KSK

It solves some questions at the expense of many more. For example, would it be possible for stars to form under the increased gravity? If it is, would you get yellow sun-like stars as shown in the game? Any sort of internal consistency in KSP is always going to be a bit of a fudge for me, or rather, there's always going to be a mental disconnect between its semi-realistic orbital mechanics and whatever sci-fi explanation one needs to invoke to make those mechanics work. To be honest I'm happier just accepting the game at face value.

Nice signature. I like the 'reverse shout-out' you did with the Big Red Button too - well played!

It could be interesting - or it could just be Star Trek with kerbals instead of humans. Most of the point of Treknology is either to hand-wave away the boring parts of spaceflight or allow for suitably technobabble resolutions to a plot, rather than being the point of the plot in their own right.* Just my opinion of course but the ships, uniforms, aliens etc. would need to be the props and stage dressing rather than the play, if that makes any sense. * With the occasional obvious exception like First Contact.

Well, after far too many late nights this week, I finally finished The Grand Tour. Magnificent work - just magnificent. Very much looking forward to Book III when it comes - and why do I have the feeling that Rozer is due for this own HAL / BERTY moment? He's a patriot but also rational to a fault and I'm thinking that the words of his President are not sitting too comfortably with BERTY's assessment of the USK.

Noooo - don't do it Ron. For the love of the devs don't do it! Great chapter. I could feel the atmosphere of barely contained chaos and I like your depiction of Gene!

Pure speculation but if the Long March relies on hot firing during staging (starting the second stage engine before the first stage has detached), you would want the open structure to relieve pressure in the interstage and stop things exploding. There was a fairly recent thread on this.

Both actually but that shouldn't come as a surprise given that solar sails rely on momentum transfer due to reflection of photons. And yes - quantum mechanics is consistent with special relativity. For example, see the Dirac equation. Briefly, photons have zero rest mass (by definition they travel at the speed of light and so from Relativity they must have zero rest mass). Since momentum (p) is equal to mass (m) multiplied by velocity (in this case the speed of light or c), then one might expect photons with zero rest mass to have zero momentum. However, photons have energy and so from Einstein's equation (E=mc2), they do have relativistic mass. From the Planck equation, e=hf, where f = frequency and h = Planck's constant. Substituting into Einstein's equation we get hf=mc2 and therefore m = hf/c2. The momentum of a photon (mass x velocity) is therefore chf/c2 or simply hf/c. Assuming a perfect reflector exactly perpendicular to the direction of travel of the photon, that photon will transfer 2hf/c units of momentum to the sail.

That makes sense - thanks for getting back to me. Or at least it makes qualitative sense - the maths would be way over my head and I suspect that thinking too hard about it would break my brain. As a very distinguished man once said "For those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it."

True. I'm curious to see what SpaceX's medium term plan is. In the short term I can see them making even bigger inroads into the comsat market, in the long term, their stated goal is Mars. How do they profitably join those two dots? Assuming (and it's a big assumption) SpaceX can get through the red tape, I can imagine quite a few countries wanting a low cost space program for the international prestige. Whether any of them will do much more than putting a couple of nationals into space and calling it done is another matter but it could still represent a reasonable source of revenue for SpaceX. I can also imagine cheaper access to space having a big impact on national unmanned exploration programs. Heck, the kind of costs that SpaceX is touting could bring interplanetary scale missions within budget for the larger universities or consortia of universities. There's also the hoary old chestnut of space tourism. If SpaceX can bring the price of a Dragon flight down into single-digit, low tens of millions and if a suitable regulatory regime can be put together, then orbital flight becomes a millionaire's game rather than a multi-millionaire or billionaire's game. Dragon is set up for seven crew if I recall correctly, so even assuming two actual crew members, there's still room for three (five if they want that genuine old-school crammed-in-a-can feeling) paying passengers per launch. More importantly, for the foreseeable future, I think the only purpose to space will be space itself. Much of the incentive for upping the launch rate will be to service existing infrastructure, whether that be orbital refueling depots, fleets of small autonomous space-junk de-orbiters or shipping guests and materiel up to Bigelow's latest. Truly sci-fi concepts like asteroid mining, space solar power and the like are a waaay off in the future for now. As a space geek, I'm cautiously optimistic about the next decade or so though.

