Cirocco

Dpends. What is your launch profile exactly? From experience and forum-browsing, I think that the best way is to go steep (45 to even 60° if your engines can handle it) up to about 15-20km, then level out and slowly climb to 25-27. Once you pass 27 km (roughly) you level out almost completely and squeeze whatever delta-V you can out of your turbojets. At flameout (around 30-32 km) you switch to rockets and pitch up hard to 45-60° in order to boost yourself out of atmo as quickly as possible. after that just coast to apoaps (giving small boosts to compensate for drag when neccesary) and circularize as usual.

Nah, my old design don't get placed next to the runway, they smash into a celestial body of choice at several km/s.

I'm sorry, were you trying to land on the Mun or smash it into the deepest region of the netherhells?

Well there's this thing I slapped together. Still needs a lot of work, both functionally and aesthetically, but this is what the main silhouette will look like:

Fired up KSP again for the second day of my return to the game. And then I slapped this together: a rough version of what will become my new interplanetary mothership. This version has two mainsails where it normally would have 6 nukes (this was a version to test if I could launch this thing in one go, not meant for interplanetary travel). It also has 2 empty MkIII cargo bays on the outer cores, those would have landers and/or satellites in the final version. Can carry a total of 58 kerbals with a complete load if my late-night math is correct. But I like to have my guys stretch their legs so probably will never have more than about 20-30 on board at any one time. so without further ado: here's a couple of quick snapshots taken during testing.

yup, blocking the exhaust means damaged structure and no thrust. As RainDreamer pointed out, one solution is to make the pulling vessel either long enough (with engines near the front and grabber on the back) so that the effect is nullified, or wide enough so that your engines fire next to the asteroid. Of course that last solution is kinda hard with E-class asteroids. A third, and in my opinion quite elegant solution is to tilt your engines outwards. That way they fire next to the asteroid without the need for making a super-wide ship. Note that this does put extra stress on your structure and reduces the efficiency of your engines because part of the thrust goes to forces squeezing the ship together. The loss is related to the angle: the wider the angle, the more loss. For reference: you'll only have 50% efficiency if your engines are angled 45° outwards.

Oh don't get me wrong, I totally agree that, if your craft is well designed, you don't need much thrust at all to make that final boost to orbit. But that requires you to have something that can climb to about 30km and something near 3 km/s (or more) horizontal velocity without an asymmetric flameout. And that in turn requires knowledge of airflow and in what order to place your engines and intakes. I personally know how to do this, my point is that people new to building spaceplanes often don't know that and will have their turbojet/LOX combo craft do an asymmetric flameout at about 23km and 2.2-2.3 km/s, forcing them to go to rocket stage before that happens. At that point you *do* need a lot of thrust to get your plane up into orbit. Igniting from that point, your RAPIER's suddenly *seem* to be a lot more efficient because you can overcome the gravity losses. That was what I was trying to explain: why new players often think that RAPIER engines are super-efficient, ever though they're actually not, they're more user-friendly and forgiving. But again, I wholeheartedly agree that if you avoid an asymmletric flameout, turbojets are vastly superior to RAPIERs. Now, if memory serves me correctly, SQUAD will fix the whole airflow leading to asymmetric flameout thing in 1.0. If that is indeed the case and asymetric flameout will no longer be a thing, then I do agree that Turbojets could do with a serious nerf. Now in response to the post just above mine: My advice is all stock. FAR has nerfed the turbojet considerably so I don't know how well it performs under that mod.

Yesterday I booted up KSP again for the first time in a lng while and re-discovered the joy of launching big-ass and cool-looking vessels. The vessel in question still needs wome aesthetic and functional adjustments, but it was nice seeing that the rough build which I had in my head worked as intended. After that I still had about 15 or 20 minutes to kill and I figured "you what's cool? the Vega rocket. 3 solid fuel stages and 1 upper LOX stage. Let's do that in KSP and watch it explode! So I slapped the three sizes of SRB's we currently have available above one another, added a very simple upper LOX stage and a few reaction wheels and fired away. Turns out this is actually a really effective and cheap way to get stuff to orbit

Damn I wish this happened to me. I tend to build highly specialised stuff which is only good at the one specific task I built it for. Guess I should either try to build big and general purpose or lower my mission parameters

I swear those shots inside the LOX tank looked so much like a stargate it was scary

the left-to-right wobble you're refering to comes from "wheelbarrowing". It happens when you have a heavy aircraft and your wheelbase on your rear wheels is too narrow, especially if you have any sort of significant weight past the wheelbase. It means that small sideways pushes on your plane cause one wheel to support more weight than the others, which means more friction, which at take-off speeds means an unstable plane and lots of pretty explosions. for illustration, imagine a round mass which stands on 3 toothpicks which form a very narrow traingle. Give it a sideways push. The mass will easily tilt sideways, then rock from side to side a bit before coming back to a standstill. Now try it with the same mass, but your toothpicks form a wide traingle. The sideways push will be far more likely to shunt the whole construction sideways rather than tilting it. Same thing happens to heavy airplanes: narrow wheelbase --> very unstable, will tilt side to side at the slightest provocation. Wide wheelbase: stable, will more likely be shunted side to side, but due to large mass the effect will be negligable. This effect, combined with the fact that the wheels in KSP can handle super-heavy loads without buckling, it's better to use a wide wheelbase for the rear wheels and a single wheel on the nose. Moral of the story: design your planes to have a wide wheelbase. Design possibilities to do this include (but are most certainly not limited to): attaching more tanks sideways on the back of the plane to have more attachment surface or attaching wheels directly to the wings. Just make sure you put some structural element in between the wings and the wheels to make sure they reach down low enough to support the plane.

