phoenix_ca

Depending on the course structure, it might be useful to only introduce DRE later. Get them to understand how a rocket works first, return their little Kerbals to home, so they have a sense of accomplishment, then add to the challenge. Add too much and you end-up with irreducible complexity, and that's never ever good for teaching, be it 12-year-olds, 21-year-olds, or 40-year-olds.

You need to "buy" those items from the science centre again. Download this and then it should only be a one-click solution.

I know, but speaking from experience, it's much, much easier to teach people a complex concept in simple terms when you understand that concept thoroughly. I have to admit I don't understand aerodynamics thoroughly at all, so, more likely to make gross errors. Ideally there shouldn't be a wiki. Ideally, we'd have tooltips when we mouse-over those stability derivatives that explain them simply and clearly as well as giving ideas for how to fix things when they go wrong. Good teachers are hard to come by. They need to so completely understand what they are talking about so as to easily explain the same concept in a myriad of ways.

Eugh. Now that I know the wiki exists, maybe I'll look at the wiki and see if I can add information about stability derivatives. But I'm not an aerospace engineer, and rather ill-suited to doing that.

There's so much light pollution here, I doubt I'd see anything.

I'm trying to condense very complicated problems down to a sentence; something's going to be lost. I could write thousands of words on why I suppose that to be true but honestly, I have other things to do with my time. My argument for that point of view is mostly based on the historical behaviour of ancient civilizations when they had abundant resources, and when they did not. The most peaceful ones had things like easy farming (flood plains), calm climates, and generally stable access to resources. The Indus Valley Civilization may be a good example.

Yes actually, the antimatter may need to be next to the reactor to work. I haven't actually played with AIRs, but the antimatter resource flow IIRC isn't set to ALL_VESSEL. (You could just do an MM config on it and change that.) Edit: Yes, it's set to STACK_PRIORITY_SEARCH, which is the same used for liquid fuel. So...yes, it would seem it needs to be attached, and more to the point, has to be in the stack. STAGE_PRIORITY_FLOW might make more sense (so it behaves like monopropellant), though ALL_VESSEL would be easiest. Fusion reactors have a few weird glitches in behaviour that can cause them to shut-down. Someone else might be able to go into more detail (I think WaveFunction and Fractal have a good grasp of what's going on). If you're having problems, you can always just ADD MOAR BATTERIES. And yes. More charged particles, actually useful for direct conversion. Stick another generator on it to suck-up the remaining thermal if you want, but note that that'll cause a display error and it'll look like you should be getting twice the amount of power the reactor can provide. It's not actually providing that much, but it does render the MJ GUI somewhat useless.

Best way? I had some ideas but after reading about Focus Fusion, if it works...that'd be the best way. It could indeed solve a whole bunch of problems with energy production in one fell swoop. The biggest impact of such an energy source wouldn't be on our lives either, it'd be on the lives of the people who don't have access to electricity, or can't afford electricity. Elevating the quality of life of people generally improves any situation greatly; if you're living comfortably and not threatened, there's not much reason to contemplate war or even small-scale conflict. Hell, it could even significantly shift how much sway extremist Islam has with people, if those people were enjoying electricity provided by a Western-made fusion reactor. A lot of the problems in the world are tied to energy production; we need it to keep so many of us alive, but the cost in conflict and drain on the economy is huge. If it works. I hope it does, but it's still an "if" at this point. If they can prove that it can provide a net output of energy, then yes, the step to converting that to usable electricity is trivial. To those talking about hydrogen as a fuel source for transportation, and brining up the storage issue, particularly whomever said it'd never happen, all we need to do is solve the storage issue. And that's already being done. I recall a paper on using feather down, burning it (in a high-temperature closed container), and using the resulting mass to efficiently store hydrogen at room temperature. It was actually quite impressive. It's not like we have any shortage of feathers. Fast food chains could even say "Eat fried chicken, support fuel cell cars" or something.

And free snacks will be dispensed to everyone that's bought the game, right?

