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Ah! My bad! So this will be the "A TOGGLE BUTTON THAT CAN BE OPERATED BY THE PLAYER TO TURN ON AND OFF A FEATURE THAT IS INTENDED FOR PEOPLE WHO FEEL MORE COMFORTABLE PLAYING THE GAME WITH SOME ADDITIONAL HELP AND TRAINING" button then? But we do need to talk about the "A TOGGLE BUTTON THAT CAN BE OPERATED BY THE PLAYER TO TURN ON AND OFF A FEATURE THAT IS INTENDED FOR PEOPLE WHO FEEL MORE COMFORTABLE PLAYING THE GAME WITH SOME ADDITIONAL HELP AND TRAINING" button popup text balloon text in that case...

Envelope math time. Let's go worst case scenario here. Starship radiates no heat, reflects no heat, and has 500 square meters of area exposed to the sun. 1380W/m2 hits Starship from the sun, for a total of 690000W. The latent heat of vaporization of oxygen is 214,000J/kg, and Methane is 510,000J/kg. Oxidizer to fuel ratio is roughly 3.5, so average latent heat of vaporization is ~280,000J/kg. In this scenario where zero mitigation is taken and all of the heat hitting Starship goes towards boiling off the propellants, Starship loses about 2.5 kilograms per second. It will spend ~60% of its time in sunlight (probably a bit high, but again, worst case scenario), so a whole 129.6 tons of propellant is lost from Starship per day. Starship would have to launch nearly one refueling flight per day just to keep up with the losses, in the optimistic 150 tons to orbit reusable config (about the higher end of what has been estimated for reusable mode). This is obviously not a realistic scenario, but it highlights how conservative assumptions can lead to large estimates. Stainless steel has something like an albedo of 0.6 (60 percent reflected, 40 percent absorbed), and with the nose facing the sun at all times, the exposed surface area is about 64 square meters. This decreases the incoming power to around 36000W. Starship will also naturally radiate some heat away. LOX is about 54K, CH4 is around 90K, some of the ship isn't up against cryogens at all, but I will assume the ship's skin is at an average of 60K, conservatively low. Stainless steel's emissivity, I'm finding a large range, let's go for something conservatively low at 0.55 (values up to 0.85 are reported). Starship's surface area is about 1500m^2, it should be higher probably, but again, conservatively low. Plugging those into the Stefan-Boltzmann equation gives a radiative flux of, uh, about 600W. Not great. Radiative flux scales with temperature to the fourth power, but we still won't get nearly enough flux even raising the entire skin temperature to 110K, the upper end of methane boiling temperatures. One thing that could be done is to have a double hull for the nose cone, which is pointing towards the sun here, which is moderately well insulated from the rest of the tanks. This could even be done by just having the nose cone empty as with a normal non depot starship. The interior would be coated to reduce interior radiation transfer. This would allow the, worst case scenario, 64 square meter circle to get much hotter than the rest of the ship and radiate more effectively. The nose is conical, but I'm not sure how to do the math on that, so I'm going to take the volume of an equivalent sphere (should be roughly equal to that of a half sphere stretched by a factor of 2, but not exact). This gives a surface area of about 250 square meters. To offset the rest of the flux from solar heating, the nose would have to rise to about 260-270K. Conduction to the rear of the ship over the surface area of the very thin tank walls (let's be extremely generous and assume 5 centimeters thick taking into account internal radiation bypassing the nose shield and stringers and such) (surface area ~1.4 square meters) (90K CH4 tank immediately behind 270K nose cone) will be calculated also. The section between the tank and the nose is, what, 10 meters long on an unmodified non depot starship? The depot one may be different but the extra length helps us here. Heat getting to the fuel is now 369W, and as we found earlier, Starship radiates about 600W by itself. Even assuming it doesn't, we have reduced the boiloff, in theory, to 114kg/day. Even if I'm off by a factor of 10, just by pointing Starship in the right direction, with not that much modification, that's like a ton of fuel per day, which is well manageable. Unfortunately, it isn't that simple because the Earth is reflecting and radiating heat as well. This ends up totaling roughly 345W/m2 averaged over night and day at the surface, as the Earth is (mostly) in equilibrium, and has four times as much surface area as it does cross sectional area. If Starship is 400km up, this decreases slightly to about 305W/m2, although the atmosphere is further out than the surface so it will be a bit higher than that. Now we get into the wonderful world of materials having different reflectivities and emissivities for different wavelengths, and I'm going to handwave this and say everything is the same as it is coming from the sun. Starship is pointing at the sun, so can't really control its Earthwise orientation. Averaged over the orbit, I'm going to assume an average Earth facing cross sectional area of 300 square meters (450 is the max, 64 is the minimum, approximately at least, this whole post is filled with approximations). With the same albedo of 0.6, Starship will receive an average of 36,600W from the Earth. Due to our solar mitigations, assuming they actually work, the Earth radiation now dominates and is much more difficult to protect against. It is possible the heat shield has better radiative characteristics and could be oriented towards Earth for maximum effect, but the depot probably won't have a heat shield... It could have some other thermal protection in its place, though. This is beyond the scope of my analysis. Total power reaching the fuel is roughly 36,600-600+370 = 36,370W. This is about 0.13kg/s, or 11.2 tons per day. Not great. If we conservatively estimate 100 tons of propellant per trip, and a full load of 1300 tons required, that is 13 trips for the principal, and then 1 more trip for every 9 days it takes. If we assume two ships per week, or one ship every two weeks from each of the four pads, that is a total of 22 refueling launches over the course of 77 days if I did the math right. Keep in mind that this is all an extremely rough approximation, but it shows how upper teens could be a realistic number. High ones could also be realistic if the assumptions on capacity, flight rate, load needed, and thermal protection were changed. We simply don't know enough. If my calculations are correct, and Earth heating is the driving force, deep space boiloff should be incredibly minor. Unfortunately this means pointing the crew compartment at the sun, which is explicitly what they talk about not doing for Mars.

