GreeningGalaxy

0/10 never seen once. Hi there! o/

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2/10. Excessively nationalistic paint job, and it's clearly built all wrong for spaceflight - far too heavy, symmetry not radial, thrust balance clearly off as a result, and where even are your propellant tanks? Have lander, will travel.

:| Wagon 63: I found... A live Dho-Nha summoning grid! Requesting backup!

:| Sure, if you like. Someone currently drinking a hot beverage besides coffee.

No, personally I couldn't care less. A moderator on another forum, but not this one.

Yes... Someone who currently has a kerbal on Eeloo.

We're absolutely in the midst of a mass extinction right now. According to WWF, the current total extinction rate of species on Earth is something like 10,000 to 100,000 per year, which is several orders of magnitude higher than the "background extinction rate" (how many species would be going extinct if we weren't in the middle of a mass extinction). Is this the result of human activities? Absolutely. Climate change, habitat loss due to deforestation etc, and pretty much just the fact that humans live everywhere is causing this. There's not really any way around that fact; denying it is a little like setting off multi-megaton nuclear weapon and then, when people ask why your formerly whole island now has a big chunk missing, insisting that the rock was weak and would have broken anyway. We've been doing too much to our planet for these effects not to be majorly influenced by our activities, and, all things considered, it's pretty much immaterial whether or not any part of what we're seeing is happening "naturally," because we're still responsible for most of it. To an extent, perhaps. What you've got to remember, though, is that every single species on the planet fulfills a particular niche in the biosphere, which contributes to said biosphere's stability, which in turn means that it's absolutely useful to humans, since we depend on the integrity of the biosphere. Our biosphere is quite resilient and probably won't suffer any particularly devastating collapse just from a few (million) species going extinct, but it's going to be a little the worse for wear. Ecological stability is a very complex thing - delicate in some ways, tough as nails in others - and it hasn't exactly been a priority of our species lately. Will we survive? Yes. But we've already had such an impact on the world (and have made so little effort to mitigate it) that this mass extinction will continue for quite a lot longer, and we're going to see a lot of negative effects on our biosphere no matter what we do.

I abused some procedural solid rocket boosters. Turns out those things can have a thrust as low as 1 kN, regardless of their size. Even if they're over 20 meters tall and 6 meters wide. See that itsy bitsy little nozzle? No? here, I'll zoom in. There it is. It's really small, and all the fuel in the booster can only escape through it! Muahahaha. I stuck the booster outside and floated it off to the side of the launchpad (with some difficulty, even with gravity hacked). I made sure the business end was pointed upwards, fired the ignition system, and... The base of the booster promptly caught fire. Okay. Soon, though, the proper end finally bore the flame, and the Unnecessary Candle of Hope and Glory and Stuff was officially dedicated. According to Procedural Parts, the thing should keep burning for over fifty days. Despite its dramatic flare effect, it's not making enough thrust to be considered "under acceleration" or "throttled up" so I can switch to and from it as I please and carry out my daily space flights while leaving it to do its thing. Which appears to involve creating lots of smoke. Of course, the booster goes out during timewarp and comes back on afterwards, so this thing will only run out after I've logged 50 days worth of unreverted, real-time flight in KSP, which, let's be honest, will never happen. So let's be real here, this thing's staying put unless I get bored and decide to blow it up or something. The flame isn't even visible from the ground through all that smoke. You have to take to the air to catch even a small glimpse. The EPA is surely on our case by now. Also, KSC is probably no longer observable from orbit, thanks to the smog. That's a good thing for some people, I suppose. One last look at the KSC with its new expensive and pointless edifice, which somewhat resembles the Kerbal Eye of Sauron. Am I happy with my decisions in life? Don't you wish you knew.

Gonna go with 'no', but this discounts the possibility of a ninja. Somebody with a crown.

Ayyyy! Ninja'd! *her. Red Iron Crown?

This sounds a little familiar... when I was in high school, we studied the solar system a bit, and we were told that Mars's moons were captured asteroids. I joked that they used aerocapture and a short burn at apoapsis to do that, but no one understood what I was talking about, of course. In a perfect Newtonian system, captures like that might be impossible (from the frame of reference of the capturing body this seems easily the case, since something that drops into its gravity well will inevitably find its way back to the starting altitude with equal speed as before, just going the other way). However, in the real universe, we have tidal forces that drag on eccentric orbits at their periapses, and it is possible at the very least for an object to get a very slow flyby by orbiting the sun (or whatever parent body) slightly above the body it will encounter, and simply waiting to be caught up to. If this happens slowly enough, the low speed of the flyby could probably make it take long enough for the tidal forces to drag the orbit's eccentricity down below 1 and capture the incident body into orbit.

