Rs2k

I always wondered what a spacecraft engine firing in a vacuum would look like. Here's an image of Apollo 8 performing its TLI as visible from Hawaii.

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=17714.0 Basically, it\'s a bug that causes your spacecraft to move by itself. It gets worse the faster you go.... to the point your ship will eventually become uncontrollable and even be destroyed.

What kind of work around would be needed? It seems like all your would need to do would be to create a small rocky planet with a very large mass and put in a HUGE opaque atmosphere... then again I haven\'t really worked with Unity. It seems rather limiting.

Welcome to the forums. I have noticed mechjeb does several odd things while trying to do transfers. Sometimes it warps for you, sometimes it doesn\'t, and sometimes it warps to a half way point for a correction burn. I don\'t know what causes it to do what though. I always try to override whatever it does after MECO.

Yes, that is the right hand rule in action. I think I overly edited my post. I could have swarm I mentioned something about orbital direction. :-[

With the 1:11 scale going on the gas giants might be the same size as Earth. =P

Try and do your plane changes by using the orbit of Mun as a reference. Look at the Mun\'s orbit straight on and compare it to yours. That should make plane changes a lot easier until it\'s included in an auto pilot. Remember that Nrml+ points your spacecraft north and firing north makes your orbit going that direction change to north. The orbital velocity around Kerbin is slow enough that you don\'t really need to be perfectly accurate to the nodes in order to get an accurate plane change. Plane changing to Minmus\' orbit (or any spacecraft orbit for that matter) is easy too. Zoom out in the orbital view until you can see the orbit of Minmus. Rotate the view until the nodes line up with Kerbin.... In other words, looking straight on you should see Minmus\' orbit as a straight line that\'s at about a 5 degree angle to the equator of Kerbin. Kerbin should be dead center in your monitor. You now know where the ascending and descending nodes are and can use that to adjust your plane.

Weather seems to me like it\'s going to take a rather large amount of time to program and implement. I wouldn\'t doubt if it would end up taking an entire update or two on its own. I personally would rather see 10 weather-less planets at this point than one with half implemented weather.... but having 10 with weather sure would be great.

Where is the source? What is used to compile it with? What language is it? I haven\'t looked up anything about creating adons yet, but I really miss the renezvous info.

Using this part makes me really wish the kraken was dead. D:

D: That site looks like an a 90\'s computer magazine!.

Yeah, that\'s what I do now. I have my live server hosted in another state. I have a backup and test server running in a closet, and several test VMs on this workstations. I connect and manage all of them with PuTTY, FTP, rsync over SSH, etc... I also use XAMPP for 'quick and dirty' php and mysql/mysqli work. My favorite program of them all is rsnapshot. I have hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups points on my live server. It doesn\'t take up much space either. If I do something stupid I\'m always sure to have a 'restore point' available.

There\'s a definite learning curve. I started using PC\'s back in the DOS days, so using a console came more naturally to me than a GUI. Though you can control linux from a GUI now a days as well. A GREAT way to play with linux without going through the hassle of a multi-boot is to use VMware. I use Oracle VM virtualbox (free program) to run a test server on my main workstation. It\'s a great and very easy to use VM program. I think the biggest obstacle to Linux is DirectX. I REALLY wish more game developers used OpenGL.

I\'ve been tearing apart PC\'s since about 1995, and I see no reason what so ever to buy a high priced computer unless you don\'t have the knowledge to build your own or simply have a lot of money to throw away. I would personally recommend putting together your own PC. It\'s incredibly easy to do now a days with some research. There\'s always a risk involved doing that though. If you are uncomfortable with that risk then finding a local PC builder or getting a pre-built PC off of a site like newegg.com could be your answer. YMMV. As for Alienware, they are a very good machine, but they are WAY too expensive.

Linux has been running my business servers since 2008 (CentOS and Ubuntu LAMP servers). I really don\'t understand why people use windows servers. I\'ve also used Linux (CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu and flavors) as workstations. While I prefer a Linux workstation over Windows for several reasons, I have been using Windows 7 on my main 4 monitor 'command post' for years. I\'d use linux, but I can\'t get anything more than two monitors to work like I want it to. I HIGHLY doubt I\'ll be using Windows 8 when it comes out. I hope I can get a decent Linux rig capable of running my wall of monitors before Windows 9 comes out. The automation, security, ease of administration, robustness, flexibility, scalability and cost of Linux is hard to beat.

That video seems politically biased. I believe politics and science should have as much or more separation than church and state. Both parties are to blame. IMO, there isn\'t anything so messed up that the government (of all countries) can\'t make it worse. The governments (US and USSR mostly) have played a large part of their role in starting space exploration and colonization, but the future of space lies with companies like spacex. Governments will NEVER be able to beat innovations that come from individuals and companies. http://www.spacex.com/falcon_heavy.php There will a reason for private companies to want to go to space, and it will happen. We\'re just not at that point right now.

