DerekL1963

Only if your spacecraft lacks an accurate guidance system. (Which both the LM and CSM had.) It was designed to be used by trained professionals, not Joe Sixpack, therefore 'normal' guidelines of user friendliness do not apply. The systems I operated for the Navy were anything but user friendly by 'normal' standards, but none of us had any particular problems operating it.

Why not? They're just as safe as liquids. Properly specced and manufactured, they can be *very* precise. But yeah, even big ballistic missiles pretty much all have some kind of PBCS for final velocity trim.

Why is there economic value in finding ways to smelt iron in conditions not found on earth? Seriously, there's a lot of talk about how valuable materials science experiments, etc... performed in space are, but no actual evidence despite several decades of doing do. Like so many other 'space spin offs', it's smoke and mirrors, not results.

If the LEM guidance computer was a piece of industrial equipment, that would be a relevant piece of information. But the LM's guidance computer doesn't really resemble what we would think of as a computer today. Yes, there's a CPU, but there's a whole raftload of other circuits (analog, digital, and discrete) as well. Making things even more complex, some of the analog signals rely on phase difference rather than voltage or current to convey information. Analog circuits in general can be dicey to splice into, but these are particularly difficult. (I've worked on these types of circuits, and I've seen a bad wire wrap take them down.) Exceeding the power of the digital portion is trivial. Replacing the full capabilities of the guidance computer... is not. Doing so requires additional support logic, emulators, and complexity - introducing a whole bunch of new ways for things to go all pear shaped. You'd be far better off to go all in and replace the entire guidance and navigation system, especially considering how tightly integrated the system is and the various advances in the related technologies over the past forty-fifty odd years.

Yep. And end-of-life considerations are so important, they're often redundant. Not only is main propulsion system designed to function (and have enough fuel) through end-of-life and the move to the graveyard, frequently there's an entirely separate system specifically designed with enough delta-V to move it to the graveyard.

Not really. "The basis for and following similar methods" isn't "the same as". You'd have to adapt your design and specification to current equipment and techniques. Not a trivial task. Not really. Much of the equipment was highly specialized (and long since replaced with newer stuff if it wasn't scrapped when the program went bust in the 60's or as the aerospace industry contracted in the 70's, 80's, and 90's) and some of the most important was purpose built for specific tasks. Even if you could get the machines, all of the jigs and tooling are long gone. It's not a trivial task to replace them. Not really. Coatings have changed, insulation (electrical and thermal) have changed, seal materials have changed, safety requirements in the workplace have changed, new environmental regulations are in place, etc... etc... It's not a trivial task to crawl through the entire design checking each and every detail. A friend of mine works engineering electrical systems for nuclear submarines - he just got done with a project replacing a pair of generators (on each hull) from the 1970's with new ones of an entirely new design. Why? Because the all-new generators cost about three-quarters as much overall as redesigning the old ones with modern materials and processes and restarting the production of spare parts. All the spares were bought when the generators were bought back in the 70's. The first-of-class should have retired five years ago, and last was originally scheduled to decommission in 2020. Now the *first* won't even retire until 2027 and the last in 2039. When this started to become clear around 2005, they started looking ahead to avoid having the spares pool dry up and discovered the problems and costs with restarting production. (And no, with just a couple dozen of these generators in service... it didn't make sense to keep the production lines open to produce a few dozen spares (a couple each of hundreds of different parts) a year.) Replacing old stuff is hard. Much harder than many people think. And there's another factor too... Rejiggering any one thing (say replacing the asbestos with fiberglass batts) is theoretically simple - but in the real world of engineering is that everything is tied to everything else. Changes in one place cascade through the system (and often in unexpected ways), and when you're talking a low margin, high performance, tightly integrated system like the Saturn V the headache is just worse. That is why the Saturn V plans are irrelevant. The costs of changing the design to suit modern materials, equipment, and processes is just too high because of the costs of re-doing all the calculations, verifications, and validation is just too bloody high.

