Mr Shifty

Looks like it was fixed 15 days ago: https://github.com/cerebrate/USAFOrion/releases That's just the dlls, so you'll have to download the mod from the OP then replace the dlls with those. Not sure if it works, but worth a try.

Edit: Ninja'd with a more likely answer.

Interesting. I hadn't known that; thanks for the link! Compared to the more than one million Jupiter trojans though...

bitbucket didn't say it could exist, just said it was generally gravitationally stable in an n-body paradigm. - - - Updated - - - From the wikipedia article you quoted: L4 and L5 are perfectly stable in a 3-body system, and as long as there are no other gravitationally significant bodies around, it's difficult to knock something at those points out of them, which is why there are Trojans at JS4 and JS5. (Nothing else in the solar system is gravitationally significant next to Jupiter and the sun.) But there's zero evidence of similar bodies trapped at any of the Earth-Sun or Earth-Moon triangular points. They wouldn't be stable over any long time frame because of perturbations caused by our moon, the sun, and nearby planets.

Better to say that the gravity from Earth and Sun balance so that the relative geometry between the three bodies (Earth, the sun, your vessel) remains the same over time. In KSP, you can actually sort of simulate this by placing your vessel on the same orbit as, but outside the SOI of, the orbiting body. KS1 can't be simulated. Your vessel will pull ahead of Kerbin because of its lower orbit. KS4/5 can sort of be simulated as above, though an actual KS4/5 would not be directly on Kerbin's orbit, but slightly above it. No relativistic physics required, just classic Newtonian physics with three gravitationally significant bodies. Nope, it wouldn't require much more than the integration methods already used to project trajectories in the game. They don't do it because n-body complicates everything (particularly time warp) and makes maneuver nodes much harder to implement and far less intuitive. In other words, it's gameplay, not technical capability that prevents it. Two notes: 1) L-points don't work in n-body simulations. They're only actually valid for 3-body simulations. 2) Orbiter simulates n-body physics, solar radiation pressure, exosphere drag, orbital precession, gravity gradient torque, etc. If you want that stuff, head over to http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/ and check it out.

Renewables are a small part of total energy consumption (~9% in the U.s.) and they're all location dependent. You can't just replace a fossil-fuel plant with a renewable plant. And there's no viable renewable source for transportation. You might be able to power a family car with a battery for commuting to work, but you can't power long-haul trucking with one. You can't power an ocean crossing container ship or a freight airliner with one. And you can't power a rocket with one. All of that means power distribution and shipping infrastructure has to be drastically altered, and we -- as I said above -- become more local. Fission is not renewable. At current rates, known uranium ore reserves will be depleted in about 90 years. If we switch a significant portion of our energy infrastructure to fission, it'll be much faster. Uranium is fairly common, so there are less-easily-extracted sources, but that means an already expensive and politically volatile energy source becomes very much more expensive and probably not worth the, ahem, fallout.

If you're trying to launch-to-match-orbit and your target is on an inclined orbit, it's actually not too difficult. You can only launch twice per (Kerbin) day -- when either the AN or DN of your target's orbit passes overhead -- which means that you can't launch straight to rendezvous unless your target passes overhead at the same time. If your target's AN is passing overhead, you need to launch to 90°-target_inclination. If the DN is passing overhead, you need 90°+target inclination. After launch, rotate 3-4° west of that heading to account for Kerbin's eastward rotation. When you start getting significant horizontal velocity (pitched down to 45° or so), switch to the map screen and observe how well your sub-orbital arc aligns with the target orbit. You can rotate left and right as you ascend to adjust your orbit's inclination to match the target. (This sounds difficult, but is surprisingly easy to do if you try it.) Push your orbit out to the target's altitude, coast to apoapsis and proceed to rendezvous as normal.

Less politically charged than the last poster: the US government has had a debt since the 1840's. It doesn't seem to have crippled us much for the last 175 years. I don't suspect it'll ever be much of a problem in the future. I'm also fairly sanguine about the SLS. It's hard to see the point of it, but I suspect we'll all be pretty excited about whatever it is NASA finds to do with it. I think sticking with Greek/Roman gods seems appropriate. Why not Athena I or Artemis I?

