Mr Shifty

It, of course, will approach from the day side. The geometry of the situation is inevitable. It's approaching from the inner solar system, i.e. the direction of the sun. Pluto's full, illuminated face will be facing NH as it approaches. It will fly directly across the terminator at closest approach (with Charon almost directly opposite), then face Pluto's dark side as it departs. You can see all this in NASA's Eyes free visualization tool: What's really cool is that, starting a couple weeks before the Pluto encounter, NASA's Eyes shows the fields-of-view of NH's instruments and communication dish. You can see it continuously re-orienting itself (according, presumably, to the mission's planning) first to observe Pluto and its moons, then to transmit back to Earth.

No problem. It's not an obvious answer unless you've looked for it or seen it before. I did a bunch of testing for Kragrathea when he was developing PlanetFactory, we discovered it, then passed it on to NathanKell when he was just starting to develop RSS. It's my one area of expertise:)

This is incorrect. All KSP bodies have zero tilt relative to Kerbin's orbital plane, i.e. all planetary rotation axes in KSP are parallel to each other regardless of the inclination of their orbits. It's possible to simulate axial tilt in KSP by putting a body on an inclined orbit (which is precisely what RSS does for Earth and the Moon.)

Entropy does not equal heat. Maximum entropy for a macroscopic thermodynamic system just means that temperature is uniform throughout the system, so there's no gradient for heat transfer. And statistically all it means is that this is the most likely future state of the system. Entropy doesn't exist microscopically; it's just a statement that macroscopic systems are most likely to exist in states with a greater number of indistinguishable microscopic configurations.

Note that with the Mun and Minmus (and most other moons in the game) their rotational angular velocity is so slow -- because they're tidally locked --, that it doesn't really matter which direction you launch. On both of Kerbin's moons, the difference between a prograde and a retrograde launch is a whole 18 m/s. (Laythe is the only moon where the difference is more than 50 m/s.) And returning to Kerbin from a retrograde equatorial orbit around the Mun takes exactly as much energy as returning from a prograde orbit, provided your escape vector is parallel to and opposite the Mun's orbit.

Yeah, I read 300 pages yesterday and had to force myself to stop reading so I could sleep. (There's a giant cup of coffee sitting next to me right now.) It's interesting how the publisher's description of the book emphasizes the long-term aftermath, when more than half of the book (at least) is about the preparation. I think you could do it pretty well with some of the [thread=81754]old spacecraft packs[/thread]. Anyone who's thinking about checking the book out should consider reading the excerpt published on Stephenson's website. It's the first 26 pages, so no spoilers that you wouldn't get just by reading. The only drawback is that after reading that, it's unlikely that you'll be able to resist going out and buying the full novel. Just to whet your appetite, it's got tons of action in LEO with diamond hard (sci-fi hardness scale, diamond=extremely realistic) orbital dynamics. Many existing spacecraft are seen/used. The near-future technologies used are extremely believable, as they're tech that's currently in prototype/advanced design phase. It's like spaceflight candy. We rarely get sci-fi like this, so give it some love.

So, Neal Stephenson's new novel, published last Tuesday. I'm only about 150 pages in, but I can't imagine any KSP enthusiast not being thrilled by it. It scratches the same near-future, hard-scifi, space-geek itch that The Martian or Gravity did. I'll post more once I've finished, but so far it's highly, highly enjoyable (and paced like Reamde -- that is to say, I start reading and look up an hour or so later to discover 100 pages have flown by.)

You could see it with [thread=98943]Distant Object Enhancement[/thread], in the sense that the planet would be visible in the sky near zenith at Kerbin midnight.

Great explanation! Just a quick correction here, though. I'm pretty sure I'm correct and that you want to launch to 150°, not 210° in order to catch the orbit at the descending node. One way to see this is to imagine that KSC is stationary and that the desired orbit is rotating around Kerbin's center. Another is to recognize that no prograde orbit is going to require a retrograde launch to catch.

