Northstar1989

The Cycler Ship and Interceptor Ship can be close derivatives of each other, like I've been pointing out! Basically, the current ITS design is already capable of functioning as either- though to obtain mass-savings you either need to cut down on the size of the crew-quarters on the interceptor ship, or literally just cram twice as many people into the ITS to be used as an Interceptor as it is built to support long-term. When it meets up with the ITS you left in a Cycler Orbit, you transfer half of them over to the new ship (the one added capability you need is the ability to transfer crew when docked- although Musk has already said the ITS might have that as well in order to send crew up on capsules after launch, if it turns out the orbital refueling process takes months instead of days). When you reach Mars, you cram them all back into the interceptor ITS. All the other changes to the Interceptor and Cycler versions are solely to make them even MORE more cost-effective (such as removing the landing legs and heatshield from the Cycler version). You could literally just forget all of them if the cost proved not worth the benefit, re-use the same exact same design twice with a double crew-complement crammed into one at launch like I said, and cut your cost-per-colonist roughly in half (the exact cost-savings depend on how many times you re-use the ITS left in a Cycler Orbit). Regards, Northstar

With growth-lamps. Indoors. A bit like hippies growing, ahem, "vegetables" in their basements, but with better climate-control of the room and some of the world's best botanists coming up with ideas for the early efforts. Actually, maybe this is more like the recent project to grow vegetables in abandoned air raid shelters and subway under London (or for that matter, efforts to grow crops on the International Space Station- except Mars has gravity). Look it up.

I'm still really amazed to hit upon the fact that the Delta-V requirements of taking the ITS to Mars, and using it as a Cycler Ship, are basically identical. This is actually really important, because it means that even without re-designing the Interplanetary Transport Ship at all, in any way whatsoever, SpaceX could easily use this to build consumer confidence. Just launch one ITS unmanned, intentionally missing Mars by a little, with the same Delta-V burn it would take to reach Mars, and it enters a Cycler Orbit. Use some of the fuel you normally would have used for capture and landing for course-corrections, and save the rest for a backup/emergency reserve. When the ITS swings by Earth again in its Cycler Orbit, having already made a distant flyby of Mars, you'll have plenty of volunteers to board an identical ITS and rendezvous with it, such as to have extra living-space for the journey (TWO luxurious spaceships instead if one!). If for some reason you failed to rendezvous and dock, the crew would have the assurance of knowing their ITS is perfectly capable of reaching Mars on its own. Meanwhile, you can be working on an interceptor version of the ITS that trades crew accommodations for extra fuel tankage on launch (so it requires less orbital refueling) and make use of it the NEXT transfer-window, or the one after that. You could even bring back the very first ITS after a couple cycle orbits to Earth and refurbish it for more traditional use again, but not start development of the interceptor-version and an ITS actually specialized for use as a Cycler Ship (meaning you reduce the fuel tankage, strip the heatshield/landing-legs, and add stuff like extra radiation-shielding and a greenhouse) until you've already landed an ITS on Mars- and fund its development in part with profit from the more traditional missions, incorporating design improvements from lessons learned flying the first ITS designs along the way... Seriously, I think this is a really good idea. Is there anybody here who is good at formal/business/technical writing who would be willing to double-check the assumptions here a bit, and kindly write to SpaceX to inform them that the version of Interplanetary Transport Ship that Elon Musk presented on this month actually meets all the technical requirements (Delta-V budget, crew accommodations, navigational systems, refueling ability, etc.) for use as a Cycler Ship- with the sole exception that when it docks with another ship it needs to have the capability to transfer over crew and basic supplies as well as fuel? Regards, Northstar

