Northstar1989

Try to remain on-topic. Talk about the technology, not what you think of the website (which is just a website with news about nanotechnology), please.

Take a look at this link: https://genesisnanotech.wordpress.com/2016/04/07/solar-cells-will-be-made-obsolete-by-3d-rectennas-aiming-at-40-to-90-efficiency/ These seem like cool stuff, and sound like they could have major applications for spacecraft if they really can exceed the efficiency of solar panels by so much (in reducing payload-mass needed for electricity generation). They also sound like they could lead to more widespread use of rectennas in general (which would be a good thing for eventual applications of Microwave Beamed Power to beam electricity to power-hungry spacecraft in Low Earth Orbit, such as Propulsive Fluid Accumulators or large ion-propelled probes). However I'm not sufficiently familiar with nanotechnology to accurately evaluate the potential of this technology. What do you guys think? Regards, Northstar

Fast-charging doesn't take two hours. For a Tesla, it's about 20-30 minutes. And when are you ever going to be in such a hurry to travel more than 200 miles in one trip you can't put up your legs and grab a snack every few hours of your trip? The more logical solution for super-fast charging on the go isn't a mobile generator anyways- that's still an incredibly inefficient solution that's bad for the environment. It's batter-exchange stations- where the batteries can charge slowly to maximize battery-life, yet a car can swap a new one in in 30 seconds... Tesla bought the necessary Intellectual Property after Project Better Place went under, but they've only built literally a single commercial battery-swap station and they seem to have no will or desire to build more... It's not surprising not many people would use the battery-swap stations when they buy the car under a purchasing model where they OWN the battery, and there's only one swap-point (so if they end up getting a failing battery from the swap, they're screwed). Now Nissan Altima ZOE owners who make use of the battery-leasing option on the other hand- THEY might be enticed to use battery-swap points if enough of them were built... It's worth pointing out I think that Tesla should sell the Model 3 with a battery-leasing option (buy the car but only lease the battery, for a much smaller initial purchase-price, at the expense of higher monthly costs. It would still be cheaper than any comparable gasoline car's monthly gas bill if priced correctly...) to help make the cars affordable to more customers. Buying the battery fundamentally doesn't make sense with battery-electrics: batteries are more like a multi-year supply of oil than the car- in that they are extremely expensive and slowly consumed as the car is driven around... (yes, I'm aware that the batteries are not LITERALLY consumed, and are re-charged many times over the lifetime of the car- it's an economic analogy for the batteries wearing out...) Regards, Northstar

Range-extended electric vehicles aren't hybrids, exactly. They're 100% electric for short drives, and can be plugged in to be recharged. However running what's essentially a portable generator to recharge the batteries on long trips doesn't make sense when we already have a widespread electrical grid. Tesla's "supercharging" stations or battery-swap stations (a la. "Project Better Place"- and Tesla developed their own versions of this, but then only built a single such station- and charges $60-100 for its use...) are a much better solution, and result in a cheaper car than putting a portable generator on every vehicle. Better yet, you can bring the purchase-price of electric vehicles down further by leasing the batteries instead of including them with the car- as with the Renault Zoe... ($27,500 *before* opting for battery-leasing) A side-note: it's no mystery where Renault got the idea for battery-leasing from. They took it directly from the failed company Project Better Place, just like Tesla took the idea of battery-swap stations from them as well. Unfortunately, Tesla only built a single battery-swap station and massively overcharges for it, so almost nobody uses it- you wouldn't expect anybody to if they OWN rather than LEASE their battery anyways... Some whisper Tesla only built the battery-swap station to get a rather large tax-credit from the State of California valid until 2018...

An S-class has a sticker price of $96,500. This is WAY below the price-range of an S-class. The closest parallel would be something like an Acura ILX ($32,000 with the "Technology Package") or Ford Fusion Titanium ($31,000). In the long-run, the savings on fuel costs and replacement parts (electric cars are far more reliable and have fewer moving parts- thus are much less likely to require repairs) are likely to more than make up for the slightly higher costs vs. those cars.

