KerikBalm

:/ .... it also seems my Jool probe is going to reach Jool before I get any contract to go there.... so I'm going to have to stay out of the SOI of the moons if I want to get any explore contracts for those too? *sigh* I guess I will plant flags and repeatedly transmit science data for money.

3 meters... wow... For the same speed "The impact depth equation no longer applies, since the atoms are literally passing through each other." I think a more correct term is the atoms (nuclei, or subatomic particle) are going past each other. Lets say the impact depth equation is like on bullet hitting a block of lead, and this scenario is like a shotgun blast going through a lead screen (or two shotgun blasts passing each other in mid air). XKCD is generally pretty reliable, but you shouldn't take it as the verbatim "bible truth" (as you shouldn't really take anything as such) Again, we have ample evidence that two subatomic particles going at .99c will collide.

I guess moons count too. I've got Eve, Duna, and Ike contracts... I want a Moho contract, because my ship is already on the way, and it will get there before my ion probes to duna and eve. Will I not get the explore contract if I get some science data, but don't do the landing?

I was wondering how I can edit contracts, ie, which ones are available, under what circumstances they get offered, etc. I was looking through my install for a file that might contain this, but I couldn't find any. Can anyone help?

You don't have any theories of "verteron space" you have uninformed speculation. They aren't in development, and there is nothing to test. The interactions are instantaneous, or at least the same speed C. When one nuclei hits another, you can't just pass through because of C (given the speeds of the nuceli in many fusion events, if this were the case, we'd never have any heavy elements). You can see how often a stuff gets hit at the atomic level in just a small section of mass with xray scattering for instance. Also, we have plenty of high energy particle beams... the LHC has no problems getting sub atomic particles to interact with each other at relativistic speeds. Photons have no problems interacting with things, and they go the speed of light! I can't comprehend how you can't comprenhend: when you smash things together very fast, they go boom, they don't just pass through each other.

I don't think the thrust loss results in a lower ISP. I thought it was just a thrust scaler, and then ISP considers how much fuel is needed to produce that thrust. Can anyone confirm? And yes, the extreme OP'dness of the jets in game is well known. They should either be given an ISP of ~150, and use air:fuel in a 16:1 ratio, or have intake air be massless (like electric charge), and keep the rest as is.

I too use it on my spaceplanes, even without my personal buff of the thrust to equal the LV-T45 thrust... but I don't use it for its "aerospike" properties. I use it simply because I want 390 vacuum ISP, and a LV-909 is too weak, and a poodle's dimensions are impractical. (also, RP reasons, or I'd design the craft to use a nuke engine, but I don't want my orbital shuttles that routinely go to and from destinations in kerbin's SOI and back to the surface of kerbin to be running engines that would release a lot of radioactive material if there is an accident) I wouldn't call it 200 m/s of usable speed. A turbojet may produce thrust up to 2,400 m/s, but you won't reach 2,400 surface velocity. That is over 2,500 orbital velocity... you won't stay in the atmosphere long enough to use it up. A rapier's 2,200 max (though you won't reach the max due to drag and very weak thrust) won't get you out of the atmosphere much I think it actually comes out to 100 m/s or less of "useful" velocity. At any rate, I use NEAR, and they cap out at 1,700 m/s (and most of my designs reach only 1,600m/s or less, due to drag and 0.01 kN of force at 1,699 m/s not being sufficient to maintain velocity), so my designs need more oomph from the rockets. I basically use it as if it were a 1.25m poodle. For that matter, the constant atmospheric ISP isn't very realistic. You can't make atmospheric ISP equal vacuum ISP for a pure rocket. Suppose you have something like the poodle optimized for vacuum: 270 to 390 ISP (or even more so, the LV-N, 220 to 800) You can redesign the nozzle to give you a better atmospheric ISP at the cost of a lower vacuum ISP, like the ks 25x4/mainsail/Rapier 320 to 360 ISP Then you could do an aerospike, and get both the low end ISP, and the high end ISP 320-390 But it won't get you a better ISP at 1 atm than a rocket nozzle designed for use at 1 atm, which won't get as good of an ISP as a rocket nozzle designed for use at 0 atm. IRL, we'd have isp ranges something more like 1) 330-350 2) 300-370 3) 220-420 Where in a staged rocket, you'd use nozzle design 1 on the lower stage, 2) on the middle, and 3 on the upper But with an aerospike, you'd get something like 330-420

Some people can't tell a shooting star from an orbiting object? What I like to do is try to figure out what sort of orbit the sat is in.... its fun spotting ones in more or less polar orbits. My dad, who did classified satellite related stuff in the 70's used to tell me that the ones going north-south were probably military, and the ones going west-East were probably civilian communication sats. Although I think that has changed now, as there are quite a few civilian sats giving us images used for things like google earth.

