Brotoro

I have my quicksave.sfs file from when I visited Magic Boulder back in version 0.18.4 (see link in sig). When I open that quicksave in 0.18.4, the Magic Boulder is where it was back then. When I open that same quicksave in version 0.19 or version 0.20, my ship appears in the correct location orbiting Ike, but I don't see Magic Boulder in the vicinity. So I think it has either been moved or removed.

Iodine is quite heavy, so Eve could hold onto it (as well as carbon dioxide and nitrogen...gasses typically found in terrestrial planet atmospheres). A problem with Eve's atmosphere being iodine (aside from the general rarity of iodine in the cosmos, as the AstroGeologist has pointed out) is that it is a moderately reactive element (the least reactive of the common halogens, but still a halogen), so I wouldn't expect it to stay in the atmosphere if there is anything on the surface to react with (just as you wouldn't expect to see an atmosphere with lots of oxygen in it unless there is photosynthetic life there...or some other explanation)...unless there was some mechanism replenishing it. I believe that Nova Silisko said something about wanting Eve's seas to be rich in stuff like Blutonium ...which has the problem that Eve's oceans would end up being huge natural nuclear reactors (assuming they contained enough neutron absorbers like cadmium and boron to keep the reaction rate from running away completely). And iodine is a volatile fission product (including both short- and long-lived isotopes), so the possibility comes to mind that maybe that's the continuous source of the iodine. I guess we would need to check Eve's atmosphere for other volatile fission products like cesium and xenon. But if this is why Eve's atmosphere is purple, it is absolutely not a friendly place. Let's hope not.

Congratulations! Good work.

90 kg is pretty heavy for a kerbal. What are they carrying in thise backpacks anyway? Oooohh, yes... The snacks.

I think an atmosphere that thick made of iodine gas would be a lot more opaque that it appears. I'm going with purple particulates, just because it's fun to say. And I'd like to check the upper atmosphere of Eve to see if if might support airborne organisms that are excreting the purple organic particulates.

Wow. I wouldn't want to attempt rendezvous with THAT ship...the light would probably fry any other ship.

Do you mean that resources weren't in 0.20, or have they announced that they won't be in 0.21 either? I think I'll be happier keeping things as stock as possible just to make updates easier in the long-term mission.

No mod. The quake and tsunami story is just my 'explanation' for changes that took place during the 0.20 update.

I experienced one by the pyramids in the Great Desert. A kerbal killing crack in reality. I ran over a moderately narrow one with a rover on Eve and found out that it will try to rip the wheels off of your rover if you go too fast.

I try to be 'accurate' in places, such as using mock-ups of heat shields even though they do nothing yet. Then again, there are times when I don't bother (such as with aerodynamic nose comes on boosters) just to keep the part count lower.

I suspect the layout of planets/moons would not remain stable over time.

Data is good. The Galileo probe dropped into Jupiter's atmosphere probably ceased working when its electronics got overheated before it actually got crushed by the pressure.

But that's how everything is affected by gravity in General Relativity: mass and energy (and momentum and pressure) cause curvature of spacetime, and all objects (be they particles with mass or massless photons) move according to that curvature. So the way photons move is affected by gravity.

I don't make one big ship. I send the parts separately.

Make more nuclear power plants. Make fewer people. That was my suggestion 20 years ago. That is still my suggestion now. Maybe people will listen now? ...Nah.

What's the point of the long angled struts?

My first landing out beyond the Kerbin system was on.....Jool! That is, if you can call having your ship torn apart by terrible winds and having your kerbals buffeted violently around a "landing". But since Jool wasn't on the poll, I chose my next planet landing: Duna.

This is true. And unless I'm calculating something incorrectly, the tidal effects on Laythe caused by Vall and Tylo would be enormous. Tidal forces are caused by the difference in the strength of gravity from one side of the moon/planet and the other side. The difference in gravitational acceleration between the two sides of Laythe caused by Vall would be 46.4 times as great as the difference in gravitational acceleration between opposite sides of the Earth caused by our Moon. The difference in gravitational acceleration between the two sides of Laythe caused by Tylo would be 36.4 times as great as the difference in gravitational acceleration between opposite sides of the Earth caused by our Moon. Somebody should check my results, of course.

When you notice that the planets in the "Loading" graphic that appears in the lower-right part of the screen are revolving in the wrong direction.

