Clamp-o-Tron

This is fantastic— but could we get a new part variant with the petals removed to act as a CBM port?

It's hard to make it more obvious Benjee. (Also, I'm sure you know, but Estreet is working on SDLVs of their own so coordination would be good)

@CobaltWolfI hate to post this a third time, but a version of the LFV without the chair and with a top node would be incredibly useful for bashing. Just my 2 cents.

Good point— if the chair is separate this could be a really useful lander standard

Hopefully assets can be reused, right?

Could this shrink to something suitable for the Orion-lite concept? (unfortunately all renditions of it are literally fan-fiction)

Just having a giant lander stage means that there's a lot of new stuff you can do with bases. <warning: a fair few pictures>

4 SNAP-19s produce 155 W of power. These solar arrays provide 5,000 watts (at 1 AU I think? A skim of the doc doesn't say), and the following table includes their assumptions about power use: So at 5 of these, they'd want 5,200 watts of power -- close enough. It seems to me like 19720021177 could be a later revision of the same general design: (Although box with solar panel wings is certainly the subject of a lot of convergent evolution)

Regardless of the IRL feasibility of the full concept, a mini SM like this for Apollo Jr. would be a lot of fun. Mercury retropack vibes. @CobaltWolf is this possible?

I love the modern Apollo paintscheme!

https://github.com/blowfishpro/B9PartSwitch/wiki https://github.com/sarbian/ModuleManager/wiki Looking at what other people do is also a great way to learn.

If this worked in the first place, it works now. No parts have changed in that area. But I’d personally take this kind of patch as an example (along with the great B9PS documentation) to learn for yourself when patches don’t exist/are outdated. It’s not that difficult if you take a stab at it.

Those aren’t up to date at all, of course, and were never finished. You can look at Kiwi Tech Tree and Skyhawk Science System for modern contemporaries, S^3 is still in dev. (also, use they for me, thanks)

So I suspect what the problem is here, but could we first get a picture of what's happened to your spaceplane? If you don't know, you can press F1, then go to your <KSP install directory>/Screenshots.

It is true that there are no official BDB waterfall configs. The ones discussed here (imho, not to diminish the work done in them!) need a LOT of work to meet the RealPlume versions in terms of quality. I have seen some interesting solutions that are hybrids of particles and meshes, but I don’t think they’re quite ready.

Hmmm... while it is interesting, there's a reason Gemini evolutions use small thrusters instead of a higher-Isp AJ-10: You need a rear docking port. Up in the front, that's parachutes and RCS, not exactly a good place to put a crew tunnel.

I get the impression it’s to not just get one datum, but to get a range of slightly fluctuating temperatures with changing atmospheric pressure, solar irradiance, etc. Not to mention weeding out noise. All that considered, 10 minutes is fair. Also gives you a reason to improve and re-launch your sounding rockets.

Do you mean Helios? We’ve got Helios already

Try something with an LMAE kickstage-ish using the F-1A and J-2S performance upgrades (at least for 18). As for how it fits inside the SLA with the LM… uhhh… I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader!

A vac-optimized SSME was to be the upper stage of Ares 1, but it was scrapped in favor of J-2X (that doesn't have much relation at all to J-2 of Saturn fame, as you should know). IIRC the issue had to do with the inability for SSME to relight for orbital insertion. I recall it also being used as an engine for the First Lunar Outpost concept, and it probably was envisioned for Ares 5 upper stage at some point.

MER is next I'm sure. I've heard rumblings about a separate probes mod invader's working on, maybe this is just being posted here for the time being.

Kepler?! What's that doing in BDB?

You could probably get away with tweakscaling for the ESM (Gemini maybe?) and using the RL10-A3 as prescribed. Other than that, the only missing parts are those cool solar arrays (which would probably not stay like that TBH). Skylab (dry) makes an excellent mission module, and the mass of the OWS itself might just work out to be the same as the ~70,000 lbs cited here. I’m not really sure though.

The original paper on the crewed Eros flyby (https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3070&context=space-congress-proceedings) makes very few comments on the reentry vehicle itself while providing detail on its service module. However, based on the diagrams, this has the same dimensions of the Apollo CM, while fitting 6 crew inside (referring to some other paper which I'm unable to find). Perhaps we've found two different Eros flyby concepts?

Dang it I…