NGTOne

I think this would be a very useful feature to have as well - if you find the tool, please share it here. I'm very fond of building very large things, which kind of works against me sometimes.

Apollo proved that it COULD be done. Now the next step is to extrapolate on what they did, but bigger and more advanced, and iterate until we have an industrial system in space.

This right here. Current launch costs (on the order of tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram) are too damn high for national governments to justify spending money on space programs (though if the US government would spend more than 0.5% of its annual budget on NASA [i'm thinking the Department of Defense could use some cuts], we'd probably be a lot further than we are now). That's actually kind of why I'm anxious to see the Skylon project come to fruition, because having a reusable, low-turnaround-time SSTO would revolutionize space travel across the board. And Skylon is being designed, from the ground up, to be low-turnaround - for instance, it follows a much shallower re-entry path than the Shuttle, so it experiences less compressive heating, which means it can use simpler (and more robust, and lighter) thermal protection on the underside, for significant savings in pre-launch turnaround time and maintenance costs. But I digress. The current problem is that any solution for decreasing launch costs, given our current technology level, would require a large number of launches to bring to fruition. Consider, for instance, the space elevator: assuming we had sufficient manufacturing capacity for carbon nanotubes, we would still have to send up enough cable to reach geosynchronous orbit, AND either send up or bring from somewhere else a sufficiently massive object to act as a tether (for instance, an asteroid). Either way, we're talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of groundside launches before the elevator is operational. There are a few proposed options that wouldn't require any space launches to build, but would be just (exorbitantly) expensive - for instance, consider the proposal for a mass driver. It accelerates you almost all the way to orbital velocity, and then you give yourself a little bump with rockets at your apoapsis to circularize. Problem is, to build a sufficiently large and powerful mass driver to send a spacecraft of any appreciable mass to LEO would cost on the order of tens or even hundreds of billions - double that if you want it to be safe for passengers (limited acceleration). I'm not saying this stuff is impossible, but unless the governments (or corporations) of Earth get their priorities straight (why the hell would any country need enough nuclear weapons to annihalate the world 100 times over?), it's not happening anytime soon.

Likes: The possibilities. Freakin' limitless, man. To quote one of my favourite lines from Tron: Legacy, I get to "knock on the sky, and listen to the sound" Dislikes: The render distance/physics-on-rails limit. 2.5 kilometers? Come ON, how am I supposed to build anything of decent size with that limit? Also, to a minor extent, the physics lag issue, but that's not really a big deal.

I've actually got really high hopes for the Skylon project - they're currently the only ones, as far as I'm aware, with a halfway feasible plan for a reusable SSTO. And they completed a technology demo not long back for the engine precooler - the most important single piece of new technology the project requires. The problem is, they're relying on government funding, which basically doesn't exist for new-technology projects. The estimated cost of the project is a couple of billion before they have a flyable unit, but they don't even have a tenth of that. Since this is a European project, I wonder if Airbus would be willing to back it...

You could probably aerobrake (corona-brake?) in Kerbol's "atmosphere", though you'd likely need to use MechJeb to figure out where your periapsis would be after the maneuver. And you might need to make more than one pass.

432. We don't ask "How much?", but "When?"

What it works out to is simple: security. Whether the "Internet of things" happens or not is almost irrelevant - that's something that will be driven by market forces, one way or the other. But the biggest problem, one way or the other, will ALWAYS be security. There is no 100% secure system. Period. NORAD isn't 100% secure. Sure, you need to bypass a lot of physical security to get to it (it's not connected to the wider Internet), but a skilled enough bulls*****r could pull it off (he'd have to be VERY skilled, though). That's your vulnerability, and it always will be - the people using the system. Doesn't matter how many software safeguards you put in place, an idiot user responding to an e-mail asking for their password will bypass all of that in an instant. And I somehow doubt your fridge will require a password. And, if it's as smart as you say, and can order new food on its own, it has to store your financial data somewhere inside itself. Chilling stuff, huh? If you want me, you can find me on the other side of the Tor network.

Is there any way to get the "Steering Error" readout from the old Smart A.S.S. back in MJ2? That was actually really handy, especially when you needed fine control (like when docking).

Is there any way to make this work with in-flight ships/stations? It would make docking large objects a lot easier (no floating-point glitch to teleport your target away from you).

Most of the original proposals from the '70s used the habitats as orbital construction facilities for power satellites and large interplanetary spacecraft, with infrastructure to support that construction. Think, in effect, of postwar Detroit in space - a large city, built around its manufacturing sector.

I never actually asked "why", though - I asked "How can these designs be made better?"

Man, I was looking for a technical discussion of space habitat designs, not the sustainability of life on Earth...

Looking towards the core of my under-construction Stanford torus. Current diameter is about 315 meters, and it weighs in at just over 11 thousand tons. Nowhere near finished yet. The same station, with an eclipse in the background. More pictures here.

Someone, at some point, discovered a trick - you can use a clipping bug to use landing legs like rotation servos, and then use docking ports to lock the rotated parts into place. The landing legs clip through your structural panel, and take it with them when they go back.

