ModZero

So, sorry if someone already did that, but I did a mindless config for @Nertea's space station & spacecraft habs and cupolas, along the lines from the comment on top of LSModule.cfg (if I understood them properly, which isn't a given this late). It's nothing special, but seems to be working and maybe it's fine as a template for someone.

I'd expect that. Kerbals, being fairly small, obviously have shorter digestive tracts than humans. That means that, like Earth cats, they have more stringent requirements on what they can and cannot eat – particularly I'd expect less tolerance of non-digestible stuffing (because they can't process it away). Things really depend on details (rats are pretty good at being highly adaptable omnivores, but they're also very small), but I wouldn't be surprised at all if they were obligate carnivores. This here vegan is not amused :-( edit: this is also a case for increasing the living space needs. Possibly to one Kerbal per vessel, no sharp objects.

@artwhaley made the crewed one back in .25 times, thread's here. It would probably need fixes, lots of fixes ;-)

I'd be with you if it was starving capsules of funding, like certain other vehicles, but this way I'm happy to see some variety, both for aesthetic reasons, and because a bit of redundancy and alternative design can be healthy.

Not really, NASA is mostly using a mix of Space X and ULA launchers, and will probably want to keep it like that to avoid vendor lock-in.

It's alive! (the vehicle, not the thread)

In promotional stuff they mention both Atlas V or Ariane V, or anything with a 5m fairing. EDIT: the gadget-fan in me is so happy about Dream Chaser actually becoming a thing. EDIT2: also, the 2016 test flight is supposed to be Atlas V

Oh, and to defend the EP thing a bit, it's actually something we do already, for example this is a presentation on the subject from Eutelsat, and this article mentions an accurate delivery helped them save weeks off the delivery time — so the entire thing isn't unheard of.

5900 is the proposed starting orbit because that's outside the lower VA belt (that's what the manual says). Of course if we go into, erm, "advanced concepts", we could just discharge the belts ;-P

Pretty sure USI doesn't require it, but both @NecroBones's mods and new Infernal Robotics really like having TweakScale around (especially the latter is a mess without some sort of rescaling). But yeah, it caused me pain as well, I keep it around for the things I mentioned but I delete all the bundled configs.

Well, if you want to speculate about propellants for the upper stage, refer to the user manual (which somehow is a thing that exists), appendix B, which states engines with impulse of 4562N*s/kg (yay! A real unit! In KSP units, that's 1.6 uranium-241 half-lifes), which sounds reasonable, but not exactly an ion engine. EDIT: oops, I used the old version of the manual. There is a more recent version here, which actually mentions electric propulsion. I guess they'd go for some of the more recent concepts, some of which sacrifice some of the efficiency for higher (but still not that high) thrusts. EDIT2: the electric one proposes a 20kW thruster to do a relatively quick boost to 5900km circular, and then having the payload use its own thrusters to get to the target over 130-160 days. So not quite two years.

Hah, you know, I might have been joking about Skylon metastasising, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if Alan Bond was actually motivated by hopes that military will step in and ask them to use Skylon for moving volatile "fuel" inside. Which won't happen, because the one military crazy and overfunded enough to go for that doesn't particularly like international suppliers, but hey, a founder can dream.

Well, Skylon is uncrewed (hear that sound? That's dreams being shattered), so it's just the super-expensive lifter you're going to lose.

Oh, definitely. It's a nice joystick that's comfortable and looks great, but it's definitely a luxury thing.

AFAIR that's how much extra dV they get thanks to using air-breathing engines instead of rockets. Which is nothing to sniff at, but not something to go to the Mun on either.

Depends on your needs, actually. I love my Thrustmaster HOTAS Warthog, but AFAIK some come with a throttle with a click-able zero point in the middle, which can be neat for things like Elite:Dangerous. For KSP it works perfectly fine, if kinda over-featured. And remember the rudder, because you do need a rudder in KSP. Not sure if yours has a twist grip, but it's either that, or pedals. Pedals are cool and work great, but they take up a lot of space. EDIT: also, obligatory: this joystick. Tell me if you find a mass-market one ;-)

