The Space Thread - Launches, Events, Live Streams, Governments, Corporations, drama in Spaaaaaaaaaaaace

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MerelyAPlateOfSpaghetti said:
Aborts are nice and all, but with rockets if something goes wrong it usually goes REALLY wrong. Starship isn't ready for people yet so they aren't designing people saving mechanisms yet, just "get shit in space and back" mechanisms.
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I find it highly offensiv that you call government workers people.
 
Gimmick Account said:
Okay damn way worse than I remembered. I forgot to count getting to orbit previously, and this time it looked like around 6900 dV for ejection and the same amount again for injection at Real Solar System scale.
Plus 9300 m/s for getting to orbit and ~3k for landing (which I didn't attempt because it looked boring anyway).
So like 26,100 m/s one-way or 43,000 for a return. Insane just to visit The Moon Again Only Hot.

But I grabbed a Venus lander program at the same time. That was hairy. Turns out I brought exactly enough RCS to get the heat shield stable under me and the one time I figured it out I came down on the night side.
So I reloaded and cheated in some extra nitrous oxide and fuck I'm glad I did, look at the job they did on those cloud layers (ignore the top layer glitching out as I 5x physics warp through the second descent):
Venereal-1_downscale.mp4
Not pictured: the surface. Because you have to do that yourselves. Not just because I forgot that RTGs obviously generate their own heat when I read the stats, so the one I brought melted, which the parachute was attached to, and I only survived because the chute snagged on an antenna for a while. And then by the time it did come free terminal velocity was so low thanks to the air thickness that lithobreaking didn't destroy anything important.
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Damn, those cloud layers do look neat, I've also seen some mods floating around that give the gas giants active lightning. I'd like to find a mod that gives each body unique terrain meshes and ground clutter, but at the same time I don't want it to add weird shit that isn't actually present on the surface of said planet. I would install some new clouds but I'm going to assume my GPU would cook itself if I tried.

But yeah, Mercury is a bitch, I don't remember right now what my closest approach was, my second probe was intended to be a surface altimetry scanner and just a general ScanSAT [photographic scans, I believe low-res] but it ended up just being a flyby, so now it's sitting out there with one intended orbital probe, just orbiting the Sun forevermore. I might give it a shot when I get further up the tech tree but for now I'm focusing on Mars and Venus, namely a manned lander for Mars and more unmanned probes for Venus. I still haven't sent anything out to the gas giants yet but I would really like to check out Titan and Europa.
 
teriyakiburns said:
Looks like it picked up a bit of a spin at the end there.
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I wonder how much of that was just extra effort to ensure one of the cameras caught enough footage of the heat shield. With the steam a lot of the cameras are quickly occluded. I can't remember how many of the spotter buoy boats they said they had in the water at the time but one last pirouette for the camera also tests hovering control a little bit more.
 
Green Man said:
I would install some new clouds but I'm going to assume my GPU would cook itself if I tried.
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A nice thing about KSP is the game itself is so old and undemanding you can kinda go bananas with extras. Worth a shot, I'd say it was the only thing that made doing fucking x-plane contracts tolerable:
screenshot65.jpg screenshot54.jpg
Using Blackrack's obviously, if you google the current release version for a leak you can always try it out for free and turn it off if it doesn't work. Along with Sol configs (and its high-res planet textures option) which I believe works with KSRSS. I'm mainly using that for RSS cloud configs, but apparently it's also meant to be more performant than the alternatives.
I'm sure all the RSS heightmaps are using as spergily-sourced real terrain data as possible, the only thing I've seen beyond that is something that changes the filtering algorithm to smooth em out a bit. Scatterer adds extensive surface detail but it's mainly just anonymous rocks and pebbles that could go anywhere. I think it adds all sorts of crazy shit (especially on Eve) to the vanilla system but I haven't seen anything wacky in RSS.

And yeah I love ScanSat. They say don't use it at real solar system scale though because low res still means like 32gb of RAM with big planets.
 
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