Kulebron

I got out, right-clicked the pod and took the data. Should I take it the same way from containers?

I have a Mun orbital station with MSL, and a lander with goo containers. I processed all the possible data. Now, the containers are still open, and the review window says it will be inoperable after transmission. I want to reset the container (but store the results somewhere) and undock and land to another biome, and bring more data. What should I do?

Jesus. These things can be weight-optimized.

@ Geschosskopf Very useful, thanks!

I did not touch science since 0.22, so now things really changed, and I have questions. 1. Why do Goo and instrument modules become inoperable? What's the sense behind this? Just to force us using the MPL? 2. I made most of the tech tree, and still see no use for MPL. I have a standard ship that brings 300 science points from Mün in every mission. I will run out of biomes soon, but how do you use MPL in interplanetary missions? Isn't it more benefitial to send a pack of probes and return them, rather than lose science points in processing? In 0.23, stock science became really meaningful, it was a pleasure to play.

This pack should be included in vanilla!

No, it was initially designed and partially built for Mir2 station.

I do know. What's your point?

Soyuz and Proton boosters scale up to Shuttle's tasks. Everything except taking a big satellite to Earth. But you can build a specialized ship for this too, and rendezvous it with the satellite, and with manned ship as well. Can you name a practical task a fleet can't do?

We've discussed Shuttle a lot with Firov in the other thread and came to conclusion (probably K^2 made this point) that Shuttle did what in Russian space programme a whole fleet of ships does. So instead of a swiss knife it would better to start with specialized ships and then solve the issues that a reusable SSTO was designed to solve: the fast repeatability of flights. This was not doable with Shuttle, because there were few of them, and preparation took quite long time, and was expensive. Soyuz rockets are better, one is launched every 1-2 weeks, but this may be too much of a waiting as well. In this case, an approach by SpaceX (if those rockets won't need reassembly for maintenance) could work.

Soyuz was designed for Lunar missions, so it has capacity for more than a week of flight. With a bigger service module it will have enough delta-v. Question is if anyone needs that orbital station there.

Parking the station at a higher orbit with no drag (1000 km) is possible, but there it will be bombarded by space debris much more. The 300-400 km orbit is cleaner thanks to the atmosphere drag. Any garbage has very short life there. At 1000 km any debris flies for hundreds of years. But probably a 2000 km orbit, higher than low-orbit satellites belt, would be fine, to keep it for later generations just to look at.

By the way, everyone is suggesting the designs, but did we consider what purpose should it serve? Will it still be a space station like ISS, purely scientific, or maybe governments decide this SCIENCE is too expensive? Will it be a tourism attraction and a space hotel, or mixed with science? Next, How much will reusability cost, especially, won't the engines require frequent dis- and reassembly to replace faulty parts? this may cost near as much as the production.

Well, it was mature at a sufficient level in 1980-s, just parts were not small enough. Lunokhod was controlled with radio relay ships in Pacific and Atlantic. And Mir station modules were launched unmanned on a "space truck" Proton rocket, and docked automatically to the station. Let me mention two things mentioned in this thread: 1. No tiles, just one piece heat shield. This makes sense if it is viscous enough to sustain partial damage and dissipate small impacts. Otherwise, if it's metallic and hard, any damage will cause cracks. Just for example, Tu-144 was made with several pieces of metal coating outside, to reduce the number of joints, and cracks on the plates, if started, ran through all the body. This caused a crash of one commercial flight of this machine. (Apart from 2 test flight crashes.) So, tiles make a lot of sense. An alternative way is to hide the heatshield somewhere. In a certain transforming configuration the ship can just hide the wings behind. (I think Boeing proposed such design.) 2. It's not so much wings as the ISP of the atmospheric engine that matters: ISP of jet engine is 4000, or ten times better than of a rocket. The problem is that if you launch from a plane, it can go not faster than Mach 2 (and it's extremely risky), but orbiting requires Mach 31. You save fuel on the initial 2 machs, at the cost of a huge system.I think what could make sense are simple disposable wings. First stage flies on a SPEAR kind of engine high in the atmosphere, then drops the wings and procedes. Could make sense.

Since the thread is not only about safety, let me remind you: one more Soyuz can be assembled within a week. If you need to scale up to Shuttle's scale, just make 3 of them. And this will still be cheaper, wider launch margins, shorter pad dwellings (hours rather than weeks). And none of your crew will have to work on checking the heatshield. You can't scale a Shuttle down if needed. Compare this to the current satellite market, where Ariane 5 has no clients, and Frenchmen decided to use the smaller Soyuz booster. When they launched Shuttle since 2005, every time they had to spend the very expensive flight hours for shield checking. And those hours were still more expensive than in Soyuz.

You seem to be doing the same conclusion that led NASA to launch Challenger to the disaster. Feynman described it very well: what he was told by NASA managers was "since it did not crash it's reliable". He insisted on many things that were dangerous like playing with fire. Just compare with Soyuz: much narrower wind/icing conditions envelope for launch, no escape system, exposed heatshield, etc. How do you comment this?

You may want to try maneuver node editor and try playing with parameters to get a tangential escape from Duna. No need to change planes. Just a bit of patience. You also may escape from Duna, and then after SOI transition burn retrograde to encounter with Kerbin.

Any moderators out there? That troll just throws some random phrases in, and others perceive this as arguing, which ruins the thread. Stop this ASAP.

Ok, now that's clear, thanks!

What's about that XKCD picture, where they say 2 L = 3 liter botte. Is liter an american unit equal to 1.5L? (Never heard of that one) You need intermediate units anyway, because people are not machines and need rounding. I thought of another option: make a decimal system instead of current seconds. There are 86400 seconds in day, so the new definition of second can be just 1/100,000th, and now we get these units: new minute (or hectasecond) = 100 seconds, or 1.440 of current minute new quarter (or kilosecond) = 14.4 current minutes new hour (or deciday) = 10,000 seconds or 2.4 current hours And with this new system you don't need weird conversions with integer divisions and remainders. 10 hr 2 min 94 sec plus 17 min 56 sec will equal just 100294 + 1756 = 102050 or 10 hr 20 min 50 sec. Unfortunately, only days and time within them can be converted this way, because yearly ciycle is not syncronized and has no common denominator with days (year lasts 365.24..... days), so essentially there should be two independent hierarchies. Not sure if humanity will be able to switch to it, unless there's a massive catastrophy and a new civilization.

You'd fly in space because of Earth centrifugal force, and Earth would explode because of internal pressure not being counteracted by gravty anymore.

As a native Russian speaker I can say the meaning changes its tones and accents with word order. Word order also tells (indirecty) whether a noun is definite or indefinite (although few natives realize that). Word orders of poetry sound weird, despite being correct, and a great advantage is that in colloquial speech you can throw words in as they come to your head - then SVO relation does not change, but you get the logical accents blurred.I guess this was true in Old English too.

@OP: for parenthesis syntax, read on the Lisp programming language. It has most of the syntax built around parenthesis and tree-like structure. The way you're heading is an effort by machine reading or learning, in which a program parses a human text and gets subject, verb, object etc, and in some cases can restructure the sentence while keeping the meaning. The yet unsolved problem is to get to the meaning of sentences. Compare these two: "A kerbal landed on Jool as it's now confirmed." and "A kerbal landing on Jool is confirmed." In those two subjects are different, and so far machines can't understand that these two sentences mean the same.

@peadar1987: the distance to the other side of galaxy is the same (about 100 000 ly IIRC), so you can arrive there not earlier than that by galactic clock.

^^ what?!!