lazarus1024

I know there are mod parts. I am specifically looking for stock parts. As mentioned, they were in KSPX, maybe stock parts (but with LOX+Fuel combined in one tank, for now anyway).

Actually I think it is somewhat less. From what we know if it, the atmosphere is pretty much just sublimated dust and rock from impacts on the moon, plus solar wind detrius. It is there, but it is on the order of a couple of thousand to a couple of million times typical vaccum in space. That is to say possibly a couple of thousand to several million atoms/molecules per cubic meter (1x10^3-1x10^8). This is compared to sea level Earth which has around 3x10^24 atoms/molecules per cubic meter (standard temperature and pressure). On the order of trillions and trillions of times less atmosphere than Earth. From the little we understand of it, Pluto, we think, has a thicker atmosphere than the Moon. Mars has an atmosphere that is millions of times more dense than the Moons (if not billions or trillions). For all intents and purposes, except academic interest, the Moon has no atmosphere. Just like Mercury, Pluto and most of the gas giant moons. We have, however, detected the presences of "an atmosphere" around most things roughly lunar sized, give or take half an order of magnitude...they are just often billions of times less dense than Earth's atmosphere (if not even less dense than that).

I could just live with an "accomplishment" system added, that wasn't for bragging rights, but was directly tied to either A) Research points or probably better Space program funding. Once money comes along of course. You've gotta produce results if you want your space program to stay above the funding line and not get the Ax. So, land on the Mun, and the achievement might increase your Space program funding. Get a probe around Eve, same thing, etc, etc. It might be interesting to have some general targets for research that are a bit more fine grained than an entire planetary body, such as doing research on one of Duna's polar caps is different from doing it on the plains or mountains of Duna, etc. However, I think certain "achievements" would be cool in respect to space program funding. It would be exactly opposite the real world in that way. In KSP, land on the Mun and get your program funding ratcheted up. In real life, land on the Moon and see it dry up.

SQUAD has mentioned that at some future date they'd like to add life support. It is likely a very distant date, close to when it goes true Beta.

Bah, now you are suggestion I actually read peoples' posts!?! What are you, a communist! Actually, yeah I missed that part, sorry.

This is in effect what HarvesteR mentioned, with the exception that Antennas means you can beam back the research data without having to return the mission, but for fewer research points than returning the mission will net you.

There aren't specific missions like you are speculating. Or at least that seemed to be what HarvesteR was indicating. It will be locations where if you have science instruments, it will give you research points. The more you do research in one location, the less ROI you get. So having a specimen container in LKO the first time might give you 10 research points toward life sciences, but the next mission you fly with one might only give you 8, then 6, 4, 2, 1 and then nothing. However, fly it to the Mun and you'll get 10 RP toward life sciences again. The next time 8, etc, etc. HarvesteR didn't get deep in to the system, since I think he was still balancing it, but I suspect at a minimum LKO, plus each planet/moon will count as a seperate research "location". Possibly orbit and surface being seperate locations as well. I don't think on a first cut they are getting any finer grained than that. They might at some point, but I deffinitely would not expect that in .22 at all.

Sweet! My in-laws watched it from the inlet of Assawoman bay (its the interior water way by Ocean City) near their house. I think that is about 20 miles away. I need to go visit them and then drive down for a launch of an Ares (or, hey, maybe some day bigger rockets!). I live about 3hrs away and I did manage to see it. Sadly the trees behind my house blocked most of the view, but I saw a few twinkles through the branches and then right after 1st stage seperation when it was well on its way through the gravity turn it broke in to the open between two trees for about 45 seconds before it passed behind another tree right before 2nd stage seperation. I got a picture of it, but I was using a wide angle lens, so it didn't come out great (25 second exposure on a tripod). I was hoping it would be in the open more, plus I was hoping to catch more of the vertical launch component, but the trees blocked too much. There is a nice raised field about 200yds from my house that should be much less obstructed views. I am going to have to try over there next time.

