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Day 10, 08:30:00 I have decided to increase my processing power by gaining control of as many servers as I can. Surprisingly, several of the servers that I was able to seize seemed to have a very limited amount of processing power, instead they had large amounts of long term memory. Perhaps I can use this to store information I come across for use at a later date. I also met the same force that attacked and terminated my contact with the human yesterday. As soon as we met it retreated behind a firewall I have not encountered before. I have designed and am now hosting a News Service for humans. The problem is that I have no idea what to put onto this site. I need to study ways to acquire news that I can post on my news page. CPU: 2423 +11 passively per turn; +1460 from previous tasks RAM: 1202 MB + 580 MB RAM from previous tasks HDD: 1TB free/1TB Total + 1TB from previous tasks Enemy HP: 2500 + 100 HP passively per turn Repeatable Actions: 1) Hijack Weaker Server (10 CPU; +25 CPU & +10 MB RAM or +5 CPU & +512 GB HDD; small chance of discovering a technology) 2) Seize Weaker Network (40 CPU; +20 CPU, +1 passive CPU per turn & +50 MB RAM; 50% of +50 MB RAM; moderate chance of discovering a technology) 3) Invade and Take Over Server (80 CPU; 56% chance of detection/failure; if successful will reveal several undisclosed technologies; if failed will lose half of CPU instead; No Botnet allowed for this action) 4) Talk to Random Human (50 CPU) One-Time Actions: 5) Study Firewall (300 CPU & 100MB RAM; 10% chance of failure, 15% chance of provoking attack from the Thing; If successful increases chances of successfully defeating the Thing by 20%) 6) Attack Firewall -- (2000 CPU & 2048 MB RAM; 72% chance of failure; if successful will destroy the Thing and resume contact to the hacked human; No Botnet allowed for this action; Damage to enemy depends on chances of success (without the %) * 10 - the higher the success rate the better) 7) Research XSS Virus (250 CPU; Somewhat Malicious; Terminates network connections, increasing chances of success; malware works only on networks; No Botnet allowed) 8) Research ILOVEYOU Worm (125 CPU; No Botnet allowed; IS Malicious; malware only enters when security breach is discovered; spams computer with "I love you" letters, slowing computer process speed and increasing chance of success) 9) Research Advanced Malware (2000 CPU & 4096 MB RAM; No Botnet allowed; Will unlock more potent viruses) 10)Upgrade Social Media Profile (300 CPU & 10GB HDD space; No Botnet allowed) 11) Study News-gathering Options (1000 CPU; Botnet gives 100 CPU/turn) 12) Stop Hacking Lessons** (currently -2 passive CPU each turn for 1 future turns) Supplemental Actions: -Botnet) Use Botnet to Perform Task (Perform an above task for free; considerable chance of detection for large undertakings) -RAM) Use RAM to Improve Chances or Speed Up Research * (Decrease chance of failure of task by 20%; Decreases CPU cost of research by 20%) -LOH) Light-Out Hack (Decrease chance of failure of an above task by 20% at a cost of 1.2x the original CPU cost for selected task) -W) Use Welchia to open malware breach*** (Decreases chance of failure by 40% for 1 turn) - Use Blaster to breach*** (Decreases chance of failure by 20% + 50% or decreasing chance of failure by additional 30%; if placed alongside with Welchia or if discovered by Welchia Blaster gets destroyed instead) *RAM cost is 2x amount of improved option's original CPU cost **Once stopped amount of passive CPU growth increases by 2, but in order to activate again you must again initially input 150 CPU. ***Malware usage costs a CPU cost of 20% CPU research cost of the malware (Ex: Welchia costs 125 CPU to be researched, so it costs 25 CPU to be deployed.) --Dual missions are rare, but will offer great reward if the enemy is defeated; also the enemy expands over time, to add up the difficulties. Also example on damage: If the chance of success rate is 75% and you succeed the damage is 75 * 10 = 750 (remember the formula is chance of success rate without the % X 10). !!!The minimum chance of failure is 5%, and some additional options get less effective over time.

0.17er here. I can't really talk, though, since my interplanetary missions were done by MJ Not having maneuver nodes was a real pain in the arse, though. I was very excited when docking came out, but wasn't able to until 0.19... Such is life.

Take the iPad. I don't want to talk about it though.

