KSK

Yeah. “Captain, scanners indicate that we’ve located the 3127th ball of rock, ices and not-even-prebiotic organic molecules, for this mission. The away team are reporting that their brief and pointless EVA has consumed 125% of the budget for this episode.”

Good catch with the translation of beast vs great beast in the last line. Might correct that to: dja orbdaban aliant Leviathan. Everything else was spot on! Onkerbal might be more of a confused author than an unreliable narrator! It was supposed to be Kerbal as the species name prefixed with the case modifier for inclusion, the whole thing translating as ‘all kerbals’ or more colloquially, ‘the people’. May need to think that over a bit. We have Old Kerba terms for ‘any’ and ‘many’ (I think), so we clearly need one for ‘all’ to complete the set.

Very true. 'Antimatter powered Skylon' is a bit of a misnomer but Skylon was a convenient place to start, it being a present day airbreathing SSTO design that I could find some numbers for. One of those things is not like the other.

But moving on, if what you want is easy and reliable SSTO travel, why not go for an antimatter powered Skylon? Skylon was designed to put 15 tons of payload into LEO. To do that it carried 250 tons of propellant. I don’t have numbers for how much of that was LOX and how much was hydrogen but from a simple consideration of molecular masses, most of those 250 tons would be LOX. With an antimatter powered Skylon, LOX is dead weight because you don’t need to burn your fuel with an oxidiser. That frees up a vast amount of mass for extra payload and/or propellant. More than enough for an extra 25 tons of cargo and 40 crew. Probably enough for multiple round trips to orbit and back especially if you assume a gliding reentry and a little bit of powered flight to your landing site. Or, as the saying goes - once you’re in LEO you’re halfway to anywhere - and with an antimatter Skylon you probably have the propellant reserve to get there. If you want to make your sci-fi Skylon a bit more flexible, add belly thrusters and retrothrusters for landing away from pre-prepared runways. And yeah Skylon is only a paper design thus far but on paper it works. Real life engineering considerations may well have eaten into that payload capacity to the point where the economics no longer worked but hey - that’s the beauty of fiction - you can assume that the paper design could become a reality. And all of the above is assuming that the antimatter rocket powering your sci-fi Skylon is about as efficient and powerful (or has the same ISP and thrust) as a hydrolox engine which is likely to be an excessively conservative assumption.

Yeah, that's kind of my point. You're writing a setting where access to space is so safe and commonplace that interstellar trade is a thing. You're positing a technology level where creation, storage and control of antimatter is easy and reliable. But then you throw in a load of detail which gives the exact opposite impression. The weight of your spacecraft is a factor. Engine running temperature is a factor. Propellant quantity is a factor. These are all things that suggest that spaceflight is still hard and risky and, speaking as a reader, it jars. Put another way, if I was writing a story set in the present day, I might have one of my characters cross the Atlantic in an airliner. Unless anything of note happened along the way, there wouldn't be much to say about it. My character buys a ticket, goes to the airport, maybe lets it all hang out a bit over some piece of (as he sees it) security pantomime, gets on his plane and falls asleep. The next paragraph he's debarking, checking his coat pocket for his passport and resigning himself to more security checks. The design and technical details of the airliner wouldn't get a moment of page time. They're normal, they're routine, my character in all probability doesn't know much about them and if he did he wouldn't care enough for them to warrant a mention. He certainly wouldn't spend his flight wondering about the make, model and ISP of whatever turbofan was pushing him through the sky, still less fret about the operating temperature of the turbine at the core of that turbofan.

We're also assuming a device that is capable of easy conversion of antimatter to matter and back again. At which point, as a reader, I really don't care about melting engines, ISP or whatever. In fact, the shift from focusing on technical plausibility and hard sci-fi, to throwing in this huge McGuffin piece of technology is quite likely to break whatever immersion I had in your story. By all means have your matter-antimatter converter. Your story, your rules. But at that point you may as well just use your spacecraft as a backdrop for the story and just assume it can do whatever you need it to do without bogging the story down with more or less spurious technical justifications for stuff.

Been having some fun this afternoon. A very mild spoiler for the next couple of chapters but mostly a little something for @superstrijder15 and everyone else who ever weighed in on any discussions about Old Kerba. It includes some new vocabulary and grammar, which I haven't used anywhere else so far, so I've included a translation too. Pilla! Manaliant soathraban! Onkerbal djaldaban mahomr dja orbdaban manaliant Leviathan Truth! A great beast took flight! All the people watched it go. And they named the beast Leviathan.

