Beowolf

Whoa, I had one of these! Impractical, true. But a spacesuit that lets you scratch your nose does sound like a valuable innovation. PS for the younger Kerbonauts: Major Matt Mason was, IMO, the greatest set of astronaut toys ever! They came out about the same time as Project Gemini, and were made from lots of concept drawings like this hardsuit. Later, they added lame aliens and ruined it, but that's what happens to everything successful, right? - - - Updated - - - Great documentary on the creation of space suits:

Think about this for a minute. To escape the "if Earth dies, we all die" trap, space colonies would have to be so self-sufficient they can recreate ALL critical components of their colony from in-situ resources. It isn't just oxygen, water and power. Those will hold you for a few years, but not even the wildest ISRU plans have us building replacement CPU chips and new spacesuits for growing children! A colony that can't make more self-sufficient colonies will still die. It's such a huge problem humanity can't even define all the variables yet. At our current tech level, manned interplanetary spaceflight on a massive scale is actually one of the easier pieces of this puzzle. We know how, it's just too expensive for us right now. Modern civilization is so interconnected that everything affects everything else. One tiny, simple example: Take a look at the list of ingredients on a multi-vitamin. We need all those chemicals and trace elements to survive. Many of the chemicals are automatically produced inside our food, of course. But all recycling has losses and the raw elements have to be replaced. So just for the materials required to make your daily vitamin pill, the colony needs extraction and refining capability for boron, cobalt, chromium, calcium, chlorine, copper, fluoride, iodine, iron, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, sodium, sulphur, and zinc. And of course the easy ones, like oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon. Right now, the only (theoretical!) way a single colony could extract the elements we need from Mars' surface is one of the ways they enriched uranium in WWII: A combination of a cyclotron and mass spectrometer called a calutron. A physicist once told me that a multistage calutron that was 10x-100x bigger than those could separate the individual elements from vaporized samples in small-but-useful quantities (grams/day). But the three "little" ones they built in WWII required 14,700 tons of silver and copper. So 100x bigger than that...built on Mars or shipped to Mars (ha!). Oh, and it would require gigawatts of power to run, so first we need a metropolis-sized power plant on Mars. Maybe soon we'll be able to make engineered bacteria to concentrate the elements we need. A few of those are in lab-prototype stage, but definitely not all we need. Still, There are bacteria and fungi at Chernobyl that get their energy from the radiation, too. That'd be a really useful trait for a vat of tiny Martian manganese miners. See what I mean? It all gets overwhelmingly complex very quickly. The more I learn about it, the less I think it's possible without advanced nanotech or gengineering. I want it just as bad as you do, though. PS If you think this was bad, look into how much water's needed to make computer chips. Even a small plant uses a million gallons a day! And they aren't particularly exceptional. A lot of our industrial processes are based on the assumption that megatonnes of pure water are instantly and cheaply available. Essentially, every process to create every manufactured material will have to be reengineered from scratch. That problem alone would cost decades and billions of dollars to solve with current tools. So we'll end up waiting for the nanotech, or some other miracle.

NASA has pointed out that Mars is actually much farther away when judged by minimum length of round trip. Transfer windows between Earth and Venus are available more often, making early interplanetary missions significantly shorter. Venus is also much easier to return from, because of its impossible surface conditions. Nobody's landing there and a Venus stratospheric airship mission involves less delta-v than a Mars landing. But the biggest issue is some at NASA don't want our first interplanetary mission to be so long. A Venus flyby mission could be back home in about a year, and we can afford complete life-support backup. The astronauts use the fancy recycling machines we'd use for a Mars mission, but if those break, they also have sufficient stored supplies to finish the mission. That isn't practical for a 5-year Mars mission. Those machines will have to work. So, given that info, I agree a shakedown cruise is an excellent idea. I don't know whether a Venus flyby is better than that proposed asteroid capture mission, but concur with their need for a multi-month-but-shorter-than-Mars mission. Just in the past few years on ISS we've learned about longterm changes in astronaut eyesight, and chemical changes happening to medications kept in orbit for six months. I expect we'll find more nasty little surprises the first time humans live in deep space for months. I'd rather not use up too many astronauts discovering them.

