rodion

what's this alarmingly phallic object (even by rocketry standards)? has it crawled from your girlfriend's the sock drawer? wait, it's full of science! this 3-part payload is going to eve where it will complete some important Dmagic contracts. it's been a long time since i launched any multi-spacecraft interplanetary missions, and even then that was back in my days of innocence when things like fairing loading, cost overruns and deadly re-entry weren't even complicating factors yet. now when it goes live i must only hope i don't, say, accidentally tap spacebar and strand everything in space; reverting is not an option (really, it isn't).

personally i don't even like simulated surround sound systems for headphones. i've tried dolby's virtual 7.1 for more than one pair of headphones and it always just sounds muddy and bad, like you were listening to music in a big old hall reflecting everything back and forth all the time. there's also some band around 500-1,000Hz that's way over-represented and for me it's too big of a hassle to EQ it out for good. for me no mixing simulation technique is better than just playing the sound through the channels it was intended for - headphones are physically stereo by design, so stereo is what they do best. also i agree with aqua, for $300 you could get say, AKG K701s, or even get two pairs of audio technica M50s and give the other pair away as a christmas present. you could be doing way better with the resources you have at hand.

it seems very unlikely to me that phobos would ever naturally fall to mars as an impactor, its composition is far too gravelly and mars' tidal influence will break it apart into a ring system long before it decays to the point that it could hit the planet. phobos has a density of less than 2g/cm^3 so we could also rule out any sort of dense core that would survive mars' tidal effects. a possibly more realistic question to ask would be what effect the energy carried by an excess 10 trillion tons of material steadily entering the martian atmosphere over a period of [some number i don't know] years might have on martian surface conditions, but i don't have any frame of reference to determine if it would be particularly dramatic.

thanks, that's a great idea. forgot this mod existed.

for the first time i finally rendezvoused a probe with an asteroid (or more accurately a probe and its injection stage, but we can ignore fact that for the sake of elegance) was an interesting and educational experience, especially since i was playing without quickloading or other crutches so i had to guess my way through the whole process of the mission. now i know a lot more about good practice for asteroid rendezvous so in the near future i'll be able to send a kerbal or three to one and have good times on EVA. what's almost more interesting than the mission itself is what i do with the spacecraft now that it's there. my original plan was to just return it to kerbin orbit and have kerbals extract any science data (not actually necessary as it turned out) and bond a heatshield to it so it can return to the surface (it's about 40,000 funds of gear so it's economical), but now it's there it still has about 2,300 dV left in its LFO and argon tanks, enough to get to duna with change, and it's a functional science platform, so why waste the capability? i can use the asteroid as an interplanetary launchpad at a later date and extend the spacecraft's mission. i'll probably land it on ike and then give the probe its well deserved retirement.

Hi, this should pretty much explain itself. it's convenient on low-gravity planets to jet around on EVA packs to explore the area, but even if i know that J. Random Feature is at X heading from the map i still have to do a fandango in and around my spacecraft to try to get an idea of where that is relative to the canonical "front" of my ship because kerbals somehow forget to pack their own instrumentation about their person (though i note that they still have the stock altimeter, barometer and vertical speed indicator). i don't know a lot about spacesuit design but it strikes me as ridiculous that a suit designed for extended EVA wouldn't at least have some kind of heading indicator sewn into the sleeve. so, is there a mod extant that adds this functionality, or failing that, is it a moddable feature?

it was always an okay part in my opinion, until the 24-77 arrived and blew it out of the water in every possible way.

i agree with these guys, sounds very much like a CPU temperature issue. most motherboard firmware will shut down your computer for safety if it detects temperatures exceeding 60-65C (varies a little by manufacturer and model). if you're using the stock cooler on your CPU you might want to invest a small amount in a beefier one, most basic aftermarket coolers are way quieter and more effective.

great analysis, but i think you may do well from exploring the benefits of LaTeX's math markup.

