).

Yes and no also. We could scale it up based on current ion engine techologies. However, there is more than one way to ionize and accelerate and ion. Even with Xenon. The Isp and thrust are based on not just the fuel source (Xenon in this case) and how much energy is put in to the fuel, but also how the molecules/atoms are ionized/de-ionized and accelerated. VASMIR is more efficient (thrust and Isp) per watt than current ion drives IIRC.

Well, it depends on how you are looking at it, on the low end it is around a factor of two. On the high end it is off by a factor of about 10 (for lithium Ion batteries). I guess my biggest complaint with the batteries is that has a large negative impact a lot of times either with probes running out of juice, rovers not having enough power driving in shadow or bases running dry through a long night. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing solar panels get scaled back by a factor of 2 or 3, but I'd like to see batteries at least double or better yet quadruple in storage density. I'd also love to see rovers be able to be throttleable as well, but that is sort of a different story.

I don't know that I'd say with no problems. Don't get me wrong, he NAILED IT. That said, he also nearly ran out of fuel because he had to pitch up and go long on the landing due to the original landing spot basically being a boulder field. I wouldn't exactly consider that no problem in regards to the landing. Also his practice on Earth wasn't a complication of the higher gravity, it was a complication of the test vehicle being used to practice landings had a malfunction. Yes, practicing on Kerbin can be rather disspiriting. That said, if you can do it on Kerbin (without parachutes) then you can do it on almost any planet. My test for landing vehicles for most planets is launch them direct from the pad, take it up to at least 5,000m and then bring it back down for a parachut-less landing. If I can do that and ge a smooth landing, then I know that the lander is capable of setting down on almost any planet (exception Tylo which would need a lot more dV). This is with no launch vehicle, this is just the internal fuel/engines of the lander itself. If I know I am putting the lander down on a very low gravity moon or some place I can use parachutes I only make sure I can take the lander up to 2,000m before setting it back down again (without parachutes). Yes, this means my landers tend to be over built a little, but generally not by a significant amount. Its a valid test for Moho, the Mun, Minimus, Ike, Duna, Kerbin, Dres, Eve and Laythe. Others, dunno. I'd assume so. If it is a lander with an ascent stage, then I generally go for being able to boost to 5,000m, set back down and then launch my ascent stage and get up to at least 5,000m (Duna I go for 10,000m). I haven't bothered with an ascent stage for Eve or Laythe yet, so I am sure those tests aren't even remotely valid as both need significantly more dV than just climbing to 5/10km on Kerbin.

I want to say they are in Earth-Sun Lagrange points.

You know, I read that one too quickly and I had a freudian mind slip of "bacon" rovers. My first thought was, "Bacon rovers...why would anyone want a bacon rover?", my next thought was, "Oh, man! That is epic. I must ask what mod he is using!" my third thought was, "Oh...he said beacon rover, not bacon rover

And look at the battery. Z-500 is .05. I assume that is .05 metric tons, or 50kg. If you assume half is casing, support and circuitry (charge regulation), and that is excessive, realistic is maybe 30% casing and other at most...you get 25kg of battery. That is 25wh per kg. Energy density of lead acid batteries are 30-40wh/kg, so even assume these are lead acid batteries, which would be stupid to use these days, you come in at around 60-80% of the real world energy density for KSP batteries. Now look at ni-cad batteries. Probably the "lowest tech" rechargable batteries you'd ever consider for space flight. You have 40-60wh/kg. Now the KSP batteries have between 40-60% of real world energy density. Now lets look at NiMh batteries, 60-120wh/kg. Now we are at 20-40% of real world energy density (NiMh would not be an ideal type to use unless there is an over abundance of generating capacity, but excessive periods of no generating capacity inbetween as NiMh have a charge/discharge efficiency of 66%, which means 33% of the energy put in to the batteries will be wasted as heat instead of extractable as electricity. NiMh have a lower efficiency than most "main stream" rechargable batteries. NiCad run 70-90% charge/discharge efficiency, lead acid are 50-92% and LiIon are 80-90%). Lithium Ion batteries run 100-265wh/kg. KSP batteries by comparison run 9-25% as efficient. So...please, please, please, please, at the very least increase the battery storage density by double. Preferably 3-4x higher. Or maybe in the future with career mode, offer different "technologies" of batteries, with higher storage density ones costing more and/or unlockable later down the tech tree or something. However, please make higher storage density batteries a possibility. I'd start at at least 50% higher and then offer at least one set of batteries with double the storage density of the base batteries. That would at least get batteries in to bunting range of real world battery storage densities. PS as a comparison my car battery weighs about 30lbs total, or a bit over 13kg and has a 90 minute reserve capacity. That is 20 amps for 90 minutes from 13.2v down to 11.5v. Roughly 380wh of capacity at a high discharge rate. At something lower, like maybe 2amps, the overall capacity is probably closer to 500wh. Even using the 380wh, that is 29wh/kg including casing, terminals, etc. KSP batteries, 10wh/kg including casing.

