DerekL1963

This, it's the easiest and simplest implementation. Roleplay that it's an automagic timer, or a programmed search routine, or whatever if that's your game. Or send a manned craft and EVA a Kerbal over if that's your game. Or don't use it at all and leave the probe as a piece of inert space debris if that's your game. Leave the choice to the player and his playstyle.

Thanks for keeping this mod alive! The large nuclear engine is a workhorse in my flight program.

*sigh* In the .23 dev version, we seem to have lost the ability to reset an antenna's target when the vehicle had no connection to a control center. IMO, that's an important 'backup' capability.

Just wanted to say how much I use and appreciate these maps. Thanks!

At least in the case of the RL ones these are modeled on, a gentle(er) landing was the whole point of their existence. Why should the in-game ones be any different?

"Dear God - what is that thing?" /princessbride

Radially attached Commutron-16's (in the experimental version) are blowing up on ascent. (No, I do not have FAR or Deadly Re-entry or any other mod likely to cause this.)

What the *heck* happened to the Commutron-16 (in the experimental version)?

So, how do I get these to play nice with MechJeb? It doesn't want to fire them at all.

Found a bug - the both the SS-5 and KR=7 are included. (The SS-5 has been deprecated AFAIK.) Also, it does not appear to be writing the .cfg file when the plugin is run.

No, it is not redundant. The new science archive has a crappy UI and does not allow for quick 'n easy locating of any low hanging fruit. It's almost as if they said "hey, let's make a list of science gathered" but forgot to say 'and make it useful".

As a user, my main interest is backwards compatibility... should mod 'x' require version 2.3.2, it should still support the features of version 2.3.0 for mod 'y'. I give and grant there will be cases (such as changes to the game itself) where this is not possible, but backing the user into the corner of choosing one mod over another should be avoided if at all possible.

For all intents and purposes, yes it did depend on clean fusion nukes - because they provide the best bang and best radiation spectrum and least crew exposure for the weight and buck. There's a reason why they were specified by the original designers. (And no, you can't "just make the fusion stage bigger" - enlarge the fusion stage without enlarging the primary and you can actually *reduce* the yield as the primary now cannot efficiently compress the fusion secondary. Nuclear weapons are very tightly coupled designs, you can't just change one term of the equation. And yes, Tsar Bomba was tested - but never weaponized or deployed. Nor did the US ever test a weapon with a sufficiently high fusion fraction. The problem is, those things you call "unremarkable" are anything but - they're quite remarkable due to their size and the stresses they'd undergo in flight. That's propaganda version of history. But it's almost completely wrong. There was a huge amount of precursor work already accomplished, which is why Kennedy chose Apollo in the first place.

Not just Atlas, by 1960 Titan I was entering service, Minuteman I was well along in development, IRBM's (Thor, Jupiter) were being widely deployed, SLBM's (Polaris A-1) were showing great promise, stand-off weapons (Hound Dog) were being deployed... The need for SLAM to penetrate the thicket of Soviet air defenses was rapidly evaporating.

FWIW - this is a bog standard real world engineering technique for "shutting down" solid fuel rocket motors. (Usually there's no need to actually shut them down, you just need them to produce zero net thrust.) It wasn't used on the Shuttle for reasons that are off-topic here.

Um... Why would you think something that pretty much every other rover save one has done is 'a little odd'? Rovers normally live on top of their lander stage.

That's just the thing... It's not human nature to explore, at least not amongst the majority of humanity. Yeah, there's a few that do those things, all all important racial yeast... but very few. The Shuttle was growing even before the USAF got involved - because if it didn't grow, it didn't have a mission since the space station had been cancelled. That's one of the big reasons why the program became so expensive and NASA sought USAF participation in the first place. And that's a huge conceptual error that runs through this thread, you can't improve the design until you know what you're improving it *for*. First, you define the missions, then you define the capabilities needed to carry out those missions, then and only then can you specify the requirements your vehicle will need to meet.

There's two problems with it. The first is is that it's main propulsion system was vaporware - it depended on 'clean' high yield fusion devices, which never materialized. The second is that precisely none of it's hardware was ever tested beyond the crudest laboratory proof-of-concept level. There are no *obvious* showstoppers in the engineering, but there's no evidence it could actually be built with 1950's technology either. They simply never got far enough along to find out.

For certain handwaving-and-smoke-blowing values of "easy", sure. In reality, it would be a complex and heavy vehicle - I.E. expensive. Very, very expensive.

Starting monitoring the forums for mod updates...

Biosphere is pretty much meaningless when it comes to determining the viability of close loop life support systems. It was designed by ecological mystics according to their political and philosophical principles, not properly engineered. They leapt from a few dozen cubic meter test facility to the huge Biosphere itself after only 30 days of testing. They completely failed to account for the contraction and expansion of the atmosphere inside... meaning that at virtually the last minute they had to spend considerable money to build expansion chambers. Between this and other stupid crap (spending tons of money to bring in African beach sand for example) they went way, way, over budget and had to rush it into service for public relations reasons without a proper commissioning, testing, and checkout phase. (It's actually not clear that such thing was ever even planned.) The result was a massive cock-up, an utter failure. But sadly, a failure that continues to poison the well.

A stepping stone in the sense of getting experience in operating and supporting a base at a distance, yes. Unfortunately, from an engineering point of view, it's like preparing for an Antarctic expedition by practicing in the Sahara desert.

FYI: That figure comes only from space supporters and space agencies - I've never seen any independent analysis of space spin-offs or ROI on investment in space exploration.

There's a lot of people who *think* they're "pioneers", but probably are just armchair adventurers. Historically, pioneers have been a vanishing small segment of society and usually driven by pressure (repression, etc...) or greed rather than adventure. (And that the 18th century is over isn't an attitude, it's a stone cold fact.)

Yep. The Shuttle was originally supposed to be the equivalent of a light pickup truck, and along with a Saturn V or Titan III derivative, the cornerstone of significant system space presence and transportation infrastructure. When it became apparent that neither the Administration nor Congress was interested in funding those pipe dreams... the Shuttle began to grow and morph into the large one-size-fits-all vehicle that finally flew. (NASA never really gave up on the idea that they would soon be funded at peak Apollo levels again.) Why? Because they were stuck between a rock and hard spot - the Administration nor Congress mandated that the Shuttle would be built, but refused to properly fund it. (Hence the whole mess with the DoD, even though that affected the design less than urban legend would have you believe as the vehicle was already growing.) But to be fair, even budget limited (but still very expensive admittedly), they did produce a near miracle... a vehicle that carried and returned more people to space than all others to date combined. For that matter, it's flown more missions than any other vehicle (Soyuz is still ten or fifteen mission behind, and in the end will have taken almost twice as long to accumulate that number, and won't match the number of passengers until sometime around the middle of the century at the current rate). It's safety and reliability is insignificantly different from any other vehicle. It carried out missions that no other vehicle in existence or on the drawing boards could have done. Etc... etc... And it's being penny wise and pound foolish that's going to kill our space program. Sure, we've gone from SUV costs to bare bones subcompact economy car costs... but we've also gone from SUV capability to bare bones subcompact economy car capability too. Only a fool thinks Dragon or Orion can replace the Shuttle.