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word: uh. talk stuff.

Love those stations and videos! We'll talk about which mods you're running, cause I really would like to change my Kerbals. I don't want the uniforms, just the faces and female Kerbals.

Well, I'm up to 5 now. Jebediah was the first one .... isn't he always? It was a simple mission to orbit the mun and come back .... I forgot to deploy the solar panels, so now he is in a highly elliptical orbit (ok, so I had other problems as well) around Kerbin with half a tank of fuel and no energy. Lesson learned ... put a few OX-SAT panels on each ship. Soon after Bill went to the Mun to land on it, I mean why not, Jeb's mission went so well what could possibly go wrong ... I added a few cheap solar panels in case I forgot to deploy the main one's after all. Well he's sitting on the Mun in an undamaged craft .... and no fuel. The 2 unmanned rescue attempts were able to land within 2k of him ... well, if you include crashing as landing. Lesson learned LTP, oh yeah and more fuel. So I got to Jool in an unmanned probe, we wont talk about not realizing a certain moon has an atmosphere and getting too far into it for my nukes to get out. Although I did get a lot of science before I crashed. So I figured why not send a manned mission there (not to land, just to look around and scan) and have twice the fuel that my probe had. Well I had a lot of trouble getting there and had to burn way to long even for nukes. Anyway, got there saw Jool and left so I'd have enough fuel to get back ...... Bob, Bobsey, and Mattop are now in orbit around the sun with no fuel. Lesson learned don't over estimate my fuel economy. Well, I plan on rescuing them in the next day or so and unmanned mission are so boring ... so I'll probably be up to 10 stranded Kerbals by Wednesday.

Hopefully not to much ram usage with all of this. Every update makes less and less room for mods. Any talk of optimization?

Note that I'm not saying that for it's purposes the game's gravity doesn't work, it does. But I'm just clearing up a misconception when people talk about n-body physics, they say that KSP has 2-body physics, when the only real physics simulation is 1-body physics.

By all means get a second opinion! The principle is the same inside the cloud city your describe, only inverted, but it most certainly at those sizes will be internal convection and winds. I'm not sure we are arguing about the same thing, I'm not speaking of temperature difference, I'm speaking of how much power (energy) you can get out of such a system. How? The city magically stays cool? Sure the hot air will rise, but that not the problem, the problem is how do you expect to keep the city cool with the outside so hot and with hot air circulating all around it? nylon is not going to survive contact with concentrated sulfuric acid, it will dissolve very rapidly! Or is this one of the many internal insulating layers your speaking of? Your not understanding what I'm saying, how much more will having said layers and vents and heat pumps, etc, etc cost? Is it really worth it not to simply fly higher and not need any of that? … where is the cool air coming from that transfer around the city? 1/3 the surface area of a sphere with a radius of 365 m (a balloon capable of lifting 100 kt, at 50 km height with ~0.5 kg of lifting force) is 1.7 km^2, with 2 cm thick aerogel that is 34500 m^3, aerogel weighs 1 kg per m^3 so that is 34.5 tons of gel, about the weight of 172 people. Actually that not much weight compare to the lifting force, but how you plan to fold and send something that is 34500 m^3 to Venus is beyond me. Your common sense made you think 34500 m^3 of aerogel would weight less then a single person, over 2 order of magnitude wrong, so no thank you, I'm going to stick to testing every idea rather then trusting a guess. No I was not speaking of infrared light. I was speaking of optical light: we need to let in some optical light for plant growth, those plants will convert almost all that light into heat, that heat must be pumped out. No I'm not saying such a thing, I'm saying you need to spend energy to keep the city cool. I understand the laws of thermaldynamics. Your city needs to spend energy to keep cool, your circulation system will do nothing to change that fact, it may honestly make it worse by circulating air and increase convective heat exchange. Considering the amount of air and the surface area your dealing with, you will have to spend mega to gigawatts of energy to keep your city cool. Your not understand what I'm saying, or thermodynamics, you most spend energy to pump heat from a lower temperature area to a higher temperature area, no matter the mechanism, no matter some apparent average temperature. No the equilibrium state would be no gradient and no heat difference, stratification is a result of temperatures being out of equilibrium. How? Can you put a price tag on m^3 of gas? We can make gas at Venus, we have to take to Venus all the mass of balloon, insulators, heat pumps, radiators. Lets me compare, I'll make a city at 57 km, 100 kt, that would be ten breathable air balloons 235 m wide, and 20 more hydrogen balloons the same width, Each balloon would weigh 17 tons, totaling 520 tons, that is about 0.5% of the total mass of the structure, of which none of that is in the form of AC system, or insulators or radiators or power plant for said AC system. Seems reasonable to me. If we drop to 50 km the balloons drop in size to 176 m in width, and total balloon mass is 292 tons, that is a weight savings of 228 tons, or about .25% the total mass of the structure. So to drop down in altitude we gain 0.25% in structural mass, less then a percent, then we have to add the mass of insulator, (20 tons, aerogel 2 cm, 1 kg/m^3 insulating just the habitat balloons) the mass of an AC system, lets assume .1 kw/kg for it all and a very optimistic 2 MW needed, that is 20 tons, and then a powerplant for that lets go with a nice 100W/kg (four times that of terrestrial wind-turbines) and that is 200 tons, total is 240 tons and look at that with very optimistic assumptions we make up the weight advantage and then some in insulator, cooling system and powerplant for cooling system. What evidence? Nitpicking, heck we have yet to talk about altitude, what is the minium orbital altitude of venus? I would bet with its atmosphere that altitude is much higher than earth, and thus the orbital energy is higher. ~90% may in fact be a underestimate. Not as long as it would take to make a colony on venus, we are talking about 22nd century at least right? And yes if we have such robots it does bring into question the whole idea of sending talking monkeys into space. Doesn't sound very habitable, heck with "appropriate clothing" work in the vaccum of space at zero gravity is not so bad either, at least one wrong move won't send you falling straight into a literal hell. What evidence? The venara and pioneer probes clearly show alot of haze, show a shifting into the red the deeper into the cloud layers. That just an artist interpretation, of course he's not going to paint a city afloat in white blankness or worse in yellow or red haze.

