Cirocco

Putting down rovers would be easier that way, but why bother landing? Drop that rover mid-flight like it's hot!

No pre-determined landing spot. Fuel will probably be pretty tight so I'll have to improvise a little once I'm in orbit, I don't think I'll have the luxury of spending fuel to manouver to a pre-determined landing spot Anything below 4000m and not *too* hilly should be fine. I hadn't thought of vernors yet to slow vertical speed, but I am (or perhaps more accurately, Bill, Bob and Jeb are) painfully aware of the problem of coming in fast I have a way of dealing with it, but I'll keep that a surprise for when I post pictures

The whole shebang. No landers, no rovers. One plane goes up, one plane does the entire mission, one plane comes back. That's the hard part: lugging all that dead weight around all the time. Oh and did I mention it's a 3-seater that uses the Mk III parts? I really think those don't get enough love. HTOL. Using parachutes is hard unless you want to land her on the nozzles (which is what I did last time, and it just feels wrong for a spaceplane to do that) and vertical landing is also very hard because it is really hard to determine where exactly the CoM will be when I land: the CoM shifts during flight due to fuel drainage and I have no way of telling exactly how much fuel I'll have left upon arrival. Plus, I figure it's a plane, so we land her and take off like a damn plane. It's quite challenging in an atmosphere as thin as Duna's, but fun!

One engine i'd prefer to avoid since I'd like to use the nuclear stage to take off from Duna again and I don't think a single LVN would have the thrust. And I'd prefer to avoid having to burn any engine other than the LVN's because of Isp. The previous incarnation used 3 of them, but for design puposes I chose to go with an even amount this time. I'll have to check if 2 engines can provide enough thrust to lift off from Duna because 9 tons is an awful lot like you said. I might go back to the original 3 engine design, but that really makes them stick out the back, making tailstrikes a real danger, especially on uneven terrain like Duna.

Now THAT is something I did not know. Very interesting indeed. It did always bug me that I needed those 4 RAPIERs just to do a single burn about 20-30 seconds long and then never use their rocket mode ever again (everything else is done on the nuclear stage). I wonder if I can adjust the design on the Dauntless to get to 32 km on airbreathers. If I could rely completely on the nuclear stage for all liquid fuel burns, I could drastically cut on the liquid fuel amount, making the craft far lighter. I could try full-on turbojet with additional nacelles for added air and fuel... To the design mobile! (also known as my ledger and ballpoint pen)

Oh I'm perfectly fine with my craft refueling as well (though I really need to build a refueling station, up to now I just parked it into orbit, sent up a tanker and did a rendez-vous) doing runway-duna surface-runway without refuel in a spaceplane is just a challenge I set myself to prove to myself that it can be done. I basically wanted to land a spaceplane without refuel on another celestial body. Laythe and Duna are the obvious candidates, and I figured that a) Duna is closer, has a thinner atmosphere and less gravity and as such needs less delta-V and the no-oxygen thin atmosphere would provide its own unique challenges (and boy does it ever. Landing a plane in a conventional manner in a low-gravity, low-atmo environment with irregular terrain is a pain in the arse.) I plan to re-design the Dauntless at some point to do runway-Laythe surface- runway. Not sure if I'll be able to do it, what with laythe being a LOT farther out than Duna, thicker atmosphere and higher gravity, but then of course I can use the turbojets while I'm there. Also I've never been to the Jool system yet so I imagine I'll have several issues pop up that I don't know about yet

That's the one. I'll accept when I get home tonight

Mine is Cirocco if I'm not mistaken. I'll have to look at it when I get home.

I already read it. It's a good guide, but I already use all of said techniques. I can try, but my aim isn't Minmus, it's Duna surface and back in a single stage without ever refueling. And I don't think the Isp of aerospikes or LV-909's will cut it when going interplanetary. I'll have a look at those, see what I can learn I set myself some pretty stringent conditions when building spaceplanes though EDIT: had a look at the pictures of the goblin and the benchmark. I'll load a few designs up into the SPH when I get home (at work now) to take it apart and look at design, but from what I can tell most seem to be a lot smaller and lighter than the interplanetary ones I use. (The Dauntless comes in at an 83 ton spaceplane when fully fueled...)

