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Just made a Phoenix-inspired SSTO with lots of margin(more LEO payload than dry mass). Powered by 10 Merlin 1D+ and two Vulcain 2 engines: http://imgur.com/iqC6f7V Being able to get back to building cool rockets is awesome.

Just made a Phoenix-inspired SSTO with lots of margin(more LEO payload than dry mass). Powered by 10 Merlin 1D+ and two Vulcain 2 engines: http://imgur.com/iqC6f7V Being able to get back to building cool rockets is awesome.

Out of curiosity, what is this ROMini thing that was mentioned on the previous page?

Install Principia on stock KSP?

That is incredibly cool! I'm guessing you can also observe Jupiter/Saturn multi-eclipses and get fairly accurate timings for those?

Any chance that this mod could get RO support? http://mods.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/239291-spacex-landing-legs It's easy to install using CKAN and provides the only key SpaceX part that isn't available as RO-modded stock parts or replicable using procedural parts which is great for low-memory installs, where single-part mods are king.

Eyeballed Farquhar transfer! I'm working on getting better at quickly putting stuff into good halo orbits so I can incorporate L2 comsats into my next career mode save with remote tech. With ion engine fine tuning I was able to get down to ~1 stationkeeping burn per munar orbit @ ~0.2 m/s.

First, get close enough to where you need to be. There aren't many visual references, I personally did it by picking an orbit that just grazed the Mun SOI and canceling my velocity relative to Mun surface when I saw Kerbin reappearing from behind the mun. After that, I performed a 20 m/s burn that gives you a bit of velocity towards the kerbin-mun axis and a bit of inclination, until I saw a corkscrew-ish pattern towards the mun or outwards which is round rather than elliptical. Incidentally, I had an easier time seeing it when the trajectory was falling outwards. When you have that, keep adjusting your trajectory with burns directly along the kerbin-mun line (use the plotting frame navball) every so often to make you fall towards the mun if you were escaping, or towards escape if you were falling towards the mun. To some extent you are spending fuel on hovering, but if you are close to the Lagrange point it will be almost nothing and you should be able to bring it down to single digit or less than single digit m/s per orbit. I had a much harder time doing it in RSS, since KSP needs all planet rotation axes to be aligned with each other, so the Moon's rotation axis relative to its orbit is wrong and Moon surface velocity is no longer helpful. = ( TLDR: Halo orbits are self correcting in the directions perpendicular to the Kerbin-Mun axis, but you need to stationkeep to not fall outwards or towards the Mun. Away from the lagrange points this is equivalent to hovering. Close to the lagrange point the delta-v cost of "hovering" is tiny. Also, staying in a halo orbit is quite a lot easier than trying to balance at the actual lagrange point.

A few neato Kerbin-Mun orbits orbits in stock KSP + principa: http://imgur.com/a/u41SA First one is a Mun almost-capture, where the craft goes far enough out that Kerbin perturbation turns a retrograde munar orbit into a prograde munar orbit. The second one is a Kerbin-Mun Halo orbit around their L2 point. Stationkeeping delta-v needed should be less than 2 m/s per month, but it needs constant baby sitting as in 4-5 stationkeeping burns per orbit. If you don't babysit it for half a halo orbit it will either fall into an unstable prograde mun orbit or get flung out into a solar orbit. First one is plotted in an inertial Mun-centered frame, second one is obviously Kerbin-Mun corotating.

Great work. Every time I've tried to do that, my flight planner crashes the game because I plotted a trajectory that intersects earth.

All right, tried it out on a fresh install, now the Kerosene works just fine.

Huh. If your install has kerosene working, I'll try this with a fresh install. Thanks again! If you are still editing the config file you posted, I'd suggest also swapping the thrusts in case someone else grabs this config. The kerosene-burning mode is supposed to have the higher thrust.

Thanks a lot for the config file! That is exactly what I needed! I'm having a weird bug though. It seems to require LqdOxygen twice instead of requiring LqdOxygen and Kerosene, even though the config file clearly specifies the latter. This doesn't affect gameplay too much since Kerosene and LOX have similar densities, but I can't figure out why the game does this.

Hi there! I've been playing around changing configs around to make historical engines for realism overhaul. One engine that I'd love to play around with is the RD-701, which could switch from a 330s seal level/415 vaccum isp mode which used a dense Oxygen + Hydrogen + Kerosene tripropellant configuration, and a 460 vac isp mode which used ordinary hydrolox. Basically a better RD-180 which can also transform into an SSME mid-flight. I've tried modifying the config of the stock RAPIER to do what I want(I don't care much about looks for now) but I couldn't get it to stop requiring inlet air even when removing intake air from the list of resources. How do I get it to work? Closed cycle works like a charm even with real fuels though. Is there a simpler way to make the mode switching work if I don't need/want air-breathing without messing with an air-breathing engine?

So, the USAF just gave SpaceX a major grant to develop their Raptor engine which "requires shared cost investment with SpaceX for the development of a prototype of the Raptor engine for the upper stage of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles". In other word, future Falcon 9 and FH variants will have a Raptor upper stage, and having access to the Raptor US variant will be necessary to make a Falcon 9. Is there any config available for the Raptor engine? Expected stats are 2300 kN thrust, 380s vac Isp, and an O/F ratio of 3.8. T/W ratio hasn't been mentioned by any SX employee but should be >100. EDIT: made one myself, where I added a config to the J-2X engine from AIES. Will share soon.