What KSP has taught me to be annoyed at

[Jovus]

Inconsistently, forgotten about whenever the plot demands it, and with implications that shatter the logic of the setting entirely if considered in any depth.

The Star Wars answer would be to turn a dumping-the-waste-heat scene into a very bad videogame tie-in.

Blake's 7 would have just let everyone cook to death. Except Avon, of course; he'd figure out a way to focus the heat onto his crewmates, leaving himself untouched.

The Red Dwarf answer ... wait, answer? Sorry, we're too busy getting drunk.

[Johno]

The Red Dwarf answer: Whatever, the heat issue happened years ago and cooked the crew. Holly dealt with it, but you're the only human left alive, Dave.

[Wanderfound]

Lexx answer: have the undead assassin personally soak up the heat (while singing the Brunen-G song). In the meantime, the rest of the cast do weird semi-sexual things with bits of the ship. Including the decapitated robot.

[Fingal]

Wonderous no-one mentioned the reentry on the end of the movie.

The re-entry scene was possibly the most beautiful moment in cinema history. I can forgive anything for the sheer awesomeness of the capsule charging through the atmosphere ahead of the debris like Theoden leading the charge in Return of the King.

[cantab]

Doctor Who answer: Run like hell to get away from the heat, figure out where it's coming from, use the sonic to reverse the polarity of the thermal flow, then think job done and fly off in the TARDIS without noticing the suspicious recurring feature on the side of the reactor casing.

[Securus]

You guys should all watch Babylon 5. You'd be proud.

If I'm not mistaken, during the run of Babylon 5, the creator of the show Michael Straczynski was getting calls from folks over at NASA asking if it was okay to use the Starfury design to base actual spacecraft off of.

Probably not true, but cool idea at the least.

[Johno]

Lexx answer: have the undead assassin personally soak up the heat (while singing the Brunen-G song). In the meantime, the rest of the cast do weird semi-sexual things with bits of the ship. Including the decapitated robot.

The dead do not burn.

[blu3wolf]

I don't even get annoyed with simulator games, because they are games and have to give up on some of the realism for the fun factor. In fact the only way any simulator can even come close to realism is if it's one of the simulators real pilots use in training that have all the actual controls they would have in the aircraft the simulator was designed for.

If they give up realism for fun factor, its not a simulator... Stock KSP is a great physics based game, and with mods you can turn it into an impressive spaceflight simulation.

[Daffs]

If I'm not mistaken, during the run of Babylon 5, the creator of the show Michael Straczynski was getting calls from folks over at NASA asking if it was okay to use the Starfury design to base actual spacecraft off of.

Probably not true, but cool idea at the least.

True. He agreed to giving them the design providing they called them Starfury.

[benzman]

To my recollection (and I've seen 2001 a number of times, one of my favorite films), there were no significant physical errors in 2001.

I did read once that the major error in 2001 is when the passenger in the Pan Am shuttle is drinking from a straw. When he takes his mouth away the drink falls back down the straw, which wouldn't happen in microgravity.

[KevinW42]

Speaking of 2001, another issue is Dave holding his breath before going out into vacuum. The number 1 thing they teach you in scuba diving is to never hold your breath while breathing compressed air or risk serious lung injury.

[r_rolo1]

Well, to be honest, the only two fictional media that approached the space exploration that I could not find much of flaws were Gattaca ( that actually had the astronauts to be firmly sit in front of desktop computers ( well, 1997 ) training orbital solutions for emergency situations before launch ( it was a Io mission, so even the delay due to light speed could be fatal if they relied on Earth feedback ) ... that is in the opposite site of sending badly trained oil drillers to a impactor :/ ) and Space brothers ( in spite of NASA there being a little too much gung ho in their management of missions and astronaut selection, but as the setting is in 2025 and in the context of a serious push for manned flight, that might be realistic enough ). Somehow I always find something off putting in the rest of the stuff I see

[Mesons]

It strikes me that nowhere else in my scientific career or social life do I get the same fulfilling conversation and debate as I do on these forums. This thread is an excellent example.

What waste heat are we speaking about in 2001? From Discovery's life support? Perhaps it is time for another re-watch...

[Red Iron Crown]

What waste heat are we speaking about in 2001? From Discovery's life support? Perhaps it is time for another re-watch...

From its nuclear power plant. When performing a burn much but not all of it could be shunted into the propellant, but when idling the waste heat from the reactor as well as any solar gain would have to be radiated away.

[KerikBalm]

Speaking of 2001, another issue is Dave holding his breath before going out into vacuum. The number 1 thing they teach you in scuba diving is to never hold your breath while breathing compressed air or risk serious lung injury.

Well, when scuba diving, you are breathing air at way over 1 atmosphere...

The pressure difference between your lungs and a vacuum, when in space, is going to be somewhere between 1 to 0.2 atmospheres.

For Apollo/Mercury/Gemini (I don't know about the ISS or the space shuttles), the internal atmosphere was pure oxygen, but since oxygen is only 1/5 of the air we breath, they could reduce the pressure by a lot to still have the same O2 concentration for breathing.

If the spacecraft was at 1 atm, this would be like taking a breath at 10m down, and then going for the surface (ignore effects like the bends, which shouldn't be an issue at those depths anyway).

If the spacecraft was presurized to .3 atms, it would be like breathing in while under 3m of water....

Probably not that much of an issue....

[Mesons]

From its nuclear power plant. When performing a burn much but not all of it could be shunted into the propellant, but when idling the waste heat from the reactor as well as any solar gain would have to be radiated away.

