Jim DiGriz

I think you're just trying to lift too much with the skippers, you'd need mainsails, and maybe a bit more fuel for them. I built something very similar to your heavy-lift-1 design at the same point in the science tree, only it was 9 skippers on the bottom, with the outer 8 asparagus staged, and I used the TT-70 radial decouplers with girder segments on them to git some breathing room between the stages. Then only put one "half-orange" tank on top of the middle skipper. Then start adding payload in the middle until you're just about completely burning all your lifter stages to get the payload into circularized LKO -- then you are more or less done with the capacity of the lifter that you designed. Mostly you'll want to get some mainsails to up the TWR in order to boost more into orbit. You probably don't want to add a lot of LV-Ns like that as well, since they're heavy. The idea is get enough big engines to get your LVN stage into orbit and then use it. If you're building a landing craft you also don't want to use the LVNs to try to land anywhere with significant gravity, you'll want a detachable lander stage that flies down and returns and then re-docks to the LVN for the transfer home (if you get large enough you can start needing more LVNs in order to just do interplanetary burns, but you're not there yet). (well, actually you can probably stack a couple more half-tanks in the middle above the final skipper and use that for your circularization burn, but after awhile you'll get diminishing returns, and you'll start falling back to kerbin before you can burn all your fuel and circularize) EDIT: BTW, I don't think you need to go nuts with the mainsails, if you convert the inner engine to mainsail you'll probably have enough TWR throughout the whole ascent to circularize, you should be able to lift a whole lot more if you asparagus stage a bunch of mainsails.

Weird, meeting it at perihelion didn't work for me at all the one time I tried it... I can't argue with that graph though...

try using kerbal joint reinforcement? you can probably get rid of most of your strut stitching if you do. also, lock your gimbals on your outside engines if you're building a big lifter.

dunno... i grew up on TOS and actually rewatched the whole series on netflix not too long ago... its got some classic episodes and spock... i think i'm going to have to go with spock > data...

you need to meet moho at its aphelion. since you leave kerbal on a hohmann transfer at a 180 degree angle away from that, you need to be burning from kerbin when you're roughly in line with moho's perihelion. not every transfer orbit from kerbin to moho will work... basically stay away from getting deep in the sun's gravity, and use moho's eccentricity in your favor...

I've definitely got anti-aliasing... Try the 331.20 drivers: https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa

I see negative learning curves all the time. The startup that can produce a website in weeks turns into the corporation that takes months to produce the same result.

Scaling up 58 reactors in France to the global economy would also spike uranium prices, which is mined and is going to suffer from a "peak uranium" issue since there's a very finite amount of easily accessible uranium.

I installed KW, Kerbal Joint Reinforcement, NovaPunch, Procedural Fairings, FAR and B9... That should keep me busy for a week or two...

I already had all the physics background to understand all the maneuvers in Kerbal. Once I got to the point where I was just totally frustrated with the maneuver node system in kerbal and its interaction with me being both too perfectionist and not quite dexterous enough, I went down a slippery slope from starting with PreciseNode and Kerbal Alarm Clock into MechJeb. Yes I know how to circularize an orbit, now its just "click, burn, done" rather than 5 minutes of me trying to position the burn exactly over the peri/apoapsis and trying to nail the delta-v down to 0.01. I still like doing SSTO takeoffs, final docking and landings myself. I just added all my plugins into my sig line (a bunch of these I just started playing with in the past day or so):

Uh, not so much. Methane is the next most worrisome GHG and it clears faster than CO2. 350 is more like the limit. But that isn't "life support" -- jack it to 2,000 and the globe will still support life. Its very, very hard to sterilize the planet short of impacting it with a bolide the size of a small planet like Mercury. The question is what do we need to limit it to in order to keep the economic and human damage to a reasonable amount. Jacking it up to 2,000 as fast as we can would likely kill billions. Caused mostly by CFCs, which regulation was largely successful at halting that problem (but the Ozone hole over the Antarctic is the major cause of the sea ice increases in Antarctica). We wouldn't do that. The response of the Earth to increased heat is increased CO2 (and the response to increased CO2 is more retained heat). Jack up the CO2 enough and you'll shift the equilibrium so that it stays high.

