DerekL1963

Except... that's not how it happened. Your analogy is horribly broken because you (like so many) fail to grasp that colonization wasn't about making a better life - it was about making money. The Revolutionary War wasn't about fixing up a broken down apartment house - it was about appropriating a fairly nice apartment built up with someone else's money. (Before you poodle, yes, I am American. I'm just using your analogy.) On top of being an American, I'm also a former nuclear submariner - and the above is so incredibly off base I don't know where to begin. We didn't draw food from the water. Or consumables (such as the hydraulic filters that had to be replaced periodically). Or spare parts to replace failed ones. Or fuel (either diesel for the backup generator or for the reactor itself). We drew water and O2, and that's it. Everything else came from the shore. Titan is in the same boat - it may have abundant resources, but it doesn't have any manufacturing capacity. (And manufacturing capacity is going to be hideously expensive to build. And don't mention 3d printing, because for the foreseeable future 3d printing is practically useless compared to the vast range of things the colony will need.) And that's something else you don't seem to grasp, the American colonies were incredibly dependent on the Old World for any number of important things - not just capital, but materiel and personnel as well. Even after Independence, that dependence continued. (And continues to this day, America has never actually been self sufficient.) Nobody but nobody has tried to set up a fully independent, fully self sufficient colony with anything above Stone Age technology in millennia - there's a reason for that.

What is the proper name of the window you're calling the "planetary data tab"?

More than once, a screenshot is all I have to re-create a vehicle in another save or in a later version of KSP...

No, you had it right... it's just an incoherent mess of technobabble.

I think F5/F9 is par for the course on a Jool-5 run... there's just so many chances for things to go bad. Even though I did a dress rehearsal in the sandbox, and thought I'd nailed all the potential pitfalls, two minor changes still lead to F5/F9 on two of the landings. (And the first only rescued me from the worst of it... the problem has occurred and not been caught before I'd saved.)

I thought it might not be, and like I said probably not a thing to worry about unless it can be simply tied to the visibility of the gondola mount. Who is actually going to complain about a little extra power? I just brought it up for completeness sake (sometimes simple bugs are symptomatic of deeper problems).

In some things, yes. In most things, not so much. In compact batteries or power supplies than can last at Titan temperatures and still provide enough energy to heat a volume as Bill suggests? Practically none at all. (There being essentially no demand for such things. Even NASA prefers to find ways to keep things at much more reasonable temperatures.)

Minor bug, may or may not be worth fixing... Solar panels generating power when they shouldn't. Maybe disable the panels when the gondola mount is on?

I just wrote up a tutorial on using MechJeb for airships. I hope people find it useful.

A tutorial I just wrote on using Mech Jeb to fly airships.

Two Mechjeb functions I've found useful while flying airships. The first is that MechJeb's Smart A.S.S. function is very useful in maintaining course and stability. (It's best to balance your craft manually if you can, because this will consume EC if your reaction wheels are enabled.) I've also created a custom info window that provides all sorts of useful data: Altitude (ASL) = your absolute altitude, useful for monitoring pressure altitude. Altitude (Bottom) = your altitude as measured from the lowest point of the vehicle, very useful for landing. (Much more useful than Altitude (true), which measures from center of mass.) Coordinates = current position. Heading = current heading. Surface Horizontal Speed = true speed across ground, more accurate than Navball speed and useful in ensuring you don't snap off your landing gear or break or bend your airship on landing. Vertical speed = Very useful for landing. Current Biome = If you're out gathering Science, this is useful to know. Pick Position Target = This works just like "pick target on Map" in the Landing Guidance AP, it flips you out to the map screen and lets you choose a target by clicking on the map. Heading to target, Target Coordinates, Distance to target, Time to closest approach = navigation information relative to your selected target. This works whether you've chosen it with Pick Position Target or picked a flag or a craft from the map screen. It does not appear to work with Kerbnet waypoints. (Or I may not grok how to use Kerbnet.)