Since you are the only object in the ex-universe, space no longer makes sense. Over the course of nonexistent time, you slowly contract to a single, zero-dimensional point and effectively are no longer anyone's bother. Some undefinable "time" later, I spontaneously re-ify into existence, catalyze a Big Bang event within myself, and become a new universe. Someone's got to do the cleaning up around here... GreeningGalaxy becomes GreeningUniverse! My universe/body (again)! (there's a hill or two somewhere inside me. <taunt/>)

I find that FAR makes building good planes substantially more difficult. Sure, I can make just about anything fly with enough thrust (KSP Interstellar fusion thermoturbojets could fly a city bus or herd of goats into orbit, with enough struts), but the tricky part for me is making it fly well. I've wrestled spaceplanes into orbit in heated, seat-of-the-pants pilot-versus-aircraft fights, but only rarely can I build something that doesn't wobble horrendously. Recently I spent a while figuring out how to make a very maneuverable fighter jet, and I did eventually succeed for the most part (analysis of the Firehound helped), but it was a challenge. I find that I really have to think on my feet when designing FAR aircraft, particularly super-/hypersonic ones or ones that are designed to maneuver especially well. I have met an especially large number of people who claim that FAR makes things easier - sure, it's possible to fly much faster at low altitudes (and in general) with FAR, and you can apply more real-world design points to your planes, but in terms of just sticking some wings on a tube full of fuel and getting it to fly nicely, stock aero is substantially simpler. I still have yet to see any craft in FAR that can remotely compete with the most agile stock planes, for instance, and you'll never end up in a catastrophic stall in stock. Stock aero enables more planes to fly with fewer complications, so in stock, arbitrarily-designed craft are far more likely to fly satisfactorily. If they don't fly well, usually they just flip out and crash; there's not a lot of middle ground like there is in FAR. So does it make the game harder? Yes, in the sense that it makes it more complicated. There's no real way around that; I don't think FAR will ever be easier than stock aero for someone who's used to the latter. Once you get used to airplane design in FAR, though, it's potentially possible to do a lot more with your aircraft than you can in stock.

The Isp cap thing in general is just borked. I get that there are going to be factors limiting the specific impulse of thermal rockets, but having just a hard limit there is weird. I could live with that, though, if all the energy you put into a thermal rocket actually showed up again - I'd expect it to appear as thrust. It does appear to do that for the most part, but there are some glaring exceptions. Sure, you'll have some losses since no system can be 100% efficient, but what you lose is still going to show up as waste heat - you can't just wave a magic wand and make excess energy go away. That's what appears to be happening on the antimatter thermal rockets - no noteworthy waste heat is being generated, the Isp is still low, an the thrust, while pretty intense for a chemical rocket, isn't remotely what it should be for a 405 gigawatt antimatter one. Unless the overwhelming majority of the power is being lost as gamma rays or only heating the exhaust after leaving the engine or something, we've got a thermodynamics problem on our hands. Of course, it would also be reasonable to expect that a 405 gigawatt engine with an Isp of only 3,000 seconds would totally break any vessel at full throttle, regardless of how strong it's built. If we assume an efficiency of 50%, that gives us a thrust of (405,000,000,000 W / (3,000 s * 9.81 m/s/s * 1/2)) * 50%, or just over 13.8 giganewtons (13,800,000 kN). Not on my ship, thank you very much! In reality, you'd never get a thrust that high by any realistic means (note that nothing on the Project Rho table goes above about 400 meganewtons or so). The propellant flow would just be too big to manage, and you'd inevitably end up with a substantially higher Isp. Of course, that wouldn't literally be a thermal rocket at that point - it would presumably be more akin to the plasma core antimatter rocket (Isp ~700,000 seconds, thrust ~50 kN for a 192-gigawatt system), which is a low-thrust high-Isp system, exactly the opposite of what the 3000-second Isp cap seems to suggest it would be. It could, of course, be "geared" by pumping through more or less propellant, exchanging Isp for thrust to a certain extent, but I have a hard time believing that it'd be able to gear itself as low as 3,000 seconds. (I may also point out that the 405-gigawatt antimatter reactor specifically identifies itself as "Plasma-core" - this isn't that hard, people. ) I don't really know what's up with KSPI these days, but I really feel like putting the 3,000-second Isp cap on the antimatter thermal rockets did nothing for realism or gameplay. At the very least, I think the engine should have its power output/input balanced, if not be reworked to model a completely different engine type.

I use this un-adjusted lens to scatter your laser.

My name is GreeningGalaxy and I endorse this campaign. sorry I couldn't resist Yeah, I haven't used antimatter thermal rockets for quite some time, but this is definitely strange - not only is the antimatter reactor putting out far more power than its antimatter usage would suggest (I forgot the 2* in that calculation etmoonshade quoted me on; with equal annihilation with matter, that means the reactor's taking up 270 GW worth of antimatter, not 135), meaning that the reactor (which claims to be putting out 405 GW) is in violation of thermodynamics. At the same time, we have our thermal engine, which is using up all the power provided by the reactor (the reactor is running at 100%), yet is putting out 4718.8 kN at an Isp of 2997.1 seconds, meaning that its total dissipated power is only about 14 gigawatts. Regardless of how you look at it, power is either disappearing, being created from nowhere, or both, and that's not quite right. Proof pics (in spoiler tags to avoid clutter): Also note 15 mg/sec antimatter consumption shown in the resources tab, and the lack of wasteheat - all the energy is being consumed by the engine. The other thing we've been noticing is that there's no thrust/ISP scaling with altitude on the antimatter rocket the way there should be for thermal rockets. It starts at sea level with that exact thrust and Isp, and retains that all the way to space. Maybe this is part of the bug's root cause?