Nuclear has a negative learning curve. It keeps getting more expensive, not less, the curve is running the wrong direction. Subsidizing it is delaying the inevitable. Solar keeps getting better and cheaper (without subsidies it is much cheaper than Nuclear at this point), so subsidizing it helps accelerate the learning curve. Energy Policy article on the French experience with the negative learning curve in Nuclear Power (which was unencumbered with issues over regulatory burden and anti-nuke hippies trying to kill it): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421510003526 Nuclear energy died in the late-70s/early-80s because it was too expensive. Blaming it on the leftists (or the leftists taking credit for it), was politically useful for both sides though.

Engineering with molten salt is a bit harder than engineering with water or steam. The cost of molten salt reactors is extremely high.

Here's a useful blog post tonight discussing issues around methane release and global warming: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/11/arctic-and-american-methane-in-context/ Note that this is written by a climate science researcher, but in this case its skeptical of recent claims of a 50 Gt C methane hydrate reservoir in Siberia waiting to go off, and puts the recent study showing that "bottom-up" reporting of methane leaks in the US is underestimating actual release by about a factor of two. Pretty even keel stuff and suggests we should do something about methane release, but there's no reason to panic. That's what you get when you get away from news headlines and ask climate science researchers their opinions. At the same time they'll all tell you that global warming is real, that its a rapidly growing problem and that something needs to be done to mitigate it, and that we are irreversibly changing the climate. But the absolute worst case scenarios are as unlikely as the koch-funded theories that global warming is all a hoax.

Just started playing with this today. Very nice. One thing that kinda trolled me for hours until I just figured it out was that the KW Rocketry 3.75m Ultra-Heavy Lift Subassembly for some reason had all kinds of wiggle in the fairing base which seemed to go away when I removed the part and replaced it. I'm guessing the subassemblies were carried forwards from an earlier version of KW and there's some subtle difference between the part in the subassy and the part definition in the plugin so that one works and the other one doesn't... Looking at the working craft vs the subassy that wasn't working all I see is that the KW3mExpandedFairingBase that works has "dstg = 5" while the one that doesn't has "dstg = 1" but have no idea what that means to KSP... EDIT: Hmmm... I'm guessing that has something to do with the staging so that's probably irrelevant... I don't what else is the difference though... I'll post more info if I can replicate it...

Most sea level rise is due to thermal expansion of water. As the Oceans absorb more heat (global warming *mostly* pumps heat into the oceans, not into the atmosphere), then the water becomes less dense and expands. Melting of land ice so far has not be very significant, trends in Greenland are somewhat disturbing lately though.

We've also trained a generation that whoever yells the loudest wins and made politics looks more like team sports. So people deny climate change simply because Al Gore made a movie about it and they have to oppose him because he's on the other team, or they just don't like him on a personal basis ("wouldn't have a drink with him" being the gold standard). Between money corrupting the message on the one hand, and everyone's decision making skills being decoupled from objective reality and based entirely on personality and subjective feelings, you wind up with in our current anti-science state...

