metaphor

Hmm, time to test that with tiny planets.

I would first plot a trajectory straight to Jool, then burn at that maneuver node/periapsis multiple times to raise your apoapsis up to just inside the Mun's orbit. That should make it only about a 1200 m/s burn left to get to Jool. You can do that at the next periapsis. Don't start too early or you will enter the atmosphere. But just keep burning after you pass periapsis, even if it takes a while, until your solar apoapsis is at Jool's orbit. Then you can do course corrections to get a Jool encounter after leaving Kerbin's SOI.

According to Wikipedia data (initial thrust / initial mass), the Saturn V had a TWR of 1.15, the Soyuz-FG has a TWR of 1.43, the Falcon 9 has a TWR of 1.18, the Atlas V 401 has a TWR of 1.25, and the Atlas V 551 has a TWR of 1.89.

Beside the gravitational perturbations that would come with having an object 80 times heavier than Jupiter in its orbit, it wouldn't really affect another planet significantly. From the point of view of Neptune, Jupiter and the Sun are approximately in the same place. But Jupiter as a star would be 5000 times dimmer, so Neptune would receive about 0.02% extra solar energy, enough to change the average temperature by less than 1/20th of a degree. In the case of Mars, the Sun would be about 3 times closer than Jupiter, so Jupiter would contribute less than 0.003% extra energy (light and heat). It wouldn't really make a difference in its habitability. The only bodies significantly affected would be the satellites (planets?) of Jupiter. If Jupiter was 80 times its current mass, it would be a red dwarf star with 0.02% of the Sun's luminosity. Assuming its satellites orbit at the same distance, Callisto would receive about the same amount of energy as the Sun gives to Earth. So what would probably happen is a lot of its surface ice would sublimate to form a water vapor atmosphere, with liquid water running underneath, possibly a global ocean. Its surface temperature would be about the same as on Earth. Ganymede would receive a little more energy than Venus does from the Sun. So it would also have a water vapor atmosphere, but its surface temperature would be significantly hotter. It would possibly have a boiling water ocean surface. Europa would receive a little more energy than Mercury does from the Sun. Coupled with its smaller size, its water vapor would probably be lost to space relatively quickly, and it would become a comet with a thick water vapor ring in its orbit. After a few years there would probably only remain the rocky core at about 90% of Europa's radius. Io would receive about 4 times as much energy as Mercury does from the Sun. It already doesn't have much water, but the high temperature would be enough to vaporize some of the rock. It would probably end up with a thick sulfur atmosphere and oceans of liquid rock (lava) at the surface.

Ha that's pretty funny. I made one earlier with a football field to scale:

In the case of the cars, the deceleration of an impact between two cars each going 40 mph towards each other is the same as each car hitting a brick wall at 40 mph. It's also the same as one car hitting a parked car at 80 mph, but it's not the same as one car hitting a brick wall at 80 mph. The difference is that you have twice the crumple zone if there's two cars involved, so twice the stopping distance (half the acceleration). If the situation is perfectly symmetric between the two cars, it's like each car is hitting an imaginary unbreakable wall which is along their axis of symmetry. So an impact between two spacecraft going towards each other at 5 km/s would feel the same as an impact between a stationary spacecraft and one going at 10 km/s, and also the same as each spacecraft hitting a brick wall at 5 km/s (or a wall of neutronium, I doubt a brick wall would survive those speeds).

Ha just saw this, I'm glad you like it. I'm not sure if it's been done before, I've never seen it posted though. It's not really that hard to do, it's relatively straightforward to plan, just requires a time investment and a computer that won't melt. You just start at the end and work backwards: think of the smallest spacecraft that can take Jeb from low Eve orbit back to Kerbin, then think of a spacecraft that can take that ship from Eve's surface to low Eve orbit, then think of a spacecraft that can take that ship to Eve's surface, etc. The highest delta-v ship I made without jets or ions was the Jool ascent rocket with 22 km/s of delta-v, could probably go up to about 26 km/s now with the 3.75m parts. I keep most of my screenshots and old versions of KSP around with every patch, and occasionally put them into my imgur albums.