@Death Engineering Thinking about this challenge more carefully, it appears to share one of the major flaws many such missions have- it rewards you for the # of Kerbals sent, ad infinitum... Such scoring always inevitably leads to players with powerful computers launching massive, extremely high part-count ships that can carry huge numbers of Kerbals, whereas players with weak computers (such as myself) are left in the dust. In fact, working on a Constellation mission re-creation completely separate of this, even 6 Kerbals turned out to be an unbearable burden for my computer in 1.05, given the part-counts well in excess of 100 parts required for any decent level of realism in the re-creation of the planned (and scrubbed) real mission. In summary, I think it is an extremely bad idea to reward players for the # of Kerbals sent without limit. Such challenges should probably be capped at a reasonable (low) number to allow players with weak computers to be competitive- somewhere between 4 and 6 Kerbals... Something to keep in mind if you ever create a 2nd version of this challenge, or anyone reading this is thinking of creating a similar challenge of their own... Regards, Northstar

All the features that are found in Precise Node are already a part of MechJeb's Maneuver Node Editor. To my understanding, the Maneuver Node Editor window in MechJeb actually came before Precise Node was ever developed- though I have no idea whether Precise Node was a MechJeb ripoff of sorts or simply the same exact idea and interface developed independently (in a case of what I, as a biologist, might call "convergent evolution"). Regards, Northstar

Awwww, I'm sorry I hurt your feelings. Yeah- I saw the part about powered landings only *after* my post. It's still only an abstraction though- and doesn't necessarily simulate things like a launch stage falling over and exploding (like the Falcon 9 did on that barge a while back...) from landing crooked, for instance. I think proper design of SpaceX-style launch stages is important to actually getting the funds back- and adds difficulty for reward in a way abstracted landings don't quite. Plus, the propulsive landings just land wherever the trajectory takes them, right? With a Spacex-style landing,, you can get the launch stage right back on the launchpad (or, more commonly in my experience, the runway- I prefer to aim for it as it's a bigger target, and I've only succeeded in landing right on the pad a handful of times...) and get a higher recovery % Regards, Northstar

May I suggest allowing Flight Manager for Reusable Stages as an alternative to Stage Recovery? Flight Manager for Reusable Stages is a far superior option to Stage Recovery (for those players who want to put in the extra effort) because: (1) You can rely on landing methods other than parachutes- increasing your design flexibility. You can rely on wings (and perhaps a few drogue chutes) to glide back to the KSC, or better yet, you can land vertically using a launch stage's launch engines SpaceX Falcon 9 style (trust me, I've done it many, many times before in FMRS, it's easily possible...) which is a much lighter/cheaper option for landing medium and large launch stages than parachutes... (2) You actually are able to CONTROL the landing of your dropped stages. This is critically important when you build in the ability to guide dropped stages back to the KSC rather than simply dropping dumbly on the suborbital trajectory you ejected them at (for instance, if you add a probe core and some batteries to a dropped launch stage, you can perform a short boost-back burn like the Falcon 9 does and end up landing right back on the Launchpad...) It also increases the realism- craft have to actually LAND. This means designs that would fall over and break upon splashdown/touchdown because they are tall, lack landing legs, and are designed to land vertically won't work, for instance. Regards, Northstar

You would have to add minerals anyways. Even many soils here on Earth are deficient in one nutrient or another. That's why we fertilize. The accumulation of salts in the topsoil (salination) that you're referring to is due to irrigation schemes in which the soil is waterlogged, then allowed to dry out, or insufficiently wetted in the first place. One of two things happens: either salts from the irrigation water itself accumulate due to inadequate hydration to leach it down to lower layers; or the inadequate hydration of the soil allows capillary action pulling salts up from lower layers to dominate the balance. Either way, with sufficient drainage and hydration (enough to provide an adequate "leaching fraction") salt is washed down into the water table, not drawn up from it... The areas where soil becomes excessively salty for farming usually are not using proper technique in the irrigation of the soil- as they don't have enough water to work with in the first place. *This* is what leads to salination... Wikipedia summarizes it well: "The primary method of controlling soil salinity is to permit 10-20% of the irrigation water to leach the soil, be drained and discharged through an appropriate drainage system. The salt concentration of the drainage water is normally 5 to 10 times higher than that of the irrigation water, thus salt export matches salt import and it will not accumulate." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_salinity#Salinity_due_to_irrigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_salinity_control As a side-note, if you allow too much water to leach, then you end up with the water table rising and the soil becoming waterlogged. Which is also not good for agricultural yields as some crops are not tolerant of being continuously waterlogged... You need to stick to that 10-20% range. To get to the point here, though- there would be a risk of the perchlorates being drawn back up into the upper layers of soil via capillary action if they were simply allowed to accumulate on the bottom. It would be highly advisable to wash all the perchlorates out of the soil first, and only *then* attempt agriculture, supplementing/replacing and minerals and macronutrients (such as soil nitrates) as necessary... - - - Updated - - - There's no reason to think you couldn't break down the perchlorates into useful elements/nutrients (other than the time/energy required). Many poisonous compounds can be useful when broken down, Even Cyanide is simply made of Nitrogen and Carbon, after all. But you probably would only have use for the products of breaking down a minor fraction the perchlorates- the rest you would simply want to throw out... Regards, Northstar