Those follow on targets are not asteroids.

Same here, and I started using SPP in 0.24 when I heard it would be in 0.25. So... its just strategies - which I don't need (though the project where you get increased recover % so you don't need to put a part down right on the runway does seem nice) Destructible buildings is "meh" to me (and given that the drop of large spaceplanes often destroys the runway... meh). Also in the 0.25 install, I put FAR instead of NEAR, and that added some headaches at high mach flight. It in general ran slower, so, yea, I'm still playing 0.24 for now

Hmm, Jool diving may indeed be a good use, its atmosphere is even thicker, but it has less than half the "surface gravity" of Eve- the TWR issue isn't so bad. Huh, rapiers and turbojets have the same airbreathing ISP This is the curve for both of them: atmosphereCurve { key = 0 1200 key = 0.3 2500 key = 1 800 }

They don't obviously. I was simply using them as an example of not-low profile engines being usable on a lander. Of course, the engine has to make sense. The LV-N at1atm or greater is a 220 ISP engine with a 2.7 TWR - Terribad. That depends entirely on the rest of the craft. A single 48-7s has a TWR of 30, while a single aerospike has a TWR of 14.9. Well there are other options, taking advantage of Eve stock aero... just use a cluster of smaller tanks, more attachment nodes, same weight. It also allows for more asparagus staging. Its simply a gameplay limitation that we can't attach more than one thing to the bottom, and there is no part adaptor for tiny engines, so you're forced to use small ones. Therefore I don't consider cubic struts to be cheating (only when used to build massless structural elements and such, not when used to simply add an attachment node. FWIW, I also modded my game so that many adaptors function as 9:1 mass ratio fuel tanks. IRL engine clusters are more mass efficient than single engines)

48-7s clusters have a very low profile as well.... and if one or two hits and is destroyed... well, if its a cluster with many 48-7s, you may still be able to ascend. And also with stock aero, its easy to mak pancake rockets with low profiles. I don't find Eve to be any more lumpy than Duna or the Mun, and I land on Duna and the Mun with LV-Ns... so... A LV-T30 can also give you that lower atmosphere afterburner effect... for that matter, so can a 48-7s cluster. Sure, they burn a bit more fuel, but you can get a lot more thrust, because their TWR is much higher, and you were just talking about performance, not efficiency.... so... They are an engine with almost the same TWR as LV-909s and poodles, and the same vacuum ISP as them.... yawn.

Ignoring funds, what you want to looke at is Thrust to weight ratio, and ISP. The poodle pre-0.24 was pretty bad despite being tied for 2nd best ISP, because it was simply too heavy -> it was always better to use aerospikes or LV-909s (if you needed thrust vectoring). The 48-7s, despite having relatively poor ISP, are one of the best engines in the game, because they produce so much thrust for so little weight. You can come out ahead using more thrust per unit fuel, if your mass is low enough that you need less thrust (and thus less fuel). The new NASA parts in .23.5 did manage to break the 48-7s stranglehold (which meant before you almost always wanted to use either a 48-7s cluster, of a LV-N, and nothing inbetween) It comes down to how much the engine weighs relative to the rest of your craft (if its pushing around a 100ton payload in orbit, a 2.25 ton vs 0.1 ton engine doesn't make a big difference, but 800 vs 350 ISP does) Basically, it coms down to a lot of math, and you should simply look at tavert's charts for now (I've made some crude graphs of my own to pick the fuel optimal engine for a reusable lander, tavert's charts are always for a mass optimal set up, which isn't what I want for reusable landers+ orbiting fuel depots)

Well, from my point of view, it didn't come across as very smart... more like you don't know what a planet is. However, it is sort of similar to a point that can be made: You can practice an interplanetary transfer from Kerbin to another planet, by practicing a transfer from the Mun to Minmus or vice versa. They are exactly analagous to interplanetary transfers, but the launch windows are much more frequent, and the dV needed to transfer is much lower (of course, that is not including the dV that you need to get to one of the moons in the first place- for a Kerbin->Mun->minmus trip, you could basically do a Kerbin-> Duna trip) Dres? You've got to be kidding me. #1) the Delta-V doesn't cease to be a problem - note there are many threads about long burn times with LV-Ns... so there's added complications of perapsis kicking, poor TWRs, more of a requirement for orbital rendevous if you intend to return, etc. FWIW, it takes ~4.5x the delta V to land on dres, than to land on Duna. 1034 for aerocapture at duna (from a 100km Kerbin orbit) vs 3989 m/s for a capture into a 12km orbit on dres - and another ~550 m/s to actually land for a total of about 4550 for Dres vs 1050 for Duna. #2)Airless bodies are harder to land on, IMO. Its pretty easy to pop chutes, and just control descent rate with a touch of throttle. Its why a landing on Tylo is much harder than a landing on Kerbin (or Laythe), despite the lower gravity. #3) Dres's orbit is highly inclined, and launch windows are more irregular as far as dV requirements (there is that rate launch window where you can arrive just at the AN/DN and ignore the inclination, all other launch windows require varying amounts of plane changing).