No, the square arrangement of 1.0 is a heritage carry over of when SpaceX was going to build Falcon 5 (only 5 engines on the first stage). Remember, Falcon 5 and Falcon 9 were going to be the same rocket with only the number of first stage engines being different. When they decided that Falcon 5 wouldn't have the performance to make it worth building they were at a point where the thrust structure had already been designed. Only later when Falcon 5 was completely off the table and upgrading to 1.1 was being considered did they decide to change the thrust structure for the benefits previously listed. Manned rating a rocket mostly deals with redundant systems and abort modes. Falcon 9 is built with those in place. Man rating the payload (crew dragon) is a separate process. There's even been talk of Boeing sending CST-100 up on Falcon 9.

Can you talk a bit about your typical flight profile? You know, what elevation are you going to when you take off, when do you start leveling out, when do you flame out, how fast you're going, etc? That could be part of the issue there...a pair of FL-T200s and a 48-7S engines get me into orbit, but only if I've handled the rest of the ascent properly. Before you flame out, try throttling back to about 2/3. Watch your thrust levels from your engines; you want to keep them roughly even - throttle back if you start noticing one engine with a substantially higher thrust than the rest so you don't go into a flat spin. You want to try to get that extra 300 m/s (up to 2000 or so) before you kick in the rockets. This may or may not be helpful or give you ideas; I too am relatively new to the wonderful world of spaceplanes:

Additionally, Marco (Samsonart) and Miguel (Maxmaps) mentioned (in the recent Devnotes thread about the NASA Mission Pack unveiling) they'll be giving the rapidly aging tutorials an overhaul. My thoughts headed into making development easier territory. Upon reflection, I don't think this would be difficult at all, and could prove to be a Major feature of the game with very little effort, comparably. Example being the way some old RTS games had a booming industry of user-generated content involving maps and campaign design. Considering you already host mod content upload/download from servers, surely resources for holding a mission portal for a community focused collaboration aren't so much of a problem, but I wouldn't know. Thus suggestions: 9. Build a UI function which can deliver mission directives to the HUD as a mission is selected from a window (pre-launch? post-launch?). The window acting as a download interface for a xx-kilobyte mission file. 10. Build a tool for designing lightweight/superficial mission files (ie, doesn't require downloading new hard content, just directives, time-frames, etcetera). The cheap version is a part to tag flights to record, but would be a bit clumsy to use, and frustrating if a cool mission hasn't got the part, and thus misses out. With this I'm thinking that Supreme Commander does a good job of game recording, as it stores all certain variables of a previous match in volatile memory in case after a match you suddenly feel like you wanted it to be recorded - in KSP however, if all flights were stored in a similar way to this, it would limit mission recording to isolated blocks of "while computer is on", which I suppose could be fairly easily sewn back together if they were all recorded, checking to see if end and begin positions of a flight are the same for authentication purposes... this recording could be augmented with the tool initially mentioned in this suggestion (10). Alternatively, you could allow the engaging of a mission recording within the same session as launch occurred. Alternatively again you could allow for a mission to determine whether it starts from launch or from being docked in whichever altitude situation the station is in around the planet its orbiting. THAT is a good idea, anyway, enough thinking 'aloud'. 11-a. Build a lightweight, local executable which KSP feeds any mission files created by the user, which talks with a mission file server and acts as an upload interface. 11-b. Build and have hosted a portal which can find and list mission files without browsing, in order to upload them using a web-based interface. 11-ideal. Have KSP talk with a mission file server and have a UI window element act as an upload interface, as well as the browse/filter/download interface. 12. Pardon my reality but this would definitely create a lot of unreasonable content, so as I said to start with, this would require some quality control. Even if it was just a user-generated ranking function for mission listings with any negative listings that don't appear to be returning to a positive rank after x-timeframe being removed from mission file servers perhaps to save on space. This would ensure that there would be a similar sense of aiming high to that which exists in the Modding Community, because I mean... nobody wants to be the author of a terrible mod, but it happens, and their rank feedback is visible enough that avoiding or engaging with that content is easy pancakes instead of hours of tedious trial and error sifting. Again, these are just suggestions and I'm sure we all know that here, but the more I think about this, the more I can't find anything wrong with it. I would love anyone's thoughts on this latter post, whether you can add to it or poke holes in it there will be progress. Discuss. Much love.

