KerikBalm

The problem is the game's ISP value takes it into account twice.... If it treats intake air as part of the propellant, then it should have a much lower ISP value. You'd only use the game's ISP values to get a close to realistic, if intake air was considered massless as far as the game's physics were concerned.

Unless using NEAR/FAR, for a given AoA L/D varies with speed (and with FAR, it varies with speed as well when you get into higher mach numbers) What you can do is simply find a glide slope where you maintain your speed (although, given how fast the atmosphere gets thicker, this can also be hard for steeper glideslopes), and then look at the angle that your flight vector is at on the navball (and take the tangent of that angle)

With willpower. How do I tell people that I can count to potato without getting funny looks from them?

You just blew my mind. If the analogy is bad, then it matches the fakeness of the video, and thus the analogy is good, in which case the analogy is bad, in which case the analogy is good... does not compute ... Paradox detected... terminating process... infinite loop avoided.

I think that he thinks that the plasma bubble would repel off thr ground.. I guess through direct contact with the ground. Obviously, the plasma would be rapidly depleted from colliding with the ground. I guess he thinks you can push the same plasma mass against the ground almost indefinitely - which is not the case.

D'oh! I derpted. Technically it is still correct, it is not an egg yolk either Basically, when it comes down to it, if I rotate the controls one way, I want the aircraft to rotate the same way. If the control pivot is below where I am holding them, this means that pushing forward should pitch down. In a hangglider, you hang underneath, and the "pivot" is above you (note that the control frame does not move at all in relation to the aircraft/wing, just your body, in a trike there is your body and some structure - wheels and a mounted engine basically, but I still wouldn't consider that the main aircraft), and thus controls are "reversed" if you think of it as moving the control frame. To roll left, you push the control frame right. Yet... to roll left, you move your body left. Again... its best thought of as moving your body, not the controlframe. but without knowing where the CoM is, it's not really possible to say which way they should move. True, I simply assumed they were behind the CG. For most designs with a "main wing", the trailing edge of the main wing is behind the CG. Yet there are numerous possible designs where this is not the case - although it depends what you call a "main wing" (is a wing providing only 51% of the lift still a main wing?). It does depend on his specific craft, and it was probably premature to think that he simply wanted his controls to be inverted. *edit* ah, reading it again, its again clear to me (as it was when I first responded), that he does want inverted controls. He stated: "...and saw that on pressing W (up) they went..." W is not "up" for standard controls. It is working as intended.

If you could magnetically contain a bubble of plasma for practical periods of time, Fusion reactors are where you would want to focus your efforts. You wouldn't be able to contain the plasma, let alon contain the plasma outside a structure. Assuming you could, what happens when your "plasma wheel" contacts the ground? Your plasma wheen gets destroyed. It wouldn't work.

I'm well aware of what can and cannot be patented. If the drive worked, the idea of using it to make a hover vehicle would probably be contested due to lack of an inventive step/obviousness. If there was some particular problem with the implementation that he had solved, then he'd probably be able to get a patent. But generally very basic ideas and concepts are not patentable, and you need to be pretty specific in what you want to patent. The examiner would not let stand such broad claims. If the claims were granted, they would be easily challenged and invalidated in a court. That said, I never made any mention of the patentability of the EM drive or applications thereof, rather I expressed skepticism that there would ever be a "generation 2" EM drive before its even shown that "generation 1" works (which it most likely doesn't)

If your craft in that other thread can already single stage to the Mun's surface, and back to Mun orbit, all you really need to do is use cubic struts (they have physics signifigance set to 1 -> they are massless and dragless) to add an ion engine or two (or 3 or 4), and then slap a few Xenon tanks on your craft, and plaster it in OX-Stat panels (which are also massless and dragless), and you can perapsis kick back to an aerocapture on Kerbin. As I already said Nukes, Ions, and Turbojets make it really easy. The Nuke is the only one that isn't OP'd compared to real life stats. FWIW, I've seen single stage ot laythe and back (granted, that only requires about 5,000 m/s of non-atmospheric dV)

So... they will make a 2nd generation of something that most likely doesn't work and has no good evidence to suggest it might work?

They can write poetry... we must make sure to sent poets on all our manned missions from now on, to maximize the return. Imagine how good the few (dozen?) hundred billion USD poetry collection that results will be! (The above respone was sarcasm)

How fast are you getting on your jets now? make sure to specify if it is surface velocity/orbital velocity How high are you getting?

The target would be intelligent robots so that we don't need to send people. The only reason to send people, is if people can live there with a little work.

I think its fairly easy to do in stock with nuke engines. Use turbojet and air hogging to get into orbit for miniscule use of Lf+Ox Nukes to Mun surface and back. Using NEAR, I just took a crew shuttle to Minmus orbit with ~900 m/s of dV left, it was using aerospikes, and I had NEAR, which though it decreases drag, it increases the non-Jet dV demands of your craft, because you can only get to about 1,600 m/s on jets - 400 m/s less than you can get in stock (and also lower in the atmosphere). Jet TWR is so good in stock that you can basically forgo the wings entirely. I once also build a rapier +ion engined plane that made it to the mun and back. I could have had even more fuel to spare if I used the ion engines more to get to the Mun (I wasn't willing to wait that long, they were providing 4kn of thrust, from 179 total kN) I was pretty low on fuel after orbital insertion, and I used the ions to start from a relatively high orbit, and decelerate as much as possible (no orbit scraping mountaintops followed by a suicide burn here), before a suicide burn using the rapier. I think I also needed to use the ions to circularize and get back to kerbin. One could easily scale it up to a 2 jet design, swap the rapiers for turbos, and and aerospikes for ~100 m/s savings before the jets are switched off, and then a roughly 8% dV increase due to the higher rocket ISP. I also was carrying too much jet fuel. The challenge is quite easy if you allow use of nukes or ions, and stock aero

