Justy

My vote: don't. I mean, keep your spaceplane -- it looks great! But use it as a spaceplane. Why haul wings and jet engines to Minmus? Make one of your spaceplane's earliest payloads a nuclear or ion powered tug. Then, future flights bring payloads up to be picked up by the tug and hauled to Minmus. This was the real job of NASA's Space Shuttle. We call the shuttle "STS", Space Transportation System, but shuttle was only supposed to be a part of a Space Transportation SYSTEM that would also include chemical-powered tugs (with heat shields for aerobraking) for Earth/Moon work, nuclear-powered tugs for deeper space work, and a maintenance dock at what was then imagined to be Space Station Freedom. The only optimizing I can see doing is to ensure your fuels are in proper balance. Once you get to orbit, you're on rocket power only, so you should have the right balance of liquid fuel & oxidizer for rockets, any extra liquid fuel beyond what you have oxidizer to burn with is dead weight from then on. There might be room to reduce some of the liquid fuel carried; between the wings and engine pods, you have a lot of storage there. Conversely, if you spend so much time on jet power that you reach orbit with an overabundance of oxidizer, that's dead weight too, and you should add more liquid fuel tankage so you can take advantage of it.

I know the basics of some of what you've listed, and almost nothing about others. Heck, I had to look up "steel detailing." The difference is that while so-and-so knows it is an honest indisputable fact that we're sending shuttles to the Moon from the ISS, I understand that I don't know anything about steel detailing.

Does Voidi's installation script still work? I was trying to help a guy on the /r/kerbalspaceprogram subreddit, but while writing him a tutorial on how to get KSP installed, I found the script couldn't log in to the kerbalspaceprogram.com webstore with my username and password. I copied over the script from a successful installation, so it already had my login details, and it failed too. I know my password is correct, though, since logging in to the website itself in a web browser works fine.

During the webcast, I thought I heard the Arianespace presenter proudly proclaim that while the first three stages of the Soyuz-ST were Russian-made, the Fregat upper stage was European. This surprised me, and doesn't seem correct... Do note that while Lavochkin seriously kerballed Fobos-Grunt, they did successfully return samples from the Moon with a robot, and only one (Hughes Aircraft's Pioneer 13 night-side lander) of the 11 Venus landers that survived functional on the surface wasn't a Lavochkin product. They had plenty of hiccups there (lenscaps popping off as designed but ending up right where surface tools needed to poke), but holy cow, they built stuff that survived to the surface of Venus.

There's a ferry service that runs between mainland British Columbia, Canada and Vancouver Island. There's roughly a dozen sailings a day on each of the three most important routes. At the very moment I'm typing this, the MV Queen of Oak Bay is making a westbound trip. We don't call it BC Ferries Voyage #368785, it's just the Saturday 8pm sailing to Nanaimo, a trip that the Queen of Oak Bay has made regularly and reliably since she was built in '81. Well, except for that time she sank more boats than the entire Canadian Navy since the end of WW2. That's what I want space travel to be. Flights should be so frequent that the launch schedule should look like the page in any port city's newspaper that lists the arrivals and departures of ships. SPACE STATION FREEDOM SHIPPING REPORT - ALL TIMES UTC - TODAY: Capsule 'Pete Conrad,' USA, passengers, from Kennedy, arriving berth 2 at 17:30. OTV 'Tsiolkovsky,' Russia, water and hydrazine, for OPSEK, departing berth 5 at 19:00. TOMORROW: OTV 'Turtle 2', USA, maintenance, for James Webb Space Telescope, departing berth 1 at 09:00. Capsule 'Pete Conrad,' USA, passengers, for Kennedy, departing berth 2 at 11:00. Spaceplane 'Silver Dart,' Canada, robot parts, from Gander, arriving berth 1 at 13:00 9:30 in Newfoundland. OTV 'Turtle 7,' USA, robot parts, for L5, departing berth 3 at 16:30. Etc, etc, etc.

