Nibb31

You are assuming that there will be a demand for materials in space that would justify the tremendous infrastructure cost of building deep space mining facilities. Smeltering hundreds of tons of minerals on an asteroid and turning those minerals into useful hardware is going to require a lot of infrastructure, probably in the range dozens of SLS flights, just to set up. Nobody has a budget for deep-space missions that would require such a huge investment. Nobody needs hundreds of tons of water in orbit because nobody is ready to pay to go up there and use it. And it will be a long time before it becomes cheaper to launch dozens of rockets to build an orbital refinery than to simply launch a couple of rockets loaded with fuel. This might happen in a couple of centuries (if we are still around and capable of spaceflight), if we ever get to Star Trek sci-fi level, but it is certainly not on the roadmap of any manned space exploration roadmap or a viable private business plan. There is no way we can move a 15000 ton asteroid with current or even near-future technology. It would cost way over $45 billion to develop, build, and maintain a large-scale orbital mining operation capable of processing that much metal and a construction facility to turning it into something useful. Nobody is going to pay for 15000 tons of iron in space, because nobody can do anything with it. Not really, because you are assuming that orbital mining is cheap. It's beyond our technology and tremendously expensive to develop, therefore not economically viable. If you want to drive across the desert in a car, you can either bring extra jerricans with you, or you can build a gas station in the desert. You're going to need a lot of traffic before the latter is more viable than the former.

You could also just jettison them like decouplers. Bobcat's Historic Pack has similar ejectable covers for its docking ports.

Yes, the lander was huge, but in the final "vertical cylinder" version, the ascent module with the cabin was hardly any bigger than the old LM. It actually had the same mass, with 4 crew members inside, a toilet and an airlock. It would have been even more cramped and simply not practical. The reason for the size of the descent stage was mainly because it used cryogenic propellants instead of hypergolics, and because the Altair had to do the LOI burn due to the Orion being already overweight for Ares I (In Apollo, the SM did the LOI burn, which allowed for a smaller LM descent stage). The whole thing was 10 meters tall and would have required that the astronauts climb up and down a 6 meter ladder for each EVA, which is the height of a 2-storey house. This made transporting equipment and cargo problematic and the risk of slipping and falling was non-negligeable. It was a bad compromise, which was kind of the hallmark of Constellation program, so it's probably best that it was cancelled. The ACES lander (in my 3rd pic) was based on a proposal from ULA to scrap the Ares/Constellation rockets and to go to the Moon on EELVs. The plan involved multiple launches, an orbital fuel depot infrastructure, and reusable landers. It was based on the ACES upperstage for Delta IVH and Atlas V, which would have variants to make it a DTAL lander, an Orion service module, or a fuel depot. Landing horizontally allowed them to put the crew cabin (or a possible cargo module) near the ground, and the ascent module used side-mounted engines, so it wouldn't damage the ACES tank which could be recycled. It landed on wheels, so they could have hauled them around and docked several of them together to build a base and even retrofitted empty tanks into a hab modules.

What's this "Discovery Shuttles" denomination? The launcher was called "STS" (Space Transportation System), or "Space Shuttle". The actual spacecraft was the "Orbiter Vehicle", and each of the 6 orbiters had a name: Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavor, and Enterprise (which never flew in space). Discovery was only one of them. If you really wanted to use a navy-style denomination, you would call them "Columbia-class".

You can't any more. Why don't you upgrade to 0.20 ?

Adding dockin cam is as simple as adding one line to the config and installing the docking cam mod! Better?

On http://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com.

For Altair, are you going with the last design or the earlier design? The last design looked stupid to me, with a tiny cabin and the huge descent stage. It would have been much heavier than the Apollo LM and less capable: I much preferred the early LSAM design, with a larger cabin and better visibility: Although it never got approved for Constellation, my favorite lunar lander concept was the Dual-Thrust Axis Lander ACES proposal:

It's not just a thrust problem. ASAS and other flight computers can't cope with the off-center CoM. The whole physics engine isn't made for this.

Your "as soon as" makes it sound like a certainty that asteroid mining is feasible and economically worthwhile. What if NASA fails to demonstrate that feasibility? There are some huge roadblocks to asteroid mining. Of course, the first is the economical and technological viability. The second is the availability of target asteroids that are: - Near enough to be reached with current technology. - Contain minerals in concentrations that make mining activities worthwhile. - Not tumbling on multiple axes. (This is currently an unsurmountable problem for landing on or capturing an object in space).

Is anyone else having trouble with the Orion parachutes deploying on launch, regardless of staging ?

What is the point of reviving this old mod when Bobcat's Soyuz is better in just about every way? BTW, this isn't Noyuz. This is the old RocktCo Soyuz launcher by Deusoverkill. The Noyuz was a copy of the Soyuz spacecraft by Xemits. They didn't even go together unless you edited the cfgs to make them work.

I get it. I was thinking of the Cupola being nothing more than an esthetic window part that wouldn't require an IVA, but that could be used to cover up CBM ports where you don't necessarily want to put docking port. In RL, a person barely fits inside it too: Of course, if you want to make it a pod or an actual hab module with an IVA, then sure, it needs to be the same size as the stock one.

You could use a generator that converts fuel to electricity, like fuel cells. This would avoid needing multiple versions of the tracks.

Will there be an APAS docking port? That drogue docking port looks weird attached to the PMA.

You might have your docking clamps the wrong way round. Only one side docks. To be sure, post a picture of your spacecraft.

Which we won't be doing in the next 30 years (and probably even this century), so the point is moot.

It is a bad idea. Nobody is going to fly in the cargo dragon, so spending time on making a IVA interior doesn't make any sense. Borklund wants this mod to be realistic, so there I'd rather see him spend his time on a dedicated manned Dragon when it is announced.

ORDA automatically does the rotational alignment, which is why I still use it over MechJeb for docking. It seems to use much less RCS fuel too.

Sure, but that gives them something to do on their 8 month trip. The actual assembly should be as automated as possible. One of the major teachings of the Shuttle/ISS program is that that is not how you should build stuff in space.

There are a bunch of objects all over the solar system. The best way to find them is to download the ISA MapSat mod. It's a bit broken for 0.20 though, so I suggest you wait for the update.

Yes and No. FAR changes the aerodynamics completely, including terminal velocity. MechJeb gets its info from the default system, so it doesn't work properly with FAR.

Who needs a shipyard? The Russians didn't need a shipyard to build Mir, neither did the ISS need to be built in a shipyard. Sending up highly qualified astronauts to do construction work is wasteful and extremely expensive. EVA activities usually require months of training, defining procedures, logistics, and are also quite tedious and dangerous. The best way to build a large ship in space to send up modules on a tug and do as much automated docking and assembly as possible.

Did I say to tilt it to 45° at launch? No. You can start a very slight 1 or 2° tilt to the east as soon as you launch. What you lose in drag, you gain in horizontal speed. When you go straight up to 15000m and tilt 45° in one go, as some people suggest, you might gain a little bit of energy by getting out of the thickest part of the atmosphere slightly quicker, but you lose a whole lot more by converting your vertical speed to horizontal speed. The most efficient flight path is a curve that starts at launch and ends at the limit of the atmosphere. Of course, this isn't easy to control manually.