wizzlebippi

I think the problem lies in science generation, not the tech tree. Right now, you can easily complete about 75% of the tech tree without leaving the Kerbin system. Science needs to be harder to get or have diminishing returns as you progress through the tech tree. More parts and nodes would be appreciated as well.

For the record, a win32 application by default can only utilize 2GB of RAM. A long mode enabled application can use 3GB.

I can forgive that, but only on the premise that they were carrying extra fuel and supplies for the mission, and that it makes no sense to start off with anything less that full tanks.

Also, the Columbia accident was inevitable. NASA has a bad habit of considering the lack of failure a success. Despite knowing that foam from the external fuel tank had been damaging the orbiter's heat shield for decades, little was done until Columbia broke up on reentry. We could just as easily be talking about any of the other shuttles. Apollo 1, Apollo 13 and Challenger are all good examples of this mentality.

There are a few misconceptions here 1. For a rich owner/pilot, you're generally looking at small 4-8 passenger jets upwards of about $10m. Beyond that, they either don't care enough to fly it and can afford to hire a pilot, or the aircraft is corporate owned. 2. Rich people are by far in the minority for aircraft owners. The vast majority are owned by companies like Netjets who rent them out complete with pilots. In fact, Aerion's major customer is flexjet, and they're likely only interested because it's faster over the ocean. In all likelihood they'll fly their passengers to and from the Aerion jet in a more conventional Cessna or Leerjet. 3. For the feasibility of it, anything's possible if you throw enough time and money at it. They already have customers, and no one else is trying to make anything like it. Aerion could prove to be disruptive to the business jet market.

Most passenger aircraft use high bypass turbofan engines (bypass ratio of 5-10) with 80-90% of the thrust coming from the fan, so that's 500-550 KTAS (Knots True AirSpeed) guaranteed. Beyond that, since all jet engines eat air at < 0.3 Mach and many fighters use complex variable geometry inlets to slow intake air, it's probably possible to make an electric ducted fan that would produce thrust at up to Mach 2-2.5. How fast the aircraft would go depends on drag, but supersonic is probably possible.

@AeroGav: Yes, anything penetrating the shock cone causes a significant increase in drag. This is why the SR-71 has a delta wing positioned very far aft and creates lift from the fuselage with vortices (why the fuselage has flanges). However, in the case of a space plane, you operate over such a large speed and altitude range that dealing with that extra drag is unavoidable. This probably can be mitigated by keeping speed under the critical mach number until the extra drag is manageable. Or just with extra thrust like the Mig 25. If I remember correctly, NACA tr-1135 contains all the information you need to estimate the critical mach number for having a wing tip penetrate the shock cone. @K^2: Some early fighters actually had to dive as well to achieve supersonic flight.

Wave drag is due to shockwave formation, transonic or supersonic, anywhere on the aircraft. A bow shock or shock cone is just the shock wave produced by the nose of a supersonic aircraft. A bow shock is a source of drag, but is not the entire source of wave drag. The main picture in this article should help. [url]http://phys.org/news/2015-08-schlieren-images-reveal-supersonic.html[/url] Anywhere you see a dark line in the schlieren photo is a compression wave and the lighter lines are expansion waves.

If the core ruptured, the crew likely wouldn't be in any danger due to radiation from the core material. Alpha and beta radiation would be stopped by a single sheet of tin foil. Gamma would be the real danger, but adding gamma radiation to space is like tossing a bucket of water in the ocean. The real danger is how are you getting home now that your engine has crapped the bed.

As a general guideline, the round fuselage of many civilian aircraft produces as much lift at the section of wing it obscures. The catch is the fuselage has a much lower aspect ratio than the wing, making it produce more drag per degree AoA. A lifting body takes this to the extreme.

Airliners routinely operate off runways in the 7-10k ft range (KSP's is 2.5km or ~8200ft) with max takeoff weight TWR's of ~0.3. I know this doesn't quite map 1:1 with KSP, but it's a point of reference. Here's my process: When unable to get off the runway, try holding full nose up control to see if your craft can rotate (try not to blow it up). If not, try moving your landing gear closer to your CG (should be slightly behind the CG for tricycle gear) or adding more pitch control surfaces. If so, try taller landing gear to give your craft more AoA to achieve more lift or more wing to produce more lift with the AoA you can achieve. I rarely end up adding thrust for takeoff reasons alone.