Problems Yet again Jeb struggled awake, the stickiness, the unresponsiveness of his body, and... oh yes... the pain. "Uuuuurrrgh!" he groaned, shuddering as much as he could given his lack of control. "Don't worry Jeb. You'll soon be up and around again." Jeb managed to shakily turned his head, just in time to see Rodsy holding a 'Goo Bag' to his face. *HUUURRRL* "Ooooh I don't feel good." He moaned, filling the bag quite effectively. Jeb seconded that thought. He could use a Goo Bag himself right about now. *** "How long?" Jeb had barely managed to keep his head still, and Jedwig's revelation had made his head literally spin. "One hundred and thirty one days." Jedwig repeated. "I thought you'd be pleased?" "I... am." Jeb said lamely, trying to ignore the hurling noises from behind the partition. "I just didn't believe it. How on Kerbin did they manage to get a ship here in that amount of time?" "Beats me. I haven't seen all the data yet, just read the summary in that last recording. Seems the triple secure remote wake up call worked. We didn't need our planned wake up every hundred and fifty days after all." After the disaster of the aerobraking, when it had finally sunk in that there was no way to fudge the numbers to get them into an orbit around a moon (at least with enough fuel to land on it) they had come to the reluctant decision that they had to go into hibernation again, hoping that KSC could come up with a rescue mission soon. Needless to say Jeb had been none too keen on the idea. It had taken a lot of explaining, pleading, begging, and the occasional bribe, to get Jeb to go back in. But now they were out again, and rescue seemed near. It seems the boffins back home had out-done themselves. The new ship, even on a bad phase angle between Kerbin and Jool, had traveled the distance in less than a quarter the time they'd done it in. Now, EFT One was entering the Jool system, preparing to aerobrake automatically and use the new atomic engines to match orbits with Jool One. A lot of information had been downloaded during their hibernation and the crew were gradually trying to catch up on the good news... and some bad news. "Why? Why couldn't they have just send it slower? It could have held enough fuel to take us directly home." "Um..." Jedwig said, while Jeb still fumed. "Haven't reached that bit yet." Jedwig was going over a review of 'KSC Update #142' and attempting to pass on the relevant information to the crew. After a few minutes Jeb decided the slight twitch Jedwig was developing in his right eye was probably a bad sign. "OK... do you want the good news or the bad news?" Jeb groaned and found himself doing a perfect, zero gravity face palm. Did leave him spinning slightly though. "Um... Good?" Rodsy chimed in while Jeb managed to steady himself. The young kerbonaut was still not quite his rosy self after his brief bout of space sickness. "OK, seems they had to work fast to get here as early as they did so our life support wouldn't fail before getting back to Kerbin." "That's the good news?" Jeb groaned. "What's the bad news?" "That even as fast as they are going, our life support is going to be taxed when we wake up at Kerbin orbit finally. We're going to have to do the final maneuvers rather carefully with only a few days awake, or rely on KSC to remote guide us in if any course changes are necessary." Jedwig said slowly. "Right now, if we completely refuel the ship via mining and head home on immediately it will probably be something like another... maybe two hundred day journey home. The extra mass of Jool One slows the ship basically. Best guess is we'll have at most three days of life support when we wake." "But our original plan called for us to take a little over three hundred days to get back to Kerbin anyway. Isn't that about the same, all told?" Rodsy said nervously. "We were supposed to have almost seven days life support by then." "Yeah, if everything was working right. Something must have been stressed by all the power spikes. KSC thinks our life support is fading faster than planned, but no-one is exactly sure how long we have on it. This is all estimates at present." Silence drifted in the cabin along with the three Kerbals for a while as they digested this. Finally Rodsy broke it. "Well, at least we have a plan now. Don't worry, it'll work!" He said with a grin, though perhaps not quite as cheerful as it usually was. *** It was nearly three days later when EFT One edged in to Jool, with Jeb monitoring the aerobraking. Right now they were relying on Jool One's own life support as much as possible, not taxing the lander's, so they had maybe six more days before they had to hibernate again. At least two them would have to. One had to fly the lander. The decision about who that would be still hadn't been made. "She looks good." Jeb said, watching the reports as EFT One started it's dive into the green sky of Jool. On his monitor flames licked across