mellojoe

Elaborate? What grids can burn out?

Something I never realized before is that the Dawn Probe has three separate Ion engines, but only uses one at a time. Why do they have three? Is it redundancy? A backup in case the primary fails? The original plans for the craft used triple gyroscopes for attitude / directional control, so I can't imagine them designing triple main engines also for directional control. What's the deal?

I thought this was from a recent event, and he kept mentioning "the Shuttle" ... was confused for a moment. This is from an event back in 2010. Good find, though. I had never seen it before.

Necro, I just today discovered the "recoverable booster landing legs" .... aka: the Space-X look-alike fold-away landing legs. Dude, they are awesome. How have we had KSP this long and never had those before? Just wanted to drop a note and say Thanks for the work on this. Really fun stuff.

When Porkjet first released his Mk2 Parts Pack mod, I knew this was an area that KSP needed in stock. It was just so good, and completely fit the stock feel and yet also opened whole new avenues. I'm so glad Porkjet was hired to do KSP stuff for pay. His work is perfect for this kind of thing. It also means that they gave him time and an excuse to go a little crazy and make MORE stuff. Love it.

JWT not scheduled to be launched until 2018, i think. Or is it 2019? Either way, still a couple years out from actually getting her up and operational. I can't wait. The entire JWT is a fascinating study. I hope the unfolding mechanism works. I've gotten to see scale models, and even those are massively complex. I secretly wish they put a "selfie" vid camera on it so we can watch it unfurl live. 21 foot primary mirror. Thats insane. And its like half the weight of Hubble. Granted, Hubble had its own design strategy (human serviceable, etc), but the fact of the matter is JWT is a suitable heir for the Hubble program.

Thats ... actually really cool.

The Pluto debate must always include Ceres, that giant asteroid thing between Mars and Jupiter. Why? Because Ceres was originally considered a planet. It was predicted to exist in the gap between Mars and Jupiter. All the planets had pretty evenly spaced orbits, and then a huge gap, and then Jupiter, Neptune and even Uranus. That famous guy Kepler noticed this odd gap way back when. Then Ceres was discovered. Aha! The missing planet. Ceres was a "planet" for over 50 years. The more we learned, the more we realized that a single category system was not sufficient. Science is about finding the truth, and that often means our opinions change as we learn more. What we know today might be proved incorrect as more information comes in. Let us not forget that it was in 1900 when Albert Michelson stated that an eminent physicist declared that we know everything, and "that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." Meaning, we knew it all, we just would get better measurements. It was less than 7 years later when Einstein proposed his theory of Relativity and changed everything we thought we knew. If we call Pluto a planet, then we must also call Ceres a planet. And then we would end up including much of the objects from the Asteroid Belt, similarly to how we would have to include everything from the Kuiper Belt. Think about it another way: If the Earth humans grew up on was part of a binary planetoid system, would that change our definition of planet? Would Jupiter be considered a planet if it was the only gas giant? What if Earth was part of a belt system of multiple objects? Our definition of "planet" is based on "what behaves similar to Earth". Or at least it did, until the 2006 consortium laid down official rules. What we know today may change in the future. Don't be scared of change in the scientific community, it just means we learned something new.

Kerbin is only rotating at like 250 m/s. Kerbostationary Orbit is what 1000 m/s? Going straight up from the planet's surface will still leave you 750 m/s short of orbiting and you'll fall back down. Orbits are more about going SIDEWAYS really fast than they are about going up/down.

Necro, The work here is great. I've recently started using your mods and the quality is just outstanding. Can I make a request? Or maybe if it already exists point me toward it? Do you have a 3m to double 2.5m interstage thrust plate? The 3m thrust plates seem to only be for reducing size from 3m down to 2.5m. I like the look of your interstage adapters better than just putting a stock bi-coupler or tri-coupler and then having individual engine shrouds. Yours being a full shroud for the engine cluster is much cleaner. You have multi-engine clusters for your 5m parts (which are awesome), and I would just like to use something similar for 3m parts. Currently, I've just copied and scaled them down for my use. Hope you don't mind. THANKS!

Agreed. The wheel issue surfaced back in like the end of 2013 or so. Testing afterward showed some problems and the team has basically chosen routes and driving habits to minimize damage. This photo from this week shows very little additional damage, so I'm guessing they've found ways to drive to lessen the impact on the wheels. Yes they look bad, but definitely not as bad as I thought.