I don't find it very useful. For those that said spaceplanes: By the time you light your rockets in Space planes, you are so high up, it might as well be vacuum ISP For those that say Eve: Its poor TWR means you need so many engines, that your dry weight increases so much that other engines are more efficient (48-7s clusters, LFBs, probably the buffed mainsails, etc). It can't accept a stage below it, and its unique ISP properties are only useful deep in the atmosphere, that implies it should be used as part of a first stage- ie "Boosters" - but it has a pretty bad TWR, which is not what you want in boosters. As a result, I buffed it on my install to have a TWR equal to the LV-T45.

They had an idea about how this thing may produce a force. The point of the null was to test that idea. Comparing the slotted to the null tells them their idea was wrong. Therefore, they lack any test for an explanation of how the force is produced. And it carries zero weight with me... or do you still believe that NASA paper about life substituting Arsenic for Phosphorus in its DNA? Citation please No, the results are: a force was measured. Force and thrust are not the same thing. There are a number of explanations for the force that, if true, would mean that it would not be able to produce thrust in space, and that it would not be a working drive. There is a *force*, we don't know what causes the *force* Depending on the cause of the *force*, it may or may not be suitable for space propulsion. To claim that this proves the drive works is to make a false claim. Lockheed doesn't have a fusion plant. They have an idea for a research project that may lead to one. Their press release made no such claims. One media group made claims out of thin air, and others parroted them. If you read what Lockheed says now, compared to what it was saying in Feb 2013, you'd come to the conclusion that the project isn't working out like they expected - there has been no breakthrough.

Science, Reputation, Funding.... These things the Kerbals should be able to affect. Thrust... NO

Excludng Kerbin (come on guys, you know what he meant), Duna and Eve are both pretty darn easy to reach. From a 100km orbit, you need a dV of 1034 m/s to get to Duna, and 1061 m/s to get to Eve, according to: http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ Looking at the first transfer windows from day 1. This difference is so small, it will easily get lost in the noise from imperfect maneuver executions and course corrections. Eve's orbit is more inclined than Duna's, but its SOI is also bigger. Duna also has a large moon (Ike) that may screw up your trajectory. Eve's atmosphere is a lot thicker, so its easier to aerobrake - Many times in the begining I came in too high, and failed to aerocapture. As far as a safe landing: Duna's thin atmosphere presents more problems than Eve's stronger gravity. Eve has oceans that you may want to avoid (or you may not, maybe you don't care where you land or what happens to your probe) Eve's atmosphere is 5x thicker than kerbin atmosphere... 25x thicker than Duna's while its gravity is 1.7x higher than Kerbin's.... 5.7x higher than Duna's If you plan on returning... Duna, no question.

I recently did a tylo landing. I'm doing a Jool-*4* mission, so its going to be a lot easier. Laythe is getting its own dedicated long term mission and fuel depots. Originally, I was thinking of doing a fuel depot around tylo and a SSTO lander (as I've done for Mun, Minmus, Eve, Laythe, and Moho -> though moho's fuel depot doesn't contain much fuel), and was designing a SSTO lander. I then decided that I was just doing the same mission profile over and over again, and I decided to try for Jool-4... still I'd never done such a landing, so I first tested the single stage lander (that would have similar stats to my staging lander for Jool-4) I budgeted something like 5,000 m/s, or maybe 4,900 -> somewhere around there, for the mission -> text edited it into tylo orbit, and tried (note, my aerospikes are modded to produce 200 thrust, not 175, but max thrust wasn't needed anyway). the first landing attempt worked, I momentarily over did it with throttle, slowing my descent to a mere 7 m/s while still too high. I did end up with less dV to spare than I had hoped:

Hmmm, at the beginning, I was thinking that, but I think the OP has a point. If we were talking NTR here, then we'd have a maximum temperature, which translates to a KE for each gas molecule. To get the highest exhaust velocity, witha fixed KE, you want the lowest mass per molecule. But this is not an NTR. Like an NTR, for a given molecular weight, if you want a higher exhaust velocity/ISP, you need a higher temperature. Thus hypothetically, you can get a higher ISP from a higher molecular weight gas if that gas is a lot hotter. Ie, run one NTR with a core temperature of 500K, expelling H2O gas, and another NTR with a core temperature of 3,200k, expelling N2 gas. Which gas gets the higher ISP? With a chemical reaction such as this, we have to consider how hot the reaction burns, which is related to how much energy the reaction releases. If the products have 2x the molecular weight, but 4x the energy, they should have the same velocity and the reaction should give you the same ISP.

