Kerbart

IF he playes the game and IF he puts it up on his youtube page and IF a lot of his followers try the game out and IF they start playing and IF they register on the forum and IF they start participating and IF they do indeed post stupid posts. Boy, that's a lot of ifs!

Xenon tank and ion engine. Oh wait. switch craft?

Well except in Kerxas. There the seasons are "Kanuari, Kebruari and Kummer"

So, there's this game, basically purely based on Newton's laws. “In which I claim that Newton’s third law is void†Yeah. That’ll go over well.

I like whacky projects and encourage people to go for the most crazy things, but here I have to agree with Epthelyn... It's all a computer simulation and part failure is not (yet?) implemented in the game. If you can can escape planetary SOI you can get as far as you want, provided you have the fuel (which you do). There's no reason to assume not, unless you run into debris (in interstellar space?) or the kraken and neither really has to do with your ship We know that relativity (be it general or special) has not been implemented in the game. So the question can I break the (for the game rather arbritary) speed of light can beforehand answered with "yes" (and it's been done already I think) No matter what it's a simulation so it's always "on paper" Now let's look at the more practical hurdles... Let's say you are aiming for the speed of light, and let's say that somehow you manage to get a full 1g out of your ion engines (which would be amazing). With c = 300,000 km/s and 1 g being 0.0098 km/s² you can see the first problem... it will take about 30,581,039 seconds to reach that speed (again, by virtue of absence of relativistic effects). That is 8500 hours or nearly a year (minus a handful of days). And unless you intend to impact with the crater the size of the solar system you will have to slow down as well; another year. That's two years of non stop acceleration/deceleration, and you will travel about 1 light year in those two years, which by interstellar standards is nothing; you will need at least an additional 2-3 years of travel to visit nearby stars. Of course in the Kerbal universe you could imagine things are a lot closer. But still...

No, that would kill it. My laptop has a metal (aluminium?) body that transfers heat pretty good (so it tends to get freakishly hot when playing ksp). I fill a ziplock bag with two supercooled blocks of solid water ("ice" as some call it) and put those on the hotspot on the laptop body. As it sucks the heat out of the body, so does the internal temperature. Once the water has progessed to fluid phase I open the bag, pour the water out and replace it with two new solid blocks. Repeat as required. I now actually use cooling pads from the local pharmacy; they stay cold longer and are less (leaks) messy. But the principal is the same.

Well Manley mode would be to use just the lander, without that launching stage. And landing on the launch platform. Without the chute. That's just extra weight, which you really don't want to carry with you when using ion engines only.

On a side note I've watercooled my laptop. It works really really well.

Yeah, think of a slinky that you hold by the top and then you let the bottom bounce. The moving coils are pretty representative of the "sound waves"

A boat as an aircraft carrier? Really? I'd like to see that. FYI the informal definition of a boat is "a ship that is small enough to be casually carried onboard of another ship" (the term "casually" is used to preemptively squash the "yeah but you can put it on a heavy-lift semi submersible" retort) An aircraft carrier is a ship, not a boat. But it would be nice to have a vehicle to recover splashed down capsules.

Did you reach orbit? Lets start there.

Option 3: You were snoring and the passenger next to you tried a novel way to stop it.

Back away from space station. Do stuff and things Make 90° turn for retrograde burn, not realizing that apparently I rotated in reverse direction for about 90° during my absence Somehow crash into space station @ 100 m/s

Mechjeb gives me vital information on orbital data. Of course, you could use the mapview. But where's the challenge in the game if you use that?

I have to say I avoided most mistakes, because I watched a whole bunch of tutorials. Now, before you call me cocky. The reason I watched those tutorials was because my rockets didn't take off. I'd hit the space bar, hear this hissing "KPTCHUNK!" and that was about it. I was about to "well this game sucks" unload the demo when i figured that somebody must have put a video or two on youtube. That way I learned you have to set throttle with shift...

Hahaha! That one made me laugh. Laughing with you, not at youâ€â€not for the mistake itself, we all make them, but just imagining the moment of discovery: “what do you mean, COUNTER clockswise?†Debris shouldn't be too much of an issue. I can assure from experience that 100m/s is already enough to totally annihilate a space station, you don't need retrograde orbits for that

Is there a thread for bug reporting? Right now kOS works for me but it's not able to get stable control of my craft. I'm using a smallish rocket (similar to the one used on the demo video) and instead of going straight up it seems to be going around in circles at 10° from the up vector (with steering set to lock steering to up.)

Those IRL missions have been planned with ion engines who have (a) insane ISP's and ( even less thrust than the Kerbal ion engine. Yes, you're losing out on the Oberth effect but in this particular case the virtues of using the ion engine (and the necessity of the spiral burn) negate that. The main point of the discussion here will be "how far up the arc are you going to fire". A 180° burn (or worse) will obviously negate the advantage of the nuclear engine. On the other hand, a 30° burn probably will not (I'm guessing here). As with everything, not taking things up to the extreme will probably do the trick. In some cases you will not have the luxury of burning in multiple stages (when being captured by a planet for instance). That's where you'll need a regular engine. In all other cases it comes down to trading convenience (single burn) for fuel efficiency. And given that I don't have to swipe my card to send up yet another set of 4 orange tanks to put an XL-400 filled with fuel in orbit, I can't blame people for preferring convenience over tedium, sometimes (I use nukes wherever I can).

Well, lets see... Built and tested a "debris collector" for the single piece of debris that, despite my efforts to prevent debris, ended up in orbit. Some clairvoyancy was involved, apparently! (see later) Decided to replace my fuel depot (a leftover from a space station with too many parts) with a simpler one with lower part count Managed to crash the fuel shuttle into said fuel depot, resulting in--by now--a beautiful ring of debris around Kerbin. My debris collector crew will not get bored over the next few weeks While adding additional tanks the new (now necessary) fuel depot I borked the docking approach about 5s before docking by trying to rotate the camera, using shift. And forgetting that in docking mode, shift is for vertical movement. The second attempt worked better. Docked. Discovered that I cannot undock the tractor. FML.

The smallest one looks like it could be a great hand dryer in Kerbal bath rooms. It'll get glowing reviews!!

I think they mean what's behind the big doors. Apparently you can get there by clicking the "launch" button. Or so I've been told.

Maybe i got lucky? It might have been picked up by one of the girders or the struts? I do get to test it. I revamped my fuel depot (LESS parts, not more) and was busy shuttling leftover fuel to the new depot. One of the runs after undocking, I got distracted with a few more pressing things (like Mousehunt, for instance) and a bit later I made a 90° turn followed for a retrograde burn. I did see something flash in view but before I could hit F1 the unplanned rapid disassembly (consisting mainly of mixing large orange tanks filled with oxidizer and fuel) was over in a... well, flash, quite literally. Now I have a cloud of a dozen pieces of debris waiting for me. To be continued...

The disappointing answer is: It's not relative to anything. No matter where you are, no matter how fast you go -- light will always have a speed of 300,000 km/s. In your example, if you were moving at . 6c towards another object moving at .6c, wouldn't it appear to approach at 1.2c? The answer is no, because of your velocity time is slowing down. Thus, when that object has come 360,000 km closer to you, not one second has passed in your frame of reference, but more than one second. Making the object still move slower than the speed of light towards you.

Yes, each of them will fire at ½√2 times regular thrust (roughly 70%) So you have TWO thrusters, doing a total thrust of 141% of what one regular thruster does. Power-wise there's no difference but your mono propellant use will be 41% higher.