Nibb31

In the rocket world: propellant = fuel + oxydizer. Rocket engineers get pissed off when you loosely use the term "fuel" instead of "propellant". Adding fuel will get you nowhere. Adding propellant increases Delta-v.

The real OK had neither. It had a sort of perforated grill thing, and the LOK had a hook that would catch onto it. This was much lighter than a real docking port, but the cosmonauts had to EVA to transfer between the LK and the LOK. In KSP though, it doesn't matter because all docking ports are actually androgynous.

I'm not seeing any difference with the first pack. It's still in the legacy folders. The textures are still 12 or 16Mb each. The Upperstage landing legs still don't attach. Many of the parts are still redundant. I've remade the pack for my personal use, by hacking cfgs to make them use GameData. This allows you to have 4 cfgs instead of 4 copies of the same part in RAM. I've also hacked some of the mbm textures to make them 512x512 png instead of 2048x2048mbm. This reduces them from 12Mb to 3Kb. I wasn't able to redo all the parts though, because hacking them this way is hard. It's a shame that the author isn't updating this pack properly, because the pack itself is really great.

@Bobcat: You need to set the altair cargoplatform to CrewCapacity=0. Right now it loads with 3 crewmembers

You can use ORDA. It still works fine in 0.20.2, you just have to install it the old way.

You really shouldn't need to use the rotational controls while you're docking. Just point your ship in the right attitude, engage ASAS, and use the IJKLHN keys for translation.

It's an umbilical that carries power, data, and consumables between the orbital module and the service module. It's designed like this so that there are no hatches in the descent module heatshield or on the side.

It doesn't matter what technology you use. If you are travelling from point A to B faster than light travels from point A to point B, then you are breaking causality and you effectively have time travel. Imagine this example of two space battleships. Spaceship A has a cloaking device and lasers. Spaceship B has FTL torpedoes. - Spaceship A fires its lasers (that travel at c) at B, which reveals its position, and damages Spaceship B. - The hit causes spaceship B to instantly retaliate by firing its FTL torpedoes and destroying Spaceship A *before* it has fired its lasers. - Because A never fires its lasers, spaceship B never knows that A was there and doesn't fire it's torpedoes. Causality is broken. Another example. - Imagine that an FTL civilization receives a distress radio signal from a far away star. - The FTL civilization sends a rescue mission that arrives before the radio signal is sent, fixes the problem, and the radio signal is never sent. Broken causality. The idea of FTL military spacecraft is pointless, because any civilization that has FTL also has the ability to break causality and will be able to preemptively fix any problems without even realizing that those problems existed in the first place. There would be no need for space battleships or wars, because those wars would be won before the enemy even started to become a threat.

Finally managed to get a picture of it, just before landing. Sorry for the poor quality, my main camera ran out of batteries at the last minute. The white dot on the left is the chase plane.

Damn, I got stuck in a meeting and missed it... Pfff... Its flight path is to go out over the Atlantic, then down to Spain and back up to Toulouse over the Pyrenean mountains. I find it amazing that the first flight of a new model aircraft is a 4-hour flight! Here's the video, it's a beautiful bird: http://api.dmcloud.net/player/pubpage/4f3d114d94a6f66945000325/51bad01506361d6273000096/c5bdf128d0d34b08ac1f84bc59d621eb?wmode=transparent&autoplay=1 You can follow its flight here: http://www.flightradar24.com/AIB350

If you have FTL technology, then you have time travel, anti gravity, and all sorts of other physics-breaking magic. If you have that kind of technology, then there would really be no point in messing with space battles.

Lots of cars parked around the Blagnac airport this morning, people with cameras and binoculars... The maiden flight of the A350 should be in about an hour now. I took my camera to work this morning, I hope I can go outside and get a shot or two ;-)

If you are crashing, then you are not in orbit. An orbit is an elliptical trajectory that circles Kerbin. Getting into orbit simply involves reaching orbital speed (2300m/s) with a periapsis (=the lowest point in your orbit) above the atmosphere (70000m). You should read the tutorials at the top of this forum. Once you're in orbit, you can leave your spacecraft indefinitely, it won't fall down. One way of putting it is that it's going so fast that it falls beyond the horizon. That's the beauty of spaceflight. There is no autopilot in KSP. There is a mod called MechJeb, but I strongly recommend that you get the basics of orbital mechanics ironed out before using it.

