Brotoro

On a sadder, yet more amusing note, on my first-ever flight in Kerbal Space Program, I sent Jeb on a suborbital lob over the ocean.......without a parachute. I thought they were a built-in feature of the capsule.

I forgot the parachutes when I sent my first rover to Duna... ...so I quickly added parachutes to the backup rover (which I'd obviously preparred just in case) and sent it off in the same launch window. What happened to the rover without parachutes? I landed it on Ike:

And here I was counting on you to ask them when they'd be implementing pintles and gudgeons.

The flux capacitor is what makes kerbal babies possible.

Good...I missed your 'not'. Regarding the direction that the particles bombard Laythe: I expect that the north/south movement of the particles (as the go back and forth between getting pinched at the Jool's magnetic poles) is much larger than the motion of Laythe through Jool's magnetosphere, so the particles would preferentially hit the poles of Laythe. Certainly the devs COULD make the game less fun by taking away the oxygen from Laythe and making it a radiation hell-hole, but they don't HAVE to do that. The KSP universe is indeed scaled down. And while this requires them to make the planets and moons have a mysteriously high density (at least for part of their interiors), it also gives the devs to opportunity to use a magnetic field strength for the tiny Jool that will allow kerbals to cavort with abandon there, and give the players more interesting places to visit.

Also, regarding light levels on Laythe, I don't think things are as bad as you think. Laythe is 5 time further from Kerbol than Kerbin is, so it gets 1/25 the illumination. Assuming that the devs want Kerbin to have roughly Earth-like lighting conditions (32000 to 130000 lux at high noon), then Laythe would have 640 to 5200 lux at noon. This classroom I'm sitting in right now probably has a light level of around 400 lux (considerable more than your typical living room lighting of 50 lux). So you are not going to be stumbling around in the dark on Laythe.

I don't think you are reading that map correctly. I've been to both polar caps on Laythe, and they are both very near sea level. Also, Laythe clearly has more than a trace of oxygen, since our jet engines work as well there as they do on Kerbin, so Laythe probably has about the same partial pressure of oxygen as Kerbin. PLUS, you keep assuming that diminutive Jool has the same strength radiation belts around it that Jupiter does, whereas I think it unlikely that such a small planet would generate such a field.

Jupiter is 447 times the mass of Jool.

Why would you want to compare equal LENGTHS of the different materials? What matters is the mass of air or water between the radiation source and you, not the amount in an equal length. On Earth at sea level, the mass of atmosphere above you is equivalent to the mass of 10.4 meters of water. People underestimate the mass of air. The air in a cylinder that encloses the Eiffel Tower has a greater mass than the iron structure of Eiffel Tower itself.

I like that 'Armstrong' is a verb.

I'm not sure what you mean. Emilynn and Hellou ARE the names of those kerbals now (since I edited the persistence file). They had some mundane kerbal names to begin with in the list of astronaut applicants, but I went in and edited them in the persistence file so that I could hire Emilynn and Hellou as astronauts.

Those names were not generated by the kerbal astronaut name generator, no. The name 'Hellou' was made up so that Aldner could name an island that (for the Scott Manley joke), and the name is made from parts of female names...'Hel' from 'Helen' and 'lou' from 'Louann'. Later, I decided to put her in the game. When I needed other female kerbal names (for waitresses, etc., whom Aldner was naming features after, and later for 'Emilynn'), I just took parts from different female names of people I knew and stuck them together (the way the name generator works in game). When the devs add the option to have female kerbals in the game (as I hope they will sometime before version 1.0) I presume that they will make an alternate database of name fragments derived from female names for naming them.

I draw the hair by hand in Photoshop to enhance your enjoyment of the story. Sort of as a demonstration of how such a feature could improve players' enjoyment of the game. Give those kerbals more personality!

I once sent a rover to Minmus that was supposed to be able to re-dock to its lander for refueling, but the gap between the lander port and the port on the underside of the rover was too narrow -- when I undocked the rover, the magnetism of the ports would re-grab. So I needed to move the body of the lander a little higher on its legs. So I went back to the VAB, tweaked all the legs a bit higher on the body of the lander, and sent it off to Minmus. And, if you are paying more attention than I was, you'll see that after the new lander touched down and released the rover.......the gap was even smaller. Because I should have moved the legs DOWN LOWER on the lander to make it's body sit higher. What a goofball.

