Brotoro

Being generally intelligent, I can't understand why astronauts would have to be calculating their ship's delta-V values when this should be a job for the engineers back at KSC. But perhaps I'm mistaken.

Well, the Tsar Bomba was supposedly a three-stage design...which is why I mentioned it. As was the American B-41...supposedly.

No, you do not understand how a thermonuclear explosive works. The output from the fission primary is focused to compress and heat the fusion secondary (the high energy neutron output from this secondary can be used to produce additional fission, if desired). The output of the secondary can be focused to set off a third fusion stage...so it is possible to make a very large design using multi-staging.

I guess Magic Torque wheels are very dense pieces of equipment.

I was eeally hoping Squad would change things so that the kerbal's specialty class was stored as a setting in the save file, since they did that with the flag that determines the ... of the kerbal. Alas, no.

I was surprised to see this happen to Kurtjmac.

I want large inflatable heat shields, too.

OK. Below is a trajectory plot for a Jool encounter. I already did the fine targeting maneuver at the descending node here before I quicksaved, so I have put in another maneuver node to show you the prograde/retrograde & radial/antiradial tweaking. For the next image below, I shifted my point of view to Jool by pressing the Tab key repeatedly until I was focused on Jool, and then I oriented the view so that I could see the far-off maneuver node in the background. You can see that my trajectory is currently set up for an encounter with Laythe tangentially to its orbit. If it wasn't set up already, I could tweak the prograde/retrograde and radial/antiradial and normal/antinormal handles on the maneuver node to get the trajectory into about the right area. OR, since I have the Precise Node mod installed, I could directly edit the maneuver components in the fields of the dialog box (or left- or right-click the buttons to increment the values by the amount selected in the dialog box). The next image below shows the effect of decreasing the prograde by 0.01 m/s...the dotted line would be the result of that change. This has the effect of swinging the trajectory out a little, and it also has the effect of causing the ship to arrive at Jool a little bit later so that Laythe is further along in its orbit: In the next image below, I show the result of instead INCREASING the prograde by 0.04 m/s. The dotted line shows that the resulting trajectory would swing inward a little, and would also result in the ship getting to Jool a little sooner so that Laythe would not be as far around in its orbit. So even small changes in the prograde/retrograde component can make a big difference in the arrival time and where Laythe will be in its orbit (because this maneuver is being done a LONG TIME before the encounter). The maneuver can certainly be done closer to Jool (even within Jool's SOI), but at a higher cost in delta-V. So if you tweak the prograde component, you can get your ship to arrive when Laythe is at the right place in its orbit. BUT your trajectory might not be hitting that point. SO you need to adjust the radial/antiradial component to swing your trajectory in or out as needed to hit the spot. It requires making many changes to the prograde/retrograde and radial/antiradial components to arrive at the right place at the right time...but it's fairly easy to do with Precise Node. The next image below show the effect of INCREASING the RADIAL component by 0.04 m/s. The trajectory swings inward a little, and the encounter with Laythe occurs a little earlier. And the final image shows the effect on the trajectory of DECREASING the radial component by 0.04 m/s. The trajectory swings outward a little, and the ship encounters Laythe a little further ahead in its orbit. And as shown in a previous post, if you miss Laythe's atmosphere (even on the side further from Jool), you can get a gravitational capture (although at a periapsis of 21 km, this would result in an aerocapture -- I later tweaked the aerocapture altitude to 43 km to get the capture orbit I wanted around Laythe).

The wiki says Kerbol has a surface temperature of 5840 K...so, yes, I would expect it to look white like our Sun. Unless the wiki is incorrect.

Surely they just pull a little extra angular momentum off of the reaction wheels to do the gimbaling. Why have more that one source of Magic Torqueâ„¢ onboard?

The air is compressed, forming a shock wave (the ship is coming in faster than the air can get out of the way). The compression heats the thin layer of air in front of the ship, which radiates about half of its energy into the ship (since it's quite close). You also get a sheath of hot, ionized air streaming back around the ship, and I would expect about half if the radiated energy from the sheath to radiate inwards (although I wouldn't expect this gas to be as hot as the layer in front of the ship). It doesn't matter if any particular atom quickly slides past the ship along the shock front...you still have a continuous stream of excited atoms radiating energy inward. But I too don't understand what "convection" has to do with it. I would think that energy radiated from the shock front and energy conducted in from the shock front through the boundary layers of air around the ship would be the source of heating the ship. - - - Updated - - - This is certainly true.

Ha, ha. Have a kerbal snack.

I sent a test payload to Laythe for aerocapture...a new Big Advanced Nuclear Tug with a random payload stack (something made for Duna, actually). Below is the trajectory (focused on Jool) after the fine-targeting maneuver made at the descending node (which happened to be a moderately short way out of Kerbin's SOI). Once the ship entered Jool's SOI, I used the RCS to tweak the intercept altitude to a bit over 43 km (MechJeb was indicating a post-aerocapture apoapsis of 3,000 km for that altitude). The aerocapture had lots of flames, but showed no overheating. Note that this Laythe intercept was nearly tangential to Laythe's orbit, which is the best case situation because the intercept velocity is minimal that way (this is what I normally shoot for). The actual apoapsis after aerocapture was 2,500 km instead of the intended 3,000 km. The heating did indeed seem to show up very suddenly once the ship dipped into the outer edge of the atmosphere (under 50 km), so the atmosphere doesn't seem to fade out gradually, but instead cut off sharply at 50 km. CONCLUSION: Direct aerocapture at Laythe is possible without special heat-shielding designs if you use a tangential intercept.