The Hohmann transfer orbit is simply an eccentric orbit whose apoapsis intersects with your target orbit and the periapsis intersects with your original orbit. You need to burn at the apoapsis (the Delta-v' point in your example) to circularize into orbit 3. If you don't, your trajectory will stay in orbit 2 and follow the yellow dashed line back down to orbit 1. It's exactly the same as a launch trajectory really. You have to burn at the apoapsis or else you will fall back down.

There really is no point is having a perfectly circular orbit unless you have OCD. It doesn't make rendez-vous or docking any easier and the slightest nudge during docking, or a simple rotation will change your orbit. In real-life, NASA considers that an orbit that has less than 100km difference between Ap and Pe is circular.

Yes, when you look at all the engineering details in Apollo, it really leaves you in awe. When you look at the details, Apollo is full of these kinds of tiny implementation details that took years and hundreds of engineers to figure out. Which is why I can't stand people who think that space missions are easy and can be done on the cheap. They tend to handwave away the engineering as just bolting parts together. The actual implementation details in the preparation of any space mission are staggering.

You're confusing Star Trek, where technology replaces magic in the storytelling, and real physics. They kind of sometimes use the same words, but they usually don't mean the same thing.

No it doesn't. No, they grow differently, which might have an impact on the yield of the crop. We don't know. And as I said, you can't extrapolate results in partial gravity from experiments in microgravity. They are two different environments and we have zero experience in partial gravity biology. Microgravity has negative effects on some biological functions. We don't know what level of partial gravity is safe in the long term. Do we need 1.0G, 0.6G, or is 0.371G enough? We simply don't know. We need to study the environment before we risk human lives on theoretical extrapolations. There's no reason to believe everything will go well. When you design a space mission, you always design it so that things won't go wrong. Then you assume they will, and design around them. Then you assume that your fixes will go wrong too, and you design more contingencies, and so on... It's not the rockets that make spaceflight expensive. It's the engineering. http://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html The shielding issue is similar. We know that there is cosmic radiation, but we can't design a base without knowing the shielding requirements, and we can't know those requirements without doing more experimentation. We simply don't know yet if we can overcome the radiation issue. How do you do that? Earth moving and digging equipment is heavy. A bulldozer or an excavator is typically 40tons. How do you send it to Mars surface? You also need it to be a special-built design to be low maintenance, electric, shielded, and to work in vacuum. It's going to cost billions... Who is going to pay for it and for why? In that case, you might as well build your bunker in a desert somewhere. There is no point in living on Mars if you're going to live in an underground bunker with TV screens for the outside view. You can do that on Earth for much cheaper. You can't make something out of nothing. You're talking about digging an underground base and now you say that you don't need heavy equipment. How are your colonists going to dig? With shovels in space suits? How does your base expand with no supplies from Earth and no heavy equipment? How do you expand your food variety? Magic? If you do rely on supplies and hardware from Earth, who pays for it? For what ROI? You can have a much more pleasant experience for a fraction of the cost by settling in Antarctica or on the Ocean floor. You don't need to go to Mars if you can live the same thing on Earth. In space, everything is much harder. You need to develop new techniques and special tools for every engineering task you can imagine. Those are not unsurmountable problems, but you've got to try them out a few times to figure out what works and what doesn't in practice. Mundane stuff like breaking a drill bit or lubricating a hinge can become a huge issue when you have to don a space suit, prepare an EVA and fix things wearing space suit gloves. It takes time and a lot of money to design around that sort of stuff. You underestimate the engineering effort by several orders of magnitude. Now I can understand the point of a scientific outpost that would spend several months on Mars, with crew rotations, on a model similar to the ISS or to the Scott Amundsen base in Antarctica. It would be mostly government funded, maybe with some private sponsorships. It wouldn't be self sustaining, it would need resupplies, the crew would rotate, and it would provide lots of science. I would personally prefer a Moon base first though, to develop the techniques and experience of working in partial gravity, ISRU, hydroponics, EVA techniques and hardware, etc... However, there is no point in a one-way colony for the next couple of decades. It serves no purpose, the cost would be tremendous, and there is no incentive for anyone to pay that much money. ETA: What Fractal_UK said. Thanks mate.