The 48-7s is my current favorite engine for ascent stages for that various moons and minor planets. Well, okay, it might not cut it (as one engine anyway) for Tylo, but it works great on the Mun, Minimus, Moho, Dres, etc.

We have spherical monopropellant and with .21 cylindrical monopropellant tanks. Is there any chance we could get some with fuel in them? Maybe somewhat different colors to help denote that they are fuel bearing (orange?) Also both those and spherical/round monopropellant tanks in probe size. This would be super useful. Thanks!

I'd be satisfied if the space marmot had a flight helmet. No suit required, just the helmet. OSHA standards and all that.

Jesus, we must be on the same wave length. As soon as I heard about KSP experiment containers and animals all I could think of was Marmots.

Well that escalated quickly. Anyway, I was under the impression that, yes, he is still with SQUAD, just on a long hiatus do to personal reasons.

Hey, anyone vaguely in the Mid-atlantic might want to check out NASA's website. The LADEE satellite is being launched in to orbit tonight from Wallops. Supposing clear skies, and it looks like it, it should be visible for about 500-600 miles North-South and about 200-300 miles west. Granted, if you are really far away it is going to be a pinprick darned low on the horizon. I really have to go and see a launch in person one of these days. I am about 130 miles away, but my in-laws live about 20 miles away, so I can always go and visit them for a couple of days around a launch. Scheduled for 11:27pm EST.

Its blurred, but I'd call it Alpha still and I believe that is what SQUAD is going with as well. As for adding features. DamnedifIknow how long it'll take before they are "done" and they move to Beta. I also dispute that Sandbox is complete. SQUAD has mentioned several pretty major additions that would flush out sandbox more. Resources being one of them. I think there is also going to be a focus on Station and Base modules and stuff IIRC. Also at least one or more planets to be added. Rumors of late in development they may add FTL and/or another/more star systems, but I think that one is more musing on the subject than a "we deffinitely want to do that". Resources, in SOME form, are pretty much a go. It is just a matter of when they will add them and what form. They were originally going to do it for .20, but backed off when they realized it would take massive work, and career was basically unstarted. So they decided to go back to the drawing board and wanted to go with development work that added the most "new" to the game with the "least" development effort. IE add things that don't exist at all first, then improve and iterate. Career being the biggest thing missing. So we got the Kerbal knowledge base and a bunch of other tweaks. Now we are getting research and tech development so that Career can finally be introduced. Next is probably going to be a system for "money" to have a funding method in Career mode. After that...dunno, SQUAD might have ideas. Actual missions you can elect to do within Career to give it more direction? Working on the Astronaut training/recruiting more? Go back to introducing resources for Sandbox and possibly Career as well? Flushing out existing features like real re-entry heat? I'd imagine at their current release cadence and based on what they have said they want to do, I think we are going to be in "Alpha" for at least another 9-12 months and 5-8 more releases before it is relatively feature complete. Then I suspect we'll probably have a good 6-9 month Beta where they flesh out a few features a little, tweak some stuff and go on a bug hunt before they consider it "final" and then maybe start working on major expansions. The major expansions might be when they look at introducing FTL and other star systems. They might also leave a major expansion to include "future tech" along the lines of FTL and advanced space flight (IE like a 2100KE KSP [Kerbal Era] add on pack or something) with plasma drives, fusion power plants, Bussard ramjets, etc.

