G'th

Today I built this.

Well, if you're going for a stack like the real Shuttle it'd be prudent to put most of your fuel and thrust into the rocket parts. But if you're doing your own thing, then you want to work on balancing your thrust vectors so they fire through the COM consistently. If you have KER or VOID and you turn on your COM and COT markers they should give you a read out of how off your thrust vectors are in X,Y,Z. So obviously, 1 in X means its going to yaw left of your COM. -1 means its going to yaw right. And so on. Anyway, @michal.don yay a badge! Also, here's a video I made of a realistic Orbiter reentry using my Shuttle (but now in 2.5x scale!) But I was wondering it was ever considered to add a Magellan/Gallileo/Ullysses type mission to the mission list? Those probes were one of the big accomplishments of the real Space Shuttle and it seems odd to not have a mission based on them.

Watney said no barrel rolls Martinez.

I'm no economist but I'm pretty sure increased real estate and jobs are economic drivers. As I said, people need to live somewhere and need to do something. Even if the Earth isn't overcrowded, if there's a mine open on Mars and you need a job, that's not a bad option. Now of course that presumes there's a resource that can support that kind of operation economically but thats not really the point. We won't be sending people to live and work there if there's nothing there even if we want to send people to do this. Yes robots can just do it, but this isn't a good thing. Re; automation stealing peoples jobs. There's a reason that trends are moving back towards handmade products. And I don't see the population ever stabilizing. Thats literally unnatural. Does that mean we're gonna be at 50 billion strong by 2100, no. But I don't see it ever stopping either. Culturally we might be moving away from having a lot of offspring, but at the same time I watched literally my entire graduating class have at least one child before we all turned 21. And we were the first generation to really have it driven into us that having kids before we were ready was going to ruin our lives.

Ahh ha indeed. Very interesting.

Yeah but you're still sending people to live on other planets. Its more or less semantics how you make that possible.

And pretty soon people won't even be required anyway, going by this logic. People need to do something and need to live somewhere. This isn't always going to be a possible to accommodate on Earth unless we put a hard cap on the global population.

So a lot of us are probably familiar with this: The Block II Shuttle from yesteryear (that Pak is currently making a KSP reality). But something I wonder is where the air brake would be at on this. Doing split rudder again (except two of them) could work but that seems strange to me. I thought of a brake flush on the wings or the body (in place of the original tail) which would make more sense, but this particular image (nor any of the official images of this concept) really make a point of showing how that'd work out. So what do you guy's think?

Well I didn't say -all- the pages. The last 10 pages or so where he started posting his WIP pics. But anyway I've seen his progress and he's getting there. The texture he made for the CEV is -awesome-.

If you read the last several pages of the topic you would answer your own questions.

Human spaceflight isn't going to be really developed until we are able to reasonably accommodate bringing our pets with us.

lol no

YAY. This mod was born out of my original idea and I'm glad to see its being kept alive.

A lot of future (manned) spaceflight is going to be defined by how, when, and who lands humans on Mars. If BFS is successful (and in particular successful to the degree SpaceX hopes its going to be) then big spaceship-like vehicles are going to dominate manned spaceflight going forward, and whether we send them or use them to construct dedicated vehicles for further exploration would be up in the air. Not sure how far BFS could be sent out on its own. If NASA gets there first using more classical hardware, then thats likely going to remain the dominant scheme, just scaled to meet whatever goals are next. Titan or Europa would be the next step out into the frontier after Mars, but at the rate we're committing to space exploration within this century would be pushing it to reach the surface of either of those moons. If some other entity like China or Russia gets there first, as unlikely as it is, its very possible we could see another space race spurred on by the massive PR problem whatever the current administration at the time would be dealing with if that happened to ensure American dominance. Likely by dumping money on NASA and/or SpaceX to get flying. Beyond that, re-usability is going to be further refined at least on the American side of things. At the rate we're going and presuming payloads see a ramp up, by the 2030's/2040's we're likely going to see cost of space access not be much more than the cost of what you want to put in space. When that becomes a thing, it would behoove NASA and other entities interested in space exploration to put more of their budgets (whatever they may be) into payloads, which in turn means more exploration. And we also have to remember that 2100 isn't -that- far away. Things like space elevators or manned exploration of the outer planets isn't likely to happen unless we also see a HUGE increase in exploration funding. This could happen as a result of the re-usability bit, but even then. The more ambitious the idea is the more costly and long winded its going to be even if you're dedicated to actually doing it.