That's one of the neatest SS2-derived designs i've seen in KSP, nice work.

i'm pretty sure the current generation of spacesuits doesn't allow anything that could fall under the class of combative actions. they're very restrictive of joint movement and rather fatiguing to wear when doing any sort of heavy physical work, plus maneuvering through open space is a highly non-trivial task (unlike the hilariously overpowered KSP EVA RCS packs that can virtually achieve munar orbit alone). as unlikely as this scenario is in the first place, i'd observe that if the astronauts were unarmed and in civilian capsules they would likely been in a non-war scenario and thus liable to charges of assault or homicide in earth courts. if on the other hand the astronauts were military they could rely on a very simple technology that's already been tested and rated for space - a gun.

thanks for the good responses, i was unaware of level of completeness of the LK system. in my mind i always thought of it as more of a happy idea (like many soviet manned systems of that period) than an actual nuts-and-bolts assembly for some reason, clearly it needs to go on my research list.

i never realized that the LK engine system development actually progressed to the point that they were doing live test-firings. makes me feel a little sentimental that all that technology never got to fulfill its intended mission.

what are you building your rockets out of, silly putty?

i sometimes listen to classical music when i play KSP (i'm on a JS bach kick of late, maybe the technical nature of the music makes me a better engineer in the VAB, or not), but more often i run it without any music at all. the in-game soundtrack really annoys me after a couple of minutes, but that's not unique to KSP, it goes for just about every game i play (the only exception being doom).

Yes, this sounds simply delightful. What could go wrong?

this is on the already suggested sticky (always check it!). to see how that discussion went, see here.

this is a problem at the forefront of cosmological understanding. the assumption that cosmologists use at present is that there were tiny anisotropies, distortions in the quantum "fabric" of the spacetime that were present from the earliest moments of the universe's existence and so over time the deviations in gravitational density of these areas caused matter to selectively sink into them, ultimately seeding galaxy clusters and so forth. if you look at images of the larger structure of the universe - full of galactic superclusters, filaments and voids, etc. - it seems pretty credible that these tiny wrinkles in spacetime existed and that their legacies are still present in an extremely inflated form. why these defects in the structure of the universe were present from the time of the big bang is, however, basically a mystery.

in my head "specific impulse", because i'm not restricted in how many syllables i can think in. in real life, i have no idea how i would shorten the mouthful because i never seem to get to talk about the fine details of reactive propulsion physics with people i know.

not only.

iapetus has always delighted me because it looks like a cartoon parody of a celestial body from a comic book that was accidentally implemented in real life. the bizarre two-tone colouring, the giant crater that makes it look like the death star (or old AT&T logo, your pick), and the 13,000m high equatorial ridge system that makes the whole moon look like it got stuck in a hula hoop are so charming to me. any one or two of these features would be enough to make a body a point of interest but the fact that all three appeared on one object just makes it perfect. an honourable mention is hyperion because, let's be honest, it's a sponge. a giant sponge in space. how does such an object even form? why is it the only moon with a chaotic rotation period? who lives in a pineapple under the sea? so many questions.

i notice that the "headlight" shape of the crew capsule happens to bear a good deal of resemblance to an early conception of the soyuz capsule from the early 1960s. i don't imagine the indian designers consciously sourced the idea from the soviets but it's interesting to note the convergence of good ideas for ballistic entry vehicles from different minds, decades apart. compare:

the failure in the analogy you presented here is that as the universe evolves it does not tend towards the state of a crystalline structure. a crystal is an extremely ordered state by definition because its constituents must each take a unique geometric position in order to form it. the universe by contrast is in the long term process of disassociating its structure - all of its particles are collectively approaching the state of isotropically flying around in random directions, rather than organizing themselves into a specific place and time.

amateur astronomers using consumer grade equipment have been able to detect and image (sometimes very clearly, see here) certain classified government projects such as KH-class NRO surveillance satellites, so given some intelligent guesses about orbital parameters it wouldn't surprise me if a person or organization was able to track the X-37, at least for a time.

this idea could go even further, you might have a whole variety of different snacks giving temporary buffs to various skill sets, if you wanted. the only problem is that i don't think anyone has ever seen what kerbals eat.