I have worked with stellar astrophysics codes involving hydrodynamics and radiative transfer, and I know people who work with stellar modeling codes. I also know other people who work with numerical simulations that involve hydrodynamics, radiative transfer, energy generation, etc. It has always been disconcerting to me how many free parameters there are in these codes... the number of "knobs" that you can twiddle to adjust the relative effectiveness of this that and the other thing. Back when we thought there were 15 billion-year-old stars in our Galaxy, the stellar structure modelers happily were able to make models telling us all about their interiors. Later, when better observations made it clear that such old stars couldn't possibly exist, these modelers said, "no problem," and twiddled their knobs to get results that matched the new observations. And guess what happened later when new measurements showed that the opacities that these guys were using were wrong? Yes...they incorporated the new opacities and twiddled their knobs and were again able to get the answer they knew was correct. Plus...there are many cases where you can get the correct answer with different sets of knob settings. Because if you have too much of THIS in there, then too little of THAT can compensate. And you can't tell which of these sets of settings are correct if you don't have observations that will match one but not the other. Now don't get the impression that this means that these numerical simulations are useless. Once you have your code settings dialed in so that it gives you the correct answers for stars at the extreme ends of your range of study (and points in between), it's quite possible that what the codes tell you about other stars in between are true. But I get very leery if anyone takes a complex numerical code and twiddles the knobs to match some known observations....and then proceeds to tell me what is going to happen OUTSIDE of that range. Extrapolation is very iffy in these cases. You might have a set of knob settings that give you good match to all previous data, but that does not mean the settings are correct (you may have faulty settings that are canceling each other out)...and when you try to extrapolate, your incorrect settings may no longer cancel, and you'll get erroneous results. I'm not a climate modeler, so I can't comment on the state of those particular codes. But I think building more nuclear power plants is the obvious solution to the potential problem, were it not for irrational fears.

So your bringing up extermination of the natives is extraneous to the current argument. The conflicts that you mentioned were not between the companies that were given charters to exploit the resources in the Americas...they were between political entities, either colonial powers or independent countries formed in the areas after populations moved in. I'm talking about earlier than that when companies like the Hudson's Bay Company (which I was surprised to learn still exists) and the Virginia Company and Plymouth Company and others were given charters to develop the infrastructures to exploit the resources of the new world. These guys weren't fighting each other. And when the American Congress and Abraham Lincoln wanted to open up access to the West, they did it with the Pacific Railroad Acts that authorized giving the rights of ways and lots of adjoining land to the Union Pacific, Central Pacific, and Southern Pacific Railroads as economic incentives. It was extremely effective. And these companies weren't fighting wars with each other. And when we needed to access the mineral wealth of the country, Congress enacted mining laws that gave companies and individuals the ability to file claims on federal land as long as they were actively exploiting the resources from that land. Yes, there were small scale conflicts between prospectors and claim jumpers, but not major wars. The government gave them the economic incentives, and they got the job done. This would not have happened if there were laws saying that all the goodies out west were the property of the American people and needed to be shared equally...there would have been insufficient economic incentive for those resources to be developed, so they would have sat there. The asteroid belt and the Moon are huge places, and there's plenty of room for lots of companies to go in and exploit the mineral wealth that we need back here on Earth. Some people have said it's NOT economically viable to get resources from space... my response was that you give out the charters to the companies that want to try, and I'm willing to bet they will succeed. Will countries that eventually claim jurisdiction over these areas when they DO prove profitable (or political entities that eventually form in space once enough people move out there) butt heads over the areas? Quite possibly. But I'll tell you what's CERTAIN (because it's already happening): If you limit people to just the dwindling resources we have on Earth, there will continue to be wars on the planet over those resources. Getting resources from space will decrease the pressures to fight over resources here at home. And giving economic incentives for people and companies to exploit those resources is how we can get this done (and by economic incentives, I don't mean paying them to do it...I mean letting them try to do it on their own and letting them keep the bulk of the profits they make). Get people out in the rocks and let them get filthy rich, and we all get extra resources. Plus, we get out of the cradle and start spreading people around so one Big Rock can't kill us all.

But Laythe does not have a low surface gravity. It's surface gravity is over 5.5 times that of Ganymede or Titan, and even more than double the surface gravity of Mars.

The DigFish is fine. The thing about tsunamis is that the height of the wave is quite small out in the open ocean...it only grows large as it approaches the shallow water near the shore. The word "tsunami" comes from the two Japanese words for "harbor" "wave", because ships would head out to sea to do some fishing, not notice the tsunami at all as it passes them out in deep water, and then return back later to find that the harbor has been smashed by a giant wave. I haven't named any additional islands.

When I crash landed in the old demo, and nothing survived but my capsule, I used to roll torque to drive around for a while. Pretty silly.