They're boring right until the moment one kills you. Well, (I'm playing cool pointless (geddit?) toys advocate here) they mostly try to spin the point as an opportunity to change business models — creating an airline-like split between manufacturers, operators and end customers. They also spin the fact that Skylon would have enormous cross-range capability, able to take a load in UK, fly half the world to a proper space center, drop the loadrefuel and go back to the military basego to orbit from an equatorial location. I'm, uh, sceptical, it all feels like there's too many moving parts in the idea, but hey, they have the pre cooler working and they've been trying to get that hypersonic bomber, sorry, suborbital transport, sorry again, light cross-range capable reusable LEO lifter thing going for what, three decades now? Let's cut them some slack for enthusiasm ;-) Isn't that really close to what a typical Soyuz has once in orbit? It would give a nice idea about what that dV actually means (no, you're not going to get to orbit on that, but you might get a rendezvous with ISS, if the ISS is still around, that is).

Well, they're hoping that there's a large market currently suppressed by a lack of Skylons (that must pay the hefty r&d and unit cost somehow). I'm trying to not roll my eyes too hard because technologically it's kinda cool. Really, I'm just hoping the project doesn't suddenly metastasize into some sort of hypersonic bomber or something equally lame and boring.

Skylon won't actually win all that much dV from the jet mode, just enough to be viable at all, really (I don't remember exact numbers, but they've shown up multiple times in NasaSpaceflight forums, with sources and knowledgable (and not-so-knowledgable) people reading it, if you want to dig for sources). It's not really a heavy lift launcher, and it will need an upper stage (hopefully reusable? They made some noises about it, but that's a lot of mass for questionable win) to get things into high orbits. They're hoping for a business model efficient in terms of profits, not really a lifter efficient in terms of mass-to-LEO.

Radiation isn't a concern because it's unreasonable to stick meatbags into these anyway, and the electronics won't have to survive long enough for this to be an issue. While you need a healthy approach speed, you don't need to accelerate along the course as much as you need to be able to remain unpredictable on approach, and a "main engine + RCS" setup tend to commit you to relatively predictable trajectories compared to "just fire all the stuff randomly with thrusts that would convert a meatbag into Chipotle. And if someone sent a meatbag at you, rejoice, as this limits their manoeuvrability and lets you convert it into a fry with a boring gamma ray.

You don't need a turning rate, you need full size engines on your sides, and potentially much lower twr for "proper" acceleration. And if you get close enough, just explode yourself throwing out lots of directional shrapnel, interesting radiation and anything else you can think about, you're going to die anyway.

Jokes are serious business.

That's not really it. Not many people treat this game seriously because I'm pretty darn sure it's not supposed to be taken very seriously. It's more due to a dislike of the 1337 crowd, because in experience of at least some of us they tend to be the Internet equivalent of the rich lad groups that trash restaurants for fun. It's something you get the first time a bunch of script kiddies wreck an IRC channel you hang out at just because they had more bots around, or when another bunch takes down your country's connection in the middle of your chat with your girlfriend (ah, late nineties, when 35-million strong countries had just a few upstream pipes) just because someone wanted some random channel and had an older brother working at some ISP or something. Oh, and turning discussions on Slashdot (I'm that old, I remember when people used to go to Slashdot) unreadable. To make things even worse, l337sp34k is also some of us did as teenagers, and therefore are madly embarrassed about now ;-) so there's a certain culture clash which would make such a name a rather groan-worthy joke for a chunk of the audience. And me, if I want a groan-some joke, I'd rather go with a pun.

That's Astrobotic, which I spent time googling. Can't find the lunar orbit one, I know of DSCOVR, but that's at sun-earth L1, using a bunch of moon swing-bys, AFAIK.

Specifically charged particles, which are "radiation" (remember, gamma radiation is also a bunch of particles, photons in this case), and while you need some sort of amplification to fry a power plant, you probably don't need all that much to fry a satellite by exciting the electrons inside the satellite itself (or messing with its panels, for example). I am suspicious about using even small nukes near Earth because of reports of interference from pretty weak sources (TOPAZ messed up gamma ray detectors, which we do have quite a few around Earth) and damage from SP which happened high up to satellites orbiting even higher up. Of course, if anything serious were to start happening re Orion, we'd get real numbers and real risks. EDIT: also, I'm not a physicist, I only used to be reasonably good at basic physics 15 years ago (gosh I'm old), don't treat me much more seriously than Wikipedia, and you shouldn't treat Wikipedia too seriously. But do be suspicious of magical spaceship drives that only got rejected because nobody would understand the true genius of every single space nerd ;-)