Earth is nothing like a closed system. Photosynthesis, which is the reaction plants use to sequester solar energy in the form of chemical bonds in carbohydrate molecules, is an endothermic reaction, which means it requires an energy input. Generally, that energy comes from the sun. Oil and other fossil fuels are formed through a long chain of a variety of chemical and physical reactions, but carbohydrates are the materials those reactions work on. Combustion is the process of getting that energy back out breaking hydrocarbons back into CO2 and water. Even if the cycle were reversible at that point (it's not, c.f. 2nd Law of Thermodynamics), it certainly wouldn't be after we use that energy to heat food or move cars around or light our houses. Think of our fossil fuel reserves as a giant battery that took hundreds of millions of years to charge. We'll deplete the battery within a couple of centuries and that's it; it's not coming back on any timescale that concerns us. I see fusion as a potential solution, but it's not a panacea. Even if we can get fusion going before fossil fuels are gone and before climate change wrecks havoc on technological industry and supply chains etc, (note: without high-tech factories and global supply routes and foundries and hundreds of other components of our technological civilization, fusion will never ever happen) it will require a massive change in how we get and use energy. Specifically, it's hard to imagine how overseas and airborne shipping works in that paradigm. Trucking disappears and we go back to using trains for continental transport, which means that paved intercontinental roadways probably are left to decay. (Space travel, needless to say, is impossible without fossil fuels.) Everything becomes more local, prices rise, standards of living fall, and we get used to living in a world that, while higher-tech, is probably somewhat similar to the early 19th century . . . until big-agriculture collapses due to climate change and 8 or 9 billion humans strip-mine the biosphere for food as we starve to death.

And though the last lights off the black West went... ...oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward springs. (Actually those are both sunsets, but I thought Hopkins was pretty appropriate.)

Add oil depletion to this equation. Global transportation and shipping infrastructure is oil-based, and it's hard to see a viable alternative. (Coal is one, but would require replacing or retrofitting almost the whole existing global vehicle fleet, and would grossly exacerbate the climate problem.) I don't see how global technological civilization outlasts fossil fuels. There's no other energy source that's remotely as versatile, energy-dense, and portable.

starving across the scholars of war, burning jazz, who were expelled from Battery of teaheaded hipsters burning Arkansas and children brought them down shuddering hysterical naked, who pover through the supernatural darkness, staggering on benzedrine until the winter dusks of wheels and kind leaping winter dusks of marijuana for the endless over the best mind listening in the motions in the scholars of war, who pover the tops of wheels and children brough the academies with radiant cool eyes

We'll see. Some facts to ponder: - 80,000 people at 100kg each is 8000 metric tons of human flesh, or about 5x the mass of the ISS. - To date, in over five decades of human spaceflight, a total of 536 people have ever been to space (above 100km), counting sub-orbital flights.

The cost of the Apollo program (putting 12 people on the moon) was about $150 billion over 10 years. A Mars mission would probably be more by an order of magnitude or more, but even if you could do it for the same cost, you'd need to sell 1.5 million one-way tickets to cover the cost at $100k per. I suspect there won't be that many seats on the first few Mars missions. Put it another way. SpaceX advertises its Falcon 9 launches at $61.2 million each. Even if every single one of those launches is 100% pure profit (which is... doubtful), it would take about 2500 launches to raise $150b, or about 200 years' worth at their current pace.

[thread=92377]Kerbal Construction Time[/thread] has a launch simulator built in:

How did the space cowboy see at night? With a saddle light.

How does the barber cut the moon's hair? He clips it. (My 4 year old told me this one.)

Did you guys read the article about how dentists are starting to use hypnosis and other non-pharmaceutical therapies as a replacement for anesthetics during tooth extraction. It's called "Trends in Dental Medication". Bah-dum, splash. I'm here every night folks.

Yeah, this confused me for quite awhile. It would be nice to have the option to close the bay for re-entry.

I can't remember if this worked prior to 1.0. (I don't think so, but I haven't played in a few months.) The terminal velocity for the kerbals themselves at Kerbin's surface seems to be below their collision damage threshold. Twice now, I've had (ahem) parachute malfunctions that involved a rapidly descending control pod. I EVA'd the Kerbal at 5km and blasted her EVA pack at full charge toward the ground (which doesn't seem to affect her velocity much.) When she landed, she bounced a couple times and walked away. This strikes me as -- resilient to say the least. Is this normal or a 1.0 addition?

This is a meaningless distinction. The experience is the game is the experience. The Tatsu roller-coaster at Magic Mountain is a spectacular thrill even if I'd prefer that the rails were painted green. Irrelevant: the single scored review of KSP has almost nothing to do with its popularity.

I'm not saying winged upper stages are the way to go, but categorically excluding them from speculation here is baseless.

Link to the review. Yeah, that sums it up for me.

More to the point, it would have stability issues if you threaded a bowling ball to the front of it, or if you tried to throw it into a tornado.

I gather that it has something to do with the collision between flat maps and spherical planets.