Kulebron

unreal battle

I'm glad we agree on this. Thank you for reminding me that, capt. obvious. These judgements thrown left and right are quite annoying. [edit] To get back to topic, with what Kryten stated, that there's no demand for high payloads in orbits, I wonder if and what could become the source of demand (with money) in the near future?

From what I have read, older engines (60's-80's) had problems with temperature of parts, and had to run at half throttle to warm up evenly. Also, engine thrust is a function like product of itself, and thrust thus is exponential. This means that an engine just sliiiightly more powered at low revs will get full thrust some seconds earlier, and this leads to uneven thrust and going off the runway. That's why engines are set to 50% revs to nivel this difference.

methane? 10char

^^ A famous bollywood star is rehearsing a new low-budget movie. [edit] let's actually post a non-low-budget one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgUbCirvP_4

Well, when you add images, it tries to make text flow around it. When you add just one image, it's ok. If you have 1-2 images per page, things start being tricky: images try to flow around also, and since the new image is anchored to some place in text, the anchor moves to another page, Writer re-flows text, and puts the image in some weird place. I use GIMP but when you need 50-100 images in one document, this is too much. Switching back and forth between editors is hard. gThumb easies things a bit (crop is easier), but you still have some difficulties: you need to save image as new file (because you can't save in place to prevent errors, and if you suggest Git/Mercurial, I do use them too, but this is too much for doing in an editor.)

On topic: I maintained that Soyuz is better that SSTO, and have to say it's better than Buran, whatever advanced it was. There was no reasonable saving in the re-usable STS: expensive boosters had to be built from scratch, and solids recovery probably cost more than manufacturing new ones. Offtopic. CIA payroll. What a simple explanation of a whole Soviet economy collapse! Bravo! Unlike you, I have lived in USSR and have some stories to tell. Just a brief into what made USSR collapse. USSR was a giant corporation where everything belonged to the State, except your home things, and villagers had their small lots with some home animals. All the rest belonged to the State, including the right to create enterprises. You could not do enterpreneurship officially, it was illegal (except some people in the street selling vegetables they grew their countryside house - nobody cared of this). In a small enterprize, the owner feels how efficient it is and is near to control things to the lowest lever workers. In a giant enterprize, the top management is insulated by some levels of bureacracy, and in the bottom, a director of one unit, say, a grocery store, does not get any profit to care of efficiency. Naturally, you introduce incentives and tools like QPI in modern corporations. The main QPI in USSR was production plan fullfillment (production quantity or sales for retail): <100% = 0 bonus, >100% = good bonus, but the next year plan is raised automatically to that achieved. This is very easy indicator to fool: just lower your next year plan, and do 103%, and you both don't need to overwork, and have a bonus. This means that nobody cared of any efficiency or innovation (or did this out of passion, overcoming all the buraucratic barriers). Not working was a crime, and there were trade unions, with a cell in every enterprize, that cared of keeping everyone employed, and having a vote in the enterprize. They had bonuses for keeping people employed. Naturally they resisted firing anybody, so firing a bad worker was nearly impossible, and it took months to get rid of a drunker (you really could afford getting drunk in the workplace, I'm not exaggerating this: hard workers were smelling bad by noon, and stopped working after lunchtime!). Retail worked upside down. Since prices were controlled and demand was always higher, shop workers could sell good commodities to themselves (since the nominal price was in cash, nothing was stolen, right?) or to friends, etc. This meant you almost never saw anything of value in a shop. When you saw it, it was called "thrown out", and would be out of stock in a couple of hours. Good commodities would be exchanged in bulk and in small quantities with others. Hence, salesman was the boss (in 1990s private enterprises blacklisted anyone who was salesman in Soviet Union: so damaging were their habbits). Sometimes commodities were sold aside and reach black market this way: you walk down a street and see someone selling things from a truck. Usually this was something rare and of value, you'd get into line and only then would ask what it was. Often the commodity ended quickly. You could agree with line neighbors to keep your place in the line and to go away and back with money, to buy more for friends and relatives. No matter if they need - quality things were quite rare, so you'd exchange them. Social networks were invented in the USSR before Internet was known. Having big social network and no coscience was more benefitial than being an obedient citizen and working hard. Foreigners have an image of USSR as orwellian "1984" with eyes of KGB everywhere. This was more like true in Moscow, where the country leadership was fearing any sort of uprising. In the rest of the country, or at least here in Siberia, there was much less of such pressure, but a very twisted economy and economic incentives being opposite to any sane morality.