Well, my "realist" position (I assume every one of us thinks he's the realist, though!) is there simply isn't the economic motivation for the sort of space exploitation we'd like to see. It's just too expensive to go to space. But whenever a profitable market develops, we'll be there to take advantage. Look at communications satellites for an example. They're crazy expensive, too, but still cheaper than the alternative of covering the planet with fiber optics, so launching them is a thriving business. All we have right now is ideas of where to look for great wealth in space. But verifying whether that wealth actually exists costs tens of billions, so isn't worth it right now. But one of these days, a pure science mission will find some evidence that'll make a commercial prospecting voyage worth the risk. IMO, the best thing humanity can do right now to hurry that day is to lower the cost of getting to LEO. You can work the supply-demand curve from either direction, but there's no escaping it.

TIL TweakableEverything is the solution to the problem where spacewalking Kerbals are annoying because the EVA thrusters are too powerful for fine control. Now I can actually stop his movement, instead of choosing between "too much left" and "too much right". Thank you, toadicus!

My absolute favorite unimplemented KSP idea is for Kerbals to pop like popcorn when they overheat, either from reentry or getting too close to their sun. /Not my idea. If someone implements it, I'll look up who originally thought of the idea for proper credit.

I was thinking about this idea, too. I was picturing a game where I have all the science, but have a specific, limited budget to accomplish a roleplay goal. It turns out to be really easy to edit your "scores" in the persistence.sfs file: Search for "funds =", "sci =", and "rep =", and change the values to whatever you want. I gave myself 100,000 science and an even million in funds, and it looks like it'll work nicely for my scenario.

I've never run into fins placed like that before, Aethon. Thanks for sharing.

Pushing an exhausted ship home using a Kerbal on EVA is a KSP tradition. Best of luck with it!

When I was in my 20s and 30s, I loved the idea of eventual immortality. Now that I'm 55, disabled from a bad heart and arthritis, I definitely suggest reading the fine print if a genie ever offers to make you immortal. I would not want to be immortal with my present body or with one that continued to age and decay. As of now, I would still go for having my brain digitized. But thinking about your question I realized that will likely change one day, too. My older friends and I can all feel our brains slowing down these days. It isn't much yet, but each of us misses something we used to have at our mental peak. So I can imagine a future time when I might think I've lost so much it'd just be better to let nature do its thing. So get off my lawn and get back to work, you darned kids! Digitizing brains will take years of nanotech breakthroughs, and I'm retired.

Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur are not amused by the metallic bias in this thread, and respectfully remind you what you are made of.

Yep I had the same issue with my first Jool probe. Worked on it for a while, but couldn't get around it. So I physics-timewarped until the probe snapped out of its funk, somewhere around 2,000 km for me.

Never tried using a hitchhiker for that, but have done it both with multiple one-man capsules in tandem, or a one-man capsule followed by one or two inline cockpits. I'm playing on the 550-science tiers, but still use a 1.25m rocket like that if I just need Kerbals in low orbit, or a low-orbit rescue. You can even do Mun and Minmus with only 1.25m parts, though the rockets get pretty silly looking. Sounds like you have the fuel line unlocked, so google "KSP asparagus staging". Building that way buys you considerable delta-v.

Probably this mod: http://www.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/224287-kronal-vessel-viewer-kvv-exploded-ship-view

It's a bug in 1.0.2. There's a community bugfix plugin here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/97285-KSP-v1-0-2-Stock-Bug-Fix-Modules-%28Release-v1-0-2c-2-9-May-15%29-now-includes-Stock-Plus Even after the fix, I find the brakes don't hold well until after the wheel motors have started. In other words, landing with the brakes on doesn't work, but once I command the rover to move, then the brakes will have a proper grip. Weird, but as long as there's a circumvention I'll cope.

LOL, easy. Yeah, it is now. Not my first dozen times, it wasn't! I had enough trouble I ended up having MechJeb do the landing over and over until I learned how by watching.