Lets lock the door before they can come in and have a secret forum for the old ones? 1. Stop the dirty talk, you naughty little roach! 2. "Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself." H.G.

Seriously... I had ONE part on my big space station that was part of a mod pack and when I removed said pack it deleted the whole damned space station. Perhaps you could have the game warn you that it is going to remove the whole craft due to missing part and give you the option of returning to the save screen so you can fix the problem instead of having it automatically wipe out several hours of flight time due to a single mistake. In fact the game currently warns you AFTER it has deleted the craft. Talk about wrong way around.

In case you don't know, soft-body physics is a system of animation that allows for non-rigid elements in video games and film. This type of animation looks ubercool, and is also extremely realistic. What I'm proposing here is a minor implementation of soft-body physics to KSP. Even though my idea may never get beyond this very thread, it'll still be fun to talk about! Specifically, I believe soft-body physics would be useful in animating the rocket engines and wheels, things like that. In rockets, engines would realistically contort to the thrust being expelled out the nozzle, and could even crumple if you land on them. This particular idea was inspired by Apollo 15's LM's Descent stage engine being smashed up when they landed unevenly. SB physics would also be handy in animating bouncier wheels, and maybe even steel-mesh wheels that could bend if too much pressure is applied. A list of other uses I see include flags, solar panels, and dentable fuel tanks. I realize that this is an idea that will take quite a bit more power to run (probably, I'm no computer expert) but what I suggest is only partial implementation. Less accurate physics points. Thanks for being drug though this long suggestion! I'll answer any questions or address any comments you can present.

I had my mothership pilot vanish due to this once ... maybe Jeb thought he was hogging the spotlight? Oh, and this was with Jeb being the lander pilot, talk about ungrateful! Anyway, I could still EVA the pilot just fine by left-clicking to access crew in the module, but no picture...