Upgraded the old runway-duna surface-runway SSTO spaceplane "KSS Intrepid" into the "KSS Dauntless". While the Intrepid was successful in it's mission to get to Duna and back, on Duna it had to use parachutes and land on its nozzles before tipping over into a "proper" spaceplane position. This felt really wrong for a plane, so with the updates to engine nacelles and RAPIERs (both of which I used in the Intrepid's design) I went back and re-designed it. Tests (read: hyperedit) show that the Dauntless is more efficient (it gets into orbit with about 300 additional fuel) and can do a regular Duna landing as long as the terrain is low enough (below 4000 or so meters, atmo is too thin for decent lift othwerise) and not too irregular. In order to improve landing safety on Duna, I actually had to add something I never thought I'd have to do in KSP. I flew the Dauntless and her crew of three up in orbit, but it was too late at night yesterday to do the full mission. Will probably finish it today and post up the mission report tonight (if I remember to do so ). Then I can also show the weird feature I had to implement.

I swear I must be doing something wrong in my flight profiles for SSTO's because I just can't believe it when people go "oh you can go up to 35 000m easy with pure turbojet", and I like to think I've become pretty good at spaceplanes. My latest and most efficient heavy-duty SSTO (interplanetary spaceplane with 4 turbojets, 4 rapiers and 4 nuclear engines) starts liquid fuel engines around 1400-ish m/s and 27 000 m up. And yes, I throttle down, cut excess turbojets, use the ramjet effect, all that stuff. Mind you, I use stock aero and I flat out refuse to intake spam to the point that I almost never mount any radial intakes on planes ever. A lot of people will call me crazy for going stock aero, but tried FAR and I kinda like the fact that it's harder to get in orbit in stock. Back on topic: I find rapiers to be good for two things: 1) very light SSTO spaceplanes with a single stack. Looks nice, lots of power, easy design, fairly efficient. 2) very heavy SSTO spaceplanes where you simply do not have enough attachment points to mount the required combination of aerospikes and turbojets. Replacing a few turbojets with RAPIERs on those craft can help give them the thrust they need to make the orbital insertion. So yeah, in my experience turbojet + aerospike combo is superior in terms of efficiency, but RAPIERs make for far simpler and sleek designs. And in FAR and NEAR, that matters.

Hey, that's a great way to identify fellow KSP players: quickly look around the plane at your fellow passengers as this is mentioned. Anyone who suddenly looks shocked and/or afraid is very likely also a KSP-er

Did you expect anything else?

I swear this is why going to moho scares the pants off of me. Getting there? no problem! lifting off and coming home? piece of cake! Insertion burn? Oh that should be eas...HOW MUCH DELTA-V?!

A bit less funny "I can't believe that just happened moment" but just a few awesome memories I have from KSP: That moment when you first land on the mun That moment when you realise shortly after your first landing on the mun that you wasted so much fuel on your several tries at powered landing that you now don't have enough to make it home. That moment when you first make orbit with your own spaceplane design That moment when, for the first time, you realise that you forgot to deploy solar panels and tell yourslf "oh darn. Well, lesson learned, that wil surely never happen again" ... That moment when you first succesfully land on the airstrip (with your own spaceplane design). That moment when you completed the final de-orbit burn on the final stages of your first inter-planetary trip and know that you've done it and your kerbals are now as good as home. That moment when things go wrong anyway and the mission is lost. That moment when you miraculously pull it off anyway against all odds. That last one for me is safely landing an interplanetary spaceplane on the runway when it ran out of fuel and RCS 8 km out and 5km up from the KSC. I felt like a god after having wrestled that plane the entire way down and setting her down safely on the runway.

Oh that is the coolest space-nerd toy ever. I am going to have so much fun inputting everything from bullet-sized diamond asteroids to planet-enders.