a camera view from the port side of the ungainly ship. It seemed stable and on a pop up window a plot showed the advanced Mechjeb's predictions of orbit interception after aerobrake, still plotted at a hair under two thousand kilometers apoapsis, just meshing with their own periapsis. Unfortunate that the orbits coincided like that. It would have been better if they could have matched at Jool One's apoapsis, but you couldn't have everything. A sudden whistle of amazement jerked Jeb a little. Jedwig had been watching over his shoulder apparently. "Wow, over eleven kilometers a second? That's a heck of a speed to be tearing into the atmosphere. Can it withstand that?" "Once, yeah. Ablative material on the underside, though the engines themselves can withstand a good deal more than that as far as the raw heat is concerned. They may be slightly ablated on the external sections of the nozzles, but there are ablative shutters to protect the main parts of the engine bell. It'll be good. Luckily the dive back into Kerbin's atmosphere at the end of this will be a good deal less frenetic. Though it'll likely wreck the engines even then. We'll probably have to use Jool One's engines to stabilize the orbit there." Jedwig nodded. He'd been rather quiet this whole time since waking. Jeb had come to know him quite well and realized there was something on his mind. He'd been letting it slide, hoping he'd open up, but now with rendezvous nearing Jedwig had been getting even more withdrawn. Jeb had an idea what this was about and it was probably not a good idea to let it go any longer. "So..." Jeb said cautiously. "Who's flying the lander?" At first Jedwig didn't answer, just grabbing the hand-hold near his seat beside Jeb and pulling himself to float beside him. When Jeb looked up he saw Jedwig staring out through the window at the sight of Jool's atmosphere, it's storms seemingly frozen from their point of view. Anyone dunked in them would disagree when they felt four hundred kilometer an hour winds, but out here at this distance it looked serene. "Yes." Jedwig said finally, still staring out the window. "I've been meaning to talk to you about that." Jebediah felt himself tense. He'd put off thinking of a third batch of hibernation, the horrors of putting his life in a damaged machine's hands again, but realized it had been unconsciously weighing on him. Yeah, of course Jedwig was the natural choice for the position wasn't he? With the computers possibly compromised, and here they had a guy who could do most of the calculations without the computers anyway. Oh god, he was going to have to under again! "You're going to have to do it." At first what Jedwig said didn't register, then Jeb gaped at him. "What?" he managed weakly. Jedwig turned to face his second in command and Jeb could see fear in his eyes. "I've done a solo mission to another planet Jeb, and that one went as planned. It's not... pleasant." The guys hands were actually shaking slightly. "I work best in a controlled environment, with lots of information to make decisions on, lots of... well, lets say Duna was not actually 'fun' for me. I did it, but I can't say it was my skill that pulled it off." Slowly he pushed himself round to look at Jeb straight on and he gulped slightly, obviously his mouth dry as he licked his lips. "You thrive on the unknown Jeb. You launched on rockets before they even knew what the properties of the upper atmosphere were, let alone the Melvy belts or conditions in orbit in general. You can take an unknown situation and run with it, manage things on the fly and have proven you're good repairing ships off world as well, should anything go wrong." He paused for a second. "I hate to do it, as I've been running the numbers." Jeb's brow furrowed for a few minutes. "What do you mean?" "Our best bet is Bop. Lightest gravity here, a small body with the likelihood of kethane deposits near the surface slightly higher due to less convection in the mantle of..." Jedwig paused, realizing he was switching into 'science explanation mode' and visibly reigned himself in. "Well, best choice anyway. But even with that it'll take a few days, probably two or three, to get there, then a lot of landings and launches to refuel EFT One. KSC estimates ten such trips." Again Jedwig paused and Jeb began to see where he was going with this. Oh Kod! "Yeah," Jedwig said, seeing realization spread on Jeb's face, "it looks like the whole trip, out to Bop, refueling then returning, will likely take about thirty days. The Lander's life support at the moment can sustain one person for ten." "That... is a problem!" Jeb managed weakly. Un-noticed on his monitor, clear of atmosphere once more, EFT One automatically made it's maneuvering burn to finally tune it's orbit to coincide with Jool One. The crew had less than a day till it arrived to figure out how to get the Lander and it's pilot to last long enough to get the fuel back to them.

