Eyes Turned Skywards

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Michel Van

Michel Van

I have sad news,
The advisor for this Alternate History
Winchell Chung
Is Diagnose with prostate cancer that has metastasized.

I hope he will survive
 

TaintedLion

Hi, I have a question about the Centaur used on the interplanetary versions of Saturn-IC and Saturn Multibody. What is the closest real-world equivalent to the Centaur-E? It was mentioned in one of the posts that it had a wider hydrogen tank, so it could be Centaur-T/G-Prime or Centaur-G (shortened version for Shuttle-Centaur). Which one would it be more likely to be?
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e of pi

TaintedLion said:
Hi, I have a question about the Centaur used on the interplanetary versions of Saturn-IC and Saturn Multibody. What is the closest real-world equivalent to the Centaur-E? It was mentioned in one of the posts that it had a wider hydrogen tank, so it could be Centaur-T/G-Prime or Centaur-G (shortened version for Shuttle-Centaur). Which one would it be more likely to be?
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We used Centaur-G Prime as the basis for the numbers. It's arguable the value of the wider hydrogen tank vs a longer Centaur-D diameter tank, though, but that's what we used for the numbers and what the thinking was at the time.
 

TaintedLion

There was a minor point of debate on the KSP forums a couple months ago over whether the Apollo Block III/III+/IV used the partial white paint coating that the CSMs used for Skylab had on them for passive thermal control. Would this have been the case?
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e of pi

TaintedLion said:
Would it have been a full coat or the partial coat like on Skylab?
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Maybe? We weren't really thinking about it at the time.
(Or to put it another way, I don't want to step on Michel's toes for speculating, but merely to point out there's not a canon answer, nor an official one. To the extent there is a canon answer, it comes from having @nixonshead still show fully shiny Apollos in the renders.)
 
Athelstane

Athelstane

TaintedLion said:
Understandable, I was just asking so I could make my ETS recreations in Kerbal more authentic.
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Ther's no canon, and I certainly don't want to even try offering one, but I can't help but speculate that this might be a more gradual development as the Apollo CM slowly evolved over time, with the ad hoc high emissivity coating used on (the sun-facing half of) the Skylab CM's giving way to more sophisticated thermal coatings on the whole surface...Crew and Cargo Dragons use a proprietary thermal coating developed by Alion that I know little about, but likely reflects the kind of direction NASA *might* go as the years wore on and the design requirements for later block Apollo CSM's became more demanding.
 

e of pi

TaintedLion said:
Understandable, I was just asking so I could make my ETS recreations in Kerbal more authentic.
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What I'd say about that is authentic depends on your goals. If you want to match the renders we had @nixonshead do, then not including it is what you want. OTOH, if you want to do what you think is more accurate to a "real" ETS-like world, you're free to go ahead and have it be partially or fully coated in something like the Skylab coating or the Dragon or Starliner coatings. There's definitely an argument it might be better.
 

Polish Eagle

Speculating as a reader: I’m inclined to say that the outer covering might have been reworked into white tiles or thermal blankets a la STS with time.
 
Athelstane

Athelstane

Polish Eagle said:
Speculating as a reader: I’m inclined to say that the outer covering might have been reworked into white tiles or thermal blankets a la STS with time.
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BTW, what exactly does Starliner use for its command module thermal coating? It's funky looking, and I have been unable to find out anything about it.

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