OK, genuine question then. What happens when an atom absorbs a photon? My understanding was that the photon disappears and the atom is placed into some kind of excited state. It's either spinning faster (if it absorbs a microwave photon), vibrating faster (infra-red photon), etc. etc. Energy is conserved, other quantum numbers are conserved but the photon has gone. Various processes can happen to that excited atom and some of them involve emitting another photon but the original photon has gone. I'm approaching this as a chemist rather than a physicist so it's quite possible that I'm missing something.

It's the old chicken-and-egg problem though isn't it? There's limited demand because launch costs are so high but because there's limited demand, launch costs have remained high. Whether cheaper launch costs will manage to break that cycle remains to be seen but all credit to SpaceX for giving it a go.

Looks pretty nice! The accelerometer doubles as a seismometer when you're landed. The science output is pretty good too - about 90 points per biome on Minmus if I remember rightly.

Cool! Don't know how far you'd got before but the chapter listing on page 1 of the thread is up to date if that helps. Alternatively, the whole story (apart from the last chapter) is up on my forum blog.

Uh, modern physics can do that just fine, so far as I know. Apart from anything else it's what solar sails rely on and spacecraft using solar sails have actually flown so it's not just a nice piece of theory.

I can see the collective face-palming at the KSC when they finally figured that out. There's no real canon yet, although obviously it's going to crop up over the next few chapters. I suspect I may have to play a little fast and loose with in-game science and planetary descriptions though to make everything work. Thanks Jeb and welcome to the thread! There's a lot of good stuff on this forum, so that is praise indeed. Next chapter is in progress - I did intend to get quite a bit more done today but a couple of days of unseasonably good weather dried the garden out enough that I could actually do something with it without churning the grass into mud. So yeah... that took priority today. Looking out of the window it seems that normal meteorological service is about to resume, so that's one less bit of real life to get in the way of moar writing.

OK. First of all, can the rotten bounder who pinched Whackjob's mojo please give it back. Whackjob's mojo does not magically turn one into Whackjob. Thank you. Right. Now for the serious part. Whack - we all know that you've long since mastered the science of implausibly colossal KSP constructions. Now it is time to venture into the realms of... installation art. Remember those guys that use to wrap buildings? Why not try wrapping some of the easter eggs? Found a Munolith? Build a replica one beside it. Spotted an interestingly sized canyon on a small desolate mun? Build a bridge over it. Simple geometric shapes will be fine, nothing fancy. The size of your creations next to the easter eggs will say it all. One other idea - how about a reconstruction of "2001 - A Space Odyssey"? Begin with an artificial monolith on the Mun. Continue with a replica of Discovery, complete with the famous pod bay doors and pods docked inside. End with a larger monolith in orbit around Jool.

Yeah, I filed the EmDrive in my mental 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof' drawer. It's getting quite dusty in there.

Mexico and Poland are both signatories to the Berne Convention so yes - they are bound by an international treaty but I honestly don't know much beyond that. My best guess is that their copyright laws will be somewhat similar or at least will adhere to a certain agreed minimum but beyond that *shrugs*. "Rather complicated" is probably a good way of putting it.

Watch this space. Although Kerbodyne might not make an appearance for quite a while. OrtwinS - yeah it hurts me too. Early versions of the story had the KIS getting a bit more adventurous before Gene had 'that talk' with Ademone but in the end I figured that you could only carry the 'built in a junkyard' theme so far. Fear not though, I have plans for the KIS - they're not out of it yet. And yes - thank goodness any solutions to the current problems will involve such a straightforward approach. Lindemherz - thank you very much! Glad you liked it and again - watch this space!