Yeah, I did see those dev blogs. I am very excited about it all. Mostly about the flags, but the program and interface work should be nice improvements as well. However...flags..HECK YEAH! Maybe almost more than the resource system I am excited about it. Resources give more to do...but darn it, there is just something...visceral? Elemental? about "space flight" where you want to put your darned flag in the regolith/dirt and say, "I claim this mun in the name of Queen Kisabela of Kespana!" Hopefully some kind of "sample" collection ability too at some point. I'd be happy with a first step just the animation to scoop up some regolith or pickup a rock action and put it in sample bag and then in your pack/belt. Later it would be neat if you could actually do something with it, like identify what material it was made out of (maybe by returning it to your ship and putting it in a rock identifier science instrument or something).

I know we had a couple of blog posts by HarvestR and C7...but isn't there supposed to be a general "state of development" post on Tuesdays? Is it delayed because of the forum rebuilding last week? Or is it off now that the Devs are starting to do their own dev blogs again? Just curious. I vant to know vat ze oo-ter devs are working on. If that isn't too much trouble. Thanks!

Yes/No. In part Yes, because hey, why not. In part no, because at least storage energy density to energy generation for the RTG, solar panels and batteries is not remotely realistic. If you assume a .05mt battery, like one of the small guys, that works out to 50kg. If we assume 50% of that is casing, circuitry, etc and the other 50% is actual battery, you come out to around 7kw/hr of energy storage. Based on a 4x1m solar panel, roughly the size of one of the small jobs, running at 35% efficiency (roughly what you'll find in a crystaline silicone solar cell) in orbit around Earth, you'd get roughly 1.2kw of generating power. That would take roughly 5hrs or so to charge the battery. In game time it takes, what, about 60 seconds to recharge the small size battery with the small size deployable solar cell? Two things I'd like to see occur in the game is both the inverse square law being applied to solar power generation at some point, so the further you were from the star, the lower the power generation. The next is, I'd like to see battery energy storage jump dramatically. At least 10x higher than what it is now. Otherwise batteries are ridiculously under rated. The solar panels themselves, just looking at how much power a light uses, actually don't appear terribly far off from what they should be. Same with rover wheels. Ion engine...okay, that is badly off. Batteries, way under rated. If you figure even a halogen light for the lights in the game, one of those big floods is probably roughly a 200-300w flood light (the brighter, more concentrated floods are probably more like 500-1000w floods). Supposing those batteries were anything like real world batteries, that should take around 20-30hrs for a single flood light to burn through the entire charge of one of the smallest batteries. Right now it takes, what? About an hour or two to do that?

Most of my designs since they use some amount of staging at each level and SRBs, I tend to launch at 100% throttle for maybe 4-6s and then I throttle back to about 80% until the SRBs burn out and seperate, then I throttle up to the limit that the main sails can handle. That way the SRBs burn out a couple of seconds before the inital main sail stage seperation occurs. My design for the first stage is generally 7 rockomax jumbos with mainsails, 6 around 1. 4 of them feed in to the central tank and the two other outer tanks, once dry the 4 outer tanks seperate, leaving center and 2 outers which burn until empty. This arrangement seems to, to me anyway, maximize heavy lifting capability with high thrust and plenty of dV. I used to do a 7 engine/tank first stage without cross feeding or seperation and I'd generally be able to deliver about 6-8mt less to the same orbit. Anyway, if I burn at 100%, first I'd blow the mainsails, but even if I throttle to about 92% thrust to keep them on the edge of burnout, the outer tanks will run dry a couple of seconds before the SRBs would run dry, hence a few seconds of 100% throttle to get my velocity up as quickly as possible, and then throttling back to around 80% or so to time it for SRB burn out right before first stage seperation.

Collecting samples (and maybe being able to do something with them) would be awesome along with the resource extraction/mining/refining. I'd love to see animated cargo bays and also the ability to actually put things in them, either in the VAB or in flight. Pretty much a "it fits, it can be put in there". You could do it so that 1.5m bay can house probe sized stuff with two or three different jr. sized docking ports. One inside wall and one at the top and one at the bottom of the inside walls, so you have a few choices about how to arrange attachment. Then once in and attached, close up the doors. 2.5m parts could house 1.5m and probe sized stuff. Anyway, this would be radically cool to see.

