AngelLestat

I am agree with K2, I read many methods already simulated with cern software which can achieve 0.6c isp, I read other papers how to achieve even 0.99c (pure photon rocket). But the biggest problem of antimatter is not the engine.. never was.. The real problem is how to storage and produce big amounts of antimatter in the first place. Those are the 2 main issues which are very very difficult to solve with our current technology and knowledge level. And any practical craft using antimatter would not be made in this century from what we know so far, so it does not qualify for the topic.. Anyone who has a better idea than a solar sail probe at 0.07c + brake in destination, please tell me how to achieve it in this century.

I vote yes (and I am sure of that), because interstellar travel for me count as the first probe mission launched to another star without taking into account the arrival date. A solar sail interstellar probe that reach 5% to 7% of light speed is not so difficult to achieve, it can also brake using a similar maneuver in the star destination. With all instruments printed in the same solar sail, in can be super light, plus the solar sail can act as parabolic mirror for comunication.

Ok true, fossil fuels is not a technology, technologies breakthrough were those able to exploit with ease the fossil fuels, as the internal combustion engine. heh ok. ok.Why you use those english quotes as argument in the first place? also you know that my english level does not include english common abbreviations or phrases But well, this is not the place to make arguments, just to analize why some people are pessimist or optimist.

I was answering to PakledHostage too.. you dint notice it?

Ok, is true, but is not very realistic invest money in an unsustainable way. So a good comparison is sustainable money income vs talent. Ok, I was not thinking in interstellar travel. But a manned interstellar travel is at hundred of years away, any prediction with so large time spawn worth nothing, is like try to predict weather with 50 days ahead. So being pessimist or optimist does not change the fact that both are being silly in their predictions. Besides the paradox may be wrong in its hypothesis, maybe interstellar travel is not necessary, maybe communications are different, there are many logic aspects which can asnwer the question "why is so difficult to make contact if the universe is full of live". He was talking of general progress, and you change the answer to technological progress.But even technological progress follow a exponential trend if you join those point leaps, population growth and new technologic tools helps to discover more things each year compared with previous years, patents growth exponential. Your aerodynamics example is also incorrect in this subject, you can not measure technology progress by single branchs, is a whole. Once you discover how the forces act over a bounce spring, there is not much left to discover in that matter.

Why so many people mention the Fermi Paradox in this thread? Is not very related... And it does not work to make a point either Sorry if I cut part of your posts. Track records or Rome are not good parameters to make predictions. For example in rome there was none game changer technology, the Oil age by the other hand was a game changer technology who allow the exponantial grow of all world cities in no time. To make a good prediction we need to analize all the logics steps under the current technology and the closest new technology. Then we need to analize all the logics steps in economics, politics, etc. I am not saying that nobody do that, but from my experience everyone just used them as a constant which is a simplification that brings errors in the final prediction. Of course things not always follow the most logic path (what is good for humanity), that is why nobody can be very accurate in predictions, but logic choices are slightly more likely to happen than bad choices.

That is not a rule, it will not be expensive and hard for always.. You are thinking that the NASA way is the only way... Is impossible to be less cost and time effective than that.

No, just the opposite, the pessimists make in fact bad predictions based on ignorance, they just project the current space progression time line which is something very silly to do. Those 45 years of space inactivity are based in many factors which does not follow a trend line. There are many aspects that will grow exponential after certain changes. Many of those pessimist ignore technology changes, business / economics, political and public interest. Also sometimes people is just pessimist because they always bet against new things, that way they have less chances to be wrong when they want to give an opinion without bother in use their heads first. But you need talent more than money to be successful in something.

Topic Update: The first steps of some of the things that I defend and predict in this topic are being taken. 1- "trigger 2 days ago" The United States’ Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted U.S. patent number 9,016,622 for the cargo airship’s ‘Flight System for a Constant Volume Variable Buoyancy Air Vehicle,’ with Onboard ‘Control-of-Static-Heaviness’ (COSH) Management. The receipt of this patent marks a game-changing advancement in the field of aviation. http://www.intelligent-aerospace.com/articles/2015/05/aeros-patents-cargo-airship-technology.html 2- "1 day ago" A new Congressional bi-partisan Cargo Airship Caucus was established in the House of Representatives yesterday, Co-Chaired by Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL) and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA). The Congressional Caucus will work to hasten the takeoff of the cargo airship industry in the U.S., an infrastructure independent mode of transportation, in support of military, economic, national security, diplomatic and environmental objectives. Both Co-Chairmen explained their motivations for leading this initiative when announcing the caucus yesterday, stating: “Modern cargo airships have nearly three times the fuel efficiency as air transport alternatives, and can land in very remote locations,†said Congressman Brad Sherman. “They have enormous potential to enable economic development opportunities and accelerate export logistics, expand U.S. capabilities in disaster relief response, and drive greenhouse gas reductions in aviation.†“The recent advances in airship technology are exciting, and the Caucus will help illustrate the breadth of benefits enabled by cargo airships’ efficient and infrastructure independent operations, including benefits to military operational tempo and mission flexibility, enhanced delivery capability, and operational cost savings,†said Congressman Tom Rooney. Members of the Cargo Airship Caucus will collaborate to accelerate deployment of modern airships capable of efficiently delivering hundreds of tons of large equipment, vehicles, containers, or other cargo virtually anywhere. For the military, this new generation of airships has the potential to revolutionize the future of intra-theater airlift, greatly increasing heavy cargo lift capability, reducing the logistics footprint in theater, reducing dependence on foreign airbases and ports, reducing the effectiveness of anti-access strategies employed by adversaries, and radically changing the hub and spoke logistics structure to one of point-to-point delivery. The cargo airship’s introduction to global logistics is expected to reduce operational constraints on future heavy-lift, radically reduce energy use for aircraft operations on a ton/mile basis, permit high-payload operations directly into austere locations with little infrastructure, increase delivery speed for cargo shipped by boat, and reduce the need for intermodal transport to move cargo from origin to point-of-need, with corresponding reductions in delivery time. More in the link... http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/03/prweb12575714.htm 3- FAA's Relaxed Drone Rules, FAA chief Michael Huerta signaled the agency’s openness to approving beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations and announced a couple of research projects aimed at demonstrating their safety. http://fortune.com/2015/05/08/faa-drone-rules/ http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-drone-patent-delivery-plans-2015-5 It will be just matter of time for companies to realize the powerfull combo that these 2 new transport technologies can give us.