This is my guess as well. Obviously, without any evidence to support it, my theory is that the engine came loose at some point and moved up the rocket body where it shouldn't have. This is probably what caused the cascading failures. Whether the rocket casing itself was burned and caused some kind of overheating event, or whether the eject charge was partially blocked, I don't know. But, my blind, over-the-internet guess is the engine motor wiggled itself loose somehow.

We're gonna need a bigger boat.

Sweet baby keezus! These things are huge! 24k thrust!?!?!? from a single part that doesn't kill my fps? *drools*

Yep, that's on my list to investigate. It's not a simple problem, since static animations will lift the entire lander, and we can't know in advance how tall the lander will be. I'm going to experiment with a landing-leg suspension and see if I can make that work. Perhaps something as simple as a fixed angle of deployment, but a tweakable distance? Something that you'd have to fix in the VAB/SPH, but then on deployment would deploy to that length. I'm thinking similarly to how tweakable landing gear works, where you can set how tall the gear is.

I just found this mod. (I've been living under a rock when it comes to KSP mods) These words literally sum up my feelings at this moment. Can't wrap my head around ... just so ... big.

So many things I still want to do, even after many, many, MANY hours: Put multiple Class-E asteroids in orbit around the Mun. Land a Class-E asteroid near enough to KSC to become a new monument. Jool-5. Build a 32-passenger SSTO that can reach the MUN and return home. Build a Duna colony. Build a cargo SSTO. Build a legit Shuttle replica. ... just off the top of my head.

I made a thing. When we last left off, my CUBE station was orbiting the Mun and I thought I was finished. . . But, apparently I wasn't finished. I realized we needed something else. What did we need? This! Its a really, really long arm. . . What are those things? ESCAPE PODS! Each pod has 8 seats, and this arm holds 3 pods. That's 24 escape seats, but really, in an emergency, we could probably stuff 4 more into each for a total of 36 Kerbals in this arm. A second arm is probably going to go up, but I'm really starting to hit the part count limit. FPS drop is becoming very noticeable. Therefore, my massive base might have a realistic cap of 72 Kerbals at any one time. Currently there are 34 on board, so this single arm has enough space for every single Kerbal to safely escape, should the need arise. - - - Updated - - - How do they work? Glad you asked: . . . I played around with several variations trying to fit enough seats into each escape pod and enough pods into the arm without making the whole thing impossibly large. Three pods seemed the best for my needs. Originally, it was just the two, and I tried four pods, but it ended up being too long to reasonably launch. One pod is ejected separately, and the other two are ejected as a pair. They separate once they are cleared from the base. . . . - - - Updated - - - Now we have three pods, ready to head home. Basically, put them on an eject burn, lower periapsis somewhere into Kerbin's atmosphere, and drop to safety. We need somewhere in the neighborhood of about 300 m/s delta-V, and these pods have a shade more than 450 m/s. . . . . . Ok, so not a perfect landing, but close enough. Everybody would be safe and unharmed. If I had landed on flatter land, it probably would have ended up on the feet. Still, I count this as a successful test of the emergency preparedness. Escape pods work great!

My solution has been ... docked single craft for orbital stations and separate modules on the ground near each other and "roleplaying" as a single base.

Yes. Many, many, many crafts of mine have died because of lack of seperatrons. Its like ... hey, this worked great. *SPACEBAR* ... oh gods, nevermind.

You have discovered the #1 problem with docking land-based modules. Getting the docking ports to match is a feat that is sometimes impossible. When I did my Mun base, I ended up using Kerbal Attachment System to dock modules together using the flexible piping. On systems with lower gravity (like Minmus), you can wiggle things around and get them to align. But on the Mun, Duna, etc, that can sometimes not be sufficient.

as a middle child, I am now more determined than ever to visit Dres and take part in this wonderful new dresteroid belt.

Wait ... what? ASTEROIDS AT DRES?!?!? When did that happen? Where was I? What YEAR IS IT? maybe ... just maybe ... I'll take a trip to Dres.

Oh gods, you may have just woken the Kraken! Your next launch will probably remind you that you are a scrub Kerbal just like the rest of us, and that you blow things up randomly, and that all your launches seem to forget ladders and solar panels. Just like the rest of us...

Maybe put some mysterious bright spots on it? Seriously, though, now I have a strong desire to park some asteroids in orbit around Dres to give it some moons. Poor Dres.