tomf

I've been playing KSP for a few years now, and the controlability of my planes are still entirely random. My latest, ultr tight budget attempt flies ok, except that it it is only stable when pointing about 30 degrees above or below it's current velocity. With SAS on if I take my fingers of the controls it will happily sit there with the nose up gaining altitude, or the nose down losing it but I have to fight contantly to get it to stay somewhere in the middle. What am I doing wrong?

The energy lost to drag is proportional to your velocity squared. At terminal velocity the gravity drag and the air drag are equal. Any faster and the energy lost to air drag climbs rapidly and the energy lost to gravity falls slowly, and slower and the energy lost to gravity climbs quickly instead.

Control surfaces at the top of a rocket will provide turning power, but they will also tend to make the rocket unstable. Aerodynamic surfaces in front of the center of mass will want to flip the rocket and make it fly backwards, whereas surfaces at the back will stabilize it. For rotational control RCS ports should be as far away from the center of mass as possible to provide the greatest moment. It won't make any difference whether they are at the top or bottom, except that the center of mass is likely to be nearer the bottom. For using RCS for translation (sideways movement) they want to be at the center of mass or symmetrical around it.

Instead of launching with empty fuel tanks could you use fuel lines to pipe the fuel down to the first stage? That way you can make use of it instead of throwing it away.

Yes, I meant that all the mechanisms by which matter looses the kinetic and potential energy in order to form clumps would be denied to it. The supernova shock wave wouldn't have affected it and the collisions required to form solid bodies are impossible, at least with bodies composed of normal matter.

This is pure speculation, but if dark matter doesn't interact with normal matter then the affects that caused our solar system to coalesce wont have affected it. It could either me a more or less uniform cloud of particles moving at galactic orbital speeds or perhaps it clumps into it's own systems. - To tie into another thread, that would give a possible invisible nemesis causing periodic extinctions.

You don't appear to have taken inclination and eccentricity into account? http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ doesn't give moho captures for less than 3300 ish. If you were going to an outer moon of Jool your very best plan is to aerobrake at Jool until you are just captured, then at your AP (at the edge of Jool's SOI raise you PE to the correct level and then lower your ap enough to get a capture. The accuracy of the charts doesn't matter too much as there are always course corrections and imperfections so you are going to want to pack 10% extra fuel anyway.

Or you can use mechjeb's manouver node helper to create a new node at the next PE. If you want to do it without mode you can sometimes drag the node all the way round the circle until you get to the point you want.

Put a center of gravity in the center of the rock. Or better still if someone starts looking for the light bending affects of a rock you just create the photons they would expect to see appear in the eye of the observer - no time travel required.

If you wanted a single stage to orbit SRB you need to have it at least 98.5% fuel by mass, which doesn't leave you much mass for payload, casing, controls etc. mass full/mass empty = e^(delta-v/(ISP*9.8)) The delta-v required for earth orbit is around 10,000 and the ISP of the shuttle SRBs is 245.

If you were running a simulated universe you wouldn't have to fully simulate every particle. A rock that no-one is looking at with a microscope can just be a surface, a collision mesh etc. If someone comes along with a microscope you will just have to fill in some details. For the simplest simulation you only simulate one consciousness fully and fake the rest. A weird kind of solipsism - "I'm not real but I'm the only real simulated person". If you believe in inevitable technological progress then you can argue that statistically we must be a simulation. Once a civilization advances enough to run simulations of consciousness then they are bound to run lots of them, which will in turn evolve enough to run their own simulations. You have a boundless number of nested simulated universes and only one reality. The chance that we are in the real one is vanishing.

The only think LHC accidents do is waste large quantities of liquid helium, which as a buyer of helium really annoys me. Do you know how expensive that stuff is?

2. 90% of the screen is just to look pretty. All the real flying is done from the navball. Anything else will get you confused. 3. After Mun and Minimus the next target is probably Duna. I downloaded the ISA mapsat mod and sent out mapping probes to Duna and then all the other solid bodies.

I have sometimes used the hyperedit mod to put my craft on a different body. When I am done with "simulations" I launch the craft for real.

Well I make the delta-v from earth's orbit to Jupiter to be at least 8km/sec so with an Orion ISP of 4300 it is going to take 1e24 kg of nuclear bombs to push to Jupiter orbit. Might be tricky, although it is probably still less energy than the piece by piece disassembly.

If you are aiming for a polar orbit the best way is to use a conics_mode 0 and a maneuver node well before your encounter to set the projected PE at either the south or north poll of the target. Aiming for the poles from well outside the SOi is very cheap and if you can aerobrake there then you will fall into a polar orbit for free.

Plane change is a bit easier to manage - just burn prograde from kerbin at the correct time and then set up a node to correct inclination at the AN/DN. Ballistic requires only a single burn but it is more complicated to work out in which direction to point the rocket. Optimal requires the minimum dv but will have a complicated burn at Kerbin and a plane change burn later on.

The acceleration of a rocket varies over time as it burns fuel and its mass decreases. Also it makes little sense to think about the velocity over time of a rocket as it will be moving through a non-constant gravitational field. It is more usual to talk about the delta-v of a rocket, which is it's total ability to change it's velocity. For most rockets in KSP the time taken to get from body to body is a matter of what route you choose to take. The route also affects the amount of delta-v required. http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ can tell you both the delta-v required for a journey and the time it is going to take. The delta-v of a rocket is found using the /Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation, for which the ISP is an input. If you wanted to know how long it will take to do a burn, say of 1000 m/s you would plug the starting mass, ISP and dv into the equation to find the total mass of fuel burnt. time=Isp*mass*g/thrust.

Yes, the total gravitational binding energy of the earth is very similar to the fusion energy available in the oceans. As for getting rid of the rail gun itself, you build a smaller one and use it to fire the pieces of the bigger into escape. Or releasing a spring in the middle ought to generate enough force for the two halves to overcome their gravitational attraction.

As my link points out to obliterate the planet entirely is a very different proposition to merely wiping out all life upon it. The stockpile of nuclear weapons wont even be enough to kill all life - deep sea life, life in caves, roaches etc are all going to survive. If you used all the raw materials in the planet to make bombs you are just going to end up with a hot lump of rock. However by a scary coincidence if you were able to p-p fuse all of the of the hydrogen in the oceans it would be almost exactly the energy required to use a rail gun to slowly fire every single kilogram of earth into an escape orbit.

The chart does have markers for transistions for which you can use aerobraking, for which you can normally ignore ~90% if that cost. They ignore the eccentricity of the orbit as well, so if you are able to catch the eccentric eeloo at its AP you will probably end up with significant savings over the prediction.

Most of the bodies with atmospheres will have a rough guide to the DV required to get into orbit written on their wiki pages. The amount you require is going to depend upon design and piloting a fair bit but if you allow 10% more than those quoted figures you should be able to make it.

Isn't it that we don't know what is going on at the center of a black hole, Relativity predicts a point of infinite density, but at the scales involved we require quantum theory and no-one yet knows how to combine the two?

In your first picture is looks like you are trying to connect the tank to both the tank above and to a radial decoupler - this won't work, each part can only be added as the child of one parent part. If you are having difficulty attaching to the bottom of an existing tank I recommend rotating the rocket until the tank is on the side so you can have the tank in the right place while the cursor is over empty space rather than the central rocket. If the cursor is on the center at the same time as under the side tank it can get confused.