DerekL1963

You can always set a manual alarm.

Yes, because vehicles on the pad wobble too... and that wobble can tear the ship apart in unexpected places. You're assuming the problem is weight.

It's not just about MOAR STRUTS!1!!11!... it's also about eliminating the sources of the vibration that are causing the breakage (I.E. relieving the cause rather than putting a bandage on the symptoms) - in this case, all the links between those X200-32 tanks on the booster. Try replacing them with Jumbo-64's.

Is there a way to restart/replace your maps?

No, they're practically the only reason the maneuver is accomplished. That's why, by the mid-late 90's they were turning heads up sooner and sooner (even while still performing the gravity turn) - the downrange stations were being decommissioned for budgetary reasons and they needed to turn heads up to communicate via TDRSS. Considering the context of the original post, which was NASA's reasoning behind certain details of the Shuttle's design, yes. I'm quite familiar with the concept of torque... What creates the word salad is when you use somewhat meaningless terms like "positive torque" when you mean "pitch up" or "positive pitch" or some other proper technical or Shuttle term. In the same way, it took a bit to work out that by "the rocket", you seem to mean the SRB's rather than the SSME's (both of which are rockets), etc... etc...

Um... no. (If I read your word salad correctly.) The Shuttle rolls "heads down" to control the effects of lift (from both the wings and the ET) on the stack and trajectory. (Also to point the antenna, which are located on the Orbiter's upper surface, towards the ground stations.)

More scanners increase per-pass coverage? I didn't know that...

It also accomplishes smooth turns on rockets not equipped with ASAS too - which means that while it uses ASAS, it doesn't rely on ASAS. (A difference roughly as subtle as that between a firecracker and a thermonuclear weapon.)

Yet, Mechjeb manages a glass smooth continuous gravity turn regardless of the vehicle it's placed on. (Presuming the vehicle has sufficient control authority.) The fact is, control algorithms are fairly simple and widely known - there's absolutely no need for precise values known in advance. ASAS is simply a very, very, very crappy implementation that's never been fixed.

One suggestion that occurred to me last night while trying to figure out which booster I needed for a project - could you include the specs in the zip file as a .txt or the .jpg in the first post?

Nothing to see here, move along.

SpaceX is flying a fairly conventional vehicle, the Sputnik-I booster was based on the (more-or-less) proven R-7 ICBM, and the Soyuz booster built on that. Then you must consider that all the vehicles in question were designed and built by folks with direct and current experience in the relevant technologies. Reaction Engines has built no functioning engines, let alone a flying vehicle. I'm aware they're not three guys in a shed anymore - their size isn't the issue. It's that pretty much everything they're trying to tackle is new. It's that *nobody* has any real/appropriate experience with flown technologies of the type they intend to employ, let alone the integration*. It's that they're trying to leap from nothing to the Concorde. These aren't cause for unbounded optimism. *And that's often the hardest part, even though it's practically unknown to and ignored by the average fanboy.

Skylon has no numbers behind it - it has projections based on calculations that are themselves based on assumptions. Treating them as facts is... ludicrous at best. No, miracles are not off the cards... but they're pretty dang unlikely. The odds of a first-of-a-kind vehicle being built by people who've never built *any* kind of a vehicle coming in underweight and on performance are staggeringly slim. Boeing could barely manage it with the Dreamliner - and they have literally man-millennia of experience. No, the prevalent intellectual error (by far) in this thread is the diametric opposite - unbounded optimism based on not actually understanding the issues and a prototype of one small component of a very complex engine.

I've attached probe cores radially (you have to place cubic struts first) and they work just fine.

Maybe, maybe not - you presume the Skylon engine will work as promised, something that's *very* far from assured. (Let alone doing so on budget and on schedule.) People seem to forget that the engine is just barely this side of being a paper exercise, and that even with full (currently desired) budgets, there's a whole heap on known unknowns (read: things that may cost a lot more than budgeted and/or may perform [well] below targets)... and that's presuming that no showstoppers show up uninvited to the party. People dreaming pipe dreams of space travel based on paper technology would do well to print out Rickover's comments on the differences between paper reactors and real reactors, post it beside their monitor, and recite it to themselves twice daily.

They stated in 1995 they could have a test flight by 2001. In 1998 they stated they could have a test flight by 2005...

Sure, they're announcing the bucks - but over the last twenty odd years they've announced all manner of things (not all of them impossible to fund/grandiose), but they've followed up on very dang few of them. Let's wait until they actually start spending the bucks (on something other than dachas for the Leadership) before counting those chickens.

Search on "landing rover" or "land rover", there's a ton of threads... I've learned a lot about rover design just by studying the "show off your rover" thread.

The Mun lander has a lot more torque from the command pod than the fuel tanker does from the remote control unit...

It takes a lot of pressurization to keep up with that rate of fuel flow... I suspect it would be heavy.

Mapsat only scans while it's turned on and the vehicle carrying it is the active vehicle.

Testing isn't "feeling feisty" - it's as basic as putting an engine on the booster, because payload builders want to be able to grab a rocket of 'x' performance and go. That's the reason I kept Temstar's Zenith series loaded and ready to go in Subassembly Loader in .19, and will again soon. All validated and with a handy chart of parts count and lift capacities. You already have to fly the booster to check your flight sequence and strutting, why not put a proof mass on top and validate the lifitng capacity while you're at it?

That and the Shuttle's engines weren't mounted with the thrust axis parallel to the body axis of the orbiter - they were actually tipped up (IIRC) 5 degrees.

Back Alley Brawler, one of the devs for CoX, put it this way: "One of the best things a developer can do it listen to the community. One of the worst things a developer can do is listen to the community".

What's it's weight capacity to 75km?