RadHazard

Yes, and as I've said, I did put one transceiver into relay mode. I was not aware that you only need a single transceiver on a relay, but I am using relay mode.

Yes, I have one of the large transceivers set to relay mode and the other set to receiver mode. I was just wondering if there were any efficiency gains to using the large transceivers for transmitters. Although now that I think about it, does the transmitter/receiver size on a relay matter at all? Or are they modeled as being 100% efficient, with the only losses coming from the receiver on the end craft?

Okay, so transmitter size isn't important then. I ended up using large transceivers for both transmitting and receiving on my relay satellites anyway due to the ease of 2x symmetry, but I'll keep that in mind when I make more solar power satellites.

What's the difference between the two phased array microwave transceivers now that they're transceivers? Does the larger one reduce distance penalties more than the smaller one when used as a transmitter as well as a receiver? In other words, how would these setups be ranked, in terms of distance losses? #1: Large Transmitter -> Large Receiver #2: Medium Transmitter -> Large Receiver #3: Large Transmitter -> Medium Receiver #4: Large Transmitter -> Small Receiver #5: Medium Transmitter -> Medium Receiver #6: Medium Transmitter -> Small Receiver I'm guessing if the size of the transmitter doesn't matter it'd be 1 = 2 < 3 = 5 < 4 = 6 If it uses the distance losses of the larger of the two dishes it'd be 1 = 2 = 3 = 4 < 5 = 6 And if it uses both transmitter and receiver size, I'm guessing it'd be something like 1 < 2 = 3 < 4 = 5 < 6 Although I'm not entirely sure where #5 (Large -> Small) would fall compared to the others in this case Are any of these correct, and if so, which one?

I think this is a pretty good idea. I wouldn't mind it if it were extended to craft files as well. The tech tree problem could be handled by simply forbidding the launch of any rocket with parts that haven't been unlocked yet.

I took a look at the leading causes of death page. 2% are from "acts of god" and another 2% are from "lost in the wilderness". I'm guessing those are the kerbalnauts who get killed by spontaneous rocket disassembly and getting stranded in space.

Here's mine. I used KerbPaint to paint my rocket white and Procedural Fairings for the looks, but the whole thing is otherwise stock. On the pad (the fairing is larger than scale, but I can't fix that without 3.75m rocket parts): Liftoff: Booster cores separation: Fairing and first stage core separation: And... Orbit! Bill prepares to deorbit the second-stage booster: Jeb driving the space bus: BONUS IMAGE - Kraken attack (this was the first time I launched, the second time worked fine): It's equipped with a LV-909 and a FL-T200 fuel tank for orbital maneuvers, along with a small RCS tank. It's almost perfectly balanced both engine-wise and RCS-wise for both translation and rotation, so if you were careful with your fuel use you could probably rendezvous it with another orbiting spacecraft, although it doesn't have a docking port. Sadly, KerbPaint doesn't support recoloring the structural panels, so I couldn't paint it school bus yellow.

You also need UF4 tanks to store the UF4 from the reactor.

You could use a microwave receiver to jumpstart a fusion reactor. That would require some initial setup, however.

An update on what I've been up to: I've got a cutting plane algorithm written that uses Gomory's Cuts. Unfortunately, I'm having trouble getting performance to reasonable levels, which is mostly due to (I'm assuming) my poor heuristic for choosing the cutting plane, leading to a large number of barely useful cuts. I'll continue to hammer this out, and with luck I should have a usable version available Soontm.

How is the temperature/ISP of a microwave thermal rocket calculated? Is it a constant value, or is it dependent on power received?

I believe the mod you are thinking of is KerbCom Avionics. It has a solver that automatically computes the optimal balance of thrust, gimballing, RCS, and reaction wheels to keep your rocket pointed where you want it. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it's been updated for 0.22.

The IVA views for the command pods actually have a "Radar Altitude" gauge that does exactly this already. I would, however, like them to add an option to display this on the external view as well.

I ended up using VOID. It's got a fairly clean GUI and it doesn't need you to attach a part to your rocket.

Looks like it's going to launch next Thursday, same time.