1 to 2 minutes in space without a space suit was the estimation last time I did some research on it (about a month or two ago). It depends on whether you're simply talking "vacuum" or "in space within relative proximity to a star". The vacuum is the biggest problem of course, but in space you also have to deal with the radiation and high-energy particles as well, which would give you all sorts of nasty long-term effects even if you're miraculously saved within those 1-2 minutes. The "if supplid oxygen" is also a bit of a problem because if you're breathing in air at anything even remotely close to atmospheric pressure, your lungs would rupture because of the pressure differences between the air in your lungs and the vacuum. If the oxygen were to be supplied in another way or perhaps if you're breathing a high-oxygen mis at very low pressures it might work? Though breathing different mixes of gasses at different pressures tends to bring along a whole slew of its own problems. But yeah, effects of being exposed to vacuum include: you body swelling up as your bodily fluids are below their boiling pressure (you wouldn't burst though, apparently your skin is too tough for that. You'd just be in extreme pain as parameciumkid mentioned). Provided you didn't try to hold your breath (in which case your lungs would rupture and you'd be looking at certain death) you'd lose conciousness after about 10-15 seconds, water in your body would rapidly start evaporating out of your mouth and eyes and possibly other orifices. If you're in space you can add the solar radiation to that, giving you a massive sunburn and DNA damage, though honestly that's the least of your problems at that point. Surprisingly, the cold isn't much of a problem. While it can be very, very cold in space, a near perfect vacuum provides an excellent insulator and the vacuum would kill you loooooong before the cold ever did. So yeah, keep your spacesuit on kids

No I probably couldn't. My brother got all the artistic traits, I got the science/engineer ones. I'm pretty good at writing individual scenes and coming up with stuff that makes me go "hey this is cool", but weaving it all together into one coherent story is where I flat out fail. That being said I do have a couple files on my PC with written out scenes and ideas for a story/novel. Maybe I'll get around to actually putting it all together someday in the future.

Well earth might not need methane, but it's a nice source of hydrogen and carbon in outer space. That being said, you don't need to be mining for methane for it to be a problem. To draw the comparison with earth-bound mining: mine gas can be a problem in any mine if it leeches into the tunnels no matter what you're mining. If the asteroid colony is mining mostly metals and other minerals but the rock/ice/whatever material the crew quarters are dug out from contain lots of small methane ice pockets, then a slow build-up is possible. EDIT: oooh ooh ooh, something I just thought of and which is a technique which is actually used in real life gas mining: it is possible for a layer of rock to have a huge amount of small pockets of gas which are completely sealed off. However, if said rock is subjected to a big shockwave or repeated tremors (in sci-fi that could be anything from ship weapons fire to a drill drilling too close to the quarters) then the rock fractures, the pockets start to crack open and voilà, a sudden gas build-up where there previously never was one.

Not impossible I think. It's an incredibly risky and desperate move which would require wide-area heat based weapons (probably explosives of some kind, some sort of ship-to-ship torpedo or something) to vaporise enough water but not dissociate it and do it fast enough before the cloud disperses too much. You'd also probably only absorb the radiation partially, but you might bring it down from fry-the-entire-ship-insta-death to not-quite-insta-death. The ship would probably still take heavy damage to the electronics and the crew would still require space-age treatment against the effects of radiation poisoning, but yeah, I think it might work. Simply putting a large asteroid between you and the sun would probably be a more effective shield, but if there's no large enough asteroid around, this is -I think- a plausible last-ditch desperation move. But hey, desperation move, just barely making it, crawling out of battle bloodied and bruised but alive... makes for a hell of a dramatic exit Also, while a nice girl would be very welcome, twelve kids is NOT on my list of things I plan to do in my life

hmm... Perhaps the management would want to cover up the fact that they skimped on worker safety in order to cut costs? If a rescue team flies in, they'll most likely going to want to know how said explosion happened, or they'll just realise it straight away once they board and see the state of the infrastructure. Of course that plotline only works if said company actually cares about their image. If it is widely known that they don't care about worker safety but are simply too powerful to be called out on it, then this suggestion wouldn't make a lot of sense.

