Jackissimus

Nova is not part of Squad anymore ...

Not necessarily:

Lol, is it just me, or was this article written by someone playing ksp? It feels weird to understand everything in the article... great link though! They are aiming for a very low lunar orbit. Any idea why they don't use one of the frozen orbits? Also, the article states that the final translunar phasing trajectory will be a hyperbolic trajectory. Is that an Earth escape trajectory? Isnt that wasting fuel? Or do they just mean it's an elliptical trajectory, the probe will just never return to Earth.

Um, I dont know, I think the father should have actually told her earlier how expensive things can be. I am 27 and although I am grateful to my parents for guiding me to the right career (I wanted to be a musician when I was 18, I am glad I am not), real life still kind of hit me in the face. And why not share it anyway? To protect them from it and let them concentrate on their studies? They won't study when they don't see the world as it is. You know, I don't want my parents to be messiahs in my life, quietly protecting me from evils, I want them to be my partners really, openly sharing what they know. This way I am just wondering what else they are keeping from me..

I remember it as one of the more interesting mods for halflife. I didnt know they made it into a game. I have to say its a really attractive concept although I guess it relies on striking the right balance in the game design a lot. That and having a really good and simple system of online servers and a community, because you have to have a certain amount of people for this game to be any fun...

You would lose attitude control of your spacecraft. I believe that's the famous gimbal lock problem that you had to avoid on apollo spacecraft for example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbal_lock

Yeah, it took me a couple of "this thread has been here a week ago" reactions to my new threads to realize that I have to use google instead.

You can get captured without burning - by a moon slingshot or aerobraking. You can also almost completely circularize your orbit by aerobraking - that's what the Mars orbiters did. You can always use lithobraking, although it's hard to circularize ... EDIT: Oh, I think I understood what you were asking. To answer: it's impossible to establish an orbit around a body with no atmosphere and no moon without burning. However if you use a standard Hohmann transfer the burns to get captured are usually very small. More info here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/41515-Is-it-possible-to-have-Mun-capture-you-in-orbit-around-it

Now you can start wiggling and turning the knife in the wound. Finish him off!

It's a realistic result, absolutely. You can speed up as well as slow down using a slingshot. If you pass a planet on its trailing side, you speed yourself up (the planet drags you with it for a while) and slow the planet down a tiny bit (you draw the planet to you, thus slowing it down). Similarly, if you pass a planet on its leading side, you slow yourself down and speed the planet up a bit.

That's exactly right. I was using the wrong terminology, mea culpa. I meant dropping from a moon to Kerbin first and doing the burn at periapsis. (Or dropping from highly elliptical orbit) Correct again. Again, I meant "without using the maneuver of dropping from a higher orbit". What should we call this maneuver anyway?

As was said here, the best way is to use Kerbin slingshots. Unfortunately it will limit your launch windows and it will become a hassle after a while. I didn't use this method much, but if you do, put a report here, I am interested! Without using slingshots, it's actually best to launch from Kerbin to take maximum use of the Oberth effect. It's true for most planets except Eve and Duna. Read more about that here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/27066-Advantages-of-high-kerbin-orbit-refueling?p=330695&viewfull=1#post330695

Holy mother of God... What's the part count?

This can't be stressed enough. It costs 2x to 3x times more to insert. My method? I try to launch a mission to Moho every Moho-year, so about every 30 days. Some Moho-years are just way too expensive so I skip them. I try to aim under about 5200m/s total. I use alexmoon's planner, set to optimal trajectory. It can be done, but you have to be patient. I first set up the correct ejection deltaV and ejection angle (roughly) and then I try to optimize until I get about the correct transfer Apo and Peri. The Apo is usually a bit above Kerbin orbit*. Then I start playing with the Normal+/- marker to move the AN or DN to the opposite side of Moho's orbit (this is where my intercept will be). Then I play sort of with all the markers at the same time until I get an intercept, the resulting dV is usually around what alexmoon's planner predicted. * I don't really know why is this, although I have some guesses. Can someone explain?

I don't ever put kerbals inside anything that doesn't have a launch escape system with the abort button properly setup. I mostly man my different ships, tugs and stations only after they have been safely lifted to orbit. That said I have to also say that I always put a kerbal module on every craft, because I don't enjoy flying only with robots.

I would love to learn a bit more about your life philosophy. To answer the question: I recently considered setting my phone browser homepage to this forum, so yeah ...

Yep, I use that bit to tease my American colleagues when I drive them around in Czechia and they start making fun of kilometres

Oh maaaan ... Random outbursts of laughter in my office ... I am trying to hold it in now, I hope my boss doesn't notice... Some gems (sorry for OT): Pascals are derived, so they are recommended, and all derived units are actually really easy to derive, there are never any conversion constants to remember (with the sole exception of Celsius, which is Kelvin + 273). Bars are actually non-SI units, you are right, but they are exactly 100 000Pa, so they are sort of pegged to Pascals. We don't usually use pascals to talk about gas pressure, only the weathermen use them for this (they usually say "we will have 1013 hectopascals today", how is it your country?). Everyone uses bars here, but they could just as easily be using Pascals, the real pressure unit.

