KerikBalm

Thats a cool and compact vehicle. Looks like your 1st stage goes pretty much straight up. What is the minimum altitude needed for launch? What do you do if there's no ore above that altitude? For myself, I haven't tried launching from sea level just yet, I think I launch from around 1km... which only matters because my initial climb is currently limited by battery power. I get to just under 11km before the batteries have nearly run out and I need to fire the rockets. I also cliumb at about 60 degrees, so that the orbiter needs less dV, this means that the 1st stage cannot land where it launched from. That's why I used a lot of batteries rather than fuel cells - so it can recharge on the ground, then fly a long distance before needing to recharge again. With fuel cells, if I land with no reserve fuel, it won't make it back to the launch site without many, many stops (which is a problem if one needs to cross oceans). I could try to give it enough fuel cells to sustain flight, and a reserve fuel tank. I could also set up 2 ground stations, one down range of the other, so that the 2nd is just for refueling the carrier, so it can fly back to the first... but my idea was to have it able to launch from and land anywhere, regardless of ore concentration (well, the launch site should have ore, otherwise yet naother prop powered fuel tanker to bring fuel to the launch site would be a PITA)... but with the glide range, and the range of suitable launch altitudes (if fuel cell powered, certainly from sea level), I don't expect that to be a problem. Kegarin's thread is cool, but I sense many (all?) of the SSTO designs are exploiting part clipping and fairings/service bays to shield parts from drag. My design doesn't do anything that I consider abusing part clipping, and from what I see of your 2 stager, it doesn't either.

What is "Oxygen not included"? A mod? A webcomic? a novel?

That's like asking if its any of your business if that Rolex watch someone is selling is stolen or not, if a product that you are buying is made with slave labor, if organ donations come from victims of accidents or some operation that murders people and harvests their organs. If they do something unethical to make a product, and you pay for that product, you are paying them to commit unethical acts on your behalf. At this point, you yourself have commited an unethical act. If you have no sense of morals, then go ahead, but its absolutely someone's business whether or not they commit acts that they deem unethical. Its his business if he buys the game, and pays the people that developed a game ethically or not. I am not a believer in absolute morality, and its possible that TTI was justified in its acts... but for now their acts have the appearance of unethical behavior, and if they have a defense, they should absolutely present it. If they can't bother to expain themselves, I'm not going to give them the benefit of the doubt.

And its still one of the fun things now. Before Breaking ground, subs had to use jet engines, and were restricted to Kerbin and Laythe (plus mod worlds with O2 atmospheres and oceans, so not Tekto), but not Eve. After breaking ground, you could have subs that use electric power, and thus their buoyancy doesn't change, and they work on Eve: (I wish I had installed scatterer for these images) So, in my opinion, with the latest DLC, they've made submarines *more* viable without any use of mods, so I'm going to have to reject many of your assertions. How do you know the intent that squad had? If that was their intent, why is there a simple option to turn off part pressure limits? Why can you still make submarines, even if they have a depth limit? Maybe it was to add some realism, and have craft have a crush depth, more intended to get players to avoid ridiculously high dynamic pressures, or to add a crush depth to Jool? I would very much like underwater colonies to be possible. Exploratory submarines are already possible, but dedicated parts would be nice.

Actually, Eve's density is higher at the same pressure, because its air has a MW of 43, compared to 28.8 for Kerbin... of course, a higher air temperature results in lower density for the same pressure (otherwise, hot air balloons wouldn't work). This shouldn't be on the wiki anymore, its quite out of date: and of course, is in conflict with this: Which clearly shows that the pressure is not a simple scale height curve. Anyway, the density is different for the same pressure, the gravity is different, so your AoA will be different, and things won't fly the same. Another thing that is different is the speed of sound, so for the same speed, you'll have a different mach number, which will also affect the coefficient of lift and drag that you get at those speeds. At very low speeds (100 m/s or less), differences in mach number won't be significant though. All this combines to a significantly different handling, yet still somewhat similar.