What I mean when I say “propaganda” is that it is only words. There is no “Mars fund”, and no deep engineering work is going forwards right now. Can Starship get to Mars? Yes. But it’s not it’s main purpose right now. In a practical context, IFT-2 brings Starship no closer to Mars than Artemis I brings SLS closer to Mars. The only difference between the two is Starship actually has the launch cadence to do a Mars mission. But the two are quite similar, with Orion CM-001 being a test vehicle in a similar manner to Ship 16 or whatever number this one is. Lucrative may be the wrong word, but the way I see it is this: satellite launches make money, sending stuff to Mars doesn’t. Unless you have another company doing the Mars research and building, but none exist right now. If there isn’t a space launch market taking advantage of Starship rapid reuse, I really have to wonder how Musk plans to fund his city. The City is the only thing I question. With Starship ready, it would be much easier to get a NASA-run Mars “research” mission (normal expedition) funded by the government. The low cost created by something like a “Commercial Mars Crew” or “Commercial Mars Surface Services” program might make a program palatable to Congress, whereas a Mars program in the style of how SLS is being done would be too expensive. To put it another way, I don’t doubt SpaceX will be capable of sending scientific payloads to Mars one day, and maybe crew on a government sponsored expedition, I just think Musk’s city plans are mainly talk at this point. It’s more of a “I’ll believe it when I see it” thing, compared to how I am more inclined to believe in uncrewed Martian surface delivery services. I’m a big Venus colonization fan. I’m highly skeptical of the ability of humans to give birth in 1/3 G or lunar gravity, so if there are going to be colonies on a planet instead of in orbit, Venus is the place to be.

All the talk on here of Mars colonies begs pointing out that Venus is in a lot of ways more habitable than Mars... The 60 km altitude level in Venus' atmosphere has comparable pressure and temperature to Earth and an oxygen-nitrogen mix of gas would work as a lifting gas in a balloon there. It also has very Earth like gravity and much better protection from cosmic radiation than Mars. Access to resources like metals would be a challenge, but every off-world colony faces serious challenges of one form or another. Maybe SpaceX's propulsive landing technology could be put to eventual use flying to/from cloud cities on Bespin Venus? Living in floating bubbles there would almost certainly be preferable to moisture farming on Tatooine Mars.

