kStrout

That's the thing, this is in career mode, I don't have RAPIERs yet, I have made at least a dozen RAPIER powered planes, this is new for me.

As the name might suggest, I am currently having issues getting low TWR SSTOs into orbit, my current design has 2 turboramjets and 2 terriers, It flies great in atmospheric mode, but when I switch to the rockets my TWR of 0.5 makes it so I have to maintain a 45° AOA to avoid falling back into the atmosphere, and that has severe consequences on my deltaV. I see lots of people making SSTO's larger than mine with less rocket thrust so I want to know, is there a standard ascent profile for low TWR SSTO's? Here is a picture of mine if it is of any help. note: Technically this is a modded craft, but the only mods I am using that add parts are TAC life support and Kerbal engineer, which do not affect the performance of the plane.

Oh man, these updates come out way too fast, I still have months of projects planned for 1.04 that I will probably never get to see happen. I still haven't gotten to Duna in my carrier game.

I remember a friend told me that the Nazis experimented with fluorine flamethrowers but decided they were "too inhumane to use", remember these people gassed and burned thousands of Jewish families. Really tells you something about the stuff doesn't it?

I have to agree with you, I am designing an eve ascent vehicle based off the MAV from the Martian, and the 12 landing legs I have are all the way compressed.

Not a bad idea, have you calculated how long it would take for it to start saving you money? And also how long does this take, I don't want to have to spend 30 minutes just fueling a rocket. Perhaps if the silo and the Miner were the same vehicle?

And the reason nobody tries to launch things twice a day is because nobody has the ability to launch stuff twice a day. When airplanes were first mass produced I bet you never had hundreds of people trying to get from point A to point B consistently every day, now look at the world. As supply increases, cost decreases to increase demand, and when you have enough demand cost will increase and whoever has supply gets rich.

No one has got to orbit that way since the aerodynamic overhaul. What you want to do now for the first four steps is fine, but don't throttle down at 100m/s(if you are worried about efficiency, you will not go too fast to soon if your launch TWR is < 2)(note this is my preference, but the following is proven to be better). And turn over almost immediately, at around 1km you should be at ~10° from upwards, and keep your nose pointed at the prograde marker as it slowly falls towards the horizon, this is called a gravity turn. (you can use the hold prograde button in the SAS menu) You should be at 45° at 10km, just keep the gravity turn until your apoapsis is at your desired orbit height, unless your time to apoapsis(viewable by hovering over the apoapsis marker in map view) starts decreasing, then you should pull your nose up until it stops and keep going. Not to stomp all over your system, it may be that more experienced players will point out errors in my system, that's just part of learning. I love what you are doing though, it is certainly true that most people on the forums assume new players will already know how to get to orbit, and your format is excellent.

Nope, it's shaped like a burrito.

Not a really big facepalm, but I am subscribed to AIAA notifications, so you would expect them to be very professional, and usually they are. But the other day there was one talking about a student that invented a highly efficient ion engine and a quote from they article they said that it works, "by hurling particles backwards so that a spacecraft can be propelled forwards". I mean they're not wrong...

The big dumb booster concept is only really useful if what your launching is really cheap, but needed in large quantities(ex water). No one cares if they lose kilotons of water on launch, they'll just demand a refund and fly on the next launch. If NASA did this on a regular basis by selling out to private companies I expect we would see serious development in the heavy lift vehicle department.

The white backgrounds are for the walls and ceilings, Is everything white for you? That might mean that you have no livable area, grass should appear in places with slopes of less than 45° and gravity between 0.6g and 1.1g, can you post a screenshot?

Bill Nye most likely. But it's actually Bob. I always thought that Bill should be the scientist as a tribute to the man who taught me most of the stuff I know about science, but oh well. Happy birthday Kuzzter Jr!

Sounds great! Any ETA on a picture showing all the planned orbits of all the bodies?

What would really help space development is a treaty that says something like, "Any party which creates a base on a extraterrestrial body with x permanent residents controls all land within f(x) distance of the base". Everyone talks about how European colonization was horrible, but it drove the industrial revolution and the modern age, and guess what the moon doesn't have natives! So there is really no reason not to authorize an ET land grab, even looking at who can do it, SpaceX is a launch provider, a private company, you bring the bucks, you get stuff in space, if other countries are interested, they can get their piece of the pie.

That's how I feel about mars, but on Venus, not only are you deeper in the heliosphere which gives you a better environment radiation wise, but You can make floating colonies at 1 atmosphere and .9g surrounded by helpful elements (O,C,N) that gets free shielding from the atmosphere and in theory lots of power from wind shear. What's on mars? A desert, a very interesting desert once perhaps, but still a radiation plagued, low gravity environment with an annoying atmosphere which is just thick enough to require heat shields, but thin enough that you can't use it for almost anything.

I believe its possible with modding magic and launch clamps.

Is there a required altitude? Because otherwise due to the fact gravity falls off with the square of the distance people hovering further away get a great advantage.

I never feel that way, I usually use TAC life support which balances any grind because your science stations can only exist for so long before they need resupply, but I still have a warm fuzzy feeling whenever I fill it up with tons of data.

atmospheres are great at capturing low energy radiation, such as radiation from the sun, that kind of radiation is not the problem, the problem is cosmic rays, very(comparatively) heavy particles traveling at VERY high speeds that will pass right through your shielding unless you have tons of the stuff. But magnetospheres are so gigantic that they can deflect these cosmic rays and turn them into easily blocked, low energy radiation, and really if you have to live in a centrifuge underground so you can live on mars you might as well live in a space colony and not be stuck at the bottom of a gravity well. - - - Updated - - - Also if you want to speculate on the effects of low g (but not 0g) on human fitness and development go ahead and speculate, because there has been NO RESEARCH on the subject, that's what NASA should be doing, building low g biomedical research stations in LEO. And considering that this could make or break a mars mission, you would think a mars-oriented program would be doing stuff like that.

Lets say we can terraform mars to have a comfortable temperature, plant life and even(lets be bold) a breathable atmosphere, Mars is still very small, very far away and would only have 0.4g, possibly not enough to sustain children, and no magnetic field whatsoever, so if you wanted to not get cancer you would have to live 2m underground to protect against cosmic rays, making your terraforming pointless. I say we mine the moon and build space colonies(see signature) in LEO, way more practical, closer, and the perfect environment with free shielding from earth's magnetosphere.

Really? every several years your body will eventually completely replace all the atoms in your body with new ones[citation needed]. Even if your brain cells stay the same, just swapping out individual molecules every now and then, most of the cells in your body die only to be replaced by new ones all the time. Does this mean you are a different person, a copy of who you were five years ago, and that he(you five years ago) is dead? No, that's ridiculous, you are the same person, with all your hardware gradually replaced as it aged, and when you upload yourself, you simply update all your hardware at once, you are still the same person. sorry, this is in response to Baggers.

I notice he isn't even really trying, he quotes that spaceship one never made it past 100km, when it did, several times.

Is there any reason you need it manned? I see you have a drone core there, and if the only point is to launch satellites, then you should switch out the nose for a 1.25 to mrk 2 adapter with a tail connector on front, more fuel less drag similar mass! Also that design looks like you should only need 2 rapiers, try getting the side tanks down to mrk 1.

For me it is always the next version of KSP, I have never played a carrier game further than a manned duna flyby Way back in 0.23(for now, I will do a duna base soon, just a bit more science), before the next version of KSP comes out, drastically changing the early game, so I start over and the whole process repeats itself.