For me, when kopernicus is up to date with the version in use, its super easy. Extract kopernicus to the game data folder. Extract sigmaDimensions to the game data folder. Go into sigmadimensions and text edit the cfg file to the rescaling that you want. Its self explanatory within the file, you just change a 1 to a 3 if you want a 3x rescale... But its a few values, since you can rescale SMA, radius of the bodies, and rotation times. Then there are some other optional changes, like different rescaling for terrain hight, and atmosphere. I play at 3x body radius, 3x SMA, 1.5x terrain heights, and 1.25x atmosphere height. Rotation period I have set at sqrt(3).

1) I personally work as a salaried employee (not in the gaming industry). I never earn overtime. When we have a crunch, we crunch. When there is a lull, I don't work a full 40hr week. For a salaried employee, you do the work needed to get the job done- and I am fine with that, as long as on average I work about as much as I signed up for, and I get paid a fair salary. Point 1 is far too cut and dry for me. If the "crunch" is a continuous 3 months of 60+ hour work weeks, that is too much. If its 3 weeks of 50hrs instead of 40, and its a fixed salary, and some times before it was more like a 35 hr week, thats fine. I won't buy it if I have evidence of what I consider unreasonable or exploitive behavior. 2-5) aren't really ethical, but reflect the quality and value of the product. I will make the determination of if it is worth it when it comes out. Although the part in 4 about claiming ownership of usermade content would be a step too far, for sure

I agree, this sounds like a mega [redacted] move. I'd be interested in hearing TTI's side, but I suspect they will be silent. If they weren't happy with the work ST was doing, I doubt they would have tried to poach so many of its employees. If they weren't happy with the work ST was doing, they wouldn't have entered into negotiations to buy ST. Now... even if you don't like was ST was doing (such as progress being too slow), it would make sense to poach some people, to at least explain the existing code (trying to follow what someone else has done if they aren't there to explain it, can waste a lot of time). They'd need people familiar with the code, but I don't think they'd do a blanket offer to all ST employees... they'd probably start with Simpson and 2 or 3 others, not 30. This doesn't sound like the team was underperforming. I will say though, if Nate hadn't jumped ship, I don't think TTI would have gone through with it. If he stayed with ST, that would delay KSP2 even more, increase the development expenses by a lot, and generate a lot of confusion and doubt among customers. I think TTI would have returned to the negotiating table if Nate and perhaps 2 or 3 other senior team members hadn't taken the offer. Of course, I don't know what happened, that's just my thoughts. Whether or not ST wanted to be acquired by TTI, or TTI wanted to acquire ST, they already had a contract with ST to develop KSP2, and if no deal was made, you'd think they could just proceed under the original agreement. When TTI poached the team, that made the original agreement untenable. I can't see how TTI could have been "forced" to do this/had no other choice. Its an unethical move, and I am much less enthusiastic about KSP2 now... I will certainly wait longer before buying it, to look at reviews and wait for sales.. not gonna pay full price for it .12 out of 30 got jobs... 18 out of 30 lost their job.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ As XKCD said, space isn't like this: it is like this: Low orbit is like... really really close to Earth. Close enough that you don't need to worry just about missiles, but also about high energy lasers if humans decided to build them... and there's no escaping those. You seem to be assuming some high tech humans, a sprint missile had a dV of about 5 km/sec, yet your first mention of earth lanched missiles was giving 3-4 times that dV with 5x the TWR (which also meant some pretty robust heat protection for the missile). Why would you get so provacatively close, what possible reason do you have? Also, if you take some time, you can survey the Earth from much higher up, and identify probably missile silos (granted, some ICBM silos are rather hard to distinguish, since they are mostly underground), and take an orbit that avoids them. Also, decreasing the acceleration of the missile doesn't change much, its still much higher than that of the ship. What you need to compare is how much dV the missile has, vs how much dV the ship can generate in the time it takes the missile to intercept. If your lower the missile TWR but keep dV the same, not much has changed. If you lower TWR and keep burn time the same, a lot can change. But lets do the math, 4 second total burn at 100g, 3 second burn to intercept, then 100 seconds of matching a 1G acceleration. Acceleration is now 1 km/s Velocity after the initial burn (minus gravity losses, which would be 1%, and unknown aero losses) would be 3 km/s. Distance covered during those 3 seconds is 4.5 km. If the orbit is about 200 km, then after the burn, it still needs to go another 195 km, which takes 65 seconds. Your missile can hit. If the ship is going at 2Gs, then the missile with this burn profile has 50 seconds of "chase", and expends its dV 15 seconds before intercept. 15 seconds at 2 G = a miss by 2.25 km. If it was 2second initial burn, and then the remainder for a "chase", the velocity is 2 km/sec, and it has another 2km/sec in reserve for chase. It thus takes 100 seconds to reach 200km, and has 100 seconds of chasing a 2G maneuvering ship... but... previously I was ignoring the effect of gravity... with the 500g missile getting a final velocity of 20km/ sec, time to intercept was so short, and velocity was so high, that gravity would not substantially slow the missile. In this case, in 100 seconds, gravity slows the missile from 2km/sec, to 1km/sec, so in 100 seconds it actually only reaches about 150 km, not 200km, In another 50 seconds, it's slowed to 0.5 km/sec, and hasn't even reached 190km... a ship accelerating at 2 G would avoid this missile. If we go back to the 500G missile... and we assume the missile is launched from KSC (28.6 degrees north), and the ship is orbiting at the equator, then the missile has to travel not 200km, but over 3,000 km. A 20 km/sec intercept still takes 150 seconds, during which time a ship accelerating at 2 Gs can change its velocity by 3 km/sec. A 15 km/sec intercept speec + 1km/s dV for chase has an intercept time of 200 seconds, during which a 1 G ship can change its velocity by 2km/s, easily outmatching the 1km/sec reserve of the missile. So if you know where to point your missile defense missiles, you should also know where you can simply avoid passing over. Flying right over a missile silo puts you really really really close to it. Why would you do that? A semi synchronous orbit of Earth is 20,200 km... orbital time of 12 hours. Medium Earth orbit... at these distances, those missiles are easily avoided. Heck, even a 2000km high orbit would make it easy to avoid these missiles. Again, why why why would you put your ship within 200km (even worse if you're talking about just above the karman line at 100km) of a potentially hostile force?