Re-quoting because this got buried under newer posts surprisingly quickly, and my final list is actually to be about 5 or 6 items long. Here's #4: (4) Instead of designing the ITS as a Mars transit vehicle that is responsible for supporting the crew all the way to the surface of Mars (or LMO if a dedicated lander were utilized instead of the plan Musk presented), design it as an interceptor-ship to meet up with an Aldrin Cycler Ship to Mars. The design for a good interceptor is basically the same- a big spacecraft with a lot of Delta-V and a large crew capacity, which you can get to LEO by using it as its own upper-stage stage and refueling it in LEO before proceeding further. But instead of carrying lots of living space for each crew member sufficient to last months, it should pack the crew in like sardines and only have enough life support for a few days. When the Cycler ship swings by Earth, the interceptor ship would speed up to match velocity, and should easily be able to rendezvous within a few hours (although stretching that out to closer to 24 might reduce fuel consumption). The crew would then transfer over to the Cycler Ship (which would be about the mass of the current ITS on the launchpad, but with slightly more of that mass dedicated to crew accommodations and life support, since it wouldn't need a heatshield or landing equipment, and it takes about the same mass to reach a Cycler Orbit as it does to make a 3-5 month transfer to Mars. In fact, Musk may have selected the current trajectory-time for the ITS since it is almost exactly right to turn into a Cycler Orbit with a small course-correction and make a free return to Earth as a possible emergency abort-option...) and remain on the Cycler until shortly before passing by Mars. At this point, they would board the interceptor again, and make a course-correction to aerocapture at Mars... An interceptor-ship version of the ITS would obviously be a lot lighter than the current ITS due to its much more draconian crew accommodations. The extra mass freed up that the booster is capable of lifting could be used in a variety of ways, but the most useful to me would seem to be launching with full, somewhat larger fuel tanks (in its current form, the ITS launches with only a partial fuel-load, since it would be too heavy for the booster if it launched fully-fueled). This would mean the ITS would reach orbit with fuel to spare, and reduce the number of tanker launches necessary to fully refuel it for its Mars injection- thus saving money. I would advocate shrinking the booster and fuel tanks and sticking with the current strategy of partially-loading and completely refueling instead, but the booster ought to be kept its current size to allow for the Cycler Ship to launch atop it the same way the ITS would (as the Cycler Ship would require about the same booster nominal capacity as the current ITS, though the redesigned ITS would have a lower dry mass...) The transit-time to Mars on a Cycler Orbit is 146 days- almost *exactly* the same voyage and Delta-V as the 3-5 month journey the ITS is designed for. In fact, when the Earth-Mars distance is such that the current ITS would make a 5-month journey, the only real difference between the current ITS trajectory and that of a Cycler Ship is that you intentionally miss Mars by a bit, so that its gravity doesn't change your orbital period too much... Similarly, a Cycler Ship only needs to support crew for 5 months (the short leg of its orbit). So the necessary crew accommodations would be almost identical to the current ITS- except that not needing a heatshield or to carry any fuel aboard for a Mars capture or surface landing would give you a bit more mass to play around with for things like better radiation-shielding, a small greenhouse to reduce the demands on the life-support system and provide fresh food to improve crew morale, solar sails to reduce fuel consumption needed for station-keeping and small course-corrections, and even MORE crew living-space than you find in Musk's current ITS design. Realizing that the Delta-V needed to establish a Cycler Orbit, and the Delta-V needed for a 5 month Mars journey like in Musk's current plan are almost IDENTICAL kind of struck me dumb. It's like finding a Christmas gift you missed opening- in June. It basically means that if Elon Musk wanted to switch to a Cycler Ship type mission-plan, he wouldn't even have to throw out the ITS design he is presumably already working on at SpaceX. The company could just use THAT design, with its luxurious crew accommodations, as the Cycler Ship (ideally they'd still shrink the fuel tanks a bit, remove the heatshield, lughten the structural reinforcement needed for re-entry and landing, and rededicate that mass to other things- but they wouldn't have to), and design another version of the ITS as an interceptor-ship with greatly reduced crew accommodations and slightly larger fuel tanks. Both could launch atop the current behemoth booster design, and the only real change to their launch cycle would be an extra launch in the second transfer-window for the Cycler Ship (the current launch schedule calls for the launch of a cargo-only ITS a window ahead ofvthe first frewed mission to land the ISRU and test the design for safety/reliability). The first time around they send crew to Mars they could even dock the interceptor and cycler-ship together BEFORE their Mars injection in order to save fuel vs. a rendezvous is solar orbit... (they'd even be able to fire their engines together with a bit of differential throttling between the two, since they'd have very similar masses and probably even shapes when both fully-fueled). Regards, Northstar

Mass efficiency strongly correlates with cost efficiency in this case. They plan on sending literally thousands of ITS missions to Mars, so it would be far better to invest in the R&D for a system with lower marginal costs for each mission than one with minimal R&D but high ongoing costs (which us what SLS represents, basically- or would if Congress and NASA hadn't managed to turn it into a fiscal black hole despite mostly just re-using Shuttle-derived hardware in its design...)