An intuition is not really good enough. Also why did you ignore my sentence where I literally say that I would replace "Cadet" by "Beginner"? Isn't it a good proposition? At least I find it better than "First Time User Experience". The message I'm replying to only talk about the "orientation" part. And to answer you, in my language you won't use first time in there, it would be a bit weird. That's why they translated it to something a bit different. Also cadet is a french word (my language), so I have maybe learned "cadet" before "first time" in english lol (I was pretty bad at it when I was young).

We are not going to talk about it because it is off topic. If we can avoid talking about a certain conflict in the Russian thread, and politics in the Chinese thread, we can do it here. I haven’t seen anyone wish for Soyuz and Shenzhou to explode just because of the politics in those two countries.

I guess we’re also not gonna talk about it here but boy this would be a whole lot easier to get exited about if it wasn’t entangled with the Elons increasingly impossible to ignore moral and emotional implosion. Hard not to root for this thing blowing up on the pad at this point.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1110329210332053504?s=46&t=Jd73T2beq0JLNtwTy1uR5A Musk has literally said the city will be complete by 2050. https://www.inverse.com/science/51291-spacex-here-s-the-timeline-for-getting-to-mars-and-starting-a-colony And SpaceX’s chief Mars development engineer has said they won’t start off with a base, but with a town. Musk has said it will only be 10 years before the town would be established after the first crewed Mars landing. Note that he began these proposals in 2019, before Artemis was planned. Musk had no plans for research on the Moon, and certainly not enough on Mars to determine if people can live there. Musk has also said he wants to die on Mars. If he has Starship working after a few development flights, an uncrewed Mars development mission has flown, and rapid reuse is perfected, there is nothing to stop him from his “1,000 ships in each transfer window” plan. He expects a million people to be sent to the planet over the course of roughly 20 years. I still don’t understand this “human nature” argument. The ISS isn’t being used to study specific systems for Mars missions because none are in development. It would be pointless to develop without a Mars program in place. The reason we haven’t gotten a Mars program so far is because we have more pressing problems on Earth. That’s human nature, but only insofar as we take care of each other instead of abandoning the majority of people in the name of “survival of the species”. Speculation is not a replacement for excitement. We have to talk about these things to see if they are viable. No one, whether it be a government or a company board, is going to fund experiments for something that might not even work. Would you fund parapsychology experiments without speculating whether they are even worthwhile first?

In an attempt to talk about anything other than the navball, have you seen the new pictures posted? I'm sure people will still complain about how game xyz is so much better and KSP sux and bla bla bla but I think these are BEAUTIFUL.

NSF coverage is hot garbage. Would be fine minus the yammering... but the yammering persists. Ditto Tim Dodd. Utterly uninterested in hearing them talk.

Calling 911 because nobody understands me when I talk about the inherent superiority of Z gauge over HO gauge.

I was there for most of space exploration (my earliest space memory is watching the re-entry of Gemini 12) and I have to at least partly agree with you. You take any course on introducing new things to business and they'll talk about those new things, especially new technologies, needing champion(s). There's a reason Robert Heinlein wrote a story about a businessman drumming up support for going to the Moon and called it "The Man Who Sold the Moon". It has to be sold and resold as an idea, as a collection of projects that need support. (Don't even consider Elon Musk. Look at what he did with Twitter. Find the real story about other things he's done. Like this one.) When getting into space was linked to international competition, it was an easier sale. I remember Isaac Asimov writing about the launch of Sputnik 1 and how it galvanised him into writing much more fact articles and books for the new era. However, don't completely worry about this. If it's possible, the impact of another major achievement by China will certainly have some reaction. Like landing on the Moon. Hopefully the reactions will be useful ones.

