Keldor

I wasn't really talking about muti-body assists - I was talking about the case where you get a gravity assist from the destination body - something like Kerbin-Moho-Moho, where the first Moho encounter slows the craft down so that the second time it comes around it can insert into orbit more easily. The trick is to figure out the proper altitude to fly by at in order to get into a resonant orbit relative to the Sun, so that you encounter the destination again. The limitation to this technique is that the closer your orbit is to the target body, the longer you have to wait for the second encounter. I really wouldn't want to try this with Eeloo:D.

Two things missing: First, gravity assists from muns on the way to some other planet. Kerbin has a very convient mun which could provide an assist to just about anywhere, provided you time your ejection correctly. Second, what about gravity assists from the destination body? The Messenger probe (I believe) to Mercury used not one but two gravity assists from Mercury to slow down enough to be able to enter orbit. This is acutally much easier to model, since you only have to calculate what height to perform the flyby so that the gravity assist slows you down or speeds you up just the right amount to enter into a resonant orbit of some sort, where you can then either insert into orbit the next time you come around, or else use another gravity assist to an even closer resonant orbit.

Just moving to double precision would not improve physics, performance notwithstanding. The size of the time step dwarfs the precision limit even in single precision, meaning that the simulation error comes from too few iterations, rather than anything to do with precision. Remember, single precision is accurate to parts in a million (and double precision is accurate to parts in a trillion). As an aside, floating point works in scientific notation internally (base 2 of course), so 0.000000167892 and 183642000000.0 would both have the same number of accurate digits (about 6-7). Anyhow, 64-bit simply lets you address memory beyond 4GB, so the main benefit would be the ability to use more mods and/or higher resolution textures across the board.

I can only conclude that they managed to lock the keys inside the capsule.

Let's see... Fix the anomolies so they're not buried. 64-bit engine. Biomes for everything. Fix science exploits (they're already doing this ^.^) Less urgent: Aerodynamics! More planets. Long term science experiments. More science experiments in general. Stuff I'd like to see in the plugin interface: Ability to create Planets. Override physics - i.e. so we could create a new physics engine. Access to the rendering pipeline.

Since they're kerbals, I imagine that you often have a countdown like this: 10... 9... 8... 7... Screw it, just launch! Clearly there needs to be a button for when Jeb gets impatient and launches the rocket with 3 seconds still remaining in the countdown!

Hmm. Bill. "Koustin, we have a negative on that parachute. Is this likely to cause a problem?"

That's a very interesting idea, assuming of course that it wouldn't screw up orbits of every craft orbiting Kerbin.

Yes! Let's just hope that they remember to store the tools on the *outside* of the space suit this time.

Circularization burn for my solar-stationary probe. Ion engines take *forever*.

Pol!! Gotta love those spiky ridges! Also, low gravity and eccentric orbit are fun.

Bill Kerman Kouston, we appear to be missing our parachute. Is this going to be a problem?

Well, with Jool, you probably want to visit/land on the moons. These orbit in the prograde direction, which may prove inconvient if you're orbiting retrograde .

Fusion bomb is actually sort of a misleading name for large thermonuclear bombs (thermonuclear is also misleading, since you want to minimize heat for as long as possible to allow the fissile materials to compress further). In actuality, they use both fission and fusion, each complementing the other. Generally, the purpose of the fusion component (tritium and lithium-6 deuteride ) is to release a large quantity of neutrons, which serve to accelerate the fission of the various uranium and plutonium components of the bomb. (It's a bit more complicated than that, if you want to read up on it, check here). The fission usually releases the majority of the energy.