It appears that's the plan already. If you install a part mod with parts in nodes that you've already unlocked, you get a "Part requires entry purchase in R&D" error when you try to use those parts. You have to go into the R&D building, click the node, and purchase the parts individually (which is free since currency isn't implemented).

On my ship with an off-center CoM: "Hmm, we seem to be turning to the right. Left RCS turn... more... more... MORE... STOP TURNING RIGHT ALREADY. Okay, there we go, we're starting to point back to where we should be. Slow... slow... stop... STOP! STOP!! Too far! Abort! Abort!! RCS HARD RIGHT!!! Right... right... and okay, we're back on track... oops, we seem to be turning to the right again..."

Gyroscopic stabilization. I forgot to account for the the unbalanced weight when I built a solar-satellite-deploying rocket and was stuck trying to make a ~1000m/s burn with unbalanced thrust. Since I didn't have enough monopropellant to counteract the torque for the whole burn and I didn't have enough reaction wheel torque, I came up with a unique solution: Point the rocket prograde, start rolling till I couldn't tell which way was up, engage the engine, and hope nothing falls off. I kept the throttle at 1/6 the whole time and it managed to stay pointed fairly close to prograde. It never veered much farther than it is in the picture now.

For every planet, the closer you get, the better. At a certain height above the planet, the amount caps at a maximum value, though I'm not sure what the height is for each planet. Landing on the planet provides a 2x bonus to that maximum.

I'm not sure why that's necessary. MJ in KSP Interstellar are MJ of electric charge. While Joules may usually be used for thermal or mechanical energy, there's nothing wrong with using the unit to measure electrical energy. Indeed, the definition of one watt is one joule of energy per second. One MJ is equal to 1000 kJ, which is what Fractal_UK uses as the definition of one unit of EC. There's nothing in KSPI that uses MJ for anything that you wouldn't use electricity for in real life. The only reason for the separate resources is so Fractal_UK can use his custom resource handler to manage it. EDIT: I'm also not sure if high-energy batteries are feasible. Enough Lithium-Ion batteries to power a science lab (5 MW power draw) for 1 hour (18 GJ) would weigh more than 38 tons. EDIT2: It might also be worth mentioning that "Electric Charge" is a misleading term for electric energy storage. While the term is colloquially used when talking about batteries, the actual unit of charge (the Coulomb, or the Ampere-Hour) really has little to do with energy storage. Batteries are sometimes rated in Ah, but this is a measure of how long it will run under a given amperage, and can't be converted to energy or power without knowing more about the circuit.

The best time to match planes with Gilly is when you first arrive in Eve's SOI. It takes a lot less dV to change planes when you're far away from the object you're orbiting.

Are there any lightweight mods out there that add an orbital period display, and maybe some other orbital information? I'm wanting to put up a satellite for KSP Interstellar power transmission, but I can't get my orbits accurate enough by hand without more information. I know mechjeb can display this, but I was hoping for something more lightweight, since this is about all I'd be using it for.

KSP Intersteller has a pretty good model of nuclear thermal rockets (which is what the LV-N is). The reactors have nuclear fuel that lasts multiple years, and the rocket nozzles run by expelling reaction mass like liquid fuel out the back. The stock tweakables system could be similar to that, where it would allow you to change the reaction mass the LV-N uses. (such as between pure liquid fuel and L/OX, both of which I believe were considered for real-life nuclear thermal rockets)

There are 2.5 and 3.75 pure liquid fuel tanks added by the mod. I do agree that more liquid fuel tanks would be nice though. Hopefully the 0.23 tweakables system will add the ability to adjust what kind of fuel each tank carries. Smaller surface-attach radiators (like the OX-STAT) would be pretty cool for small probes, although I imagine they'd need an inverted form of the solar panel efficiency code so that they don't work if they face toward sunlight.

Getting your Apoapsis outside the atmosphere using only jet engines would be quite the challenge. Jets stop working well above 25km or so, but you still get significant atmospheric drag up until the 30-35km range. If you manage to get that, however, it wouldn't take much dV to circularize since you're already going almost orbital speed already. It looks like you're close to that point already with your jet already, but I imagine those last few hundred m/s you need are probably going to be significantly more difficult to get using jets only.