InfinityArch

Any chance that we might eventually see beamed power light sails?

Okay, I'm just having a small issue with this plugin; for some reason, radiators, the science lab, and whatnot start out with the appearence of being deployed when ships load in, despite not actually being deployed in terms of in game stuff, ie I can fly as fast as I want without them tearing off. any idea how to fix that?

Out of curiosity, how many launches will this succession game allow? Most of my interplanetary missions have at least two launches, frequently more. Secondly, do we need to return the kethane to kerbin in order to achieve victory, and finally, are we allowed to sabotage other players' crafts as long as we don't take control of them or otherwise interfere? (i.e. by intercepting someone's orbiting kethane tanker with a kinetic kill vehicle) If we're required to return the kethane to kerbin but can't sabotage other players, there's more or less no reason to go anywhere but minmus, given that the landing delta-V on minmus. Personally I'd suggest giving each player a period of in game time to gather kethane rather than limiting them to 1 mission, I'm not sure what time frame would be best, but if you want interplanetary missions to be doable, I'd give people 6 months of in game time, or a full year if they need to return to kerbin with the kethane (if this is solely going to be within the kerbin system, 30 days should suffice), though you'll have to limit them to a certain number of launches to prevent someone from launching 50 kethane landers and strip mining minmus in that time. Ultimately, it really depends on how much kethane you're expecting people to get, though I'd suggest between 5 and 10 launches allowed per turn... And, given that you can apparently sabotage other players as long as you don't switch to their crafts (sorry, reading comprehension fail), I'd say go for around 5 launches maximum per turn.

When dealing with rovers, Skycranes are the way to go. If you don't know what that means, basically you build the landing stage for the rover ABOVE the rover itself, then detach the rover once you're right above the ground and crash the skycrane a safe distance away.

Deadly Reentry makes Eve missions of any sort hellishly difficult. Which is a good thing IMHO. Of course, it makes drogue chutes an absolute requirement for reliable unpowered descent in non-spaceplane designs if you're using it alongside FAR, and I can't seem to find a decent looking radial or interstage drogue chute. Also, I've notied when using this mod in 0.21, spacecraft in Kerbin's atmosphere tend to explode or loose parts with low heat tolerance when loading quicksaves. Not sure why that is, but I'd really like it if someone could fix that bug.

So has this mod been abandoned, because I'm still having issues with parts occassionally exploding upon loading while in an atmosphere, particularly on Kerbin.

^ The notion that the universe causes itself only really violates causalities assertion that cause must precede effect. Which any sort of "ultimate cause" or the utter lack of a cause already does.

^^ On the contrary, you would see little else besides lasers and missiles, either pure kinetic kill or nuclear, given that no non-nuclear explosive is going to add significantly more power to a weapon. Unguided weapons besides lasers move far to slow to be of any use on the offensive. Furthermore, except in the case of false flag operations (a war crime) or defection, there is no such thing as an unsuspecting enemy in space; the heat emissions from something as simple as the space shuttles maneuvering thrusters could be seen from the orbit of Pluto, to use an example from projectrho.

While it may simply be that there is no "ultimate cause" to existence, and the Big Bang (or whatever may have come "before") "just happened" for no reason, that would be deeply unsatisfying and strongly against the fundamental basis of scientific inquiry, namely the notion of cause and effect. It's also non-falsifiable as far as I can tell, and can, at best, only be a speculation. To me, the most plausible sounding explanations for existence are those that allow for eternal recurrence; the idea that reality causes itself is a bit hard to wrap one's head around, but, as far as I can tell, provides the only solution to the age old "chicken and the egg" question of reality that doesn't require an event without a cause.

Fantastic. Does that mean the ETA is tomorrow?

Cool. I imagine that a reactor for an MPD engine would be fission based rather than fusion based, and would, for the sake of part count, be assumed to contain the necessary thermoelectric generator equipment to convert the heat generated by said reactor into a usable form. In terms of gameplay, you could have the reactor consume a resource called "enriched blutonium" (the nuclear fuel that kerbals seem to use for RTGs and NTRs) when active, and produce something on the order of 100-10,000 units of electric charge per second depending on the size of the reactor. The MPD thrusters in turn would consume a similar amount of electric charge per second along with xenon gas; while current MPDTs have used hydrogen, and the best performance would hypothetically be lithium vapors, xenon is still usable, and would probably be the best choice for gameplay reasons. Now, in real life the specific impulse of MPD thrusters would be around 11,000 s, and they'd also only have thrusts on the order of .1 kN (though mind you, that's for a design for probes), which is worse than current ion engines in KSP. However, given that current KSP engines are, assuming 1 unit of electric charge is about a kilowatt (which makes the most sense in the context of ion engines' power consumption), about 2000x more powerful but significantly less efficient (4,200 s vs 6,000 s) than current VASMIR engines operating at the same power level, and more than 100x more powerful than electrostatic ion engines at any power level currently tested, giving an MPD maximum thrust on par with a NTR of a similar size-about 50 for a 1 m diameter that is-and specific impulse around 3,500 s wouldn't be unreasonable. Balancing this out in terms of gameplay would be the engine's high power demands; probably something along the lines of 1,000 units of electric charge per second, and the fact that it's TWR when accounting for the reactor would be lower than the NTR; a completely unburdened NERVA has a TWR of about 2.7 in kerbin's gravity well. I'm not sure if an MPD would theoretically be capable of pushing it's own weight, though I'd make it just barely able to overcome kerbin's gravity well-maybe about 1.05-with no payload, though I'm not sure how well that would perform, and once you add any fuel whatsoever or a command pod/probe body, that value will plummet.