I need to make heavily illustrated books (both paid and hobby work), such that I can both print and share online as PDF. My current workhorse is Google Docs. But it has some shortcomings, and I'd prefer an offline editor. LibreOffice Writer is as awful as MS Word. Once I used Adobe Indesign, but for my case this is heavy: need to run a virtual Windows machine, and there's no chance of collaborative editing. (I have to note that LibreOffice team did a great work repeating everything in MS Office, including all the bad things, and making exactly zero improvements.) Things I want: * easy styling and clonetitles (Writer has this, but Google Docs improved it by a notch putting this part of UI on a diet. The simpler interface made it easy to use. InDesign complicated this part, which is too much for me.) * perfect images snapping, like in Google Docs. They did it very well! Nothing starts moving madly like in Writer (Word). * image cropping (Again, Google Docs is a great example. I could not find this in LibreOffice, 'cause it had to be exactle the same as outdated MS Office.) I also use SublimeText quite a lot and value its features like line moving (shift+ctrl+up/down). The main problem with Google Docs is that I often need to work in transport, and 3G works not so well. Another difficulty is keyboard shortcuts that are shared with browser. Can someone suggest editors capable of doing such tasks? (But please, no latex and other BSDM stuff. )

I think this will be a necessity for a stable ecosystem. If there are no viruses or bacteria, it will take little time for them to evolve. Just remember about bacteria getting immune to antibiotics. Isolated sterile life will have catastrophic consequences if any virus or predator comes in. We can't really estimate how that sort of colonization may happen, but if this will be made for humanity to come, viruses or bacteria will eventually get there too. Watch a documentary on a family who lived as hermits for some decades. Those who were born in the forest were lacked any sort of immunity to normal diseases. 3 of 4 them died of pneumonia, and the younger sister is still alive, but when she travelled to relatives, she got very sick every time, just of eating any usual food.

Game may show time in Kerbin units (6 hour days, 400 days/year), precise node may do it in Earth units.

Not everyone has video accelerator cards, many people play on laptops. Thanks a lot!

Also note that Kerbin is very far at the closest approach. Either depart from Jool in steeper orbit (to fall down on Sun quicker) or depart "upwards" a bit, to come later.

Depending on what you want to achieve. If you're trying to get Tylo assist, you have to time it, and with the maneuver nodes you show you don't encounter Tylo. Try to see where Tylo is at the time you'll depart (make it target). Maybe you'll need to skip an orbit or two to get perfect alignment. Then you need depart from Laythe in a steeper orbit (relative to Jool) and make Tylo turn you to closer to Jool retrograde. You have plenty of delta-v, why do you want to reduce it with Tylo assist?

Thanks all for your help!

Hm. Not for free. I'll write a post with this craft file.

I't impossible to run on a reasonable system, let alone record a video. Please, weld it and post as a part (GameData/Challenge/Parts etc).

^^ Would be very cool to see an optimal trajectory as equation rather than try-error approach. I learned this at university, but it's too big to try for me. Wish you good luck!

I used FAR and know how rockets behave, but now I have no way to test this in KSP right now. So, question to those who mastered it: how are jet engines performing in FAR or NEAR mods? How is opened/closed air intake affecting things? What can you achieve with MechJeb utilities? (manage air intakes + prevent flameouts) In stock, I managed to get a 40km x 80km orbit on jets alone, and needed only 30 m/s to circularize in apoapse. Fuel usage was ridiculous: 15 tons in orbit on 80 liquid jet fuel. How is FAR compared to this?

@RocketBlam: Yes, you have to pay to ship the fuel itself. If you look at our screenshots, Kasuha lifts fuel in another vessel and calculates both its own cost and delivery. I start with fuel that's needed for the round trip, then refuel the interplanetary vessel. Other guys flew the entire round trip in one ship. The trick is that we use jet engines that have much higher specific impulse (about 10 times more) and this saves a lot of fuel.

If it rolls along its axis, this might be side boosters connected slightly off-center: view from the top: main ship )_( ) booster The booster connection is not on it's thrust axis, so it will want to bend a little bit and will produce some torque.

