Nibb31

What a stupid thing to say.

You would need to find someone willing to pay for a payload that might not make it, on a specific schedule, and an insurance company willing to cover the payload and any damage caused by the failed launch. These things are expensive and take time to develop, and you don't want to set back your experimental flight because the payload isn't ready. Chances are that the mas simulator payload had some kind of diagnosis and telemetry equipment too.

The Bermuda triangle does not exist.

There's controversy on that " proper scale". I would say that if the Kerbals don't fit inside the rescaled Soyuz, then it's not the proper scale. The scale of the kerbals in IVA isn't even very important for the majority of people who don't use IVA. The relative scale of Soyuz compared to Mir is much more important for most people.

Vostok couldn't land. The cosmonauts had to bail out to survive the landing. That makes it an inferior spacecraft in my book.

Yeah, sorry, Altair of course !

When you have such a low flight rate, the cost of the actual launch is irrelevant. There will be no economies of scale because it will only launch every 1 or 2 years. The bulk of the cost will be maintaining the facilities and the personnel. These are fixed costs that you have to pay, whether you launch or not. After a several billion dollars paid for only one or two flights, it will probably get cancelled.

Nope. Constellation was Ares I, Ares V, Orion and Antares. Ares V and Antares were really just case studies with no development budget. Ares I was over-budget and under-performing. Only Orion was a good design, but suffered a lot from Ares I's shortcomings. SLS is more like the Direct project, which was an alternative study that was run on the sides by NASA folks who were unhappy with the Ares launchers.

Constellation: - Pros: At least it had focus and a clear mission. Return to the Moon, establish a base. - Cons: The Ares I launcher was stupid and didn't work. It under-delivered and couldn't have been able to launch a real Orion into orbit. It's only reason to exist was to keep ATK Thiokol in business. SLS - Pros: It's big and capable - Cons: It has no mission yet. With such a low launch rate, it will be way too expensive. I think NASA is doing what it can on a shoestring budget, hoping that once they have the rocket, Congress will give them a mission to use it. Ideally you should first agree on a mission, and then design your hardware for that mission. I'm pretty sure that SLS will launch 2 or 3 missions, maybe manned, and end up being cancelled because it will have a huge annual cost for one launch every 1 or 2 years and no budget for actual mission modules.

Erm... I don't think so. However, the Russian Polyus experimental battle station was mounted upside-down on the first Energia flight. This was deliberate because of the CoM of the payload, and the station was supposed to rotate 180° before firing its engines. For some reason, someone entered 360° instead of 180° in the flight computer, causing the Polyus to do a full turn and burn in the wrong direction. Major Oops.

Even a geostationary altitude, there will always be some drift. Real GEO sats have station keeping thrusters to maintain their position and they die when they run out of fuel. In KSP, you can't have station keeping unless you keep focus on the satellite. To change a GEO sat's position, you need to slightly raise or lower your orbit to move in one direction or the other, and then bring it back to GEO altitude as soon as you get to the right spot. As for getting correct data, I suggest using MechJeb. It provides all the orbital parameters as well as latitude and longitude.

A Hohmann transfer only works if you have different orbits. When your orbits are at 120 and 123km, they are basically the same, so it will take ages to catch up. What you want to do is to make a phasing orbit, typically 30 to 50km higher than your target (if the target is behind you) or lower (if your target is in front of you). MechJab can suggest a phasing orbit, but you can do it yourself. When you get to something like a 60-45° phase angle to your target, then you can ask MechJeb for a Hohmann transfer.

There is no "MechJeb 0.19". Either it's 1.9.8 (the official release) or 2.0.6 (the pre-release of MechJeb 2).

Probably not very effective, as it would take 6 months to reach its target and a LOT of ÃŽâ€v.

You can stick it on a Soyuz, it works fine.

Are we going to necro all the dead threads from October just because that's the latest backup date ?

Has anybody got the Land at Target to work properly ? I can't get MechJeb 2 to work with the Land at Target mode at all. With the same craft, MechJeb 1.9.8 lands right on top of the target, but with 2.0.6, it starts spinning on all axes at the end of the initial deorbit burn. In a previous version, I managed to get a decent deorbit burn with a proper prediction of the landing site, but then it screwed up the landing location during the braking burn.

Is there a trick to get the Kliper to fly? Every attempt has resulted in a crash. Or does it use parachutes ? Also, I couldn't find how to decouple the LES in order to expose the docking module. I used the docking port from the Soyuz TMA. Is that correct ?

It could be a problem with final alignment ? Is your target ship moving at all ? Have you tried with ASAS or Smart ASS activated on the target ships ?

You need to have focus on the spacecraft, but you can leave it running at 50x warp.

Taking only volunteers doesn't make it any less unethical. Sending people on a one-way trip to another planet is sending them to die a very ugly death for just a TV show. Getting companies to pay for commercials and people to watch the volunteers slowly die on TV is even more ugly.

Mars One is basically a televised high tech suicide. It's really about as low as we can get as a species. It would make me really angry if that is the best we can do to get humans to Mars. What happens when the TV show get's cancelled? When they run out of supplies? When some crucial piece of life support equipment fails ? When they get sick or injured ? The whole plan is unrealistic, inhumane and damned cynical.

I think what you did was a Duna free return. A cycler would orbit Kerbol with an orbit that would do both Kerbin and Duna flybys on a regular basis. The main advantage of the cycler concept is to provide comfort for repeated long journeys, something like an interplanetary cruise ship. It allows you to launch the crew and cargo on small shuttle crafts at the departure and arrival points. The hab modules, cabins, entertainment, kitchen, exercice equipment, zero-g swimming pool (!), and so on, go on the cycler ship and are only launched once and reused for many round trips. The shuttle crafts still have to carry the same delta-v as the interplanetary cycler (because they have to rendez-vous on the cycler's interplanetary orbit), but they can be lighter and therefore use less fuel on each round trip. If your cycler is a one-man cabin designed for a single round-trip, then there is no real gain. But it is interesting as a challenge

The LM had the one big issue that if the ascent engine failed, they were toast. There was no redundancy. Which is why the engine was fully accessible through a cover inside the LM cabin, so that they could attempt to fix it or manually tamper or bang on it with a spanner during ascent... The ascent engine was also to be used to abort to orbit if the descent engine failed, which made it critical. The LK on the other hand had 2 redundant landing/ascent engines. Only one was required, but the backup would kick in if necessary. There was no specific descent engine. The Block D stage would do most of the braking and powered descent, then be dropped, and the LK engine would only do the final landing burn and land with nearly full tanks. If something went wrong with LK engine, it would have aborted to a landing on the redundant engine.

What's the point of "reserving space" if you have nothing to publish yet? It's not like the forum is going to run out of threads or anything...