pincushionman

Conical Re-entry Ablative Protection

By "this" I meant "digitally reproduce content in the library's posession, by any means," not specifically use a camera.

You know what I would use instead? A digital camera, and a small tripod. Make sure you have permission to do this, too.

Spaceception, instead of making a duplicate thread and everybody getting confused which one is the better one to post to, you can always "report" your own post and ask the moderators to move it to the proper forum instead. I've gone ahead and done that for you before this one gets too long, but you may want to do it yourself and include the link to the other thread. I hope this doesn't come across as "backseat moderating" (since I'm not a mod myself), but it's not obvious to everyone that the mods will move stuff if they know about it, and that the "report" is the best way to go about it.

It should be the Hypersonic Inflatable Decelerator Extension (HIDE). Because acronyms are cool. And stuff "hides" behind it. "Extension" doesn't sound very good, though, but I didn't think "enclosure" was very accurate. The design challenge here will be not flipping out from all the drag, no?

If you have a rigid body, pure moment ("torque") can be applied anywhere and it makes no difference. As others have said, however, we don't usually have rigid bodies. We usually have long, flexible ("bendy") structures where it might make sense to distribute moment along the length. This would reduce the stress between parts, but it shouldn't change the global response (rotational acceleration of the craft as a whole). One thing where location does make a difference, however, is the "control from here" point. You want this close to the CoM if you can. Because SAS measures the rotational acceleration at that location, and at the ends of long bendy structures, it not only inherits the CoM's rotational acceleration, it also has it's own accelerations relative to it. These can either add to or subtract from the global rotational acceleration, depending on what exactly is happening. In extreme cases…well, look at Pecan's last image: …The rotational acceleration at the end may well be in the opposite direction of the vessel as a whole. And then everything goes to hell and SAS shakes your ship apart.

Being able to site your own KSC (or multiple centers later in career (would be cool if it were meaningful. Right now KSC is at an ideal location and there is little reason to consider other launch sites. But I envision cities across the planet, some of which represent locations of the various agencies. Building from or launching from locations near the agencies would provide discounts for part and launch costs (think transportation costs for materiel). Current KSC wouldn't be near anything, and would have the highest build/launch overhead cost due to that. So you would have to weigh convenience vs. cost in siting your build and launch facilities. And at certain locations it would be cheaper to use a single manufacturer's parts rather than mixing and matching so much. …on second thought, this would probably be WAY complicated to track, both from a technical standpoint and in communicating it to the player. Plus without axial tilt the actual advantages of different launch sites just aren't there. So this would be better suited for a mod. It would be an impetus to create more life around Kerbin, though.

Why woulld you think that (a) we could tell any difference, from interstellar distances, between "we see evidence of water, and also evidence of salts" and "we see evidence of salty water"? My understanding of our science is that we can detect water, no further details. (b) if we see salt water, we can't assume fresh water is present? If there are both seas and land, and the temperature and pressure ranges match ours well enough, we can safely assume there's a water cycle, meaning it's highly likely there's fresh water somewhere. If not, desalination is a relatively straightforward process. Expensive, but straightforward. (c) if there is salt water, we can't expect habitanility? After all, our own seas are teeming with life of all types. I would imagine that incompatibilities with our physiology would be more likely due to the native ecosystems than the presence of salt.

I thought that not only was scatter not collision…able, it also wasn't persistent. If this is still true, it needs to be made so prior to collision being added.

I don't really understand what's going on here. Do I add this to my profile somehow, or is it a browser extension?

To be honest, I would be ecstatic if they ignored new content for the next released patch and focused on performance and core gameplay features, especially as 1.05 was mostly content slated for 1.1. We know that's not happening completely, as the new antenna system has new antenna parts slated for it, but there's going to be so much going on under the hood with the engine transition and the re-write of several major core systems, they really can't afford to have much in the way of new flashy s&%t.

[quote name='Gaarst'][noparse][url]insert your image URL here[/url][/noparse] Or you can just click on the [SUB][url]http://i.imgur.com/05zYJ29.png[/url][/SUB] icon in the bar above the text box.[/QUOTE] This, but it has to be on imagur/photobucket/etc. already. You can't link to a file on your hard drive. Shame really; a forum for a game I was involved with ten years [size=1]*gulp*[/size] ago actually hosted its own users' images, but nobody seems to do that anymore.

You can absolutelely make your own mirrors. My brother was in the astronomy club at the University of Illinois, and they would build their own telescopes, having "polishing parties" to work the mirrors by hand. Don't know how they got them silvered, though. They may have been professionally front-silvered…or they may have taken advantage of the chemistry department.