The game can’t please everybody! It just has to please the largest possible number of it’s intended audience. If LS feels any more of a chore than planning transfers and dV/TWR requirements, then the design or implementation will have failed! All I see is your pointing out the obvious — that different people have different preferences, and we’re here to talk about them. I don’t think that’s a problem. Do you?

I swear I remember hearing some talk in the past about KSP2 using a graph style representation for ships rather than a tree representation, that would allow for stuff like multi-docking but it seems like that isn't the case so same limitations as KSP1 at the moment am fraid.

Why do you keep bringing real craft UI which is not at all the same as a game and moreover when we talk about the third person view? And also ksp is mostly about spacecraft, not only planes, and generally in spacecraft you don't really look at windows which is different from ksp where you need to know where you land, that's the main argument. Besides, I don't know where you found this picture of Crew Dragon but all I could find is a navball in the corner: For Orion in your message, I won't call that "front and center". So even talking about real life, it's not even a valid argument.

????? So we can talk about the KSP 2 UI not handling certain resolutions well (for the record: when it comes to the pixelated style scaling improperly, yeah, I agree that is a problem), but as soon as we discuss the KSP 1 UI becoming outright obstructive at certain common UI scales, especially those you can expect console players to play at, it's "[not] too fair"? Not to mention, claiming "if you make it the whole screen, I agree it's obstructive" which, purposefully or not, implies people who play at these UI scales would do so intentionally only to make their experience worse. I think it's completely fair to cite this example. People playing at lower resolutions or with their monitor across the room like in any living room setup is not unheard of, and if anything, it's frankly not fair to pull the rug from under my argument as soon as any criticism of UI scaling poorly blows KSP 1's way. I guess this is a convoluted way of saying: I don't think it's too fair to the discussion to excuse Squad with "the game was designed for and tested at a certain resolution", as if it isn't standard practice to ensure UIs scale well between 720p and 3840p and super incompetent on Squad's part to not do so! Matt Lowne would not configure his game purposefully to make his console experience even worse, full stop. Players playing with the UI this big is not something that never ever happens and is not something devs shouldn't try to account for when coming up with layouts for their UIs. I'll hold Squad fully accountable for placing the navball in the middle so that players have to zoom way out to see the ground below their landers.

Probably... Actually, I'm gonna hop on investigating how it's done. A fun video I remembered due to this talk: The video mentioned in the comment, or rather, comment response above. Yes, you're thinking correctly. This indeed IS the longest text ever put as a description of the link.

1. The interface. The team had a bunch of nice ideas posted publicly (and probably few more never revealed) but settled for style that neither fits the general feeling of the game (high tech civilization heading to other planets, even stars) but also is barely readable thanks to 15000 different font types, sizes, inconsistencies and general clunkyness of the chosen style - retro pixely text was never good at being easy to read, which brings me to the next point: 2. Accessibility. As widely elaborated here https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/219151-can-we-talk-about-accessibility/ it would be good to have some options, considering that many not only fully featured games, but early access titles as well, have those options. And it's important, if you want your game to be played by everyone without limits their bodies made on them. Please also note that in both paragraphs I'm talking about the style. The layout is fine. 3. Discovery-and-situational-based technology unlocks. As opposed to, once more, the science system based on points. We've been through this already. 4. Actual Mission planner with alarms and transfer windows. I forgot if it's gonna be introduced in FS! but it's nearly crucial for long term simultaneous missions. Since you do have TriggerAU on board, he knows his stuff. 5. Fairings that are actually solid. No more clipping through payloads, please. And some additional structural integrity would be nice if, say, I want to build an interstage fairing and hold the munar module in it. Right now the only place where the fairing is connected is on the base. The open top should also work as structural element. KSP1 sort of allowed for mounting points in the middle, it wasn't the perfect solution but it was something. 6. While I'm at it, surface attachments for the tube parts. Please, I'd like to put solar panels there but I can't. 7. Picking the side of the runway on launch. The other side is much closer to the KSC buuldings if I want to take a drive. And I may want to liftoff straight to the west. 8. Once heating arrives, and some more electricity generation systems.. perhaps a way to turn excess heat from <insert a manufactory process or sthn> into power. Even tiny amounts. Balance it so that it needs to be radiated but when in atmo, part of the heat could be worked through a turbine of sorts. 9. Different surface properties on different bodies. Rock should feel different from grass, grass should feel different from sand, sand should feel different from molten basalt that is solid but still hot and sticky. More in linked thread. 10. I dunno, just some basic QoL features that will make playing more pleasant. There's too many to list.