Not having enough fuel to make it back is as common as pimples on a teenager. I've been playing two years and my first Kerbal to Duna's surface in my 1.0.2 career game ended up not able to come home. Valentina had enough to get into a polar orbit, though, so it wasn't a big deal as these things go. She spend a couple of years doing EVAs and measuring temperatures over all the biomes. It wasn't long till I had docking ports and the grabber available for in-space refueling, and then I always send fuel depots to Duna and Eve, and later to Jool. Normally paid for by "build an orbital station" contracts. BTW, when you start getting those contracts, you don't have to put crew in them. "Room for 5 Kerbals" just means room, not warm green bodies. Comes in handy! edit: It's also handy to send those planets a tow truck. Just a lightweight one-man craft (can be a chair instead of a pod), with a grabber and lots of delta-v. That's how I retrieve ships like Val's, with empty tanks. You can transfer fuel or monopropellant through the grabber, or just tow the ship back to your fuel depot.

Because later on you'll get tourism contracts where one tourist wants to orbit both Duna and Eve. Or land on Dres and Laythe. One fool wanted me to land him on Eve and return. For under 400k. I don't think so. But yeah, I'd do the one you have now in a single pass, too.

Those test contracts can be really useful if properly misused. The parts are usually in tiers you haven't unlocked yet, and once you accept the contract you can USE those parts as often as you want and for anything you want, until the contract completes or expires.

Sorry to be the one to break this to you, but "people" want lots of different, often conflicting, things. I personally find flying rockets by-hand silly and boring. IMO, it turns a cool sim into an arcade game, which isn't a bad thing but is something I'm not into. The game I play is about managing a space program's needs vs. resources. Luckily, KSP's flexible enough to meet both our needs. KSP players come in several different types, and you're only speaking for the group you happen to agree with. Please don't assume "people" all agree with you...about anything...ever. They don't. Hey, Squad! Thanks for limits on electricity, fuel, intake air, and now heat, ore, and wind shear. That kinda stuff is the reason I'm still playing after two years. I learned how to make a rocket go anywhere I wanted hundreds of launches ago, but I'm still here. Incidentally, getting rid of all those limits is as simple as editing some .cfg files. So if you don't like the complexity, fix it then share your changes as a mod for others who feel the same way.

All these people complaining about your design decisions made me want to complain about what's important: THAT WAS SEVEN PARAGRAPHS! Thanks for the tutorial. Was just trying my first ISRU test and needed it.

Thanks blizzy78, sarbian!

MechJeb's exactly like ANY other tool: It can be used, and can be abused, and the rule for which is which is subjective. For me, proper use is for MJ to do all the routine stuff I've done a thousand times and am bored with. After two years and over a thousand hours, believe me I can get into orbit (In fact, the MJ Ascent autopilot isn't working well for me in 1.0.2, so I've been doing all launches by hand). Same for executing a maneuver node. Where's the hard part in that? You point at the node and burn the curved line down. So why do it by hand? OTOH I think rendezvous and docking is fun, so never let MJ do those. My turn, machine! It's also a wonderful training tool for newbies. When I started out, MJ's the one who taught me how to do airless landings. But 95% of MJ to me is information! Even after two years of this argument, I'm utterly unable to understand people who play KSP without knowing their craft's delta-v and TWR. What's the point? To me, it's like sitting at a slot machine pulling a lever to get random results. And I really hate the way KSP presents the little info they give us. I want a panel with my orbit info all in one place; not to keep switching between screens and hovering over things. But if you're having trouble getting into a circular orbit manually, and use MJ to send a huge, unstable rocket to Jool, that's "cheaty". Though nobody should care unless you then brag about your Jool mission. THAT's where it turns into cheating, and frankly I haven't seen much of it here. Most folk mention up-front if they used MJ. The quicksave/quickload/revert features in stock can be used or abused in similar ways, so I don't see why people keep picking on poor MJ. Heck, real aircraft autopilots are even worse. Real pilots kill themselves every year thinking their autopilot's smarter than it actually is. Even a silver hammer can be abused. Ask The Beatles.

I only used the inflatables from this pack, but use them quite a bit. Under 1.0.2, I'm finding buoyancy is there but flaky (works great on Kerbin, barely seems to work on Laythe), and auto-deploy is busted. If anyone knows of .cfg fixes, or an alternate buoyancy dll that's working better, please let me know. If there aren't any other choices, how about a link to the dll source? I haven't messed with compiling KSP plugins, but 30 years of programming oughta be good for something now that I'm retired, right?

Blizzy, I've started using a separate toolbar for MechJeb windows. Is there a way to override the "?" icon I get for my custom-defined MJ windows? Tried to search both here and in MJ threads, but without results. Thanks!