Rastaman

You also don't need a refueling station in orbit. You can simply fly the fuel shuttle up to an orbiting "customer" and dock with it. That way you don't need to dock the customer to a service station first. This also saves fuel and/or monopropellant. Having buffer tankage in orbit has some advantages though. Then there is the issue of the latitude of the drilling rig and refinery. On bodies with a long day, you might have to wait for a long time until you can launch the fuel shuttle without an inefficient plane change maneuver. Doing the plane change in a hight orbit is not so great either since you have to decelerate the cargo back down to the refueling orbit. Having the customer craft in a high orbit is better but it takes a long time to reach it . It could be a good idea to haul the ore/fuel on the ground as close to the equator as possible to launch it there.

Aha, interesting. So the lab has the same value with fresh untransmitted data as with used already transmitted data.

So how to build good stock radiators? Given the detail Squad put into heat flow, it should be a conductive, light material with high surface area. I'd say while solar panels are very good radiators, it seems to be that wings are really better area wise. You just can't fold them like solar panels.

If you use the normal LF/OX tanks I mean. So you need more tank volume, and more tank structural mass. It's pretty cool actually, since LH2 density is only a 16th of that of LOX in real life (rho_LH2 = 71 kg/m^3 ; rho_LOX = 1141 kg/m^3, Source: Wikipedia). So nuke tankage should be much larger, but not more massive. The mass ratio in normal fuel tanks should be 1/8, not 0.9/1.1.

Since you don't burn Oxidizer in the nuke anymore, you need more tank volume for the same deltaV now!

Reentry heat and aerodynamics? Great. Ker-dames? Necessary. Resources? Finally. Now the most important thing for me on Monday is to go to the map and see that Eeloo is not there anymore. Because it is in orbit around an as yet undiscovered planet where it belongs. And maybe there's even more beyond. With resources, an outer system is all the more doable now. I don't care how long it takes to get there. Who's bloody with me?

I suspect they're already there. Nobody has found them because the building or tech can't be unlocked yet.

He who has the largest rocket controls space. And he who controls space, the world. Cost is irrelevant considering what's at stake: Everything. It could be ten or a hundred times as expensive, they'd still have to do it (and they did in the 60s). There are more important things in the world than economics and efficiency, and that is absolute capability. One look at the US defense budget will confirm this. The economy of space launch systems is a fake debate. It doesn't matter for the trillion dollar military. The powers that be in China know and intend to build their very own SLS, the Long March 9. Still, it is likely the Americans will get there first. It's called "Full Spectrum Dominance". And without control of space you don't dominate anything. Independent development of significant space hardware and infrastructure by private companies is science fantasy. Risks and costs are always socialized. If we waited for private enterprise to create anything substantial infrastructure wise (aka the important achievements of civilization), we'd still be living on trees.

I'm with both, but use mostly Mechjeb because I use the autopilot features. It makes my maneuvers more reproducible, which incidentally is what engineering is all about. One of my projects is to find out how to create a reproducible minimum fuel cost automatic ascent from Kerbin with FAR and with as little user input as possible. With FAR, manual ascent is easier than the auto guidance. You heard it here first: NOT using MJ is easy mode. Without it, you can slap any old rocket together, with MJ you need to take care of exact TWR, burn times to get a good ascent path.

Docking is easy if you are aware of these things: 1. How to put your RCS in the correct place (anticipate your approximate center of mass in this phase of your flight). 2. The Chase Camera accessed by pressing the button "v" a couple of times. 3. For spatial awareness during the docking process, you rotate your viewpoint with the mouse. 4. There is a docking mode button in the lower left of the screen. Once you're in it you can switch between linear and rotational modes by pressing the spacebar. 5. ASAS is very helpful to keep direction and keep you from rotating. 6. Take it slow. 7. There are also many mods that help with most of these points either by giving you information or by doing the docking automatically for you. When people start out they are not yet aware of these and it becomes difficult for them.

The question is, how much dv does the Oberth effect provide? In stock KSP it seems largely insignificant. You maybe have 100 m/s difference between an 80 km orbit around Kerbin and a 1000 km orbit, a difference you rarely even notice. It is massively outclassed by aerobraking for instance, which you can use in most planetary systems.

The classification only holds in our solar system, it is likely that elsewhere you still have multiple say Neptune sized bodies in similar orbit and it might take thousands or millions of years to clear the orbit. Are those gas giants dwarf planets? Hardly.

It means the new engines are not overpowered at all. There are right there with the others. With the same payload, you get at most 70% more dv than the mainsail out of it. The mainsail gets 60% more than the skipper. Costs aside, there might well be objects in the solar system which are much further out than Eeloo or Jool. Objects you need more dv to get to and explore. For this you need a bigger rocket, more mass into orbit with linear rockets.

I did a similar thing with FAR and procedural parts. Launch TWR was 1.1 for each. Payload was 4.2 tons each. I used the same ascent profile as the OP, a pitch of 80 at 2 km, pitch of 45 at 6 km, upon an apoapsis of 40 km a pitch of zero until an apoapsis of about 120 km, then circularization at apoapsis. Pitch and circularization was done by mechjeb. Always single state to orbit. Expended dv was always about 3700 m/s. Engine dV Remaining Skipper 1120 Mainsail 1800 KS-25x4 2850 KR-1x2 2670 KR-2L 3050 It looks like if the new engines are overpowered, the Mainsail always was overpowered compared to the Skipper, yet nobody noticed.

I also use it for the control of burns. I want inefficiencies to be caused by my bad planning, mission and rocket design, not by clicking the wrong button. I also fine tune maneuvers with the node editor. Sometimes I only control the throttle, sometimes I let MJ have the full control. Standard maneuvers like circularization or plane changes I let MJ plan and execute. Transfers and maneuvers performed at non standard points or with elliptic outcomes I plan myself. Because MJ can't handle Ferram's atmosphere, I always do ascents myself, and I have found I standardize my staging and button presses. Stage 1 has 1500 m/s with a TWR of 1.05, stage 2 has 2000 m/s with a TWR of 1.3-1.5. At 45° bank angle I aim for around 500-550 m/s surface speed at an altitude of about 25 km. I found this gives me the cleanest ascents. If MJ could do it, I would let it ascent for me though. Landings I generally do myself, although there is something terrifying and fascinating about switching to a Kerbal standing in the landing zone and watch from the outside as MJ lands a craft automatically.