KSK

Yup - shallow re-entries are the way forward now and Klesh has you covered for the new launch profile. The new aerodynamics are great though - you can do proper gravity turns now, as in 'switch off SAS and let the rocket fly itself.' Well sort of - I tend to chicken out at about 45 degrees and fly the rest of the ascent manually. But it's still pretty cool to watch the first half of the launch!

Hopefully Unity 5 (is that the latest version?) will fix some of the OS X problems and if not, I'm sure Squad won't be leaving us Mac users swinging in the breeze. In the meantime - turning the texture quality down to half made a big difference for me. KSP doesn't look quite as pretty now but I'll sacrifice a bit of eye candy for a lot of stability any day. There's also a pretty good thread covering OS X issues on the Support forum. Hope this helps and good luck. I know exactly what you mean about leaving KSP for other games!

Getting a bit choked here - great work both of you! Love the skinny LV-902 on minepagan's Kerbin 1 - that really does look like a souped up hobby rocket. Likewise, I love Yukon's use of stock parts to give the LV-15 that cobbled together look. I've added a new section to the contents list...

A fine example of why either Internet customer ratings or numerical ratings (you choose) are usually not worth the time it takes to read them. "This game is great but because it omitted one small detail, I'll give it a zero." Because that clearly makes all kinds of sense.

Pictures of any First Flight craft - stock or modded - would be cool! And I'm really stoked about the mod! minepagan - provided it's not called Satellite 5 everything should be good. Yukon - The actual KIS launch site is at KSC, Barkton is further west i.e. close enough to provide a feasible population centre but safely distant from the rocket launches. However, the KIS facilities aren't quite what you see in-game (at any tech level). The launch pad and VAB are out of town but all the admin buildings are back at Barkton as are the manufacturing facilities. This may change eventually but at the moment, all the KIS hardware is built at what used to be Jeb's junkyard*on the outskirts of town and then hauled out to the VAB for assembly, systems testing etc. * Which, it's safe to say, has grown somewhat larger since it became Jeb's junkyard and spaceship parts company.

I'm not a physicist I'm afraid - just a chemist with a decent general science background and a good poker face. So I don't have much of a feel for power requirements either, although this website, seems to have some decent numbers and your 1200 watts looks about right. Not a problem in a lab or a hospital or anywhere you can plug them into a wall, maybe not as useful in the kinds of environments you might be looking at using them in. Doing some quick Internet digging, I found this prototype air purifier which uses microwave-thermal desorption to regenerate the various beds. For CO2 and water, incident microwave power was reported as 300W, so maybe double that for required wall plug power to drive the thing. That's getting better but 600W is still quite a lot

Just throwing some numbers out here for comparison. A really big superconducting magnet (plus its cryostat) for high field NMR spectroscopy weighs in at about 10 tons and puts out an 18.8 Tesla field. For comparison, the Earth's magnetic field is around 25-65 micro-Tesla depending on where you measure it. Safety distance from the magnet - i.e. the distance at which important stuff like pacemakers are no longer affected by the field is about 1.5 metres. Now granted NMR magnets are narrow bore magnets configured to give a nice homogenous field within the bore rather than a big 'lets pull lots of random junk into my expensive magnet' external field but even so... Magnetic repulsion over any sort of distance doesn't sound feasible.

I don't like this idea. Fair play to the OP for suggesting it and if it gets implemented as a replacement/update to the current warp-to system then fine. I wouldn't use it myself but clearly some people would. If it replaced the current time-warp system altogether I think KSP would be a lot poorer for that change. This is spaceflight. Things take time. Much as I dislike the phrase, pressing a button and skipping over most the actual flying-through-space part of spaceflight would be immersion breaking for me. Missing a maneuver node through over-zealous time-warping is annoying but no more so than crashing into the Mun, forgetting some small but essential piece of equipment, running out of fuel or power, or all the many things that can go wrong in KSP. Learn, move on, try again. Sorry, this is something of a pet peeve and not directed at the OP specifically. It's just something I see far too much of on game forums in general. Some player does something stupid and the knee-jerk response is very rarely 'that was stupid, I'll remember not to do that in future' but mostly 'OMG this broken game needs to be fixed to stop me doing stupid things.' It gets very tedious. Short answer - I don't think the current system is flawed, it just requires some care to use.

I agree with Alshain. The MPL is fine, it provides a different way to earn science points than grinding Minmus missions and using it is entirely optional. If you feel it's game breaking then don't use it. Or use it for aesthetic purposes but don't bother loading it with data. Also, there's more to Career mode than science grinding. I don't see completing the tech tree as being the end of a Career game.

