sevenperforce

New aerial footage of the last Falcon 9 landing: Beautiful, as always. Anyone care to guess what the debris is that gets kicked across the landing pad?

Then let's take the what-if out of the equation, and just ask the question. Exactly. Does anyone know whether the re-entry profile, thermal management, chute deployment acceleration, and splashdown speed are reasonably safe for one or more passengers?

What about the whole EDL process?

And if they brought their own air, and figured out a way to remotely unberth?

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that they figured out a way to remotely trigger the unberthing mechanism.

Very nice catch. I was actually going to ask this question myself. In a really, really ridiculously bad situation -- like, meteoroid impact that takes out the Soyuz lifeboat and the life support systems and gives the astronauts only a matter of hours -- would a docked Dragon 1 be enough to get the crew home safely? They'd need to bring their own air and such, obviously.

Ditto on what everyone else said about emdrives and fusion reactors. If you're going to go the saucer route, you should spin up the whole ship rather than wasting time with a separate rotating segment. A saucer shape is decent if you have rotating engine nacelles, because you can land and lift off vertically but then transition to lift-assisted forward flight. It also is nice and draggy with a good blunt shape for aerobraking.

Nope. I can easily get exoatmospheric with 100 units of liquid fuel and a jet engine, so getting to the North Pole that way will be a snap.

I'm absolutely certain I was the first to land propulsively on Minmus, the Mun, and Kerbin (no chutes) in the Demo with all-stock parts. Much part clipping follows, though.

I mean, you can just say "don't use wheels for propulsion" and leave it at that. Honor system. Note that under your current system, there is nothing to prevent someone from building a VTOL jet-powered vehicle and simply landing on wheels.

Technically the Dragon has bipropellant rocket engines and they were reused as well, so...officially a rocket.

The atmospheric aspect was mostly an afterthought, which is why I hadn't worried about the insane multiplier; if you can get 100 kerbals into orbit on a single engine, more power to you. But yeah, the multiplier was a math mistake; I was thinking of (Distance * (1 + (kerbals - 1)/2 )).

I was just going to use it for part counts and aerodynamics.

The name EXPLOIT 3 fits your craft, you came up with a great idea this scoring system has a serious problem; say one have 100 kerbals on a rocket, adding 1 kerbal to the rocket would make it so the rocket is only 1.01 times heavier (if it accomplishes the same task), but that persons score would increase by 1.5. I suggest that the scoring system should be distance*kerbalcount. Hah! Indeed. I should have simply specified that the craft be capable of actually flying. Didn't think that needed to be stated, but obviously it did.

I was excited for a second because I saw "ISRU".

You win all the internets. At least on Kerbin. Kinternets?

Stock please.

Does Tweakscale count as a minor part mod or a major one?

Nah, submit away.

Spotted something VERY kerbal -- the first stage started the flip for the boostback burn using its cold gas nitrogen thrusters, but the engine ignition happened before the stage had stopped rotating. So they used the engine gimbal to stop the rotation rather than waiting a few extra seconds for the nitrogen thrusters to arrest. I've done that so many times; just wait until the RCS has my rocket pointed in generally the right direction and then let gimbal + SAS do the rest.

Fair enough. Another way to do something like a Jool-5 would be to pack a drop-tank SSTO full of tanks coupled with docking ports rather than decouplers, and leave them in orbit between landings.

Well, that's not quite the spirit of the challenge; I said no refueling because I wanted people to use only the fuel they could get off the ground in a single launch. But don't let that stop you from making it!

High-altitude winds are pretty difficult to avoid or counter. Shear will rip a rocket apart. You can do something like Stratolaunch to get above the wind, but then takeoff conditions become problematic.

Because you want to have the same craft come back and refuel using engineless tankers "launched" onto the runway? That wouldn't be allowed, no. That's why I said no refueling or ISRU. The point is to get as far as you can with only the fuel you can lift using a single engine.

Absolutely. Any stock engine is fine. If you can get something off the ground with an ion engine, more power to you.