If you want to go solely by delta-v, then the Mun is one of the hardest bodies to land on in the game, with only Tylo, Moho, Vall, and Eeloo being harder, since you can get pretty much anywhere else for the same delta-v you use to escape Kerbin's SOI (with gravity assists). But delta-v doesn't matter as much in KSP as it does in real life, since it's scaled down. There's many other things that make the Mun easier in other ways, like being very easy to get to without planning. Incidentally, it's also true in the real solar system that it takes less delta-v to get to the surface of Mars than to the surface of the Moon, even including ~1 km/s you would need to slow down from terminal velocity to land large spacecraft.

That makes sense since the delta-v's are about 3 times smaller than stock (sqrt(10) to be more precise).

If you wanted to scale it to stock, the day should be about 15 hours long (6 hours * sqrt(6.4)). That would keep all the orbital resonances the same as stock (e.g. for every Mun orbit, Kerbin would rotate the same number of times). This comes from Kepler's third law, when distance is multiplied by a factor of X, time is multiplied by a factor of X^3/2 to keep the orbits working. You would also end up with the same relative boost of equatorial rotation speed to orbital speed when launching a rocket. If you did that for every planet and moon, you would also end up with the same resonances as stock, like Duna and Ike facing each other all the time. Basically in order to scale up a system by X but keep the same surface gravity, you just need to multiply distances by X, masses by X^2 , and times by X^3/2 .

I mostly did it to see if I could. It would be much more efficient to do it with docking, something like , so you don't actually have to launch an Eve ascent vehicle as a payload of another Eve ascent vehicle.

If you can get it to within 2 km of the Sun's surface and under 100 m/s relative speed, I'll count it as landed. Not really expecting anyone to do it, just added it for completion. That's kinda what I did with the asteroid multiplier. It just seemed simpler since the mass is not as easy to figure out (it won't even show unless you have a craft attached, and then that's including the mass of the craft). If you can find a lower-mass asteroid of each type props to you.

I haven't seen asteroids used too much other than landing them on Kerbin or putting them into Kerbin orbit. In the future, asteroids will contain resources so it's going to be important to send them to refuel bases and stations around other bodies. So here's a challenge to see where else we can put asteroids... Basically, try to get an asteroid to flyby, hit, orbit, or land on other bodies in the Kerbal system. Here's the scoring table (approximately based on delta-v): [table=width: 600, align: left] [tr] [td]Celestial body[/td] [td]Flyby[/td] [td]Impact[/td] [td]Orbit[/td] [td]Landing[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Kerbin[/td] [td]0[/td] [td]0[/td] [td]0[/td] [td]0[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Mun[/td] [td]0[/td] [td]0[/td] [td]10[/td] [td]25[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Minmus[/td] [td]0[/td] [td]0[/td] [td]15[/td] [td]20[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Sun[/td] [td]0[/td] [td]100[/td] [td]0[/td] [td]1000[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Moho[/td] [td]25[/td] [td]30[/td] [td]80[/td] [td]150[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Eve[/td] [td]10[/td] [td]12[/td] [td]15[/td] [td]12[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Gilly[/td] [td]15[/td] [td]18[/td] [td]25[/td] [td]30[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Duna[/td] [td]10[/td] [td]12[/td] [td]15[/td] [td]20[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Ike[/td] [td]12[/td] [td]15[/td] [td]20[/td] [td]30[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Dres[/td] [td]20[/td] [td]25[/td] [td]50[/td] [td]80[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Jool[/td] [td]25[/td] [td]30[/td] [td]35[/td] [td]30[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Laythe[/td] [td]30[/td] [td]35[/td] [td]40[/td] [td]40[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Vall[/td] [td]30[/td] [td]35[/td] [td]50[/td] [td]100[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Tylo[/td] [td]30[/td] [td]35[/td] [td]50[/td] [td]250[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Bop[/td] [td]35[/td] [td]40[/td] [td]60[/td] [td]90[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Pol[/td] [td]35[/td] [td]40[/td] [td]60[/td] [td]80[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Eeloo[/td] [td]35[/td] [td]40[/td] [td]70[/td] [td]120[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Sun escape[/td] [td]50[/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [/tr] [/table] The size of the asteroid counts, you get a multiplier for each type: A-class x1 B-class x5 C-class x25 D-class x125 E-class x625 If you do more than one of those things, even with different asteroids, the scores add together. But only one score for each celestial body. Two scoring tables: one for stock parts (including info mods like Alarm Clock, KER, Mechjeb, etc), and one for modded parts. You can use one launch, multiple launches, orbital docking, etc, whatever you need. Stock 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Modded 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Enjoy!