I\'d say so. That\'s where I started. I went from cheap plastic cox control line to estes rockets to RC airplanes to RC helis to powered parachutes to ultralites to light sport aircraft to cessnas to sundowners to bonanzas. My eventual goal is a turbo prop or a jet.... Maybe there\'ll even be private space craft available before I get too old.

From what I understand, Xplane is a lot more accurate when it comes to aerodynamics... but I don\'t think that\'s very important for pilot simulations. FSX is accurate enough that except for the missing visual queues and forces on the yoke and rudder, flying a mushy, near stall simulated Cessna 172 feels very similar to flying a real Cessna 172 near a stall. I think FSX takes the prize for being a better pilot trainer. I can\'t say the same for downloaded aircraft. I have a lot of time in Sundowners (musketeers) and Bonanzas. the downloaded Beech aircraft don\'t handle anything like the real things. The Beech aircraft were a dream to fly while the game versions felt a lot like Cessnas that just flew at different speeds. By the way, I don\'t like Cessnas, they are safe and stable aircraft, but they fly like dump trucks. haha!

I had a Clipped wing Challenger 2 with a 55 HP Hirth engine that I completely recovered and modified by extending the nose (I have long legs) and adding a spring suspension landing gear. I also completely redid the instrument panel, added a heater and vortex generators to the doors and wind screen. I also added That about as much ultralite designing I\'ve done. Adding the vortex generators was the best (and cheapest) mods I ever made... next to taping a piece of yarn to the windscreen. The challenger had a TON of rudder authority. Not only does it have a large rudder, but it was a bit unstable on the yaw access. You could literally steer the aircraft by sticking your hands out the doors. The rudder authority on this aircraft made its crosswind handling capabilities amazing if you knew how to control it. My personal best is a 25 MPH crosswind.... not bad when you consider the touch down speed is only 45 mph. This thing slipped like mad! In a hard slip you had to look out the side window to fly. It made getting into tight fields a peace of cake. This aircraft also has removable doors (GREAT feature!). You took the doors off for summer flying and put them on for winter. The problem with this is the doors make the aircraft fly differently. Adding the doors made the already rudder sensitive plane even more sensitive. It also sort of added a dead-zone to the rudder. It made the airplane feel very slippery. Basically, what the vortex generators did was remove the dead-zone to the rudder. They were simply cut out of thin aluminum sheet metal, bent into shape by hand and applied to the plexiglass with double sided tape. I really miss flying this plane. Buzzing wheat fields with the doors off and 'slipping it in' was sooo much fun. The airfield I flew out of was 6 miles south of a large Airforce Tanker base. I regularly flew above the altitude the KC-135s flew. It\'s quite surreal to stick your head out the window and watch that much metal zooming along below you. Nice video (not mine): I won\'t get into all the RC and rocketry things I\'ve done, but I\'ve made some very odd things fly. I once turned a 1 liter coke bottle into a rocket, and have flown anything from a 1/4 scale Cap to a piece of corrugated plastic with a .46 CI engine on it. I also played around with both electric and nitro powered helis.

You can also get special boards that allow you to build your own joysticks. You can also just take joysticks apart (I did this when I built a flight simulator using an old piper cockpit). It\'s a lot of fun to wire up switches and buttons that control different parts of your 'vehicle.' You can even make it a full motion rig in the future if you wanted.

Great idea! I would recommend setting up a monitor for the external window, and another two or three for a glass cockpit. A glass cockpit is going to be much easier to deal with than trying to make gauges work. That would provide a pretty amazing immersion experience. All of this can easily be run from a single computer.

I used Flight Simulator 2004 and later X while learning to fly. It\'s an absolutely amazing tool for learning IFR, cross country flying and using the instruments in general. I used to fly a trip on the simulator before doing it for real. The big difference was you can\'t use ground references in the simulator. There\'s no real substitute for VFR though. That takes a real plane. One of my instructors told me, 'Using a flight simulator will save you a LOT of money when learning to fly.' I think he was absolutely correct.

I would guess that there are extra forces the sun can 'feel' depending on how far it is from the barycenter. The sun is large enough I\'d imagine the difference between he gravitational pull on one side of the sun may differ slightly from the other side depending on where it is in relation to the barycenter/other orbiting planets... Kind of like the tides the moon causes on earth, but more subtle.

A possible explanation for the sunspot cycle is what really makes this interesting for me. I also never realized the sun could be so far away from the solar system\'s barycenter. Since the sun contains somewhere around 99.8% of the solar system\'s mass, I always thought the barycenter would be very close to the center of the sun. I mean the earth is something around 98% of the earth / moon system and the barycenter is within the earth. I guess I never took the size and density of the sun into consideration.