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Hey all, so I've been trying to build a mars tranfer vehicle somewhat in the vein of Hermes (from The Martian). For me, it's an 80 ton, crewed, ion propelled spacecraft. Unfortunately, when I got it assembled and fueled in orbit, I discovered that my mod install had reduced the thrust of the engines from 2 kN to 0.25 N which is 8000 times less thrust, and KER told me a 10 m/s burn would take 4 hours and change (8 engines). I am obviously going to have to rethink my plan, but that's actually not my main point of interest. \ All this got me wondering, how would a real world ion rocket leave earth orbit for an interplanetary transfer? I am very experienced with using multiple perigee kicks to make low thrust escapes, but the thrust of real life ions is SO low that this isn't possible. Even if I halved the mass of my rocket to 40t and tripled the number of engines, it'd still be more than half an hour for 10 m/s. At that rate, it'd take more than 300 kicks to reach escape velocity. I know that all real world ion spacecraft to date have been lauched into heliocentric orbits using chemical rockets, so I'm not sure it's actually possible to use such a low thrust system for earth escape. There are however, several hypothetical vehicles, both fictional and real concept designs, that do appear to exclusively use ion propulsion once in orbit. Does anyone know what kind of trajectory would be used? The only one I can think of is a very long spiral up to very high orbit, and from there on to deep space. However, I imagine this would eat up an absurd amount of dV, so it doesn't seem like a good option for anything except maybe a solar sail vehicle. Ion drives in stock are time consuming, but you can basically treat them the same way you would small chemical rocket engines like the LV-1. With realistic ion drives though, I don't have the first clue how to use them. Thoughts? Ideas?

I have been making a new rocket, and I was surprised to find only one launch escape system (I'm inexperienced). I am wondering if squad can add more launch escape systems in stock?

Whatever the reasons were to change the mapping of the 'Escape' key in time warp mode to '/' (forward slash) - please change it back to the way it was in all the previous versions. Please!

Hello Forum Today i have finished the work on a very challenging mission to Eve and back with my blog post which can be found here: https://kerbal-eve-one.blogspot.de/2016/06/mission-eve-one.html Hope you enjoy and extend this mission with me. Video: Kerbal - Mission Eve ONE - Re ascend to orbit Have fun

I'm aware that this has been suggested a number of times before. However, I have never observed much follow up to the topic. I think it would be a very welcome feature to be able to toggle parachutes out of staging entirely, like you can with decouplers (as of a few patches ago, anyways). The first and perhaps most significant advantage to this is that it would allow the user a lot more freedom in designing emergency systems for their rocket. At the moment, I find it very frustrating that although the game includes both an emergency escape tower as well as a dedicated "abort" action group assignment, it's kind of inconvenient and annoying to actually utilize them. The primary reason for this is that they just add additional components to wrangle in staging. The interface could be exactly the same as the staging toggle for decouplers. Just right click the parachute, then click the option to disable it in staging. Another use of such a feature would be more precise control of parachutes for specific situations. Slowing a landing space-plane, for example. You could have parachutes be in their own separate stage, but then you have to worry constantly about accidentally triggering them at a bad time. With them toggled out of staging entirely, you can decide exactly if and when the parachutes are deployed. On a personal note, my neigh-pathological fear of messing up chute staging is why I've never tried making a space-plane styled after the space shuttle. A secondary suggestion, for the same reason, is to make it possible to toggle engines out of staging as well.