Long-term Laythe Mission - Part 8 TL;DR version: Something different. Update woes. Tsumani 0.20 hits. I suppose it's foolish to try to do a long term project in an Alpha game that could change file formats radically at the drop of a hat, but such is life. When KSP updated to version 0.20, I continued to use version 0.19 because I needed certain mods, such as the Kerbal Alarm Clock mod for keeping track of all the ships I have coming and going between Kerbin and Laythe. And it never hurts to wait a bit so some initial bugs can get squashed. So I didn't try to update until after version 0.20.2 came out and some of my needed mods had been updated. I read that the file formats were supposed to be "backward compatible" so I had hope for a good result. So I naively copied over my persistance file and fired up the new version... and a huge number of my spacecraft vanished in puffs of smoke. Ah. Let's check the KSP forums... Ah. It seems that when the parts from a mod are not available, the ships just get removed. Ah. And it seems that Squad changed the folder structure for where parts go, so I didn't even have the ones I installed if they were in the wrong place. Ah. And some of the older parts could work, but you have to edit the their part.cfg files and insert "Part {" at the beginning and "}" at the end. OK... I can handle this. So after multiple attempts, I got most of my ships to survive loading. Huzzah! The ISA Mapsat mod wasn't available, so a couple mapping satellites vanished, but I can live without those. The Damned Robotics door hinges haven't been updated, so a few Folding Fido rovers vanished from the Mün, Minmus, and Laythe...and the one on Laythe was the only one that concerned me...so I built a hingeless version of the rover and snuck it onto Laythe with persistence file editing...hopefully the boys won't notice the difference, since they have a newer rover to use, anyway. But my big problem was the Dishy JEB 9000 units that I have been sticking on ships that I've spread all over the Kerbol system. These are nice little parts that my friend George first told me about for adding MechJeb to your ship without having to attach a honking big ugly part. And they look like a HAL 9000 interface...so cool. And if I want to post a craft file, I don't have to worry about it having a non-standard capsule part to mess other people up...I just pull off the JEB 9000 part. Dishy released a Bill 9000 part that interfaces to MechJeb 2.0, but that didn't help me having all those JEB 9000 units everywhere. I found that I could install BOTH MechJeb 1.9.8 and MechJeb 2.0.8 (in different places) and Bill 9000s and JEB 9000s would both work...but I was leary of having both versions of MechJeb installed because I thought they might argue. In the end, I took the cfg file from the Bill 9000 folder, placed it in the JEB 9000 folder, and then edited all the "Bill" references inside it to "Jeb" or "JEB" references (careful to capitalize properly in all places as needed)......and the JEB 9000 units now seem to link to MechJeb 2 just fine. I think...since I haven't tested it much yet. The last problem was that changes in the terrain on Laythe resulted in one of the rovers (with Kurt and Nelemy inside) appearing UNDERGROUND...and exploding when I tried to do anything about it. To fix this, I just moved the rover to a safe location in version 0.19 before updating to 0.20. Now I probably have lots of my old landers and landing site marker probes on various planets that will show up underground and explode...I haven't checked them all yet. But the Laythe Mission hardware is up and running! So let's join the crew on Laythe as see how the update went for them. It's after lunchtime at Laythe Base and Kurt is in the bottom Laboratory level analyzing some soils samples, Thompbles and Aldner are in the middle control cabin level checking on the satellite data readouts, and Nelemy is up in the top sleeping quarters level reading a magazine. Then the Base begins to shake rhythmically. Aldner: "Hey, Nelelmy! Knock it off! Nelemy: "Dude...It's not me...I'm not doing anything!" The Base begins to shake violently. Thompbles: "Quake! Hold on!" (He and Aldner grab loose equipment to restrain it) Kurt: (from the hatch below) "Hells! Hells blazes!" After several minutes, the shaking subsides. Thompbles: "Is everybody OK?" Kurt: "Yes!" Nelemy: "Yo!" Aldner: (nods) Thompbles: "Looks like we actually get to try Kurt's emergency plan. Everybody head for the SSTO!" The boys pile out of the Base and run for the rovers as dust settles. Thompbles and Aldner use the old Folding Fido (which they don't notice appears to have had all its hinges damaged in the quake, so they no longer function. But no loss). They climb aboard the SSTO and Kurt starts flipping switches as Aldner reads off the emergency launch checklist to him. Thompbles calls up the data links to the Ocean Probes and starts analyzing wave height data. Nelemy stays in the open hatch and scans the waters of Fido Bay for any activity. An alarm blares. Thompbles: "What's up?" Kurt: "Autopilot system is giving me a 1202 alarm. It may have been damaged in the quake." Aldner: "Try SCE to Aux." Kurt: (flips switches) "No joy. 1202." Thompbles: "I thought you didn't use the autopilot for ascent on this ship." Kurt: "I don't...but if we need to target a return trajectory later, it would be handy. But the other systems check green. We can launch on your mark." Thompbles: "Roger. Just hold. Nelemy, anything?" Nelemy: "Dude...not a thing. No tidal waves. If anything, the water level is going down." Aldner: "Crap." (Moves to hatch alongside Nelemy with binoculars) "Hmmm. I think he's right...but it a very small decline. Anything from the probes?" Thompbles: "There's possibly a very long wavelength signal, but it's not large. Centimeters, maybe. It's down in the noise. But it's showing up in the data from both Ocean Probe 1 and DogFish, heading this way." Nelemy: "Dudes! Wave coming!" Aldner: "Hmm. Not too big...maybe one or two meters. What's the elevation here?" Kurt: "We are at 18 meters elevation, a little over half a kilometer from the shore." Thompbles: "Kurt, spool up the jet engines. Minimum power." Kurt: "Roger. Spooling up jets. LV-T45 ignition circuits are hot." (the roar of the wave is joined by the rising whine of the jet engines) Aldner: "The wave has reached shore...coming in." Nelemy: "Dude, the old Fido Pup probe just got swamped!" Thompbles: "Aldner? How does it look?" Aldner: "Hold. Hold. The wave is slowing... It's not even going to make it halfway here. Retreating now, Skipper." Thompbles: "OK. Kurt, cut the jets. But stay ready." Nelemy: "The wave has washed away that narrow peninsula at the mouth of the inlet. It's completely gone! Whoa." Thompbles made the crew wait in the SSTO for the rest of the day as he monitored wave data from the Ocean Probes. But nothing else came. Below we see the Fido Pup rover probe, which had been sitting happily along the shore of Fido Bay for 15 years, floating in the inlet after Tsunami 0.20 passed. The next day the crew checks over all the equipment at Laythe Base. The first thing Aldner did was check out the BirdDog, and then he tried docking it to each of the two GasStations to see if he could get good dockings after they had shifted position during the quake. Aldner: "Yo, Commandant Thombles, sir! Good news." Thompbles: "What is it Aldner? BirdDog and GasStations check out fine?" Aldner: "Indeed they do, Oh Prophetic One. One of the docking booms that I was able to use on GasStation 2 no longer fits, but the other two now work." Thompbles: "Sounds good, Aldner." Aldner: "I also checked the cargo container on GasStation 2. The remaining cargo in there all shifted in the quake. It's a bit of a mess, but I don't see anything damaged. And I found the flag that was buried in back." Thompbles: "That is good news. At least after all this mess we can finally have our flag planting ceremony." Aldner: "Aye, aye, Cap'n. I'll bring it back with me after I do the reconnaissance flight." The land around the Laythe Base area had shifted somewhat, but the stretch of land to the west that Aldner used as his landing strip still looked moderately flat, with perhaps a few new ridges. Takeoff was no problem. Aldner: "Laythe Base? You Copy?" Thompbles: "Yes, Aldner. Anything to report?" Aldner: "I'm over the mouth of Fido Bay. The tsunami sure did a number on the coastline here. That peninsula that Kurt named Macydean Point is completely gone. And there are now two small offshore islands instead of one...and a tiny island between them. Good thing Kurt and Nelemy weren't still sitting there in their rover...the land elevations appear to have changed quite a bit." Below, Alnder flies over the inlet by Laythe Base that was reshaped by the tsunami. In the meantime, Nelemy has used the remote control systems to coax the Fido Pup probe out of the water, using most of its remaining RCS fuel. Aldner lands the BirdDog, gasses it up at GasStation 2, grabs the flag, and heads over to the Base. Our intrepid heroes gather outside the Base module for a solemn ceremony. Aldner: "Here's the flag, Captain!" Thompbles: "Thanks, Aldner. I want to say that I'm very honored to be here working with you gentlemen. I'm proud of how well you all handled the potential crisis today. I plant this flag to commemorate our first outpost in the Jool system. We came in peace for all kerbalkind." Kurt: "Hear, hear!"" Thompbles: (plants the flag pole...flips the catch to release the flag.) Nelemy: "Whoa! Dude!" Thompbles: ... Kurt: "Very nice. That's our flag, is it?" Thompbles: "What...the...hell? Is this some kind of joke, Aldner?" Aldner: "Not by me. Nice flag. Good speech. Very moving." Nelemy: "Hey, look! There's a postcard attached. (snags it) 'Dear Aldner. Here's some special flags to mark the best spots on Laythe. Be sure to give the regular ones to Thompbles. Love, The KSC Gang.'" Aldner: "Ah! Then there must be other flags in the cargo container. No problem. You want we should take this one down?" Thompbles: (ponders the flag) "...Mmmmm...No. I think we'll keep this one up for a while." And so ends another adventure on Laythe, and a successful transition to a new version. (And a tip of the hat to Chobit389 and Trekkette for their fine "Postcards from Laythe" site.) Brotoro's KSP Mission Web Pages