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About koshelenkovv

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    Sr. Spacecraft Engineer

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  1. Actually, it's not that weird. Rosetta was not powered for entire flight, it used hibernation mode. New Horizons uses hibernation too, despite of having a continuous power supply from RTG. Let's pretend that when you switch to KSC to manage other missions, your probe enters hibernation and consumes negligible amount of power. And you do not use any of its instruments at that time anyway, so it looks right.
  2. Oh, those glorious days! New planets to explore, and no maneuver nodes, every journey is dangerous and exciting, every maneuver is non-simulable and irreversible, no launch window planner either. And I miss these old tanks. New ones are so gray and boring. Ah, and there was no massively overpowered or unuseful junk parts like orange tanks or SLS pieces. And no rover wheels, no probe bodies, no docking, no action groups - everything must be activated in staging sequence (non-changable once out of VAB, of course!). It pushed fantasy and ingenuity to the limits - docking 'grapples' out of landing struts, RCS and rocket rovers on landing gears, waterfoil boats with detachable 'rover' for the race to South Pole, intricate landers, etc.. People on the forums even made deathcubes, shooting decouplers, even monorail train! Now everyone is building huge space stations and sends even bigger motherships to Minmus . 0.15.2 IIRC 0.17 Eve rocket and rover
  3. Depends of mission. Researching the rings of Saturn? Of course, unmanned mission. Studying how to live on the Moon? Of course, manned one! I think, for EO and Moon manned missions frequently will be more effective than unmanned ones (again, depends of what is studied) For far space we really have no alternative to unmanned - flying to Neptune will take 15 years, it's crazy to send people. Even ion engines or VASIMRs will not make it faster than in a year.
  4. I really miss these old tanks :3 New ones look gray and boring. Here the rocket. 16 parts. Gravity turn Departing to the Mun Orbiting low Landing Managed to land after A LOT of fiddling. It's definitely not easy to land on LV-T45. LV-909 have much nicer weaker thrust, but there is no LV-909 in 0.12 Rolled to face East. I know, there WAS enough fuel in this rocket for return (7454 m/s dV after all!), but sloppy piloting (mostly due to old SAS/Pod control) made this impossible. Now I stuck orbiting the Mun.
  5. Piwa, Kryten, please, refrain from delving into political details and petty bickering about who waved his d--k first. Let's discuss is it possible and reasonable to save ISS (and how to do it) if Russia will really pull out in 2020, and will be OPSEK really built using ROS modules or not (if it will be built at all).
  6. Zvezda have it's own array. It does not take much power to feed Zvezda itself, tiny lab and airlocks. Funding is not a problem if there is political will. Just shake more money out of citizens or reroute some from other megaprojects. There is no democracy here. Problem lies in a massive lack of experience, knowledge and expertise, because most of those people who were engaged in space engineering years ago are now retired, emigrated, dead or changed occupation and almost no new men came to replace them. What's why Fobos-Grunt fails, Proton made fireworks, Angara rocket still not flew after 20 years of development, 3 GLONASS satellites were delivered to the ocean bottom etc. And Nauka ISS module was delayed again, to 2017. (10 years delay in total).
  7. Not really. Do not forget a fact that Zarya is owned by US, not by Russia. Detached Russian part will consist of Zvezda, two airlocks and tiny Rassvet lab module. Approx. 1/3 of old Mir station. Definitely not very useful for making science. On the other hand, USOS does have life support for a crew of three, but it lacks reboost capability (and NASA cannot control ancient Zarya). US have the Interim Control Module completed and stored, but launching it and docking with ISS could turn out to be non-trivial task. Other option is to contract some more ATVs from ESA. ISS split up is lose-lose outcome for both parties, but not definite end to any of them.
  8. There is circumnavigation challenge. A lot of ideas in this thread http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/25884-Kerbin-Circumnavigation-Challenge-Reloaded-New-Rules-Once-More
  9. (Finally, I found him!) Here the Kraken Prober on launchpad. Looks somewhat biggish and overkill, but whatever, it will do the job. Liftoff! Reaching over 2000 m/s and flying up to 100 km is easy when your vehicle is small and light. It's even easier now with thrust limiter and new engine behavior. Squeezing last newtons of thrust Detaching interplanetary stage and circularizing (need only 112 m/s). Lifter stage will fall on the planet creating no space debris. In order to perform aerocapture in soupy atmosphere of Jool craft needs massive heat shield. Such horrible contraption will make probe unreasonably heavy, which will render launch vehicle huge, expensive, and unreliable. So I decided to do not use shield and performed pure gravity capture instead. Laythe flyby and gravity assist The green ball of Jool. The rest is easy and there is no reason for sparing dV - I have a lot of it. Thrust limiter allows to do incredibly precise burns - down to 0.03 m/s In search of Deep Space Kraken Here he is! Killed orbital velocity and detached interplanetary stage. It will fall on the surface creating no space junk. It seems like about 1200 m/s of dV in probe will remain unused. Landing now! Transmitting science back home.
  10. Started new career game and discovered that I can make unexpectedly simple SSTO right away. It breaks at landing, but pod survives. (It have enough fuel to soft land, but topples over anyway.) It could be fixed by realigning tanks to make pancake rocket :3
  11. Thanks, but I don't really care. I did it for fun - never made pure solar circumnavigation before :3 Gained a lot of experience about relation between electric propeller power consumption, air density and speed. Also with maneuvering while being properly aligned with the Sun (like back zoom or descending wheels-over-head to get some light on panels) Edit: Also, solar circumnavigation cannot be done much shorter than in one day - you need light to fly.
  12. Introvert(67%) iNtuitive(12%) Thinking(62%) Judging(33%) I guess other types just don't like this nerdy rocket-building game. It's too hard, its learning curve is too flat, and even worse, playing it presumes a lot of thinking :3 Edit: Oh, and it's not massively multiplayer.
  13. 6 hours 3 minutes (i.e. 1 day) on electric airplane It was fine toy some time ago. Now, in 0.23.5 it became extremely nose-heavy. I do not know who to blame - 0.23.5 or new Firespitter. I realized that it was strategic mistake to start journey at morning. Cruising speed is slightly greater than Kerbin's rotation speed and this makes Sun to unrise back. Technical stop here. Ooops! Luckily, nothing have broke. Ocean, only ocean below.
  14. Do you ever tried to deorbit an asteroid? It bounces too!
  15. I do not see how a chip in my head can make my life better. So it's unnecessary and should not be installed.