thorfinn

Well, if you didn\'t also rebalance the weights by making things like the axial decoupler much lighter, no wonder you weren\'t getting off the ground

Everything needs balance, C7 just needs more

Don\'t worry. Come to the dark side. We have candy. And many more girls than the engineering department Well, right now we don\'t have game objectives, so if everything worked the first time, where would the challenge be? I look forward to the day when KSP becomes the 'let\'s play Werner von Braun' simulator it\'s destined to be, and to play the campaign very carefully, without losing a single Kerbal. Actually, if I wasn\'t so thrilled by following in real time the developers while they make this game, the best thing to do would be forget at all KSP for at least a year and come back when it\'s complete.... ...but this is not that day. Today, we crash rockets and kill Kerbals for science! ;D Well, truth to be told I\'m with you concerning spaceplanes. One of the things that KSP teaches you is that rocket are easy, and aircraft are hard. Right now, we really don\'t have a way to tell a hideous deathtrap from a good aircraft without flying it in all conditions. Things like center of gravity and center of pressure markers in the Hangar are pretty much a requirement.... I hope they\'re implemented soon. And, oh. Whenever you feel discouraged, just watch this: It\'s interesting how three placeholder, barely-animated figurines became a sensation just because the one in the center seat smiled maniacally without concern for what happened

Well, I am a physics major but... Don\'t worry, you don\'t need to understand that to play the game. At all. The conditions of Kerbal space are forgiving enough that trial and error, with just a tiny bit of knowledge, will let you achieve the first objectives. From there on, you\'ll learn by doing and through Wikipedia. Now that we have better trajectory prediction in the map view, you\'ll also get an intuitive feel for complex maneuvers more easily (hint: open settings.cfg and change CONIC_PATCH_DRAW_MODE to 3. At least, I think it\'s more natural.) I think that KSP is extremely good as a self-learning tool: I could make all the calculations in the correct way, but usually I just eyeball it, and I can say that some concepts of orbital mechanics have actually become more natural to me through experimentation. Some people make threads like the one you linked because KSP has inspired them to learn about the physics more rigorously; there\'s Closette, for instance, who reverse-engineered the (very wrong) aerodynamic model that KSP uses and derived the perfect ascent profile for a rocket, solving our instance of what is a notorious problem in control theory. You don\'t HAVE to do like them; but maybe, just maybe, after playing KSP for some months, you\'ll WANT to Anyway, the developers are now putting at high priority some sort of 'charting table' mode, for planning maneuvers, that has been on the backburner for some time; it will be needed for mantaining this intuitiveness in the future missions There is no 'simulation mode' because trial and error, and ludicrous failures, has been a very appealing feature of the game for now. There has been lots and lots of speculation concerning how to change this when the campaign mode will be introduced. A full-featured campaign witrh economics and a large tech tree has always been the end goal of KSP, and when failures will cost money the feel fo the game will have to change drastically. We\'ll see when we get there

Nice work, Raptor. I updated my post. So the gravity is 0.08 G; Strange, Harv was speaking of 0.04....

You\'re right. But for now, looks trump realism

The old minmus was just a single shimmering pixel form parking orbit. The new one probably is 2-3 pixels wide and more noticeable...