I have to admit that I've been burned out on KSP for a few months now. I hardly ever actually fire up the game anymore, I might get back into it once 1.0 hits (new aerodynamics! proper spaceplanes! resource mining for long-range deep-space missions! female kerbals! so good!). But the one thing I never stopped doing is dreaming up possible new designs for rockets/spacebases/spaceplanes/etc. So I guess for me the biggest enjoyment from KSP comes from a part that is not, in fact, part of the program namely the creative bit: dreaming up designs.

yup, did some research, near-IR actually is quite far away from the heat radiation spectrum and the heat of a surface wouldn't change much about its near IR emissions, my bad. That being said I got not a singular bloody clue what the two white spots would be. Might be what Lajos suggested, but the two dots seem to be kinda big for that? Again though, I'm a total n00b when it comes to astronomy, I'm just a passionate amateur Can't wait until Dawn enters orbit and we get some closer and more high-resolution images.

I... just... that visualisation... I have no words...

Welcome to the forums fellow kerbonaut! Hope the Eeloo mission goes well it's actually quite doable if you refuel in orbit. And of course not landing the entire SSTO also helps. A few designs that come to mind: MkII or MkIII spaceplane with LVN atomic engines and a cargo bay containing a one or two-man lander: fly it to orbit on a combination of airbreathers and rocket engines (possible the nuke engines if you can manage it), refuel and use the nukes to go interplanetary. Go apollo-style with the lander and you shouldn't have too much problems rocket-style SSTO that uses a couple big powerful engines to push a lander to orbit (the SLS-type engines come to mind), refuel in orbit, use nukes to get to eeloo and again do an apollo-style landing and return to mothership in orbit. Never say a thing is impossible! It just hasn't been figured out yet

I use seperatrons, like the vast majority of people. Normally I place them just above the CoM of the full booster so that they don't flip too hard, but I do like the idea of mounting them on the main stack rather than on the booster. That would ensure that you only push long enough to get the boosters clear and avoid possible over-flipping and it also gets rid of the damage the seperatron exhaust causes to the main stack. Good idea that.

weeeeellll, you'd have to degine what exactly you mean by "meaning" or "purpose". In my opinion, life was never created or evolved with a singular goal in mind, so going off of that assumption you could say "it has no meaning/purpose". However, life did spring from self-replicating molecules (at least according to most current theories) so from that standpoint, you could argue that the "purpose" is to replicate/procreate. Actual meaning I don't think can be attributed to life, unless you believe life was created or evolved for a singular purpose, which seems highly unlikely to me, especially with the way evolution works. Evolution isn't targeted, it just rolls with whatever works best at the time. That's also the reason why evolution sometimes comes up with ridiculously intricate and complex solutions to problems which no logical thinking mind would ever come up with (seriously, have you seen the mechanics involved in human hand and finger motions?) but hey, they work. Personally, I just don't think about it too much. Purpose or not, my life has whatever purpose or meaning I give it. And I have decided that that purpose is to try and be as awesome as possible And of course there's always 42

Silicate lava is dark when oozing across the earth surface and viewed in the visible spectrum, but on an infrared or near-infrared picture (and I believe that those pictures are near-IR?) it would be extremely bright due to the intense heat. Mind you I absolutely agree that magma volcanoes on Ceres are pretty much impossible due to the lack of any real heat source. My money is also on ice, possible cryovolcanoes, but I'm actually secretly hoping that it's something else entirely that no-one even thought of and would be totally surprising. Probably not gonna happen, but one can hope this post, as all my other posts comes with the caveat that I'm no astronomer so I could be totally wrong

