MockKnizzle

Well sure, in the context of the events of the film that's fine. I'm not saying that McConaughey should have changed the past, but rather that his positioning as the sole savior of humanity is a bit of a stretch for me given that the 5-D future-humans are portrayed as having nearly godlike powers. It's not a quibble with the internal consistency of the narrative, but with the writer who decided that Cooper's love for his daughter was somehow the key to saving humanity. I suppose this kind of incredible coincidence is par for the course in any movie, though.

I really enjoyed the visuals (who wouldn't?), I thought the acting was pretty good, and the astrophysics and orbital shenanigans (the KSP-esque docking sequence especially) were pretty refreshing for a Hollywood movie. But the whole movie left me with a big, giant question: why did the entire movie need to happen at all? If the 5-dimensional future-humans were powerful enough to create a wormhole around Saturn that led to 12 different habitable planets, as well as manipulate space and time in such a way as to allow Matthew McConaughey to communicate backwards in time to Murph and then subsequently bring him back from beyond Gargantua's event horizon... why could they not just solve the whole problem in an easier way? Why not just communicate the necessary data to Michael Caine so he could complete his magic formula and save everyone the trouble? Or the secret to eliminating the "blight" that's poised to de-oxygenate the atmosphere? Or even just inform NASA of the existence of Edmunds and arrange to teleport people straight there?

I uploaded the pictures to an Imgur album, then linked the album using the [imgur] tag. My launch platform is so big relative to the size of the lander and SM because I was only allowed to use the LV-1 engines for a challenge. They're rather inefficient, especially for a lifter, necessitating lots of fuel.

I'm not sure if this thread is more so focused on the price of ships, but if we're talking physically small then I have a craft I put together for a challenge a while back. Just because you limit yourself to the tiniest engines in the game doesn't mean you can't accomplish big things

Are you starting with a command pod?

Maybe it's to keep the dust off all the important bits inside?

My interpretation is that he imagines the plasma bubble to be analogous to the air trapped under a hovercraft's skirt - a region of high-pressure fluid trapped between the vehicle and the ground that provides the necessary lift. A hovercraft contains the high-pressure air underneath itself by blowing a relatively small volume of air at high velocity through slots in the bottom edge of the skirt, creating a curtain of air that traps air inside (just like the air-curtain doors that some supermarkets use to keep their conditioned air inside when the solid doors are open). The vehicle only needs to move a relatively small amount of air to maintain both the air curtain and pressure in the plenum, and thus requires significantly less power to hover than a momentum-based helicopter. Theoretically, an electromagnetically contained, pressurized plasma plenum would keep a vehicle aloft the same way - but good luck trapping it beneath the vehicle for any useful length of time. Electromagnetically containing plasma is already difficult enough in the lab, and when you need one side of your containment vessel to be the ground, you make that job essentially impossible. Now, you might then decide to re-think the idea and pressurize the plenum with regular air, and have the skirt be the fancy bit: maybe you use your ionized air as a "plasma curtain" instead of an air curtain. This seems slightly more practical to me, but again, creating and controlling the plasma curtain is a big problem. Regardless, I'm still left with one giant question... why would you ever want a plasma hovercraft instead of a regular one?

I poked a hole in a piece of cardboard to make a pinhole camera and projected the image on the side of my house. It looked pretty much exactly like your second image

Isn't the entire point of cryosleep to pass long periods of time without having to experience months or years of extreme confinement and boredom? Being stuck in a ship the size of my bedroom for the years it takes to get to say, Jupiter, sounds incredibly unpleasant... I'd much rather lay down for a nap and magically be there. What could I possibly be "missing" when I'm crammed into a soup can millions of miles from anything remotely interesting?

In a nutshell, "weightlessness" or microgravity occurs whenever an object is in free fall. There are three basic criteria for an object to be freely falling: 1) The object is not in contact with the ground. 2) The object is not in aerodynamic flight or subject to large aerodynamic forces. 3) The object's engines are off. With this in mind, you can experience a second or so of microgravity from the comfort of your own home... all you have to do is jump off the roof!

As anyone who has taken some basic physics or statics will know, the location of an applied torque on a rigid body doesn't matter in the slightest. However, as ships in KSP are collections of elastically-connected rigid bodies, putting your reaction wheels on the ends of long, bendy bits can lead to wobbly-spaghetti syndrome. As long as your craft is well-strutted, you cans stick your reaction wheels anywhere.