Indeed, a nuclear power plant would have an enormous amount of waste heat to be dealt with...the solar radiation absorbed would be rather minimal by comparison, especially out at Jupiter (or even more so at Saturn, as it was originally written).

[Skyler4856]

Read the book "life as we knew it", it's painful...

[SpaceXray]

I have been playing KSP for well over a year now. It has taught me SOOOOOO much in the way of, well, rocket science. When I first started playing I thought if you just went straight up hard and fast enough you'd reach orbit. Wow was I wrong. Every aspect of this game has taught me how things in space work, from planetary captures, to the principles of docking, to even the simplest of things such as thrust to mass ratio.

My point of this thread though is I was watching the movie "Gravity" tonight. Because of KSP I was able to point out so many flaws with the movie itself. Granted I did love it and know that Hollywood will never go off of true realism. But there was one scene that really bothered me. It was where where Sandra Bullock was tethered to a space station by some parachute ropes to her leg. She caught George Clooney and stopped his momentum so he didn't float away. He decides let me go because he says he's pulling her away. With my knowledge of motion in space all she had to do was give a slight tug on the cable between them and he would have drifted towards her thus saving himself. It drove me nuts watching this.

Yes I know, just a movie. Before playing KSP I would have never have known this basic principle. All I can say is thank you KSP for making me a smarter person (although getting me mad at the occasional movie )

They were both actually still moving, you just didn't notice and that was also the intention of the director. Clooney was still dragging her, the ropes were strong enough to rubber-band Sandra back, but not the both of them so Clooney had to let go,

[Tw1]

When the shadows are too muted, there are billowing dust clouds, and they're supposed to be on the Moon. And they arrived in a space shuttle.....

[Geher]

When the shadows are too muted, there are billowing dust clouds, and they're supposed to be on the Moon. And they arrived in a space shuttle.....

Are you talking about the latest Episode of Doctor Who (Season 8 Episode 7 "Kill the Moon")?

There are so many things wrong with that. The Space Shuttle lands like there would be an Atmosphere on the Moon. Even on the inside while landing they are standing there and feel the gravitation. BUT THEY ARE FALLING!

Despite the fact that the STS couldn't send any Space Shuttle into lunar orbit not to mention landing it.

[Geher]

double post

Edited October 7, 2014 by Geher
Sorry, double post

[Tw1]

The latest episode of Doctor Who (Season 8 Episode 07 - Kill the Moon) ?

-snip-

Why using a Space Shuttle anyway for a Moon-landing!?

Yep.

I know right!?! It's supposed to be 2049, if we had developed the technology to make a space shuttle even capable of getting to the Moon, surely there would be better spacecraft available. And that landing.. at very least they could have popped out the wheels, and maybe animated some VTOL jets...

Somehow, the rest of the Doctor Who club I'm part of were less bothered by this.

There also seemed to be a shot early on that had the world partially lit, despite it being dark later, but at least they got the phase of the moon pretty correct...

Though there was sound in space. There seemed to be sound near the Moon you could hear from Earth. It's high time there was a law requiring anyone writing about space things pass a test first.

Edited October 6, 2014 by Tw1

[RizzoTheRat]

To be fair the premis was that the moon had managed to gain enough mass to have earth like gravity, in which case presumably it would gradually attract a bit of an atmosphere, but in the space of 10 years (think that's what they said) I doubt it would have gained enough to fly the shuttle in, and prevent their suits inflating when they exit, but you don't need that thick an atmosphere to hear sound.

Surely the bigger plot holes are how the hell an egg managed to gain several billion tonnes in weight, how the creature managed to move in space by flapping its wings, and how a newborn creature managed to lay an egg the same size as the one it's just been born from!

I'm not that impressed with the new series to be honest.

[Steampunked]

Folks,

I wanted to contribute a thought here that no one else has mentioned. It's actually a small detailed and has nothing to do with orbital mechanics or any of those physical stuff that we have learned our way around in our adventures in KSP.

This is not a widely known fact, but manned space flight does not function under standard pressure conditions. It is (currently) unfeasible to manufacture a space suite capable of maintaining an internal pressure of 14.7 PSI (standard pressure at sea level, aka "1 atmosphere of pressure"). The problem is that, in the vacuum environment of space, a flexible suite pressurized to 14.7 PSI will become too stiff to maintain any sort of reasonable motion range (this is due to ballooning). To counteract this, space suite internal pressures are maintained very low (with very high partial pressures of oxygen). The Space Shuttle, Soyuz, and the ISS all function at 14.7 PSI (it is worth noting that the Apollo program operated at 5.7 PSI and that the pressure in the LEM was even lower during moon landings). Any diver knows that going from a higher pressure to a lower pressure involves the risk of off-gassing nitrogen in solution with blood (severe off gassing results in pain and nervous system/brain damage and his commonly known as "the bends"). This means that prior to ANY EVA activities, an astronaut must spend HOURS pre breathing pure oxygen while stepping ambient pressure down to control this off gassing (US space suites operate at 4.7 PSI while Russian ones are at 5.7).

In short, it will be traumatic to the body to rapidly transition between either the low pressure environment of EVA or the high pressure environment of the ISS/Shuttle/Soyuz. Going from low to high is uncomfortable but going from high to low is lethal.

[brianorca]

This is not a widely known fact, but manned space flight does not function under standard pressure conditions.

I think the new Mars suit NASA is designing has rigid joints, (constant volume rotating metal) instead of ballooning fabric for exactly this reason, so they can keep it at full pressure.

Edited October 7, 2014 by brianorca
clarity