Yeah, nothing is impossible. If you climb up to the top of a 100 story building and jump off of it, you /might/ fly. Gravity is just a theory. It would be presumptuous of me to assert that it was impossible that you might fly. I don't really have all the variables. You should try that and let us know how it turns out... Or not... The thing is that there's very little reason to doubt that you'll wind up a sidewalk pancake if you try that, and lots of evidence in favor of it. When you look at the notion that the Earth is round, that was believed as early as the ancient greeks, and you can point to glaring holes in the idea that the earth is flat. There's changes in how the stars rotate across the sky, when you climb up in altitude you can see further past the horizon, ships masts appear before they do as the come across the horizon, the Earth casts a round shadow on the moon, travel to the south and the sun will throw a shadow to the south, etc. In contrast to the flat earth idea, there is basically no phenomenon in the entire observable universe that you can point to which violates SR right now. You have to go digging around in the center of black holes to find areas where SR might be broken (and that can't be 'observed' in the strict sense which is why I say nothing in the observable universe violates SR -- there's a very precise meaning of observable there). At this point we do have a massive body of collected evidence across all of the history of science, which means that anyone who wants to claim something otherwise needs to come up with a theory which explains all the current observables, but in certain cases violates SR. The burden of proof is on the person who has the new idea. It must be able to explain everything that SR does and then more. That makes it hard. The argument around the culture of science fits better at the fringes today. Supersymmety, GUTs and String Theory have taken a huge beating from the LHC results, and its entirely possible that the last 20 years of theoretical high energy physics was all a study of a non-existent aether. There have been people who spoke out about the failure of String Theory to explain anything useful and they were mostly marginalized, while clever people who were very adept at advanced mathematics turned theoretical physics into a club of very smart mathematicians one-upping each other and looking down on anyone outside of their club. The few who claimed the emperor had no clothes and were looking for alternative approaches are starting to get a bit more attention now. It may turn out that its the String Theorists who look incredibly foolish in the future and their critics look like the wise sages in the future (or the 13 TeV LHC might barf up a stop particle and the String Theorists may turn out to be victorious after all). Right now String Theory has started to be backed into such a corner that leading physicists are starting to claim that its simply impossible to know the ultimate laws of nature, that we live in a multiverse and that the anthropic principle just accidentally gives rise to the universe that we live in out of a ridiculous bajillion different possible laws of physics, and that knowledge about fundamental physics is starting to come to an end -- now *that* sounds like old farts falling back on telling people its impossible to learn anything more, which really sounds *wrong*. Just plain old violating SR, tough, sounds like jumping off a building just to see if you might happen to fly today, since it might not be totally impossible... Not a very good bet...

We've already gone to FTL travel so that means that clocks are ticking with imaginary time, mass and length are imaginary and we've used more than an infinite amount of energy to get going this fast. There's nothing special in this case about the plane of simultaneity that we start out with (for example in Kerbin's reference frame), and somehow we got from being at rest on Kerbin to travelling FTL. That means we certainly can turn around and head back. We can also pick a different reference frame, like one at our location going away from Kerbin at 0.9c and look at its planes of simultaneity, which certainly may intersect with Kerbin back in time, and decide we're going to travel FTL relative to that frame and go backwards in time relative to Kerbin. If you've already done 6 impossible things this morning, then there's no law that prevents that...

FTL travel in one reference frame is also traveling backwards in time in another reference frame, so if you can travel FTL you can go back in time, then you wind up killing your grandfather or hitler or whatever...

If you set aside FTL or light-speed travel and just consider large fractions of the speed of light, then you've arrived at the thought experiment that special relativity solves. Instead think about what happens when you're moving at 90% of c. If you turn on a strobe do the photons going in front of you seem to travel at 10% of c, while those behind you travel at 190% of c? The answer is that you observe light to travel at c no matter what your reference frame is. You will measure the light beam out of the front of your space ship as being 100% of c and the same with the tail lights. An observer back on Earth will also measure both your headlights and taillights to be traveling at c as well. The speed of light is invariant under transformations between non-accelerating reference frames. Work out that statement in math and you'll get the time dilation and length contraction of special relativity.

Contentious articles in very small niches can be extremely bad. Some of the technical diving articles are written by trolls and basically flame bait, and its very difficult to go through their moderation process to carefully document the inaccuracies and get them removed, so nobody does it because they have lives. For stuff that isn't contentious at all, and where people have taken the time to write up good articles it can be pretty good, and more information that I'm usually looking for. Even for contentious articles, that have gotten enough attention to get moderated and fixed, if you know how to read defensively, you can usually get a lot farther a lot faster when starting from zero on the issue. But making up your mind on something contentious (monetary policy, global warming, or government socialized health insurance) by just using wikipedia is a pretty bad idea.

Yep, I've got that one. I usually have to hit 'g' twice to extend landing gear as well, dunno if thats somehow related... Something wonky with window focus and keypresses. I tried installing unity desktop yesterday, but for some reason the login gui didn't give me a button to login using it, so I haven't been able to test if this only happens because I'm using a !unity window manager..

So, this bug is kinda driving me crazy and seems to be Linux-related: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/55904-VAB-SPH-woe-in-Linux I wonder if it has something to do with not using Ubuntu's Unity desktop(?), since there's a poster there using Gubuntu 13.10 and I'm using Lubuntu 13.10 with cinnamon...

Bump. Yeah, it affects windows in things like Kerbal Alarm Clock, MechJeb, etc. I just caused an accidental stage separation and ejected by cockpit on my SSTO when I didn't mean to...