maccollo

It will create pure radiation. Gamma radiation in fact, which tends to go straight through stuff, and it's omnidirectional. But the idea of a large particle accelerator as an engine with an ISP close to C is a sort of cool idea. You just need a power source of godlike efficiency to make it practical.

Always point towards prograde when you do major burns. Not pointing towards prograde is wasted acceleration. Imagine you had a really long burn escape burn from Kirbin. One that was as long as your orbital period. If you pointed. By doing the 50/50 approach and pointing towards the maneuver vector, then you would begin this burn by pointing towards retrograde. Clearly this is not efficient, burning towards pro-grade is efficient, everything between in a gradient.

This is the approach I use. Works without fail. 1: plan a maneuver that will get a Jool encounter. 2: raise your apoapsis with number of burns, starting at t- 2-3 minutes, and ending at t+2-3 minutes. Doing this will make sure the periphrasis doesn't shift. 3: Stop raising it when you get it just above the moon. Make minor tweaks to make sure you wont intercect the moon on the escape if nessesary. At this point you have 90% of the escape velocity, but looping around will only take 6 hours or so, so it wont affect your launch window much. 4: Do one final loop and burn all the way. The timing of this burn can be tricky, but I've found it usually works best to wait a little bit longer than the 50% point, something like 40% of the burn at t- and 60% at t+ tends to eject me in line with the planned escape vector.

So you are better of just releasing the accelerated particles at near the speed of light in a single direction. At that point it's all kinetic energy. If you collide the particles to generate antimatter you convert that kinetic energy into matter and anti matter, which then gets converted into radiation, which you must then somehow turn into thrust.

Found what I was looking for. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/740512main_FY2014%20CJ%20for%20Online.pdf Page SO-5 My guess for transportation cost estimate of 1.3 billion wasn't to far off. The actual cost for cargo and crew transport in 2014 is about 1.5 billion dollars. Research is a puny 220 million. The other big chunk is "ISS Systems Operations and Maintenance" at 1.3 billion. I presume that has to includes alot of the infrastructure costs of Johnson space center. No matter how you slice it, 1.3 billion is a lot of money to maintain a station of 6 when you've already subtracted the cost of cargo and crew launches. It's actually the same as the development costs for SLS that same year. That would make sense if the transport and cargo expenditure increase slowed down during 2014 and forward when SpaceX really takes off, with more missions on it's manifest for this year than all previous years combined. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/740427main_NASAFY2014SummaryBriefFinal.pdf Page 12 shows what launches are planned up until 2020. In 2017 the firsts commercial crew launch to the ISS is supposed to take place, and then 2 for each year that follows. So in 2018 we should really see a drop in transportation cost, but instead the projected cost just keeps going up.

At the same thrust, it will take the same amount of time and degrees rotated to stop as it took to accelerate to that point. If you wanted to rotate 90 degrees as fast as possible you would rotate 45 degrees and then flip it. Not much of a calculation really =P

I'm of the opinion that the NASA budget should be increased relative to the federal budget and that that amount of money could easily be saved from cutting some tiny aspect of milletary spending. However I don't like to make a fuss about this, because I'm not American, so it's not my tax dollar, and it would be hypocritical, because the ESA only gets 0,035% of EU GDP, so I have no right to complain about NASA getting 0.1% of USA GDP, 3 times more. ANYWAY I didn't start this topic for political ramblings. I wanted to know where the 3 billion dollars end up, and I wanted to know it a bit more precisely than "dude, the Russians" How much goes to the Russians? How much goes to resupply missions from American contractors? (Already got this for the most part) How much goes to astronaut training and ground infrastructure? Now it appears that at least half the cost goes to actually paying for launches to the ISS, which is good... So why is it becoming more and more expensive each year? Shouldn't it become cheaper (for the US) if it relies less on the expensive Russians and more on cheap SpaceX?

It would be very easy. All struts and fuel lines that are connected to the same part with both ends are badly connected (Btw it would also be nice to be able to remove all of these with one button). Also for symmetry struts, if any strut point doesn't connect to the same symmetry group that you selected for the main strut.

That would be one hell of a reliable and safe rocket.

Narrower margins for safe operations means less safe. Lack of abort systems means less safe, and is a design flaw. You wouldn't say there's nothing wrong in a car that lacks crumple zones and seat belts. Columbia?

I understand that NASA pays the Russians to send astronauts and cargo to the ISS. The question would be how much of the annual budged allocated to ISS operations go to the Russians?

They do need to eat. However in 1.6 billion contract with NASA spaceX only receives 133 billion per flight to the ISS. Orbital Sciences got a 1.9 billion dollar deal, so a total of 3.5 billion dollars. This will really take off next year when spaceX will launch 4 resupply missions. Assuming Orbital Sciences will launch a few that should come out to about 1 billion dollars in 2014, and then a little more than that each year until 2016. There's gonna be 4 Americans flying to the ISS in 2014. At 70 million dollars per seat that adds up to another 280 million dollars. So that takes care of 1.3 billion, so there's 1.7 billion dollars left that's going to something else. This is just slightly less than the total cost for all of the SLS development in 2014, and NASA is not launching or developing any major payloads for the ISS. Nauka is developed, funded and launched by the Russian Space Agency. The only thing launched by NASA will be the inflatable habitat, and the contract for the development of that is only 18 million dollars.