Well, what I said assumes the missile launches from directly underneath the orbit of the ship. If the missile launches from Florida, and the orbit of the ship doesn't take it to a higher lattitude than Costa Rica, the distance to intercept is much greater, and the time is much greater. I was also assuming a single burn, like some ridiculously high performance SRB... Or the way many AAMs work. However, many AAMs have a 2nd pulse as they near the target. If you had 4 seconds of 5km/s2 acceleration, and burned for 3, then at the very last second, you can still change where you are going to hit by 2.5km. Of course, doing it earlier can make a bigger difference, but then the ship has more time. If the missile can throttle back or has an arbitrarily high number of restarts and arbitrarily short burns, it can put itself on an intercept course with a 2 second burn, and match the ships 1G maneuvers for the next 500 seconds... which is more than enough time to hit. A ship moving at 2G brings this down to 250 seconds. Basically, if your ground track goes over the missile, the missile can get you in leo, even more so if it can throttle/pulse its propulsion. But even 8 seconds is plenty of time for a CIWS laser to neutralize it... So maybe you want to have it burn all at once and go for a kinetic impact... That sort of missile won't be easily defeated by an active defense system... A maneuvering one, or one with a warhead would be more vulnerable.

I play a custom 3x rescale. I use kopernicus (not officially out for 1.9, but there are some recompiles floating around that work for many, but not all, purposes) And Sigma dimensions to handle the rescaling (its tedious to do it manually with kopernicus configs) I highly recommend increasing the scale. Right now the only challenges I find are multiple destination missions *without* ISRU, reusable eve cargo shuttles (using BG rotors... Or without... Thats even harder), and reusable jool divers