Maybe I have missed it somewhere in here, but I am curious, anyone running it on a Windows 8 tablet? Specifically I am wondering about an Atom based tablet. I am curious both on performance and if it'll even boot up with the SGX based graphics. I am kind of eyeing up these possible 7/8" Windows 8 tablets rumored to be coming soon. I have an iPad 2, but my son(s) has/have pretty much bogarted it. So I need a new tablet and this time around, I am thinking Windows based, but I want something slightly smaller than a 10" for better portability (I did/would take it to work often and an iPad mini sized tablet would fit in a large jacket pocket, where as a 10" won't). Anyway, I am not concerned about it being a serious gaming machine, but it would be HUGE fun if I could load it up on a tablet and do even small launches/missions at lower res. I have a nice enough blue tooth keyboard and a very portable mouse (MS arc touch)...though it would require the tablet having at least one USB port of some type (as the mouse is not blue tooth, but has a USB dongle receiver). Though it sounds like the future tablets coming soon will be baytrail based with Ivy Bridge graphics. Though, again, performance on Atom? The new ones should be faster, but still a lot slower than what Core architecture manages these days. Memory might also still be stuck at 2GB. Thanks!

More than anything, it is a YMMV situation. The same satellite placed on Earth's surface is going to have less solar light power density than one in orbit. During the daytime with the sun hitting it, the atmosphere absorbs some of it and even though a lot is re-radiated and will be absorbed by the satellite, it is at a slower rate as it is spread through the day and night time. So at any given moment, the satellite does receive less solar power than in space, even if over the course of an entire 24 hour period, the amount of radiation received is roughly the same amount. The power levels are lower during the daytime and higher at night. You also have the issue that in space, you are radiating as a black body. There is no conduction/convection either in surfaces it is touching or in to the surrounding atmosphere. This is the biggest problem. Even ignoring solar input, the active heat of the space craft with all of its systems running is often times enough to cook the ship (Skylab, though that was a solar reflector issue more than anything). Of course, the converse is if running at little to no power, temperatures tend to plummet (Apollo 13), at least if the space craft is designed to shed heat mostly passively.

Very nice. I just finished my Jool Station (actually might end up being a Laythe station). I haven't been to Jool since .17 and I feel like it is time. Unlike my normal process of sending a probe first, I am going going mun rocks to the wall and just launching a Station there. I'll send a lander later (other than Laythe, I've never landed on any of Jool's moons). I have the Jool station on a 300->580km orbit waiting to kick in the main stage NERVAs. I had boosted it up with the remaining fuel in the fuel tanks and Atlas engine that was the final stage of the station after assembling everything in orbit. I should have more than enough dV to get to Jool. I used a similar arrangement to get to Moho with a slightly heavier arrangement (smaller station, but rover and manned lander were included in that mission) and had maybe 10-15% fuel remaining in the final tank, so I suspect I should be able to get there with 20-30% fuel remaining in the last tank. Its 3 rockomax jumbos with a 2.5m NERVA on the end. Central tank/engine and two side tank/engines. At 33% fuel remaining, I cut out the engines, transfer all fuel from the side tanks to the central and jettison the side tanks. This time around I have the central tank setup so I can jettison the engine once I get a good orbit around Jool/Laythe and leave the tank attached to refuel future missions (for landers and/or Eyloo missions). Pictures to come.

Technically on orbit stuff is getting more energy. IIRC in LEO it is roughly 1KW per M^2. Where as at Earth's surface, high noon at the equator it is around 860W per M^2 due to atmospheric absorbtion. It would be nice to see radiators at some point to cool parts. Hopefully either radiators will work kind of like monopropellant where it'll cool anything on the ship, so long as it is attached, or else like fuel tanks where you can connect directly to a part you want to cool, or indirectly using coolant hoses (like the fuel connector hoses). Hopefully we don't get to the level of detail of needing them for life support and every little thing. Needing them to cool things like fission/fusion power plants, NERVA rockets and maybe the mainsail or similar in space would be kind of cool. Much more than that would get a little excessive (and introduce some problems).

Yes it would. To expand, even without a significant magnetic field of its own, it is likely to have low enough radiation to have life. Or at least the possibility of life. Especially within its oceans where received radiation doses would be significantly less than on the surface. The atmosphere would provide a fair amount of protection, even if doses would be dozens-hundreds of times higher than background radiation on Earth. Light protection could still do for you and light construction techniques would be all you'd need for buildings. Just make sure you don't sunbathe too much (err, well stand under exposed skys). At least not with a light protective suit.

One thing to take in to consideration is that Laythe also has a moderate atmosphere, and this would do a fair amount to screen some of the high energy particles. It would not be as effective as a good magnetic field, but it would reduce some of the impacts of the radiation contained within Jools magnetic field.