Ok dodgey I would answer you later. However the area that we need to insulate is just 1/3 of the envelope, the bottom part. First I want quote some words of Dr. Robert Walker about this topic and how these kind of discusions helps and contribute with science. Is what its call Science 2.0 What I want to said, is that we have something good here, of course there is a behavior that I need to correct the same as Rubisco, we need to read more to not end in a flame war like the doctor explain. After all, where there is not more to talk, the tread would die alone.

Guys, we already had to close one thread like this because the arguments were turning nasty. We'd rather not have to do it again. Do not resort to insults, no matter how strongly you feel about the subject, and remember to talk about the subject and not each other, or we will have to lock this thread as well.

I know about the Vega ballons case, it was just a change of altitude that dint last much and it was the only measure between all ballons missions. Again, I said less than 0,5m/s (like average). But it will not matter in this discussion. who tell you that?? where do you get that info? http://eeasolar.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Infarot_9.jpg http://www.thermalimageuk.com/userimages/hot%20air%20balloon%20thermal%20image%20(4).jpg And that is just the envelope temperature, the air inside the ballon goes from 40 to 100C in few meters. Besides the burner every time that fire it mix the air, so is not a good example for a stratification experiment. Like you saw in the water experiment you can have 50 degress in difference (or more) in just 10cm. So I was being very conservative with my values. For sure you can have more than 3 times that delta T in 200 mts. All this without take the fact that water has a lot thermal conductivity than air. But here what matter most, is convective. And hot fluids always rise. I know very well all eco-friendly technologies, that is what I would do (analizing) for living in shorted. But it has nothing to do with the thing that we are talking about. Why are you mention this??? You're not understanding... Extra weight of insulators?? heh.. The main characteristic of any good insulator is "light", if they are not light, they are not good insulators. One of the best is Aerogels. Heat pumps? Power plants? Radiators? You need to put some effort to understand what I am saying before try to search a flaw. The AC it does not need to be so big, is just to compensate some heat mix that would start to happens in weaks or months, becouse there is no perfect process. So is only to reinforce the stratification. And it would took energy from outside of course. Winds, solar panels, or heat difference between the top envelope and the outside, etc. ??? Plants does not need UV to growth. In fact they are better without UV. They use just visible light. Is all in the graphic... Is not so difficult to understand... I'll make it simple for you, forget for one second about all the insulation and the different IR layers, AC, etc. Now you have two environments, "outside" and the "city envelope". All the radiation and heat by convection and conductivity equals temperatures. Now imagine that you are in a small room in this city, you just cold down the room. To do this you need to counter all energy that the city is receiving?? No. Why? becouse it only matters the heat received and expelled by the system, they need to be equal or temperature rise, or down (there is not violating in this process); but when we talk about equal temperatures between enviroments we are talking of average temperature!, you can have many different temperatures inside the envelope and you would not violate any law meanwhile your average temperature is the same that outside. Now you can have a lot of insulators and reflect almost all heat, you just receive 1kw of heat in the whole envelope, if you manage to radiate the same 1kw of energy to outside, you have equilibrium. Doing this you can have any temperature you want. Or maybe you expend extra energy extracted from outside, and you keep cooling the inside until you reach almost 0 absolute. (you are not violating any law). So returning to the stratification idea. Here if your average temperature inside is equal to outside, you would exchange the same energy that you receive. But you can take advantage that hot air rise and cold air downs. Encouraging this process with vent methods and some insulating in the right places, you can have an area where your temperatrue is low and another area where the tempearature is higher to compensate. Is clear enoght? You know how many times you said in this mail the words: weight, cost, lots, violating; between others? Try to be more positive, problems are easy to solve Using the same "parachute" that I mention to produce drag, then energy from the parachute and proppelers. Is the thing that you need to maintain latitude in conjunction with rudder, without expend electricity (also if you are in the equator you dont need it). How? In the same way that kite surfing. No, I said that venus low orbit is easier to reach due to 0,9 g and venus diameter, and you said that only is a 10% of reduction due to gravity. Now I said again, is not only for gravity, is also for diamenter, and you have a 0,9 of earth diamenter. Both parameters matter in equal proportions. If we have an hypothetical planet of 3 meters of diamenter with a surfuce gravity of 9,8m/s2, then we can enter in orbit with just a jump. You need to go outside to assemble things, maintenance, fly to other cities, go to work to other stations, it can be a scientific station, or the rocket launcher station... or maybe just becouse you wanna go out and fly over there.Completely white blankness??? You are almost in the bottom of the clouds. I would said that days are almost as shiny like a sunny day at earth. http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~dfischer/venus/ http://www.cyberphysics.co.uk/topics/radioact/Radio/EMSpectrumcolor.jpg ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I found a good link about pros and cons for Cloud Cities in Venus. Is very complete. http://www.science20.com/robert_inventor/will_we_build_colonies_float_over_venus_buckminster_fullers_cloud_nine-127573 It has good information with quality links. Here explain a possible transportation model for venus. http://www.clowder.net/hop/railroad/Venus.html

