Brotoro

You need to right-click on the maneuver node.

But, just like Jeb, we arose from the ashes.

Ah! I did not notice that that was my leet post. A picture to remember it: And I'm just 2 points away from hitting 500 reputation. EDIT: And I just passed 500 reputation. A good day for Brotoro.

I dropped the rock in at a few different places to see what it did. On one of the videos I saw, an asteroid crashed into the ocean and apparently disintegrated. With my Tug slowing this guy down to (I think in that case) 130 m/s, the asteroid survived splashdown and sunk to the bottom (but I could still see it through the water). The ship was obliterated, of course.

That's true…not only do the nuclear engines not have enough thrust, and are therefore unsuitable for landing the rock, I did spread radioactive debris all over the courtyard of the building. Oh well: Fission Chips for supper in the astronaut cafeteria tonight, folks! I still have a quick save with the asteroid in low Kerbin orbit…so I'll try building a proper asteroid lander (and leave the nuclear tug up in space where it can be refueled/re-used chasing other asteroids). (Although with an impact speed of a little over 100 m/s, the fuel rods may be mostly intact after that impact, so the cleanup might not be horrendous. And I do have emergency parachutes on those nuke nacelles for emergencies…I should see what happens if I deploy them on the way down.)

To capture my first asteroid, I used my standard Nuclear Tug (now with The Claw!) launched on my standard Reusable Rocket (now with many fewer struts, plus extra nose cones!). I goofed up a little and didn't catch the asteroid until a little after its periapsis, but I got it into a huge orbit and then shifted its plane to equatorial (it had about 60 degrees of inclination to start). The asteroid was a Class 2. Once I got it in the equatorial plane, I used about a dozen aerobraking passes to drop it into a 130 km x 100 km orbit over Kerbin. The multiple aerobrakings were tedious, but saved fuel. Then I had fun deorbiting it. The two nukes could slow it down into a nice vertical descent, but they didn't have the oomph to soft land the beastie, so it crashed at about 100 m/s. This destroyed most of the Tug (which was unmanned), but the asteroid survived. I wanted to drop it on the SCIENCE buildings (because those guys always ignore me), but instead it ended up as a decoration outside the Astronaut Complex. Must sleep. I can post more details later.

To capture my first asteroid, I used my standard Nuclear Tug (now with The Claw!) launched on my standard Reusable Rocket (now with many fewer struts, plus extra nose cones!). I goofed up a little and didn't catch it until a little after its periapsis, but I got it into a huge orbit and then shift its plane to equatorial (it had about 60 degrees of inclination to start). The asteroid was a Class 2. Once I got it in the equatorial plane, I used about a dozen aerobraking passes to drop it into a 130 km x 100 km orbit over Kerbin. Multiple aerobrakings was tedious, but save fuel. Then I had fun deorbiting it. The two nukes could slow it down into a nice vertical descent, but they didn't have the oomph to soft land the beastie, so it crashed at about 100 m/s. This destroyed most of the Tug (which was unmanned), but the asteroid survived. I wanted to drop it on the SCIENCE buildings (because those guys always ignore me), but instead it ended up as a decoration outside the Astronaut Complex.

My account blew up like Jebediah was pilot. Lost a couple hundred posts and 18 rep. Happily, I had copies of my longer mission reports, so I was able to re-post them after the recovery. To Squad and the Mods: Good job on keeping things running smoothly since then!

All the Êž's are disappearing from the Êžerbal space program forums? I can taÊže a joÊže.

Because somebody put up the money to fund it. Its real name is the "Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel".

I'm also currently on hold, because the new surface refueling ships I want to send out to Laythe in my next launch window will use the Claw. I've made the ships with empty FL-T200 tanks as stand-ins for the Claw so that I could check alignments, etc. …so I just need the Claw to arrive.

Somebody posted a thread about this (back in December, I think), and he was getting a much greater lag effect from debris and other ships (outside of the rendering range) than I would have expected.

I didn't previously see Z-Man's videos (I was playing with my gyro and posting my comments when he posted them), but that was the behavior I was expecting to see. But my gyro was on a shorter string and ended up in a different mode where the gyro's attachment point was circling around below the suspension point with the gyro's axis pointing radially outward from the attachment point.

Wouldn't it take just over 84 years for someone at my starting point to see me land? It's going to take just over 42 years for me to get there (in their frame of reference)...and then another 42 years for the light showing me landing to reach home base.

So... I took out my gyroscope. It is a pretty crappy gyroscope, because it's just a toy. And I tied a string to one end of the axis. Then I spun it up... held it with its axis horizontal and the string vertical...and let go of the other end. What I saw (after repeated attempts for verification), is that when released, the gyroscope will precess and therefore rotate around its center of mass. This rotates the endpoint of the axis where the string is attached away from being directly below the support point...so the string is no longer vertical. This results in a horizontal force (provided by the string's tension). So the gyroscope started moving sideways (roughly perpendicular to the direction of its axis). It was also precessing, of course, so it continued to deflect the string, which continued to provide the horizontal push that sort of 'chased the gyroscope around the circle' making a larger deflection until things stabilized with the gyroscope circling the center point as it precessed, and the string providing the centripetal force needed. My gyroscope doesn't run long enough or smoothly enough for this all to be pretty, but I saw nothing mysterious about what it was doing.

The rocket for my Apollo-style mission is not meant to be close to a Saturn V in appearance… only in operation (link in signature).

As I recall, most of the RORSAT reactors are still in orbit. After the end of the operational lifetime of the nuclear powered radar reconnaissance satellite, the reactors were boosted into high orbits for longterm storage. It's only when the mechanisms for boosting the reactors into high orbit failed that the reactors reentered (or one was a launch failure).

There isn't any up there that is going to "reenter at any moment." We know where the stuff is. But the Soviet Union did inadvertantly crash a few of their satellites containing RORSAT reactors to Earth. A couple went down into oceans, but one spread debris over Canada in 1978. The Soviets paid Canada three million dollars for the necessary cleanup that followed.

I saw a T-shirt once that said: Mathematicians know 2+2≠4! …which I found amusing

1 + 1 = 10 (There are only 10 kinds of people: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.)

The Wiki lists the 6-hour day of Kerbin as its sidereal day.

It turned out that the ring around the asteroid was just Whackjob testing his new Asteroid Launch Vehicle... Artist's conception of ringed asteroid:

Astronomers Discover Ring Around Asteroid …but it turned out that Whackjob was just launching an asteroid back into space from Kerbin's surface! Below: Artist's conception of the new ringed asteroid:

Doesn't 0.23.5 have an adapter that mates 2-meter parts to the new bigger size parts?

Yes, I would expect this to be the result of an impact. Or at least I can't think if a more likely explanation.