Search the Community

No, there actually is a problem. There is no long-term facility for storage of high-level nuclear waste anywhere in the world. It just sits around in short-term storage such as cooling ponds waiting for the day when some sucker agrees to take it away. Every year there's a little more, and every year we get less certain about where it all is, how much there is, and what we're going to do with it. There has been talk of geological storage facilities, but no one has actually bitten the bullet and built one. Nobody really wants the stuff on their patch, which you can't really blame them for. It's a hassle to look after, and doing so brings no benefits. I'm not anti-nuclear at all, but high-level waste is an unsolved problem at the moment.

Wow, Krev, that was a comprehensive response. Much appreciated! Yeah, after I posted I went and started googling nozzle design and couldn't find any mention of a relation of thrust to size. All they seem to talk about is shape as it relates to efficiency. A thought occurs to me though. If we have EM containment on fuel storage, could we not have containment on the reactor core? I'm kindof envisioning a toroidal core envisioned by some fusion reactor designs. Or would that just get unworkably big?

One of the big problems with nuclear energy is what people percieve as radioactive. When they say something is "highly radioactive" people think of "its going to be radioactive for millions of years!" In fact it is the complete opposite. Plutonium is highly radioactive because it has a short half life (something like 83 years) but U235 has a half life of something like 235 million years. People extracting uranium for fuel usually handle it without protective gear. In fact, if you see them with protective gear it is usually to protect the uranium from humans (oils, dust, you name it.) Its like burning coal to burning gas. They may have the same amount of energy, but gas burns immediatly while coal can talk a long time. But I'm not going around screaming "COAL WILL BLOW UP THE WORLD!!!"

Do not talk about mission creep, I tend to launch missions to add more features to interplanetary ships before they leave. Like adding four probe rovers to my Duna mission to explore the poles on Duna and Ike, Duna has high mountains at the poles Ike does not. my last mission in the 0.22 career mode is the Eve mission. I needed an Eve lander, lets add an rover to it for exploring, add two probe rovers for exploring the poles, add an probe to explore the atmosphere as its hard to do wile landing the main lander. You save fuel by sending the Gilly lander from low Eve orbit to Gilly instead of using the mothership but you need an larger lander.

I've tried JetLifter as first stage up to the ~25km (add more air intake). Had about 50 Jet engines plus 2-3 x 100t fuel tanks (depending on load). From simple gamer perspective I just don't see this as stable enough lifter. It is hard to control, at all - it requires additional attention during launch. And it is limited when we talk about bigger rockets (as good your PC are you are still limited on parts count when it comes to thousands). As for realism - it would be practical to use jet lifters if you would reuse them.

I dont care if you have or not, I'm a bit amazed by the fact some people take these ETA questions as an insult. People love this thing by just looking at the screenshots and want to play with it, rather now then tomorrow. That SHOULD be a great compliment but to you guys it's not somehow. Second, the guys here dont like to get ETA questions and are way too busy for anything KSP realted it seems, but do talk about this mod in other topics, what do you expect my friends? Feeling rushed/pushed by those comments is a choice, you can choose to ignore it and not let it get to ya, which I think is the more adult thing to do. I mean look at this topic, the last 2 pages I see only complaints and sneers at eachother.. How sad.\ Also, I gave you guys a possible solution: put the damn ETA in the OP allready!

Hi again, Tank. Now you know the math. Let's talk design. m0/m1 = (M0/M1)^(V/v) for equal delta-v. Quiz: Figure out which of these scenarios is preferable: Which produces enough delta-v for ship 2? A) m0/m1 < (M0/M1)^(V/v) m0/m1 > (M0/M1)^(V/v) Let's assume now that you have designed ship 1, and are happy its delta-v, but want a version with at least as much delta-v, changing only the engines and the amount of fuel. In KSP, most liquid fuel tanks have a full to dry mass ratio of 9. In the real world, the ratios depend on a lot of things, such as fuel type and cryogenic needs. I'm going to use 9 below like KSP, but you could use a variable or a different constant for a different tank mass ratio. m0 = rocket mass with full fuel m1 = rocket mass with no fuel Let's define a few more variables: mP = mass of the payload (minus the tanks): everything on the rocket that is not a fuel tank, fuel, or an engine mT = mass of the empty fuel tanks mE = mass of the engines empty rocket: m1 = mP + mT + mE full rocket: m0 = mP + 9*mT + mE Presumably, mP = MP: the payload is the same on ship 1 and ship 2. mE and ME are not the same: mE = 48-7S mass. ME = LV-909 mass, for example. mT and MT are also not the same: ship 2 will need a different number of fuel tanks I'm leaving the final bit of algebra to you: Solve for mT, the mass of the empty tanks, (or 9*mT, the full fuel tank mass), (or 8*mT, the fuel mass). Good luck!