X=0.5a*t^2. You've specified acceleration of roughly 5 km/s/s. I will take a t of 3 seconds (a few seconds). so the distance they travel before running out of fuel is 22.5 km. Their final velocity is 15 km/s. Lets take LEO to be 200km. you have over 14.83 seconds to avoid the missile, 11.83 after it stops accerating. At 1 g, in 10 seconds, you can move your ship 500 meters from where it would have been if you didn't accelerate. In 11.83 seconds, that is 700 meters. If your ship is more than 1400 meters long, this is not enough (assuming the missile is aimed at the center of the ship). At 2 G's, its 1.4 km you can dodge. But do they have proximity fuses? What is the blast radius? If the blast radius is 1.4km, they get you even at 2G. Do they have 4 seconds, 5 seconds, several seconds of fuel? Due to the t^2 term, one additional second of 500g acceleration changes a lot. Final velocity at 4 seconds of burn is 20km/s, it travels 40km while accelerating, and to intersect your orbit, needs to travel another 160km, or 8 seconds. At one G, you can move just 320 meters. Any movement you do before the missile stops accelerating is essentially irrelevant, given that it is accelerating 250 to 500x faster, and will easily compensate for your altered trajectory. If the missile assumes that you will keep accelerating at 1 (or 2) g, you shut off engines, and it misses by the same amount as if it assumed you wouldn't accelerate, and then you engaged engines. Going from LEO to higher orbits would change things a lot.

See my post here: I just made a new RocDefs.cfg file in my personal mod folder. You can also directly edit the rocDefs.cfg file with some cop+paste+rename the features and change the body and biome that its supposed to appear in/on. It worked right out of the box with no mods, but it didn't work for planets added with kopernicus. I don't know if they work with Kopernicus 1.8 now, but I was provided with a .dll (not sure if I can/should share it) that makes planets added with kopernicus also able to get surface features.

@Dragon01 Just tell all the employees to remove everything that couldget blown around, melt, or catch fire! I'm sorry, but using a "scorching hot jet stream" to disinfect a building just seems like a good way to ruin everything inside the building... Since we're talking about supersonic combustion ramjet tech, it seems like at a minimum the exhaust would be supersonic... that is going to fling all sorts of objects inside the building all around the place. It seems highly impractical to me. Compare that to just leaving some UV lamps on overnight, or giving the ordinary cleaning staff a spray bottle with 70% ethanol...

@DDE This sounds ridiculous... not quite as ridiculous as the idea of injecting bleach into lungs, or shining intense UV light inside people's lungs... but still ridiculous. I heard Musk made an air purified that can kill the virus with a scorching hot jet of flammable liquid, I think he called it a flame thrower.

If they could? I'm pretty sure they can if they really really wanted to. It would give stability advantages, but you have to consider what sort of tradeoffs would be needed to make such a system work. I think any such system would add a lot more mass and cost than its worth. They would do it if it was cheap, easy. and didn't increase mass. Since it would be hard, expensive, and would add a lot of extra mass, they don't.

For your first point, can't the attachment be made stronger? Also you could simply restrict your very large planes to low G maneuvers. Furthermore, you can distribute the weight away from the center, to reduce loading on the center attachment, like the Helios and similar solar planes: If you have nearly all your weight at the center, then when you pull G's that puts a lot of strain on the center joint. If you have substantial weight attached to the wing and the tips, then the aeroforces will be distributed over multiple attachment points. I would view it as a design challenge. For the battery, there is a 2.5m one (with 4,000 EC, not 40,000). A 3.75m one would be great... as would a 2.5m diameter one, but one that is longer (like the FL-T100 vs FL-T400 tanks... same diameters, different lenghts).

Well, my thoughts are: Part count was way too high (often gratuitous, with uneccessary parts for looks). The design was unstable with empty tanks, as seen when it approached laythe. Much redundancy in the "air carriers", their purpose wasn't ver clear to me Video trickery or mods would have been needed for those air dropped craft, since he had 2 craft flying simultaneously for a good period of time in the atmosphere Refueling with his tailfin probe would be very. very tedious. It would also be impractical to reattach it and have the plane still fly straight (good luck getting it aligned close enough). Its cool, but not very practical or realistic.

Source?