So looking at Nasa's budget projected over the next 5 years, the share that's taken up by the ISS is 3 billion for FY 2014, and it will grow each year to 3.5 billion in 2018. The budget request for the ISS in 2009 was 2.7 billion in inflation adjusted dollars. That was the peak of the ISS construction, with 3 shuttle launches and the station mostly complete. How can it be this expensive for NASA now when it's not launching or developing any major payloads? Where is all this money going?

Austria is a member state of ESA, contributing about 1.5% of the 5.5 billion dollar budget.

Here's a more down to earth example of the same effect. If you got very strong legs, and you jump upwards with a velocity of 10 m/s you will reach 5 meters (assuming for simplicity's sake that G is 10 m/s). If you climb a 5 meter ladder and then perform the same jump you will reach 10 meters. If you instead double the velocity of the initial jump to 20 m/s you will reach 20 meters. When you pass the 5 meter mark your velocity will not be 10 m/s, but 17.3 m/s To experience this effect in a very big way in KSP, build a probe that can escape the Kerbol system. Burn straight from Kirbin and out and observe your velocity when you reach the orbit of Jool. Now do it again, but this time raise the apoapsis to the orbit of Jool, and then lower your periapsis as close to Kerbol as possible. Burn the rest of the fuel at the orbit of the sun and observe how you leave the Kerbol system at ludicrous speed. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/22015656/ludicrousSpeed.png

The position of Moho doesn't matter. Just leave when you are opposite to Moho's periapsis, perform the inclination change with your escape burn from Kirbin and then just orbit the sun a couple of times until you can get an encounter by burning retrograde the encounter point.

Well the problem is the same as it has always been. You land on a planet, and then you leave after a few minutes because your goal is accomplished. The hope was that science would change this but it hasn't, because everything you need to do is right there. Just click on a few modules, collect the science and leave. What is needed is something that motivates exploration. So instead of just exiting the land and then clicking on the kerbal, here's an idea for how sample return could be made more interesting. Instead of being able to collect samples from the same dirt you landed on, wherever you landed, you would need to find samples in specific locations (collectibles). There may be any number of these on a planet. Their locations are not known from the offset, you must find them. This means you will need the ability to scan from orbit (making use of probes) and then collect then on the surface (making use of rovers). This would test multiple skills, like: Knowing how to get into an orbit to scan the surface of a planet adequately: The ability to land close to your target, and the ability to land in general. The foresight to include a rover in the mission design. You then get to rove around to acquire the sample.

How would this get them killed? Besides, it's not the scientist who would do it for the money. They would do it for the science, mostly. The institutions who would fund the research would do it for the money and the publicity. Anyway, your point is irrelevant cuz money. Actually, we did For a more recent example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox But if your point is that you can't domesticate 'a' wild wolf then yeah... Of course you can't. But then you can't domesticate anything. You can't "domesticate" a dog either. In order for a species to become domesticated it has to not be domesticated at the offset. You can't "go to London" if you are already in London. But domesticated or not, rich people would pay handsomely to have their own little raptor. Especially the more eccentric types. Again, dinosaurs were animals, not monsters. They would not survive machine gun fire.

Money, money and yet more money and publicity and science. That may or may not be true. How do you know? Yes... That is indeed a bad idea. Why on earth would you release such a priceless project onto a battlefield where they would just run around scared and confused before getting killed? You watched to many movies. Dinosaurs were animals, and they would be no more dangerous than modern animals, they will not smash through steel fences. There's been a series of movies as to why we should not go to space. It caries the same amount of merit.

1347 days, or roughly 3 years and 8 months, or 12.6 Kirbin years. The reasons it was relatively quick was because I didn't spend any any time waiting for transfer windows. This worked out mostly ok, with a few exceptions. The wonky retrograde Gilly intercept was because I wouldn't have been able to catch the Moho transfer otherwise. The other part where it didn't quite work out was when I was gonna transfer from Eeloo to Duna. Duna was on the completely wrong side of Kerbol, so I had to gun it towards Kerbol to get the intercpt. However this did in a way work out well, because it shortened the length of the transfer quite a bit.

You only need 2 thirds of that to make an SSTO that can launch a 3 man mission to Mun =D Observe! Or you can just use 4 of them to launch 1 kerbal to LKO:

My closest shave was a mission I did just recently where I landed Jebediah on all the planets and moons (can be viewed here http://youtu.be/Q2V6a9-FUHM). The craft was 980 tons on the launch pad, it took me several days to do this mission and combining all the manouvers the mission requires the delta V adds up to something like 60 000 m/s. I finished the mission i had 2 units of fuel left, or around 60 m/s. When I rendezvoused with the Kirbin landing capsule at the end I sighed the biggest sigh of relief I've done ever in KSP XD.

It looks way better than the flying bricks one often sees in KSP =P

This challenge appears incredibly simple because: The rules do not forbid the use of decouple boosting or solid boosters beyond 100 km orbits. If that isn't intentional you might want to amend that.

You could just do a planeshift. You could raise your orbit and then do the planeshift. You could escape Laythe, encounter it again, and come it over the poles.