GreeningGalaxy

Your spaceplanes are totally unreal, Overfloater. I can barely get a single FL-T800 into orbit on an SSTO these days.

Banned for ellipses. Eccentricities between 0 and 1 are banned under the 4-Dimensional Orbits Act.

How do you know it's not? What if there were three temporal dimensions?

I got RPM, with which I proceeded to make an IVA-only landing on Minmus. It was hell. On the subject, does anyone know if/where RPM lets you know that you've touched the ground? I don't really like estimating based on the assumption that my ship is ~9 meters tall and just looking to see when it drops a little below that to know when I've hit bottom. I should probably also get Vessel Viewer so I don't have to keep popping in and out of IVA to turn the nuclear reactor on and off and change the VASIMR engine settings.

Thing I did multiple times to myself today: Get a ship into a perfect hover on NFT VASIMR engines over Minmus, then put Jeb on EVA and accidentally fly him through the exhaust beams. He survived getting blasted with hot hydrogen moving at 160 kilometers per second, but he also struck the surface of Minmus with a somewhat significant fraction of that speed. Good thing I quicksaved!

That's an impressively elastic collision! :0 Usually that kind of crash would just kill the kerbal, or at least just kind of go 'squish' and not bounce much / just cause a spin.

Did a re-entry with a heatshield that turned out to be just a little bit too small for the ship. Also, I forgot to retract the radiators, so they formed a pretty little cloud of flying shrapnel behind my ship. I'm gonna get fined for littering again, dang it.

[edit: whoops, wrong thread!]

Today I got Near Future Technologies to see if it suited me better than KSPI. So far, so good- The reactor system is a bit different (and I'll miss fusion a lot) but it works and I like it. Not quite as complex as KSPI, which is another thing I'm going to miss, but I think the fact that the parts it adds are more realistic and could be more feasibly constructed with today's technology makes up for that. The model/texture artwork in this mod is absolutely incredible. Everything looks rugged and high-tech yet at the same time just a little old-fashioned- maybe the tiniest hint of a steampunk aesthetic? Couldn't say for sure, but those nuclear reactors really wouldn't look too out of place on a dirigible. After mucking around with engines for a while, I decided to send a VASIMR-powered transit vehicle (with enough delta-V to reach Jool or Eeloo, I'd imagine) to Minmus. And of course, as I tend to do, I decided to land it even though it didn't have any landing legs. Only this time, Jeb decided to jump out and beat the ship to the ground, so came down next to him with Bill doing the piloting. And so they landed and started the reactor shutdown sequence. But before the glow even faded from the radiators, Bill noticed something he hadn't before: The ship had no heat shields or parachutes! Luckily, Bob was already on the way with the next mission, a revamped version of the vehicle with landing struts, heat shields, and parachutes, plus a bit more reaction wheel torque than the previous model. That gave Jeb an idea- since they now had a way home and their old ship was useless, there had arisen an opportunity for some big explosions! Ignoring Bill and Bob's protests and incoherent whining about something called "radioactive waste", Jeb jumped into the defective ship's cabin, throttled up to maximum, set the trim off-center, and started the reactor boot-up sequence. As the ship started to shudder and tilt ominously, he narrowly escaped and jumped clear. The ship took off across the surface of the Minmus sea, nearly knocking Bill upside the head on its way past. Its unbalanced thrust caused it to perform a graceful loop in the sky... ...before becoming a new, radioactive crater on the icy surface. I like this mod!

Whoaa. That's a big ship. I've built some big things before, but that really puts them to shame, and probably would make my computer catch on fire and/or hate me forever. What's the total delta-V?

Someone needs to make a mod that can make probe cores duplicate themselves at a variable rate. Then we can have a KSP Gray Goo scenario, except with macrobots instead of nanobots.

Banned because the area defined in your location field is irregular in shape.

No kidding. I like to use that pod as an escape capsule for my big ships and it just will not point the right direction. And even if you do get the ladder lined up right, if you control the ship from there then the horizon will be skewed. Big pain if you were planning on landing horizontally...

Cool! Then we could do a Mars Climate Orbiter / Mars Polar Lander replica mission!

Couple of weird little things I found that are probably not my fault: -The fusion reactor says it puts out 8.00 gigawatts when first placed (with its default size set to 2.5 meters), then reverts to 4.00 gigawatts for that size when scaled up or down and then back to default. I haven't ever seen it put out more than 4 gigawatts in-game, but the number in the VAB screws up the thermal helper's calculations. -The core temperature of fusion reactors goes up as they're scaled down, with the biggest ones reaching only 7500-ish Kelvin and the tiniest getting to over 9000 Kelvin (meme not intentional). Was this an intended effect of rescaling? If so, why?

Last I heard in a Scientific American article, the energy required is now thought to be about equal to the mass of one Voyager space probe converted to energy- still pretty intense, but not unattainable. Actually generating negative mass exotic matter is a whole different beast, of course, but we're making progress there too- last I heard, they'd figured out how to separate positive and negative vacuum energy with big lasers. As for the energy conservation issue, my current best guess is that the gained potential energy would come not from your momentum, but from the exotic matter structure of the Alcubierre bubble itself, which would mean that you'd need more energy to sustain the bubble if you were going up a gravitational field. That still doesn't conserve momentum, but hey- that QVPT engine appears to have worked in some capacity, so maybe the LoCoM is bogus after all. That was a joke. WaveFunction mentioned a NASA lecture on the subject- do you have an actual link?