Using a recompile of Kopernicus, started trying to update my Rald mod to use new textures. I'm not even doing scatterer yet. Changed from a laythe template, to a Kerbin template... didn't expect the KSC to get duplicated, working on it now. I'm not quite sure what causes the change in textures... may switch to an eve template

Well, I guess my design may fit this thread. I guess the innovation here is that I've got a RoRo payload bay. I've already tested a mining rover that can roll on and off, so with that module, the entire thing becomes self sufficient.

So far I don't have any SSTOs, but I do have reusable 2 stage designs. Single kerbal shuttle: Only change needed is the orbiter needs a shielded docking port, and thus must launch seperately and connect with the 1st stage plane (the dockingport heights line up on the ground) And then a roll on-roll of cargo hauler which can lift 18 tons... thinking about making a seperate fuel hauling variant that ditched the cargobays (7 tons) to allow it to lift more fuel. Again, the orbiter needs its docking port changed. The carrier also needs a long time for its RTGs to recharge the batteries... But these designs can boost the orbiter up, the orbiter can reach orbit before the carrier falls back into the atmosphere, and the carrier can survive reentry and fly on EC back to a fueling base. The orbiter can glide back to near the landing site, and the carrier can dock with it on the ground. They can then fly together back to a fueling site, and be ready to go again. I would really like to see SSTOs though

KSP's main limitation is a slow play speed due to a high part count, so I think we could use some new parts that can replace smaller parts that are commonly used in multiples: #1) Larger jet engines, reaction wheels, and large diameter LF tanks #2) Larger wings and control surfaces... no, the Big-2 and FAT-455 are not big enough for me :p Breaking ground specific: #3) quad blades for prop/fan/heli blades. I'm thinking that if you were to place these with 2 fold radial symmetry, it would look (and behave) like 8 fold symmetry of the normal blades. A BG motor could thus be 3 parts instead of 9 (when you need to use a lot of blades) #4) Larger batteries (3.75m ones, double thickness ones), larger RTGs: Now with Breaking Ground, in some of my designs I use 12 heavy rotors... these consume A LOT of power. In my last reusable eve cargo shuttle, I had 26 large batteries, 12 heavy rotors, 6? RTGs, and 12x8 = 96 fan blades. Implementing 3.75m batteries that store about 3x more EC (they can be a bit thicker, for the same EC/volume and mass), would save 17 parts. Implementing the quad blad suggestion would lower the blade count to 12x2=24 instead of 12x8= 96, and would save 72 parts. With these suggestions, many of my 300 or so part designs would come down to 200 or so part counts, and the game would play much smoother

Isn't some sort of solar panel code needed for rescale mods? While I don't do interstellar mods, I do like to scale KSP up 3x... and it would be pretty sucky if that resulted in solar panels producing 1/9th the power (sure, I could then go in and manually change the output of all the solar panel parts again, but still). Code for solar panels that can work for different star systems though... that's not my thing (but maybe it will be in KSP 2)

I did it, I got a working reusable Eve Surface-Orbit RoRo cargo shuttle working. only a mid size mk3 cargobay and 18 ton payload, but hey: Uses BG rotors to climb: Gets above 10km with plenty of power to spare: but power consumption goes up, climb rate goes down, and I engage rockets before 11km: Fuel exhausted, but a pretty high Apo: Separation of the orbiter: Orbiter pushes to orbit (I'd have to replace the docking port with a shielded one in the real system) Orbit achieved: (a pic taken later showing payload) But there's no time to waste, that carrier is falling back to Eve: I had to quick load a few times to get the descent profile right.... Eventually I found an attitude that worked, but my plane entered a stable falling configuration that I hadn't anticipated: But as I got lower, I was able to regain control by restarting the motors and pulling it into proper forward flight: Landing it was a piece of cake, and it ended up landing close to a previous carrier for a single kerbal shuttle: Ready to be refueled, and ground docked with the orbiter. EC is provided by a few RTGs, and 2 fuel cells for ascent. Lots of batteries would enable it to make flights of good duration after landing, to get back to a place where it can refuel/pick up the orbiter (where ever it happens to land)