That's not necessarily a problem, although the distinction between 'inspired by' and 'copied' can be a tricky one to define. It's not in the same genre but if you've read 'The Sword of Shannara' by Terry Brooks, it is quite obviously inspired by 'The Lord of the Rings' (down to the level of analogous characters and plot sequences in places) but that didn't stop it being published and doing very well. I confess (the shame, the shame!) to only being partway through 'The Grand Tour' and whilst it does seem to be inspired by '2001 - A Space Odyssey', my gut feeling is that it would be different enough to avoid any copyright problems - although Czo might want to remove some of the direct quotes. OK as homages on a fan-fic board, probably not so much in a published work. Of course my gut counts for precisely zip, so don't take this as any sort of advice. I know Czo has mentioned this before but I'd be more concerned about getting permission from Squad and checking the terms and conditions for this forum, in case they include anything about Squad owning the copyright to anything posted here. If I remember correctly, the terms and conditions for mods are fairly reasonable but I'm not sure about stories, pictures etc.

Already done - or sort of. On their last flight SpaceX managed to soft-land the first stage on water, the idea being to use water landings as test flights for an eventual recovery on land. What I didn't appreciate until recently was that they did the water landing in the middle of a storm. Yup - couldn't get a boat or a plane near the recovery site due to bad weather but they managed to land the booster in one piece! The bad weather is also why the footage from the landing is so bad - priority was given to transmitting telemetry from the booster rather than pretty pictures.

Wikipedia has a nice (but approximate) delta-v chart for Earth-Moon-Mars missions. 6km/s looks about right to me from LEO to Mars orbit. I have trouble reading TMI as anything other than Trans-Munar Injection though.

I don't think it would be feasible with medium lifters. Some rough figures (in metric tons) Apollo CSM: 30.3 Apollo LM: 14.7 Dragon: 6 So you're need about 45 tons of payload capacity to get an Apollo style orbiter and lander into orbit, or a modern day equivalent based on Dragon. Apollo Command Module weighed about 5 tons, so Dragon is slightly heavier but a modern Service Module could potentially be a bit lighter (?) I don't have the numbers for Orion but it was billed as an Apollo-plus level of mission, so I'm assuming it's going to be heavier than 45 tons. Next, you need an Earth Departure Stage (EDS) of some kind to get all that from LEO to Lunar orbit. Extremely rough weight for that is 73 tons based on the Saturn V payload difference to LEO (118 tons) vs TMI (45 tons). Take into account that a) the Saturn V SIVB stage also did some of the lifting to LEO and you could probably get away with a lighter EDS if you launched it separately (rather than making it sturdy enough to stick a CSM/LM on top of) and you could maybe (handwave handwave) get that 73 tons down to 50-55. Which coincidentally (or probably not) is about the projected payload for the Falcon Heavy. This is assuming an Earth orbit rendezvous of CSM/LM and EDS. Building a moonship out of more than two parts would be challenging, for the reasons that jwenting points out and also because your fuel only has a limited lifespan on-orbit before it either boils off or corrodes the spacecraft plumbing. Orbital refueling would get around that of course but that is yet another layer of complexity. Summary: not going to happen with medium lift, unless we figure out orbital refueling or get really good at building spacecraft in orbit from relatively small parts. Could happen with a heavy lift vehicle of around 50-55 ton payload capacity. Possibly.

Take a Whackjob style challenge. Start with an orange tank. Build a rocket that will get it into orbit. Now build a second rocket that will get the orange tank and the first rocket into orbit. See how many iterations you can manage before lag/frustration/molten CPU get the better of you.

Likewise 666 - number of the Beast and all that. I think that is OP's problem here - not the fact there's a bug but the fact it causes the altimeter to show all sixes. I would be astonished if that was at all deliberate though.