Stratzenblitz75

Hah what a nerd right. I did it better:

I had a video, but youtube ruined it

Today, I built a megaton sized..... rocket

I'm curious as to how you'd do this with Sony Vegas. I haven't been able to find anything to remove duplicate frames specifically.

Today I went to Eve:

For recording software, use either Nvidia shadowplay or AMD's relive (depending on your card). They offer the highest quality and lowest performance impact recording. OBS can also use those codecs but its more work than its worth to set it up IMO. For editing, I use blender. Its free and can speed up footage by ridiculous amounts (which is not something that most other editors can do in one render). Theres a good set of tutorials on YouTube to get your started if you are interested.

Today, I WE went to Jool:

Today, I went fast:

Today, I went to 3 planets/moons with 3 parts:

Today, I went to orbit using only jet engines:

Today, I went to the sun:

Today, I went to Gilly:

Well, its been a long time since I did a Jool-5 mission, so I figured now would be as good of a time as ever to revisit it. Here's a fully reusable, low-mass take on the challenge (without using jets, NERVAs or Ions). Of course, resource tab and KER are open throughout all important burns and maneuvers. Let me know if you'd like me to provide anything else. Thanks!

Today, I went to Jool:

Today, I went to Mars:

Here's 2.032 km/s <1 Km. The real trick to doing this is a fairing + sideways heatsheild. I didn't optimize this very much so someone could probably take the same principle and make faster one. And yes, it does fly at lower speeds and can be landed without a parachute (although, with much difficulty).

Today, I built a communications network... With math!

Today, I built a big rocket...

Indeed, having a TWR <1 on Eve is a bad idea. You really need to be ascending as quickly as possible to start out. However, my point with a horizontal take off isn't to try gradually climbing to orbit, but instead, is a different way of getting the vehicle vertical. After a horizontal take-off, you can quite easily leverage the engine gimbals + lift to point yourself upwards. You could even use the upward slope of a hill to help out too. Of course, as you said, during this initial pull up maneuver, you aren't making any progress, but the horizontal take off isn't as bad as it seems. Also, yeah the suborbital hang-time is a problem for the second stage. To get around this, I think you could build the first stage so that it is almost an SSTO (maybe 500-1000 m/s of orbit). From here, you should be able to get the second stage into orbit before leaving KSP's 40 Km unload range.

I haven't tested this, but my first thought for reusable Eve infrastructure is to have a ISRU equipped rocket spaceplane with a detachable, winged second stage. The first stage of the rocket plane would take off horizontally and then climb into a suborbital trajectory where it would deploy the second stage. The second stage would reach orbit, while the first stage would glide back down to a flat, high altitude landing site (>5000 m). From here the first stage could use ISRU to refuel, and the second stage could deorbit and glide back down to this landing site. Since they are both horizontal when landed, they can be redocked and the arrangement can take off again without too much trouble. Alternatively, you can setup a ring of high altitude ISRU bases around the planet for the plane to land at. This would require more setup, but would enable better payload fractions. While this may work on Kerbin, it probably won't work as well on Eve. This is because Eve's oceans are much denser than Kerbin's: An ore tank on Kerbin will sink just fine, but will barely sink on Eve. If you want ballast for Eve, you pretty much need to use Vectors, or the I-beams to be effective. And even then, you need a surprising amount to get something to sink, much less sit upright in the water. Not to discourage you from this approach, just be sure to do your testing on Eve first because their oceans are quite different.

You can actually get quite a boost from a centripetal launcher... Given that your reaction time is fast enough and your launcher can keep itself from tearing apart. As mentioned by EpicSpaceTroll, tangential velocity is calculated from ω*r, where ω is the angular velocity and r is the radius. However, there is another factor to consider; centripetal acceleration, which is calculated from ω2*r. As you can see for a fixed radius, tangential velocity depends depends on ω, while tangential acceleration depends on ω2. This means that as you double your tangential velocity, your centripetal acceleration will quadruple. So, what does this mean for KSP? Lets look at an example. Lets say you want to build a centripetal launcher to put launch an object from the surface of minmus into orbit. Lets say you choose your launcher to have a radius of 10 meters. Since minmus orbital velocity is ~160 m/s, you would have to achieve an angular velocity of 16 rad/s (150 RPM). This would induce an acceleration of 2560 m/s2 or 261 Gs. Okay, this is probably not viable. Even ignoring the G force, the high rotation rate would make it very difficult to time the release. Lets shoot for a more reasonable rotation rate then. Say we want 2 rad/s. In this case, we would need a radius of 80 meters. A launcher of this size would induce 320 m/s2 or 32 Gs of acceleration. Something like this is totally within the bounds of human reaction time, and KSP's auto-strut strength. However, with a radius this large, the launcher's moment of inertia becomes very large as well. Even if you use a lot of reaction wheels, you'll be waiting a long time for this thing to get up to speed. Another electric power source you can use are wheels. If you are launching from the minmus flats, you can feasibly use wheel power. The bugged differential steering on the large rover wheels could be the perfect power source. While a cool idea, for most cases a centripetal launcher is likely not a good option. Rocket engines are far less complicated and are much lighter. That said, screw practically! Centripetal launchers are a fun engineering challenge to build and are an excellent physics demonstration. I encourage anyone who is interested to give it a try!

Today, I celebrated Christmas... On Laythe:

This may not be a first in KSP, but I'm fairly certain its a first since the aerodynamics changed in KSP 1.0: Duna and back on electric power and xenon:

Today, I went to Duna and back... Using only electric power and xenon:

Today, I sent a rocket to the seafloor of every ocean.