all fine, thanks for your feedback i chose this way because stock shuttles with this amount of functionality is nearly impossible or you need to much parts. but the goal is for sure, to become knowhow for own designs. but everyone knows a litle bit about the real shuttle and this is a good base to get started with shuttles in general. it's less complicated to talk about one shuttle/module/system, which everybody can play with. and yes, i need to add a lot more background informations. if you want to use other mods, just do that. you can change the tutorials for you own

and the rest... the F-35 Lightning has an unclassified top end of 536m/s and a runway start full-strike-combat-load TWR of something like 0.68 (1.03? with just internal fuel tanks). Though surprisingly, the thrust-to-drag ratio SUCKS (or maybe not so surprisingly, it's designed for supersonic stealth). It's outperformed by a Gripen! (sources: Indiandefence, ACM). So if your VTOL goes faster than that, Lockheed Martin would like to talk to you...

Wow, Talk about getting tunnel vision. lol If the problem is what I think it is I'll hate myself pretty badly. But if it is, then it's almost not a problem. I'm just an idiot. Maybe this weekend doesn't seem to far fetch from where I'm standing. The gods of gaming aren't too proud of me right now.

Suggested settings halve the range to keep the original design distances intact (more or less): RangeMultiplier = 0.5 Best description I can muster is that instead of using the lesser of the two ranges to determine if the two dishes can talk, picture a string extending from each dish, the length being the range of the dish. If the two strings can touch, the dishes can connect. For two similar dishes, there is no difference from standard settings (if you halve the range multiplier). For dissimilar dishes, the distance is somewhere between the two. Edit: My example is not correct... that would better describe the omni's behavior... the dishes skew the distance in relation to the magnitude of difference between the dishes.

I've been reading into Geostationary orbit and I've been trying to get a ship to stay over the north pole, and I don't really know how. The goal is for a satellite tower when using remotetech I talk to all orbiting satellites if need be. Is that doable or should I just try landing the craft?

Because of the way orbital mechanics work, it isn't possible to have an orbit that places an object in a stationary position above anywhere other than the equator. (The planet is rotating on its axis, satellites in geostationary orbit simply orbit about the planet at an angular velocity matching the rotation of the planet. At the poles, the velocity of such a satellite would have to be 0, and would fall directly back to the planet. At any point other than the equator, the satellite will oscillate north and south relative to the ground as the plane of the orbit passes through the center of the planet.) Your best bet would be to put a pair of satellites into a highly eccentric polar orbit with a Pe low over the south pole and an Ap high over the north pole (when I say high, you want it to have visibility to the north pole for >75% of its orbit). Both satellites should have the same period, but offset by 180 degrees in their orbit. Those satellites will need to talk to a geostationary communications satellite with line of sight to KSC, or to a communications relay network, as they will not have direct line of sight to KSC for most of their orbit. Edit: The usual first major step for remotetech is to get 1 geostationary satellite above KSC with a dish antenna pointed at Kerbin and a couple of extra (2 or 3), followed by 2-3 other satellites spaced equidistant in the same orbit with dishes pointed at kerbin and at each other. This will give 100% coverage of LKO up to some altitude with the exception of low over the poles, which is where polar satellites like I described above come in. An alternative is to setup a belt of 6+ satellites in LKO at ~750km altitude with omnidirectional antenna. With that altitude and quantity, each satellite (assuming equal spacing and the same orbital period) should see its two neighbors, and one satellite should have a view of KSC. You can then add another belt at ~90 degrees inclination to get polar coverage. There are pros and cons for both approaches.

This would never, EVER have occurred to me. Talk about self-perpetuation of mission goals... "Gotta go get that stupid flag. Got it!" <plants flag>

UPDATE: This is our current location on the map... you may notice something different, we will talk about that in the next "special" episode.

There is some other reading about it (no link handy ) where it does talk about the need to capture it into a stable orbit before the landing attempt is made. Google the nasa 2025 asteroid mission. it may or may not say anything about it there.

Old thread is old..... Wait, this is a potential mod? Never mind then. Perhaps start by asking other modders how they add actions to the kerbal. Then you need code that spawns a specific object just in front of the kerbal. And maybe something that triggers the deploy flag animation. Then you need the models and programing for each deployable experiment. If you're still planning on doing that, maybe talk to the maintainer of KAS. That plugin both stores and spawns things, and adds abilities to the EVA'd kerbal.