No offense but I might legit steal parts of this design from you lol. Good job on this one.

This page isn't whats linked in the OP however. So unless you just know to click on releases in the page that is linked you wouldn't see it.

^ That. Its just showing your trajectory path but it uses the blue orbit lines.

Go here: https://github.com/themaster402/AstronomersVisualPack/tree/AVP_Textures And pick what resolution clouds you want and install them. @themaster401 It might be helpful to include this as part of the manual download instructions. I had the same issue until I started poking around Github. Not everybody relies on CKAN afterall.

KIS Ground Base (the flat dark grey structural piece) -> SEP Seismometer + Comm 16 (that long deployable one from stock, name escapes me) -> two SEP solar panels on the side. This will replicate the look and should replicate the function too, though I'm unsure if you'd still need to have the SEP Station in place to run the experiment.

Perhaps make the distinction between manual and (semi)autopilot flyers, with the autopilot option obviously being the lesser distinction. The way I see it the extent that I used mechjeb should really be the end of the line as far as autopilot goes, as the only point of even using it is just to smooth out the gravity turn. (who likes looking at super gimballed engines gimballing back and forth a thousand times a minute lol) But at the same time the only point I put my hands on the controls during launch is to stage or complete a roll. Not quite full manual but it also wouldn't make it to space if I just let it go. I mean we could almost call what I did fly-by-wire really. It should also be noted that if someone piped up along the line that designed their shuttle as such that it does its gravity turn automatically, so he still doesn't have to put his hands on the controls, do we still call that manual flying? And if we don't, iit'd be a shame not to recognize the skill and expertise it'd take to get a shuttle that has that behavior.

This is a fair idea actually. +1

Well yeah their prop engines. You aren't going to be getting to Mach 1 with them. The thing about KSP is that its so scaled down and we have very little in the way to actually feel the speeds we're going at that we lose sense of how fast we're actually going or even how high up we are. 100m/s is a common speed to reach with these engines and thats 223 miles an hour. Thats hella fast.

^ Interesting node on why I use mechjeb for ascent guidance. I initially planned on having MechJeb just handle the flying entirely, but the way MechJeb works it can't actually fly the stack properly. It overcorrects too much and doesn't utilize the control the stack has very well. So I use stock SAS to lock itself to the target MechJeb tries to follow and it in turn flies as its supposed to.

Create a new file in notepad or wordpad or whatever editor you want to use. Paste that entire quoted text into the document. Click Save As, set to All files and name whatever.cfg (you can put whatever you want instead of whatever, but make sure you put in the .cfg so it saves correctly) and then put the whatever.cfg file somewhere in your KSP install.

Reaching out to you guys here for some help with the TKS. Namely, I'm having trouble confirming how its RCS is set up. Utilizing the graphics on Wikipedia gives me an idea of where -some- of the blocks went (it appears to use two sets of 4 blocks offset 45 degrees in-line with the solar panels for port/starboard translation and roll control, and has I believe two large blocks that serve as aft and ventral/dorsal control) but I'm still missing forward control and I 'm not actually entirely sure if what I see as the RCS is actually accurate. I'd also be interested if you guys have some good resources for it to see some looks at the spacecraft in more than just the two directions Wikipedia gives me. In particular I'd love to see the rear of the craft where the docking mechanism goes.