Lt_Duckweed

The intakes will only be able to refill on Kerbin or Laythe, and as long as you are under 30km or so they will refill all the way back up to full.

And if anyone is curious, I specifically used this bad boy, 400 of them to be precise!

Today, I flew on Duna using stock jet engines

The reason being that restock very slightly changes the colliders and the drag cubes and thus is technically not stock physics. So this mod is for people like me (I run and film stock missions). I want good looking plumes, but need to stick with the stock parts & models.

For the purposes of landing, do water landings count or must it be on land?

Nerv does help though. On my Eve sstos, I use a ratio of 2 nervs for every 1 vector. I start up the nervs and vectors at the same time at 16.5km, the vectors then run out of fuel at a surface speed of about 2500m/s and the rest of the trip to orbit is done by the nervs. With these ratios I have been able to achieve 5% payload fraction to orbit. Ideal twr in terms of efficiency balance between engine dry mass and total fuel load seems to be ~78 tons per 1 vector and 2 nerv. So for a 176 ton ssto this translates out to 2 vectors, 4 nervs, and ~8.8 tons of payload. I fou

For an Eve ssto, ions don't make sense unless you are trying to get back to Kerbin. The total impulse you can extract from an ion engine on an ssto ascent is less than the impulse you can get by just replacing the ion engine with liquid fuel for your nervs.

Even at the top of the highest mountain on Eve Nervs produce 0 thrust, so no way to spin the props. Unless you mean using the nerv ec to power the prop, which might work, depending on if ec scales with throttle or real thrust.

A large drill has a base rate on asteroids of 5 ore a sec, which means it can power 10 recipes. A small drill has a base rate of 1 ore per sec, so it can power 2 recipes. To get more fine grained: The base rate for the liquid fuel + ox mix is 0.5 ore a sec for .55 ox and .45 liquid fuel. The base rate for ox only is .55 ore a sec for 1.1 ox. The base rate for liquid fuel only is .45 ore a second for 0.9 liquid fuel. The base rate for monopropellant is 0.5 ore a sec for 1 monopropellant.

I know this answer is really late, but there is another option. Currently they bend and flex because the thrust from the rapiers is not pointing through the attachment point of the servo. If you use the shift key to increase offset range, you can offset the engines so that they are centered on the attachment point of the servo. This should let you get away with a smaller, lighter servo while also having much less flex.

You can aerocapture everywhere (including Eve) without using any ablator, as heatshields are already insanely heat resistant on their own.

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It does not. The wings will behave entirely normally.

Considering the number of blades you are using, you can almost certainly drop one size down on the rotors and use the medium rotors. This will let you use 16 rtgs instead of.... 100

Essentially, there are a number of different parts in the game that can under the right circumstances produce lift to drag ratios MUCH higher than what is possible with standard wings. The very simplest is the small retractable landing gear. Simply roll it 90 degrees so it is sideways, then angle the front upwards about 30 degrees. This particular one can give a lift to drag ratio about 3x higher than what can be done stock (stock max supersonic/hypersonic lift drag is in the range from 4.3 to 5, depending on mach number, with the landing gear trick it is nearly 15. They range anywhere