Mother. Of. God. Want. So much want. I really cannot wait for this stuff to be released. The engines look fantastic, and while I'd prefer the nuclear reactors to look, you know, like a real world design, the model is brilliant nevertheless. Out of curiosity, how far into this 3 week tour are you Yorik? On a more negative note, there's just one small issue I have with this pack; there's not much research going into chemical-ion hybrid rocket engines in real life as far as I know. A more realistic technology with a similar effect would be a magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) arcjet, which is an electric propulsion system that uses enormous amounts of power (to the point of more or less requiring nuclear reactors), but would be capable of thrust on par with chemical rockets. There's also VASMIR, though that'd require a relatively simple plugin to get the "switch gears" thing to work. Finally, I'm wondering if you guys have ever considered possibly approaching hoojiwana, whose also working on an ion engine pack, with the possibility of collaborating on this, given that your work overlaps a great deal.

^ How so? Propellium burning rockets have ISPs on par with LH2 rockets IRL, and there's no reason to assume it isn't stored cryogenically.

So I just noticed the tanks from this plugin say things like "oxygen" and "carbon dioxide", when the kerbal terms for those chemicals are "oxium" and presumably "carbon dioxium".

At the very least, I'd like there to be a requirement to be in contact with probes to control them.

How long it would take to travel to another star system at current time warps depends largely on how fast you're going. At near light speed, it would take slightly more than 1.73 hours at 100,000x acceleration to reach a star 20 light years away. Of course, kerbal scales are about 1:11, so a star 20 light years away in real life would be more like 2 light years away in ksp, which would take about 15 minutes to reach at 100000x time acceleration traveling close to c. At kerbal scales, it would only be a few minutes at 100000x time acceleration to reach the closest stars at light speed.

I imagine he'd categorize it as a "dad" game; Too dry and frothingly realistic for him to get into, despite that KSP is most definitely not the latter, except in comparison to most "science" fiction games of our time.

^ The problem with that is that mono-propellant RCS systems actually involve a reaction. Generally what happens is the mono-propellant is passed across a catalyst which causes it to energetically decompose.

@sidfu: I'm aware of that, but as I said, there should be, for the purpose of realism, some inefficiencies that cause you to gradually loose resources in this life support model. Even if it's 10% lost per cycle, that's still 10x longer endurance for a vessel, which will make missions to Jool significantly more forgiving on life support budgets.

@sidfu: I'm aware of that, but as I said, there should be, for the purpose of realism, some inefficiencies that cause you to gradually loose resources in this life support model. Even if it's 10% lost per cycle, that's still 10x longer endurance for a vessel, which will make missions to Jool significantly more forgiving on life support budgets.

I'd really like to use this mod, but there are two outstanding issues I see with it; A. The current parts have rather ugly models; hopefully at some point a seasoned modeler might be able to help you out. B. More importantly, there's no way to create a closed circle life support system, and this no way to have permanent off-world colonies. This also looks as if if'd make interplanetary missions quite difficult. For the second issue what I'd suggest would be 5 modules for this purpose: First would be a fuel cell module, which consumes liquid fuel and oxidizer to produce electricity and water. Second would be the compressor/decompressor module, which can be used to convert oxidizer into breathable "oxium" (to use the Kerbal term for it), or vice-versa in the case of excess "oxium" supplies. Compressing oxium to oxidizer naturally uses a lot of electricity, while decompressing it consumes significantly less, only requiring you to heat the oxium to usable temperatures. After that, we start getting into more advanced and long-term, but extremely heavy and power hungry life support systems capable of recycling the waste produced by kerbals. The third part I had in mind would be the waste processing module, which would use electricity to recycle waste water into regular water plus solid waste which can be dumped or further defined. The fourth module would be a waste processing module, which, with an input of electricity, converts waste into fertilizer. The fifth and final of these life support related modules would be a hydroponics tank, which uses water, carbon dioxium, fertilizer derived from waste, and either sun exposure or electricity depending on the specific part used to produce food, oxium, and a refund of the water consumed by the module. This module would, unlike other life support systems, produce large amounts of its product at regular, albeit long intervals, rather than producing a steady trickle of product. For the purposes of realism, I'd suggest introducing a small "leak" from the above cycle to represent inefficiencies, requiring either occasional resupply trips or utilization of locally available resources.

Regarding the higher delta-v requirements of real life spacecraft, do realize that real life fuel tanks are capable of significantly, significantly higher mass ratios than Kerbal tanks, and real engines have much higher thrust to weight ratios.

Hmm, shouldn't life support and female kerbals/visually distinct kerbals in general (just to list two examples) be here, along with a whole lot more stuff on the "Do not suggest" list that's there because it's been suggested many, many, times before, not because the developers are against including them.

I'm not sure about the first one, but I doubt it. As for the second one, I suppose you must mean denser, and that is a resounding no. It's about twelve times denser than liquid hydrogen if my google-fu is correct, which makes it slightly less dense than water, so no, it's not denser than lead, though it is comparable in density to kerosene. If you were to say use metastable metallic deuterium for a D-He3 fusion rocket, it also appears helium would become the "bottleneck".

I play with FAR, so I start turning almost immediately. You can generally get going a fair bit faster lower in the atmosphere with FAR assuming you've got an aerodynamic design, which makes delta-v to orbit a great deal more variable depending on your crafts aerodynamic properties, ranging from about 3.5 km/s to about 5 km/s.