I had prepared a table during experimentals, then Squad changed Minmus because PQS was having trouble ^^ (Also, the ultra-low gravity was making people impatient... landings were veeery slow.) I\'ll post it anyway for 'historical reference'... the only changes from it should be, now the surface gravity is doubled and the radius is 60 kilometers. Other parameters follow accordingly. I\'ll check for myself in the following days, though... [glow=red,2,300]Old astronomical table:[/glow] [table][tr] [td] [/td][td]Kerbin[/td][td]Mun[/td][td]Minmus[/td][td]Kerbol[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Mass (kg) [/td][td]5.29x1022 [/td][td]9.76x1020 [/td][td]1.836(5)x1018 [/td][td]1.75x1028 [/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Radius (km) [/td][td]600[/td][td]200[/td][td]25[/td][td]65400[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Density (g/cm3) [/td][td]58.5[/td][td]29[/td][td]28[/td][td]---[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Surface gravity (m/s2) [/td][td]9.81[/td][td]1.63[/td][td]0.196[/td][td]273[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Escape velocity (m/s) [/td][td](3430)[/td][td]806[/td][td]99[/td][td](188900)[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Safe orbit period (minutes) [/td][td]30.5[/td][td]38.1[/td][td]45[/td][td]??[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Semimajor axis (km) [/td][td]13.5998x106 [/td][td]12000[/td][td]47000[/td][td]N/A[/td] [/tr][tr] [td] Eccentricity [/td][td]zero[/td][td]zero[/td][td]zero[/td][td]N/A[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Inclination [/td][td]zero[/td][td]zero[/td][td]6°[/td][td]N/A[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Orbital period [/td][td]106d17h[/td][td]38h36m[/td][td]299h18m[/td][td]N/A[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Rotational period [/td][td]6h[/td][td]~41h[/td][td]still?[/td][td]??[/td] [/tr] [/table] [glow=red,2,300]Official 0.15.0 astronomical table (data courtesy of UmbralRaptor)[/glow] [table][tr] [td] [/td][td]Kerbin[/td][td]Mun[/td][td]Minmus[/td][td]Kerbol[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Mass (kg) [/td][td]5.29x1022 [/td][td]9.76x1020 [/td][td]4.233(7)x1019 [/td][td]1.75x1028 [/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Radius (km) [/td][td]600[/td][td]200[/td][td]60[/td][td]65400[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Density (g/cm3) [/td][td]58.5[/td][td]29[/td][td]47[/td][td]---[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Surface gravity (m/s2) [/td][td]9.81[/td][td]1.63[/td][td]0.78[/td][td]273[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Escape velocity (m/s) [/td][td](3430)[/td][td]806[/td][td]307[/td][td](188900)[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Safe orbit period (minutes) [/td][td]30.5[/td][td]38.1[/td][td]32.7[/td][td]??[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Semimajor axis (km) [/td][td]13.5998x106 [/td][td]12000[/td][td]47000[/td][td]N/A[/td] [/tr][tr] [td] Eccentricity [/td][td]zero[/td][td]zero[/td][td]zero[/td][td]N/A[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Inclination [/td][td]zero[/td][td]zero[/td][td]6°[/td][td]N/A[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Orbital period [/td][td]106d17h[/td][td]38h36m[/td][td]299h18m[/td][td]N/A[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td] Rotational period [/td][td]6h[/td][td]~41h[/td][td]~300h??[/td][td]??[/td] [/tr] [/table]

Kerbin is much smaller than Earth; also, the fuel we use is very energetic, if you do the math. The game will be rebalanced in the future, but for now, you\'ll discover that flying in Kerbal space needs much less imposing designs than in real life

Very very very interesting, but just one thing about the formatting for now: did you notice that the code boxes inside spoilers collapse to a single line? I suppose you didn\'t want them to do that.

I would advise going in the *.cfg of all the decouplers and disabling fuel crossfeed. It\'s really counter-intuitive, and with fuel lines we can explicitely route fuel if we need to anyway.

I expect Zakus and Gundams in the coming months....

Something like 560, I\'ve read on the wiki... and Kerbin\'s gravity well is so small already! ^^ Engines should be lighter, axial decouplers should be MUCH lighter, and Isp should be nerfed to about 320.

It would be very heavy on resources; all the involved planets would have to be fully instantiated, as all the involved ships... also, the terrain code couldn\'t keep up if you switched to 10000x time... it goes against the whole idea of the rails system. That\'s why I think the game will simulate the results, instead of actually producing them. (Some amendment to the rails system would be welcome, for example to make possible things like ion drives, but this seems too difficult)

In the game, such missions will probably be handled in a more abstract/'gamey' way: fulfill required parameters -> unlock data from the planetary map. This is a very clever and funny hack, but it takes hours and hours to scan a planet, as in would in reality... I think that actually simulating a radar scanner like this plugin does isn\'t necessary

This is something I could get behind We could make the case that once something becomes 'easy', the government should reduce or even drop its interest in it... and conventional rocketry probably has reached the 'easy enough' point. The bureaucrats should understand that, even if this is true, the world isn\'t going to run out of hard problems or unprofitable things that we deem important anyway anytime soon, so it\'s not like they will become redundant...

I\'m waiting to see the animation code The maps are beautiful.... this shows perfectly the kind of crazy shit that KSP makes possible: a couple hundred lines of C#, some time (a lot of time...) and you have something that looks like it came from a real space probe of the Sixties...

I tried that in 0.11, since I didn\'t have much more to do (except early Sun shots! ) but I don\'t know how much good it did me. On Kerbin, everything happens MUCH faster because of the higher gravity, you are burning six times as fuel and so getting lighter much quicker, throttle control that would be completely acceptable on the Mun is completely inaccurate on Kerbin, etc. All in all, I never managed a powered landing on Kerbin, but made a Mun landing on the first try.... My advice is, on the first tries, overengineer your landing a bit and try to get to a dead stop at about 6000 meters indicated alt. Picking a spot isn\'t so important, and if you aim for the center of a mare you should avoid steep ridges. Then, go vertical, manage your vertical speed and keep the cross-circle on top of the navball with RCS translation. After you\'ve done it this way a few times, you can start omitting RCS, and trying to 'fly' a landing, though our current instrumentation is very bad for that right now (I\'ll try fixing that if I have the time ) All this with ASAS, obviously.