Thanks for such an interesting challenge! I'm surprised there not many entries at all. Apparently, it's very exhausting to perfect the design, rather than getting a goal at any cost.

I liked X-Plane for the ability to build a plane and fly it. Too hard to do in FSX. Also, in FSX planes fly like on rails, just try landing with chase view: you'll see it keeps any pitch like fixed. This is impossible in X-Plane, as it gets some turbulence and is always floating in air. With good models with realistic wing profiles you can get proper stalls. Nevertheless MSFS were good to learn aviation basics. X-Plane always had a harder to use UI.

This is enough to land 2 kerbals on Laythe and get them back.

The Russian word for Cosmonaut comes from "cosmos" (úþÑÂüþÑÂ) which is borrowed in Russian and, as all borrowed terms, has more specific meaning: interplanetary or interstellar space. So the one who flies in cosmos is, naturally, cosmonaut. I'm curious about the way the English term formed. I guess space is too broad to have been a root of the neologism, and cosmos means something like universe, which is too broad again. So the choice fell on astro-. By the way, Russian sci-fi since Tsiolkovsky's times or a bit later has always had a word zvezdolyot (star flier), but in real life it's always called "space ship". That's interesting. I'm sure, maintaining our own word wasn't a matter of any rivalry. There just wasn't any other suitable word. Few technical specialists knew English those days, let alone read any foreign mass media. The ICBM industry was super secret (and was part of it untill the collapse of USSR), and communications with the outer world were scarce. Language is usually a matter of understanding each other, and common ideas. It's hard to tell people how to name things. Xerox couldn't have stop people from buying a Canon xerox, or have "xerokopirovaniye" (xerox copying) in legal documents. The exception is when you have strong influence like propaganda, or having PR department in such a narrow (in the scale of the humanity) sector as space exploration.

I used to write about fuel efficiency, so I couldn't pass by this. My entry. $95.11 per ticket! (see cost breakdown spoiler below) Highlights: 1. 16 passengers. 2. 2 SSTO planes on Kerbin and Laythe and a cruiser ship with a nuke. 3. No dropped stages. 4. No recovery cost: SSTO can land at KSC. Extras: - Free bus transfer to the nearest beach on Laythe. - Ships have to dock, and Kerbals have to move between those. Also we kindly ask to repack chutes for the next passengers. Highlights gallery: I don't know if rules allow, but someone may try improving by flying Kerbals to orbit in seats. Otherwise, I don't see much space for improvement, unless it's some weird combo maybe with ion thrust. One could use lander cans everywhere, but that saves just .4t, or 2.5% of Laythe shuttle. I could have planned Laythe arrival better, and have inclination change less than 20 degrees, but that would save just 100 m/s of dv (about $2 per ticket). Ship names: Ployka (Kerbin SSTO shuttle), Multifora (cruizer), Vihotka (Laythe SSTO shuttle). Images made afterwards, from saves, to show the initial resources and that Kerbals can climb the lander on Laythe. Design considerations: 1. Specialization. On Kerbin you need 5 engines to lift passengers and fuel. On Laythe you need just 2, and wasting fuel at Laythe is the most wasteful. So why carry all that metal to Laythe? Just put another metal there. And one more metal for the trip. 2. Wings are overrated. (edit: didn't notice Kasuha's entry with similar design.) Planes that have TWR>1.5 don't need any, they can perfectly sustain themselves. When I was making conventional spaceplanes I gradually reduced the number of wings, and results were only improving, so wings create significant drag. Without them, you only need to get higher (at 23Km engines will generate twice more thrust) and accelerate to have the centrifugal force keep you. 3. Landing legs are overrated. But cubic girders sinked into the ground, so I put decouplers on their tips. 4. I used a lot of air intakes. 12/engine on Laythe shuttle, 9/engine on Kerbin shuttle. Before doing this mission, I did half of one with conventional spaceplanes (images below), and those were hard to fly, had narrow range of critical angles, and were even harder to land. Aspirating rockets instead can ascend and land with MechJeb. A cut sequence, a-la Jackie Chan: Spaceplanes. Before trying this challenge, I had built 1 (one) plane, and it would just veer off the runway. So I had to learn ALL about them: take off stability, flying stability, stability in vacuum, landing on a runway and, of course, to adjust them for landing on rough terrain. Here's Vihotka, a plane for Laythe (picture taken after the mission, just out of hangar)