EnderKid2

IRL you're never going to get the COM and COT exactly aligned. People move around, fuel drains, wind applies forces, manufacturing tolerances means the thrust vector of the engine is a fraction of a degree off from ideal. That's what SAS is for. Also from your concern with the vertical position of the COM, I believe you are subscribing to the pendulum rocket fallacy.

I think Trajectories and some of the lower-level VTOL assists from TCA (like vertical and horizontal velocity control) should be integrated, unlocked as you progress.

integrating some version of the Throttle Controlled Avionics mod would be great, it provides so many useful probe functions.

we have them, they're called mods #pcmasterrace *airhorn sounds*

You'd still want the full array of RCS thrusters because when doing maneuvering close to other things, you don't want to be swinging your spacecraft around a lot.

You can't do this in stock, I think, but Throttle Controlled Avionics supports using engines as RCS

Have you built planes before this one? Besides the COM/COL issues, your rear landing gear is quite far back from your COM so your elevators can't lift your nose easily.

Isn't it bulb-shaped in the videos of the spacex launches because they're not truly in vacuum, just in the upper atmosphere, so there's some gas interactions that slow the sideways velocity of the plume? In deep space I would think you would get that conical or even horn-shaped plume.

I really don't get how you're getting overheating issues. In all my usage of the things (without radiators), they tend to stabilize at a core temp of about 1000 kelvin, which is toasty, but not close to overheating.

The way Factorio does it, and/or something like MultiMC (a launcher for handling many different instances of the game, with different versions and mods and saves), would be great.

Vtuber doesn't necessarily mean money, the vtubing space is pretty saturated at this point. You're about a year too late.

An oblate planetoid with an extremely high rotation rate, such that the effective downward acceleration is noticably lower at the equator.

more specifically, it will have it in the modules. ModuleDataTransmitter can have its antennaType as DIRECT or RELAY

What antennas do they have? I'm pretty sure the parabolic dish I see there isn't a relay antenna.

Why would you accelerate the ships up to full tangential velocity before taking the slack out of the tether? Get them going at some small velocity tangentially with the tether near-straight, then once the tether pulls taught and stabilizes at some small fraction of a G centrifugial force, accelerate the system up to speed.

Yes, yes, but in that vid Firefly said they only needed to spin up the pumps to low velocity before injecting fuel. Perhaps their tap-off cycle makes this easier. This starter motor thing would likely only be practical for small engines though.

I've been watching Tim's Firefly Aerospace tour and they were talking about using nitrogen to spin up the turbopumps. I know Rocketlab uses electric motors to spin their pumps, so I was wondering if there might be utility in an electric starter motor for turbopumps, like a car's internal combusion engine starter. Perhaps it would be useful for situations where you have a turbopump-fed engine and want an arbitrarily high amount of restarts.

yay

doesn't that depend on the specific heat of your heating element?

also the Watt is a unit of power, or energy per time, not a unit of energy, so a storage capacity of "3 petawatts" makes no sense.

I use the standard port size for inter-ship connections (refuling tanker to mothership, lander to mothership, lander to lander ISRU backpack, etc.) and the jumbo for intra-ship connections (assembling mothership)

What heat production? I slapped a NERV on a medium-length Mk3 liquid fuel fuselage, and I could run out the entire tank without overheating. For any reasonable burn you'd make (a few km/s at most) your fuel tank provides a big enough heatsink to not even let the engine start glowing. Fine, if I intentionally try to insulate it by sticking it on a stack of cubeoct struts to overheat it, it heats up much faster, but why would you ever do that.

In addition to modulemanager, I think Kerbal Engineer Redux and all its info readouts, in the VAB but most importantly in flight, would be great.

In theory, Waterfall is significantly better-performing, as it's just some textures and meshes as opposed to loads of particles. I think the lag is specifically talking about the Rapier plumes, which are scuffed in some way that they're much harder on your graphics than other engines.