thorfinn

Lunar related but in-topic post: Do you remember the micro solid rockets that Nova has shown us mid August? I suspect that they are part of a larger set of new components (probe parts?), but now that I think of it, there is one very straight forward use for them with the stock parts we have now: Behold one of the few good ideas (?) that the Soviets had for their lunar attempt: next to the legs of the LK module, a small solid rocket fires down to settle the lander thoroughly on the ground after landing. Considering the way most of us fly and the bounciness of Minmus especially, this innovation could save us many rescue missions....

I gave a look at your source code. Very good work, and also instructive for my long-delayed modding project! It's hard to avoid the fact that a Kerbin reentry is definitely mild compared to what we experience on Earth, though But there are a couple of things that maybe you could think about... First, why don't you just lower the speed of sound a bit? 320 m/s feels terribly fast on a planet as small as Kerbin, and our leading planetary scientists (I mean here on the forum ) have long debated the very high density of the Kerbal atmosphere. I'd raise the molecular mass and lower gamma to get something like 250 m/s for Mach 1 at sea level.... (your "R" contains both the gas constant and the molecular mass, right?) Two: can we say that you are modeling a metallic, "heat sink" type thermal protection system now? You assume that the whole mass of the TPS is heated uniformly after all (like in the first experiments for ICBM nuclear warheads if I'm not mistaken). This means that the capsule sits on a slab of red-hot metal during peak heat... and you could easily say that even the low temperatures that you get are not that low at all in such a situation: the shield requires its own insulation to avoid frying capsule systems and scalding the Kerbals. So, you could put a quite low temperature threshold for heat sink, forcing them to be quite massive, and start working on an approximated way to model an ablative shield for weight-constrained users (I have an idea about this last point but I still need to check it.) Also: you are right, the steep end of a reentry corridor is usually constrained by G loading, or peak heat flux (since they go hand in hand): but the maximum total heat load is encountered on the shallow trajectory.

Yeah, a big aeroshell that lands a small robotic plane (battery powered, RTG-recharged) with deployable wings that flies around the landing site! I'd love that, but parts so small would probably come under the purview of the various "satellite assembly" or "rover building" facilites that have been proposed multiple times and kinda-sorta planned by the devs.

Rocket engines typically reach maximum efficency at 100% rated thrust; Isp can actually decrease when throttled. As for jet engines, I'd like to see afterburners in the future, either as a mod or (better) in the main game: those should definitely behave that way.

Hallo guys, I've been out of the loop a bit so I have certainly missed things, but this question shouldn't be too annoying (quick searches return no hits)... I remember that Nova's star system, in some of its variants, had a brown dwarf in the farthest reaches complete with its own small system. I always liked that idea: is that still in the cards, or has it been excluded... or none of the above?

Festeggiamo romanamente l'atterraggio di Curiosity:

OK, guys, what's with the censoring of "***" in "***ociated"? :D Reminds me of this quote from bash org... Also, the "advanced editor" isn't advanced in the slightest, it's just a text box with no commands. What's with this new forum? I guess you're right; I'm no expert in this kind of highly non-linear problems, so I don't know where the hard limit to stability would lie.

Well, to measure a gravity field (and thus the mass of the body generating it) you need a test mass. For the planets that have moons, those will act as your test masses; their orbital data contains the information about parent body mass. For lone planets, we'll have to get there.

Very Simcity. I like it Though there should be several; a single loop continuously playing would annoy very fast.

This image explains very well why we need to have repair EVAs someday

Happy birthday

Hallo. Long time no see, around here. The little contest I want to start is quite simple. Show me, with pictures, how far you can fly on the Mun with our brand new rocket packs. I\'m not going to organize this in a very formal way, I just want to see what people can manage to do I\'ll leave this here just to get you started: Yesterday, the good Bob Kerman flew 4200 meters away from my first heavy lander and back, skimming the surface and burning about 80% of the MMU fuel. (The marker in the image says 4,1 km, but I walked around a bit.) So, the maximum range in nap-of-the-Mun flight is probably something like... 11 kilometers, 12? Or maybe I suck, somebody will manage 15 on the first try, and I\'ll eat my bowler hat Rockerduck style. Semi-ballistic arcs should take you quite farther away... but good luck to everybody when trying to judge a safe landing with just the altimeter and variometer For ease of scoring, many of you will want to fly all the way in one direction. You are not required, but encouraged to go and pick up your athlete afterwards in that case Minmus edition: you are also encouraged to try this on Minmus, of course (haven\'t gone there yet in 0.16, myself). But I understood that the MMU delta vee is enough to get in orbit around Minmus, or nearly so... therefore this could become a bit meaningless But we shall see.