Lots of rockets. My payload to LKO was something like 2800 tons. The balloons were only for landing - it was a conventional rocket launch. I didn't want to try a balloon-assisted launch, because it a) would throw off my ascent profile, and might have ended up tearing the whole thing apart (the whole package weighed around 16 thousand tons at liftoff, if memory serves), because it was decided to redistribute force upwards, not down. When you're building something this ridiculously big in KSP, real structural engineering principles apply - strut spam doesn't get you very far, because you end up connecting pieces that don't need it, and not connecting pieces that do, and by the time you're done, your vehicle is 20 thousand parts, 19 thousand of which are struts - rather counterproductive, in my personal opinion. [shamelesspromotion]There's a whole thread for it here, with lots of pictures[/shamelesspromotion]

I've heard that standalone PhysX cards can improve physics lag - the guy said he didn't start seeing part count-related lag until he hit about 1500 parts. I haven't had any independent verification of this, though - does anyone else have a standalone PhysX card to test this with?

Stanford Torus "Is an idea a true copy of the real thing that it represents? Sensation is not a direct interaction between bodily objects and our sense, but is a physiological process involving representation (for example, an image on the retina). Locke thought that a "secondary quality" such as a sensation of green could in no way resemble the arrangement of particles in matter that go to produce this sensation, although he thought that "primary qualities" such as shape, size, number, were really in objects."

Construction: OrbitalCon for orbital construction, Extraplanetary Launchpads for ground construction. Both available on the Spaceport, I believe. Happy exploring!

My skill level at building and launching insanely large (and heavy) contraptions = ludicrously high (click my signature for proof). My skill level at docking = improving. My skill level at building aircraft = BOOM.

About 40 years ago, NASA was on a post-Apollo high, and was gathering ideas for what the future of space habitation would look like. The answer was less "submarine" and more "spinning cities in space". A few different designs were proposed, the chief ones being: The Stanford Torus: A large, doughnut-shaped station about 1.6 km across, that would rotate at 1 RPM to produce 1G at the edges of the ring. Estimated populations ranged from anywhere between 10 thousand and 100 thousand (based on design housing density - densities ranged from those of an urban suburb to those of a city core). It would also have agricultural and manufacturing sectors, using materials imported from the Moon. In the most optimistic scenarios, it was capable of self-replicating. The Bernal Sphere: A spherical station, about 16 km in diameter. It would also rotate to produce 1G along the equator of the sphere, with less as one got closer to the poles. Estimated population was anywhere between 20 and 30 thousand (with the entire population living near the equator, to benefit from the higher gravity there). A smaller version, about 500 meters in diameter, would house 10 thousand people, and rotate at 1.9 RPM to produce gravity. It would also possess agricultural and manufacturing facilities. The O'Neill Cylinder: A long, tubular station, optimized towards creating weather on the inside. The proposed design actually had two of them connected, rotating in opposite directions to produce gravity on their inner surfaces. Each one would be about 5 miles in diameter by 20 miles long (a sufficient volume of air to create [limited] weather effects). The "connectors" between the two cylinders would contain agricultural and industrial systems. So, the question I put to the KSP community is this: are these designs efficient (for a given goal of permanently, comfortably housing a large civilian population in orbit, as opposed to on the surface of a body)? If not, what improvements could be made? Are there better designs?

Funny enough, Star Trek. Back in elementary school, I was introduced to Trek by a classmate through one of the tie-in RTS games (Star Trek: Armada, for those who've played it). One thing led to another, and an obsession with space travel was born. Died down somewhat in high school, but returned full-force when I discovered KSP about halfway through the first year of my CompSci major.

Personally, I subscribe to a philosophy of "Go big or go home" - my "rovers" are more along the lines of rolling bases. I've found the track mod to be invaluable for this, as the tracks are far more resilient than wheels, and can take a lot more weight. As an example: This vehicle clocks in at about 650 tons. Landed on Eve without a hitch using airship parts (parachutes didn't work well because they would cut too early, when 90% of the vehicle's mass wasn't on the ground yet, due to its large size and the terrain not being ideally flat). I haven't tried sending it to other bodies yet, but its sheer mass would, I think, compensate for the grip issue. It actually has a problem on high-grav worlds, because the track pods have SO MUCH grip that trying to move it across anything other than flat ground (or, God forbid, turn it) has a tendency to tear it apart due to slight differences in grip between the pods (and, because of the vehicle's size and mass, the forces involved are too large to compensate for, even with super-struts from mods). I really should send one of these to Gilly at some point, to try it there. The differential grip problem was acute enough that trying to roll that behemoth off the back of the runway would occasionally tear it apart. Its successor design (never completed, clocked in over 1000 tons last time I worked on it) tended to fare better.

IIRC means "If I Recall Correctly". And I agree completely, this should be a feature. Maybe even hold the crew state of the ship that's currently in the editor in memory.

Depends on what mods you've got installed... and how creative you are with SRBs. And I'm pretty sure how well a rocket flies depends entirely on how much you believe it will... so, in other words, just like Orks But they're not very warlike, so I dunno...