You are aware you can have multiple controls in the same experiment. *one* of their controls produced thrust, and one didn't The next question is if the one that didn't was an appropriate control. Consider a very simple PCR reaction... lets say you are screening colonies for a successful transformation. You could have a negative control that is just water instead of a PCR mix - then when its negative, and all your other colonies are positive, do you conclude they were all successfully transformed? Do you include a PCR mix without the fwd primer? without the rv? without the polymerase? without the DNTPs? without the template? Did you do a ligation, and in one you have ligase+DNA insert+ backbone, and as negative control you also try insert+ backbone but no ligase, another that is backbone and ligase but no insert? Did you include any colonies from those as negative controls in your PCR screen? A positive result for any of those could mean a problem with your PCR screen. Good experiments have good controls. Just because one negative control works, doesn't mean anything if it wasn't a good negative control. Did they put that Rf load in the same cavity? was the RF load device otherwise the same as the RF test device Did they alter the shape so that its not resonant? Could they replace the microwave emitter with a LED emitting visible light (presumably, given the different wavelength, it wouldn't be resonant)? The paper only states: "the test article was replaced by an RF load to verify that the force was not being generated by effects not associated with the test article." There are all kinds of other explanations (magnetic interactions, interactions with the air, etc). They had no controls to rule out other possible explanations. They did have a prediction specific to the effect they are trying to prove, and the negative control for that prediction failed. Their RF test load is not worth much as a control. The device produced a force. The experiments show the force production does not behave like predicted by their explanation. Thus the experiment provides no evidence to support their explanation of the force. The force remains unexplained, and they didn't have proper controls to narrow it down. Does the cavity have to be resonant for this force to appear? Does it have to emit microwaves? Etc... They had 1 negative control for their explanation of a reactionless thruster that failed, and another negative control that wasn't worth much of anything - only showing that they could measure thrusts. The source of the thrust remains completely unexplained on the basis of this experiment. Therefore it is BS (at least scientifically speaking) to claim this as evidence to overturn current theories/"laws" which are well supported by evidence. 0 evidence against these "laws" Much evidence for them. I see no problem with these criticisms of the paper (and more particularly, the claims being passed around based upon this paper). The experiments were not very well performed - regardless of your assertions to the contrary. The controls were nearly worthless, and the experimental conditions werent very good either (not even a vacuum test, come on!) Science requires good controls, you don't just have 1 control for an entire experiment, you should have many controls. Without good controls, the results can't be interpreted with any certainty. And that is the case we have now: uninterpretable results.

I would only support kerbal experience affecting science and science transmission - and only for certain experiments. You could have experience modify the stupidity and bravery stats. Your EVA report won't be very informative if the Kerbal is having a panic attack. - EVA report from Duna's upper atmosphere: "I saw red out of my peripheral vision, I was too scared to look down" Your EVA report won't be very informative if the Kerbal is an idiot. - I looked down, it was very red, with some white stuff and blurs vs - I observed faint aurora on the night side at the poles, indicating at least a faint magnetic field, several features of the planet were suggestive of past water flows. Faint clouds were visible over the planets limb. Likewise: - Definitely not delicious mint desert vs - Detailed description of the mineral grains, type of rock, blah blah blah. Science transmission boosts should be OK Rate stupidity/bravery on a scale of 0-1 (1- stupidity+experience)*(1+bravery+experience-Fear)* transmission efficiency Obviously, each term in () would be capped at a maximum of 1, and fear would be some factor like I guess the game already has, when it determines how the kerbal faces look (scared, happy, composed, etc). And it would only apply to things probes can't do- surface samples, crew reports, eva reports. I guess you could have transmission boost from the lab be dependant upon stupidity& experience only (no bravery or fear factor). Bravery of the kerbonauts could affect reputation gains for the mission. Maybe add a "charisma" stat, that gets you more rewards - Its sad, but people would probably be more willing to fund a space program that picks celebrities to lead their missions, rather than some geeky poindexter. More people would watch space flights if the flight commander was Brad Pitt, and the two other crew were J law and Emma Watson. So crews would affect science, funding and Reputation, but not thrust, ISP, structural integrity, aerodynamics, etc.

You could probably just duplicate a part, and then lower its max temperature. Ie have your oragne tank overheat and explode within seconds of the mainsail below it firing.... or something like that?

Did you read my post #12, I completely agree with you (and provided my own set of ridiculous examples that should be shunned)