Coming a bit late into the discussion, but anyway: In my work I often perform installations of scientific instruments which are either American-made, Japan-made or German-made. I have to say that I like the German instruments the most. The Japanese have their horrible "Japanglish", which makes the manuals nearly unreadable, but the imperial units sometimes really boggle my mind. Like the first time I installed an antivibration table with the air pressure measured in psi. Pounds per square inch? Really? How do I convert that into bars? My toolbox is basically twice the size because I need to carry the metric tools and imperial tools. And what's with the weird ratios on the allen keys? How is it easier for anyone to have an allen key of the size 5/32 inch or 7/64 inch? That said I have to say that the little inconsistencies in SI units also tick me off sometimes, being the perfectionist that I am. Why is the kilogram the base unit of mass? Shouldn't it be simply the gram without the prefix? Why don't we use megameters or gigameters (well, except KSP)? Why don't we use gigagrams instead of tons? Shouldn't this be the more logical system? I also think we shouldn't be using degrees in angle measurement anymore, it's just completely arbitrary to have 360 degrees, 60 minutes, 60 seconds. We should be using radians instead, it's just a matter of getting used to it and it makes the math simpler. Regarding Dichebach's point: if you grow up in metric, you don't think of imperial. I have no concept of the ceiling being 12feet high, I have to convert to meters. I never measured in feet and when I try to use my feet to measure something, I quickly realize that my foot is smaller than 30cm. Usually when I try to guess the height of a ceiling, I use me as a quick mental measuring stick, because I am about 180cm high.

You use engine thrust vectoring to maintain attitude while in the atmosphere.

Oh man, you wouldn't believe. When I am at my parents' house on weekends I spend all the time playing KSP. My mom tries to lure me away from the PC by making great meals and my dad tries to propose walks in nature etc ... no chance. Sometimes my father tries to initiate chat with me during breakfast by starting a conversation about space ... hopeless attempts

I only wanted to watch a couple of minutes, but I couldn't resist to watch the whole thing ...

As much as I like Phil Plait, I can hardly expect him to run a balanced article on this. Why do the predictions always overshoot reality, why don't they undershoot sometimes? Why don't the models sometimes predict cooling and then get a surprise warming?

We won't be able to build space elevators for decades, if ever. We simply don't have a strong enough cable to build it. You need long enough CNTs without defects, and spinning them together probably won't produce a cable strong enough. All arguments about space elevators end up with this problem. So it's basically the same as arguing for building the Starship Enterprise. We cannot build it unless we have warp drives, so why even discuss it. Rocket scientists and engineers cannot push this issue forward, we need to wait for the chemists. Go into chemistry, it's a great field!

OK, I should really make it clear now that I am mostly fighting against the kind environmental ideology that borders on political propaganda. I come from a postcommunist country, I hate propaganda, it stinks. I am not fighting "honest" science. I would never fight that, but it has to be honest, not tinged with premeditated intent. I am now going to reply to Lajos's post. Exact science should be about "yes" and "no". If a you encounter one event that is against a physical law, then the physical theory is gone, forever. But that is beside the point really. What I was hinting at is that it's really misguided to hide your argument behind some percentage. It's not like 97% of scientists agree to whatever the environmentalist agenda has to say. It's usually a "yes, but", or "no, but". The models are very unreliable to solicit such a surefire response. Look at this chart: I was wrong about the lack of warming, and I really am sorry, see I am learning too. But this graph reminded me of another interesting phenomenon. In the 60s and 70s people were alarmed about global cooling the same way they are now alarmed about global warming. This shows that maybe a bit more patience and less panic should be employed. As said above I was merely voicing a concern that the political debate is not balanced anymore. You should really live in Europe for a while. They banned the sale of incandescent light bulbs recently. I will not, in my life, see a light bulb again unless I travel to the US or China. You should see my country, we are a solar superpower now, there are fields of solar panels everywhere here, and the local yearly precipitation is on the level of Seattle. My post says "barring anthropocentric arguments". I clearly said that if it weren't for our livelihoods, higher CO2 concentrations are actually good for nature. I was merely driving my point that CO2 should not be called a pollutant. But as was stated in the posts above, the heat->turbulence link has actually not been proven. I honestly don't know what you are referreing to. If you knew me you would know that I hate conspiracy theories. My boss believes Americans have torn down the WTC themselves, the jews are controlling the world, he believes he has seen a real UFO and he believes that he has experienced astral projection. If he didn't have a lot of money, I probably wouldn't be working for him now (luckily for me, I love my job). You sort of went on a tangent there, but the end is somewhat coherent. Nevertheless you also hang on to the single point you know is right, and I don't blame you, I like to do the same. So the earth is warming now a bit, it might even be partially anthropogenic, I don't deny it. What really interests me though, is the next question: What do you want to do about it?