DRA? That the lander (and for that matter the ITS) would and should capture into LMO before Mars descent is patently obvious. Though I will admit, the best place to store the lander between transfer-windows is probably on the ground, at the ISRU site. This way the lander wouldn't need heavily-insulated propellant tanks and an active-cooling system to store the propellant needed for a Mars ascent or propulsive landing for the years between transfer-windows (note you could re-use the lander every transfer-window). The lander would probably reach Mars in the first place using its own MethLOX propellant stores for an unmanned TMI, but capture into orbit using a combination of aerocapture and repeated aerobrakes, and a small hypergolic orbital maneuvering system that it would use to circularize after aerocapture, dock with the ITS, and would replenish from stores on the ITS (which uses a cold gas RCS system, but could certainly carry some tiny amount of hypergolics from Earth for the purposes of refueling the lander) between each trip to the surface... Alternatively, a combination of cold-gas Methane-propelled thrusters and a small more heavily-insulated propellant tank only connected to the OMS and refueling lines would work (although with the required insulation and cooling, it would actually mass more), and allow for reliance on ISRU even for the RCS system. Regards, Northstar

Don't worry if you missed it- some of this (llike the 20 ton return capacity) I actually got from other comments Musk made to reporters about ITS following the presentation. Even if the lander were designed to carry up all crew and fuel at once, you'd still save on heatshielding, structure (since the ITS would be subjected to fewer max G's), and if you used dedicated capsules to ferry crew to and from the ITS in LEO (leaving the ITS in LEO after return would also be a lot cheaper than re-launching it after every trip) landing legs- which aren't trivial for a ship this size. Plus, you don't end up accelerating empty tankage used to attain LMO from the Martian surface back to Earth, the lander has a lower ballistic coefficient, and the lander should be much smaller and have a higher TWR since it doesn't need to carry large lavish crew quarters built for a seceral month voyage. In short, you save mass in a lot of ways even *IF* you can't store up the propellant needed for several trips to ferry the crew to the ITS and use a smaller lander multiple times each transfer window. But Musk explicitly stated the ITS would be re-used every 26 months (transfer window), so this implies that he must be planning on storing up propellant on the surface, as I doubt he intends to produce all the return fuel in the month or so you'd have to return to Earth after a 3-5 month voyage, before it became too far past the teansfer window and the Delta-V requiremwnts became too large... (that Musk is apparently planning on returning the ITS in the same teansfer window also makes me think he's planning on a longer, slower return voyage, since even 3-5 months will sunstantially increase the minimum Delta-V needed for a return...) Regards, Northstar

Read what I wrote more carefully. I explicitly said the lander should bring fuel "back up" to the ITS. This was obviously so that it can refuel the ITS, and it doesn't need to bring its return-fuel from Earth, as it can use propellant produced from ISRU on the Martian surface... I'm going to edit and clarify that point further, since I doubt you will be the last person to misread what I wrote about a lander... You also don't need to be able to take all 100 people back up to Mars orbit at once. The whole point of this is that you're establishing a permanent surface colony. So you're clearly going to leave them behind on the surface- the only people you bring back up are those who want to return to Earth, and Musk himself has said the nominal return capacity to Earth is only about 20 tons- so clearly you couldn't bring all 100 back at once anyways... Finally, what's this about dragging along an 100-man capsule? And plrase don't use acronyms that aren't clearly obvious from the context and have been used before. I don't know what you mean by "EDL". Anyways, using a dedicated lander doesn't mean you eliminate the capability to conduct a propulsive-landing: the thrust for that is already more or less baked-in with the ITS having the TWR to be used as its own upper-stage on LEO ascent, and slapping on some landing legs and extea avionics isn't THAT big a deal. Rather, the main benefit is reducing the maximum Delta-V gap the ITS is designed for, and the robustness of its structure and heatshielding (Mars re-entry would subject it to higher maximum G's than Earth re-entry). Regards, Northstar