I can't get excited about cargo airships anymore. They hooked me as a kid with the "Hystar" demonstrator at Expo '86, when heavy lift airships were just a few years away from transforming the logging industry (no more logging roads, and selective logging will be so cheap there'll be no more clearcuts!). But cargo airships have remained "just a few years away" for the 28 years since (Hystar's main business since then appears to be moving its headquarters from New Brunswick to Maine to Delaware to Nevada). I was up in the arctic when Discovery Air, a moderate sized charter operator who, to their credit, run services with oddball aircraft like their trio of Dash-7's, announced they were going to buy a fleet of hybrid airships from the UK, but by then I just didn't believe anymore... and lo and behold, it didn't happen. Might be a case of very forward thinking. At least, the future of America's roads is very much in question right now, and we don't have a top-notch rail system to fall back on.The availability and cost of energy for transportation use will be a problem before the roads fall apart. You can't save long distance transportation in North America (Canada has the same problem, only worse!) with a system that consumes more energy to move the same payload the same distance. If airships can't compete on a cost-per-ton-mile (or cost-per-passenger-mile) basis, an all-powered VTOL has no chance. Nevermind passenger rail; if you want to enjoy the future, pound tracks for freight rail, NOW.

Decades ago we had air raid sirens on the mainland, they used to fire up the one in Port Coquitlam (just outside Vancouver) on Remembrance Day at the end of the two minutes' silence. I know I heard it the first time I went to the ceremony as a kid in the very early '80's, but it was torn down shortly after. I'm not sure if there are any public warning sirens in service in BC aside from Tofino now. The Province of British Columbia promotes subscribing to text messages from the Provincial Emergency Program's Twitter feed. This way you can be woken up at 3am to be notified of a forest fire evacuation 900km away, or an offshore earthquake already judged to pose no tsunami risk. It's a terrible system.

Canada does not have anything like EAS. The closest we have is Weatheradio / Radiometeo, our version of your National Weather Service All Hazards Radio where you get a special little receiver that listens for tornado or flood alarms. It has the ability to carry non-weather alarms too, same as yours (it even uses a compatible region code, like you ise for counties), but it's unclear on whether it'd actually be used. The province of Alberta built a more involved system after a tornado hit a major city (Edmonton) in 1987, and their system is more like EAS, interrupting commercial broadcasts etc. I think the village of Tofino on the west coast built its own tsunami siren, too. Aside from that, no, we do not have a national CONELRAD / EBS / EAS, and all attempts to build one have been answered with, "yeah, that's a great idea, we should have one... some day."

I THINK IT'S A BAD IDEA. I'M NOT YELLING. I'M JUST PRACTICING TALKING OVER THE ROAD NOISE AS MY TIRES ROLL OVER ENDLESS MILES OF RUMBLE STRIP AT HIGHWAY SPEED. But seriously... we can't manage to keep bridges and tunnels in good enough repair that they won't collapse, the idea of building roads from discrete tiles that requires someone come along and re-tighten the bolts every few months is scary. And of course they won't wear evenly and we'll have uneven edges between tiles, just as we do now with the concrete blocks that make up I-5 and I-90 in Washington State, only now it'll be a mini-speedbump every one and a half feet instead of 20 feet. I really wish I could like this idea, but I can't.