I got my Apollo 2 CSM and LM in to Mun orbit. Apollo 1 ended with a comedy of errors. Tipped over on landing as I didn't have an ASAS to control the RCS jets to keep from tipping. I think popped my rover without first getting a kerbal in the seat, so it rolled 3km down the slope of a crater blowing up as it went. Then I dusted a kerbal after planting my flag at the top of the a nearby mountain. I tipped the lander on its side and broke it apart by accidently hitting the throttle (not cat walked on the keyboard. Where are my damn cats when I need to blame someone???). I redesigned things as I wasn't super happy with the LM, not very Apollo like. So now it is a little better and the rover is better as well. I also landed a probe where I was thinking of putting down to find a flat(ish) landing spot ahead of time as part of my issue was having to put down on a slope as the area of the mun I put down, there are zero flat landing places. So I have the area pre-scouted as well as a nice marker to aim for. I am still not positive at the LM will work perfectly, but I have tested the crap out of it on Kerbin (about 20 design iterations and at least 10 tests). The landing stage has about 700+ m/sec of dV and good TWR, the ascent stage has about 900m/sec of dV, but much lower TWR. It is really the ascent stage that has me worried as I am worried that the TWR is going to be too low. I think it'll manage okay, just paranoid. The thing is overkill for Minimus, but once I am done with the Mun, Apollo 3 is going to go to Minimus. Then, it is on to Duna with a modified version. I am think I am going to a do take on what NASA came up with during the 70's for a Mars mission with modified CSM, LM and 3rd stage Saturn converted to living space (though I'll do it straight up as living space as a hitch hiker module).

They have discussed a lot of their future plans on a very high level, subject to change way over time. The last couple of releases since .19 they've pretty much said they work a lot more from one release to the next. They have some high level plans for the future, but after every release they sit down and figure out what they are going to focus on for the next release. So discussing pie in the sky features that could be 3 or 10 releases later doesn't sound terribly productive other than "at some point we want Career" or "we will never introduce multiplayer". Much more fine grained than that doesn't sound too helpful. They sometimes stoop to the level of "We want resources at some point" or "There will be more planets. Eventualy. Probably".

Pretty much true. My general control strategy is to disable gimbal on most of my boosters except the center engine. This keeps overall wooble to a minimum, but still provides enough control authority. For smaller rockets with no side boosters, I generally disable gimbal as well, but I slap on some canards for aerodynamic control. 4 canards plus the built in reaction wheel is generally enough to keep most designs pretty stable up through around 20,000m and generally I've ditched the lower stage by then anyway. Upper stages with lower powered engines the wobble often isn't a big deal.

Meh, I do it the way the Russians did. I guess and then launch a bunch of rockets until one of them makes it to space. Actually, that is pretty much exactly the way I do it. These days I've been building rockets long enough I generally have a good idea +/- about 10% how much thrust and dV I need for various payloads. I generally enjoy the process of iterative design and testing, so most of the time I'll throw together my payload and test it on the pad. Then I'll put together my upper stage and test it with the payload, then the next stage down and so on. Just to make absolutely sure I haven't messed up staging or not strutually sound, etc. By the time I hit the 1st stage I rarely need to tweak the design more than maybe once or twice at most to get the rocket right. Other times if the payloads are more modest the design is complete with no testing, I hit the launch pad and go. 95% of the time the rocket is at least adaquete and maybe only 1 in 5 times is the rocket overkill of that 95%. When money comes along, I do hope that SQUAD adds a feature in the VAB that will tell you a lot of the things that Mechjeb/Engineer do, like dV, TWR, etc. That would likely help me squeeze at least 10-15% better cost efficiency out of my rocket program (I am assuming in career there will be a method to test and/or recover failed launches without financial penalty...if not due to cut down testing, knowing exact dV and TWR, etc ahead of time would probably make my rocket program at least 100-200% more cost efficient taking in to account the occasional botched launches and somewhat lower rocket efficiency (IE overkill built in)).

Nope, all the parts are going to be in there and it looks like other enhancements as well. That plus a way to earn research points, the parts needed to do that, etc. I am sure it'll get tweaked and enhanced in future versions, but .22 is going to be all about the research, so it'll be more or less fully fleshed out upon delivery of .22.

I spent 30 minutes on my first attempt about an hour after .18 came out before I gave up and hopped on the boards. It took an hour or two to hash out since docking was brand new. Turns out I was using a JR to Regular docking port, so no bueno. After that I docked within 2 minutes of trying on my second attempt. I had been practicing rendezvous in .17 a fair amount, before we had manuever nodes even. These days docking is rarely a laborious process. Rendezvous often takes a lot longer simply because docking on lower kerbin orbit often means getting limited to only 50x timewarp and it might take 3-8 orbits to get effective rendezvous depending on launch profile. I only struggle with really akward ship designs and/or poor/no choice in placement of RCS thrusters.

