King Arthur

As a compromise, GN Condensers could perhaps produce electricity through GN particle consumption. Would make for a very nice additional choice to other, more traditional means of electricity production. GN Condensers even without GN particle generation are already really great for moving around in LKO though. They show their limits beyond LKO, but that's to be expected. Also, another thought: How about making the Tau Drives use a different resource? Right now both the GN Drives/Condensers and the Tau Drives use "GNparticle" which means they can all interoperate and exchange particles between each other, except it's quite obvious the GN particles produced by the GN Drives/Condensers and the "space cancer" particles produced by the Tau Drives are entirely different beasts. EDIT: Also, possible bug report. The CFG for the GN Condenser has its model set to that of the Tau Drive. I set it instead to the "NewModel.mu" file in the Condenser's directory, no idea if that is how it's supposed to be or what but I thought I should point this out. EDIT 2: Would it be possible to add Trans-AM capability to the GN Condenser? As I recall the 00 Raiser equipped with two GN Condensers performed a short-lived Trans-AM in the movie. For that matter, the Tau Drives as well had Trans-AM I think. Perhaps drastically increase particle consumption rate during Trans-AM to balance out adding it to the others?

I don't know what contraptions you're daring to dock, but personally I've never had that procedure fail me. MJ will do a better job than any human at maintaining a constant heading and roll attitude, and the human can do a better job translating than MJ will. Now MJ's autodocking on the other hand, I've had MJ literally ram my target after completely missing its mark entirely numerous times. I never trust autodocking for anything now. :\

TGT -PAR orientation via Smart ASS, translate manually with RCS. You get the best of both worlds, precise automated heading (and optionally roll) guidance and effective RCS translations.

This is going to be my most-favorite KSP mod ever, thanks!

I just found another must-have mod.

I for one couldn't care less if someone played "pure stock" or not, just like I couldn't care less about what mods someone plays KSP with. In my opinion, anyone who gets upset at people playing pure stock is just as bad as the people who get upset at people who play with mods.

Without some context about that line of code, we can't really comment in any constructive way unless we happened to be a dev who worked on this game you speak of. For what it's worth though, I can at least say that looks like XML or some other similar markup language.

On the other hand, why does it matter if someone's achievements are "dilute[d]" because they used mods? KSP is a completely single player game outside of challenges, it should not and does not matter how each individual plays KSP.

What mods I use is my business and mine alone. What mods someone else uses is their business and theirs alone. 'Nuff said.

'Nuff said. In addition, any pictures the Hubble Space Telescope has taken is automagically awesome.

US-Russian cooperation came about successfully because the Russians had something the US and its partners just could not refuse: Years of experience in designing, launching, and flying space stations. The US on the other hand could supply the funding the Russians needed to keep Mir flying and then, eventually, the party members (US/Russia/Japan/EU/CSA) could pool together enough money and technological prowess to make the ISS (essentially a combination of Space Station Freedom and Mir-2) into reality. The US also had the Space Shuttle which could fill the gap made by the cancellation of Buran. By contrast, what does China have to offer? Space stations? Nope, already have that. Launch vehicles? Might as well have the Russians launch some Soyuzes for us. Lunar missions? Nope, already have that. Space telescopes/observatories? Nope, already have that. Meanwhile, China will without a doubt steal every single thing they can get their hands on since almost everything we have is unknown territory to them. Pure and simple, the US has everything to lose and nothing to gain in a relationship with China.

One word: No. US federal laws absolutely prohibit NASA funding from being used for anything related to China, up to and including (but not limited to) accepting official Chinese visitors at NASA facilities. Yeah sure, China might look to currently have the space program with the best short/mid-term outlook with its motivation driven by nationalism and seeming willingness to drop tons of money on projects like a space station. However, nothing will happen as far as international (read: US-China) cooperation goes for one simple reason: Everyone and their grandmother knows China can and will steal every single piece of technology with extreme prejudice when given the slightest chance, I personally don't want NASA's (or JAXA's, or ESA's, or Roscosomos's) hard work stolen wholesale by the Chinese.

Thanks for the dev work on MJ, have fun in Japan!

In the interim, you can fly the burn manually by having MJ lock on to your node and burning the engines yourself. That said, I too would like to see MJ's TWR calculations refined at some point, some burns are burns where you really just want the computer to fly it even though flying manually is always an option.