With the current non-saturating reaction wheels, I see this more as a convenience than an exploit to be honest. If I'm flying something big and ponderous enough that time warping to stop spin is useful, then I invariably have it kitted out with solar arrays. In which case I have effectively unlimited electrical power and so unlimited control authority via the reaction wheels. At which point it makes no difference (from a game balancing perspective) whether I choose to spend time manually fiddling around with my ship orientation or stopping it by magic using time-warp. I don't find it breaks my immersion. Or at least, it only breaks it to the extent that time-warping does.

Fantastic! Looking forward to seeing screenshots when you're ready to reveal them.

Could have been worse. He could have buried the flag in the hope that it would sprout and grow up to be a really big flag.

Sweet! Looking forward to seeing how it turns out. Couple of notes if you need them for balancing. The Kerbal 1 was powered by a single LV-15 and four RT-5 'Trashcan' SRBs (coined before the official RT-5 'Flea' was a thing.). That combination was enough to push a three kerbal capsule (in my mind, a primitive version of the original 3-kerbal Mk1 capsule now found as an in-game museum piece at KSC) to 35 km. That's probably about right for the in-game version, although I'll probably need to rescale it in-story at some point. The in-story Kerbin system is scaled to our Earth-Moon system - mainly for ease of research - most of the spaceflight facts and figures are borrowed from NASA. The trajectory details for Rockomax's Endurance launch, for example, are based on the real values for the Saturn V. Incidentally, Minmus would almost work in that context, using scaled up distances it's just about within Earth's Hill Sphere, although I took some liberties with its in-game appearance and made it a slightly more plausible captured 'dirty snowball' comet. The Kerbin 1 (Kerbalkind's first artificial satellite) was launched on a two stage booster consisting of an LV15 powered 1st stage and an LV-902 powered second stage. The LV-902 was basically a smaller derivative of the '15 and still used turbo pumps (a re-engineered version of the less than satisfactory LV-9 pumps.). I think for this to work in-game you would need to assume a very light satellite compared to a very heavy capsule for the Kerbal 1. The Kerbin 2 (heavier advanced satellite and re-entry test vehicle) was launched to orbit using a slightly updated version of the Kerbin 1 booster. Basically the same '902 powered upper stage but with the improved turbo pump technology that enabled the 902 applied to the LV-15. I don't think I said as much in story but you could call that the LV-20. The Moho series of single crewed capsules (in-game Mk-1 capsule would be fine) were launched on a massively upgraded version of the Kerbal 1 booster. LV-T20 powered main stage, augmented by four pressure fed LV-905 powered strap-on boosters and a 905 powered upper stage. The Eve series 3-kerbal capsule and accompanying service module (think Apollo CSM, in-game the Mk1-3 capsule plus a suitable command module would work) was launched on a vastly more powerful booster. Based on a core stage powered by three LV-T30 engines, with an LV-T20 powered upper stage and three LV-T20 powered strap-on boosters. The Eve service module main engine is an LV-909, basically the vacuum version of the 905. In practice, there's not a great deal of difference between the LV-905 and the LV-909 - think Space-X's Merlin C vs Merlin-Vac.

Goodness, that would be a project. Not necessarily for the volume of notes (you might be surprised ) but collating them from a motley collection of handwritten pages and text files into something vaguely coherent. Then I'd probably need to add a brief list of Internet sources and dig out some of the impromptu world-building asides from this thread. Happy to do it though if folks are interested and on a practical note it would be quite useful to review some of my older notes before getting stuck into Part 4 of the story. Meanwhile, my very first set of notes were actually posted on this forum! Some of those ideas made it into the story, others not so much, which I still think was wise.

It's back!! I declare this to be National Rejoicing-Nutting-Spacecraft-and-Stabbing-Minmus-with-a-FLAG Day! Now I just need a less clunky acronym...

Will do, although I'll be a while since I'm on holiday at the moment, accessing the Internet via tablet. I've had a look for Tantares images but haven't found any good close-ups of the engines. In general though, the KIS and Rockomax hew to US style boosters with fewer but more powerful engines, rather than Soviet style multiple combustion chambers and nozzles on what is effectively a single engine. The LV-15 engine was pretty crude with most of it's internal workings visible at the base the rocket. Like all early KIS engines it was ablatively cooled. The LV-10 was Wernher's first attempt at a regeneratively cooled engine but his first design (which relied on a coiled tube around the combustion chamber) never worked and resulted in a number of costly failures before he abandoned the idea. Much later on the invention of a double walled combustion chamber, paved the way for development of the the LVT series of regeneratively cooled engines, most notably the LVT-20 which powered Jebediah Kerman's first orbital flight aboard the Moho 1. Rockomax made extensive use of SRB's in the early days because of their heritage as the Speciality Fireworks Company. However their SRB's were a lot more sophisticated than the KIS 'Trashcan' boosters. In particular, they developed shaped propellant loads which gave them some degree of (pre planned) throttling and also experimented with steering by liquid injection into the exhaust stream. Rockomax were fairly late to the party when it came to gimbals, their first proper gimballed engines were the breakthrough SK1 series.

