Anton P. Nym

The main objection to including Orion as a stock engine is that it's so powerful it makes orbital dynamics moot... and it's those dynamics that make Kerbal Space Program unique as a game. You don't need transfer orbits or gravity assists; you can point at your target and hammer away like in Elite. Orion's fun for a bit, and I enjoyed even my failures with it, but it really doesn't fit in with the rest of the parts of the game and I don't think it should be incorporated into the stock parts set. -- Steve

One way I tell is a change in the engine sound, it sounds a bit thinner just before it stalls out. That's my cue to throttle back or to switch to the rockets. -- Steve

Nicoll-Dyson laser, if we're talking Karadashev-II levels of technology. The ultimate in ominous-hum-THOOM! technology... -- Steve

Actually, that's one of the solved problems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_yield. The real problems are radioactive fallout (as they still use fissile cores) and the strategic/political/safety problems with hauling hundreds of nukes over other peoples' heads. -- Steve

Believe it; a test model [actually flew: I believe it was Dyson himself who calculated that statistically each launch of an Orion would cause one fatal case of cancer. Can't even call for volunteers, because it's so random a risk... We aren't flying ORION because there are real problems with the drive, not just technical issues but very serious problems with its side effects. -- Steve

Astronomers going over data from the Kepler Space Telescope discovered evidence for a solar system much like ours, but smaller. I had more witty observations on the parallels with KSP, but alas they escaped my brain while preparing lunch... so all I got is I hope you enjoy the article. -- Steve

The Arro Flechette, my most recent SSTO. It's quite, er, spritely compared to my previous designs. --Steve PS: I'm not certain the photos will show; Photobucket is acting weird again. If they don't, hopefully they'll return when the servers go back to normal.

I routinely put multiple radial intakes on my craft to get a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio, but I don't "stack" intakes. More out of esthetic reasons than anything else... one option missing in the game is the option to put larger intakes on to increase airflow, so I justify the added radials as a form of inlet widening. -- Steve

Here's how I use the sepratrons: 1) making sure big radial boosters don't collide with the main stack; I have a couple of heavy-lift designs that use twin Rockomax 64s and they don't drift terribly quickly, so a little extra boost helps get them clear 2) de-orbiting insertion engines with sepratrons facing retrograde, cued to fire upon staging. I also use them to de-orbit my Popcorn miniprobes; a pair's enough to give over 180m/s delta-V on the wee things. 3) ejection motors on my spaceplanes' escape capsues, to get the cockpit and crew away cleanly I've also toyed with using them as boosters on sample-return probe stages, but not really put them into practice for that. -- Steve

I'd like to think we'd have a relatively strong negotiating position in situations like this: If nothing else, we can export our abundant chutzpah. -- Steve

What too many people are forgetting here is that KSP is a game. Realism is nice, but not essential. Balance is essential... and that's something folks need to consider. If you do the stretchy tanks thing, what will the in-game role be for the stock tanks? Will it remove the design challenge involved in building a successful spaceplane? Conversely, will it make designing craft too difficult for newer players? It may be simple to code, but that doesn't mean it's easy to implement in a game. There are other factors to consider. -- Steve

I think people confused "tweakables" with "procedural tanks" and very badly over-estimated what would be in such an update. That'd naturally lead to disappointment. (Not me; I'm okay with the current tanks as-is, myself.) -- Steve

Go to the initial post, click "edit" then click the "go advanced" button in the edit window. That should show you an option to change the thread tag. -- Steve

Well, the ejecta came from both bodies... so I consider that a variety of Extreme Lithobraking. -- Steve

Then there's always the currently-accepted theory of how Earth captured the Moon; lithobraking. -- Steve