Not a graveyard, it's the collection of Ailes Anciennes, a historical preservation society that's been restoring old planes for years. The collection has been moving around various parts of the Airbus factory for years, waiting for a permanent location. I've visited them once or twice, most of the planes are in dire need of some tender loving care, so it's quite sad. There are some interesting pieces however: the old Super Guppy, a Breguet double-decker, a Caravelle, two Noratlas, a DC-3 and lots of old military jets from all countries... The city council is finally building a proper museum, which will open next year, north of the Airbus factory, which will have the planes you see on the picture. Airbus will also be donating the two Concordes that are in Toulouse (one is the 001 prototype, which is quite different from the production aircraft) and the first A300B prototype. http://www.aeroscopia-blagnac.fr/

@Latcarf, I just found the official name it, the skyhook: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_(structure) Like many space things, the idea was fielded by Arthur C Clarke, but the first serious study on the subject was from this Boeing proposal: http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/annual/jun01/391Grant.pdf

http://www.dailytech.com/Airbus+A350+XWB+to+Take+First+Flight+Friday+Looks+to+Challenge+Boeing+Dreamliner/article31742.htm It's not everyday that a new aircraft gets it's first maiden flight. I happen to live right and work right next to the Airbus factory in Toulouse, and I hope I'll be able to witness the first flight of the A350, which is scheduled at 10am this friday. This will mark the start of a year-long certification campaign and the first deliveries will start in 2014. I watched the first flight of the A380, and we get to see regular flights of the A400M and the good old A300ST Beluga, but the A350 is definitely the sexiest airliner ever! I'll try to get some exclusive pics and upload them here

Any news on this pack ?

If you could orbit the Mun on a geostationary orbit, you could simulate the EML1 and 2 points. However, the wiki indicates that the Mun's stationary orbit is beyond its SOI, therefore it's not possible either.

The ISS isn't self sustaining. It relies on supplies, fuel, water and spare parts delivered on regular basis. Simple hydroponics isn't enough. You need high-yield hydroponics and high-nutrition varieties, which will come at the expense of crop variety. Hydroponics work on Earth, but we have no knowledge of how those particular varieties perform in low-gravity/high radiation environments. Are you willing to risk your life on them? What if they turn out being inedible? What if you lose your entire crop from some kind of disease? What if they don't produce enough? You don't know that, because nobody knows anything about partial gravity pregnancy. We know about full gravity and a little bit about micro-gravity, but we have never done any biological experiments in partial gravity, so we have absolutely no idea about what to expect. It's like studying the properties of ice and steam, and extrapolating the properties of liquid water without ever seeing any. We are only just getting the first results from MSL on ambient radiation on Mars surface. We do know that radiation has a much stronger effect on the developing cells of a fetus or a child than on a grown adult, therefore the acceptable radiation levels are much lower. We simply don't know anything about the effects of cosmic radiation on a developing fetus. There are simply too many unknowns at the moment, and we need to do a lot more science before we can find out if humans can safely live and reproduce on Mars. Yeah, that's still a pretty small horizon. Base modules will have to be shipped from Earth, with mass constraints, therefore small. Cosmic ray shielding means that walls will have to be thick with very few windows, so there won't be much to see. You can have inflatable greenhouses, but again, they will have to be shielded to protect the crops, with artificial lighting. Don't count on using local materials and construction in the early decades. Mining and construction is hard. Mining wearing a space suit is harder. Specially designed heavy equipment will have to be shipped from Earth, with mass constraints and a huge expense, yet most supply missions will be bringing basic survival supplies in priority. Combine that with the lack of food variety, entertainment, social opportunities, any hope of a better life, and the tremendous cost of actually going there, and it really doesn't look like a very appealing life for most people. Again, we have never done it. There are spots where it might be possible in theory, but as long as we haven't surveyed the sites, tested the techniques and developed a reliable system to use ISRU, we can't depend on it for the survival of a one-way expedition. No, because living on Mars for a lifetime will expose you to more risk than a 9 month transit. Yet we still hardly know anything. Did you know that MSL is the first time we have actually measured cosmic radiation on Mars? We have never done any sismological studies, any biological experiments in 0.3g, any drilling beyond a couple of centimeters, any atmospheric sampling, any ISRU experiments, or even any proper meteorological surveys... There is so much more we need to know before we can assume that we can survive on Mars for more than a few months.

Upload them to a proper image hosting site, like imgur, dropbox, or imageshack. Then, post the link on the forum between tags.