tomf

When leaving Minmus the prediced orbit in Kerbins's SOI is incorrect. Starting with a rougly circular, equatorial prograde orbit if I use the standard escape of ~190 m/s with the burn in the middle of the kerbin facing side of minmus I should end up with a kerbin orbit with a low PE. However the orbit line was rendered showin an orbit that escaped Kerbins SOI. Playing around with the manuevre node I found the one shown below which claimed a PE at Kerbin of ~80km. Orbital mechanics tells me this is incorrect. And when I executed the node and warped out of minmus's SOI I found myself on a Kerbin escape trajectory as I would have expected. This screenshot doesn't show it terribly well but I was prevented from creating a better one by a variety of other bugs

R, the same as for RCS on craft

Wait, that's a feature? Genius!

It's an electric current that scotius was talking about. I think it is hypothesised that the electric charge on the substrate makes it easier for the coals to build their skeletons. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrified_reef#:~:text=An electric reef (also electrified,Goreau in the 1980s.

Ooh, I have an idea that is at least good enough for sci-fi. Strangelets are particles consisting of roughly equal up, down and strange quarks. They are hypothesised to be stable because 3 flavours can be in a lower energy state than only 2 flavours for larger groupings. My entirely unknowledgeable hypothesis (1) is that the same will apply to up, down, anti-strange. This won't anihalate with regular matter as the anti-strange can only anihalate with strange quarks. So you have one fuel tank full of anti strangelets, and the other with regular strangelets, mix and boom! You do have the possibility of your whole ship turning into strange matter but if that was really a problem we would know about it already. (1) based on reading the Wikipedia page on strangelets just now

Most extrasolar planets aren't detected by transits but by monitoring the Doppler shift of the parent star. If a star cycles between moving towards and away from you with a regular frequency then that is due to it orbiting around it's common barycentre with a planet. This works as long as your aren't too far of the ecliptic. I believe our solar system would be close to the limits of current detection, the inner planets are to small to move the sun much and the outer planets are too far away so their period is to long to easily detect. Thats why most of the early extrasolar planets were Jupiter sized planets with a period in days.

Ah you made the classic error, at 40m the pressure is 5 atmospheres, and what are these forums for if not needless pedantry. But seriously I have tried diving in Imperial units and I can't imagine how anyone properly plans a dive. The ridiculous way Americans define the size of a cylinder, as the volume that gas stored at a particular pressure will assume at atmospheric pressure, doesn't help though.

That is an awful article, no real explanation of how it works other than "ions" and loads of nonsense about how because CO2 is used to manufacture the refrigerant it might be carbon negative.

On Eve my KSP-I fusion powered ssto works well but not as well as it does on Jool

UK English we don't normally use the word vacation so a holiday is either a day of the year with a specific name, Christmas, good Friday, August bank holiday etc or something you plan for that involves leaving your home.

I think evolving with 10 digits on our hands was the first mistake. We should have evolved 12 then we could all use a duodecimal counting system and so many of these problems would have been avoided.

Bit late on this but I think that this thread proves that ideas are cheap and you might as well come up with some new ones based on the launchers you have or will soon have.

I guess the difference is in how long they are expected to spend checking that that ship has worked ok Vs time spent doing moon science stuff.

You seem to have missed my point entirely. Little damage was done because people worked hard to ensure that the problem was fixed in time. The media might have posted some silly stories but that is what they always do. The bug is so often used as an example of "experts cry wolf" when really it is an example of "grown ups identify a problem and work together to fix it instead of squabbling like children, denying the problem exists and trying to blame someone else"

Like everyone involved in IT I find this meme deeply irritating. There was a problem with potentially serious consequences, people took it seriously, a lot of people worked very hard and the problem was averted. If only that could be said for the other crises affecting mankind.

Correct except that it was "the best bang" said by eccentrica galumbits about zaphod beeblebrox. Which reminds me we should probably add improper use of an infinite improbability drive to the list of potentially interstallar civilization ending disasters. And cricket.

Wow that might be the biggest bang since the big one. It sounds like it was powerful enough to destroy whole galaxies. Even a galaxy spanning civilization may not be entirely safe.

To elaborate I would get the sma of the current orbit and use vis Viva to get my velocity at pe, then I would get the sma of the desired orbit and calculate the required velocity at pe

It's helium that people breath of the need to go deeper than 50ish meters, the nitrogen that is normally in air starts to have a serious impact on your brain around that depth, a lot like being drunk. The old Cousteau documentaries had him and his crew living for an extended period at 30m depth. They were even smoking down there.

The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles -- kingons, or possibly queons -- that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed. Terry Pratchett, Mort

Does that make the moon a medium planet?

The whole polar bears are black thing is just people trying to appear superior by knowing something. The skin may be black but their fur is clearly white. Sure there is a reason why their fur is white but that is true of everything. Supporting xkcd

That isn't the Roche limit, the Roche limit is about how close a secondary body can orbit to a primary body before the tidal forces pulling it apart are stronger than the gravitational forces holding it together. On the rapidly spinning body, close to breaking up - it would be very oblate, the apparent gravity at the equator would be very low while the gravity at the pole would be more normal for a body that size. Aparent Gravity would always be perpendicular to the floor so things wouldn't roll away to the equator. A throw from the equator with 0 inclination would return to hit you on the back of your head if you didn't dodge. Any other inclination would land somewhere though

I think the question is can a planet spin fast enough that it's equator is traveling faster than the velocity required to orbit that planet. The answer is no, the planet is simply going to disintegrate. On the scale of planets there is no force that is going to be able to hold the planet together. An asteroid held together as a single rock could spin faster than its orbital speed. To land on it would be a matter of grabbing hold as it whizzed by, or landing at the poles.

.For capturing as I mentioned above getting that Delta v to point in the right direction that is hard, and is related to the velocity of the assisting body. Imagine a very massive but distant and slow assisting body orbiting at speed V. We can get a good angle of deflection if we wish, but that just leaves us in almost exactly the same orbit just going the other direction with a 2v difference. E.g a previously prograde hyperbolic orbit about the primary is now an only very slightly less hyperbolic retrograde one. We could go for a smaller degeneration angle but then the Delta v of the assist is limited.