There are a number of ways SpaceX could improve the efficiency of their plan: (1) Use a dedicated, reusable lander instead of taking the ITS all the way from LEO to the surface of Mars, and back again, each mission. This way the ITS won't need to carry enough fuel to both make it to Low Mars Orbit from the surface AND return to Earth in a single stage (the lander should carry crew down to the surface on each trip, and fuel back up to the ITS. Possibly these two functions could be seperated into different specialized landers for each task to obtain greater efficiency.) The lander or landers would transfer fuel to the ITS after each ascent, in a similar manner to the tanker refueling the ITS in LEO. Aside from reducing the Delta-V the ITS needs to carry and allowing the ITS to avoid the need to carry as much heatshielding (the presentation by Musk shows that the most difficult re-entry with the most maximum G's will actually be on Mars, not Earth) this also benefits from the fact that smaller vessels have lower ballistic coefficients due to the Square-Cube Law (so the lander should experience fewer maximum G's during Mars re-entry), and avoids the need to accelerate any empty tank-mass (originally used to hold the fuel for Mars ascent) from Low Mars Orbit back to Earth. (2) Send the cargo seperately from the crew. This will allow them to to shrink the MCT and use a smaller booster instead of a 42-engine behemoth, thus increasing their launch-volume. The closer you get to mass-producing your rockets and keeping your launchpads in constant use, the better your economics... (3) Send the cargo a transfer-window ahead of the crew, on a slower trajectory. We know the ITS is already capable of a minimum of 5.4 km/s in order to finish its orbital insertion after booster separation, and most estimates put the transfer trajectory at about 6 km/s based on the 3-5 month table in Elon's presentation, plus they must have additional Delta-V for orbital circularization after aerocapture ,and landing... So the determining factor on the size of the spacecraft fuel tanks is the Delta-V needed for Mars insertion, capture, and landing- not for initial LEO insertion... This means that if you developed a cargo-only variant of the ITS you could increase its payload, and send it on a slower transfer (we already know the launch stage is capable of handling a heavier upper stage than the crewed ITS, since the tanker variant weighs about 25 tons more on the launchpad...) since you wouldn't need as much Delta-V for TMI. The slowest Mars transfers possible take about 16-18 months and 3.1 km/s (minus gravity-assists from the Moon), so there's certainly room in the Delta-V budget for extra cargo, especially if you're willing to not return the cargo-only ITS to Earth for reloading until the NEXT transfer-window (transfer windows come every 26 months, so otherwise you probably wouldn't want to take longer than about 7-8 months getting to Mars so you'd have plenty of time to unload cargo, head back to Earth a good bit past the transfer-window, and load more cargo before the next transfer window...)

I have an SSD. So the hard disk is actually quite fast. It does have awfully high baseline processor usage though. Thrashing, so that's what's going on... Getting more RAM isn't an option for me. I'm broke. I recently moved to be close to a city where I could actually use my skill set (a graduate degree in Biology, and Boston) but I haven't gotten a job yet, and am living from childhood home. Making some follow-up calls about some job apps tomorrow (including returning a voicemail from a job agent), so fingers crossed... Life would have been so much easier if I had a driver's license so I wouldn't have ended up stuck in rural Illinois for 2 years after grad school without the $ to move back to MA (I applied to a few jobs with relocation packages- but didn't get any bites), and could have started using my skills right away- or if the minimum wage weren't so darn low that I had a hard time saving up for the move- even working 2 jobs- but such is life... Regards, Northstar

