khyron42

I've seen enough references to stealth that I have to second the suggestion early on in this thread: read the projectrho website, in particular: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#id--There_Ain%27t_No_Stealth_In_Space I deliberately pointed out the failure of stealth in my example story. Any active drive will get spotted if a sensor happens to be pointed its way at the right time, and between active and passive scanners ships will get found. While that page is not god-given truth and he might be wrong about some things, he is very right about detectability. Any kind of high-energy engine shouts, to the whole solar system worth of passive sensors, "Hi, I have a weapons-grade engine on this thing, and by watching how long I leave it running for and how much I move during that time you know I'll be arriving at (destination) in (time frame)." You can always do a big burn with your heavy engine and then fine-tune with RCS to surprise people on when you'll be arriving by a few days, but they'll know you're coming. The more efficient drives burn even hotter and are more easily detected, and usually have to be left running for hours or days to make major orbit changes; but even the relatively weak space shuttle main engines could be detected from Pluto with current technology if you had sensors aimed at earth during the right 10 minutes. Any war zones is going to have automatic sensors to pick up on things like missiles heading their way from the other side of the solar system. When you're not boosting, you still can get spotted. Power systems always eventually result in heat directly proportional to their power output, and you can't just throw away heat into the surrounding space via conduction or convection. Between power systems to keep your crew alive, power systems to operate your electronics, and power systems to operate your weaponry (if not chemical-rocket missiles, which goes back to detectable by seeing the exhaust) you have at least kilowatts of heat to radiate away, and more likely on a warship mega- or gigawatts. The closest you'll get to stealthing that is putting all your radiators on one side of the ship and trying to keep the ship between them and your enemy. And every sensor the enemy has scattered around the area. For reference, the ISS has solar arrays capable of producing about 100 kW of power. (For comparison, the average house in the US has a power main capable of supplying 20-40 kW.) That's a tiny amount of heat to radiate away compared with what you'd need for basic non-missile weaponry, but it takes 168 square meters of active radiator surfaces to get rid of 70 kW of it (the other 30 uses passive radiator systems.) My math says those panels are likely running a bit warmer than human skin temperature, not very visible. http://whatif.xkcd.com/35/ gives good examples of what happens when radiating larger amounts of waste heat from a small surface. you're either going to have giant, flimsy, very poorly stealthed heat radiators or small, extremely hot ones. Keep in mind that anything you do to hide your infrared signal just means that you have to run hotter somewhere on the ship to cool the parts you're trying to keep from showing up on passive IR sensors, too. Now - if you want to go with magic drives that can do massive acceleration with no hot exhaust and no massive power usage, or magic stealth technologies that let you hide all your heat from IR sensors, you're welcome to move into science fantasy, but science doesn't seem to allow for that right now. Everyone will know some object, warm enough that it must be using x amount of power, is boosting towards them or is coasting along on an easily detected trajectory. Your best bet would be to never launch the attack ship in the first place - instead, use an engine burn from your big bright engine to hide the missile launches. Not stealth, but subterfuge, will rule. Edit: I got curious just how infrared detection of the current ISS would look, and found an image. Note the radiators shining like beacons. High-end amateur gear got this image from 400-600 km away, but could have at least seen a bright IR source moving against the background from hundreds of times further. http://www.awesky.com/Planets/Misc/International+Space+Station/

