phoenix_ca

I think you understood my point whilst assuming that I was making a different one. Or something... That's exactly what I meant. Hubris, incompetence, greed, and sheer stupidity. Humans a prone to it, and nuclear power can be such a pain-in-the-ass when it comes to making mistakes, that it's wise to plan against human idiocy. A lot more than we do for say, airplanes. As for space agencies being somehow immune to bad design, error, and incompetence, (as the person I quoted asserted) that's equally absurd. NASA whelped a probe once by human-error and bad design, by completely mucking-up metric-to-imperial conversions. And Hubble was definitely a case of bad design and error (I'm not bashing the telescope here; the thing is fantastic), which just goes to show mistakes happen, even at the best of times when you're extra vigilant. Add a bit of corporate greed and complacency to the mix, and you have a recipe for things to go very wrong. My point is, that most of the time, we can afford for something to go wrong some of the time. Civil aviation is a wonderfully safe enterprise, where things go right almost all the time, and when they go wrong...okay, some people die, but on the whole not that many when you consider how many people get moved-about in the same time frame. When nuclear power plants go wrong, they can go very, very, very wrong in the worst cases (analogous in this case to the plane crashing into a mountain, say; rare, but happens). We've learned from our mistakes, sure, but we're still human. That means we need to be hyper-vigilant, and more so when these toys are in the hands of people with profit motives that want to squeeze their margins for all they're worth.

If/when. My money for the short-term is still on travelling-wave reactors, because of their ability to use good ol' common U-238. The major benefits there is that we already have all the fuel infrastructure set-up, and it has the same benefits as a thorium reactor would in terms of compactness. No need to go digging for thorium just yet, because we already have piles and piles of "waste" U-238 just sitting around that we could use as fuel. In any event, I'm not bashing the idea of thorium reactors, just saying that I wouldn't bet on it short-term. Long term, sure. The point is we desperately need carbon-neutral energy that actually provides for our current consumption. Wind and solar just can't cut it; they're nice supplements, sure, but there are lots of places that couldn't use them. (Vancouver, solar? Not in winter. And Singapore is completely screwed for wind power...actually, they're kinda in a bind for everything.)

I figured someone would come along and try to pick-apart what I said. That's why I prefaced everything with conditional phrases ("more-or-less" and "I have to wonder"). Joke's on you, silly. As for the terminology mix-up, yes, I'm referring to flywheels, yes, it'd be heavy (that's rather the point, but as long as you can get out the door...). That, and I haven't slept in two days, so forgive me for referring to a KSP term on a KSP forum when I'm talking about reaction wheels.

Eh, neh...well, it's darn cool. The only thing that bugs me about the whole escapade is who was doing the funding, but it's not like a drink franchise has much interest in it than the advertising on something cool, and they seem to be keeping their claws off the science as a result. Hell, I'm just glad the human race has these types in it still. Taking some risks like this push us forward, and he proved that it's possible for a human to (more-or-less) re-enter from orbit. A squishy human. I have to wonder if it's at all possible to slap a small SAS unit onto the suit so that there'd be some automatic control of angular momentum in stratosphere so there's less of a chance of turning the squishy meatbag into red pasty sauce.

I think I noted this before, but if you upload it as an attachment, the forums will resize it. You need to upload it elsewhere.

Is it just me, of has there been a lot of "remember this game concept and design decades ago that was just fracking amazing? Let's update it and make a new version!" going around in the gaming industry? XCOM, Carrier Command, Pioneer, Nexus: TGA, Wasteland 2... It's like a lot of devs got fed up with big publishers being atrociously predictable and boring with their games so went out and made their own... O.o

Quite right. I'd love to see a sequel. That game Nexus TJI was great at making space, well, freaking space-like. If only the camera didn't have a top and bottom point it'd be more awesome. Hm. I'll try to find some money for it, but I went on a stupid spree with XCOM, Carrier Command, and Dishonored so...yeah. Dammit, I need to eat too, apparently. (Silly human needs getting in the way of things.)

Just don't call it "nuclear" energy. People will be totally down for it then. Seriously though. We need this stuff. The fact that these concepts exist already makes our non-use of them inexcusable.

I think the Japanease would beg to differ with your assessment.

Moral of the story. Keep air outtake and intakes clean; surface temperatures mean nothing. To illustrate that point, I'd suggest installing a temp monitoring program and watch the temperatures while your computer runs. Even idling, my CPU cores tend to run at 60 degrees C. These things could easily fry an egg (albeit slowly) without their heat sinks.

