DerekL1963

Once again making the mistake of implying that one playstyle is superior to another and looking down on those who chose to use one over the other. What exactly is wrong with using autopilot features? Adding a stock option for a playstyle is bad.... how exactly? Oh, right, you already covered that - it's the "easy way". And the "easy way" is not acceptable. WRONG. Rather than re-typing what I just wrote, I'll just direct you to scroll up and read what I said above about the validity of different playstyles since you seemed to have skipped that part the first time around.

I didn't say his comment was without basis, I said not all players are him. These are not equivalent statements. "A feeling of success" is a description of an end-state, not a description of play style or prescription of the route to attain it. I certainly have a feeling of success when I design a vehicle that lands on the Mun, even if MechJeb does all the flying. And why shouldn't I? Designing vehicles and missions is what I find fun. Proof that my designs work exactly as planned is what gives me a feeling of success. Take a look at the "What did you do in KSP today?" thread in the general forum. You'll find an incredible number of different playstyles - all equally valid, and without a doubt in my mind equally giving their players a feeling of success. Implying or suggesting (or stating outright as some do) that there's only One True Path (and that using MechJeb is a deviation from that path) is complete nonsense.

Thanks! So many new parts to play with, I obviously missed one.... Now that I look, there's an Apollo sized one too. My discoveries so far: The structural tubes were done right.... You can get at the surface beneath them to hide stuff without using the ugly service bays. The colliders are wonky, but you can surface mount inside them.... (basically things only mount normally at the 0 and 180 degree positions. And they're configurable in length... That's basically what I've done in KSP today... played around with the new parts. Yes, they all look identical... Mouse over them and look at the specs though. There's a 1, 2, and 3 crew variant.

How did you build out that interior? (Top right) And how did you get that closure (gold foil)? (Bottom right) Inquiring minds want to know!

However, it's not something you can do ingame... and thus is not a valid challenge.

Nobody was claiming that things had to be "perfect". Choosing the proper material for an application is neither nitpicking nor perfection - it's basic bog standard engineering practice. No, I was not essentially saying any such thing. (Though your wildly disconnected from reality defense of SpaceX's failures was indeed very silly.) And speaking of emotional arguments.... wow. Just, wow. I'm done here. You're not interested in anything that isn't blind worship of SpaceX.

I tried three times... so, me too.

Well, fact based engineering discussions aren't getting the point across so I thought I'd emulate your argument. Nobody has claimed that saying such a thing is silly, nor that failures are unexpected. So... I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about here.

Stability control maintains attitude, it does not control trajectory ("counter wind"). Guidance controls trajectory. And to do so it has to know at least the rudiments of where it is - it can't counter the wind if it can't detect that the wind has affected trajectory. Flight control takes the output from stability control and guidance and generates the actual hardware commands. These are inseparable functions. Your control problem is going to be much worse if you have a separate set of controls operated automatically. How are you going to prevent one set from work in opposition to the other?

Extremely rewarding to you. But not to others. Please stop presuming to speak for anyone who isn't you.

STS-51L was a flight that could have achieved it's goals if allowed. STS-107 was a flight that could have achieved it's goals if allowed. Or, to put it another way, that's an incredibly silly thing to say.

So long as it's less than 1/2 flights inappropriate. If it's 1/100 inappropriate, they may not have seen it yet (or if they've seen it they may not have realized the seriousness). Or, to put it another way, it was fine to fly with leaky o-rings - until suddenly one day it wasn't. In the same way, it was safe to fly with substandard and misspecified parts... until one day it wasn't. And while airframe manufacturers made some errors that some people lived through - they also made errors that people died from. It's disingenuous at best to leave out that half of the story.