Just to be clear, Big Dumb Boosters a la Sea Dragon didNOT have safety issues. Let me put this in KSP terms for you. A Big Dumb Booster in the style of Sea Dragon would be like if there were a line of parts you could buy in KSP that were quite a bit heavier and had inferior performance, but cost a third as much. You'd end up needing a bigger rocket in the end, but you'd still save money. A rocket like Aquarius, I won't even refer to as a Big Dumb Booster anymore to avoid the potential for confusion. Instead I'll call it a Discount-Cost Low-Reliability (DCLR) Rocket. A DCLR rocket like Aquarius is an entirely different concept. It would be like if you could buy a line of parts in KSP that were slightly lighter and a third the cost, but had a random chance of failing in a mission-breaking way during launch. It would save you money, but only on low-cost payloads like fuel... Regards, Northstar

You would launch the lander "dry" (with empty onboard fuel tanks) and launch its fuel on a separate launch. In fact there are actually some benefits to not transferring the fuel to the lander at all until right before your Mars landing (from an orbit-to-orbit transfer vessel like the Copernicus- and only just enough to land, as you can refuel with ISRU on the surface) has some major benefits- because then you don't need nearly as much insulation or structural reinforcement on the lander tanks (pressure vessels experience stresses over time, so the linger they have to remain full, the stronger/heavier they have to be). You can also launch the fuel in small increments on smaller, more cost-effective launchers this way. And, if you already have to work on improving technology for orbital fuel transfer (the tech exists, but has only thus far been used in tests transferring small amounts of hypergolics between specially-designed satellites. Cryogenic fuel transfer is much more difficult...) then you might even have motive to go ahead and develop something like a Propulsive Fluid Accumulator or a small, low-cost low-reliability launcher specialized for economies of scale and launching disposable payloads like food and fuel that you can easily replace in a launch-failure (something a la the Aquarius rocket...) to get your propellant in orbit even more cheaply... Also, if you are running your Mars lander on MethLOX, you can design its engines to run very O2-rich, or even cut in small amounts of an inert dense gas like CO2. This will reduce your ISP, but increase both Thrust and fuel-density (because O2 and CO2 are both denser than CH4), which will actually allow you to return to orbit with a smaller lander, by giving you a better mass-fraction of fuel... Regards, Northstar

Antimatter should not be exhaustible. First of all, it's very spread out, and virtually impossible you could harvest it all. Second, it naturally replenishes over time. I think I read the entire antimatter population of the Van Allen belts is replaced once every 16-32 years? (depending on solar wind conditions dyring those decades) That's not a fast rate, but it *is* on a timescale that's relevant to KSP, especially when players are conducting multi-year missions to Eeelo and Jool... Regards, Northstar

This thread is for the discussion of Blue Origin's proposed "New Glenn" rocket, which is a beast of a heavy lift vehicle (though not as heavy as some historical or proposed lifters, it still beats everything currently in use...) and would rely on first-stage reusability, much like the Falcon 9/Heavy rockets of SpaceX. It will come in both a 2 and 3-stage version, with the 3-stage version having higher payload . Feel free to discuss here. More detail and maybe some pics of the design art!) probably coming soon. Regards, Northstar

His ISP is too low for the BE-4. Since he doesn't have any reliable ISP data, he takes a guess of 315/338 sl/vac (based on quote "eyeballing" the expansion ratio and comparing the chamber pressure to known KeroLOX engines- these are both very poor predictors of the performance). This would be reasonable for a KeroLOX engine, but MethLOX is a lighter propellant and gets better ISP for the same chamber pressure and expansion ratio. The closest known engine is the Raptor, which we have reliable ISP stats on that were released in June 2014 (earlier figures were just speculation)- 320/380. As the BE-4 is Staged Combustion, but not Full-Flow Staged Combustion like the Raptor, an ISP of say 316/355 or 316/360 might be appropriate for the BE-4. Which means that the YouTuber's payload capacity is too low, even BEFORE you account for RTLS vs. barge-landing... Regards, Northstar

Works like a charm for me. I was wondering why KSP was running so horribly on my 64-bit system... Now my memory usage dropped by nearly 400 MB (though this may also be due to Razer Cortex's boost function working better with the 64 bit exe) and the game runs smoother than it has for years on my system... Regards, Northstar

