Jackissimus

Oh man, you are my idol. I think I could do this rant to the face of about 95% of the people I meet every day. Like recently, I was sitting with a lawyer friend outside a pub having a beer and I looked up and said - "Look, ISS!". And he actually said: "Oh yeah? So why is it moving?" He told me that he thought that once you get things in space, they just float there, motionless. Or my brother asked me when did this man land on the Moon. I told him there were actually 12 of them and he looked at me incredulously. Or I told our secretary that there will be a Christmas comet this year and it will most likely be visible with the naked eye, possibly very bright. She laughed at me and actually shared a laugh with my colleague, that it's silly of me to think that comets could be seen with the naked eye, astronomy is after all reserved for the scientists with the big instruments. I feel with you.

Really? That's great! That is what I was hoping for option 4. Let me just see if I understand this. So I am approaching Dres. At the time of arrival the polar orbital station has an orbital plane tangential to the velocity vector of the planet. How can I set up the correction burn to align myself with the orbital plane? Should I basically burn to get in front of the planet? I really need to learn to change the conics mode for this, I just don't understand my orbits before I reach the SOI.

EDIT: Double post

Misunderstood, sorry. Anyway, without Kethane I have no motivation to build the station or the fuel lander whatsoever. I think without kethane I would just build one station around Kerbin and that's it. The station is heavy too. It holds a lot of fuel itself. I was really hoping to just leave it on a polar orbit, and use the lander the shuttle back and forth whenever the station flies over the surface base (basically twice every planetary day).

I think this wouldn't work. When you kill your horizontal velocity in a high orbit, you come hurtling towards the planet at much higher speed because you are falling from higher altitudes, so it doesn't save you much delta-v. Also about the landers vs buses mass - it's actually the other way around. I have heavy surface lander shuttles that are meant to lift up a lot of fuel from my kethane bases and resupply the station. I want to have as much fuel left in them as possible when I reach the station. But the interplanetary bus mostly carries passengers, sometimes some base or station modules. The buses are relatively light, because they refuel all the time at the planetary orbital stations, so they are mostly payload mass. Exactly, you can easily go into a polar orbit when you arrive at a planet. The problem is that I need to randezvous with my station then, because my buses are not equipped for landing. And then I have a problem because my longitude of ascending node (LAN) can be very different than my station's. As I said, what do you do when you want to do the same with Dres? It involves a lot of waiting.

He meant pitch, not rotation.

What a wordsmith! I hope "munth" lives on, it's a great word Yeah I was guessing option 2 as well. It's the golden middle way. It's faster than option 1 and probably cheaper than option 3. I still wonder if there is an option 4 though ...

I am running a reusable space program, which means I don't waste any stages after I get things out of Kerbin atmosphere. That in turn means that I have to always have an infrastructure in place if I want to fly somewhere. I fly up to Kerbin Space Station, take a bus to Mun Space Station, then take a dedicated Mun Lander to the surface. The Mun Space Station gets refueled by a Fuel Shuttle from a Kethane Base on the surface. So far I've been doing all this in equatorial orbits and equatorial landing sites. What if I wanted to land anywhere on Mun, though? I would need a space station on polar orbit. But that creates a problem that I can only take my bus from Kerbin twice per month. That's because I need to approach Mun at such an angle that will reach the space station without needing large burns to correct my longitude of ascending node. I might reach Mun polar orbit, but with a longitude of ascending node 90 degrees off in relation to the Mun space station. Correct me if I am wrong here. That's not a big problem though, I can wait half a month (well not really a month, but it's tedious to call it "a time it takes Mun to do one full orbit"). The real problem comes when I want to do the same with Dres for example. Then I have to not only always wait for a transfer window for Dres, but also wait when the transfer window is aligned with the right approach angle for the polar space station. This might take many years and I don't like huge time warps. So what's the best way to reach every point on Dres then? I thought of many things: The first option is the one I just described - as far as I understand it involves a lot of waiting. I could wait for the usual transfer window to Dres, then enter a really high equatorial orbit when I reach Dres. Then I need to wait for the right time to do a 90 degrees inclination burn to align my LAN with the station. The inclination burn should be cheap because I am in a high orbit, but I don't know how much waiting this involves (probably much less than option one). I could just set up everything equatorially and then always land at the equator and perform a short suborbital hop to my base at higher latitude. This could be the fastest, but I don't know how much deltaV this involves. Maybe there is a possibility to set up some maneuver nodes during the flight to Dres in such a way that will allow me to approach the polar space station at the right angle no matter when I come to Dres? I am not sure about this, what do you think? This is interesting to me especially because it's sort of realistic. I know NASA had plans for a station around Earth, Moon and a tug between them, before the budget cuts in 60s/70s. EDIT: This is a picture of option 1:

Mind sharing your sources?

I killed Bill. It was not my fault. There was this mountain on Mun and the idiot wanted to see it up close. Well, he did. Anyway, to my surprise, three days later he is back at KSC. Has this happened to you too?