Trust me - I'm an engineer? I think atmospheric pressure also has a lot to do with it. You see it on F9 launches too from the in-flight camera - that exhaust plume really fans out at higher altitude / lower pressure. The fact that the Saturn V had about four times the thrust of the Falcon 9 helps a bit too.

And in related news, water spotted flowing downhill. Absolute cobblers. We have two competing Starship teams building separate prototypes. We have the mark Mk2 and Mk3 prototypes under construction before the Mk1 has even flown. This whole program is based on rapid iteration and the failure of one prototype tells you very little about the rest of the development schedule. Unless you have the ear of a SpaceX project manager or two and are privy to information that the rest of us don't have. In which case, please do share. With all that said, is this a setback? Yes. It means that whatever other tests they were going to run with Mk1 will probably need to be run on Mk2 or later. Does this need to be investigated? Absolutely. There's no point doing rapid iteration if all of your rapidly iterated designs pop their tops before getting to the launchpad. Is this a reason to panic or cast shade about ineptitude or design ignorance? No it is not. Does this paint Musk in a good light? That depends if you like Musk to begin with, I'd say.

That’ll be the new Russian hire’s work. Aleksandr Popov. Edit. To be clear, this comment was made purely for the bad pun. I am not casting aspersions on Russian engineering or Russians in general.

It's a little bit off-topic but I thought this post from the latest Ars Technica Starship thread might raise a chuckle or two... Can someone explain how is this tall Starship going to land perfectly vertical and stay stable on moon dust. I am an expert on this matter so allow me to enlighten you:First off, your first lander is gonna tip over. There is simply nothing you or anyone else can do about that; that’s just physics But that’s also why you gotta build a second lander. Lander 2 has retractable landing gear extending from its sides so it can hook onto Lander 1. So you land Lander 2 on the moon within 200 m of Lander 1 and then literally walk Lander 2 over by carefully tilting it back and forth. And just when the two are finally united, you run out of battery power. So now there are two landers stuck on the moon. Which is where the third lander comes in. This one is a beast. You add a mulch ton of batteries and propellant on it just in case. So much weight in fact that it never makes it out of LEO. So on to the fourth lander. This time, you add a further sixteen solids and some more liquid tanks for good measure. And this baby makes it to the moon with fuel to spare. You slow walk it next to Lander 1 and have the crew from the Lander 2 hop inside Lander 4. Then you extend the sideways landing gear on Lander 4 to hook onto the first lander as best you can. And finally you max thrust and pray your two landers stay cobbled together as they go for lunar orbit. And amazingly they make it to lunar orbit just before... running out of fuel. And this is why you need a good space tug. It zips over to the moon, does and lunar orbit rendezvous with your two landers, extends out the equivalent of a catcher’s mit made from landing gear (because you have not researched real docking yet), and then slowly pushes both landers back towards your home planet. Now keep in mind that 90% of the time, one of the landers is going to come undone while being tugged back to earth, so you’ll probably need a second space tug. Maybe more...But, at a very high level at least, that is how it is done. I know all this due to my long and illustrious career with the Kerbal Space Agency

They don't look particularly engaged do they? I bet the chap in the blue shirt is looking at lolcats on his mate's computer.

Possibly. After I got accused of being elitist about the issue, I didn't bother going back to the thread.

No kaboom this time. That's good to see.

I feel that at least some of this is down to player pressure. If a game in a particular genre tries to break away from certain expectations in that genre, it can often get pilloried by the more vocal elements of the fan base. Try and do something a bit different and a recurring comment on your official game forum will likely be something along the lines of ‘don’t get me wrong - I love this game but it would be so much better if it had x, y and z features.’ Those features tending to turn the game in question into yet-another-genre-clone. Then you get the WoWification of many genres. I use WoW as an example that I’m familiar with. I enjoyed it a lot back in the day and am dabbling in WoW Classic now, but not every game needs to hew to the same principles. There will be a starter zone. Game concepts will be spoonfed one at a time. There will be a clearly marked progression path. Stick to that path and you will (mostly) not be allowed to fail. You will need the +1 club of kobold bashing to defeat the Blue Kobolds in a reasonable time. Once you have defeated the Blue Kobolds you will gain the +2 club of kobold bashing which you will need to vanquish the dastardly Red Kobolds. Mind you, I’m definitely soured by the Elite Dangerous forums. One comment that I particularly recall was a request for a tutorial on how to leave a space station, including undocking etc. This despite the fact that when you’re docked (and not doing anything else like trading or refitting, there’s a prominent menu in the middle of your screen with ‘Launch’ as its first option. Reading and a wee bit of thinking - is it too much to ask for?

