Kerbart

So you think it's not a big deal if the pilots of your plane can't see anymore? How about hearing an announcement during a flight? “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your flight crew. I lost a bar bet yesterday so the copilot and I are going to finish the rest of the flight blindfolded. The landing may be a bit rougher than usual†will get a Steve Jobesque no biggie from you? I think that trying to blind the crew of an airplane (even a helicopter) is effectively an attempt to kill them. And yes, attempted murder should be punished harder than "regular" car theft.

I like your attitude. I want to get there and I want to get there NOW! I tend to think of the Kerbodyne parts as Saturn V equivalents. It's good to see them in a launch configuration where they are packed together like a bunch of straws. Please tell me that all this is just to get Jeb mounted on an external command seat to Ike.

Top off at Minmus, a light burn to get out of the minmus SOI into a large circular orbit around Kerbin, burn from there? Has the advantage that you don't need 1000m/s dV to escape Kerbin. Given the long period of the orbit transferring to other planets may be tricky though. But as Red Iron Crown mentioned, returning full tanks to Kerbin (with some aerobraking to save even more fuel) is probably the more practical approach.

There, I fixed it.

The only virtue, but I'll admit it's a magnificent one, is that it's already in orbit, which is half the way of getting there (insert mandatory Heinlein quote). Aside from that it's about the opposite of what you want: Build a large station in LKO without any regards for ever flying it. Asymmetric, long parts sticking out in every direction. And then add a few mainsails (or as Whackjob calls, them, "seperatrons") and try to fly the friggin' thing to Duna. 'Nuff said. The weight mass! So many parts you don't need, and they all need to be propelled to Mars! So many things missing! Extended life support (can't really rely on those regular Progress deliveries). Shielding against radiation. Long range radio systems. Shuttles And last but not least. You've owned a car for twenty years. You've come to that point where the recurring costs of repairs to keep it running starts to become higher than the cost of leasing a brand new car. And just when the garage tells you the timing belt needs to be replaced, what's your reaction? ROAD TRIP! LET'S RIDE IT COAST TO COAST BABY! If I were a professional astronaut I'd politely decline to step into that death trap to mars. But there's always the Mars One people of course...

Not really. You had me at "mainsail seperatron"

All I know is that there is a restaurant at the end of the universe.

With a diameter of 1,200 km, the circumference of Kerbin is 3,781 km and the rotation period is 6hr. That means the surface velocity at the equator (which is pretty much where KSC is at) is around 175 m/s. Normally you get that for free, but now you have to overcome that instead; so I'd say the penalty is 350 m/s.

Well if we're splitting hairs over semantics let me know you intend to drive from New York to Paris, if it's on the ground, after all. That boeing did not break the sound barrier; "breaking the sound barrier" suggests moving beyond mach 1 indicated air speed (and "indicated" is important as, by virtue of the way it's measured, it "magically" takes things like air pressure into account). What that boeing did was moving at a ground speed that exceeded the speed of sound at sea level. Which is pretty impressive, and sometimes convenient*, but in the end just means "moving faster than a fairly arbritary speed." Breaking the sound barrier on the other hand is a physical barrier to overcome that can destroy the aircraft if it's not constructed for it. * Then again, most of my translatlantic EB flights where we had a good tailwind and arrived 2 hours early ended up with 2 hours in a waiting pattern, "there are no landing slots available except our original one"

Actually, only one crashed. Now that did push the Concorde from the top of the safety list (zero fatal incidents) to pretty much the bottom (because these lists are "per passenger km" and the Concorde simply didn't transport that many people in its lifetime) of the list. The incident was caused by a piece of metal left by a previous plane on the runway (I think the lawsuit over that is still going on) piercing a fuel tank as it was kicked up by the landing gear. What really shut the program down was that this was a pretty good excuse to shut the program down; the reasons had more to do with economics than anything else. As Kryten pointed out, when you take into account all the security checks (which might have been more extended with a high-profile plane like the Concorde) you lose a lot of the shorter travel time. Another way of cutting your transatlantic travel time down is hiring a business jet (bypassing most of the time-consuming BS at an airport). You'll get a similar door-to-door time, for probably a comparable price, with a much better experience. I work in the transport industry. Customers will always tell you that shipping speed is of the utmost importance to them. When it's time to pull the wallet, they'll pick the slowest (cheapest) option anyway, with the exception of a very, very select few.

We know it can be done, so what I really expect is a VAB-sized boulder landed right next to the launch site in Cape Canaveral

Forward movement is created "against" the air (propellors, jets, etc) not by the wheels. Wheels don't count in the sense that what happens underneath the wheels is irrelevant.

And accruals. No financial reporting would be complete without extensive accrual analysis. Which, given the way contracts work, is essential.

The bigger question is how they make THREE three hour movies out a book of 200 pages.

There's a Gary Larson (The Far Side) cartoon* where a male mosquito wearing a fedora, trenchcoat and briefcase enters his 50s style home with his wife cooking on the stove. “Work SUCKED today†Larson mentions that everyone seemed fine with the fact that apparently mosquitoes talk English, wear 50s outfits, have a home, cook dinner on a stove, etc. BUT OH THE HORROR OF GETTING THE FACT WRONG THAT IT'S THE FEMALE ONES THAT SUCK THE BLOOD OUT OF YOU. Now, why am I reminded of that? * which I can't post as it's copyrighted and Gary Larson is not Scott Adams

While manned before unmanned is something I can see that is defendable (though questionable), I really, really, draw the line at “we can go to the moon. We just haven't invented ladders yet.â€Â

If the stock functionality is truly mediocre, the mod will continue to be popular. If the stock functionality is equal or superior, the mod's popularity will wither. Assuming the willingness of the mod developer to continue working on the project is purely based on the mod's popularity there would not be any concern. Either the mod is no longer needed or it will continue to exist as it feeds a need not covered by stock.

What I hope to see is that a rocket gets shredded to pieces if, at 10km and Mach 1, you try to go to an instant 45° angle (at which point it spontaneously will become 90° I guess)

Well, yes, not "straight" as in "to the moon in a straight line", but straight as in "without bothering to set up a Kerbin orbit". Basically launch as usual, but instead of circularizing your orbit (raising the periapsis) raising the apoapsis for a Mun intercept instead.

I turn early anyway. While Unity takes care of parts outside the Real Physics bubble, it still doesn't feel right to be ditching boosters and stages while straight over the KSC.

Would a trajectory that inserts you straight from launch into the Mun SOI bring some savings? I'd imagine that not having to raise your Kerbin periapsis from -600km to +75km would save you some 500m/s dV.

Thank you very much! I hope you can endure my questions!

I'll try. What throws me off is that altitude, etc do work. One would think those would be zero too then? EDIT: It was a good suggestion, but alas. Velocity is zero, independent of the reference frame used. Both surface_reference_frame and orbital_reference_frame (well, more specifically vessel.flight(vessel.surface_reference_frame).velocity -- for the nitpickers) return (0.0, 0.0, 0.0) when the vessel is clearly moving.

Ugh. The number of missions I had to cancel over that!

flight().velocity (and the related speed values) seems to be stuck to (0.0, 0.0, 0.0)