Hi! I am learning to land this way: But I don't know when to start the burn when I want to do a precision landing. Does anybody have any tricks? Can I perhaps read it from the craft's TWR somehow? Or can I somehow use a maneuver node to give me an estimate? EDIT: I think I need to clear up my question a bit. The whole burn to kill your horizontal speed can take up to 3 minutes. So you have to start burning maybe 50-100km before your target area. Problem is you don't really know when exactly. I don't want to do trial and error all the time to determine the right moment to start the burn. It's different for every moon, each craft design and sometimes even each craft (because it carries different amounts of fuel). I was hoping I could make some prediction before the actual landing. I tried two things: - to guesstimate it somehow from the numbers: I know the thrust (240kN), the initial weight (80t) and the horizontal speed (500m/s), I thought I could get a reasonable number if just calculate - my TWR is then about 0.3, which means I can produce an acceleration of about 3m/s^2, and that means I will need about 160s, or 2m40s to kill my horizontal speed. However this isn't a good way to go at it and my number ended up about 50% off - to make a maneuver node right above my target and hold the retrograde marker all the way to 0 final speed. It then gives me a time estimate, but it's way off too. I don't know, I just thought there would be some way to guess about the right number.

Watch this video (the fun part starts at 4:25, no need to watch the beginning):

All laptops are made in China, it doesn't matter if it's Lenovo or Dell ...

This should be a blurb on the game's main site. And my thinking exactly!

Hi, I am a kethane newbie and I just learned that you cannot drill for kethane in the background. You have to be there with the craft for it to drill. For me that begs the question - why are there all the large Kethane tanks? See, if I can only drill when I am there, then it's most efficient to just have a big bunch of kethane drills in one place (instead of scattered around the planet). And when I have them all in one place, then I might just as well convert it at the time of drilling, I am not shipping any kethane around after all. And if I am converting at the time of drilling, the smallest kethane tank will suffice as a buffer. Why are there all the tanks then? I just wanted to have one big base as a kethane converter, fuel depo and launch platform and small kethane drilling hoppers hopping from deposit to deposit, but that's just useless I think. Or am I missing something? EDIT: yeah, basically exactly like this guy here: http://oi42.tinypic.com/2r72e5g.jpg ... there is really no incentive to do anything else, is there? EDIT2: even better - http://i.imgur.com/5iHiYjp.jpg

I would concentrate on developing better propulsion methods. Much like SpaceX, but more basic research into the needed physical chemistry, materials science etc. So nuclear thermal engines, nuclear pulsed propulsion, launch loop, space elevator, SABRE, scramjet, ISRU plus methods for rapid reusability, mass production and cost cutting. In the meantime I would launch some awesome stuff into space using chemical rockets just to do some PR and generate more interest and funding.

Even if I were alive at that time, I still wouldn't be able to watch it, because they didn't show it on the TV in the eastern bloc. They just mentioned it in the newspaper somewhere, but there was very little information. I heard that it was on TV in Poland though, it must have been great to see it.

In physics the word "delta" means change. If you have 7 eggs in your fridge and you increase the number to 10, then you just increase the amount by deltaEggCount = 3. V is for velocity, so if you are driving on the highway at 80kph and increase your speed to 100kph, you increase your speed by deltaV = 20kph. That's all there is to it, you just need a lot of deltaV to go from 0 to escape velocity.

Guys, I admire your patience and just general tolerance, because I was banging my head on the table with laughter when I first read the question. I certainly wasn't gonna answer it, because I thought someone is trolling. I am a bit ashamed of myself now, really.

I don't understand a few things in this thread myself: 1) Why should winglets be on the bottom of a rocket? Does it really matter where they generate lift when they just turn the rocket back and forth? They can turn it just as well on top of the rocket, can't they? 2) Why should RCS ports be on the bottom? Again, basically the same question. I don't get why I should move my RCS ports closer to my gimballing engines.

So do you think Squad implemented some kind of random name generator for this? That German Kerman sounds just like a randomly added -man suffix.

It's a shame really, but I've also gotten into the habit of using RTGs for all my power needs. They weigh about the same as panels and batteries and there is just less hassle and lower part count. Maybe the game should somehow make RTGs less attractive.

So when do you use SRBs? Also, how is asparagus noncreative?

A single Apollo mission did more useful work in three days than Opportunity rover in eight years: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/why-space-exploration-is-a-job-for-humans/255341/ What about project Orion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4k_YZAXSEI. This was a very real project in the sixties until cancelled in favor of Apollo. The technology exists, it just needs to be developed. Radiation on Mars is not bad at all: http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/2012/11/27/radiation-mars-expected-curiosity-measurements-suggest/ Lower gravity effects are not yet well understood, it's not a strong argument. Anyway, what do you want to do? Have humankind live on Earth forever until extinct?

What does the detector attenuation stuff mean exactly?