Kerbin Dallas Multipass

@K^2 You hope that life can exist on a non-water basis to prove your point. The scientific approach this not is (fake Yoda quote)

Yea I agree. More robotic spaceflight. Manned spaceflight is a very political act and not so much science related. Now that you come up with realism I would rather have a 20 m sediment probe from mars analysed (not necessarily brought home) than a spoonful of any of the awesome moons.

I do share your train of thought here absolutely. But... If any life form can survive the process of being hit by a meteor so hard that it gets accelerated to escape velocity and then survive several months in space and then survive re-entry and impact we are probably not talking about life but simple molecule chains. Those simple molecule chains could as well be present in any comet and have been seeded all over the solar system for billions of years. I personally love Titan but I think it's overhyped because of its geology that looks so earth like (and fascinating). However, it's raining methane there, I think liquid water remains the most promising candidate for finding low life forms.

Enceladus Because liquid water

Kessler syndrome

I happen to work for a large publishing company. Just send me your credit card and your PIN so we can credit you with a first advancement.

Interesting question. All I could find out is this: They had to re-establish their free return trajectory by burning the LM engines This trajectory gave them a moon periapsis of 100km higher than "normal" (not sure if higher than free return or just higher than mission plan) The "speed up the orbit" burn is called a PC+2 burn, meaning its done 2 hours after lunar periapsis. Not sure what that means yet. The reentry was a bit unusual but not sure how unusual

@Monkeh because If the effect of gravitational compression were to be factored out, the materials of which Mercury is made would be denser, with an uncompressed density of 5.3 g/cm3 versus Earth's 4.4 g/cm3. (WP)

Sounds correct to me. Having all reaction wheels stand still might be a simplification, perhaps they want one or the other keep spinning a bit, they just would like to "unload" the RPM. about your EDIT: the article has some info how they unload the CMG. They could as well redirect the tachion beam to the warp core using a nanoflux radiation so jerody la forge can see the radyon emissions with his visor... technobabble to me.

Acceleration/deceleration of the wheels produces torque. Once the wheels are turning their momentum produces stability along their axis (which makes it harder to rotate around the other axes) In an ideal world, with just one reaction wheel around the center of mass in an otherwise empty universe you could probably accelerate the wheel a bit and stop it to rotate the craft by an exact amount of degrees, minutes, seconds and come to a full stop with no loss. In reality you will have some losses by friction and off center mass etc. Plus you want to rotate around all 3 axes freely. In a probe, the wheels are mostly used to counterbalance other influences like solar wind or rotation/movement of the photovoltaic panels or other instruments. So, over a day in space they will pick up quite a few RPM just from making sure the craft just "sits there" and has one part (an antenna, or itself) pointed at the earth and another part at the sun (solar cells) and maybe a third one (a camera) pointed at something that looks photogenic. In a podcast a space guy responsible for a scientific probe said they "unload" the wheels via RCS every day, using up 0.5 grams of fuel on average. Think it was a mercury (the planet) mission but I could be wrong.

BTW: Do you "imperialists" know by heart that 8ft == 96 inches? Or that 3 yards == 108 inches == 9 feet? (or that 2 gallons = 462 cubic inches or 256 fluid ounces) If you ask 100 people in the street in a "metric country" how many litres fit in a cubic meter you will probably get 3³ correct answers, so its not trivial either I guess.

J002E3 is the designation given to a supposed asteroid discovered by amateur astronomer Bill Yeung on September 3, 2002. Further examination revealed the object was not a rock asteroid but instead the S-IVB third stage of the Apollo 12 Saturn V rocket (serial S-IVB-507). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J002E3 Found this article so funny I thought i'd share

"Spaghettification" is an actual term in astrophysics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification What an awesome word! And so pastafarian, too!

Objection your honor! Let's look at the hands on approach. OK, first of all I would always measure my actual room height in all corners and not just believe that they are precisely 8ft (they never are). Now lets say you put in wooden floors first. That will reduce your ceiling height by lets say half an inch. What have we got now? 8ft - 1/2 inch = 7ft 11 1/2 inches or 95.5 inches. I'm sorry but thats just not intuitive, and its the most simple real world example I could think of. Feet and inches are nice because theyre easy to guess with the naked eye, but the imperial system is by no means intuitive.

Putting a suicide probe/rover on Eve is easiest. Once you hit the atmosphere any parachute will guarantee a soft landing. A return mission (Eve and back) is close to impossible (yes, it has been done) Landing on Duna is tricky. You want to take many parachutes and prepare for a powered touchdown. For return misssions Duna is the easiest planet out there. I would forget about the slingshot around the moon, you will probably end up using more fuel to correct your trajectory than a proper hohmann transfer by the book.

Did I just watch a 10 sec Youtube video of a still diagram?

Can anyone who actually knows a bit about thread-safe programming confirm that it's even possible to compute the physics of one huge multipart rocket in multiple threads?

So awesome O_O

Thats pretty. I <3 Phobos for looking so badass

Saturn V had 5 turbines with a combined output of 275000 horsepower (205MW). Not for thrust, just to pump the fuel to the engines.

Thanks for sharing!

Lethal dose: "few miligrams" 1mg per human would be 7 billion * 1/1000g = 7,000,000g or 7000kg. Cassini had 33kg on board so there isnt enough for everyone to die. I'm assuming the stuff was packed away safely so it would have survived a launch malfunction. However, Cassini did a close flyby of earth in order to slingshot to Jupiter. WP states: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E2%80%93Huygens#Plutonium_power_source

Today I learned that Saturn would float in water (Mean density 0.687 g/cm³)

Just a thought, no idea if this is in any way feasible: We have subassemblies coming, right? Why not have a "certification process" for payloads that travel inside fairings? The subassembly gets taken to a kerbal test facility where it is rattled around by all sorts of g forces. If it breaks you are not able to transport it within the fairings. Perhaps the game could work out center of mass, "wobblyness" and so on in that test to generate a simplified representation of the payload. This process would make sense from a gaming perspective, would avoid cheating and the engine would not have to simulate the wobbling of each individual rear view mirror of each rover during launch.

Hello, I'm a relative noob to KSP. This is one of the suggestions i'd like to post while I'm still in that "noob" state. I apologize in advance if my idea is pointless or already implemented. Problem: I sometimes have to make a decision at 1x speed, but I cant see which way objects are moving in their orbit. The only way to find out is to set warp to n times normal speed and observe the motion. In 1x speed: I can't see which way round a probe is orbiting the mun I can't see which way the planets are orbiting around the sun I can't see which direction a planet is rotating I can't see the axis or pole a celestial body is rotating around I can't see where north is (relative to the navball) when taking off with a lander Suggestion: It would be great to have hints of that kind in map view For example the orbital curves could fade out (get darker or thinner or transparent) "behind" the object celestial bodies could have a hinted circle in that fashion hovering above their north pole, indicating both the axis and the rotational direction and where "north" is. Direction of orbit could look like something depicted childishly photoshopped above