Hotel26

Not before it runs on Linux. Show-stopper.

For the record, the following were/are inspirational: How to build and pilot your own EVE SSTO!!! Leave Nothing Behind - EVE SSTS - Success! It kind of grows on you!...

Ignoring the "thing" in the middle: on its left, you can see Mauve Mountain, which has an airport elevation of 6415m. On its right: you can see a flat, square airfield, Eva Firma, which is 5x5 km and elevation 3100m. (No facilites as yet.) Which brings us back to the monstrosity in the centre: Old Smokey. A little over 3x3 km square, it accommodates a 3 km ruway and has an elevation of 20km. You can see the curvature of Eve from it, looking over the edge; and the sky is completely black, but no stars! From a distance, too, it does look like a Squad 'monolith'... [albeit unnaturally elongated. ] So we know that the "state of the art" is to use propellers to get as high as possible and then single-stage rocket power to go to orbit, delivering a single kerbal with perhaps a packet of smokes. I guesstimated that propellers might get one somewhere close to 20km, before kicking in the rockets. (I figure if it's too high, we'll just bulldoze some of it over the side. ) So, we don't know what the next part of the plan is. It would be good to get an ore loading measurement on top of 'Old Smokey'. So any rocket vehicle that can get from 20km to 90km on Eve, ought to be able to fuel up at Eve Firma and then climb to and land on Old Smokey. Then refuel. It's an SSTO[2], which signifies "Single-Stage, Take-Off twice". Alternatively, a super-charged passenger prop aircraft can ferry pax to the top of Old Smokey and then the SSTO[2] craft can simply ascend to orbit from Old Smokey and return to same. It just has to have wings. Which will be the other side of the too-low (to orbit) equation. How well will wings fly (glide) at 20km on Eve (too-high)? OK, so we still have a lot of work to do. Just call this then a mad, mad, mad, deluded scientific/engineering experiment. As mentioned earlier, my KSC Kommand believes that kerbonnel is the only reasonable "export" from Eve. Not fuel, not equipment; not even science (which can be tele-transferred (albeit for lower points)). 8-10 out at a time would be the jackpot.

On long interplanetary voyages, there is not a lot to do except gaze out and ponder how small the Kerbolar system is, embedded as it is, in a vast panoply of an artificial "sky box" [whatever that is]. Does this look familiar to you? Big Dipper It looks to me like a French Legionnaire cap... but YMMV. Some Kerbals I know say it is a saucepan. Or a Big Dipper (ladle). So then, if you are a Sky Watcher, here is the thread for you to waste while away some productive time as you journey across the vast interstitial space... If you see a distinctive 'constellation', post here in this thread as an "entry". If someone else finds it, and posts a similar image except including a slightly wider area (sufficient to be validated by the original finder), a link to your image gets posted here (OP) in the index, listing the Constellation Name, Discoverer and Validator. As well as the Constellation Index here, there will be a Leaderboard for Discoverers (1 point each validated post) and Validators (2 points once confirmed), as well as Aggregate. (No, you cannot Discover your own Post; but you already knew that.) Constellation Discoverer Validator Big Dipper Hotel26 -none- Have fun!

Well, here's a square island I built on Kerbin at location 70W on the equator about 50 klicks downrange from KSC: Same for Eve, except it would be purple and "toad-ugly".

Yes, CSV was a typical Intermediate Language; and 'Export' used to be known as 'Compile'. With Commas most often used in the western hemisphere, whereas the Soviet Union and Friends used Tabs, preventing code interchangeability, for obvious reasons of national security. [You might have known of it as '3PT']

And even closer to CSV!

I think this is brilliant! Congratulations. I knew this was theoretically possible and have been waiting years to see a realization of it. Is there any chance of you posting your component craft for study, somewhere like e.g. KerbalX? Kudos!

Just discovered this same thing myself. 3x astelets. Nope, now there's 4... How very dreslicious!

So I have graded a perfectly-flat 6x6 km landing field, Eva Firma, 3100m altitude at -0.2169 +169.7142. SSTO is most probably going to be a Mk2 capsule (3 kerbs) + hopefully 2 Hitchhikers (8 kerbs) and will be vertical liftoff, return glide capability and vertical landing under chutes. Thus it can easily return to Eva Firma and be refueled, passengers embarked and disembarked. Fuel trucks and fuel production will be onsite. At departure time, the SSTO will make a short ascent trajectory over the nearby Mauve Mountain facility, currently 6415m MSL, located at -0.5147 +167.5023 and land there fore topping up before final ascent to LEO. The launch platform therefore only has to be big enough to target for landing from nearby, plus contain a fuel depot and fuel trucks. I think 500x500m should be sufficient, thereby reducing the amount of earth-moving. So the the remaining question is still the key question. How high? Any advice about engines would also be helpful!? I guess this can be trial & error. My next step should probably be to get a dV budget and then make a preliminary space-glider design. Even just 7 kerbs in & out in an SSTO config would be outstanding, so I will start with that as a baseline. I have this funny feeling that everything about this project is going to be toad-ugly, except for the bottle of champagne at the end.