Re: old games respecting your time more. Go look up the term ‘Nintendo Hard’ Re: games as art (good) vs games as thin fronts to make money (bad) Totally depends on the game. I give you Dwarf Fortress as an example of game=art, which, out of the box (as it were) has some biggish flaws in my opinion. On the other hand, I play a couple of mobile ‘premium currency available for real money’ games which are clearly examples of game=thin front to make money. But I don’t spend money on them and they’re pleasant enough, if not particularly deep, games. Re: Elite Dangerous with full Newtonian mechanics. It’s called Frontier (Elite 2). And honestly? The full Newtonian part was kind of overrated. Combat became rather dull (at my level of skill anyway) - it wasn’t so much artful dogfighting using all six degrees of freedom so much as a series of high-speed gun passes. Intra-System travel, atmospheric flight, docking etc? I’d do all that manually on occasion but if I actually wanted to get on and play the game, the Autopilot was my first, last and best friend. Re. Grind. I find this to be a very subjective and unhelpful term. In general though I don’t much care if a game is repetitive in places of playing through those repetitions is fun. I think there’s a subset of gamers who miss the part where a game can be mostly about the journey rather than the destination.

With a little gift-wrapped wheel of cheese for each occupant left in the storage lockers.

Thanks - I guess time will tell if I've managed 'deep'. After that wee summary, if you're still looking at the chapter list at the start of this thread and thinking 'I don't have time for this', I would say to try reading up to Chapter 31 (Echoes of Time). By then the story (and writing style) has settled down a bit, you'll have come to a significant point in the space program arc and, more usefully, a very significant point in all that other stuff I was talking about. Alternatively, if that still looks a bit much, or you're getting a bit bored with the space program arc (as I said, the first few milestones are a fairly predictable if you've played KSP although there is a story in there too), then I would just take a look at chapters 8 (The Other Side), 11 (The Seed), 15 (New Homes), 19 (Reunion), 24 (Dreams), 26 (Circles), the end of 30 (The Cords that Bind) and then 31 (Echoes of Time). Obviously, speaking as the author, I'm hoping you'll be intrigued enough to want to carry on past chapter 31. But at that point, if you're still not getting into the story, then I'd also say you could put it down knowing that you'd given it a fair try but it just wasn't for you. In any case, however much you read or don't read - thanks for giving First Flight a go and popping onto the thread to comment! On the other hand, if you are getting into it, there's plenty more to come. Take your time - it's not going anywhere and who knows? It may even be finished by the time you're finished!

I can't speak for any readers on this thread but if you'll settle for a couple of words from the author?

Printed on polyethylene I presume? Every little counts.

Hey folks, Just as a quick update, I have a chapter’s worth of new material ready to go. However, after reading through my Good Editor’s comments, I agree that the various sections of that new material don’t fit together as well as they could. The good news is that I think that can be fixed. The less good news is that the fix involves writing the next chapter and then doing a bit of cutting and pasting between the two. So it’ll probably be the end of the month before I post the next story update but that update should be a double bill.

Yeah, for all the skepticism on this thread, you can't deny that it's one impressive piece of hardware when you see it like that.

I've been looking at this from a slightly different angle. The EUS will apparently put out about 440KN of thrust. Assume that is all in shear, that is, for some mad reason you're attaching an EUS to your spacecraft as a strap-on booster. From a quick poke around on the internet, a standard M39 stainless steel bolt can have a shear capacity of up to 375 KN. Diameter of an M39 bolt - well the clue is in the name - 39mm. Not exactly a large piece of metal and actually pretty small as bolts go. My point is that two modules joined by a Common Berthing Mechanism are effectively joined by a bolted structure. Those are strong.That M39 bolt can't quite take an EUS worth of shear but it's not all that far off the mark either.

So, something like the Common Berthing Mechanism used to join US-side ISS modules? Link here to most of the technical detail you could want. Capable of berthing and un-berthing operations (as was shown multiple times during ISS assembly), held together by sixteen damn great motorised bolts and rugged enough to cope with ISS reboosts. This is not an insurmountable problem. Yes, space is hard, but you do seem to make a habit of over-inflating problems which have either been solved previously (guidance systems) or that NASA etc have quite a bit of working experience with (docking bits of spacecraft together)

Adding to Kerbiloid’s link, this one might help as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_radiation If I remember correctly, energy lost as synchrotron radiation gives you the practical upper limit of how much energy an accelerator of a given radius can impart to the particles it’s accelerating. It’s maybe stating the obvious (apologies - I don’t know how much background you have here) but the bigger the radius, the lower the radial acceleration on the particles at a given velocity and therefore the less synchrotron radiation emitted. Eventually you get to a point where any energy you’re adding to the particles to accelerate them is just radiated straight back out again.