ok my two cents: Is the cold in space actually a problem for humans? Not really. Either you're in a full spacesuit which insulates you so much that heat is more likely a problem, or you're subjected to the vacuum of space, in which case the cold will the very least of your problems. A vacuum is actually a very good insulator, other stuff would kill you long before the cold does. Would it be possible to survive space in just face protection? yes, for a very short period of time, under a couple of specific conditions (not too close to a star or subjected to another source of deadly radiation, stuff like that) and the face protection probably wouldn't do much for you. As stated several times before, if air finds itself into your lungs with any significant pressure while the outside of your body is subject to vacuum, it would almost certainly cause lung damage due to the pressure difference. You would be much better off making sure you exhaled all air prior to getting blown out the airlock. Some back-of-the-envelope maths for reference: atmospheric pressure is about 100 kilopscal at sea level (give or take a couple hundred pascal). That's 100 000 Newton per square meter. Given that the force that a single kilogram (about 2 pounds for you empirial folk) exerts on earth is about 10 newtons and assuming that your chest is about 1 meter squared, if you're breathing atmospheric pressure air through that facemask of yours, you're looking at a force equivalent of 10 000 kg (about 20 000 pounds) pushing outwards from your lungs. There's a reason NASA only inflates their pressure suits to about 30% atmosphere (they use near-pure oxygen to fill them I think. Could be wrong about that) And if so, how long? What would kill you? Most articles I've read on the subject agree that under "ideal" conditions, humans would be able to survive about 30 seconds of outer space exposure without permanent damage. They would probably be the most unpleasant 30 seconds you've ever experienced in your life and "without permanent damage" is assuming you haven't been bombarded with cancer-inducing high-energy particles and radiation and haven't encountered any insta-killing conditions. As for what would kill you? Oxygen depravation, as has been stated before in this thread.

cryovolcanoes, not "regular" magma volcanoes. From what I read, Chris Russel (one of the Dawn mission scientists) said that "normal" magma volcanoes are pretty much out of the question because if that were the case, the light would be different (brighter). Ice volcanoes or cryovolcanoes are quite plausible though. Other theories incluse ice patches or salt patches

Everything except gravity assist, really. I've done a gravity assis or two, but only if chance decrees that a certain moon is in a proper position during a transfer, in which case I adjust the transfer burn to save some delta-V. I haven't done any actual planned gravity assists though, so I didn't check it in the poll. Everything else is actually relatively easy to learn once you've mastered the basics of KSP. EDIT: actually, now that I think of it I have done a few free-return mun missions. That's technically a planned gravity assist I guess?

Turbojet/rocket combo is more efficient. Slashy pretty much summarized it for you, but there's two things I'd like to add: 1) the reason why you suddenly had more success with RAPIERS is probably due to the fact that even though they are slightly less efficient than the combo, they are a lot more user friendly. You can be a lot more efficient with the combo, but you need to design and use it properly,using all the tips and tricks to squeeze every single bit of thrust out of those turbojets. If you don't do it right, you'll end up losing more efficiency than you would potentially gain due to aerodynamic losses, gravity losses, etc. RAPIERs are simple and user friendly. They might not be as efficient, but you probably won't end up losing a metric ton of delta-v due to inefficient flight profiles or sub-optimal design. 2) one other reason is the thrust: airbreathers don't produce that much thrust in comparison to rocket engines of similar size. So you'll need a LOT of them on heavy planes and often pack 2 to 3 times as much airbreathing engines than rocket engines. That means you need a LOT of 1,25m hardpoints to put all those engines, but only a couple of rocket engines. If you replace all of those engines with RAPIERs, suddenly you've got double or even triple the thrust in your rocket phase, but with slightly more weight and less engine efficiency. That means you'll suddenly have a lot less gravity losses than you might have had with the turbojet/rocket combo, but you don't want to be using that craft for long burns. So in short: the Turbojet/rocket engine combo is potentially much more efficient, but less user friendly and forgiving: if you don't design and fly it correctly, you're likely to accrue more losses than gains. RAPIERs are easy to use, especially to get to LKO. Good example is interplanetary travel: if you can get a spaceplane in orbit with turbojets and one or two LVN nuclear engines, you can get it to another planet easy-peasy. But doing that requires some pretty advanced design and flying. Trying to go interplanetary with a spaceplane that uses only RAPIERS is incredibly inefficient in comparison, but building and flying a plane that can get to orbit with RAPIERs is lot easier.

weeeellll, it kinda depends on how you define the edge of the solar system. Like you said, researches estimate that the closest it came was 0.8 lightyears. That's not even near the inner oort cloud (where it could perturb asteroid/comet orbits and catapult them into the inner solar system). Maybe this sort of event could help explain some weird orbits, but I doubt this one in particular did much. The dwarf star wouldn't even have been visible to the naked eye in the night sky at closest approach. of course I'm no astronomer so I could be talking total bullcrap right now

I try to avoid putting debris in orbit around celestial bodies, with the exception of the sun. Ships/rockets are usually designed to stage in such a fasion that the expended stage is left to either crash/burn up on a celestial body, or left in a graveyard orbit around the sun, since the odds of debris in such an orbit hitting anything are astronomically low. I don't really de-orbit debris actively, too much of a hassle. Debris that does happen to achieve a stable orbit due to unforeseen circumstances or simple design decision is left up there. I'll do cleanup when things start whizzing past my ships/stations at insane speeds and too-close-for-comfort distances.

This is true! I was indeed thinking of actual exhaust velocity, which is not the same as the specific impulse (also called effective exhaust velocity). Rookie mistake, thanks for the clarification