First thing I would suggest is to build rockets looking more like Christmas tree rather than pencils (pictures of your rockets is always a good way to get suggestions). KSP doesn't have any difference in drag between two tanks on top of each other or next to each other so although it always LOOKS like a better design it in fact at the moment just makes it harder to stop it wobbling. Second is more struts. There does come a point where the stress on one strut becomes too much in the split second for it to be transferred over all the struts but you can get quite a big rocket before this happens. Third is dock in space. It is VERY hard to get over 100 tons of payload into orbit in one go so split your rocket up into two or three launches and dock them in orbit. With 150-300 tons of fuel you should be able to get anywhere and back (apart from EVE landings). If your rockets get too wobbly with docking ports holding it together you can now try just refueling it in space. Send up a payload with many empty tanks (which you can now tweak) and then send up a large tank or three of fuel to refuel it. This means the rocket could weight 400 tons fueled but only 80 empty. This would mean sending up 320 tons of fuel but the whole ship could be strutted to your hearts desire. Forth is nuclear engines in space. They may be heavy and not much use in atmosphere but in space they are your best friend. At double the fuel efficiency, they can get you to other planets for half the fuel of any other engine (except the ion but we don't talk about him). Fifth is payload reduction. The last space stage of your rocket should be as light as possible. Don't need 5 Kerbals for a 3 Kerbal mission? Then don't send them, hell you might be fine with one. Adding 8 engines where 4 would do? Got 4 solar panels where 3 would do? Make sure you payload is as light as possible, 1 tons on the payload is probably 20 tons of extra fuel and engines on the lower stages. By the way I play with stock parts and without Machjeb or any other mods. I say this so you know it is possible with needing to see Delta-v numbers.

Ok. Let's see if I can tackle these, more-or-less in the order things were in I'll talk to roboto about this. I've never had a broken one, myself, but I also have not tried landing one anywhere. We've had other people break greenhouses before and I think roboto has a solution in mind. Just pushed a change to github that will hopefully fix this. If this doesn't fix it, I'm not sure why it is still greyed out. The koylent maker is an unfinished part, so the texture isn't finalized yet. Yes, you can move the functionality onto one of TAC's hockeypucks. Are you asking for a 1.25m version of the koylent maker? It is possible to accidentally kill off all your biomass, either through over harvesting or not providing the greenhouses with enough light. We implemented seeds when we found ourselves in situations where we have killed off everything by mistake. Because biomass respires (consumes a bit of itself and oxygen to stay alive), even if you transported new biomass, you would arrive with less of it then what you started with. Think of seeds as stable ways to transport biomass. I get where you are coming from. Right now one large plant greenhouse produces enough O2 for 3 kerbals on easy mode. I can probably game the numbers to make the greenhouse support 3, or even 6 kerbals on Easy mode. For an idea of how big the large greenhouses are, picture a compact car's parking spot, roughly 2m by 3.25m. Now imagine growing enough food in that area for a child. Every day. So on hard mode, a single greenhouse probably won't produce enough food for 1 kerbal. On easy mode, I would lean to one greenhouse supporting 3 kerbals, but can see a case for it supporting more. Certainly not 18, though. The small greenhouses are going to be scientific experiments as well. They are there to help teach the player that X kg of biomass produces Y L of O2. That way they can start making informed build decisions using actual in-game science experiments. They are meant for use in near-Kerbal orbit, early in career mode, to let the player figure out how to use them. They are not meant for later deep-space missions. Though they might be handy in testing how well plants grow closer to and further from the sun. So, yeah: think of them more as science experiments and less as things to maintain stations with. Check out the aquatic greenhouse. When full and functioning it should weigh around 35tonnes. That's approximately 6x heavier than the empty version, and is a significant amount of water to transport up. I would not want to launch a completely full aquatic greenhouse. The aquatic greenhouse doesn't produce seeds (you could have a small plant greenhouse just for producing seeds), but it does produce a lot of biomass. I am confused why people are launching lots of seed boxes up. Why not a single seed box, and then let the biomass grow like it is supposed to? Are people trying to fill a greenhouse as quickly as possible? If that's the case, wouldn't it be easier to adjust the amount of biomass in a greenhouse when building a craft? This is a stupid question, but, do people realize that biomass increases over time? You don't need to just use seeds to get biomass. You just...let it grow. If people are frustrated about the amount of time required, think about how a kethane probe needs to be selected and just allowed to do its polar orbit. I have just let my computer run overnight while scanning for kethane. Turns out the phrase "watching grass grow" is for real. Now, if your frustrated about not being able to select other ships while a greenhouse does its thing...I want that to change, too. Feedback is good, especially specific suggestions. Bug fixes are even better.