*appears wearing Sal_Vager mask* Yep! You guessed it! Nah, just kidding. WinkAlKerb?

10/10 hi!

--removed after mod ninja-- Sorry, Vanamonde

At the subatomic level, Hype appears to exhibit self-confinement properties if the external pressure is high enough, sustaining a process somewhat akin to fusion which produces Hype's characteristic extreme temperature. At pressures lower than about 75 millibars (about the atmospheric pressure at 18 kilometers up), however, this property is lost, and typical methods of sustaining fusion in a near-vacuum, such as inertial or magnetic confinement, are impractical because Hype exhibits no significant magnetic properties, cannot be ionized in any known way, and requires more input energy from a laser-confinement system than the resulting Hype reaction actually produces even in states of total ignition. Storing Hype in a pressure vessel in order to induce its customary sea-level behavior seems to be an obvious solution, but all reactive Hype brought past the Von Karman line invariably reaches an irreversible Boredom State within moments, seemingly in response to some poorly-understood and otherwise undetected form of cosmic background radiation. Since no known material can block this radiation without a thickness of many kilometers, this makes Hype use outside the protection of Earth's atmosphere virtually impossible.

There's a lot of different ways to use fusion power as a propulsion system. If you use the KSP Interstellar mod, it does a pretty good job of representing many of them. The most basic one doesn't even need the fusion to produce more energy than you put into it - you just use a fission-electric powered z-pinch or laser inertial confinement system, get enough fusion to make a nice high exhaust velocity, and you're golden. You won't get much thrust at all since you're losing energy to the fusion reaction, but you'll get a respectable Isp since the individual fusion events will launch charged particles away from you at very high speed. Assuming you figure out how to actually achieve ignition with ICF, that system would work substantially better. You could make what essentially amounts to a miniature, constantly running Orion drive - toss the fuel pellets out the back, strike them with powerful lasers, and then funnel the high-speed fusion products into an exhaust beam with magnetic fields. According to our good friend Project Rho, the theoretical limits of that kind of engine are quite substantial! (See "FUSE: IC-Fusion (MAX)" towards the bottom of the table). The easiest method for a tokamak-like design is probably a NERVA-like thermal rocket, pumping a hydrogen propellant through the hot part of the reactor. Deuterium-tritium fusion puts out a lot of neutron radiation which isn't too hard to thermalize with a nice big slab of tungsten, so you won't have much trouble designing an engine like that once you have a working reactor. A thermal rocket would give you a pretty respectable thrust and Isp, but nothing like the direct-drive external inertial-confinement system would when properly refined. You could also use the reactor to generate electricity through some type of heat engine or thermoelectric system and then use that electricity to run a plasma thruster, but that system is going to be inefficient since you're converting your energy so many times - today's Brayton-cycle thermal generators only get a few percent efficiency, and then you'll lose energy from your power distribution system, and then the plasma engines will make heat as they run too, and eventually the energy that actually shows up as useful work will be minuscule compared to what you made in the reactor, and you'll have to find a way of dissipating all the heat you lose, presumably with large and heavy radiators. For the foreseeable future, I'm with UmbralRaptor and the fusion-heavy Orion concept. Sure, it's dirty and complex and involves a lot of wildly terrifying engineering, but it would get the job done - the theoretical maximum Isp would be around a million seconds. If you could figure out a good way of smoothing out the acceleration (the Medusa concept looks good), you'd be pretty much golden.

Kilogram weight is a valid unit of force, but I'd agree that SI units are better. We keep encountering psi in my physics textbook, and it makes me want to yell.

Oh wow, this is awesome! I can't wait to see what the public comes up with. Personally I hope at least someone suggests "Moon Holder."

Just the second time? #interestingiftrue Also: "Females?" We're women. Sure, whatever, "it's technically correct" or whatever, I don't care. It's annoying to be called "females," it makes it sound like you're talking about livestock. Women are actually a pretty significant chunk of the gaming population. According to that article, women make up a total of 48% of all gamers, and there are substantially more adult women who game than teenage boys. As for this game, I'd love to think that a large percentage of people who play it are not men, but it still focuses on STEM fields and "nerdy" things, subjects which our society still steers women away from. Sure, there are plenty of women who do play it, but there are probably substantially more women who play puzzle games or shooters than complex, stereotypically-nerdy games like KSP. You can see it in the lack of anything but male kerbals in the stock game - this is a game made by men for men. (And yes, they've said they'll put in kerbal women eventually, but that's clearly coming as an afterthought in response to the women who do play the game, so I wouldn't say it detracts from that statement.) Also, again with the "females." Can we please all knock that off?