I am getting ready to ship a flotilla of bulldozers and earth-moving trucks to Eve for a highly-specific project. The aim will be to build a 4x4 km spaceport platform somewhere on the equator of Eve. The initial altitude will probably be 10km MSL. (Something like 64 cubic km of earth to move, which ought to take less than an hour.[1] ) Skycranes may likely be employed to ferry equipment from lower altitudes up the slopes to the spaceport precincts. The question being posed now is: "on Eve, what is the lowest reasonable altitude to launch from to make conventional VLHR[2] SSTOs viable? So to address the subject of payload, I am primarily/solely limited to an interest in personnel[3] and think 4+16 in a Mk3 format would be super. Maybe 2+8 in Mk2 at bare minimum. Would 10km likely be sufficient or will this project need to Aim Higher?? I would particularly like to hear estimates/advice from those who are reasonably experienced in Eve ascent, but all insights welcomed. [2] Vertical Liftoff Horizontal Return [3] Opinion of my Space Kommand is that only personnel and science need be transmitted out of Eve's atmosphere (and science can be relayed electronically).

Progress at Eve. From L-to-R: Venus Ascension (3x Mammoth), Hummingbird (2x NERV), Mule (4 NERV), Egg, Rim Shot. The Ascension arrived, requiring one last top-up before descending to the surface. The Mule/Hummingbird combination brought the Egg to the Rim Shot station. The Ascension will take 11 kerbals down to the surface once a landing site has been scouted (by surface parties). It'll then await a mobile refuel (to be implemented) and can take 3 kerbals out; then return on a final trip bringing three more down, making a total of 14 colonists in and 3 executives out.

A sudden urge: Nimble. I could say it's a Minmus SSTO but it was intended as a local hopper. Very convenient embarkation through the rear door. I haven't tried Kerbin re-entry tests but, full disclosure, won't be doing so either.

Let's first accept this as a premise. Then ask the question about other intelligent life. We feel it should be there but we have found no sign yet of intelligent life anywhere else, or ever. See Fermi's Paradox. Let's guess that there have been other intelligent species but none have surmounted the same challenges we (are said to) face: limited resources, nuclear weapons, climate change, artificial intelligence(?), genomic monkeying... Odds then that we are going to share the same fate as our supposed predecessors. Now let's ask "what would a truly intelligent species do?" -- realizing the above. Firstly: pointing out that we are a product of natural evolution over hundreds of millions of years in a protective environment (Earth, unlike space itself). Secondly: pointing out the anomaly that we accept that we are the product of a long chain of evolution but somehow think (selfishly) that we are now the immutable end of our line of evolution. Thirdly: pointing out that we are not evolved for space, do not have time to "evolve" for space (before being overcome by our own limitations), and the chemical/cellular life form is never going to be universally efficient in space ... nor throughout the universe. So the unthinkable next step is to do what every species does (given time), which is to produce its successor... but in the radically intelligent case, do it sapiently... thus: produce an artificially-intelligent elecronic form and endow it with imperatives: preserve its existence respect and preserve other life explore the universe and share the knowledge It would certainly utilize robotic instantiations but 'it' would be electronic, distributed and -- in a certain sense -- able to travel[1] at the speed of light. Homo sapiens sapiens might not survive (or perhaps it would, aided by its successor (but not replacement, see #2) but we would leave a sign in the universe that no other precedecessor intelligent species appears to have ever done before. More importantly, by leaving that permanent entity in the universe, we would thus resolve Fermi's Paradox. Quite an accomplishment. [1] not necessarily 'propagate'

So, welcome to the forum. (Assuming you are on Windows), it is possible (especially since you know the file path in the ksp directory), to recover deleted files. I would not guarantee this will work, though, if you have already recreated a new file by the same path/name. But this is the avenue I would explore... If you can't find the persistent.sfs, try looking for a quicksave.sfs and if you were using Kerbal Alarm Clock you might have any number of other .sfs files in your save directory. And by the way, the obligatory, "live & learn". (No, I am not a Windows user. Where to start, I can't say, but help wil lbe online.)