Not trying to criticize anyone present this time, but I've been wondering about the warp drive ever since FractalUK's first versions: It preserves your entire momentum, always, regardless of whether your warp jump took you up or down a gravity well. This is a huge violation of the conventional picture of the law of conservation of momentum (and the law of conservation of energy, for that matter, but this could easily be remedied by a tweak to the drive's power usage based on gravity well climb/descent), which can be illustrated easily by imagining what would happen if you used the drive to take off from the surface of a body- You'd go from a standstill on the surface to a high-altitude escape trajectory in the blink of an eye, with zero engine burns and using nothing more than a few gigajoules worth of exotic matter. Sure, the energy consumed could be proportional to the difference in potential energy of your starting and ending altitude (it's not, but it seems like it easily could), preventing one from making an infinite-portal-fall type perpetual motion machine out of it, but this doesn't address the fact that you're effectively getting a whole bunch of momentum from nowhere during your jump, which can be exploited by doing a climb-fall-climb-fall maneuver cycle to build up speed in any direction you want from a planet's (or star's) gravity well. Is this really how an Alcubierre drive would work in real life? If so, what branch of physics am I ignoring in this reasoning? If I'm not wrong about this, one could potentially make the warp drive system more realistic by making it remove momentum from your ship as it climbs gravity wells and add it back on as you descend them- If you warp from low orbit to a higher altitude, instead of finding yourself on an escape trajectory, you'll find yourself falling towards the planet. Your total orbital energy would remain the same, but more of it would suddenly be converted from kinetic energy to potential energy, resulting in a much higher altitude but much slower speed. I'm still a little fuzzy with how the exact math would work here, but I think it might result in long-distance warp transfers between planets leaving you with much less of a difference in velocity upon arrival, and far less delta-V would be required for the capture burn. This would, of course, make using the warp drive properly much easier, but would remove the possibility for unorthodox maneuvers generating massive velocities from nowhere. I'm curious for someone better educated in the relevant physics to weigh in on this.

I love how many of these solutions involve ramming things with kerbals. In KSPI I have several vessels that run on antimatter power, and I've rigged elaborate fail-safe/safe-fail systems into them to prevent my kerbs from dying of antimatter poisoning. Generally, I put a decoupler and a few sepratrons between the antimatter bottle and the Alcubierre ring, so that in the event of a power failure, I can split the ship in such a way as to keep the Alcubierre drive with the habitat module and the antimatter with the drive section, so the kerbals can escape at 0.10c. Other systems involve autopiloting the drive section into warp with its destabilizing antimatter bottle in tow, or else going for a drop-bottle-at-warp-then-kill-warp scenario. These have the advantage of getting the antimatter out of the vicinity of any other ships that might happen to be within the blast radius, but the last time I tried exploding something while at warp, it didn't end well.

Today I was tooling about on Minmus with my latest DT Vista-powered KSPI ship. I tried to pick the ship up and move it to a more interesting landing site while Orlie was on EVA about 2 kilometers to the north. Takeoff with the Vista was fine, but rotating the engine to point away from my intended new landing site (and towards Orlie) was apparently not fine, because the engine immediately cut itself off, leaving me hanging sideways about 100 meters off the ground over Minmus. I didn't want to disable radiation safety and save the ship at the cost of Orlie's life, so I had no choice but to try my best to kill my fall with RCS and hardware-assisted lithobraking. The gravity isn't strong there by any means, but I hit the ground hard enough to rip the stack in half and strand both kerbals. At least they're both still alive...

It gave me no trouble in Chrome on Debian, which surprised me because usually Linux Chrome has every conceivable browser issue (ever try using it with Scratch?). I did get a little tired of rubbing at my scroll wheel after about 15 levels or so, but it's nevertheless one of the better XKCDs to date in my opinion. Where can I find me some KSP rocket parts? Would've made an awesome entry in the 4H fair last year!

FractalUK's idea in making the smaller fusion reactors look different seemed to be that the big ones are tokamaks, which work better at huge sizes, and the small ones are laser/inertial reactor designs which are theoretically much easier to scale down. I get that extra models cause memory issues, but having a different type of reactor for small sizes does add an extra touch of the future-realism KSPI is known for.

It's been a while since I played KSPI in career mode, but could that be what unlocks the science lab's antimatter generation function?

After thinking about it a bit more, and playing the old version of KSPI some, I can only come to the conclusion that you're right. I did judge this mod a little (or a lot) unfairly and hastily, if not before playing it at all then at least before really thinking about all the changes. I still don't really agree with the fission buffs and the particle bed/molten salt thrust/ISP tradeoffs, and the removal of KTEC generators, charged particles, tritium breeding, and water tanks really cramps my style a lot. That said, though, the fusion/antimatter rebalance makes a lot more sense than I originally gave it credit for since the Kerbol system is so small compared to real life, and all of the bug fixes and new features really do improve the game a lot. I look forward to everything WaveFunction says is going to get added/re-added, too, and in the meantime, I imagine that most of my main issues could be fixed with a config edit or two. Anyway, thanks, WaveFunction! Sorry I was so presumptuous in my earlier post.

Banned for totally killing the thread.