Well the second two points are already part of the system as-is. At least the part about the ability to convert EC to MJ and transmit it (this is currently implemented as a patch for solar panel parts allowing them to convert excess EC to MJ, and code for the old Microwave Receivers that allowed them to sense and transmit these MJ from solar power even when unloaded, so long as the craft were in direct sunlight...) The distance calculation currently allows for unrealistically small transmitter apertures because building ground-based infrastructure the size of a football field or larger (how large a ground-based array would be in real life) is and remains un-fun and near impossible in KSP. I would encourage an increase to the transmitter part mass, however, to reflect that a transmitter with the same capabilities would be a bit heavier in real life... (note that the old transmitters already mass much more than they should for their in-game size, which Fractal_UK undoubtedly did for balance reasons...) The old transmitter parts (I haven't really seen or done much with the new part you added more recently) as developed by Fractal_UK already did the job they were intended to in a fun and reasonably balanced and realistic manner without needless complexity. I had just assumed that the new part you added to replace the old was for visual reasons more than anything- but I don't understand why you would feel the need to go in and change the underlying code... Fractal's system for MBP, with 2 transceiver parts (one deployable for larger aperture in a reasonable-sized part. Note that in the original system aperture DOES matter for receiver efficiency, although it has no effect on transmitter capabilities) and one smaller dedicated receiver part worked just fine. I wouldn't advise going and ripping it up- in fact I would suggest returning to the original transceiver parts if possible (the new part you added recently might work for a dedicated receiver- although Fractal's version had the advantage of re-using a stock antenna texture, which could lead to RAM savings if coded correctly to recognize this texture-sharing and not duplicate textures already i stock, like Stock Extension mod currently does...) As for the new transmitter parts you suggest, the physics are completely wrong. Microwave Beamed Power, in the wavelengths usable, is not ever produced by cyclotrons or such. It's produced using gyrotrons, or possibly magnetrons (in a shorter wavelength), both of which are MUCH lighter, cheaper, and more compact than any known cyclotron of similar power... Lasers aren't a bad idea- but only for use in a separate laser-sail system entirely distinct from the MBP system (although perhaps sharing the same ststem to determine if a receiver can "see" a transmitter). They could also be used to give extra power to solar panels (and with much less power loss over distance than microwaves)- but not microwaves, which would just pass through any solar panel as the wavelengths do not match for a microwave and a photovoltaic... Finally, atmospheric absorption already occurs. At least it did in the MBP system as built by Fractal_UK, unless you somehow disabled this functionality in trying to add your new MBP part recently. Didn't you ever notice that you would lose a lot more power when beaming through the atmosphere at an angle than straight up? I used to play around with MBP all the time back in 0.23.5 up through maybe 0.90 (when KSP became too laggy for my computer to handle the additional stress of the MBP system), so I have a lot of firsthand experience with exactly this phenomenon. Go and dig up the old parts, or Fractal_UK's last version of the original KSP-I plus the correct version of KSP (it's perfectly possible to install and run outdated versions of KSP at any time) if you don't believe me... Regards, Northstar

I must admit, I'm a bit confusedby all the talk of 'together alone' being this horrible thing, or griefing... Together Alone is literally the signature feature of my second favorite game of all time- Minecraft. And it'sdatill a great game for MP- even with griefing. It's not like player communities don't work out ways to deal with such things anyways... Whitelists anyone? KSO also has something unique from Minecraft that should make MP much more gratifying. Fundamentally, it's a hard game. It requires a lot of technical knowledge and planning to carry out really impressive things like an off-world ISRU infrastructure, and thus multiplayer would allow players to split up tasks and only do the things they like while contributing to something greater. For instance, maybe I really like flying spaceplanes, so I just build and fly soaceplanes to orbit carrying other player's payloads there for them and leaving them in LKO. Could work really nice in a MP career mode, as it would create economic incentives for specialization like that... Regards, Northstar