Programming. A visual scripting system, layered on top of a standard LUA/Python for more experienced players to replace the action group system. It would allow simple conditional action groups even to players that don't care at all about programming, with things as simple as parachutes deploying automatically or lights turning on when there's no sunlight, and get them curious from there. Electric and methane powered props and rotors, along with aerostats and airship parts. We have an helicopter on Mars right now, and it has flown for 65 times already (of the 5 planned), flying stuff, even where you don't have the oxygen for jet engines, is already here in space exploration. Returning from Eve with an air launched rocket from an electric plane has been my favorite KSP1 mission in 10 years of playing the game. A non-resource based and non-lethal life support. I don't care about having to carry Kerbal Fuel on top of rocket fuel, I want to have interesting design constraints given by the environment I'm going to explore and the duration of the mission. Non-lethal to preserve the existence of rescue missions, maybe make that a canon thing with emergency hibernation capsules or something. Robotics But not for props and rotors. Those should be single-part engines, just like wheels and rocket engines. Functional Bases and Stations. Even before colonies, I want a reason to be building a base/station, be it science, surveying, training, tourism, mining or whatever else. I don't want to build a space station just because a procedurally generated mission told me so, i want them to be part of the gameplay loop. Not just colonies, even that small entry level LKO outposts resembling the ISS, it has to have a reason to be there other than "I want a ISS replica" or the game rewarding me a couple hundred science points and then ignore its existence. I'd like for it to be functional. Being able to store/edit/recover specific named crafts. Especially when resources kick in, I don't want my first ever supersonic plane to be scrapped for parts and rebuilt every time it's used. I want to have an hangar with all my built planes, and have them serve multiple missions each. Construction times (and refurbishment) Self-explanatory, not a big deal for people not wanting it, just time-warp it away, but it adds a layer of logistics I would enjoy. A Strong supply automation system. I don't want it to just transfer resources from point A to point B, being able to "Certify" a booster for automatic recovery (and then hangar, and reuse, skipping the construction times the next time you need it), being able to send back to the KSC a mother-plane after it has released it's air-launched rocket. And, on the other side of things, having to do test runs, and hops around the KSC landing pads to "Certify" said booster. Testing environment A test environment of some sort, a "simulation" in which we can test landers, parachutes, gliders, and whatnot in the condition of the target body, but only after we've unlocked it by bringing the right instruments in that environment. The last 4 could all be buildings (or even multiple buildings each), in the bases/stations/colony system for that functionality I talk about in point 5 (A mining rover garage to store your mining rovers on your Mun mining outpost, ILS equipment for the runway at your Laythe AirBase, and a wind tunnel to test new designs...). And, number 10: The color picker. Every other reply here adds it and I'm jumping on that one to. Gimme the hex values for colors, and a custom palette thing where I can save the colors I use more often.