Breaking an asteroid into small pieces would generally improve the situation for a very simple reason: the atmosphere will absorb much more of the enery from the fragments. The reason is simple. Drag is proportional (more or less) to surface area, and by breaking up the asteroid, you increase the surface area. Make the pieces small enough, and they will end up impacting the ground at around terminal velocity. The question then is how much energy the atmosphere is capable of absorbing before turning into an oven and baking us all. From what I've read, the big extinction events are not caused so much by the impact as by the dust kicked up into the air. This suggests to me that for a reasonable sized impact - certainly for anything small enough to actually be blown up - that dispersing the energy into the atmosphere would be the best option. Mind you, if you broke it into fairly big pieces, then instead of say one 3 km asteroid, you could end up with 20 1 km sized ones, which would not be an improvement, since they are still big enough to retain most of their energy through the atmosphere, and since blast radius is proportional to the cube root of yield, the overall area directly destroyed would be much greater. Anyway, nukes would be the best way to try to redirect an asteroid, since they have the highest ISP by far of any reaction we're capable of creating. The larger yield ones would be best, since the key to making a more powerful nuke is not so much making them bigger as getting the plutonium compressed as much as possible in the first microseconds of the explosion. This gives rise to things like two stage nuclear warheads, where you effectively have a small nuclear explosion just to compress the second stage of plutonium, thereby giving a much more powerful overall explosion. During the 1950s, when the nuclear arms race was focused on yield, you had monsters like the Soviet Tsar Bomba, which theoretically had a yield of up to 100 megatons, though the version that was actually tested had been modified to reduce fallout, and "only" had a yield of 50-60 megatons. More modern construction techniques have reduced the weight of bombs, with the highest effeciency at around 5 megatons TNT/ton bomb weight. Back of the napkin calculations tell me that oxigen+hydrogen rocket fuel has 3-4 times the energy density as TNT, so a nuke should produce on the order of (assuming 50% of the energy hitting the asteroid) an ISP on the order of 250,000,000s. For launch systems, the Saturn V would have about what it takes to launch a high yield nuke to the asteroid. They built 15 of them in just 6 years, for the cost of a single launch being about 1 billion of todays dollars, but if you were to turn the whole global economy into making them (and if you knew of a massive asteroid coming at the earth, you would!), I dare say you could produce upward of 1000 per year, or perhaps even considerably more with mass production. Given a large amount of head time, you could definitely deflect an asteroid of significant size. The real problem would be calculating the orbit of said asteroid accurately enough to know it was going to hit you. If you get that wrong, then at best, you just wasted an unimaginable amount of resources. At worst, you could deflect the asteroid from an orbit that just misses into one that actually hits the earth.

Patching leaks Reassembling rockets Inverting accelerometers Cutting budgets Lobbying kongress Applying duct tape (come to think of it, we already have one like this) Investigating unplanned incident Revising mission plans Lithobraking Fishing out dropped screw Tweaking cosmological constants I fully support these ones already suggested: Switching SCE to AUX Stirring oxygen tank

Note the part about "haven't touched the ground yet". I had a problem with a kerbal randomly popping while jetpacking around on Pol. He was about 30 feet up in the air at the time.

I want to develop a plugin that completely replaces local spacecraft physics, since I think I could significantly optimize (multi-threading, GPGPU) it's performance as well as removing the Kraken from certain aspects of physics (energy conserving timesteps, Jacobian iterations?). In order to do this, I need to disable the game's built in physics. Now, I know I could save part positions every frame, then on the next one, revert them and calculate my own physics, but clearly this wouldn't allow for any performance enhancements! What I need is a way to disable it altogether, so that the calculations are not performed at all. Is there a way to do this? Would simply setting PhysicsSignificance=0 to every part do the job, albeit hackishly?

Honestly, I'd love to see Squad move to Minecraft's model of mod support, which does in fact permit decompilation. It seems to work fine for them! I for one would love to do infrastructure mods - i.e. rewrite/replace the physics engine, add cool graphics effects, and so forth. The only real issue I see could be the possibility of Unity's license preventing this, though a clear seperation of Squad's code from Unity engine code might fix this. Anyhow, I think adding modable planets would be of moderate difficulty to the devs. The tricky thing would be getting it to work with procedural generation, but even then, a simple callback into either Squad's code or a plugin should suffice. Except for the space center, but it could be a special case. A planet definition would have a structure something like this: Planet name Orbital, rotational, scale, gravity, sea level and atmospheric parameters, ect. Texture and heightmap paths Points of interest Various special rendering and other flags, parameters Procedural generation callback (can be overidden in a plugin) Special handling callback (intended for difficult special cases where direct access to game code is needed, e.g. Duna easter egg. Probably not overridable) Many fields would be optional, and unrecognized items would be ignored, so that later versions of the game could change and add things without breaking too much.