Hmm. Unless I misread, that article only mentions that C-call asteroids (which are the most common ones, certainly) can be mined for, amongst other things, methane. Doesn't say which concentrations a single asteroid usually carries or in what form. I just figured what with methane having such a low melting and boiling point that it would be among the first substances to boil off if exposed to sunlight or heat. That being said I am for form an expert on astronomy, could be that asteroids do contain larger pockets of methane ice that somehow doesn't get boiled off (I wonder how though... to google!). Again, I'm no expert on asteroids, I'm more of a chemistry person. Happy we could be of assistance though. EDIT: aaaaand I found the answer to my question. It's mostly just semantics as Kialar suggested . It appears that the difference between comet and asteroid is simply whether or not it has an active coma. Small celestial bodies (which apparently is the common denominator for the two) come in a wide range of compositions going from almost no volatiles to tons of them and everything in between those two extremes. The difference between comet and asteroid is completely artificial. learn something new everyday

Alright, I've been doing some thinking on this on the ride back home from work. Here's what I came up with: as mentioned before, while the conditions for a chemical explosion with methane or another combustible gas is possible, a violent decompression or some other form of physical explosion is more likely unless the miners are very, very careless and thoughtless in their base construction and operations. However... Kialar's comment regarding a hydrazine explosion caught my interest. Hydrazine is commonly used as rocket fuel, often in monopropellant engines. However, pure hydrazine is NASTY. It is dangerously unstable, incredibly toxic (lethal dose lies somewhere in the parts per million range) and some very nasty long term effects even in sub-lethal doses. Imagine an explosion in your hydrazine storage on an asteroid base. Not good. And it gets better. My interest being piqued, I looked up the properties of hydrazine. A lot of info is readily available on the wikipedia page, some other info I remembered from my classes back at university. Hydrazine is, as mentioned, unstable. When exposed to a metal catalyst (more precisely, iridium compounds) it violently reacts with itself. So violently in fact, that in a rocket engine it heats up the reaction chamber to 800°C in milliseconds. Now, iridium is an extremely rare metal here on earth. In fact, quite a bit of the iridium we nowadays use in catalysts doesn't actually originate from earth. It comes from, you guessed it, impacted asteroids. Now of course iridium in its raw form won't be as finely dispersed as it would be on a catalyst specifically made for the job, but it can still be a huge pain. So say you store your rocket fuel outside of the base. Seems sensible right? don't want to risk something that toxic getting into the enclosed atmosphere. Now say you spring a leak in one of the cannisters. Hydrazine starts venting into space, encounters a patch of asteroid with a larger amount of exposed iridium.... Next thing you know VERY bad things are happening. I'm not sure if this will help the OP in any way, it might be too technical or far-fetched, but I just wanted to share.

yup, correct. Eeeeeeeeeerh... For an asteroid to contain large enough amounts of frozen methane seems unlikely. If it does, it more than likely would also contain large amounts of other volatile ices and would resemble a comet more than an asteroid. Asteroids tend to be more rocky. FCISuperGuy brought up an interesting point though: if it's an industrial accident you might actually be able to sidestep the problem entirely. Rather than blowing up a naturally occuring resource such as methane, you might just as well blow up a fuel supply or something else that was brought along by the inhabitants. Don't know if that would fit with the rest of your story of course.

depends. From an asteroid I think that's pretty unlikely. Methane is usually a product from either geological of biological processes, and asteroids (which are either solid or loosely held aglommerations of rubble) don't really have either. It's possible an asteroid might contain pockets of methane, but for one to have large enough pockets to be able to mix with air and cause a catastrophic explosion seems extremely unlikely. Now, comets on the other hand are a different story. Comets are often described as "dirty snowballs". They are composed of (usually) mostly water ice, frozen gasses and quite a bit of carbon-based compounds. It is far more likely for a comet to have pockets of hydrocarbons such as methane or other combustible/explosive gasses (ethane, ethanol, HCN, etc.). If your comet is big enough, I don't think it's unthinkable that there may be pockets of explosive gasses large enough to cause an explosion if mixed with oxygen or another oxidizer. This of course does assume that said comet is being mined and that an artificial, breathable atmosphere is in place.