Solar Power Sats in Low Kerbol Orbit are useful mainly in that they don't require any additional reactor fuel. Ever. They will never really match the power output of a nice, large nuclear reactor close to the vessel you are beaming power to unless you build a ton of them. You can get a solar power sat from Low Kerbin Orbit all the way to Low Kerbol Orbit with proper use of nothing but a Solar Sail and the mods allowing thrust and rotation while in time-warp though, or haul them to Low Kerbol Orbit with a reusable tug that refuels off ISRU propellants, so the strategy can be rather cost-effective in career-mode for providing moderate amounts of power over a very long period of time. Something like an ISRU base (if you're willing to baby-sit it and time-warp: I don't remember if Microwave Beamed Power works for ISRU when a craft is unloaded...) Speaking of that- what ARE your plans for the MBP overhaul @FreeThinker? Feel free to PM me about the topic. Also, note that I just sent you another lonnnggg PM on the theoretical aspects of thermal rocket performance in response to an old PM I never replied to. I really do think I get carried away with those explanations sometimes... Regards, Northstar

If anyone is up for some "ahem" light reading on futuristic spacecraft propulsion (a lot of the kind of stuff we deal with in KSP-Interstellar) I suggest taking a look at this book. Do note that it costs $88 to buy a hard copy, however. https://books.google.com/books?id=aI9QhDA4AVwC&lpg=PA385&ots=Nl9KggVmi7&dq="specific energy" ISP&pg=PR1#v=onepage&q="specific energy" ISP&f=false Regards, Northstar

To get off the ground at a very low take-off speed, you want to produce lots of lift. But this doesn't necessarily need to be on the ground- in fact the more lift you produce on the runway, the more drag you experience there as well. If your wheels don't produce too much friction (mind you can tweak the friction way down in 1.13) then you are better off relying on the normal force of the ground on the wheels to support your plane rather than lift while it is still on the runway so you can get up to takeoff speed as quickly as possible. Try, basically, to build in as much lift and as little weight as possible. The more thrust and the less drag/friction you have on the runway the better as well, as it will help you get up to speed more quickly. Only try to nose up once you have enough speed for take-off (this will take a little trial-and-error and reverting)- trying to nose up before this point will only create additional drag from your control surfaces- and in the case of rear elevators, will actually produce negative lift that will press you more firmly into the runway (increasing friction with it). Flaps help because they produce additional lift when deployed. Flaps should ideally go either forward of or at the center-of-mass however, as placing them too far back will push the nose down and make it harder to nose off the runway... Regards, Northstar

