DerekL1963

Why would they start with the one thing absolutely guaranteed to lose them money by the dump truck load?

Um, no a small change wouldn't be significant - that's why I called it a small change, not a significant one. While the centrifuge would be as light as possible - that's not the same thing as being featherweight. (A battleship is as light as possible too - otherwise it would sink of it's own weight.) It still has to support tons of equipment at 1G. And the expense of firing things into space? Have you actually seen the movie? They have regular passenger service [e]with stewardesses[/e] to the moon. That's not happening if the costs of firing things is expensive.

If you're going to use MechJeb for docking... try the No RCS Method: . I usually don't need the docking autopilot at all.Otherwise, yeah, what they said about starting small. Even with MJ, you need to understand the basics to use it to maximum advantage.

In other words, those companies are pretty much never going to the moon. If nobody flies, then the technology never gets developed.

From the people moving around, it would shift around a lot... it just wouldn't shift very far. The mass of the crew is *FAR* exceeded by the mass of the centrifuge's structure and the equipment mounted to it.

Nice, but you really need to pay more attention to pacing and lighting.

Total mass satcharna.

Coolness... will have to look into this. Thanks!

With magnetic or gas bearings, there'll be damm little friction - and the mass of Discovery is very large compared to the mass of the centrifuge.

You don't have a budget or a schedule in KSP. Nor does your equipment have a shelf life.

They're developing any accessories. They're paying a million Euros to Reaction (and several other companies) for a bureaucratic report. jwenting probably has it right, it's just a bit of pork to help pad the ESA's spending in the UK for FY13. (The various countries that make up the ESA contribute money and 'in-kind' to the ESA, and get rather testy if they don't get their "fair share" back.)

OK, it might be the dark pictures or the first cup of coffee... but I can't see how the assembly method works.

The simple fact is this - the difference (statistically) between Soyuz and any other booster is only a couple tenths of a percent. It fails just as regularly as any other booster. It's failed five times since 2000, and it's only a matter of luck and a reflection of how few manned flights it carries that none of those failures have been on manned flights.

For certain handwaving values of "flying, though not yet orbital" - it never got over a few hundred feet or a hundred miles an hour or so. (Not that it could go orbital in the first place - that would have been the DC-Y.) Which *sounds* bad, until you realize the 'one final component' was a *MAJOR* component - the fuel tank. Which showed no signs of being complete anytime soon. (In fact, it took five more years before a sample tank of the same general design and material was successfully tested.) So long as disregard the fact that it was flying under helicopter rotors, not over rocket motors and couldn't get higher than a few hundred feet... And that they'd already cancelled the (very problematic) original engine in favor of a lower performance engine (that was itself still in development.) And ignore the fact that they weren't funded by NASA in the first place. (They did however go bankrupt.) Success was a lot closer? Only in the sense that that "Mars (flight testing) is closer than Alpha Centauri (operational flights)", otherwise not so much. But Mars, in all three cases, was still a very long ways off.

Do you have your MJ box mounted at an angle? Did you click on the docking port on the active craft and select "control from here" and select the proper docking port on the passive target?

Mechjeb no RCS docking: Note, I have not tried this in .21 after the SAS changes as my space program hasn't gotten back to that point.

Just what I need for the Duna lander I'm building...

Actually, no. It was a complete new build that really had nothing in common with the LEM other than being vaguely octagonal. NASA did originally propose modifying a LEM descent stage into a telescope mount, and the flying the whole LEM + and Apollo CSM as a stand alone mission. Somewhere along the way, the guys working Skylab picked up on the idea and incorporated it into Skylab... but it was eventually dropped in favor of a new design as the basic design of the LEM limited access to the telescopes. One of the more clever bits of Sjylab's design is that those 'scopes were mounted on a cylinder inside the octagonal main frame - so instead of having to spacewalk all over the place to retrieve/exchange film, they just built one hatch in the side of the main structure and rotated the inner mount to bring the base of each 'scope to the astronaut in turn.