Guys, SpaceX is able to do what it does (and I\'m happy of their success) because government-funded scientists have already solved all the hard problems for them. They are making conventional rockets with LOX-Kerosene engines: it\'s a 50 years old technology by now, with lots of public domain material you can learn from. Had they started from REAL scratch, they would have had their own Vanguards, their own dozens of stupid accidents where they discovered the quirks of rocket science one by one, and they almost certainly wouldn\'t have been profitable. I don\'t remember where, but I have read an interesting piece about commercial launch companies starting with 'simple, streamlined' payload and vehicle processing routines, and then rapidly approaching the government ones after a couple of 'freak, unlikely accidents' that the older operators had experienced before them. The private sector has a wonderful capability to improve technologies that are readily marketable, but the beginning of big innovations usually isn\'t profitable; look at the Internet for an example... it started as little more than a game for scientists, military or not, then had all its seminal and organizative work done by universities and the DoD, which means on a not-for-profit basis, and only after that it became a business. And even then, at the start, everybody relied on the National Science Foundation backbone. Even in the old West, it was the Federal government that built the railroads...

Except that the guy making the claim IS a biologist. Anyway, seems like overinterpretation of too little data to me. Something that people should be wary about, but in fields like planetary science it\'s almost understandable: we have SO LITTLE data after all, that the temptation of milking it for anything it can be worth is obviously strong. LOL. Though, I really don\'t like the strip. Reeks of the kind of academical arrogance I see more often than I\'d like in the lab...

One of our esteemed historians and freedom fighters, Norberto Bobbio, liked to put it more or less this way: 'All democratic men treasure Liberty and Equality, but in a pinch, the left-leaning man will favor the latter, and the right-leaning man the former.' At least for the economic part, I think he was right. And as you said, this is philosophy, and as I usually to add personal preference; if I like better one side of the tradeoff, it\'s just what I like, by itself it doesn\'t make me better or worse than those who like the opposite side.

Well, I\'m not American, but I think that there isn\'t much difference about the particular point I\'m going to make between western countries... The problem, I believe, is that of a 'scientistic' approach to politics that is much in vogue these days. People have been convinced that all matters of government are just administrative problems, which 'any honest person with a calculator' could solve; economists, and their fans of the Austrian or Keynesian persuasion, shout that they have a true, scientific economic model that describes how to run a state: if that was really so, anyone who holds a different opinion wouldn\'t be just disagreeing with me, but wrong; ad that\'s exactly how most people behave today. Nobody wants to accept that the most basic matters of economy are, in the end, matters of personal preference: no, there is a scientifically right way to do things, so anybody else is wrong, and thus evil if he insists with his ideas. The almost complete lack of real predictive capability in economics, strangely, doesn\'t scratch this belief.

I think I don\'t really understand what you mean by 'shortest path'. You\'re thinking at rolling the ship to bring one axis in the plane of the required maneuver, and then do a pitch or yaw to the new attitude, instead of maneuvering the two axes simutaneously? Yes, with a long and thin ship, the difference in moments of inertia should make that economical in terms of fuel expenditure or speed over a considerable range; personally, I wouldn\'t want the craft to roll if I have not commanded it, unless the scenario is punching some numbers in the computer for a large attitude change. But I suppose you meant just that... (it should roll back to the original angle at the end of the maneuver, though) Re. the algorithms for RCS and fins: well, maneuvers with reaction controls should be done as acceleration-coast-deceleration, while the aerodynamic surfaces generally need a constant input to mantain rate (since you\'re counteracting the natural stability of the craft). SAS is a middle ground, in that it behaves sorta like RCS, but you don\'t have to worry about not wasting fuel. As for what we have now, the ASAS oscillations are due to integral windup. The ASAS PID tries to bring angular momentum to zero, plain and simple... since when the value actually crosses zero, the integral term still 'remembers' the precedent offset, the ASAS keeps thrusting/torquing until the error in the opposite direction cancels the integral, then it starts bouncing back (at reduced amplitude). My first fix would be shortening the 'memory span' of the ASAS: I\'d try to add an exponential decay to the integral value, with a time constant of... uhm... 500 msec? Does that make any sense for you? If I don\'t hear objections, I\'ll try it in my modded ASAS and see how it goes As for the Shuttle attitude at launch: I think that the heads down attitude wasn\'t particularly more stable, but since the SSMEs need to be angled upwards to have their thrust going through the center of gravity, in this way the sideways thrust component is directed up, where it\'s useful... flying in normal attitude would mean pushing downwards. Anybody knows which way the Energija/Buran pitched? Or even better, the cargo version of Energija (the Polyus launch, for example)?

I\'ll try as soon as I come back to a decent web connection ^^ I also foundsome documentation on Unity GUI functions, that should be useful.