No, it's not. Intake spamming is counterproductive from 1.0 on. All it does is add drag in exchange for air that you can't use. If engines are fed beyond their useful speed and altitude, they will produce nothing but noise, heat, and *negative* thrust at the expense of fuel. The goal now is to have just enough intakes to keep the engines lit while they are still useful while adding as little drag as possible. Precoolers are the new hotness in 1.05. Best, -Slashy I've said this before, but this system is NOT reflective of how real jet engines work, and I think that's a problem. Real jets are completely unaware of outside speed and altitude. All they know are the characteristics of the intake air stream received (its temperature, speed, and oxygen content) and the ambient pressure outside the exhaust nozzle (just like with closed cycle rockets, ambient pressure can compress the exhaust stream, reducing thrust. Just like with a rocket, it is also possible to expand it to a lower pressure and higher speed in the nozzle, increasing thrust when the exhaust pressure exceeds the ambient pressure. Generally, you get the least thrust for a given exhaust stream at sea-level...) This means that, *in theory* intake spamming *should* work with open cycle jet engines (note that technically, rockets are a type of jet engine, hence the open/closed cycle terminology). The *problem* is that you would need to reduce the airstream to the same internal speed without exceeding temperature tolerances. When you compress the airstream to increase its pressure to a usable level, you increase its temperature. When you slow it down, you compress it. This is a problem as intake compressors will overheat and melt if you compress the airstream too much... This is where precoolers could, theoretically, help in real life. Although no precooler has ever been attached to a working jet engine on an aircraft that has flown in real life (this is why the speed and altitude curves are a useful approximation of the performance of a jet engine in KSP as it currently stands- because they reflect the performance limits of the jet's compressors and engines themselves when you don't pre-cool the airstream...), the British *ARE* developing a highly potent precooler system for the SABRE engine (off which the KSP RAPIER is likely inspired), so it's not so far-fetched that KSP has one. In real life, a precooler would work by reducing the temperature of the airstream before it reaches the jet engines, allowing you to slow it down and compress it further. With a powerful enough precooler system, you could theoretically slow down and compress an airstream from *any* speed and pressure to one usable for even the most low-speed of jet engines without loss of thrust or efficiency. Of course, the cost is the mass of the precooler and the need for a heat-sink for all the heat you remove from the airstream... This is *NOT* how precoolers work in stock. In stock they're basically just fancy inline air intakes with no effect on thrust or fuel-efficiency. KSP-Interstellar Extended, however, *USED TO* include precooler code that allowed the stock precoolers (as well as precooler parts unique to the mod) to act much like they would in real life. That is, when attached to an air intake and an engine, they would fool the engine into thinking it was operating at a lower speed/altitude than it actually was. This allowed the mod's Thermal Turbojets to operate up to much higher speeds and altitudes while still producing usable thrust. This also helped prevent jet engines from exploding due to compression-based overheating (KSP-I included code entirely separate from the stock heat system that added heat to engines purely based on the speed and altitude their intakes were operating in). This was especially relevant when the mod included powerful next-gen fission reactors, fusion reactors, and even microwave beamed power networks that could all easily propel a spaceplane to Mach 5 or 6 with a sufficiently precooled intake airstream and well-designed plane, at least in FAR. You'd lose most of your Thrust as you reached Mach 6 in KSP-I, because one precooler was as good as 12 (in real life, you could theoretically just alternate coolers and compressors to reach any desired pressure and airspeed with enough precoolers and compressors). This technology was invaluable for allowing things like my construction of the first-ever working HTHL spaceplane in RSS 64K without cheats (OK, to my knowledge- somebody else might have done it earlier and never told anyone- although another player posted one a month or two later and thought they were first, as I didn't really document it much on the forums... I did have dated Imgur albums however...), the last in which my seies of designs could have even worked in full scale RSS (I built three successive working models in a six-plane series with countless intermediate prototypes between these reference designs- the 3rd was the first suborbital, the 4th was orbital but crashed often, the 5th stable, and the 6th had a higher payload capacity and could have even worked in RSS full-scale with a smaller payload). Note that I limited myself strictly to the lower tiers of fission reactors for this, as I considered fusion and antimatter reactors a tad unrealistic... Anyways, to conclude this very long tangent and get back on-topic, the stock precoolers don't work like this at all. Someone at SQUAD really should consider rewriting them to function more like this- as in real life precoolers aren't air intakes at all, and function mainly to (in combination with compressors- which KSP seems to abstract as part of the engine parts, based on their mass vs. the intakes...) allow jet engines to produce usable thrust at higher speeds and altitudes than they would otherwise work at. Regards, Northstar

I've noticed slight increases to memory usage with Module Manager installed- even greater ones if I add then remove a mod with it installed... I'm trying to run KSP on a craptop with just 2 GB of RAM, so every bit helps... (being poor sucks- it sucks worse when you've worked and studied hard your whole life but been nickel-and-dimed to death... Medical School applications cost thousands of dollars once you take interview travel costs into account, and USA universities, banks, and apartments all love to charge you a million fees...)

Does KJR currently require ModuleManager to be installed? I am running on a *very* tight memory budget with minimal modification in order to try to stop crashes due to my computer running out of memory, and would like to avoid installing it unless necessary... Regards, Northstar

Looks like I wrongly blamed some of the 300 MB on SXT. SXT was using just over 120 MB (still far too much for a "lightweight" mod), FAR and its dependencies was using a bit over 40 MB, and 70 MB more was being used by the Firespitter plugin that came with SXT, Kerbal Joint Reinforcement, and Kerbal Alarm Clock. I discovered this by removing mods 1 by 1. Oddly removing all mods but MechJeb did NOT restore my RAM usage to previous levels before installing all these mods- I seem to have lost about 70 MB vs. a clean install with just MechJeb by adding and then removing mods somehow... (maybe ModuleManager has hidden some config files somewhere besides the GameData folder, and I need to find and delete them?) Regards, Northstar