I think one of the things that will complicate space warfare is that first strike is absolutely critical. Let's say you're in a hypothetical space version of a coast guard cruiser stationed at Venus. You've got super sci-fi terawatt lasers that can poke a hole in most anything in a split second pulse (assuming it's not 3 light-seconds away still and actively random dodging with variable thrust; it's not like you can accurately predict where a dodging target will be 3 seconds from now...) You're also carrying kinetic kill missiles and multi-megaton nuclear missiles. You have an efficient fusion drive that can do 5 g's even with a full fuel load, and that's carrying enough fuel to burn for a solid 24 hours. There are colonies on the moon, mars, and in orbit around venus, and asteroid mining - but you and others like you are on station because there's also been some incidents of space piracy, and people need rescuing sometimes, and to keep the colonies from turning into lawless frontiers. Something is seen boosting for earth from the asteroid belt; they tried to hide the burn by making it a long slow orbit that only burned when Earth was on the far side of the sun, but they didn't know you have automatic detection gear in orbit around Mars. According to your computers in 6 months' time it's going to pass near Venus; course projections say that another burn there would let it pass through Earth's vicinity at a high relative speed 4 months later. Based on the rate of delta-V your detectors caught it was only able to burn at 2 g's; your coast guard cruiser can out-manuever it easily. You are launched on an orbit that will let you intercept them one month before they reach Venus, assuming they do no further burns. They don't; 5 months worth of your three-man crew playing cards and getting on each other's nerves later, it's time to intercept. You start matching speeds while you're still a few light-seconds away and demand that they surrender, and get your first good long-range telescope views; It looks like a salvage job, two asteroid miner ships were welded together at some point. They've got a relatively weak NERVA engine putting out some radiation even at idle, must have used chemical boosters to do the initial burn, and no visible weapons, and they say "Thank god, yes, we surrender!" as soon as you ask them to over a fairly low power radio... looks like they may have been trying to make it back to be rescued. Once you've matched orbits and are only a kilometer away and one of you is suited up to go over and inspect them using suit thrusters, the seam where two ships were joined pops open like it was being held together with explosive bolts, two 100 kiloton nukes pop out and detonate in a split second. the bulk of the miner ship was nothing but shielding to make the nukes undetectable against the NERVA's background radiation. Your ship might pop some leaks from being superheated along one side, but it's not gonna matter; that much x-ray and neutron radiation has your crew almost instantly unconscious, and they die without ever waking from the coma. but you just saved some colony on the moon or in orbit around the earth from the same fate. It's the space equivalent of a check point stopping a car bomber before they can get to their intended target. Small space engagements will go to whoever shoots first; You had that booby trap outgunned in every possible way, but they lulled you into letting them shoot first. if you'd opened fire on them from 10000 km away they could have set off those nukes and barely hurt you, due to inverse square law giving you a tiny fraction of the radiation you took at 1 km. It's going to make everyone trigger-happy whenever anything the least bit unusual happens, and the scenario I outlined above will mean you desperately need those coast guard equivalents to prevent direct kinetic-kill kamikazes against colonies and space stations (and then you'll have to be ready to shoot down your own coast guard if a crew goes rogue or one of those ships gets hijacked.) Back to the original question - the best defense against a laser is to be a few light-seconds away and randomly altering your thrust. if you're 5 light-seconds away, 10 meters long and changing your speed by 0-30 meters per second at random, they'd have to just take a random guess where you'd be and have a lucky shot to take you out even with an impossibly strong laser, or blanket the whole potential spread of your positions with random pulses (so, as long as the laser is strong enough to still kill you even with only 1/1000th of its power hitting you, that could work.)

Correct. My math was for the current game's stock physics, with all wings "leading edges" facing directly forward. In the current physics, wings generate lift proportional to the airspeed against their expected "forward" direction, is my understanding. I was wrong earlier - my test procedure was to pitch to 10 degrees nose up as early as possible in the takeoff roll and hold it at that angle, and record what speed was enough to take off at that pitch. My exact tests from earlier: test name Craft mass Craft lift Rotation speed Liftoff speed @ 10 degree nose up Notes lift test 1 9.79 3.6 10 N/A slight downhill glide at 10 degree nose up and 100-110 m/s forward velocity. Lift test 2 9.89 6.8 10 65 m/s lift test 3 10.03 10.6 10 to 12 40-45 m/s craft was tending to nose up and may have gotten airborne early @ 40 m/s with higher nose-up. The test craft images: http://imgur.com/a/tsMVb