[quote name='Scarecrow88']Biplanes work just fine. ... As this is stock, it does use a jet engine at the back, which may help resolve some of the CoL/CoM issues mentioned above.[/QUOTE] What did you do to move the center of mass forward? Do you just have that much fuel at the front?

If you're worried about moving parts fouling up in a pistol-type weapon because the lubricant going away, you'd do something like the Metal Storm concept and have a stick of, say, ten rounds that are cast together and shoved into the chamber at once, individually fired from the front to the back by electronics. No casings or moving parts at all.

I'm going to have to agree with everyone else and guess that your rear gear is too far aft. The closer your gear are to the CoM, the less the aircraft's own weight counters the desired rotation. You also need to make sure your pitch controls (elevators) are far enough from both your CoM and your gear to be effective - canards need to be far forward, and/or tailplanes must be far aft. As long as your gear are close to your CoM, far enough from one is far enough from the other. Now, if you're doing a tail-dragger, it's not that important since you're already rotated back, and in fact the plane may naturally rotate forward during roll-up. So the typical answer is to make sure your gear are near the middle. But there are other alternatives if you're constrained: - Shorten your aft gear so you're already rotated when you start. - Rotate the main wing upward in your design ("geometric" angle of attack). This achieves the same thing. - Use oversize canard elevators and brute-force the rotation. This is very dangerous. - The end of the runway is raised above the surrounding land. If you're careful, you can roll off the end of the runway at speed and rotate in the air. This is pretty much what is done on aircraft carriers. The key here is to not go so fast you lose control on the runway. Again, seeing pictures would help as we're just guessing here. But you probably do NOT want more engine. Real aircraft get by with T/W on the order of 0.3. And since I assume you want to land and collect science, you're heading for rough terrain. You want low-speed takeoffs and landings, and more engine does not help you there.

Because we don't have the parts to pull the CoM far enough forward most of the time. Real biplanes have "puller" propellers and engines [i]way[/i] at the front. *EDIT* Ninja'd. Wow, I'm wtiting slow today.

[quote name='Geschosskopf']…And if the ship is not active, all you'll see is the gray oval and NEVER see an encounter even when it will happen in less than 1 orbit.[/QUOTE] Did not realize this limitation. Are SOI change predictions shown only when the object is *actually* active (being flown), or are they predicted when the object is selected in the Tracking Center? Because I doubt very many people would choose to fly a potential rescue object unless they already suspect upcoming encounters, and just give a quick look at it from the Tracking Center map.

The question is "will SQUAD apply any behavior tweaks?" If there are no new parts and they leave the balance alone (which I'm hoping for, personally), there's a [i]chance[/i] everything will still work ok. But I doubt it. If they're already reworking a lot of code to get it working in the new engine, it's the perfect opportunity to fix some longstanding logic issues. Plus there will be new bugs that appear in the port. And I'd be shocked if they don't apply some balance tweaks while they're at it.

"On rails" simulation is exactly the same as full simlation except it ignores, in particular: 1) atmospheric forces (lift and drag) 2) internal forces All orbital-motion effects such as SOI changes are respected, and in fact in 1.0 the SOI-boundary behavior was changed under the hood to ensure it always happens (prior, you could skip through at high warp under certain conditions). As for why you didn't see it in the orbital predictions, I can think of two reasons off the top of my head: 1) did't upgrade Tracking Center. If you haven't upgraded to "show patched conics" then the predictions will not account for SOI changes properly. They'll still happen, though. 2) At the time you looked, the Mun encounter was simply so far in the future the prediction didn't bother to show it. How much time had passed?

It should. Plug it in (BEFORE you start KSP) and find out! You'll need to go to Settings in the main menu and map axes and buttons before you can do anything with it, though.

The joint flexibility between the left and right sides is different, even with symmetry on. It's the same bug that causes a slow roll on otherwise-balanced airplanes. Try mounting your gear to the fuselage and give it a go. EDIT. Or install KJR and see if it helps. On second thought, install KJR before you even start.

[quote name='selfish_meme']Can you use the Hat? I can't seem to get KSP to detect the hat buttons[/QUOTE] The hat is typically a digital axis, like a D-pad. So you're somewhat limited as to what you can actually map to it.

Unfortunately, that one is a known bug.

What exactly are you adding to the velocity vector? What equations are you integrating, and what kind of integrator did you write?