Non USA persons also might not understand that in many parts of the US, "reliable enough" also has shades of "but don't really trust it with anything important if you can avoid it". So yes, I think we're saying the same thing across a modest language speedbump. But that's not really a different market per se, even though they haven't actually lost one nobody believes that's anything but a temporary situation. They might have better insurance premiums, but they still insure. Wal-Mart is chain of stores here in the US specializing in very cheap (in both in price and quality) goods. It's generally viewed as a place where only poor and/or stupid people shop.

I understood what you were saying quite clearly. I was explaining that said market doesn't exist - if you're not sufficiently reliable (both in meeting schedule and successful delivery), you're not going to be in business long. People buying launch services for payloads that cost a fair fraction of a billion dollars and stand to produce substantial revenues do not shop with a Wal-Mart mentality.

When "reliable" basically means "your payload either arrives at the correct orbit or ends up scattered across the landscape" - there's no such thing as "reliable enough". Either it works, or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, then those lovely government contracts that are currently paying a good deal of the freight dry up, and not long after that insurers stop underwriting and commercial contracts go elsewhere too. The next step is the Sheriff at the door. Musk may be <REDACTED> insane in some senses, but he's no dummy. He's not about to make the same mistake he made with Falcon 1 (basically building for a non-existent market).

The navball is showing the correct orientation. I'll edit the OP.

So how in the heck do rover controls work? I'm using Docking controls, in Linear mode, and I can't seem to steer or produce forward or aft movement. And yes, it has power, and drivers aboard, and everything else required. The Navball is displaying the proper orientation. It drives in Staging mode using WASD (though it rocks and rolls since that mode induces rotation). Mechjeb drives it just fine. I'd prefer not to remap.

Good point. (On top of having worked with them in the Navy, including helping to load and prep the bird in my userpic, I've studied them quite a bit. So I was curious. My opinion differs, but your general point I can't disagree with.)

Something I forgot to add earlier, but something I've been saying for years - "If you don't understand why we haven't been back to the moon, you don't understand why we went in the first place". I am curious though, why you count SLBM from Poseidon rather than Polaris. (Myself, I don't rate MIRV *that* highly...) I'd go no later than Polaris A-2. (A-1 was something of a kludge, rushed to sea to get something out there and on patrol to deter the USAF.)

Yup. It took me longer to figure that I needed to restart KSP to see the new flag (nameplate) than it took to look up how to create one, open up Photoshop and actually create one, and save it to disk. Silly me presumed it would be like dropping ships into the VAB/SPH. BTW, those look like Near Future panels, but where did the ducted fans come from?

The funny part is that all these missiles were already largely obsolescent... Liquid fuels were already plainly on the way out, and so were the SRBMs and IRBMs that many early space launchers were based on. Precision guidance, lightweight warheads, and reliable big high-energy solids were changing the game. (SLBM's were a beneficiary as much a driver here.) Yes... and no. The Gemini Titans were of a modified design and were produced on a separate, dedicated, production line in Baltimore. (SAC Titan's were built in Denver.) And really, that goes to some extent to all the I(C|R)BM's-cum-launch vehicles... They weren't exactly production vehicles, they were specially selected, modified and handled. The engines for the MR series, for example, were cherrypicked off the line after proof firing. Barely alive... In '65-'67 the Apollo budget was sharply trimmed, by '69 the program was running on fumes, force of habit, and (as you say) inertia.

Nit: The fallout from an Orion drive will be microscopic and submicroscopic particles and free molecules and atoms. Even if these are trapped in the magnetosphere, I suspect they aren't coming back to the Earth's surface anytime soon. (And there's not going to be that much of it - weapon debris and a miniscule amount of local gases and particles.)

Other than the whole "full duration burns aren't actual flights and don't expose the vehicle to the environment and stresses of flight" part.

For most engines, yes. For the LV-T95-8? Not so much.

Minor nit, the image album link for NF Spacecraft points to the Near Future Propulsion album.

I don't have an opinion, and it's pretty disingenuous to ask for one. You're a smart guy and you know dang well the risks of generalizing from small sample.