The manned Soyuz capsule has a launch escape system, and it's been used twice, both times successful. 1975, just before the 5 minute mark climbing through 145 km, the third stage lit even though the second stage failed to properly separate. The flight computer fired the Soyuz' service module engines to move it clear of the booster (the LES tower was already jettisoned), then separated the SM and OM from the RM manned capsule. 1983, 90 seconds to launch, a kerosene fire on the launch pad. Mission control had to activate the escape system via radio backup because the fire had burned through the control cables! From there, automated systems separated the spacecraft and cut the payload shroud, fired the LES tower to pull the RM and OM clear (17 gees!), ditched the OM, dumped the heavy heat shield, deployed parachutes and fired the braking rockets, all automatic. The crew was recovered a few minutes after; the pad fire burned well into the next day. They made sure the launch escape system on Soyuz worked. Twice it turned "disastrous spaceflight accident kills three cosmonauts" into "triumph of engineering protects lives of three cosmonauts." Fun fact, the Russian term for Launch Escape System is Sistema Avariynogo Spaseniya. Russians know how important it is to have SAS on a rocket! As far as Proton goes... Proton has had its share of failures, most of them to do with the upper stages ("Blok D" or "Briz," depending on the flight), and the rest in the first & second stages. The third stage was only a problem twice before, once 24 years ago, the other so far back man hadn't landed on the Moon yet. The third stage has been perhaps the only reliable part of that rocket. For now, politics is not interfering with the CURRENT operation of the ISS, though it is raising some questions about its future. Soyuz TMA-13M is still planned to fly on May 28, carrying Expedition 40 -- one Russian, one American, and one European (German).

Little Jeb was too busy doodling model rockets in his notebook, and didn't pay attention when his teacher was trying to tell him the names of the planets! Little Bill and Bob tell him it's okay, it's easy if he remembers one simple phrase... My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas. Many Very Educated Men Just Screwed Up Nature (minus Pluto; XKCD gave me a better mnemonic for this one but it's not for polite company). My Very Excellent Mother Constantly Just Serves Us Nachos, Pizzas, Hamburgers, Meatballs and Eggplants (includes Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, Eris). These are mnemonics for helping people remember the names and order of the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and sometimes Pluto. I invite you to comment with your version for the solar system of the Kerbals. Include an "S" or "K" for the Sun/Kerbol if you like, or don't. Ignore Dres as a dwarf planet if you like, though if you do include it, a really good one will include a way to distinguish between the two adjacent D's (in the example in the thread title, DR = Dres. Maybe you'll have a phrase where the first D-word evokes Duna somehow.) Any ideas?

I've been having an issue with the four-way hub in the newest zip (but I have not tried the newest experimental code from GitHub). I can't add it to a vehicle in the VAB unless I either start with it as the root part, or I'm connecting it using the forward or backward node. If I attach with the top, bottom, left or right nodes, it snaps into place but remains a ghost. Has anyone else experienced this? I am using KSP x86_64 0.23.5 under Ubuntu Linux 14.04, but I have seen a similar issue with another mod (Kerbin Shuttle Orbiter System v1.06? I don't have it installed anymore) under KSP 0.23 in Windows 7. I will try the new GitHub code tonight, since you specifically mention you've made some updates to that part. Thank you for a SPECTACULAR mod, RoverDude!

My first computer game was subLOGIC A2FS2, the immediate ancestor of the first MSFS (Microsoft bought out the original developer). It was on a double sided 5-1/4" floppy disk, 140 kilobytes per side, you physically removed the disk and flipped it over to finish loading the game; still, I had it good, I hear there was a version on CASSETTE TAPE. It had four discrete regions of scenery; in theory you could enable the infinite fuel hack and fly your 124mph Piper Arrow all the way across the empty featureless void from the patch of a few airfields around Chicago to a few more around New York, but with no autopilot and no joystick, I never bothered. I only had a monochrome amber monitor at the time, too, so pretending to fly that far IFR would have been very difficult, as my artificial horizon was a black-and-yellow checkerboard pattern for the sky, and a slightly offset but otherwise identical black-and-yellow checkerboard pattern for the ground. It had great pack-ins, though. Along with the usual instruction manual there was a separate, slightly thicker manual on the basics of flight, laminated keyboard reference cards, and best of all, printed maps of each region for VOR/NDB navigation.

Reminds me of Stunt Race FX for ye olde 16-bit Super Nintendo!

"The best way to defend against E-bomb attack is to destroy the platform or delivery vehicle in which the E-bomb resides. Another method of protection is to keep all essential electronics within an electrically conductive enclosure, called a Faraday cage." --Globalsecurity.org