More testing with Deadly ReEntry installed now, and something is *CLEARLY* not balanced correctly for Real Solar System 64K with nuFAR also installed. I managed to drop a 1.20 meter heatshield with NOTHING behind it (not even a capsule) on a shallow sub-orbital trajectory with a PERI at 51.6 km (that's the equivalent of about a 40 km PERI in stock), and the thing burned up and EXPLODED before reaching 50 km (PERI lowered during aerobraking, of course). That's a 1.20 meter Procedural Parts heatshield with NOTHING BEHIND IT and a full Ablator load at 100% (default) ReEntry heating setting, once again. The G-forces never even climbed that high... Actual craft are even worse- I had engines, fuel tanks, and a Mobile Lab Jr in a stack all sequentially burn up on a shallow Munar return-trajectory at just 67 km within a couple seconds of loading (after having the craft unloaded earlier in the re-entry, for testing purposes...) Clearly, something needs to be adjusted so that craft and heatshields don't burn up so easily. In the meantime, I'm using DRE's handy little difficulty slider to turn re-entry heating down to something more realistic, which should not be something I should ever have to do at default heating (that is, the default should not be so much more difficult than real life...) Regards, Northstar

What on Earth are you talking about? Those *WERE* the latest releases of nuFAR and B9 Proc Wings at the time of my post (haven't checked for new versions in the past week since). Also, the issue actually fixed itself spontaneously without my doing anything once I started taking screenshots (figures). The plane that had went tail-up the last 5 attempts took off perfectly without an issue or my doing anything differently the moment I loaded up KSP again and started taking screenshots. Which makes me think it may be some kind of asset-loading issues, as I suspect it was the restarting KSP, rather than the taking screenshots, which fixed it... Not that it mattered- said plane still crashed due to Dutch Roll problems later in flight. But that was my fault- the stability derivatives were only *slightly* in the green for the roll derivatives at the subsonic airspeeds and altitude I was flying at- the design was optimized for supersonic rather than subsonic flight... (and didn't have enough dynamic pressure for the very large but low-deflection control surfaces to do their magic to a sufficient degree to prevent such problems...) Regards, Northstar

What are the Thrust and (effective) ISP spec's on these parts? This kind of information would really help if it were listed in the front post- to help people decide if this mod has the appropriate level of realism for their tastes (the real Orion and Medusa variant had INCREDIBLE effective ISP's, so it's interesting if the mod gets the numbers right- but also some players may want a less realistic variant for reasons I can't understand, and competing mods exist that may offer that as well...) Regards, Northstar

Old save: And new save: Regards, Northstar - - - Updated - - - What IS THAT????! Where can I find those parts?

I agree. Wait, when did we actually allow electric thrusters to run directly on intake atmosphere? That doesn't really work well, because the magnetic fields need to be pre-calibrated to a consistent fuel-mixture. And atmosphere is, well, anything but consistent. It varies in molecular composition and water-content by altitude and weather patterns. Aside from the question of how the atmosphere would be routed to the electric thrusters in the first place by the air intakes (this would need to SERIOUSLY increase the drag from air intakes to even be considered- jets work on a moving airstream, but electric thrusters require the propellant flow to be decelerated to a standstill first- which of course creates a strong negative acceleration on the entire craft...) the variability of the atmosphere would be a MAJOR problem that would significantly impair efficiency... That being said, the issue with jet engines is that, because they don't stop an airflow entirely, and have a limited range of temperatures and pressures they can operate within, they have trouble operating at very high speeds. Which is why it usually makes sense to utilize Hybrid Turbojets and switch to internal propellant at high atmospheric speeds- especially if you are playing in Real Solar System where orbital velocity is much higher... Regards, Northstar

See what you understand of the source-code, and I'm sure ideas will present themselves from there. Right now I'd mostly just like you to familiarize yourself with the code and the intricacies of how it works... Regards, Northstar

A little practical experience might be helpful, no offense... Still, the source code is freely available (it's linked on the front post). You're free to take a look at it and try and make heads or tails of it if you can. My understanding of programming is, to say the least, minimal. Still hoping AaronLS will be willing to help work on this project, though... I assume you'd be fine working with him if he does join up? Regards, Northstar

Thermal Tubojets are not ATTILA thrusters. They have entirely different operating principles. One works on internal propellant that is superheated and contained in magnetic fields, the other simply sucks up atmosphere and spits it out the tail end after superheating it with a nuclear reactor. Why would we try and measure the two against each other? Regards, Northstar