That is not a yolk, that is fundamentally different. I know of this form of control input quite well. ^that is me. Well, there are control surfaces, and there are controls. FWIW, hanggliders(excepting rigidwings) and trikes have no control surfaces. With control surfaces, you move the center of lift, with weightshift, you move the center of mass (although in a flex wing hangglider, shifting the weight does noticably warp the wing, soch that roll inputs are much more effective) That is not a flight yolk or a joystick - that is the control frame, two downtubes and a basetube. I know of no 3axis control aircraft that allows you to push forward and have that pitch up. Basically, if it controls control surfaces, pushing forward makes it pitch down. If you are just shifting weight, shifting the weight forward makes it pitch down.

I have *NEVER* heard of a plane where the controls are configured such that pushing forward causes the nose to pitch up, ad I would very much like to see evidence for that. It simply boggles the mind that someone would make a plane with controls that go agaisnt the instinct of 99.999% of pilots everywhere. The only case I can think of that is remotely similar to what you describe, are weightshift controlled aircraft, ie a hangglider/Trike, where the control frame is pushed forward relative to the pilot (but really, its pushing the pilot or pilot+ trike backward, shifting weight backwards). If its anything else, I think the designer should be shot.

W is not up, it is the same as pushing forward on a joystick, which pitches down.

Then file a patent and stop with the secrecy.

2-3 * 16 times the ISP it should be. Intake air should either be treated as massless for the ISP equations (like electric charge), or the ISP rating should be nerfed to 1/16th its value, due to the 15:1 mass ratio of intake air to jetfuel being consumed as reaction mass

What a waste of precious helium

Interesting, so the thrust scalar effectively scales ISP as well, I did not know that! I had begun to suspect something like that with my fuel consumption rates in NEAR/FAR, when my jets produce very little thrust at ~1,500 m/s, but I thought it was specific to the mod. I think that *1000 is to convery kN to N Can you do the calculations as to when a 390 ISP engine is more efficient that Turbojets in FAR? when the LV-N is more efficient in NEAR/FAR? Assuming 16x1200 ISP (the rated ISP for Turbos at very high altitude, ISP won't change much between 30km and 60km) for the turbos, and 800 ISP for the LV-N (again, I'm assuming one gets nearly vacuum numbers at 30km) or 390 for the aerospike. Jets get 19200 ISP at their peak thrust levels. (1000 m/s stock, 900 for FAR, 1100 on the rapier) 390/19200= 0.02 800/1920= 0.042 So... at what speed will turbotjets or rapiers give 2% or 4% thrust , given these velocity curves: Turbojet key = 900 1 0 0 key = 1800 0 0 0 Rapier key = 1100 1 0 0 key = 1700 0 0 0 Do I do linear interpolation, or is it logarithmic or something?

Well, the question is to reach, not return, and if a burn becomes too long, you don't simply wit for it to complete, you have to break it up. If you have a very low TWR, and a 1 hour burn... considering that the prograde direction becomes retrograde in ~15 minutes in LKO, you can easily end up with scenarios where you need to perapsiss kick. .Once in orbit, you can return from anywhere with an ion thruster. Dres is very similar to Mun, and ion thrusters are generally insufficient for use on the Mun. Duna's atmosphere is so thin, that it is hardly a concern on ascent, and LV-Ns will operate at very high ISP, and have plenty of TWR I was referring to the rare (not rate, sorry for the spelling mistake) window where you don't have to make a plane change, where you arrive as dres crosses the ecleptic. Interplanetary plane changes are an additional complication for new people, which makes it harder.

I feel like some of the contracts could be "story mode" in a fashion similar to storyline missions in GTA. Sure... you can go put out fires, or drive people around in a taxi, or do some other side branch missions, but there is a set of more or less linear storyline missions as well. Right now we have random contracts... and we have fixed contracts that are offered based on progress - which already begins to form a storyline for your spaceprogram (Lanch a vessel, 5000m altitude, orbit, then Mun, then minmus, then eve and duna and ike... and so on) Altitude records (Add speed acheivement too? 1,500 m/s for example, not just the 5,000 meters then orbit) Orbit Explore Mun/Minmus (side contract/mission, search for unusual features? ie mun arches, monoliths?) Acheive orbital rendedvous Explore Duna... Fine print style predetermined missions... like establishing surface habitats on duna/laythe and fuel depots. Locate surface anomolies, bring a science lab near them... etc. The problem is the conclusion of the story.... I don't find Nova's old plan to have a good ending (teleported dead planet way off in the far reaches of the kerbin system? meh... I would add 1 easter egg as a destination... like... vallhenge or something, and call it complete. maybe you find vallhenge, and it tells you to search a specific continent of laythe... and you can find pyramid/henge ruins and a kerbal face there... I'd say make duna the dead planet of the precursors (add a pyramid complex near the face?), and laythe a failed colony. Find their last outpost -> the end

What do rocket engines have to do with terrestrial biotechnology Are you hoping to engineer some microbes to make rocket fuel or something?

A very low one, because there aren't that many particles. The Earth has a whole lot of particles, so many that there's no straight line through without hitting one. That is the same principle as to why it doesn't take much lead to stop most radiation. When you ave less than a gram of subatomic particles flying at less than a gram of sub atomic particles, if the collision rate is low, that doesn't mean you can expect to travel through the entire earth without having a collision. Anyway, the point is, that at .99c, these forces are applied fast enough, you can't outrun the interactions.