1) You'll need to launch when the target orbit is directly overhead. This happens two times per day. One time the northbound section of the orbit will pass overhead and the other time the southbound section will pass overhead. 2) You need to launch to the correct inclination. If you launch when the northbound segment passes overhead (at its ascending node), you need to launch to a heading of 90°-desired_inclination plus a couple of degrees to account for Kerbin's eastward rotation. In this case that equates to a heading of about 30°. This means you should lean your rocket toward the 30° mark on the horizon-line on the Navball as you ascend (not the 30° mark that indicates pitch.) If you launch when the southbound segment passes overhead (at its descending node), you need to launch to a heading of 90°+desired_inclination minus a couple of degrees. (You always make the correction for Kerbin's rotation toward 90°.) In your case, you'd launch to a heading of about 150°. 2a) When you get skilled enough, you can switch to the map screen during the final minute or so of your ascent and nudge your rocket right or left to adjust your heading to make your suborbital arc parallel to the desired orbit, which should put you very close to the correct inclination. 3) Raise your apoapsis to the periapsis of the desired orbit (73.5km) and circularize there. Your orbit should be parallel to the desired orbit, nestled inside it, touching just at the desired orbit's periapsis. 3a) If you need to correct your inclination, you should do it now by burning either normal or anti-normal (the pink triangles on your Navball) at one of the two points where your orbit crosses the desired orbit. (The crossing points are the ascending and descending nodes.) Use a maneuver node to figure out which way to burn and how much. (For reference, you always burn anti-normal at the ascending node - AN at the AN.) 4) Coast to the desired orbit's periapsis and burn prograde to raise your orbit's apoapsis to match the desired orbit's apoapsis. Note: Step 1 ensures you have the correct longitude of the ascending node (LAN), Step 2 ensures you have the correct inclination, Step 3 matches periapsis and Step 4 matches apoapsis and argument of periapsis.

In a perfectly elastic collision of an object against a wall, say, the angle the object bounces off the wall is determined by drawing a line normal to the wall at the collision point and reflecting the object's approach vector around that line. (Another way of saying this is to say that the velocity of the object tangent to the wall doesn't change, while the velocity normal to the wall reverses direction.) In a gravity assist, the angle is determined only by the initial velocity of the vessel relative to the planet at a given distance, not by the angle of approach. It only functions like an elastic collision in a very limited set of cases.

Yeah, it's possible. You have to be on a parabolic trajectory, which means you have to be going exactly escape velocity. So for instance, for Eve: rSOI =85,109,365 m rEve = 700,000 m hatm = 90,000 m µ = 8.1717302×1012 m3/s2 Escape velocity at Eve's SOI edge is: vesc = (2*µ/r)1/2 = (2 * 8.1717302x1012 m3/s2 / (85,109,365 m) )1/2 = 438 m/s So you'd have to be going that speed relative to Eve when you encounter it, and also encounter it from directly ahead in its orbit. You can find the relevant math here.

Kerbals can drop out of the sky onto the land and survive too. I've EVA'd out of a couple of doomed capsules on descent (burned up parachutes) and survived just fine.

Can't really happen because if an object is at 0 mph relative to the Sun, it will immediately start accelerating directly toward the sun because of the Sun's gravity. They're not really like collisions; the train photo was an analogy (and the photo is misleading because the ball wouldn't be thrown toward the train, but in the same direction as the train. In a real orbital situation, crossing retrograde orbits would have far too much relative velocity for the planet to affect the spacecraft at any distance.) The situation is determined by 1) the relative velocity of the spacecraft and planet, 2) how close the spacecraft will pass to the planet, 3) the mass of the planet and 4) the initial angle of the spacecraft's trajectory relative to the planet's orbit around its primary. Roughly, the faster a vessel is going, the less influence a planet can exert. The closer it passes to the planet and the more massive the planet, the more influence the planet exerts. And the closer a vessel approaches the planet from directly ahead, the more the planet can change its resulting sun-relative velocity. The maximum velocity change occurs when a vessel enters a planet's SOI from directly ahead, loops around the planet in a 180°, and leaves its SOI directly ahead. It gains 2x the difference between their sun-relative velocities. (This is what happens in the train image, where the train is going 50 mph and the ball is going -30 mph, for a relative difference of 80 mph. 2x80 mph=160 mph, which when added to -30 mph gives 130 mph.)