Thanks! Not familiar with KSPI but that sounds feasible. You'd probably want to do something with the LVT-30 as well to reflect its evolution from the LV-15. Although you'd need to add gimbals to the '30 too - in-story, all the LV and LVT series engines were gimballed.

Slow going at the moment I'm afraid, mainly due to a heavy few weeks at work. We're not done yet though - this parrot is nowhere near the point of pining for the fjords. Cheers. KSK

Empirically I've found that a 200km orbit is very nice for easy rendezvous. Simply launch as your target vessel passes over KSC and go straight for a 200km altitude - no parking in a lower orbit required. You might need a radial burn to fine tune the intercept. Circularise as you approach the target and Bob's your father's brother. One time I managed to launch straight into a 1.5 km closest approach - that was a good one.

So just a modest request then? I'd like that plus a chicken in every pot and a pony. Because, Kerbals on ponies.

Mainly because the first thing that came to mind when you mentioned desorption was MALDI. I figured that using lasers would be expensive (as you said) so wondered about microwave desorption instead. Not even sure if microwave desorption is a thing but my, kind of ad-hoc, theoretical justification would be that microwaves should provide enough energy to desorb the N2 without heating your zeolite (which you seemed to be looking for alternatives to). Microwave spectroscopy is all about rotational quantum states, so it would make sense to me that microwaves should be absorbed more by the N2 molecules (which are free to rotate) than the zeolite framework (which isn't). Edit - from a quick online search it seems that Microwave Swing Adsorption is a thing so might actually be worth reading up on more seriously. Who knew!

Cheers. On that last point, I quite like the way that Kerbal Construction Time does it. You can simulate your flights all you like - for a price - before the actual launch. You can also start the simulation anywhere you like, from the launchpad to Eeloo orbit - again for a price. It's a nice way of having the game tell you 'here's what happens when you launch this' but it's still entirely up to the player to do the engineering and design iterations - that part doesn't get any easier. I don't have KCT installed at the moment but being able to sim my flights really appeals to me for the reasons described earlier and might also make me more inclined to try hard mode. Of course you could reasonably argue that sims do take much of the point out of a 'no revert' mode.

Oof - that's taking 'avoiding easy mode' to it's extreme. If that's the way you like it then fair play to you - you've certainly got either a lot more tolerance for trial and error or are doing a whole lot more pen-and-paper work than I am. I'm not getting drawn into the MechJeb debate (other than a passing raised eyebrow that the debate has popped up yet again) but I'll happily admit to using KER, delta-V maps and launch window calculators. Even before career mode, my games were 'career like' and I'm not a big fan of excess time-warping. End result - relatively few interplanetary journeys and the ones I do make, I prefer to get approximately right first time rather than revert them and lose the many months of game-time that have elapsed whilst my Duna probe (or whatever) was in transit. Similarly, the fact that I'm playing a lot of actual game (rather than time-warping) between interplanetary flights gives me limited tolerance for trial and error. For my very first interplanetary flights, I looked up the delta-V requirements and phase angles but did the delta-V calculations myself and - literally- used a protractor against the screen to judge the phase angles. These days, I prefer to use KER and Alexmoon's calculator - having dates rather than angles for my launch windows is a wonderful thing. If I'm playing easy mode then so be it.

Depends how long your story is. On a good day I can knock out about 1,000-1,200 words of first-draft writing, maybe a bit more if I really hit a groove. That's somewhere around three pages of an average paperback. Then I'll spend more time tweaking and polishing. My KSP fanfic is currently up at around 170,000 words and it's taken me over two years to write in my spare time. How hard is a difficult question to answer and will entirely depend on personal style. Once I had the outlines of an idea for my story, fleshing out that idea into a rough plot wasn't too bad. Filling out that rough plot into chapter summaries sometimes took a while particularly if the chapter was particularly important for the overall story, or needed a lot of research, or had to be particularly consistent with previous chapters. The actual business of turning chapter summaries into something readable is the part I find hardest.

Cool. No need to include SRCs on the list then. And oddly enough, that sort of fits with my fanon too. From later in that same conversation that I quoted earlier: James chose a slice of redfruit. “I think I’ll stick to spicy SRCs,†he said dryly. He raised an eyebrow at Sherfel. “We should ask Ademone to hire a chef for the Rockomax crews though.†“Oh, Derny’s not really a chef,†said Wernher. “He was one of the rocket-spotters as a matter of fact. Until he managed to talk Jeb into giving him a job.†So yeah, definitely pre-SPICE, or its equivalent.