All this talk of bugs and killing will give me nightmares >_>. My Solution - A small soda bottle wrapped in paper and half-full of hot, wet dirt should suffice. Jeb's Solution - A Mk2 Command Pod with docked Lab, Materials Bay, Mystery Goo, 2HOT, Presmat, Double-C, and GRAVMAX--all lifted on a hexagonal asparagus of seven Common Booster Cores. -Duxwing

I must missed this post previously. I haven't used procedural wings (or B9, another aerospace add on), but when I hear people talk about either mod they are usually also discussing FAR. I'm not sure how reliable procedural wings is in stock KSP. If I recall correctly, there are people who successful use B9 with stock KSP aero. Wing selection is pretty limited in stock KSP parts. Realize you can also use control surfaces, many of which have a lift rating of 0.7. They're a bit easier to hide than delta wings but still provide a good deal of lift. If you use them, make sure to disable the control surface using tweakables, unless you want them on. Just watch out because if you get too many control surfaces fighting each other, it makes your craft jittery (that's a SAS problem).

It will probably be something like that. The torpedo idea sounds cool! I hope we could make this work, but first I have to worry about the ship itself, then we'll talk. Also the back of the ship is really hard to model, but I'm getting there.

That's good to know because, from your posts, I got the impression you were trying to define Part Clipping for the rest of us. As I see it, Part Clipping is defined by the user opening the debug menu via alt-f12 and enabling the "Enable part clipping" toggle under the Cheats and Hacks heading. This would allow the user to overload connection nodes and place parts in ways that the editor normally doesn't allow (which I'm not at all against outside of a contest about rebuilding stock craft). As I earlier said, though, there are ways to force the editor to your will without touching the debug menu so it's sometimes hard to tell. Part clipping through alt-f12 is also a fine tradition in the spaceplane building community here so it is understandable that we're having this talk.

There was talk to make it a setting that the user can set which, I think is nice that the user can pick and .24 is more then likely going to break save's.

That's what I love about the BSC challenges. You get to build something new! Your designs for that 'something-new' can influence your gameplay of KSP tremendously. And my favorite challenges are the ones that can help you with KSP in general. One little comment: You talk about how we should "Vote Mallard," when I think you mean that we should "Vote Plover."

