Search results

It is said that war is our way of learning geography, and there's a certain amount of truth to that. I know a lot of the geography of Normandy, but couldn't tell you what corner of France Toulouse is in. (And I'm going to be really embarassed if Toulouse is in Normandy...)

Hey, we get to mock that screen too, don't overgeneralize. http://xkcd.com/385/ http://xkcd.com/850/ Honest show of hands... Who here had ever heard of Benghazi before the war, and who knows whether it is east or west of Tripoli without looking it up? /flamebait

The big blue letters are all katakana, it says SoRaNoWoTo, which interestingly enough actually works in google. It's Sound of the Sky - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Wow, we have so much in common! I'm not Canadian either? What are the odds?

A vector is a vector. Normalized vectors should work just like position and velocity vectors, so x,z,y should work. Are you perhaps confusing the direction of thrust with the direction the exhaust is going? Or are you using the spice->orbiter conversion when you should be doing orbiter->spice...

Be careful when you calculate this. To get the off-axis thrust t_y of an engine with total thrust t_t angled a certain amount theta, use t_y=t_t*sin(theta). To get on-axis thrust t_z, use t_z=t_t*cos(theta). Note that if you just add t_y and t_z you get a number greater than t_t, but this is ok...

For concreteness, we'll use some numbers. 20 metric ton (20000kg) spacecraft (dry+cargo). Say that TransX says you need 4km/s to depart Earth parking orbit (7.5km/s to 11.5km/s), 3km/s to enter Mars orbit, and 3km/s to depart Mars, and 4km/s to return to Earth parking orbit. You then decide to...

The boosters have their nozzles angled slightly outward at something like 3deg. This puts their thrust roughly through the vehicle center of mass, so it doesn't matter how out of balance they are. You could, but they don't, put all three on one side and it would still work. This 3deg angle...

1) Use BurnTimeCalc MFD, on OrbitHangar 2) If you want to know the math yourself, rather than just using that MFD, the rocket equation is the way to go, as mentioned above. 3) Also as mentioned above, be careful with units. If you are using Orbiter, all the units are already SI, so the problems...

There are a couple of places where there is *** rather than the expected number in the charts and tables at the end. If this is intended, you might want to put --- or N/A instead of ***, which usually means that a number is too wide for its field. In the pictures on p9, the point of failure is...

How did they plan on recovering the LFBBs? One shuttle runway, three vehicles (the orbiter might need to RTLS as well). Were they going to bring them all down at SLF, and if so, were they going to land in formation or was one going to be in a holding pattern until the other one was towed off the...

Sorry I dropped out there for a moment. I was working on another project, which ultimately failed (see http://stkwans.blogspot.com/ for details) Anyway, I am currently working on two projects, one just a simple weekend endeavor, and one my long-term plan to change the very nature of launch...

I'll have a look at this when I get home. Anyone else who wants to look into it themselves can, since the source code is included. I'm actually working on AtlasV, mostly as a guinea pig for my VesselMass library, but I can shift back to SDHLV.

You only criticize what you care about, so please take this in the spirit in which it is intended. Please oh please oh please turn off the "safety" feature for attitude hold bank. While I can and have successfully entered and landed using attitude hold as-is, I had to raise the nose a lot more...

You can set the thrust of the virtual engine to zero. This way it won't use any fuel. Don't connect it to the main fuel tank, because this way once the main tank empties, your control system stops working. Make a special fuel tank for the virtual thrusters. It only has to have something like 1...

I object. It does not sound like a lot. For round numbers, say g is 10m/s. After t seconds you reach ta speed, so it takes half a second to pick up 5m/s of speed. After t seconds the distance travelled is (at^2)/2=(10(0.5)^2)/2=(10(0.25))/2=(2.5/2)=1.25 meters, about 4 feet. I have indeed...

Even though they were RTG, not reactors, the Voyagers still had this problem. As far as I know, Voyager had no batteries, so its RTGs were sized to run everything simultaneously. When it doesn't run everything, its RTGs are still providing full power (can't be throttled), which is dumped...

Check the docs with my addon. Pad 39-E was really planned at one point. It never got that far, but LC-39 was originally planned for 3 pads with an option for 2 more. I have also heard about plans for a Nova rocket complex north of LC-39, with even bigger and more widely spaced pads...

Remember that I didn't make this up, the guys planning LC-39 did. Based on their experience with the V-2 and Atlas, which had only something like a 25% success rate in their early test series. There is a reason they built ICBM row with eight near-identical pads. Originally it was thought that...

Launch Complex 39, Fully built out Chris Jeppesen 5 Jul 2010 -- Installation -- WARNING - This will overwrite some of the surface tiles for Cape Canaveral. Even if you change the config file back to its original form, the tiles will still be changed, and you will have pads C, D and the...