It works very well in lunar gravity. It\'s next to useless as an upper stage engine in a Kerbin launch, though, that\'s right. The same is true for the 1m small engine. There is a gap to be filled between first stage engines and 'deep space' maneuvering engines. Instead of just making new models with inbetween stats, I\'d like a way to use 1m engines in groups under 2m tanks.

And you would not lose your money. You\'re right on the spot And that\'s why using a 'floating' reference point in the six-dimensional space of positions and momenta, instead of just the normal 3D space, should solve the problem. (In practice, most of the ship\'s velocity will be 'offloaded' to its frame of reference, like most of its displacement already is)

There\'s a lot that they can do, they just haven\'t gotten around doing it yet because there are no other planets for the time being. They must fix it, it\'s an absolutely vital part of the program... they already have a plan*, actually, it will be implemented in the update that brings in other planets. * IIRC, they will move the floating origin system into the phase space.

Not Mechjeb, nor anything else can utilize *SAS units, because each unit has its own logic. They do their thing by themselves, so they will fight control inputs generated by different laws. I had proposed a kinda-sorta workaround for this, but it didn\'t get much traction.

Not exactly. Small bodies could exist in the L4 and L5 points (I KNOW that KSP doesn\'t simulate them ). In reality, there are two clumps of asteroids in these positions along the orbit of Jupiter, and also faint clouds of dust associated with Earth Lagrange points if I remeber well...

I wouldn\'t be so categorical. This is one of these points where the notion of 'reality' and 'existence' start to require lots of qualifiers; if you get a bunch of physicists in the same room and ask them OP\'s question about virtual particles, you\'ll get a bunch of different answers (and yes, I\'ve done that ) The problem of the energy density of the vacuum is still controversial, and most probably ties into the bigger problem of quantum gravity - regarding which, as you probably know, we\'ve been stuck shooting almost in the dark for the last few decades

I have the feeling that crewmen will be moddable someday (Though I\'d go for the crew of the Bebop or the girls from Stratos 4, but hey, to each his own )

Harv said some time ago that a friend of his passed him some closed-form approximate solutions for the decay of an orbit in presence of very faint drag. If possible, he will add these to the rails system to simulate 'well enough' the orbital decay of debris, and maybe of low Kerbin orbit crafts. You are right. Since I like to keep LKO clean, for now it\'s there in my checklists: 'ensure destruction' I think that this will be half-fixed, in the beginning, by just destroying debris below some altitude, and afterwards thoroughly fixed with the decay/reentry model I was talking about.

I think that the Kerbol system will let us experience many different regimes. Actually, if it was me, I\'d make it a trinary or quaternary star system to make room for more combinations And maybe even have 'difficulty levels', by choice of which star to start from (each would have a life-supporting planet, with different parameters) (The atmosphere of Mars is mostly negiglible in the return phase, by the way. Now, lifting off from Titan... )

The only thing I don\'t like about the idea of strong greenhouse effect on Kerbin is unfortunately a kinda big one... every outer planet would by definition be a icy wasteland: in a game, we\'d like to have more variety.

Remember that the Shuttle had wings I\'m not an expert, but I\'ve seen radiative heating cited as an important factor in Mars entry, which is relatively mild... but you are also encountering a lot of molecules and radicals with excited vibrational states there. I don\'t know. Where did you get that 15 km/s figure? Anyway, that was more for continuing conversation about the physics than for direct application to KSP: in the game, we will probably have to 'cheat' to make Kerbin reentry interesting (in the Chinese sense...) The energy involved is just so low.... Ah, I\'ve found a presentation that may be of interest to those who are reading this: http://research.nianet.org/~grossman/Fundamentals/Hypersonic%20Aerodynamics/Section.5.pdf

Very nice resume on basic aerothermodynamics Just three points: 1) The density of Kerbin\'s atmosphere seems to be much higher that 1,2 kg/m3 (See Closette\'s work for details.) 2) If the density is actually very high, a lower gamma would suit better an atmosphere with a high percentage of complex molecules. 3) You are completely neglecting radiative heat flux: but in Earth reentry conditions, it actually dominates. What\'s the temperature of your shock layer? Is it a reasonable assumption?

As Maltesh said, it\'s a overflow in the patched conics code. 0x7FFFFFFF seconds = 68 years, 35 days, 3 hours, 14 minutes, 8 seconds