Scientists has doubts about the rotation speed being the only problem to lack of a magnetic field (not even a little!). Some believe that the core is not solid due to the high internal heat (by radioactive elements). It does not matter what is the outside temperature or the inside temperature, the only that matters is that you expell the same amount of heat you receive and produce. I was just pointing in case you was using a formule which take into account the wind speed. Even that you are traveling at the same wind speed, of course you would have always air flow moving around. But I guess they would be less than 0,5m/s. I dont know.. In that case you need to have into account the Heat capacity of the gas, that is very small. I can only talk using common sense and some previous experiences in widespread rooms with AC or heating sources. Becouse there is not a practical use or need for this concept yet. But I can give you sources of this same concept but with water instead air. For example Solar thermal collectors needs always exchange temperature with cold water to improve the efficiency. Also helps a lot to heat a small part of the boiler and not the full boiler to start use hot water. So distribute the heat in layers is very effective in this case. This is a case study: http://task32.iea-shc.org/data/sites/1/publications/task32-d2.pdf This is one of the products for sale http://energiaesole.eu/index2.php?lang=en&pag=sole_gas Heres mention the normal case difference between top and bottom in this tanks 80C of dt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_water_storage_tank Ehh? where do you get those numbers? Why 1km?? You almost not need to inject energy to keep cold your surface city. It would work like this: Lets imagine a egg-shape envelope with 2 layers (not extra materials need it), instead had 1 layer with X thick to support the city weight, you divide that layer thick into 2. First we need to have a reflective IR-UV layer in the whole envelope to counter the wavelenght heat due to Sun light and cloud reflective light. You set a good insultaion in the bottom, and a bad insultation on top. For this you need a low emissivity layer (for IR in the 66C wavelenght) at bottom and a high emissivity layer at 70C-100C variable from half to top. Also an extra conductive insulator at city base (but the same air between the 2 layer envelope works like a good insulator.) (better configurations of emissivity and reflective coeficients between layers are for sure possible, but I let that to someone with better thermodinamic undestandings) The key of this system is to extract air from the height that you most think convenient and drop it (with its temperature increase it) to the height that has a similar temperature (never mix temperatures). So you dont have vertical wind flows, and air is a very bad heat conductor. So you only need an small AC (becouse you would have always some energy loses) to cold the city, and that´s all. You find your thermal equilibrium between outside and inside, no thermodinamic laws is violated. You can use the extreme heat at the top to get energy, for example heat water to cook or other process. Or a rankine cycle and produce electricity. Also you dont lose lifting power with this method. No they dont. If you have a heat engine which converts a heat difference directly into electric power you are not violating any law. And that would be a heat diode.Or a heat pipe. Also, you will find this interesting: http://www.hngn.com/articles/23141/20140128/controlling-heat-flow-new-technology-could-allow-thermal-management-in-computers-buildings-and-even-clothing.htm Is not for altitude control, is for latitude control in case you needed to receive materials from the surface. But you forget that the diameter is also smaller. Why you need very low speed to enter in Kerbin low orbit if the gravity is the same? The same for saturn, it has similar gravity than earth, but its orbit speed its very fast. The thermal equilibrium is the same, like you see in the graph. If I gain heat faster, you also lost it faster on the top. But dont get me wrong, I would like to be at a height where someone can go outside with propper cloth and not feel so much hot. If you find something that punctures it, that would be a hell of discovery. I imagine scientist discussing and imaging what could cause that. Life at venus clouds is not totally discard it by scientist.

nope I if you go to the resource monitor it will hint on things but if you use other software it is a lot more accurate. when there is a static screen up (take you pick there .. and you see the working set and the committed kb you can see what is going on pretty well .. I have noticed that if I have a stable mod I can let everything sit still and I should see no upward increment for either of those stats .. however when something is going to be problematic if I have something related to that new mod .. a part a button whatever ... and let everything stabilize then open that object there will be a slow (sometimes not so slow) increase in the consumed resource. Crashes don't always happen at the 3.4 most peeps talk about but the chances become exponentially greater from that point forward .. that's why I like to work in a safe range of 2.9 or less if I can .. it'd be sort of silly to base it on a crash ... at least I think it would. side note .. i have found though that with the KSP background up the rate of increase is much slower .. it's not a full stop but its a lot slower ..

Here's a possibility: Keep a low-resolution version of every texture in memory so as long as the game runs it has something to display. Then opportunistically load full-resolution textures for nearby objects as memory permits. It would be complicated code, and someone with actual 3D programming experience will have to talk about the performance hit. But it could be the least bad option for getting more content into a 32-bit build.

Was there any reason why? It's a bit surprising to me, I was looking forward to seeing NASA people talk about ksp.

Afraid I don't use KW fairings, so...dunno. brooklyn666: yep, just set it = Root in the cfg. It's my "half-real" attempt at more realistic antenna behavior. Math correct in both cases. For "KSP" I assume you mean KSC? That depends. If you want to replicate real life, you want a truly staggering range: enough such that maybe your 600Gm dish can talk to KSC from Pluto. That requires KSC having something like a 100Tm range. This is where those clamps become useful: even with a 100Tm range, the max range between KSC and a 500km omni is only 50,000km.