I think the issue with fail-learning is that people talk about how this worked well when the Europeans crossed to the Americas and the US expanded westward, but ignore the massive costs involved in that. Someone from Bulgaria made a good statement when talking about the p-word over on the For All Mankind Reddit. To use it here in the context of how we should go about colonizing space, “yes, the 1800s pioneers were successfully in colonizing, but with great loss of human life along the way. That was fine for the 1800s but unacceptable for modern society.” IMO, I think it’s in engineering where that “fail-learning” is best applied, but a good level of discussion by multiple parties is necessary for ethics and broader goal planning. Soviet space goal planning in the 60s was not unlike Musk’s “we’ll land on Mars in 2024” style of doing things. It cost a number of people their lives, such as in the Soyuz disaster of November 1966. A little more thoughtfulness might have prevented loss of life, and if the program wouldn’t have been so secretive, it might have benefited from think tanks auditing the design bureaus’ engineering practices, in the same way Soviet nuclear strategy was influenced positively by both civilian and military think tanks. That’s not a jab at present day SpaceX by the way. They’ve clearly done well so far, with a darn good safety record and impressive engineering feats. I’m talking about SpaceX in the 2040s or 2050s, which may be a wildly different organization from the one we have now, much in the same way 1990s NASA did not resemble 1960s NASA that much. The Soviet method of management and organization performed just fine for Sputnik and Vostok, but failed when they tried to go to the Moon. There’s a thin line between insanity and genius, and I’m just concerned SpaceX will tip the wrong way in the future.

I’m a little bummed that docking physics is STILL not on the list of things needed to be fixed.. : ( especially since this has been an issue since launch.. about 8 months or so ago. I have reported this issue as a bug here on the forums before. I’ve seen others talk about it on discord. I’ve seen Matt Lowe himself mention it a couple times now on his videos on YouTube. . So I’m confused as to why this isn’t being worked on. This is a major issue that’s preventing me, and likely many others from enjoying the game. Can a dev please reply to this so I know that it’s at least known and if there will be any sort of fix for this soon? I really want to enjoy this game but the docking and undocking is very unstable and has been since the beginning of this games early access launch. Just this morning I was trying to do a mun mission and when I undocked my Lander from my other vessel it blasted it away, up at an angle. Rather than a smooth disconnect and slowly moving away as it should. And recently I was not even able to dock with my other vessel at all. It would just bounce right off the other vessel and would not dock at all. The dock part was previously connected to a decouple, which apparently breaks the docking physics once that’s disconnected.

I refuse to judge KSP2 based on the dreams of community members. Heck, it's finally a pretty mainstream opinion even in the forums that it is not reasonable to 100% believe the official statements either. That's 8 months of building trust right there. It'll stop being a non sequitur when people start actually playing the game for real on long term science/exploration saves. But hey, you can talk about future imagined optimizations and I can't talk about a very real issue that's currently in the game waiting to explode? (did once already, too). May I know what you call nonsensical placements? You mean the navball and vital information such as speed right in the center as it exists on almost every plane or spacecraft cockpit? Again, altitude I give to you, that's bad. I mean, if you're talking from a different timeline, might as well make it clear now, because you seem to live on a completely different reality. Probably born from not leaving the forums, which is a common problem. Normal cockpits might have a compass, altitude and speed tape, yet again, in real life they know those elements are not there to be pretty, and they should communicate information in a fast, compact and concise way: In real life, on a PFD, the speed tape exists to communicate overspeed, selected speed, current speed, and even acceleration. In KSP2 the speed tape does nothing but exist behind the one useful number it shows. The compass tape also communicates other elements, like selected heading. In KSP2 the compass tape exists as a huge useless element and the one thing it should communicate is a number which in KSP2 is sitting outside the tape, not even in it. An altitude tape shows your current altitude, selected altitude, vertical speed, and in some cases terrain altitude too. In KSP2 you need to hide one number to show the other, and the altitude tape exists only as a background element that does nothing useful. In real life, all these elements are presented in a compact way, on a single square screen that doesn't waste any space, yet shows all the useful information without overwhelming the pilot. In KSP2 it looks like someone hit the explode button, with every element taking useless space for no reason. Here's a real life PFD as an example. It sits centered in your view, so you just look down and see it, and can derive all your information from it. In the worst case, it's on one of two or more screens, but you can select on which to display it. It's the same engine, but don't worry, hating on Squad and KSP1 after getting thousands of hours on it is the only cope that has been found to justify KSP2, even though KSP2 is still the worse product of the two.

maybe grammar then talk

yes Talk:Spacecraft

Did you mean: Talk:Train?