Mars One's been hashed to death on the forums. See [thread=47036]this thread[/thread], which runs to 65 pages.

Just wanted to say that I'm really enjoying these contracts. I've been working my way (slowly) through a career save since 1.0.2 and these contracts provide real, rather than arbitrary, sights to see and visit. I just finished a seat-of-my-pants Mun return visit to the Armstrong memorial, and it was glorious. My favorite parts of KSP involve trying to figure out ways around oversights and unforeseen problems. The Anomaly pack provides plenty of opportunity for that, and a unique reward when you get there. Thanks!

Oil wasn't the game changer. Both oil and coil have been used for heat and light for thousands of years. There was even refinement of oil into kerosene as early as the 13th century. But oil wasn't used as a large-scale fuel source for engines until the mid 19th century. The first electric power stations, in the late 19th century, were hydro-electric or coal-fired. The industrial revolution itself was powered mostly by energy from coal (and water), but the game-changing technology wasn't fossil fuel utilization, but standardization of tooling and large-scale manufacturing (particularly of textiles) using machines. I'm no student of Roman history, but I can speculate that the Romans developed similarly disruptive technologies: aquaduct water transfer, paving, bridge building, concrete, glass-blowing, mining, plumbing, siege engines, turbine-driven mills, etc.

You mean the 40 years where we sent orbiters to Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, Ceres, Vesta, Eros, etc? Where we sent robots to crawl around Mars for years gathering scientific data? Send a lander to Titan? Where we have flown by every planet in the solar system, including -- by July -- Pluto and its moons? Where we've maintained a nearly continuous human presence in LEO? Assembled an enormous orbiting space station? Photographed the moon in high enough detail to see the Apollo landing and booster impact sites? Sent dozens of telescopes into space to gather un-imagined information about the distant galaxies, exoplanets, cosmic radiation, and countless data about our solar system, galaxy and the universe we live in? Successfully prototyped exciting new technologies like solar sails, ion drives, remotely piloted mini space cameras, on-orbit refueling, etc etc? Set up a global network of satellites that allow you to pinpoint your position anywhere on the planet to within a couple meters? Enabled a global communication network? Made hundreds of discoveries about Earth's climate, weather, geology, biosphere, oceans, etc? In what world has NASA wasted the last 40 years?

Sorry if this has been addressed before: I had FAR installed, then uninstalled it, but aero was acting really strangely. (Ridiculously high terminal velocity, weird ascent profiles, TWR that made no sense, etc) I couldn't figure out what was going on. In desperation, I deleted all of the MM cache files and everything suddenly worked fine (and KSP loaded faster.) Should we be sure to delete the cache files when we uninstall mods?

Never said so, but when the only example we have runs counter to your argument, you have to do more than wave your hand at it to make your point.

This argument gets used quite a bit. Here's a chart of NASA's inflation adjusted budget for the last several decades: Note particularly that after the moon landing in 1969, the budget decreased every year throughout the whole time people were walking on the moon. That gigantic accomplishment did not result in a long-term renewed interest in space and more money for space travel.

Pretty sure you can still get to Gilly orbit with your EVA pack. A while back, Scott Manley showed how you could return to Kerbin from Gilly's surface using just the EVA pack (and an EVA parachute mod.) I'm not sure if that's still possible, but it is still pretty awesome.

Generally, if you're trying to launch straight to rendezvous, with the new aero and flatter sub-orbital profile, I'd launch when the target is 60-45° west of your launch location. (45° is about 4 minutes at LKO.)

Another is that intelligent life is rare, and that technological civilization is even more rare. This seems pretty likely to me -- intelligence isn't a pre-determined outcome of evolution; there's no evidence that it's particularly adaptive in the long run. And even though we've been more or less the way we are for a few hundred thousand years, we've only had the capability to make ourselves known to the wider universe for about 100 of those years.

I was browsing through the forums looking for something and ran across this post from a fondly remembered, venerable thread. Ah, sweet, wistful irony.