Well, plugging in the exhaust velocity of the SSME (4500m/s, a reasonable starting point) and a dV of 1m/s into the rocket equation, I get around 1.33x10^21 kg of propellant required. That's about 10% of the Moon. Where you will get that propellant, I have no idea.

Really all you need for that kind of calculation is the rocket equation. You can pretty easily find/approximate the necessary dV for those transfers, and just plug that additional dV into the rocket equation and solve for payload mass. If you're looking for a quick rule-of-thumb, I have no idea

I don't think we would transport anything more than bacteria, fungal spores, seeds, and maybe some fish and insect eggs or something. Transporting full-grown organisms seems like a huge waste of space and weight.

In more precise terms, you're asking about what would happen if inertial mass (the mass used in F=ma) and gravitational mass (used in F=G*m1m2/r^2) of an object weren't the same, meaning that the object would be violating the Equivalence principle. My initial thought is that you could just think of it as applying a correction to the mass in question when calculating gravitational forces, in this case multiplying the object's mass by some fractional amount. The general effect would be just as magnemoe described, essentially the object would behave on earth as it would in a weaker gravitational field. Now, if this effect is extended to more than just one object, there might be some paradigm-shifting cosmological problems that physicists would need to work out, but I'm certainly not knowledgeable enough to speculate on what those might be.

Why would you waste all the fuel to haul the shuttle and its fat useless-in-space wings all the way to the moon? It's a super-pointless vehicle for that kind of mission, with capabilities that do not match the mission parameters.

Even the mockups you've shown here are miles better than the particles we have in-game. I would be all over this mod if it were implemented.

I suggest downloading and using the NavyFish Docking Alignment Indicator mod. It's a plugin that displays all the data needed for an instrument-only docking, including relative rotation angle. Just make sure the angle indicator reads 0 or some multiple of 90 and you're good to go, without needing to bother with multi-port docking and higher part counts.

I'm not sure why everyone is talking about a 50km impactor, since that's not what the article the OP linked is talking about at all. For those who didn't read, the hypothesis is that 12800 years ago the Earth passed through the Taurid meteorite complex (which originated when a large comet fragmented into millions of pieces on its way through the inner solar system), resulting in the simultaneous impact of thousands of smaller meteorites across most of North America. Most of these fragments exploded in a massive storm of airbursts (like the Tunguska event, but larger) that heated the atmosphere to temperatures so enormous that a large portion of the surface was vaporized and blown away in giant supersonic flows of gaseous rock. There is no evidence of a large crater anywhere because there wasn't a single large impactor, but a storm of many thousands of smaller ones all in a very short (seconds to minutes) timeframe. I read the entire article, and I must say that the author's analysis of the geographic evidence for such an impact storm was pretty compelling.

Finished putting together my floating base test-bed. A total of six modules: two tugs to move things around, two habitation/lab modules, a 4-way junction, and one module that I'm pretending is a desalination life-support machine. The system worked beautifully, however at 550ish parts I'm getting unplayable framerates in the less-than-5 range. Working on a new, streamlined design.

"I need to go to the store. I couldn't reach the store. Help." If the above sounds rather pointless, that's because it is. Why couldn't you reach the store? Do you know where the store is? Did your car explode in your driveway? Is there a giant wall in the way? Just like going to the store, there are many challenges to overcome when trying to go to the Mun. We need more information about the specifics of your problem to be able to help.

Working on a modular, floating base to eventually transport to Laythe.

Red Iron Crown, my assumption is that the tank with the yellow bands holds monopropellant. All this stuff sounds super awesome, especially the quality-of-life improvements like crew transfers.

It's not about KSP physics, it's about real-life physics which KSP simulates. The force of gravity is a vector which points directly towards the center of a planet. A spacecrafts's velocity is also a vector, aka prograde on the navball. While in freefall, these two vectors define a two-dimensional surface which is the plane of the orbit. Since one vector points directly at the center of the planet, the plane of the orbit must also intersect the center of the planet, and consequently must cross the equator.

The inclination of an unpowered orbit can be no less than the highest latitude you want to orbit over. If you want to orbit over, say, British Columbia at a latitude of 50 degrees, your orbit must be inclined at least 50 degrees. A consequence of this is that you also cannot launch directly into an orbit with an inclination less than the latitude of the launch site (a Soyuz from Baikonur cannot launch directly into an equatorial orbit, for instance). It is possible to have a spacecraft move as you've described, but it must be constantly thrusting northwards.