Both my Moho and my Eeloo landers looked pretty much like that, though they might have been two tanks per LV-N rather than one (I really don't remember). In other words, that thing is likely to be able to get just about anywhere you want.

AFAIK, courage effects whether they tend to get excited vs. terrified for a given amount of danger. Stupidity determines how "emotional" they are about it. That is, a kerbal with high stupidity is likely to just sit there with a blank face.

1 user to point out that halogen lightbulbs are brighter and more energy efficient. 4 to argue over economics of lightbulbs, using terms such as "price brackets" and "user demographics". 1 to note that halogen lightbulbs produce "harmful UV radiation". 3 to argue over whether the amount of UV produced by the bulb is significant and/or actually harmful. 1 to showcase a home-made skin tanning station using halogen lightbulbs. 1 to bring up blacklights. 3 to post pictures of parties where blacklights were used (along with copious amounts of alchohol). 1 to bring up how prohibition of alchohol didn't really work, and how we should likewise rethink bans on other drugs. 13 to engage in narcotic flamewar. 1 mod to roll back last 72 posts of flames and throw out a couple bans for good measure. 3 users to discuss the technology behind blacklights, and contemplate just how high an electromagnetic frequency could be reached through gas fluorescence. 1 to proclaim that flourescent lightbulbs are much greener than other types. 3 to complain how flourescent lightbulbs hurt their eyes and are too dim besides. 2 to suggest that "natural light" flourescents work better. 3 to complain that those also hurt their eyes. 1 to point out that flourescent lightbulbs contain mercury, and thus can't really be environmentally friendly. 5 to argue about just how much mercury is actually present, and whether that amount could be harmful. 1 to note that "natural light" flourescents actually use xenon, rather than the mercury found in must flourescents. 2 to argue that since flourescents have been used in office buildings for years, that they must be completely safe. 1 to suggest LED based bulbs as an alternative. 1 to complain that LED lights, having narrow band emissions, have the same light quality problems as flourescents. 4 to note that both LEDs and flourescents are expensive and return to the "price brackets" and "user demographics" arguement. and finally, 1 California legislator to skim the thread, and use this as a sole basis to draft a new law banning several types of lightbulbs.

From another forum--seems applicable to... well, maybe any forum... How many forum users to change a light bulb? 1 to change the light bulb and to post that the light bulb has been changed 14 to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and how the light bulb could have been changed differently 7 to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs 1 to move it to the Lighting section 2 to argue then move it to the Electricals section 7 to point out spelling/grammar errors in posts about changing light bulbs 5 to flame the spell checkers 3 to correct spelling/grammar flames 6 to argue over whether it's "lightbulb" or "light bulb" ... another 6 to condemn those 6 as stupid 2 industry professionals to inform the group that the proper term is "lamp" 15 know-it-alls who claim they were in the industry, and that "light bulb" is perfectly correct 19 to post that this forum is not about light bulbs and to please take this discussion to a lightbulb forum 11 to defend the posting to this forum saying that we all use light bulbs and therefore the posts are relevant to this forum 36 to debate which method of changing light bulbs is superior, where to buy the best light bulbs, what brand of light bulbs work best for this technique and what brands are faulty 7 to post URL's where one can see examples of different light bulbs 4 to post that the URL's were posted incorrectly and then post the corrected URL's 3 to post about links they found from the URL's that are relevant to this group which makes light bulbs relevant to this group 13 to link all posts to date, quote them in their entirety including all pictures and signatures, and add "this." 5 to post to the group that they will no longer post because they cannot handle the light bulb controversy 4 to say "didn't we go through this already a short time ago?" 13 to say "do a Google search on light bulbs before posting questions about light bulbs" 1 forum lurker to respond to the original post 6 months from now and start it all over again.

Hrmm... What about a contact binary?

Jebediah: Elect me and I'll make sure every child gets their own rocket! Bob: If you elect Jeb, he'll give dangerous rockets to your children! Bill: *30 seconds of blank, indifferent staring* My name is Bill Kerman, and I approve this message.