You're confusing yourself. The reason lunar regolith (moon dust and whatnot), which is not toxic as far as I know, has very sharp edges that it "eats through spacesuits and boots" is because there are absolutely no mechanisms on the Moon that involve erosion. Erosion, brought on by various mechanisms such as water erosion, air erosion, etc. is what makes rocks, sand, and other materials here on Earth have rounder, shaved off edges compared to regolith.

I'll support this if all the KPS typos are fixed.

I like how the rendezvous autopilot currently works, it prioritizes less time spent flying rather than saving fuel by insisting heavily on using phasing orbits. A rendezvous without the phasing orbit is already possible through the manuever planner (inclination match -> hohmann transfer -> match velocity at closest approach).

My favorites would be a tie between the Saturn V, the Space Shuttle, and the Delta IV Heavy. The Japanese H-2A/B rockets are great as well though.

What is the end difference? In either case the boulder gets analyzed and we get new scientific data.

Confirming this bug, I also had one of my ships fly away from the station when I came in on the wrong side and asked MJ to auto-dock to a port on the far side of the station from where I was.

On the other hand, the Russians have racked up substantial information on how the human body reacts to a microgravity environment (read: an astronaut from Mir still holds the world record for longest continuous space habitation, 427 days if I recall?), an amount that is more than enough to understand what happens and what can be done to address them. As far as leaving humans on the ISS/in space to "see what happens to them", we aren't really accomplishing anything new or groundbreaking anymore since we've already done it. And let's not forget the spacefaring time logged by the Space Shuttle and Skylab crews as well, they also provided much needed data in addition to Mir's that we still need to work on, rather than rehashing the same experiment. Regarding political motivation, (un?)fortunately the US has gotten over the euphoria of having men walking on other worlds. Manned space exploration, given current technology and its growth rate, is (still!) expensive as all mighty hell even for the forseeable future and it will quickly drain a country's coffers at an unsustainable speed as the US and Russia both learned the hard way. As for emotional, yes even I admit I want to see space travel become routine, but we need to get there in a manner that is sustainable. Unmanned space exploration is that sustainable method of exploring space and the future of space exploration until we develop the means to significantly cheapen individual rocket launches and the costs of keeping a human in space alive. On the other hand, a robot requires no life support nor a human-hospitable environment. As long as the robot has a means of generating electricity (solar panels or RTGs) the robot in theory can go on forever until it meets the end of its mechanical lifespan, and assuming the robot was well-designed it will (should) be able to accomplish all primary objectives on a given mission. In short, the reduced complexity and reduced costs from not needing human life support far outweighs the speed/ad-lib benefits of having humans on the scene.

Last I read the Bigelow module was planned to go up at a later date, I assume it was a fairly recent turn of events that cancelled it if the funding was indeed cut?

As I said sometime ago on a topic similar to this, the problem with manned space exploration can be summed up in one word: Why? Unmanned space exploration, which includes but are not limited to satelites, deep space probes, space telescopes, rovers, landers, impactors, surveyors, etc. can return almost all of the scientific data a manned mission might be capable of returning and then some at a substantially cheaper cost and higher safety. When unmanned space exploration is so utterly efficient and effective, why (in so far as space exploration) do we need to have a human presence in space? Besides the "flag waving" and the prestige/bragging rights associated with having a manned space program, there are unfortunately no practical reasons for having a manned space program at all.

1. Cancel SLS (including Orion), the program is a political moneysink and lacks direction and initiative. 2. Pull out of the ISS. The station is not worth the costs of keeping US astronauts in space, especially now that we lack a direct way of getting there. 3. Cancel the James Webb Space Telescope, as ambitious as the program is it has suffered from consistently terrible management and beaurocratic bullcrap. 4. Re-invest in the Great Observatories, developing and launching clear successors to Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra with a strict budget, direction, and tight management. 5. Invest in more unmanned exploration missions along the lines of Voyager, Cassini-Huygens, New Horizons, and the Mars rovers which have all proven consistently throughout history to return scientific data on the order of several magnitudes larger than the original financial investment.

The price tag for any extraterrestrial materials being sold here on Earth will at least involve the total cost of launch vehicles, propellants, hardware (maybe reusable?), and so forth. A price crash? The only thing that's crashing is the asteroid mining market itself since nobody will buy unless: A. Absolutely no more of the stuff are left on Earth, or B. Cost for launches and space hardware is significantly (as in several magnitudes) reduced.