I wonder if there's a video of this? http://life.time.com/culture/hubert-alyea-the-science-teacher-you-wish-you-had/#1 Princeton Professor Hubert Alyea apparently gave some very entertaining presentations in the 1950's on how nuclear reactions work. "Breeder" reactors that make more nuclear fuel than they consume (by transmuting Uranium into different radioactive elements) were well started on the R&D path, until the "greens" got that whole field of inquiry stopped off in the USA. Instead of recycling "spent" fuel we waste it by pulling it out and holding it in big pools of water and have a criminally wasteful on-again off-again plan to permanently discard it under Yucca Mountain (or not). It doesn't matter to the "greens" that there's no water for thousands of feet beneath that mountain, and the tunnels have been carved into a layer of solid rock. The material might somehow, possibly escape, sometime, maybe in a few thousand years. I'd like to think that long before then (if the facility ever gets used) that sanity would return to this and the nuclear material would be recovered for use. There already is a perfectly safe, non-explodable, type of nuclear reactor. The "pebble bed". The "pebbles" are about the size of softballs and have many small spheres of enriched uranium embedded in a graphite sphere. Around that sphere is a layer of ceramic and another layer of graphite - repeated to seven layers. There's not enough uranium in one sphere to be able to reach melting temperature and the shells are thick enough so that no matter how many are packed together, melting temperature cannot be reached. The heat transfer medium is Helium gas. If there should be a leak, it goes *up*. "But what about cracks?!" "There's no such thing as a nuclear pebble without cracks!". Yup. There's not. That's why the seven alternating layers. The odds of even one pebble getting a crack straight through all its layers to the center is very tiny. That's why pebble bed reactors have a system that pulls pebbles from the bottom, tests them for radiation leaks and if none is found the pebble goes back into the top of the reactor. If one is found to be leaking radiation (has one ever?) it's shunted to a shielded storage area. One of these reactors in Europe did have a problem with that system. IIRC a pebble got stuck but instead of calling in the people who knew what to do, the people on site decided they could fix it but instead damaged the pebble extraction system. Big stupid anti-nuke, media fueled broughaha followed and the reactor was shut down instead of being repaired. There was no radiation leak, nobody was in danger. The only people who should've had any problems with it were the ones who didn't follow the procedures they were told to. "This is your job. If something happens with anything not your job, you call in the people whose job it is." As for Fukushima, if you've seen some of the pre-tsunami file footage of the control room, you may have noted that it looks like it's technology from 40 years ago. That's because it *is* technology from 40 years ago. These plants were built then the anti-nukes have beset them ever since with lawsuits and regulations that have blocked any progress and technology updates. The damage caused by the tsunami and the results must've been like a ******* ****** to some of the "greens" so they could say "See? I told you it was a disaster in waiting!". They care more about being "right" in their wrongheadedness than actually improving people's lives. Some have wised up over the years, look up what the two guys who founded Greenpeace got into after they quit their own organization. Part of the problem Three Mile Island had was due to the even then aging technology. The control room had walls encrusted with controls, gauges and indicators. The lamp indicating the stuck open vent valve was on a different wall from where everyone was clustered, trying to figure out why stuffing more and more water into the thing wasn't working. When someone noticed the light and hit the manual override to force the valve closed, problem over but the reactor core was trashed. Only a small amount of radioactive steam escaped the buildings. The radioactive water was all contained. Historically, nuclear plants have taken so long to wend their way through the process of being allowed to be built that they're technically obsolete the day they first start generating electricity. The designs had to be "locked in" years before construction could start. Looking at San Onofre and its premature steam generator tube wear, I'd bet it was an issue some engineers were concerned about before the first shovel turned dirt on the site - but nothing could be done to change the design without delaying it for years. A modern system, as seen in many newer power plants and factories, puts everything in view of the operators on computer screens. If there's an alert, it doesn't depend on a tech making a circuit of a huge spread of gauges, the alert comes to the tech on his or her monitor. If TMI had had even the (what would now be primitive) best technology available at the time, someone sitting in front of a screen of green or amber text would've been flashed an alert about the stuck valve and there would have been no incident at all. Great idea but just try and get it added to an old nuclear power plant. Humans still have walk around and observe lots of separate and disparate things and make lots of notes. The 1977 TV series "Battlestar Galactica" likely had more advanced technology on its Galactica bridge set than TMI had in its control room. As an analogy, compare the original flight deck of the first Boeing 747 with the flight deck of a Boeing 787. The old nuclear plants are still at first 747 level when they should have received complete control upgrades at least once a decade or even closer together. Big airliners get upgrades, ships get upgrades, the Space Shuttles got upgrades. But not nuclear power plants. This "can't change a thing" craziness doesn't just affect nuclear power plants. In the 80's a company with a furnace they used to burn their waste to generate electricity for their plant needed to replace the refractory burner grates. The furnace manufacturer was long out of business. New more efficient burners could have been retrofitted but nope, wasn't allowed. either the system had to be restored to the same condition as it was when installed or the entire thing had to be replaced with an all new system. I don't how they came to talk to my father about their problem but he was able to take one of the old grates, made some forms from sheet metal and cast some new burner grates that passed muster with the regulators. Same shape, same or similar material, good to go. Here's some real big booms... Nice, safe, non-nuclear chemicals... I think somewhere there my be a video of the test where 25,000 tons of TNT were exploded - to see if the blast effects would be like those of an atomic bomb calculated to be equivalent.