That's just unmanned minimalist though, a crewed mission with life support even to one of the moons would be way harder.

You can use cubic octagonal struts to place as many engines as you want on the bottom. The cubic octagonals surface attach, so you can put them on in symmetry mode, and then put an engine under each one.

Here it is, Eve and back... and Eve and back again. No docking, just a single ship with 1250 parts, 7200 tons, 38 stages, and 37000 m/s of delta-v.

Here's something I did a while ago, unmanned orbiters and landers on each of Jupiter's moons, with lots of gravity assists.

The way science works now already doesn't appeal to completionists, since on most experiments you don't get 100% science the first time, so you have to redo it multiple times, and there's always that 0.2% left.

Are you time warping before or after SOI transitions? If you time warp at 10,000x or 100,000x during or right after SOI transitions, your trajectory will be very different. This happens right after SOI transitions too. If you go straight to 100,000x right after leaving Kerbin's SOI, that will change your trajectory significantly. Make sure to ramp it up slowly (going 10x, 100x, 1000x, 10,000x, 100,000x over a few seconds).

Looks great!

I think this also works for any radially symmetric shape, as long as you express the formulas and take the derivative with respect to a distance from the center that's perpendicular to a side. For example, for a square of side length a, let r = a/2. Then its perimeter is 8r while its area is 4r^2.

Actually they should if it's the same version of the mod. Anyway, I'm moving away from seeds for the next version, since it's not possible to have them with configurable settings.

With only 53 tons to LEO you can't get Orion near the Moon, no matter what (chemical) stages you use. The mass ratios just don't add up. The SLS is a pretty big improvement over the Shuttle IMO. Besides being able to launch much bigger payloads in one piece (so you could launch the entire ISS in 4-5 launches rather than 30+), it will be much cheaper than the Shuttle in terms of dollars per ton to orbit. It costs less to NASA per year (~$1.8 billion rather than ~$3 billion for the Shuttle). Plus it's actually on budget and ahead of schedule, partly due to its more efficient design compared to Shuttle and Ares. If the marginal cost estimates of $500 million per launch come true, it would even be competitive with the Falcon Heavy in terms of cost per mass in orbit. What we need now is for payloads to be developed. In my opinion Orion is more of a waste of money. It's been in development since 2004 or so, and the total amount spent on it until its first crewed launch in will be greater than that spent on the SLS. It was originally designed for lunar missions, so it has some carryover baggage. A capsule designed specifically for longer-term missions like Mars would be more efficient. Orion can't really do much by itself, just go in orbit around the Moon and come back. Plus it's behind schedule right now.

braininator, what's in that download you linked? New planets? I don't see a description of what it is.

Duna also has an atmosphere that's about 30 times thicker than Mars's. That ice canyon moon sounds awesome, especially if all the atmosphere collected in the canyons (with a very low scale height) so you could either land there with parachutes or land on the top propulsively.