But if all you fly is specialized ships, you'll never solve the issues - you can only improve what you fly. If your metric is "small, low capability boosters/capsules" (depending on which Soyuz you mean), then yes, they were better. But that's like claiming a Ford Focus is "better" than a bulldozer or a cab-over Pete. Before you can reasonably define better, you have to answer the question "better at what?" and make for d--- sure that you're comparing apples to apples.

That's a known RT bug.

It would require more than just building a new SRB factory - it would require solving all of the unsolved technical issues that were a good part of what lead them to choose segmented boosters over monolithic boosters in the first place. Since, AFAIK, nobody has done any serious research and development on large monolithic boosters in forty years, you'd be all but starting from scratch.

Yes, Soyuz was originally designed for lunar missions - but it went into service modified as a general purpose orbiter. Subsequently it was pressed into service as a space station taxi, and subsequent generations have further converged on that purpose - to the point where it's all but useless for anything but LEO taxi service. (In particular, the heavy heat shield needed for lunar operations was replaced decades ago.)

Then you're woefully uninformed. Seriously, you actually believe that it's that simple for hardware that's been unmaintained for over forty years? Not to mention that you're wrong, in particular there are no flight IU's known to survive. Heck, I've seen equipment that was carefully packaged and stored that was utterly useless after a mere fifteen odd years. A replacement cable assembly for the MTRE MK6 used in the MK98/0 Trident missile fire control system. Purchased and stored in the early 70's when MTRE MK6 was introduced to the fleet as part of the MK88/1 Poseidon missile fire control system. When we opened the package in 1989 to replace a failed cable in one of the system trainers, the cable insulation had acquired a 'set', and when we unfolded it... the insulation just cracked and came off in chunks. NASA had that problem after ten years... several of the fins on the Saturn-I's used for Skylab and ASTP had to replaced after cracks were found to have developed in the fins while the boosters were in storage.

No and not true in the least bit.

sarbian added a couple of digits of precision to orbital period in today's MJ dev build FWIW. All constellations drift eventually, it's just a question of when and how fast. I just use Kerbal Alarm Clock and schedule constellation maintenance every few months. You can display the semi-major axis by editing the orbital information window. matching the sem-major down to millionths of part is theoretically possible but... I just schedule constellation maintenance.

This. The 'CPU' of the Apollo guidance system was really just one small component of a much larger and more complex system, pretty much nothing at all like an iPhone's CPU. While it was a Von Neumann machine, and theoretically Turing complete, it just wasn't very powerful... It made up for this lack by being embedded within a number of specialized support and interface circuits (IIRC some of the coordinate transformation were analog), and it's these that make it essentially impossible to compare then-to-now.

If the 'high orbit' was sufficiently high, yes. But you'd have to go pretty far out because her solar wings produce a lot of drag.

Mostly ensuring the sanity (as defined by DRE) of your re-entry path I'd imagine.

On the contrary, if fitted for the docking adapter, she could easily reach the ISS - she just couldn't carry much there. In fact, during her last OMDP she was modified (cabling and structural mounts installed) to accept the docking adapter. Had she returned successfully from STS-107, she would have been fitted with a docking adapter and flown to ISS as STS-118.

This. It's just as technically feasible and reasonable as all but one or two of the suggestions posted here.

No. The ISS has to keep the Shuttle in a particular orientation for thermal control.

Here's what will happen if you try to move the ISS with a magic drive that somehow doesn't cause it bend and break in most inconvenient ways: First, it's electronics will fry as it passes through the Van Allen belts and beyond - it's only shielded for the (very) benign radiation environment of LEO. Next, it will freeze solid - it's thermal system is balanced around having the relatively warm Earth filling most of it's sky. (Yes Virginia, things in full sunlight in space can freeze - Q.V. Apollo 13.)

MJ's landing behavior is... interesting. Drop by the main support thread and grab the latest dev vesion, it's somewhat better. They're working on the landing routine now.

Kerbal Joint Reinforcement is your friend for life.

Aaannd.. installing Module Manager did indeed fix the problem. Moral of the story, do not re-install KSP and a metric buttload of mods without having at least *finished* that first cup of coffee.

No, and I figured out that was the problem about three minutes after I posted here when I saw Module Manager mentioned in another thread. It's downloaded and installed and KSP is loading even as I type.