That's it, thanks. I have more math issues to work out, but this gets me much closer.

Apparently my problem is not understanding what RequestResource returns. I was thinking I could get the remaining amount of a resource in a part using it. Still, if you can right click on a fuel tank and see how much fuel and oxidizer is left, there must be a way to get the remaining quantity of any resource.

I figured out finding the quantity of a resource for the vessel: Definition = PartResourceLibrary.Instance.GetDefinition("string") Amount = this.vessel.GetActiveResource(Definition).amount For a part, I'm still stuck. Here's my line of code: Amount = this.part.RequestResource("string", double) Is this really the right approach? Is there something else that takes the place of double to convince the RequestResource method to spit out a number?

How would I get the quantity of a resource for the active vessel as well as the quantity of a resource in a given part? I know this is possible with the RequestResource method, but am struggling to pull it off. Thanks

Sorry, I forgot that we didn't manage to break the sound barrier or put a man on the moon without modern computers. Seriously, Hoerner Fluid Dynamic Drag (at least my 1965 edition) covers everything from low Reynolds number to hypersonic drag. Given your project and the likely extreme speed range, readily available software probably won't cover anything beyond Mach 1 because that's not where the majority of aircraft operate. Where given a quick search of a book from 1965, I was able to find:

For a more old school approach, as long as it can be broken down into simple shapes, your answer might be in Hoerner's Fluid Dynamic Drag.

It's to lift the shockwave off the surface of the aircraft. Slower supersonic aircraft like fighters have pointy noses so they form a clean shock cone for less drag. As you go faster, the air temperature in the shock wave increases to the point where it will melt the craft creating it. A blunt nose places a cooler subsonic bow wave between the craft and the shockwave, helping protect the craft from the high temp shock wave.

When anything in the air is painted with radar, and is big enough and moving fast enough to not be filtered out, that's a primary target. A secondary target is when an aircraft has a transponder that the radar can interrogate, and the transponder can issue a mode C (minimum of altitude encoding) or better response. A weather balloon, regardless of if you equip it with a reflector or not, probably won't appear on ATC radar because of it's atypical path, smallish size and slow speed. You need to contact ATC with a time and place for the launch well ahead of time (at least a day) so they can route traffic around you. Don't be surprised if they require you to launch from a specific location to avoid airways.

What ultimately beat the Russians was the N1 crashing shortly after liftoff and destroying a sizable chunk of Baikonur in 1966. Even if they had completed a lunar flyby, there was nothing to follow it for years.

Since everyone here is doing everything but explaining how a rocket works, here it is: Force = Mass * Acceleration Force = Thrust Mass = Fuel and Oxidizer Acceleration is caused by burning fuel with oxidizer, creating heat and causing the resulting exhaust gas to expand. This pressure is contained within the combustion chamber and forced out the nozzle. The exhaust gas is accelerated through the nozzle, reaching Mach 1 at the throat and continuing to accelerate until it reaches the end of the exhaust bell. Newton's third law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The rocket is accelerated with the same amount of force that expels the exhaust gas out the nozzle. Nuclear rockets use the heat from a nuclear reactor to expand fuel within a pressure chamber and accelerate it out the nozzle. Ion engines use electricity to ionize a gas like xenon and use the resulting repulsive force to generate thrust.

If I want to embark on a mission to explore the Jool system, using stock parts I need heatshields everywhere, or I have to build a monster heatshield out of the 3.75m parts. Larger 5m and 7.5m heatshields would really help. Also, awkward maintenance aside, the space shuttle successfully used a reusable heat shield for decades. While ceramic tiles aren't the most durable things ever, they are from the era KSP draws from, so why not add reusable heat shields as late game tech.

That's disappointing, but understandable from an optimization standpoint. Do you (or anyone) have any insight as to how thermal simulation works beyond 100x, or a way to prevent the ship from immediately cooling off at 1000x?

I've been having a problem with AddThermalFlux and timewarp in a mod I'm working on. Basically, in exchange for constant heat output, the part constantly produces power. At 100x tmewarp, it's perfectly happy for extended periods of time. If I increase timewarp to 1000x, my test ship immediately overheats and occasionally exploads despite being equipped with sufficient radiators. Here's the line of code: this.part.AddThermalFlux(Heat * TimeWarp.fixedDeltaTime)

Acceleration. They're pretty sure it's not a warp drive. Also this thread isn't exactly brimming with useful information so I don't blame you for not reading it.