My early attempt at a sample return mission to Duna, finally reaching its target thanks to a quick gravity assist by Ike... I launched this thing some time in August, I think. Definitely learned a lot about design since. (Moar fuel. No, more than that... keep going...) And the sample return lander on its way down, before retracting the solar panels and hitting the atmosphere. Not captured was it tearing itself apart when the chutes opened at 500m while still moving over 1km/s... From this spectacular failure, which left exactly one lander leg sitting exactly on Duna's equator until I tried to view it directly and it thus fell the last 10m to its collision-mesh doom, I have learned to build a much better lander which I'll launch at the next window. Project Sundiver just before burn at periapsis, an attempt to put a satellite in a 1 million km circular equatorial orbit of the Sun. (Period 1 day, 10 hours apparently.) The first burn with the leftovers of the injection stage is complete; I'm typing this while the second ion burn is underway at 4x physics warp. It takes a while to dump 10km/s excess speed... -- Steve PS: Nope, needed another canister of xenon on Sundiver. However, I did get a 1 million by 2.345 million km orbit, so that's something...

That's definitely too fiddly to do with just maneuver nodes... which is part of why I only do it out to geosynch or a bit more. (Also making sure I don't get an unplanned slingshot by the Mun or Minmus in there, and keeping the orbit period low enough so that the bird's at periapsis during the window.) It's not optimised, but it is enough (or seems so anyway) to help. The added bonus of having a "flatter" arc to the burn, reducing wastage when following a maneuver node marker, is nice to have too. -- Steve

I use an eccentric parking orbit for this reason; periapsis at around the 120km mark, apoapsis out scraping my geosynchronous satellites. It makes for a roughly 3 hour orbit, so not too long to hit a window, and gets about 3500m/s down at the bottom to take advantage of Herr Oberth's math. -- Steve

Solids definitely have their place. I use the larger solids to boost aerospike-driven stages (with high-efficiency but low-ish thrust) until they've burned off enough propellant to exceed an unassisted 1:1 TWR, for instance; makes for a much lighter craft overall. And I find Sepratrons invaluable; separating from radial heavy boosters, de-orbiting spent insertion stages, propelling ejector capsules, and even cheap de-orbit engines on my tiny Popcorn probes to save the liquid propellant for landings. When currency gets involved, I think a lot more people will pay attention to the use cases for solids. -- Steve PS: They also really help with parts counts; engine and fuel tankage for each is 1 part, instead of three or more for asparagus designs. Folks with slower CPUs might be interested in trying solids.

Possibly in story canon, but the thread is titled "Why a Star Trek replicator will never be possible" and I was addressing the real-world likelihood... which is nil. (In this universe, we obey the Laws of Thermodynamics! /homer) -- Steve

The real problem with the replicator is the real problem with the transporter as described (and fig-leafed by {TECH} in the script): Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. There's no way that the system could reliably assemble the matter from photons in the appropriate patterns. There's also the problem with the waste heat. A 100mL cup of tea (Earl Grey, hot) would require: e = mc^2 = 0.1kg x (300 000 000m/s)^2 = 9 000 000 000 000 000 J Even at 99.99% efficiency, that leaves 90 billion Joules of waste heat. It only takes about 45 000 J to boil the water for the tea. -- Steve

The thing about random events in KSP is that it's not like we can power cycle the rendezvous radar or set SCE to "Aux" to recover. It's just not that sophisticated a simulator. Random failures would essentially be unrecoverable, so unless we had much more redundancy than real-life rockets the failure would terminate the mission. Just not fun, at least not for me anyway. -- Steve

The button to do that is "terminate flight". If a flight's not being tracked, then it can't be resumed either so it might as well be deleted. -- Steve

That's correct. Anything inside the Moon's orbit here is in cis-lunar space. -- Steve

I keep LKO clean by deorbiting insertion stages with Sepratrons or by boosting to just short of orbital velocity before separation. The only debris I have there right now comes from, er, rapid unplanned disassemblies. Cis-Munar space I keep clean by making sure separated stages either collide with the Mun or are ejected out of Kerbin's SOI by gravity assist; I must say the Mun has done a wonderful job of clearing out some debris left by my very early missions flown before I started to take care with debris. Interplanetary missions, well, I haven't done enough of them to worry about debris; space is big, man. Maybe if I do start a serious effort to colonise Laythe I might take some measures in the Jool system, but otherwise the risks of collision are just too small to pay the delta-V cost of cleaning it up. -- Steve