What determines whether or not a gravity assist will speed up or slow down a ship depends on how the directions of the ship's incoming and outgoing velocity vectors compare to the direction of the velocity vector of the body you are encountering. If the outgoing vector is closer to the direction of the planet's vector than the incoming vector was, then the ship will be sped up by the encounter. If the outgoing vector is further away from the direction of the body's velocity than the incoming vector was, then the ship will be slowed down by the encounter. So if you are coming in tangentially to the body's orbit (the ship's velocity vector is in the same direction as the body's velocity vector), then the ship will be decelerated by the encounter if the ship passes on either side of the body (since the outgoing vector will be bent further away from the planet's velocity vector). By shifting the path to either side, you can try to get as close as you can to a desirable post-encounter orbit. For an example, see the "Tricky Tylo Transfers" section of Long-term Laythe episode 31. I had sent in a payload for Tylo, intending to use a weak aerobraking at Laythe to slow it into Jool orbit (without stopping at Laythe)...but I found out that a near miss of Laythe (with no aerobraking at all) resulted in a gravitational capture with a periapsis out by Tylo. See the image of the capture trajectory. The same thing happened in the "But Wait, There's More! Maneuver Mayhem!" section near the end of Long-term Laythe episode 35 when the Pol and Bop payloads arrived. Again, I had originally thought to use aerobrakings at Laythe to slow them into Jool orbit, but instead shifted them into Tylo gravity captures (now that I understood gravity captures better). The capture trajectories are shown.

Both planets were easily in the field of view using a 25mm eyepiece in our 8-inch Celestron.

Setting up a Tylo or Laythe gravity capture into Jool orbit is not as difficult as you might think. The trip out to Jool takes a long time compared to the orbital periods of those moons, so just increasing or decreasing your travel time by altering your trans-Jool trajectory can get you there at the proper time for the encounter you want. You just need to tweak you prograde/retrograde in combination with your radial outward/inward components (while focusing on the Jool system as you tweak the distant maneuver node in the background) to see ho this changes things. I usually do this targeting burn just after leaving Kerbin's SOI. The prograde/retrograde component will shift your arrival time, and the radial component can be used to target the encounter. You want to arrange for the encounter to be tangential to the moon's orbit...and the distance you pass by the outside of the the moon will determine the resulting capture orbit around Jool. I play with it until I get an acceptable result (I like the Precise Node mod for the fine tweaking)

Some places I've been, the drivers seem to think it goes: Green light means 'Go', Amber light means 'Go Faster', Red light means 'Two More Cars'.

I love the Physics. I love to rendezvous. I love the landings. I love the crashes too. Creativity... all the things I can do. Boom dee ah dah. Boom dee ah dah. Boom dee ah dah. Boom dee ah dah. Boom dee ah dah. Boom dee ah dah. Boom dee ah dah. Boom dee ah dah. I love moar boosters. I love SSTOs. Experimenting... to see just how it goes. But I'd be happy with a refueling hose. Boom dee ah dah. Boom dee ah dah. Boom dee ah dah. Boom dee ah dah. Boom dee ah dah. Boom dee ah dah. Boom dee ah dah. Boom dee ah dah.

I think Frybert is correct.

I ran a test by sending a payload off to Duna (I Hyperedited the ship into Kerbin orbit, then sent it to Duna as usual). When it arrived at Duna, I followed MechJeb's aerobraking advice and targeted it at a periapsis of 19.something km with the intention of capture into an orbit with a periapsis of 2,000 km. When I had done this previously (back in 0.90) the aerocapture showed no flame effects at all. In 1.0.4 the aerocapture was very flaming. None of the parts overheated (but it's easy for me to not notice the little red indicators). The ship survived without problem, and it ended up in an orbit with an apoapsis of 1,800...so MechJeb (a recent development version) was not horribly off, but is much worse that it used to be at predicting aerocaptures. I play with stock settings, so the entry heating slider was set at whatever its default value is.

So the plane's nose should be kept 7-8 degrees above the prograde marker on the navball? Is the actual angle of climb unimportant?

The semi-major axis (a) is half of the long axis of the ellipse. For a circular orbit, it's just the radius. For a satellite orbiting the Earth in a circular orbit, it's just the distance from the center of the Earth to the orbit.

Hate? Nothing. And I certainly don't HATE anything enough to require capital letters. I am embarrassed for Squad at the sloppiness of the SAS system, and very frustrated by the continued existence of many venerable bugs (especially the fact that I can't play for a long time before the game freezes), and disgusted by the Bad Rocket Science of hot nuclear engines, and disappointed in the number of bugs that make it through testing, and unmotivated to do complex missions because the parameters of the game won't settle down... things like that. But I have gotten lots of things I've wanted for a long time in recent updates, so I'm not unhappy. Now if only they'd do something 'brilliant' like give me surface refueling hoses. I have confidence that Squad will get all this figured out by the time they are ready to release version 1.0.

Squad just needs to give use some useful parts that need radiators: Bimodal Nuclear Thermal Rocket engines (which can be used to generate electricity when not being used for thrust); and a compact nuclear reactor that can be used to power deep space operations.

I looked for that change in the release notes, but was sad when it wasn't listed.