jebbe

I believe experimental physicists are by now down to a few hundred attoseconds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrashort_pulse

Not exactly a paradox, but: #define true false

There's already a very similar challenge, somebody went to Duna and back: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/52043-The-Tech-Level-1-Orbital-Challenge?p=687458&viewfull=1#post687458 My entry - mun and back: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/52043-The-Tech-Level-1-Orbital-Challenge?p=686870&viewfull=1#post686870 Edit: Ninja'd...

This was fun! After around twenty attempts and never less than 100m I got lucky:

Oh right! I got so caught up in doing things old style, that I completely forgot about that option! So, back to the drawing board!

Pretty awesome! Although - are you sure you are not using fuel lines?

This is awesome, feels just like the old times! Mun and back: http://imgur.com/a/zuMOa#0 ----- Achieve a stable Low Kerbin Orbit (Periapsis 70km+) with one Kerbal: +20 points - forgot the screenshot in the final attempt that made it though... Achieve a stable High Kerbin Orbit (Periapsis 100km+) with one Kerbal: Nope, Pe was below 80 all the time, on Kerbin as well as on the Mun Achieve either orbit with two or more Kerbals: No again, just one, although I did carry six empty pods to LKO. Successful reentry to Kerbin atmosphere: +5 points Pilot(s) survives return journey: +10 points Rocket is completely undamaged after landing: I actually exploded almost all of it, it's called "staging"! Total: 35 points Additional awards: Mk1 Decoupler (External Combustion Engine) - Excessively! Extra-Vehicular Propulsion - Jeb tried on a previous attempt, but it wasn't enough to return to Kerbin. He's stranded now. The BobNova Award for Gallantry in the face of Common Sense - Is the Mun's sphere of influence outside of Kerbin's SOI?

Wixhausium. Because Europium, Germanium, Hassium, Darmstadtium - what has to be next? Of course! (GSI) Edit: Darmstadtium = Bowel-city-ium, Wixhausium = Masturbation-town-ium. Towns have great names here!

A simple way to do something similar at home is to use a CD and a laser pointer. Point the laser to the data side of the CD and watch the reflection pattern. Careful - only look from the front side of the CD, such that the laser points roughly in your direction (not into your eyes!), with the CD in front of you. Project the reflection pattern e.g. to a white wall. A CD is basically a fine refelctive grid rather than a single/double slit, so all the reflection patterns from all the "slits" overlay and give you very distinct maxima, and wide minima. A CD works better than a DVD (let alone a bluray), because the coarser the grid, the closer the maxima. And modern technology produces such fine grids, that the maxima can be really far apart.

Hm ok, true, if you consider the dry mass of the fuel tanks. Yeah, I guess that's how it should be done.

Sorry, but I have to disagree: delta-v is proportional to the logarithm of your initial fuel, and the logarithm doesn't converge - it grows very slowly, but it never reaches a limit.

Actually, there is no limit: To increase your delta-v linearly you need exponentially more fuel. Or, in other words: Increasing your mass linearly only increases your delta-v logarithmically, but you will always get some additional delta-v, without any upper bound. You just need more and more fuel for less and less delta-v, which is probably what you have noticed. So there's only the practical limit of how large a rocket you can design without it getting unstable, or your computer lagging too much. However, I have built rockets with more than 30km/s delta-v, well capable of doing a grand tour, and there's a neat trick to it: Make your spacecraft as lightweight as possible, ideally it's just a probe core with a minimalistic propulsion system (tiny fuel tank and ant engine / ion propulsion system). The gain from small decreases in the spaceships mass is enormous, try to get rid of everything you don't absolutely need; for example put ASAS and RCS to lower stages and dump them before activating your leightweight spaceship, or even better, don't take them along at all. Actually, if you could make your ship infinitely light, then you would get infinite delta-v. All this is just inferred from the rocket equation; try to understand it, it will help a lot with building rockets.

I have browsed through the optimal ascent thread again, and dug out this: The optimal TWR is 2+2*a/g, where a is your current acceleration, and g is the accelaration due to gravity. This will actually increase from two to something like 5 for most designs during the first tens of kilometers of the ascent. Afterwards you are basically out of the atmosphere, and these considerations do not matter any more - as said before, for the orbital insertion you should try to stick with light-weight, high-efficiency engines.

In this thread we had an extensive discussion about optimal ascent profiles. Bottom line: If you are aiming for fuel efficiency, you should stay close to terminal velocity (as stated before), and that is achieved by a TWR of roughly 2:1 in the beginning. However, while fuel drains, the TWR increases, and fortunately that is exactly what you need to keep up with the terminal velocity. For the orbital insertion you want to use a TWR as low as possible (light, high efficiency engines) - just high enough that you get into orbit without burning away from the prograde vector too much.

I'm actually very sceptical about our ability to communicate with alien species. Let's stay on Earth: There are intelligent beings down here on Earth, with complex communication patterns, able to communicate over geat distances, and we have no idea what they could possibly be "talking" about: dolphins and whales. These guys might be just as smart as we are, they grew up in an environment very close to ours, they are even mammals just like us, and yet we do not understand them at all. So how would we ever get around to communicate with somebody that has evolved in a completely different chemical environment?