Nah. My bet is still on nuclear fission as a viable power supply. Wind and solar are nice, but we don't have the batteries for it. (All of the world's rechargeable batteries could provide a mere ten minutes of power to the world at current consumption. Unless we have a huge breakthrough in energy storage, It's unreasonable to expect solar or wind to provide for the world.) And we aren't running out of fuel. That's just silly. We are having slight issues supplying enriched uranium to LWRs, but HWRs can use practically natural uranium. And the travelling wave reactor (look up TerraPower) could use all the nuclear waste we have in storage as fuel, providing power at world consumption rates for a millennia. (Seriously, that's what the numbers come out to. A thousand years of clean energy to the world, without the risks of nuclear proliferation and weaponisation, all using the waste from our current reactors. Quite frankly, screw anti-nuclear NIMBY types. I WANT this thing in my back yard. Litterally, if possible.)

Yup, I've had the same issue. It's...disgruntling. Worse, I've been able to get a rocket that fell apart in flight because of this odd behaviour into orbit in a successive launch. One might try a true bucketload of RCS thrusters. Perhaps the Kosmos versions because they are hilariously overpowered.

I dual boot OSX/Win7 on an iMac (Win7 for games, OSX for everything else), with many Linux distros bouncing around in virtual machines on the OSX side using Parallels. Actually every computer I have has some Linux distro or another on it, either in a VM or dual-boot. My only major gripe with Windows is and always has been the command line. It's just...well it's atrocious compared to bash, and/or <pick your Linux shell>. I can't use it. O.o

At that point, it sounds like less of a question of "can it still fly" and more "did we program the flight computer well enough to pull itself out of this mess?"

Ships flying apart at high speed is the "Kraken" and should be fixed in 0.17. As for the speed of light, I highly doubt that's modelled at all. Light effects are handled by the engine, and they are anything but something that resembles light rays. (That would require ray-drawing graphics. However while hyper-realistic and relatively fast compared to current raster-based graphics, require custom build GPU architecture, which at least partially explains why it hasn been widely adopted.) As for accurate drag, I'm not sure but I don't think that part of the engine is complete. The current system is quite basic. That said, maybe it can be expanded later to base behaviour at least partially on an object's mesh. Anything that does that though will be a loose approximation at best. Accurate fluid simulations require immense amounts of computing. Anything that resembles relativity will probably be kludge-like in nature. As a computer simulation, the space that KSP takes place in is Euclidian, though things are almost certainly complicated beyond my paltry explaination here by KSP's scenes.

I made a set of config files that update the Kosmos pack panels to produce energy and this be functional. (Still working on-and-off on figuring out heat management with PowerTech.) the developers of Kosmos have them, but if/when the get incorporated into the mod is anyone's guess. The values for power generation are roughly balanced with the values for the MMI panels.

Space doesn't actually do all that great a job at cooling things. It takes other atoms to carry away thermal energy, and there just aren't all that many atoms in space. It's full of nothing. As a roughly analogous example/explanation, the ISS uses photovoltaic radiators to a manage heat. They can be thought of as, roughly, photovoltaic solar cells, but in reverse. (Radiating photons isn't an issue in space. Radiating thermal energy is.)

If you convert Newtons into its more basic units you may have an easier time seeing the relationship between thrust and the other two values.

Indeed. The huge downside there being that any location dependant on the polar satellites will need quite sofisticated tracking equipment to keep its dish aimed at the overhead satellite. (Same issue with Molniya orbits of course.)

Uh...impossible to set-up, more like. Have you looked at a methane atom? Bonding is in three-dimensions, not two. The only possible way to maintain such a set-up would be to use statites, and we don't have those. They're more-or-less theoretical. That's part of the reason why we have and use Molniya orbits.

That's a really messy question. It all depends how many it loses and at what altitude it loses them. One lost while it's high up there is peanuts to compensate for, as it's TWR is already high, and losing one isn't going to ruin that, but the lower in altitude you lose it, the worse off you are. It may well be impossible for it to reach orbit if say, by some fluke, it loses an engine or two when it's a mere 100 meters up.

Look, I don't mean to be snarky, but...really...

Quite babbling! We need this nuclear-powered-robot-with-freaking-laser! (Just kidding. Take as much time as you want............within reason. I'll send you cookies! (S&H not included; may not be real-life cookies; may contain nuts or Kerbals))

The amount of delta-v spent in total would still be roughly the same. Actually, more because you'd have refueled and thus be carrying more fuel when you escape orbit.

Well, all the engines draw fuel from the same source(s). Diverting more fuel to burn the other engines longer and compensate for an engine-out isn't too hard. Kinda like airplanes, where all the fuel to keep your engines going is still in the wings and fuselage (well...you hope it's still there). One engine goes out, so there's less thrust, but more fuel to burn. I mean...you're launching a giant fuel can at speeds measured in m/s. The whole thing is a controlled explosion.