Borklund

Is this true for 1.0 as well as 0.6? Avid user of Kerbal Engineer, hope the SRB issue gets sorted soon.

It's the same on the real v1.1, yes. It was speculated to be the case since the v1.1 made its first appearance in an Iridium brochure and then confirmed when Elon Musk tweeted the picture in Ipam's post. They do look good but they can always look better. For one, the panels are too shiny and the shininess is entirely too even. It'll look even better when The Stinger has done a second pass on them. That's what he's focused on right now, a second pass of the Dragon's textures, while I work on the new models.

It's not about what astronauts will or won't do; NASA administrators decide that policy. With the 99.9% launch vehicle safety goalpost I don't know that they will move the radiation goalpost further to the right; NASA is super focused (some say unreasonably so) on safety. The 5% increase is for a round trip of 180 days using chemical propulsion. Solar electric propulsion/plasma could bring this down to weeks and it is way more technologically and politically feasible than sending a nuclear reactor to orbit Earth (nuclear propulsion is never going to happen). Solar electric propulsion exists already and has powered several small spacecraft. That tech will be scaled up to be able to be used in propelling humans across space in the decade to come. While radiation protection can be improved stuff like carbon nanotubes are way further out than solar electric propulsion which cuts down on the radiation just by the fact that it takes less time to get to Mars and back. Too much radiation too quickly will kill you and I'm pretty sure that there are radiation levels that you do not simply adapt to, or thousands of people would not have died or suffered illnesses from Chernobyl for instance.

It does not use those, instead there are separate interstage fairing parts (see the Structural tab).

Here's the regular Merlin 1D that's going on the Falcon 9 v1.1 (almost completed): v0.3 will offer a single Merlin 1D as a standalone engine for more versatility. Here are nine of them (hastily thrown together) arranged in the Falcon 9 v1.1 octoweb pattern:

Mars One is never ever going to be anything but a fancy website and marketing.

Yay, you're back! Are you going to update/add new things to the pack any time soon?

Hello! Here's a quick update: This is the Grasshopper version of the Merlin 1D which is now 99% complete. Since you last saw it I have added a bunch of detail but still managed to trim the poly count down by 1k to 4k tris. The Falcon 9 v1.1 M1D and M1DVac are not done yet but they will be soon as they build off of the M1D you see above. For Falcon 9 v1.1/Heavy there's going to be an overhaul of how the parts are structured to bring them more in line with stock parts with more regular attachment points and more separate parts (I'm working on a mockup of this that I'll show off later). Oh and if you haven't seen it yet you have to check out this totally awesome LEGO Dragon.

Surprised there hasn't already been a post about this. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1458134548/arkyd-a-space-telescope-for-everyone-0 Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company, is using Kickstarter to crowdfund a small prototype space telescope, offering backers rewards in the form of control over the spacecraft to take a picture. Who's backing this and at what level?

The radiation levels are indeed news, no spacecraft to my knowledge has measured radiation in deep space for any significant chunk of time. Curiosity had some levels of radiation protection for the cruise stage but the rover itself has radiation hardened parts, so obviously that level of protection would not be ideal for a human. The 662 mSv dose is a 180-day reference Mars mission using traditional chemical propulsion but with solar electric propulsion that could bring the travel time down to weeks (and thus the radiation dose received during the trip). There are other ideas such as lining a spacecraft's inner walls with water which could also help. It remains to be seen how tough the radiation environment is on Mars but I don't expect it to be greater than in deep space given the fact that Mars has a tenous atmosphere and is a large rocky body. You would always have that risk however and another option would be to move the radiation dose limit. The career limit of a NASA astronaut is a 5% increase in the risk of developing fatal cancer, or 1 Sv/1000 mSv, but NASA tries to keep it to below 3%. This is in addition to the already huge risk everyone has of contracting cancer here on Earth (26% in the UK).

Craft files are now uploaded; get them here! Regarding crew Dragon/DragonRider/Dragon 2.0: As far as I can remember (can't pull the exact moment from the youtube video I remember this from), Elon Musk has said that the next version of Dragon, the crewed one, is going to be very different from the current Dragon. I believe he specifically mentioned the shape and the fact that for Dragon they didn't know what they were doing, so they went with a common and proven pod shape, but 2.0 is going to look positively alien (I believe that alien is the exact word he used). While Elon Musk has been known to exaggerate this is enough for me to not put any work into replicating the DragonRider mockup with the nose-looking SuperDraco mounts. If this is what you want then I'm sorry, but it's not going to be offered as part of KerbX. I will wait for the new Dragon to be unveiled later this year. We still have a lot of work to do on the current Dragon and Falcon 9 v1.1 + Heavy. Sorry, I forgot to include them in the SpacePort upload but they're there now; see the how to use tab on SpacePort for assembly instructions. The formatting is bad and I can't get SpacePort to let me use paragraphs in that part. When oh when are they going to abort the omnishambles that is SpacePort... attachRules = 1,1,1,1,0 and node_attach = 1.25, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1

I like your idea CERVERUS. You could theoretically use the real cargo Dragon in this manner, as a sort of last ditch space life raft (though I can't imagine you would actually survive the trip without being tightly strapped in). I'll make the docking port usable as a hatch for EVA's and let up to 3 Kerbals stow away inside but I won't work on an IVA scene until after everything else is done; Falcon 9 v1.1 + Heavy, Dragon drogues and chutes and graphics revamp.

Ah, I see. I might add a hatch and an empty cargo interior, but it's not a priority. There will be a crewed version of the Dragon with seats and controls and all of that, but it won't look the same as the current Dragon. SpaceX haven't released any pictures of how it will look yet, so I have nothing to go on for now.

How do you mean?

The craft files are still not showing up on SpacePort and it looks like I'm not the only one having trouble uploading mods. Glad I got KerbX uploaded before it broke. Man, Squad are cocking up supporting the modding community quite badly.

The craft files are still not showing up on SpacePort and it looks like I'm not the only one having trouble uploading mods. Glad I got KerbX uploaded before it broke. Man, Squad are cocking up supporting the modding community quite badly.

Use winrar or 7zip to archive the folders and then upload the file to a free hosting service like Dropbox, Mediafire or Google Drive and then post the link here (or PM me).

Cool video! It turned out great I've tried to upload the craft files twice but SpacePort does not seem to want to process it. I'll keep trying.

When pictures of it start to emerge. Based on what Elon Musk has been saying it will look quite different from the Dragon and the DragonRider mockup.

I am not able to replicate this. Can I have your save and your KerbX folders please? I hadn't really given up, it's just that the Great Forum Disaster of 2013 made my motivation to work on KSP fall off. Thanks for the kind comments Unfortunately I won't be picking up work on the DragonFly, at least not for the time being. If I remember correctly Bobcat is working on the same vehicle (Klipr/Clipper) for his Russian pack. Next for this mod is Falcon 9 v1.1 and Heavy + revamped Dragon with a full feature set (including chutes and drogues).

It looks like SpacePort stole my upload and ran away with it. I shall try again.

KSP 0.20 - now with quantum mechanics editing? I'm going to take this up with the devs. edit: looks like this isn't a new thing. Problem with the attachment node being inside the collider. Will have to look at fixing it in the future.

I was able to replicate this. It seems that if you move the nose cone up through the pod first, the nose cone attaches. If you try to attach the nose cone by moving it down over just the docking port it won't fit. Very strange, I'll take a look at what might be wrong.

I got it to work no problem. Can you upload a screenshot showing the problem? Thanks Zaran but I'm going to go with just the logo for now.

Yeah I haven't really been active since the Great Forum Disaster of 2013, but that's changed now. Better late than never I suppose!