Is possible? What happen when my main rocket keeps its curse to orbit, can a autopilot guide the booster and landed close to the KSC even if I can not longer see it? There is a script for Kos that work like this? There are 2 mods that help with booster recovery, the one that I use is "Flight_Manager_for_Reusable_Stages" which is cool but with manual flight is always hard, also I need to do this for both boosters. The second mod is "stageRecovery" but it just recover things with parachutes included in a not realistic way, which is the same than nothing. It will be nice to have a mod which we can set some action groups and parameters (as retro burn) and then use the engines to land at certain coordinates. "Smart parts" mod can help in this.

Ahh now I understand, so my quote is the thing that the official version does, and DRE fix it. It seems that I dint read very well the same text I was quoting well good work, I will test it in few days when more mods reach the 1.0 status.

Sorry if this was explained before, in that case I would love to be pointed to the answer.I know that 100kw distributed between 100 kg is very different than between 1000kg. But that heat conduction to other parts is not instant, so not sure what you want to explain with this example. Also a 1000kg craft with little surface difference in comparison with a 100kg craft will reach lower atmosphere layers at higher speeds. Or your comparative is just between heatshields mass?

I am agree with TomTheHand request, in case they are possible.. About the gap between heatshields and decouplers, maybe is possible to do the same than official heatshields and decouplers do in 1.0 If you put a decoupler under a heatshield, it creates a tiny skirt (fairing) to hide the gap.

But 45 years pass... We have new materials now, all electronics are much lighter, engines are lighter, etc.20 tons for 4 crew is more than fine.. And I bet they carry more equipment and they will travel more confortable.

I dont think that might be a good idea. Space exploration data is not related with the majority of hardware components used to achieve space exploration. Is like pretend that the space agency is the only thing in the whole kerbal sociaty. The discoveries you made in ksp world, is just a way to represent how data collection and research may help to develope new technology, but this new technology may come from any place. But in ksp we can only measure the science breakthrough from the agency perspective as an average parallel to the other science branch.

Is that a joke or you want to point a serious case in reality? From what I know.. an active accretion disk will be the exception, not the rule of today super massive black holes, when we see quasars, there are all supermassive black holes with an active accretion disk and a jet particle stream pointing to us. But that is because we are seeing the first billions of years of galaxies, when they had a lot of gas to consume. Also I dont see how can you fall in a super massive black hole, the galaxy is huge in comparison, and you only fall if your periapsys is super close.

You can use sea water to get hydrogen without extra complications, but even if you use potable water there is not difference, the amount is nothing compared to the amout of water we use for irrigation or different industrial process.

If the elon musk claim does not include a time period about when this will happen, then it has a 100% chance to become true some day.

To the ksp members that are always talking about mars and the best way to achieve it, here you have your oportunity to make a real contribution. https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/9933746 The award for the best idea is 15000U$S. It's a shame that is not for Venus clouds PD: They have also this other challenge (passive and active radiation shielding) that is kinda related to the mars challenge. https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/9933638

Hi mrsolarsail, I thought that maybe I could find an equation that might help you to plot the orbit prediction with less cpu, but I was wrong. The equation that I remember works only for 2d spiral trajectories over a choosen ecliptic, but not all possible orbits works over a choosen eclipctic, in fact we can float over the polar region of the sun if we want. The equation that I was mention was this: http://ccar.colorado.edu/asen5050/projects/projects_2004/tetzlaff/ 3.0 Background and Conceptual Development of Logarithmic Spiral Trajectories But you know a lot more of this than me, so I doubt I will be able to help. For those that wants to check the same function, "propagateOrbit" is in Preview.cs, perturbOrbit is at SolarSailNavigator.cs as is mention. I found some papers that deal with solar sail navigation centered in planets. They are all kinda hard. Also papers about how to calculate the best time launch to interplanetary transfers. Yeah that, and some intermediate tutorial resume about how a solar sails work.. The solar sail wiki page goes deep into details, it will be nice a quick resume to satisfy those with a small curiosity on the topic. Some info to add to your solar sail part mod the day you make it, in case you want to leave this plugin for a more general purpose. I will make a small tutorial so you have an idea of the things that a noob like me might find intesting for a first quick read. That maybe helps you to make your solar sail introduction text. I am not, sorry I never code in C++ or any code oriented to object, with the PHP exception, but without much experience either. There is a IRC channel that all ksp moders use. Try to ask there. I only can help you with the appearance of your http://flightschool.solarsails.info/ page if I found time later. Edit: I still dint test the new version, I wil try later.

