stibbons

Percussive deceleration. It's the kerbal way.

Oh, I didn't realise the RT flight computer let me rename things. That should do nicely.

I have a few box sats with temperature probes in a polar Mun orbit to complete temperature scanning contracts. The tiny little box whizzing over at 7.5km altitude really is a sight to see. But the problem I have with them is that I can't rename them. They were all launched at once, created as subassemblies that I attached to a larger ship with TR-2V decouplers. Now they all have the same name and presumably the probe core is the root part. But the probe core is fully enclosed and I can't right-click it to change it. I guess it's possible for a crewed mission to go and intercept them and open them up. Any other suggestions to rename them short of editing my save file? Would also be interested in ways to prevent this happening again. Is it currently possible to use an Infernal Robotics hinge to open/close the maintenance cover?

Then you'll know that ckan already supports metapackages.

[entitled tears intensify]

You might want to check again. NSW definitely doesn't get the extra day this year, neither does Victoria. Not sure about other states.

Nice try, boss.

Video still isn't loading for me. Still uploading? typo in the link?

Elite: Dangerous claims to use a realistically-sized replica of the Milky Way. EVE has on the order of 5000 star systems. The original Elite had 8 galaxies each with 256 star systems, in 1984. The Kerbol system arguably has a much broader scale than those games - as far as I'm aware it's the only one with fine terrain detail on any of the bodies. But for sheer size, not even close.

Sure. The only real limit is how much time and money you're prepared to invest in it. Any respectable flight simulator exports all of the telemetry data you need. For KSP, mods like Telemachus or KSPSerialIO (the one I use) export telemetry and accept commands. KSPSerialIO's data packet includes heading information in all three dimensions, but not acceleration vector info, so a full motion simpit might be pushing it. For now. But check out the custom hardware / simpit repository thread for some of the impressive hardware people are building for it. X-Plane has very detailed data packets it will send via UDP. More than enough info to fling a pilot around, as well as light up a full display panel. The Orbiter forums have what looks like a rich simpit community. Flightgear, perhaps unsurprisingly, seems to have a completely customisable and extensible IO subsystem. And at that point I gave up googling. Building actual hardware is where it gets fun. I'm not going to pretend I know much about the details. But using what looks like parts sourced from eBay and scrap yards.

Will be starting a new career, and the only mod that's really compulsory for me is KSPSerialIO. Won't be spinning up a new game without it. Apart from that I'm happy to play vanilla, slowly adding in my usual mods as they get updated. Looking forward to seeing how the new resource system works, and whether or not I still want to use Karbonite.

That seems as relevant as all of your other arguments.

"it doesn't look like real life!" -- people describing a video game about little green people flying around an imaginary solar system

The target orbit has little animated dots running around it to indicate what direction to go. Are you going the right way.

Get the Texture Replacer mod, and use it to replace the skybox with a pure black image.

If you're not yet, try getting your satellites in to place and then edit your save file. Make sure they all have the same semi-major axis, and they'll all have an identical orbital period. The thing with floating point numbers is that their precision varies depending on how large they are. This is pure speculation because I'm not sure of the scale, but I suspect the smaller mass and orbits of the Mun just mean that small errors turn up in the calculations a lot more than they would for Kerbin.

I'd assumed that would be happening. Nice to see confirmation.

We already have rich and complicated resource gathering and refinement mods (personally I'm a fan of Karbonite combined with TAC Life Support). They won't be evaporating.

Comms with the computer happens over the Arduino's USB connection.

Built my first atmospheric plane that works fairly well in FAR. It's ugly, but has decent range and I can usually land it on the second or third try. This afternoon it's taken me to all of the monoliths on Kerbin, and I'll probably try for a couple other anomalies while waiting for trans-munar missions.

Not really. If you want to talk about raw wholesale bulk $/kg, then that article is right. The ~$10000US figure is an approximate cost for putting a cubesat in LEO, including all of the non-payload hardware. And, at a very rough guess, the weight limit after the chassis and control gear is a pound, give or take.

And the web wasn't made for threaded conversation (what's wrong with a damn mailing list?). Yet here we are. Just because you don't see the point doesn't mean it isn't useful.

Obviously the Doc knows best.

Most if not all Cubesats currently hitch on ISS resupply missions, and are essentially thrown out the side of the space station. A 1U cube, being 10cm a side and no more than 1.3kg, will cost around $10 000US give or take to get to LEO this way. Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat

That would be very, very boring. Instead, go and have a look at the Community Cubesat people, who are working towards putting a real satellite in orbit.