Perpetual motion machines cannot exist. Every single physical process we know about has some inefficiency in it, be it friction, or the small amount of heat generated by a loss of kinetic energy when a bouncy ball compresses, or aerodynamic drag, or heat generation from metal fatigue, or...okay that's enough. Point made. If you could get away with some amazing breaking-the-laws-of-physics-as-we-know-them thing then sure, maybe. Probably not. Gravity is the result of matter distorting space-time. Pretty much all matter does it to some degree just by existing. There are some theories that postulate that gravity may be mediated by a particle (just as light is mediated by photons), but so far there is no experimental evidence for this view.

When it comes to tritium, currently, it costs $30,000 USD per gram. It's just absurdly rare and difficult to get. A lot of the research with nuclear fusion now is about finding a way to make a reactor that would breed its own tritium supply. That'd simplify the logistical nightmare of feeding a reactor with tritium significantly. Commercially I'd say the other problem is that nuclear fission will be a very strong competitor for many decades to come. Current generation fission reactors are very safe, reliable, and also have power outputs in the 1,000MW range per reactor. The Advanced Candu Reactor (ACR-1000) does, and that can be fueled with natural uranium, no enrichment required. Sure it needs heavy water to operate, but the cost of acquiring that much heavy water pales in comparison to the cost of acquiring enough pure deuterium to power a fusion reactor. And you get to keep the heavy-water with a CANDU.

Clearly, this is cheating. And you should feel bad for using such OP engines to cheat with. Or something. Perfectly reasoned argument is perfectly reasoned!

No: @PART[Soyuz?Docking?mechanism]:HAS[!MODULE[ModuleConnectedLivingSpace]] { MODULE { name = ModuleConnectedLivingSpace passable = true } } Fixed.

Yes but...have you seen the table of stability derivatives FAR creates?

I hope you're using FAR. Wait, no. No I don't. That'd be cruel to subject kids to that level of math without adequate preparation. O.O

Because it would work from a design perspective.

Stable enough to use if you're reaching the limits of ATM. I certainly did. It'll crash, so be sure to keep saving. As long as you don't do anything to stress it too much (like flipping through all of the pages in VAB, then jumping scene to a huge ship, and jumping back to the space centre, jumping to a new ship, all in quick succession), it generally behaves.

Sure, and it'd be great if getting the telescope out that far meant "ZOMG SO MUCH SCIENCE", but I don't think that is mutually exclusive with adding a curve so that you can try a Spitzer-type mission with some success.

The obvious choice would be to reduce the distance from the Sun required. The real-life mission the idea is based on (the Spitzer Telescope) is in an orbit just trailing behind the Earth. What I would suggest from a gameplay perspective is to scale science rate with altitude from the sun; the farther out you get, the more science per day. That way we'd have a much more interesting and meaningful choice in where we put the telescopes. Put them super-high (like near Jool) and they'll pump-out science, but resupply would be much more difficult. Put them closer to Kerbin and supply would be easier but science output much lower. As it is it's just extraneous code that has no practical purpose in-game.

There are two different options for them. You either use a mathematical formula to determine the correct time (which will be off because it doesn't take into account inclination), or a model of the system. The model is more accurate, and goes up to 100 years starting from Day 1. Honestly I would only use them as a rough estimate anyway. Alexmoon's Launch Window Planner is far superior for accurate planning.

It's definitely weird. Kinda like...you need warp drive, to do the mission, but doing the mission has no point if you've already got the warp drive (highest tech level).

Harv already went into detail about why they are concentrating on career mode right now. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/entries/303-A-rant-about-development-asymptotes And he's right. Before this slog through career started, there was no career mode. At all. It was completely unimplemented.

Yes, though it's my experience that when you switch back to the **** Smart A.S.S. will start again and reorient the ship. (It's one of the reasons that SAS really should be as strong as it is. IRL reaction wheels can take a loooooong time to make small adjustments to attitude, and that's perfectly fine. But with KSP we get things put on rails and those adjustments that could've been made with a tiny amount of torque over a long period have to be done in a fraction of the time.)

...What makes the transfer alarms unusable? And the Kerbal days setting works just fine. o.O

For those who still need to learn how to get things done, there will always be sandbox.