You do realize that "keeping from not flying off from the wind" and "not caring about small deviations" are mutually incompatible statements? Not to mention keeping it "not flying off from the wind" (keeping it on a flight profile) is a guidance function, not a stability control function. Just like SAS in KSP, the rocket steers until it reaches the desired attitude (as determined by the guidance function) and then stability control keeps it there. The two functions (stability control and guidance) are intimately bound together. And that's not even getting into the flight control function, which takes the output of the guidance and stability functions and translates them into actual hardware commands. Non trivial, not the least of which because you may have to correct the commands for roll orientation - possibly while correcting roll orientation. This isn't plug-and-play Estes (or even Cesaroni or the like) level rocketry. (Their burn time, and thus effective control time, is too short.) This is serious high level rocketry.

No, that is not a valid solution for real world hardware. There's a reason why it's not standard engineering practice. There's a reason why even back alley grease monkey machine shops specify their materials. Because SpaceX's "solution" is how you lose payloads and vehicles worth a fair fraction of a billion dollars. If there's any remaining hardware that's not up to snuff in Falcon, or any such hardware in Dragon 2 - that's how people end up dead.

Referencing TR-1: Specifying the material based on a thorough understanding of the material's properties and recommended usages isn't "nitpicking". It's bog standard engineering practice. It's so standard it was taught in high school metal working classes (back when high schools had metal working classes). If SpaceX wasn't doing that, and/or if SpaceX was specifying a material contrary to the manufacturers recommendations - that's a pretty serious error. And looking at TF-1 and -2, it looks like it might possibly be an endemic problem, not a one-off.

I think that you're monstrously confused here. Guidance and stability control (and whatever you're using for attitude reference) are intimately related. Not the least because the signals from the first have to be mathematically combined with the signals from the second to derive a single control signal for whatever you're using for thrust vector control. And that's setting aside the fact that thrust vector control is a very complicated problem in it's own right. Heck, the problem of properly mixing the signals and deriving a combined control signal is very much a non-trivial problem. No offense, the basic problem here runs much deeper than not knowing anything about controllers and how to program them... You don't even have a good handle on the problem domain. let alone the difficulty of the overall project.

I'd say drop by the appropriate forums for the computer you've chosen and ask there... You're more likely to find people there with the appropriate knowledge and skills.

Note that is complete and groundless assumption on your part. And just maybe you've forgotten sandbox mode exists.

I've never really used the SPH much except for building rovers, so I didn't note the other ways until I went double check on subassemblies last night.

Already possible using subassemblies. There's also the merge feature, but I haven't really used it. Either use the new (v1.4) direct access buttons to directly swap the vehicle, or save the vehicle as a subassembly, or use the tabs at the top of the "open" popup. (I just noticed those, they may be new.) I use specific craft names, so the default alphanumerical sort automatically organizes like craft next to like craft. There are also mods that change the open/load interface but I don't know much about them. If you want to look at what it looks like in 'x' stage flight, simply remove the prior stages and set them to one side temporarily. If you have a really weird staging setup, you might try enabling advanced tweakable and zeroing the thrust on the engines that shouldn't be running then. And welcome to the madness that is the KSP forums! I hope this helps.

Docking was one of my first tests, because of the new RCS system on the MK 1-3. Absolutely zero problems.

That was all about weight and handling. (That's why they went segmented in the first place.)

Heavy (IIRC, compact tankage among other benefits), (IIRC) easily ionized, well understood (chemically), and (at the time) high purity mercury was easily commercially available. It's only real drawback (aside from it's toxicity) was that it took power to vaporize. Cesium (the other preferred alternative at the time) was even worse in that respect. The potential for a radioactive release is always a problem. Handling radioactive materials is always a problem. Crapping up your test cell with radioactive material is a serious problem. And radon's half life is only 3.8 days. It's daughters are all solids, and plate out - and after an hour or so you start accumulating Pb210... Which is not only toxic in and of itself (and bioaccumulates), but is a beta emitter. I shoulda looked up the half life first. That alone stops your idea dead in it's tracks.

The barge also carries tank trailers for the various fluids that aren't LOX/Gasoline that the booster requires such as the N2O4/UDMH for the Fregat (if used). Basically one trip hauls everything for one launch.

Probably for the same reason mercury was abandoned as the propellant of choice.... Toxic propellants make life so much more difficult in so many ways.