Temstar

Then there are weirdos like me, largely shun by the daywalkers, who find big hulking engines and their giant exhaust plums mesmerising and the little engines on payloads underwhelming (unless we're talking half a dozen nukes slowly turning cherry red with a 10 minute burn). I design lifters to loft tanks of LFO up to orbit for no reason other than the fact that to me, big rockets and SSTOs are reasons enough for their own existence.

Your probe went off as normal? What does that mean? Can you see your AP increasing at all? If you AP is not increasing and the nuke engine looks like it's firing then most likely some part of your ship is blocking the exhaust. You don't need TWR over 1 for orbital maneuvering, even a tiny TWR will move your AP.

Regenerative cooling unit that provide active cooling by consuming some LF?

I recall there were some pretty good reasons why Little Joe II was developed, which is analogous to what's happening here. They needed a high degree of versatility of thrust, and normal liquid fuel engines (at the time at least) didn't have deep throttling capability. Little Joe II could achieve this by changing the number of sustainer engines and their ripple fire pattern to simulate different stages of the Saturn V ascent. Given you will probably want to fire a few of these abort test boosters to test abort of different flight stages it's probably cheaper to make this single stage solid rather than buying five Delta IV.

Is it definitely Dark Knight? No chance of liquid fuel boosters? I always thought developing a big liquid fuel booster is pretty good idea - it gives you the option of sticking an upper stage on top and using it as a stand along rocket ala Zenit.

I've seen the aerodynamic centre also referred to as "centre of pressure" from which derives the term "CGCP mismatch". CG is centre of gravity, so essentially centre of mass in KSP while CP is centre of pressure, which is the aerodynamic centre you're talking about here. A CGCP mismatch is when CP is ahead of CG which as we can see in KSP causes flipping. This issue is one of the things that doomed HOTOL. You can see when Reaction Engine people went back to the precooled air breathing engine concept with Skylon they changed the HOTOL design and put the engines in the middle: This shifted the CG forward so its towards the middle of the craft slightly ahead of the CP. Or if you look at another area of real life design that faces the same problem as KSP SSTO, that of winged flyback booster: Notice something in common? They all have jet engines mounted in their nose. Flyback boosters need that jet engine because when it separate from the core stage it's going to be pretty far down range so needs powered flight to make it back to launch site. The easy way is to just put the jet engine in the back like the proposed production version of Buran shuttle. However like HOTOL and our KSP SSTOs flyback boosters suffer CGCP mismatch since they have that big hulking rocket engine on its tail, so by putting the jet engine in the nose (and so having to do all that complicated ducting) you shift CG forward to match with CP.

It would be a huge buff to rockets overall, because it's quite easy then to make a narrow center column of "load bearing" strong fuel tanks or even structural elements surrounded by tanks tweaked to minimum dry mass that are not load bearing.

The map screen makes cheating rather easy, since you can't see the craft the only thing to go by is the name, and name can be changed. In any event it's a simple case of designing with KER turned on then not actually attaching KER to the rocket. Would that deserve the KER tag or not?

It had the glide ratio of a flying brick.

Why does KER need a special tag? How are we suppose to show payload weight in orbit without KER?

I'm really proud to get this working, so I try to flaunt it every chance I get: Hurricane Trio Block III:

I remember those old days when struts, wings, fuel lines and all those small random parts had their own icon in the staging list despite lacking a staging action, and as a result your staging list was like 3 screens tall. I also remember the bad old days when stock docking didn't exist and all missions where either direct ascent missions (even interplanetary ones) or relied upon wonky docking mods that worked by extremely strong magnetic attraction between parts rather then physically join them. When you time warp the "docked" sections will slowly drift apart until you drop out of warp, were they would either instantly teleport back together again or the whole ship would just explode.

Worth pointing out that when you make a large number of a given engine, the price for each engine decreases due to mass production. Falcon 9 uses 10 Merlin engines per rocket which is a lot, yes the engine on the 2nd stage is modified into an upper stage engine but its still a Merlin at its core. Having a lot of engines also makes throttling down easier - you just shut some of those engines off instead of having to make your one big engine deep throttlable.

Water reclaiming systems are not 100% efficient, and they're pretty big and bulky to start with just to process the urine and water vapour in the air on ISS.

Oh you

Rokea = Ikea

@Streetwind, only the Mars return fuel tank needs to be zero boil off, the earth departure tank can be regular LH2 tank since it will be used straight away. This tank and its content is by far the biggest proportion of the vehicle and can be 20:1 tank. In fact once you use up the Earth Departure LH2 tank it can be jettisoned straight away, there's no need to carry this empty tank back to Earth or even brake it into Martian orbit: Generally the design for NTR ships have this "saddle strut" in the middle where the earth departure tank sits so it can be floated off out the side once empty.

It's pretty old now, but if you want replace "www./download/" with "www.This website cannot be used on these forums/download" It's a Squad thing. Supposedly people are seeing adult ads from mediafire, if you're offended by that sort of thing then you might want to avoid it. Personally I've never had any trouble with mediafire. I'm waiting for 1.1 to retry the modular base thing. These bases take a lot of parts so the performance improvement from 1.1 is needed to make the most out of them.

What's the dry weight of you spaceplane? Can you post a screenshot?

Wait, are you suggesting they should aim to not wear clothes at all in space?

Yes, NASA thought the same thing so they commissioned a company to build them a prototype space washing machine for the ISS: http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/spaceflight/life-in-orbit/dirty-clothes-nasa-plans-introduce-washing-machine-space/

And that's precisely the reason why I wouldn't want it in stock.

I don't know if that bar is actually all that high. Case in point the default staging order, We all know the default staging order the game generate is rubbish and you pretty much always need to manually sort the order out. But would it make KSP a better game if the game just didn't bother at all and gave you all your staging actions on a "scribble letter holder" when you build a rocket and ask you to put them in the correct order one by one? I feel a stock TWR and delta-V calculation in VAB/SPH and KER's default HUD (the thing KEP puts on either side of your altitude meter) in is probably what stock needs. The HUD can do without the biome and true altitude above terrain. But having something there, even if it's occasionally wrong is probably beneficial to the game than having nothing at all.

There are people who don't want KER? I understand that current KER is considered by some to be too powerful and a stock implementation could do with a smaller volume of information so as not to overwhelm newbies, but are there really anyone who's against informational readout in KSP in principle?

This, I can confirm docking of ships already launched work for expand station contracts and in fact this makes station expansion contracts extremely lucrative. Not long ago I got an "expand Mun station to 22 kerbal capacity" contract when it already had a capacity of 16 with a craft with 7 crew capacity already en route to the Mun when the contract popped up. Accepting this contract and docking the craft to the station on arrival netted me 150k easy money.