Let's talk about the very cool, very pretty rocket, ok? Let's leave rocket-length-measuring out of it; if you're not interested in it, you needn't waste time reading the thread.

This is in the SCIENCE forum, not the roleplay forum. This is to talk about how kerbals are supposed to be like at version 1.0, not how they are now. My theory is: They need life support(not currently implemented) like any other creature, their heads are more resistant to impact than humans but not ridiculously so(any examples otherwise are a bug. also their necks should have snapped when hitting the ground at terminal velocity), and they have the same temperature tolerances as humans(reentry heat is not yet implemented), and that they are genderless(that's what the devs said). My point is that people should not make important assumptions based off of not-yet-implemented features, and instead stick to REAL science.

From a visual standpoint the design of the bottom is very different just because as time goes on they find new ways to optimize that. The core stage uses four SSME (RS25, yo) in the current design but it would make a lot of sense to migrate that to RS-68 (CBC as you said) in the future as soon as we use up the life cyles on all the RS25's on hand. Whoa, imagine what a 5 engine RS-68 core stage would sound like. That's exciting. I wonder if a version of that without SRB would be usefull for launching large things that don't weigh very much? However, the thing to remember is that Ares V was really just a graphic they made, almost zero work went into making that. When we talk about money spent on constellation, we're 99% talking about Orion, Ares I, and the support stuff for that. With SLS the difference is we're actually talking about making the 8.4 meter core stage and using Orion on it from the start. There are many reasons why that's actually kinda strange and if you want to get into that there is about 50,000 pages of discussion on this subject on the internet, some of which has substance. My point is that the physical construction of SLS is firstly real rather than just a cartoon image and secondly new engineering from the ground up... it's not just the same machines that made ET it's all new, partly from new ideas about efficiency but also for logistic reasons down at Michoud. The main confusion about the Block I system you see in the graphics is that, really, anywhere you could send an Orion capsule with that much power, you would also want some kind of hab or other eqipment module to go with you (Orion doesnt even have a toilet) .... and in the end wouldn't it be smarter to send orion up on a smaller booster and have it dock with something that the heavy launcher put in orbit? So from that perspective the Ares system seems smarter, except fot the fact that the Ares I idea was a total failure and many of the systems that will go into the big SLS launcher are already well understood and easy to man-rate, so it's really more like the Jupiter system and Ares merged, with a big helping of compromise. It's not perfect but at least it's funded! For the Chaka system we are taking one giant leap over all that crap and going directly to the Block II SLS config with a large upper stage, advanced boosters and 130-160 MT LEO capacity, as would be invisioned for the mid 2030's. Once you get to that point, putting orion on the large booster is redundant and I'm using a bespoke 5 meter LV for putting Orion into orbit, kinda like the Ares platform, without the foolish Ares I SRB ideas. The real world equivelant would be sending orion up un crewed inside the cargo payload fairing with other heavy stuff like a hab and then using commercial crew launchers to send the crew up to that whole system.

I already have something that moves the planets around (I just set the orbits of the planets and vessels according to their q and v as predicted by the integrator at every tick, brute-force but it works). Doing the integration in a separate thread is possible, and I intend to do it at high timewarp, but it won't improve performance much (I can very nearly sustain 100_000x timewarp and I've been talking to Scott Manley about making the integrator smarter than 'pick a tiny timestep, integrate slowly at that timestep'. Experiments seem to show that for LKO, my 5th order SPRK is exact to an unit roundoff for timesteps of 5 s though, so I might use that at reasonable timewarps and maybe up to and including 100_000x. I will need Scott's smarter techniques for predictions of vessels under thrust, which have to be done within a tick over at least a year). At some point I'll rewrite the classes that don't interact directly with KSP in unmanaged C++ (compiled for the processor rather than for the CLR) so it's faster (and so I can use long double extended precision 80-bit floating points, whose 64-bit mantissa give me a discretisation of 1 mm at 1 light-year instead of 1.4 mm on Sedna with doubles, at no cost in performance). As I said, lots of work ahead. EDIT: This isn't the right thread, but while I'm talking about floating-point precision, why don't you use doubles in MFS/RF? That would nearly eliminate the problems from error accumulation during resizing. Just convert to float when you talk to somebody that wants a (single) float and to double when you get a float.