The greenhouse effect works by impeding the escape of infrared radiation from the surface. It doesn't matter WHERE the energy came from that made the surface warm...the greenhouse gasses will still impede the infrared energy's escape to space. So energy from tidal heating that works its way up out of Laythe's crust still has to contend with the greenhouse gasses, so the surface will be warmer because of it.

Because I have the Lazor mod installed (just for the docking port camera) I also have the part it comes with that allows you to set the rendering distance to some large number... so I could have used that to allow me to bring both capsules down at the same time (although it would have turned into a huge lag-fest once they passed into range of Fido Bay and all the ships there). BUT, because Emilynn was going to make it in under the 12-hour limit, I didn't need to attempt that. Plus, extra tension. I see that as of tonight my Long-term Laythe mission thread has become the most-viewed thread in the Mission Reports forum. Thank you all for reading my little adventures.

Aurora on Laythe would be cool:

That is only an effect I was counting on the help. It's the resin that does the trick. "Wrapped in plastic...its fantastic."

That is not the case. On Earth, the atmosphere absorbs only about one quarter of the incoming solar radiation. Another quarter is reflected by the the atmosphere. About half reaches the Earth's surface, and most of that is absorbed (maybe 5% is immediately reflected by the surface).

OK. Yeah, Minmus is a different problem. But they told me it was ice... and the only way I could come up with to reconcile this was to imagine that the early Minmus (still warm after formation from radioactive decay inside) had a species of microbes living in its oceans that secreted a resin that remains to this day in the ice of Minmus. When the ice of Minmus is exposed to vacuum, the water will indeed sublime into space...but the small fraction of resin gets left behind and forms a barrier to further sublimation. Also, the ice on Minmus will reflect away a lot of the incoming sunlight, so it will not get as hot as Kerbin at the same distance from Kerbol. (Our own Earth is at a distance from the Sun where its equilibrium temperature would be below the freezing point of water were it not for the greenhouse effect of our atmosphere jacking it up another 18 degrees C or so.)

Is 5% carbon dioxide toxic to kerbals? We don't even know what the composition of Kerbin's atmosphere is (except that it contains substantial oxygen, since jet engines work fine there). Edit: Ah! You are referring to the EVA report? Yes, that could be because of high carbon dioxide levels.

How can you disagree? The Earth gets along just fine with that average heat energy impinging on its surface, so why would the surface of Laythe (and I include all the surface, even under the oceans, not just on the islands) have to be molten under that same average daily heat flow condition? The surface of Laythe wouldn't even have to withstand the greater heating spikes that the Earth's surface does when it gets bombarded with over 1000 watts/sq.meter at times...Laythe's crust just deals with the steady outflow of a few hundred watts/sq.meter.

It depends on how much heat is working its way up through the surface. On Earth we have the Sun providing us with something over 1,000 watts/square meter when it is high overhead....and it will be less when the Sun is lower in the sky, and absent at night. So a daily average of a few hundred watts per square meter (the amount of geothermal heat coming out is small compared to that, so we can ignore it). If the tidal heating on Laythe produces that same energy outflow, then Laythe would be happily Earth-warm. And it would take even less because Laythe is NOT as warm as Earth, and could have a greater greenhouse effect to help hold the heat.

If you can accept the cases where the tidal heating is only enough to keep a liquid ocean under the ice, and the case where the tidal forces are strong enough to make a molten rock surface, then why do you find it hard to accept the middle case? The tidal forces in the Jool system would be very strong because of the very close distances between the moons, so tidal heat will be substantial. Give Laythe a lot of carbon dioxide to go with its oxygen so that it has a substantial greenhouse effect to hold in enough of that escaping heat, and we are good to go.

And I am applying what we know from chemistry and astrophysics to the parameters we are given for the KSP system. That's why I said that it is NOT impossible for us to speculate about what conditions on Laythe would be like even though it is unlike any object in our experience. There is no need to imagine it being bigger than it is to apply what we know about physics.