Brotoro

We extract oil from the earth using energy that comes from oil AND THE OXYGEN IN EARTH'S ATMOSPHERE.

It wasn't a proper mission, because I Hyperedited the ship to Duna orbit, but I was impressed with how my fuel-cell-ion plane handled in Duna's atmosphere in 1.0.2. I was able to easily fly the plane down from orbit and land it horizontally on the surface (which I always found very difficult to do in old versions of KSP).

In some cases, launching without a fairing (even if the fairings have proper masses) might work better than using a fairing. If you try to enclose a rectangular-planform rover in a circle, you are going to be enclosing a lot of wasted area...so a naked rover could have less drag than the large fairing. (This is why I built the rovers for my current Duna mission to have a circular planform so that they could fit in fairings once 1.0 came out.) But it depends on how many parts the rover is made of and how draggy it all is. And if you don't have to worry about the aerodynamics ripping off parts of your spacecraft (as you do with the very fragile spacecraft we have in real life) you can get away without a fairing's protection.

ADDENDUM: The fairing used on the Skylab launch (aluminum in construction) was 6.6 meters in diameter and 17.1 meters long. The complete assembly had a mass of 11,068 kilograms. So the Skylab fairing had roughly twice the mass per fairing surface area as the Titan IV fairings. - - - Updated - - - in this case, for both reasons of realism and for reasons of gameplay (and we want to encourage people to use these cool fairings after Squad went through all the effort to put them in), I think it would be best if the masses of the KSP fairings were decreased to at least match the best real-world fairings...and give them a low drag coefficient, too, or however that gets calculated in the new aero model.

If you want more data on real-world fairing masses, here are the dimensions and masses for the Titan IV payload fairings. These were constructed from aluminum. The are still available (I gather) as a "legacy" item for government projects (which I think refers to spy satellites) on newer launch vehicles, but I think most customers go with a more modern fiberglass option nowadays. The vertical dimensions in the diagram below are in millimeters measured from the separation point (SP) line at the base. The diameter is 5.08 meters (the inner diameter was 5 meters...so the shell thickness was about 5 centimeters). The names and masses of those fairings, from left to right: 50ft PLF: 3,600 kg 56ft PLF: 5,000 kg 66ft PLF: 5,500 kg 76ft PLF: 5,900 kg 86ft PLF: 6,300 kg - - - Updated - - - The narrow base of those fairings, by the way, was 10 feet (3.048 meters), so the masses of these fairings should be representative of fairings made from the 3-meter part in KSP (if the structural material is aluminum instead of fiberglass).

I exploded so many times driving around Pol, it wasn't funny. But the glitches of death seemed to be confined to one hemisphere, more or less.

Everything else in the Kerbol system should be orbiting around Magic Boulder if it had that mass

I am reminded of a post one of the moderators made when players disagreed with the announced repurposing of the Round-8, and we spoke out strongly against it. He said that our complaints about the Round-8 reminded him of all the complaining that people did when reaction wheels were removed from some probe cores...but, hey, a couple weeks later everybody had just moved on. My takeaway from that was that if we ever shut up about a problem, it will be perceived that we are OK with that problem existing.

Thank you. I hope we can all get the chance to return to Magic Boulder some day.

Huzzah!

I was under the impression that the precoolers "compressed and cooled the incoming air"...or some such, thereby making your engines more efficient abd less prone to overheat at high altitudes and speeds. And adding them to my spaceplane in 1.0 made the previously failing plane get to orbit.

I, on the other hand, would like the kerbal's profession to be a value in the persistance file that I can edit (instead of being based on the kerbal's name).

What are you going on about? I didn't say this was a scenario I LIKED...but I think it's a scenario that is LIKELY. Most people are lazy. Most people let others make the decisions. And if the machines end up doing the work well and making wonderful decisions, why would people complain? After a several generations of this, the people won't remember any other way things were done. At that point, we can only hope the machines are nice to us, because they could make us entirely useless and we would dwindle away. And they could do it while seeming benevolent the whole time.

Wow. I didn't realize the mass of the KSP fairings was that ridiculously high. Squad...please fix this. And a kerbal snack for Giggleplex.

If the planet mass is m, and the moon is a distance r away from the planet (center to center), then the circular orbit speed of the moon will be SQRT(Gm/r) around the planet. Add that to the planet's orbital speed around the star, SQRT(GM/R), and you'll have the moon's velocity relative to the star at the point shown in your diagram.

The AI takeover doesn't have to be violent. People (being lazy) will probably just hand over more and more of the work, and eventually more and more of the decision-making, to the AI beings. Given long enough (machines can wait a long time) and with gradual enough change, people will get used to anything the machines decide to do then.

Need to know the mass of the planet.

I learned a most-valuable thing from a NathanKell post: If your engines ever flameout asymmetrically, then you don't have enough air intakes. If you do have enough air intakes, your engines will flameout symmetrically when you get too high.

Huzzah! Yay, Squad!

And hopefully the mass of the fairing gets put forward where the center of mass of the fairing should be, and not just at the position of the base part. (I haven't checked yet to see if this is true.)

I don't understand the term “flutter throttle.“ Please clarify.

The reason is mass. It takes a substantial amount if mass to shield an operating nuclear reactor, and excess mass is a killer in rocketry. That's why the NERVA engine only had radiation shielding in the front. To provide shielding all around the engine would increase its mass dramatically, and you'd end up with an ineffective propulsion system.

The reactor of a NERVA emits high amounts of gamma and neutron radiation when in operation. The only direction this radiation does NOT go (nearly as intensely) is in the forward direction because the NERVA has a radiation shield built in right on top of the reactor core. Yes, the exhaust of a properly engineered nuclear engine need not be radioactive because the fuel passes through the reactor core very quickly and isn't likely to absorb may neutrons. If your materials are poor, you could get particles of radioactive material eroded off of the walls of the channels the fuel passes through in the reactor core. This stuff won't harm your ship because it leaves quickly in the exhaust, but you might want to not spew it around in an atmosphere. Better to use a design that does not suffer from this problem. Putting propellant tanks and other mass between your kerbals and their nukes will reduce the radiation flux, and distance is always your friend since the radiation falls off as 1/r2. The radiation levels would drop rapidly after the NERVA is turned off as the short-lived isotopes in the core decay away. But the reactor will still be "hot"* because the core now contains fission fragments, so I wouldn't go hug it. *"hot" radioactively speaking. The temperature in the core of a NERVA is supposed to drop below something like 500° C after shutdown.

I don't know if this counts as a bug, because the program is doing what it was programmed to do... I just have a problem with what it's programmed to do (because I'm colorblind). KSP version: KSP 1.0.2 (Mac...not Steam) A detailed explanation of what happened and what you were trying to accomplish: I was trying to build a fairing, and was clicking like crazy but couldn't get the fairing point to place a cross-section. It turned out that this is because I can see the "[LMB] Place Cross-Section" text changing from gray to some yellowish color, but I can't see that sometimes the yellowish color is orange (apparently) and sometimes it is green (or so I was eventually told). A screenshot of your craft or any relevant screens Is it orange? Is it green? I couldn't tell there was a difference: The ouput_log.txt or player.log file KSP creates when it launches and, if applicable, the crash log KSP has generated when the program crashed Not Applicable A detailed list of system specifications Not Important here, I think. I would recommend that Squad fix this particular aspect of the interface to avoid frustrating their colorblind customers. If the cross-section can't currently be placed, the TEXT should CHANGE (not just its color) to indicate why. Also, your choice of prefixes here doesn't have one that really applies here (perhaps something like [colorBLINDNESS] would work)

Nicely done. I give unto thee a kerbal snack.