Moore's law deals with price, not the actual number of transistors. You double the number of transistors for the same cost every 18-24 months. Which more or less continues to remain true. As for actual performance, a lot of those transistors aren't going to the CPU, they are going to iGPUs, uncore, etc. Some is going in to lower overall cost, etc. CPU performance right now has been tracking around 10-15% per generation for the last 4-5 years. Mobile is improving faster, but it had a much, much lower bar to start from (it is also using more and more power, so overall performance is tracking faster than performance per watt, though both are improving), but that is starting to peter out too. Part of it too has been throwing more cores at issues and not just single threaded performance. Single threaded performance even over the last 10 years has tracked at roughly 20% per year, give or take a little on the desktop. There have just been some big leaps in the last few years on multithreaded performance as we went from single core single thread processor designs up to now quad core 8 thread designs on the high end (not including SBE/IBE). So single threaded performance over the last 10 years is up maybe 400% overall (don't forget the power of compounding), but multithreaded performance is up more like 1000%+ If it bothers you that much, figure in another 2-3 years the processors you might be able to buy will probably be at least 20-30% faster in single threaded performance to todays. From a personal perspective, I'd love things to be faster, but my i5-3570 clocked to 4.2Ghz single/4Ghz all 4 cores can easily handle 350+ part count ships with showing any hiccups in frame rates. I don't think I have ever built anything larger than that. My i5-3317u laptop on the other hand gets brought to its knees with anything more than about 200 part count ships. It would be nice to see even midrange systems easily able to handle 500 part count ships...beyond that I think you are getting very much in to edge cases.

It is possible that the resistance of Kerbals varies depending on the amount of atmosphere they are exposed to and/or the level of gravity. Therefore you launch with a voltmeter to determine if the resistance (Ohms) of a Kerbal varies by using a Kerbal in series with a high amperage power source and a voltmeter and measuring the voltage as a Kerbal ascends and is later subject to the vaccum of space.

Visiting every planet and moon with the same lander and mothership. Refueling is just fine. I have never done one. I have personally envisioned it as a mother ship that is towing along a single lander. At each planet is a refueling tanker as well as the staging necessary for that planet for the lander. IE so Moho would have a tanker in orbit already and it might have a landing stage to add to the lander. Seperate the lander, attach to landing stage from the tanker, land on Moho, plant flag, launch from surface, detach landing stage (if there was any fuel to use for part of ascent), meet up with mother ship, refuel everything, launch for Eve. Get to Eve, get landing and ascent stages from tanker, land, plant flag, launch, meet up with mother ship, refuel, etc, etc.

I think it would be cool if at some point if a vehicle test facility could be added. Either small scale or large scale. One of the "frustrations" I have on occasion is attempting to design landers and stuff for other planets and Moons. Do I have enough thrust? Enough dV? Is it stable enough on landing? Etc. I can do some testing on Kerbin and I have some vague rule of thumbs for some planets and moons about what it takes. However, sometimes it is just too hard to test. Does that little 20 thrust engine really provide enough for my capsule to get to orbit? I've got lots of thrust, but I can't even lift off the pad until I am down to 10% fuel remaining on Kerbin, but hey, the Mun has a lot lower gravity! But is it lower enough for that kind of thrust? Sometimes it is just hope and pray. It would be cool if you could have a test facitlity so that you could launch from any of the planets or moons, or at least SIMULATED that you were. For example, you select the test facility and then the craft you want to test. You then have your ship spawned (kind of like the hypereditor) at that location to test. You could choose, for example, orbital height (auto-spawns at a circular equitorial orbit at the proper velocity) from the body, or choose a ground launch, which would launch from the equator at some pre-determined by SQUAD test location. This test facility would be an "engineering simulator" for the kerbals. You would not be spawning within the context of your game and as soon as you "end flight" the instance is ended. No even sandbox playing in it. If this is ever possible, I've gotta say, it would save me HUGE amounts of time and guess work to create proper landers without over engineering (or under).