Magnetic nozzles shouldn't produce *high* thrust with fusion- the reactors don't produce *that many* usable charged particles... The plasma in any fusion reactor we can currently conceive of is very low-density: so while fusion produces a lot of charged particles relative to its fuel consumption mass-wise, it doesn't consume that much mass or produce that many charged particles in total... It would take an antimatter reactor (or maybe aintimatter-initiated fusion, I'd have to look it up) and very high rates of charged particle usage to get anything more than a very anemic thrust from charged particles- their main benefit are astronomical ISP's, which, as crazy as this sounds, last I checked still weren't nearly high enough in the mod compared to what is expected in real life... (their ISP's are one of the highest of any known form of propulsion- in real life they would have far better ISP than plasma thrusters are capable of, for instance...) In real life, fission fragment propulsion is expected to have ISP's of over 7000 seconds at a minimum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket However many estimates are, ahem, quite a bit more generous... http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php Yes, that's a specific impulse of over 1 MILLION seconds from a Dusty Plasma Reactor's charged particles in the latter link... Regards, Northstar

OK, so to be clear (because I'm seeing different things about this scattered around). Does Deadly ReEntry still adjust the rate of stock heating for Real Solar System in 1.04? I'm having trouble with craft burning through their heatshields much too quickly in RSS 64K, even on very shallow re-entry trajectories (as in, periapsis at 54 km and little more than a capsule and heatshield in the stack, and it still burns through the heatshield before 58 km and the capsule explodes by 54...) Regards, Northstar

Is the Euler release having issues with the 2.0 "unofficial" maintenance thread release of B9 Procedural Wings, or the latest version of Real Solar System 64K? I ask because, with Euler and both those mods installed, I'm having planes that are nose-draggers according to the SPH and stable according to ALL of the stability derivatives go straight nose-up after liftoff, as if they were huge tail-draggers... Screenshots coming soon. Regards, Northstar

I see that the tech limits I put forward some time ago were eventually implemented : http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/39512-1-0-4-Procedural-Fairings-3-15-%28June-27%29?p=1795833&viewfull=1#post1795833 However I also see that my name was not added to the authors list for the dummy parts in the tech tree (with attribution for "config" like StarStrider) This makes me a very sad panda. Great mod as always, though! Thanks for all the hard work! I just hope, maybe, I can be attributed for my (very minor) contribution? Regards, Northstar

I wonder too, actually. That is why I started this discussion in the first place- to try and answer that question. Although, to be fair, OTRAG was classic "Big Dumb Booster" approach- and *that* was attempted, and only called off because they choose to attempt it in a horribly politically unstable country, not because of any issues with the engineering approach itself. Thank you for bringing the discussion back on track, Red Iron Crown. Regards, Northstar

The only place where meaningful scientific or technical obstacles are raised is in the post I quote below. However... The design was made without sinking large amounts of money into it. Sea Dragon was designed very cheaply in fact. Whether it would work is another story, but the facts refute this assertion entirely. Also wrong. The whole point was that, by simplifying, the design process became very quick and easy. Relying on pressure-fed engines instead of *anything* using a turbopump removed a *large* number of design hours, for instance. No. By relying on very wide engineering margins the whole point was they did *not* have to spend much thought on the materials of the combustion chamber and exhaust. Low ISP combined with use of materials much stronger than should by any means by necessary meant that they didn't have to spend large amounts of time modeling the stresses to determine *precisely* how thick the engine bell needed to be at any given point. They just designed it with tons of margin, knowing that they were well over-engineering compared to any of the possible stresses. As for the injector placement, yes, this still takes some time- but Sea Dragon didn't need to eliminate *all* the difficult parts of the design process to work, just simplify the majority of them... The Sea Dragon team was aware of how finicky turbopumps can be- which is why they avoided using any in the first place. The design was to be entirely pressure-fed: as would any smaller versions of the basic deisgn-concept for this class of Big Dumb Booster. Thus, these issues were avoided outright. All this is false. Because it relies on the grossly inaccurate assumption of a longer R&D phase, when in fact the whole point of something like Sea Dragon is that it has: (1) A much shorter R&D phase than a "smart booster" by avoiding using any of the components (such as a turbopump) which are extremely difficult to design whenever possible, and over-engineering things with huge margins rather than laboriously calculating maximal stress-levels whenever it's not. (2) A much cheaper manufacturing cost, because it is designed with very wide engineering margins, and greater manufacturer error become acceptable- allowing less precise facilities such as shipyards to build the rocket, with less laborious (and expensive) testing along the way. The Sea Dragon doesn't eliminate *all* the difficult or expensive parts of rocket design, but it does avoid a large number of these obstacles altogether. And, aside from scaling up to large sizes in the case of Sea Dragon itself (which, once again, is just a prototype for the class- you could easily build much smaller designs along the same concept lines), Sea Dragon does not introduce any *new* obstacles- which means there is absolutely no logical reason whatsoever to expect anything *other* than a much shortened R&D phase and a much cheaper manufacturing cost- which all adds up to a cheaper rocket on the launchpad in the end. Regards, Northstar