What you mean by perform research over multiple flights? To resume all the things I said, my only suggestion is to have a way to include dynamic conditions and a point based progress on data collection, not sure how hard or easy is this from the mod perspective.

I like what you want to accomplish here, but I am not sure to understand the whole mechanism. In the real world, the data that we collect helps to make discoveries, but some time we can make discoveries just pushing researchers to work more hours with less data. Lets imagine that we need to improve our climate model (which is science), for that, each extra data of a different condition that we gather will help us to develope the model, the data that helps us to comply this might be temperature and pressure from differnet height and locations, also from other planets (a good climate model should work for any planet), more data we have, more easy is to improve the different levels of a climate model. Lets imagine that the climate model study has 10 levels, to increase each level requires X data points, data that is very similar does not add much extra points, we can also invest fund or other means to increase levels without the need of much data, or we can increase levels with a lot of data and less investment. Other studies may be effect of gravity on kerbals, this will require many different kerbals, experience different G levels and exposure times. Then studies in space station needs to require a scientist, but each scientist will add certain max data in certain time, then to get more data you need to contract another scientist and remplace the other one. So to allow all this, we need an easy way to set conditions. If we need to set each condition and we need to accomplish one by one then is not much different than the current ksp science system, we need to have dynamic conditions. For example: we add a data point for all measures with a certain difference in height or value, and the data worth more depending how different their values are. This will be easier for the community to design new science objectives.

I did a quick read on your code searching something as trigonometric functions to see how you make the preview, but I could not find it.. If you have time, can you point me the code line and the file? Nice page you have there. You are a solar sail fan or you work with something related? In that tutorial is not mention how the solar sail move and how to realize the most basic maneuvers. I can try to make a resume if you want. About a realistic attifude control mode sound great, but not sure how much time would take to the sails to turn, those are days that may change severely your preditions. Yeah I saw that in solar sails books, you can extract the same image from those, they have a better perspective were is easier to understand the reference frame. Ok, so you use higher angles as a way to "throttle down" instead add 90o sections on the orbit? I hope you can find moders willing to help you with the new parts or models that you may need in the future. Take care.. Any thing that you need, ask.. Maybe I would not be able to help you, but we never know..

welcome to the forum.. Thanks for the news.

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA ok you said it all. Lol, you dont realize that your same argument is giving me the reason to me? Our you really think that the JWST should cost the same than the LHC??? Yeah I dont wanna hear the answer... Is that your argument? Incredibly precise?? So they are very good doing calculations.. Why they estimate the total cost on 1.2b to 3billions when the design was finish? Why in the 2000 they did an estimation that it would be launch in the 2007 to 2010? Incredibly precise? The same goes for telescopes in earth.. they are much much bigger, they need adaptive optics deforming mirrors in real time, they are all build in top of montains, many in earthquake zones, as all those in chile. The country with the hardest earthquakes on the world, they need to counter the earth rotation and temperature variations. You can add the cost of the hardest things about JWST and still is impossible to reach that cost, at least you are dealing with the most inneficient way to do things. I only know this, just for the Exterior cladding of Burj Khalifa, 380 engineers was involve. In the peak construction time, there was 12000 workers (all categories) in the site. ???? There always was a world competition about who had the tallest building. It was always very tight, they always break records with few meters of difference until the Burj come. From 500 meters, they go to 880 meters. And you think that it does not require any new technology? ...... You have not evidence.. Also you will not find all the people who work in the Burj or JWST with their respective salaries to compare, also is pointless, because we knew that all that money was spent due 18 years of time lost. What I want to said, that this could be done by 1/10 of the price if somebody as Elon Musk would be in charge, he knows how take care the money. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There is something very wrong about how NASA is doing things. The missions needs to be time-based, get back to 'acceptable risk' and allow NASA to shuck off the modern 'zero defects' mentality and the tentacles of bureaucracy and regulatory constraints that infect much of government-funded science. Take a look to the SSC project, costelation program and all other programs who was canceled but this failed way to do things. In nasa all scientist are delusional about that does not matter how much time or money they spent due its inefficiency, they think is all justified. Nasa keeps in secret all the missions who had to be skipped due the extra money spent by the JWST. 20 years to plain a mission is not acceptable! I am sure that with all the new tech discoveries done in that time, they can redesign the whole telescope to comply the mission with a much more cheap way to do it. And many of you are defending that same inefficiency that would harm the same NASA and it will delay all new missions.