I sit here on my overpriced Alienware, listening to people talk about their computers which are of equal quality, for a third of the cost.

The way I hear engineers talk (and I do work with a few), it's less twice as big and more that there MUST be a better way to do it.

Why do they oppose it? Because they're uneducated and stupid. I honestly don't know anyone knowledgeable of nuclear power technology that is against uranium fission. It's the safest, cleanest and most plentiful source we have which could become almost renewable with heavy employment of MOX and breeder technology one day. I cringe when people talk about burying nuclear waste. It's not waste, it's precious. How bad are we talking about? If it's total disaster like Chernobyl, that's impossible even with, for today's standards, old power plants because they have containment domes. Fukushima was not "really, really, really bad". It was very serious, and don't forget it was the tsunami, and don't forget thousands died because of the sea, nobody died because of the power plants. PR lies are a large problem, I agree, but remember that the worst disasters (Chernobyl, Mayak) happened in USSR which was a highly corrupt country. Fukushima happened in Japan, which is a traditionally fu*ked up society when it comes to being open about facts and exposing corruption. Whistleblowing and sincerity is just not a part of Japanese society as it is in the West. I'm sure that there would be much, much less PR problems if Fukushima had happened in France or USA. Granted, the PR problems with Fukushima were nothing compared to USSR in 1986. Remember TMI? The population was unharmed, yet the media and the society went all hawkeye on them, and it was in the 70s. The situation today is that when an ant farts in the vicinity of a Western nuclear power plant, the media goes crazy.

What is this "outside" you talk about? I'm going to fetch my telescope. Or is it a new planet?

its somewhere in the middle i think. things like threading are good to get in early because it vastly effects the code structure. you could end up having to rewrite huge sections of code over again because it doesnt like your division of labor. x64 on the other hand is something that can and should be done in beta, before you start doing low level optimizations on your maths. when you implement this you all of the sudden have 2 architectures with different instruction extensions, each needing their own set of optimizations and bug fixes so that they behave the same. the compressed texture formats that i talk about in every single 'make the game faster' thread is a do it now kinda thing. why: x64 is a huge thing to implement(unless you linux), multithreading is a huge thing to implement. texture compression is a relatively tiny thing to implement (my game engine has that and its written in friggin lua! took me an afternoon) and self contained. it also will improve memory consumption enough where people wont be demanding x64 as much. later on, when you have x64, then you can double the resolution of ALL THE TEXTURES, and it will still use less ram than the current textures (and then double it again because you can address ram in droves). that doesnt really solve your physics bottleneck though. threading (or using the gpu) is how you fix that one. thats a big problem that is hard to solve. i expect that dev cycle to be no less than 4 months. it will be worth it when we get it though.

Wrong... 5thHorseman, your anecdotes makes sense only if you mean optimization before all the frills. Perfectly it would be optimize engine first before starting to add features, but sadly these days in development is features before everything else. And IMO KSP at the moment already has all the main features it needs (and what it does not have is, and can be covered with mods), but at this point what it really lacks is better performance. Its getting to a point where new features are becoming useless because of bad performance. We got docking, but we cant make space stations without major lags, there is talk about stock planetary resource system (you can use kethane mod at the moment) but you cannot make a decent planetary base without lags. In any direction KSP wants to expand (with features) it will hit the wall of max 300parts without lags. As it is for now, KSP only works well for building simple go to (and maybe return) ships. One exception is science and career mode(with parts cost eventually), as it actually forces you to minimize and gives additional meaning to "go-to ships". Also the more features you add the harder it becomes to replace/optimize the underlying engine.