By defining one direction as North and entering that data into your GNC.

It's worth pointing out that radar/radio control is *exactly* the approach the US took for early ICBM's and to update the guidance and navigation systems of the early sea launched cruise missiles. The decision, in the case of the Atlas, to rely entirely on inertial systems was not taken lightly and without some trepidation. Inertial guidance, despite not suffering from the doldrums that other missile technologies did post war, still took a great deal of work to bring to an acceptable level of precision and reliability. If you haven't read Mackenzie's "Inventing Accuracy", it's a pretty decent history of the development of guidance and navigation systems from the end of WWII to the mid 80's.

No, it's not silly. An orbital booster isn't just a tweaked up V2. It's virtually an entirely different beast - you need engines of much higher performance, you need a vehicle with a much higher T/W ratio, you need staging... and when it comes to guidance and control, the difference isn't just of degree it's of *kind*. If you don't have the spare industrial capacity, you can't create a space program. Industrial capacity and economics matter. If you're unaware of the vast quantity of precision built equipment turned out by the US in WWII... Well, that's strike three. I've attempted, repeatedly, to place this discussion on a rational footing and to work forward from the facts... but as you refuse to face them there is little further point in continuing the attempt with you. Good day.

No, it really doesn't involve fewer "what if's" - that's point I've been trying to make. It involves a metric buttload of additional what-if's that you steadfastly refuse to recognize the existence of. Let's put this in perspective; Germany had a skateboard. The US had all the parts of a skateboard or knew how to make them or could learn how to make them in reasonably short order, but hadn't realized it yet. It sounds like Germany has a commanding lead - until you realize a skateboard is insufficient to the task. You need a turbocharged six cylinder four door sedan. Germany had no ability to build such a vehicle due to manpower, manufacturing, and materiel shortages. (For that matter, producing reliable skateboards in quantity proved problematical.) The US not only had no such shortages, they had an excess of all three. (And access to the best brains of the UK, and most of what had once the best brains of Germany.) If building such a vehicle becomes a national priority, the US has a system in place to ensure it gets the resources it needs. Germany on the other hand, has a series of interlocking fiefdoms perpetually at war with each other over resources and the Fuhrer's favor - even things that should have had priorities (like the Elektroboots) often suffered because their patrons lacked political juice (and because Germany's leadership was often reluctant to disturb existing production lines because as things were they were barely producing enough). Before you challenge me to produce a scenario, you've got to come up with something better than "[handwave]but Germany had a crude rocket and a crude guidance system and thus is assured to be first[/handwave]!". You've got to address the facts of the situation.

Well, we've got you most of the way to the light... lets bring you the rest of the way. No, the question is "who would have been first" - and the resounding answer is "if anyone, it won't be Germany". Why? Because Germany didn't have the resources and had no prospect of getting them. If you need a Lamborghini, that you have a crap riceburner and everyone else has motor scooters is meaningless if can't afford the Lamborghini. The answer to the question of "who would have been first?" is probably the same as "which nation could have lost it's entire carrier fleet twice over in the first year of the war and replaced them within two years, developed not one but *three* long range heavy bombers in parallel and fielded them all in vast quantities, fielded multiple generations of ever more advanced fighters, and, by the way, ran a successful nuclear weapons program on the scraps of the rest of their war effort (which also included shipping significant quantities of arms to other nations while retaining enough to fight a two front war themselves)?" (And that's just the high points.) This analysis concentrates on the US v. Japan, but it gives a rough idea: http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm Don't base your estimations of what the US might have done had it determined that satellites were vital to the war on the 'starvation years' that US rocketry endured from the end of WWII to the early/mid 50's. Once we decided to go that route, we went from practically nothing to birds on orbit in about five years.

Terminology matters. And now, your rules are inconsistent because in one place you specify purely ballistic flight must be used and in another you allow aerodynamic flight.

Then it's a glider, not a ballistic projectile in free fall.