From some testing I did long ago on a roughly 10 ton aircraft, if you get your rear landing gear just barely behind the center of gravity: A "lift" rating of 10.6 (totalling up the lift number from all the various wings and flaps) let me tip the nose up and get airborne at 40-45 m/s. The speed at which you can tip the nose up depends on both lift, and proper placement of the landing gear. The speed at which you can raise your nose is called the "rotation speed" in the real world and is documented for most aircraft. A lift rating of 6.8 got it airborne at 65 m/s. A lift rating of 3.6 couldn't get airborne at max speed of 110 m/s before running out of runway, and ground, ditching into the ocean. Based on those, if you're really leaning towards designing rather than testing, I'd aim for at least .6 lift rating per ton of aircraft mass. Beyond that I'd design for lift enough to hit whatever target rotation speed you like, keeping in mind that poorly placed landing gear could keep you from taking off no matter how much lift you have.

I explored some of the amazing mountains on Kerbin... ... and then tried to land near them.

I had launched an improved version of my interplanetary expoloration ship... and then screwed up during refueling and hit shift instead of alt when selecting a tank to transfer fuel. The loosely attached refueling port ripped off, in the process putting enough spin on both ship and tank that they managed to knock off half the solar panels too before I stopped the spin. Now I have to get a safe crew return vehicle up to the gorram thing to get the two-man crew back down, and then deorbit it and launch a replacement. With struts for the refueling ports and a hotkey for toggling the engines this time.

That's a good 18 km/h, don't worry - you'll be there in under 3 hours of steady driving! I guess "Mun Rover" can be part of next year's Desert Bus for charity event.

I've managed round trips from Duna's surface, and one that visited and explored both Bop and Pol before returning to Kerbin. However, I've never managed a return from Eve, so I wouldn't call myself amazing. I love things that add realism and challenge, like Deadly Reentry and Ioncross. I try not to lose any kerbals, and never use quicksaves (I use reverts when I'm just seeing if a design even has enough lift or thrust to take off.) Docking is fun but slightly challenging - those last 5-10 meters, trying to get exactly aligned both heading-wise and position-wise, are usually tense for me.

I barely managed to put this into orbit today, my first time really building something huge with B9: That cargo bay is about the size of an orange tank. It got to a crappy orbit with dry tanks, and I had to use a 10 minute RCS burn to raise the Pe above 69 km, but it made it. Once I refuel it, it'll contain 9.8 orange tanks worth of fuel. It's designed to be an interplanetary exploration vessel. I'll put logistics modules like extra oxygen and batteries on a clamp-o-tron in the tail end of the middle section (I'm running Ioncross Crew Resources to make crew consume oxygen) and whatever lander is called for by the mission in the main cargo bay. The two rear 2.5m docking ports are for refueling, but I might also use them as drop tanks or for installing a higher efficiency drive. Just forward of the main bay are two clamp-o-trons for any small probe I might want to carry along.

I thought I'd start a thread to post new discoveries in the redesigned worlds, rather than just post them on the pictures thread. This was also a chance to thank Squad - one of the things missing before was truly abrupt slopes, where you could drive/walk up to a lip and look straight down a cliff; it always started sloping down and made a few transitions before. I think those "sheer cliffs" exist now in plenty! After some radar scanning of the new surface of Kerbin, I decided to land an unmanned probe at the highest point I'd detected. The landscape is amazing, totally worth the view and the dead crewmember who tried a manned flight there and had to ditch in the ocean out of fuel. The snow cover is appropriate; Temperature sensors show it as -41 C there, with atmospheric pressure at about 1/4 of sea level. I'm not sure if those distant dramatic peaks are taller, and not sure I can manage to land a probe on them - but they sure look awesome. I think there are probably many new peaks over 6 km tall, so there's lots of amazing things out there to see just on Kerbin. This range raises abruptly from coastal planes, and if I drive slightly downhill I have a great view out to the ocean in the opposite direction. Those who want to know coordinates can PM me. Who else has visited extreme locations on Kerbin, Mun, Duna, or other remapped planets - or just found new amazing views?