My hangup is fear of trying missions with nothing more than IVA view. No map; no maneuver node. Maybe once in orbit I'll allow him to EVA to get some bearings. For all the "talk" about doing launches by going straight up instead of establishing orbit first I am strongly tempted to point out that if you figure out your launch window for straight up that it is MUCH easier from in IVA perspective to go straight up to the mun instead of first trying to pitch over for orbit and then figuring out when/how to burn from orbit to intercept. I haven't tried it hardly at all yet; but... it would be really interesting if SQUAD could include this sort of "feature" that would limit 3rd person perspective and limit map view and actually have an "impossible" difficulty that only supported IVA navigation. Maybe even have a 1st person EVA perspective.

I've heard people talk about putting parts in a game object, but I've never done it and still gotten parts that worked in KSP. Including air locks, although those are a bit hit or miss. Part of the problem with trying to mod this game is that everybody seems willing to share an opinion about the correct method except squad. I'm not aware of any tutorials done by squad personel. MY hirarchy for a pod with an airlock (but no IVA) is the pod mesh with a game object inside of it for the airlock. That's it. Just 2 items in the list. It may not be right, but I get a pod that kerbals can exit then re enter so it's not wrong either. Of course just cause it works for me doesn't mean that it will work for anyone else.

Obviously, you don't live here. "What time it is?" "Where you at?" "That ain't it." "Y'all cain't [sic] talk no English." Every day. Like the beating of the old man's heart, it drives one to madness! They /are/ uneducated. That's the state of being unaware of things, such as grammar and spelling. It's inappropriate to be offended by being considered uneducated. There's little or nothing you can do about it.

If your in career mode, purchase the parts inside the research center? I'll investigate this later. I highly recommend Hullcam VDS, as the developer is willing to support my mod otherwise talk to Romfarer for a key to exit the camera view.

Have you checked out the engine ignitor mod? I'm using it with Soyuz. Also, I've added Ioncross Crew Support to it. They're completely optional, but quite fun to use. Also, you could talk to the guy who made the ignitor mod for a better MFS integration. It should be able to tell hypergolic fuels from normals ones, and act accordingly. Also, ignitor number and max ignitions could be modified via MFS interface.

I think its a partial scam, Their just all talk and no trying to get it done. And YouTube vids as a selection program? WTF these people are dumb. No one who posts a video will have the training. I bet whoever they pic will die cause they dont have the proper education and stuff.

I say its a scam. It seems like their all talk and no do.

OK so I'd revisited an old old OLD story concept I'd had after reading an asimov book about space (forget which but it does go into detail about the concept of a generation/colony ship as means to get Out There.) Basics are a third or fourth generation Generation ship ends up parking in orbit around a star to top off on water, minerals, etc etc.... and finds another ship from a similar era though not built at the same time it was. Cue celebrations, dusting off old 'this language will be preserved because we realized societies would drift in hundreds or thousands of years and want ships that spawn from this program to have a way to talk' protocols. Unfortunately I haven't had much luck getting feedback. I know it's been done storywise since basically EVERYTHING has been done. Plus there's lots of room for things ranging from silly (one of the ships is full of genetically modified cat people) to Horror (robot servants took over and are now prepping to expand by cannibalizing the newly discovered craft) to... well anything. The thing is my original notes listed these things as roughly the size of texas in terms of total area with a much smaller habitable/people friendly zone. Thing is that just seems kind of off. I know a lot of area would be needed for things like intakes for scooping hydrogen gas, fuel storage and processing, random machinery needed when you come into resources (oort cloud, orphaned planet, whatever...) but that just can't be right, especially since I don't know the math and was just sort of spitballing a random guess. Also notes list safe cruising speed at 0.2c with a theoretical upper limit at as high as 0.25c, but the fuel/energy requirements would be... Insane even if you had some kind of exotic propulsion system. The concept was more a prop/window dressing for a D20 game that never got off the ground due to no playerbase. Might revive for NaNoWriMo this year. I dunno. Since we're all space geeks. Discuss? Was thinking of calling it 'The Many Faces of Humanity' since well hundreds or possibly thousands of years would lead to interesting developments in the populations even if you ruled out scifi genetic manipulation.

I know there was talk about this a few weeks ago, but has anyone running the Linux x64 bit client been able to get Stretchy Tanks working in 0.21 or 0.22?