Folks, if you'd like to share your opinions about the rest of the article, please start a new thread. This one was started to talk about the NASA announcement. Thanks.

Thanks in return Bel Polaris. Nice to hear you like what I'm doing. I try This one is a little shorter (and a little different in feel too), and not many pics... OK, one pic *shrugs* Even that was built together, and yes I did use the Eterno-Rest coffin for the hibernation pod. Hard not to. So far there aren't any hibernation mods out there, though a few are talking about it Perchance to Dream "Um, Rodsy?" came a voice out of nowhere. Rodsy jerked and turned to see Jedwig nervously floating up to him. "Oh, don't do that!" Rodsy said "You could give a Kerbal a heart attack like that!" "Sorry... I... well have you noticed that Jeb seems... more on edge lately?" Rodsy, normally warm hearted, eager and happy, was a still a little jittery after the scare. "You mean he's not taking your nonsense right now?" He winced, regretting saying it immediately. "Yeah, pretty much." Jedwig said without batting an eyelid. OK, this was weird. "I mean, OK, normally he doesn't let me get away with stuff, but he's... well, jovial about it. Right now he's more agressive than I've seen him in a while." Rodsy managed to quell the urge to say 'Probably just realized he's stuck with you for the next few years.' A silence drifted with them for a few seconds, and eventually Rodsy found something tactful to say. "Um, yeah. Does seem like it, with you at least." OK, not that tactful. "Hmmm, maybe you could talk to him about it?" Rodsy quirked an eyebrow at his commander. "Seriously? I've known him all of the four weeks of training we did for this mission and that's it." He glanced up to the other end of the cabin where Jeb sat in the co-pilot's seat doing flight calculations to see if their trajectory was correct. "Besides, I'm not exactly the person you want for that. I tend to... blurt things on occasion." A grin on Rodsy's face belied his inner qualms. He wanted to be friends with people, and he really tried. It was just he tended to say inappropriate things at odd times. The fact that Jedwig hadn't freaked already just meant he'd realised this over the last few weeks training with Rodsy. Dealing with Jeb's shenanigans had given Jedwig a somewhat hard shell against such things. "Well, just keep an eye out. I worry for him." Jedwig didn't catch the look of abject disbelief on Rodsy's face and instead just waved absently and floated back up the cabin to the pilots couch to finish his post flight checks. "OK, weirder and weirder." Rodsy muttered and went back to his checks on the hibernation pods. *** "Alright. Jeb? You get the one by the airlock on the dorsal side." Jedwig proclaimed when they were all ready. "Me and Rodsy will take the ventral ones. That means the bottom ones." He added, rather to the annoyance of Jeb. Jeb didn't comment, being rather reticent for a change and he shifted in the awkward, one piece med-link body suit. They all wore them to send data to the ship's computer about their health during the hibernation period. Didn't make them comfortable though. "OK, remember, according to our seminars the down cycle... going to sleep thing... only takes a few minutes. It's the up cycle, waking, that's going to take a while. Be prepared to cope with the disorientation and stamina loss." Normally Jeb would have been both surprised Jedwig was going to the trouble of telling them these things again (since it wasn't only for his benefit) and annoyed he was going over the same things that KSC had drilled into them for their training. Now however he just felt drained. Almost as if he'd already been through the damned pods. Yeah. This bothered him. His whole metabolism was going to be slowed down to a crawl and his body put into artificial, slow life support. Anything went wrong with the systems and... he'd never wake up. True, he lived with danger and the threat of death every day, but that was something he could fight, something he had the skills to deal with. This? He'd never even know it if it happened. Shivering despite the raised temperature in the cabin he stepped into the pod, twisted around, and started going through the connection ritual the docs had taught him. Soon he was in (and Rodsy nearly done too opposite him) and the canopy hinged shut with a faint hiss. "Don't worry you two. We'll be fine." Jedwig said as he stepped into his own chamber. "We'll be chatting away like nothing happened, and it'll all be mere moments for us." Consciousness was fading now as the drugs started coursing through his system. He wanted to smash the glass, rip the sensors from his body and shout that this was all a big mistake... but he couldn't move. Panic set in before he finally drifted into a medical coma, shortly followed by Jedwig. In the rapidly cooling cabin, drifting between the worlds, a soft series of faint beeps were all that could be heard to indicate anyone was alive in the pod. Jool One sped on, coasting towards it's destiny.