DerekL1963

Where did those batteries and capacitors come from?

Note how they say nothing about paid DLC. Zip. Zero. Nada. Your semantic games are not "Squad said".

@dlrk Um - I don't seen the word "paid" in there. So, we're back to square one - nobody has mentioned paid DLC.

Since nobody has mentioned paid DLC - I fail to see how this is a reasonable question.

You do realize that completely an utterly fails to support your claims? No? Off to the kill file with you then, you're a loon.

Until you present actual evidence, yes, yes it is just an anecdote.

Never mind.

No, they made extensive studies and sized the length almost perfectly. What they "screwed up" (in quotes because it depends on your definition) was a) the shock absorption system in the legs was capable far beyond the requirements (the astronauts generally left the engines on longer than had been anticipated, resulting in much lower touchdown shock), and b) the footpads were over sized as they underestimated the bearing strength of the lunar regolith (they were designed long before the Surveyor results were available). It's probably the latter you're thinking of.

That's kinda my point, these ventures are beyond extremely speculative at this point - something like investing in He3 mining futures back in the early 1900's. Simply announcing "people are working on asteroid mining" is essentially meaningless, as people have worked on a lot of things that came to naught or took lifetimes before the "killer app" was found.

Once I started looking at the problem, it just made no sense to haul all that extra weight around from moon to moon. The challenge is hard enough without putting one foot in a bucket of cement. Thanks!

*sigh* Nobody here is proposing trying "hippy" or "new age" stuff - they're proposing stuff based on actual science.

People are working on perpetual motion too.

Going to be a lot of one-liners for a bit... The dress rehearsal for my Jool 5 run is underway, and I'm not taking any pictures because I want to save them for the real thing. Anyhow, the Tylo run is done. One moon down, four to go.

Update: 10/03/16 - Just out of curiosity, I hyperedited the beast above into a 3000 kilometer Kerbin orbit, and it made it to Jool with a whole 200 m/s of d/v. White knuckles indeed. - The dress rehearsal is underway, and the Tylo phase of the mission is complete. One moon down, four to go. I did made a slight error and brought the quad lander back to the mothership rather than transferring directly from Tylo to Val, wasting a bit of fuel.

Personally, I like context, even when not telling a story. A picture is worth a thousands words they say, but it's not always the right thousand words. MJ does that - open Ascent Guidance, then select your target in Map View. I know when launching from KSP, usually you have the esc/revert back after the first time and it nails it on the second (it has to learn the vehicle's performance), I don't how it would work in your situation though. Drop by the game questions forum? (Since the MJ thread is currently locked.)

Sunday's update on Monday morning as I was tired and cranky when I was finishing up last night. After tossing some probes to Jool to gauge delta-V requirements, I used the data I collected to design this beast: Theoretically it can be assembled in orbit, and theoretically it has sufficient delta-V... In reality, it didn't work so well but fixes are fairly straightforward I think (crosses fingers). Most importantly, my confidence level that the mission is doable just went up considerably. More pics and information in the thread linked in my sig... Questions and comments are always welcome.

Update: 10/02/2016 (Sunday's update Monday morning because I was tired and cranky as I was finishing up last night.) Hurled a series of probes from Kerbin to Jool to gauge the delta-V required, and to learn to recognize a good window vice a bad window. NASA has supercomputers, and I have the sand box. (Plus, most delta-V maps are for 'ideal' circumstances. They've never worked well for me.) Seriously, one of the most important tools I have is my steno pad for keeping track of things like the performance of each probe... I probably have have a dozen scattered about the apartment, each dedicated to one task or another. It was a habit I learned at my mother's knee and that I've never been able to break... That delta-V information then lead to the design of this beast... Theoretically it can be assembled in orbit, and theoretically it has sufficient delta-V... In reality, it failed miserably because the burn time was a large fraction of it's orbital period and it ended up in an oddball orbit as MJ doesn't handle that at all well. So, I either need to use a node-splitter or raise the altitude of the assembly orbit so that the burn time is a more reasonable fraction of the orbital period. But, most importantly, I've shown that the mission is at least theoretically possible with my current skills, and that gives me the confidence to proceed. I really need to run that dress rehearsal and double check my fuel calculations. If I can decrease the size of the mothership/fuel farm I'm golden. If not.. well, I don't want to think about that much. Now it's time to adult for the day, and then catch up on anime premieres. (Hey, I do have a life and hobbies other than KSP!)

Unless you run with a ton of graphic mods... KSP isn't typically GPU bound, it's CPU bound.

Well, no. It doesn't work quite that way. What matters is the end cost to the customer - which includes the amortized cost of the booster, the amortized cost of major maintenance on the booster, the amortized cost of fixed overhead, non reusable hardware, variable overhead directly chargeable to the flight, refurbishments costs directly chargeable to the flight, handling and launch operations, oh, and fuel plus a bit of profit. Fuel is a major item for the airlines because they can amortize costs over thousands of flights per day and per airframe across it's lifetime - and because they've ruthlessly slashed costs overall. At $40 million a flight (the current guesstimate of the cash price for a flight on a reflown booster)... the fuel costs for the booster are still way down in the noise. Costs per flight need to drop well below that figure before things change much.

Not with fuel prices ten times as high as currently. Maybe with fuel prices a hundred times as much as currently. Fuel is cheap in industrial quantities. They would be insansely stupid. Why take H2, and add energy (thereby increasing the cost of the fuel) to turn it into methane rather than burning it directly? Not to mention, currently H2 production is from fossil fuels - if they manage to make one of the processes work that don't use fossil fuels... well, see the first two sentences of this paragraph. Elon Musk is many things, but stupid is not one of those.

Then close the windows you don't need... Seriously, I've played with MJ for several years now, and the most windows I ever had open on a regular basis is five - and that's only for a single specific function. (I could get that down to two then three in the second portion if I wasn't paranoid about time constraints.)

None of the rockets SpaceX has on the drawing board is within a couple orders of magnitude cheap enough for fuel costs to rise significantly out of the noise.

I think you want this thread: Or, this thread:

True, but that doesn't really match what I want to do.

I'm sticking with 1.1.3 myself... I've played out games with Remotech and don't really want to add that level of challenge. Doubly so since my mission architecture depends so heavily on unkerbaled flights.