For a science system to be really integrated in a way that makes sense, there's a significant amount of underlying gameplay changes that need to occur on top of just the valuation of transmission/return of data. To cover what's been said in the thread so far, I'd like to see a system where 'data based' science (like thermometer readings) could be covered 100% with transmission, 'materials based' science only being fully researchable with a return, a balanced diminishing return that allows some additional value from multiple readings, and a relevancy system where the data gathered assists with directly relevant unlocks. But here are some of the underlying, more system-oriented changes I think really need to happen to let the above blossom into a solid long-term science setup: 1) Robots first. This means that incentives need to be balanced such that manned spaceflight has to have riskier mission planning and greater rewards than unmanned spaceflight, as well as an incentive to send the robots before the manned missions. Right now, using an unmanned vehicle is generally more prohibitive than using a manned vehicle because of the electricity burned off by the robo-brain (especially in career mode where solar panels/RTKs aren't immediately available), and it offers no benefit whatsoever - only the drawbacks of no crew reports, EVA reports, or surface samples. On top of simple things like manned pods being an unlockable after unmanned controls, there needs to be an introduction of overhead costs for manned vehicles; rations, life support, etc. Probes should be the primary tool for initial exploration because of their low cost to maintain and their only resource being easily and directly renewable (electricity). This can obviously play into talk of things like hydroponics etc, but that's out of scope of the discussion. 2) Modularity within modules. Within a given module could be several different 'slots' for sub-modules. These could be as broad as things like Hitchhiker containers holding four slots that can be filled with seats or storage (for supplies, etc) or direct improvements like a science module being improvable with better hardware, providing a new fount of science. This would allow for individual modules to continue being useful within a specific envelope with only a relatively small amount of effort required to upgrade them and gather more data. This would be especially pertinent when money is triggered - you could have an extremely expensive space telescope that gathers/transmits huge amounts of scientific data but it eventually loses value due to diminishing returns. Later, instead of launching a new space telescope when you research better optics, you launch a small manned mission to improve the existing telescope, allowing it to gather much more science at a small fraction of the cost of launching a new telescope. 3) Modules as containers, stuff as objects. The two ideas above require not just modules that can store objects beyond a simple meter (100/100 snacks) but modules that can store discrete objects within a shared storage space (60/100 storage, with 40 snacks, 1 mystery goo sample, 2 mun rocks). This could work for abstract 'data' as well, letting you store different results on a hard drive while keeping the results discrete. This would serve a couple different goals: this would be a vehicle for the greater overhead on manned spaceflight (you would have to budget weight and physical space for snacks, etc), a larger amount of hard drive space can be baked into robo-brains while a larger amount of physical storage can be baked into manned pods (pushing probes' role as exploratory data gatherers), and it could open the door for 'consumable' items to be loaded up, like emergency extra batteries for the life support systems. These three fundamental changes could allow for far deeper interactivity with science. For example: Science lab modules that can convert samples to data for transmission. These could have a varied efficiency based on quality and sub-modules slotted. It would allow for a sizable portion of the 'return' value to be gained remotely, but would also require a significant amount of infrastructure to run (a space station, rather than hot glued to an OKTO2). Research gathered from a specific celestial body can unlock sub-modules that can boost later research from the same body. You would be motivated to send a probe into orbit around Duna to gather data from orbit which would then be folded into 'extra research gained from Duna' sub-modules for the later manned mission. Stuff like 'mystery goo module' could be changed to simply a 'what does a sample look like module'. Mystery goo can be loaded up in your cargo and you can run it through tests (exposing it to the environment, setting it on fire, looking at it, etc). If you haul up a dozen goo, you can run a dozen tests. This could also play into things like seeing what happens when you release Eve water into Jool's atmosphere, creating an incentive to have a large network of science gathering rather than having a single manned vessel touch down and leave with 100% of the science (and 100% of the incentive to be there). Also, kind of unrelated, but a minor balance tweak that I'd like to see to make the rocketry side of research a bit more useful: when you switch up to bigger fuel tanks, there should be a weight savings due to economy of materials for the empty tank. Say, instead of a Jumbo-64 weighing 4 tons empty (which 64x T-100's would weigh), it could weigh 3, making it objectively better to use single bigger tanks over multiple smaller tanks but not so much that it would override staging/etc.

Quick question, I see rovers a lot in screenies and talk, do you guys build them or are they a mod or something? I'd just like to know cause' I'd rather play for a good while without mods until I really feel the need to add em'