peadar1987

I didn't suggest new planets.

Actually, you want the spare fuel rods stored in a material that's NOT neutron reflective, and especially not neutron moderating. I've worked with nuclear fuel, and the only protective gear you have to wear is paper overalls, a dust mask, hairnet, and gloves. This isn't to protect you from the fuel, it's to protect the fuel from you. It's going in a highly precisely-engineered machine for the next six years, and it better not be covered in your sneezes, dandruff and mucky fingerprints! Spend fuel should either be ejected or preferably reprocessed. The ideal power source would be something along the lines of a molten salt Thorium reactor, which would "breed" its own fuel, and be capable of burning most of the longer-lived fission products of the primary cycle, meaning the only waste would be small volumes of short half-life stuff. Nasty for a few decades, but not much of a problem afterwards

Hey everyone, I know this is something that gets suggested every few days, but I just wanted to give my opinion on it. Basically, Squad is a business. Sure, Harv and his teams are passionate about what they do, and want to create the best game they can, but at the end of the day, the purpose of KSP is to make money, and it does that by selling copies of the game. Most players probably spend the first few weeks of the game inside Kerbin's SOI. I've had the game months, played it more or less constantly, and still haven't been to Moho or Eeloo. It will make pretty much no difference to a new player (read:prospective customer) if there are a few more inaccessible dots towards the edge of the map view when they're getting hooked on the demo and scrambling to reach their credit card in order to purchase more explodey goodness. New planets are a feature that cater pretty much solely to advanced players, i.e. people who already own the game. And probably people comfortable enough with using it that they have no problems installing mods like Krag's Planet Factory. New planets would be a fantastic addition to the game, but I can see exactly why they're nowhere near the top of Squad's list of priorities.

You can also focus on your manoeuvre nodes, which is handy for fine-tuning them, or looking closely at something far away. Simply place the node, and then press "tab" in map mode and the camera focus will switch to the next node on your flight path.

And sometimes once you get within 0.2m, the magnets kick in, and pull the spacecraft towards each other, but they don't quite dock properly. This seems to be because of SAS fighting the magnets, so if you turn it off for a second, it usually fixes the issue

You used to be able to set a target for your antennae even when you dindn't have control over the spacecraft, but they seem to have changed that in the latest release, which is a pity, because it made things much less frustrating!

So, does this have implications for a satellite of a body in an elliptical orbit, where the velocity of the parent body will change significantly between aphelion and perihelion?

Does that mean that the earth is actually orbiting the point where the sun was 8 minutes or so ago? How does this apply to stars that are moving very quickly, like those hypervelocity stars that were supposedly observed recently (should they have planets orbiting them)? Or am I just failing to get my head around frames of reference properly again?

I wouldn't, you probably wouldn't, but there are plenty who would.

This has been suggested before, and I love it. I'm always in favour of recording the history of your space programme, and a museum with details of all your flights, plus any spacecraft you've recovered on pedestals, would be an awesome feature (although probably one for a later release, polishing the game for v1.0)

I've circumnavigated Kerbin with a rover loads of times. Never when they haven't been attached to the top of a rocket though!

NOBODY tell Whackjob about this thread!

It raises the question of how big the craft has to be before the test-tube astronaut becomes a free person. Obviously creating an embryo to grow up on its own in a tin can in space, never to see another human is wrong, similarly if you only send two or three people, but if we send 50,000 people in a huge, self-contained biosphere, where there would be as many different jobs and career options as in a large town on earth, are they really any more "enslaved" then the people back home?

They could be idling, ready to throttle up at a moment's notice. Let's face it, we don't know how sci-fi engines work, or what they look like in various stages of operation, so the creators can hand-wave it however they want

Aye, point taken, but it would have been a much less interesting movie (at least for the mainstream) if it was about a mission to repair the Hubble Space telescope that went smoothly and resulted in a textbook landing at Edwards in clear skies and light south-easterly breezes!

You're dead right, and that makes things worse, because the collisions change the velocities of all of the pieces of debris by a small amount, putting them in slightly different orbits, meaning the spread out and form a cloud, instead of all staying together. This greatly increases they area of space they sweep through, and therefore your chances of getting hit.

Dragging the thread off-topic again: Video games are getting more and more advanced. If, one day, we can create a sentient AI that will run on a domestic-standard computing device (read:games console), it's not beyond the realms of possibility that some evil company (read:EA), will want to use it to process NPCs in an FPS. Is it immoral for you to play the game? (Ignoring one possible solution I've thought of, but I'm leaving that out for the sake of the question)

Yup, and it actually makes sense that a military satellite would be in a polar orbit. Not that it's at all likely, but it's not physically impossible. Anyway, the point's been made that the film isn't supposed to be a documentary about Newton's, or even Kepler's, laws, it's a survival film that deals with isolation and desperation, which just happens to use space as a setting, so I don't mind too much if some of the more advanced stuff like orbital rendezvous and the distance between real life space stations gets thrown out of the window. That said, I wish they'd come up with another way of with the parachute at the ISS. Even having the station obviously rotating would have solved this nicely.

Slightly off-topic, but if you could create a "human" with no higher functions in their brain, and keep them hooked up to life support to "grow" organs for transplant, would you consider that unethical?

Use a two-loop system, keep the acidic stuff under pressure in the primary loop, and then boil demineralised water to run a turbine in a secondary.

Or be in an orbit with a period that's an integer multiple of your own. You go around the earth twice, and meet the debris after it's gone around once.

Well it certainly wouldn't form rotating that fast, as if the rotational force is greater than the gravitational, the planetary nebula will be spun off into space instead of coalescing into a planet. Some catastrophic event causing the rotation after formation? Maybe, but it would have to be made of incredibly strong material to have that sort of rotation given to it without being obliterated.

Fixed that for you

I was so confused by the labelling of L1 for ages. When I first saw it I was like "That's a huge mistake, it should be labelled L2, and rotating at the same rate as the moon. Took a good two minutes of watching the animation before I realised it was the Earth-Sun L1!

They still have the plans for the Saturn V, no need to reverse engineer them from 45 year-old space debris