Beautiful handling of it though! Just so you can see what I mean about gaps in my scans, here's my current Mun map:

Ooops... forgot to check for "-0.something" latitudes. 0.27 degrees south of the equator there's a mountain 5967 tall. Hope your orbit's really exact, TMS!

Searching through my data again for just points with "0.something" as latitude, I get 5873.2 elevation at -129 longitude on the equator. The equator is where my data had the biggest gaps still so there could be something even higher.

After gathering mapsat data overnight but not yet having full coverage of the Mun, the highest point it shows in the raw data is 7054.9. There might be higher points out there that I didn't get, but I got full coverage of both polar regions and that seems to be the highest points.

This sounds like something's badly broken indeed. The prime candidate is a corrupted game install, and the first step would be to completely delete the game and reinstall from scratch (and rebuild your craft by hand rather than copy over the .craft file.) If the problem's still happening after that, someone needs to contact an exorcist.

The version linked in the first post is not the dev version. Click through to the developer's blog (in his signature) to get version X4r1 - second post down in his blog.

Right now I'm busy mapping out Kerbin's new elevations, but I plan to mapsat the Mun next; if you haven't gotten an answer before that's done, I'll post what I find in the raw data from mapsat.

Building a colony on Minmus is almost too easy - whereas with Laythe, the higher challenge is so much more fulfilling when you suceed! Also, missing from the Minmus pros / Laythe cons: Gravity. It will be somewhat harder to do targetted landings on Laythe, and MUCH harder to send anything back to orbit from Laythe.

Thanks very much.

I'm seeing many references to enabling "update hilo.dat" in the last few pages - but I'm sure many other people than just me have no idea where to set that. Anyone able to provide directions for us casual mapsat users who don't know where this settings screen/file/whatever is?

Did they still have the amusement park rides? When I visited in the 90's they had one that was basically 30 person 3G centrifuge, and one that was an open frame around a tower - that one threw you up into the air at about 3 G's and then you got to feel a few seconds of free fall. I remembered to take my glasses off at the very last second and then nearly lost them during the free fall portion.

Every new version, I start over from scratch; the first flight is always a pod with chute on top of the smaller 1m SRB. Wherever it lands I used to just abandon the pod and leave it there; since .20 I'm planting a "First Flight" flag there instead.

Or they could have stuck with one of the original proposed names, "George" and "Herschel". Imagine that one - Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, George, Neptune. Come to think of it, King George III was kind of a... well, inner 10-year-old joke. Us rebellious colonists might have a biased view on that one though.

Go on, let him out, so we can move on to "your mom" jokes. Side note: In Russian black holes are called "frozen stars" instead, because black hole meant the same thing that Uranus means to your 10-year-old... not that I'm getting a head start on the "yo mamma so heavy" jokes or anything. =) And, on that note, I'm just gonna go back to General Discussion for a bit!

That's a completely different question. Is it worth a separate thread, or continue it here? Material to start that discussion either way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_extinction From that material, there doesn't seem to be much evidence for a fixed 26 million year cycle. The most recent mass extinctions found in the fossil record are: current day, (I'm going to ignore the oceans-only 2 million year ago one), 14.5 million years ago, 33.9 million years ago, the Big One 66 million years ago, and then one at 117 million years ago. That's closer to supporting a 33 million year cycle than a 26 million year one. Meteor impacts and massive volcanic events are considered the likely causes of all of those recent ones except the current one, which is due to "human activity" in the last 50000 years or so. It's a little freaky to reflect on human beings cultivating crops for, at the minimum, the last 10000 years; and hunting large land animals to extinction starting 50000 years ago. Time scales like that are utterly outside our daily lives but very real for the species as a whole.