Rakaydos

SpaceX is doing well enough for itself... There can be two paths that lead corporations to space- Transportation infrastructure in the short term (like SpaceX, where other people pay them to take stuff places) and once that aspect gets large enough, Space based manufacturing to remove launch costs from both the transportation and payload.

I'm playing a game inspired by someone's Spaceplane Only carear mode. Getting the first liftoff with sideway SRBs and capsule torque was interesting, but now I'm trying to get enough fuel in orbit to stock a minmus lander. (getting an orbit at all before turbojets was also a challange)

But the selection pressure is pushing us furthur away from "natural" solutions. If you dont count hygine, antibiotics, germ theory, and medical technoligy as a form of evolution, then there is no evolution. If you do count technoligy as an evolution, then we are evolving faster than ever before.

Seriouslt, I launched this thing with only 50-80meters of grass before hitting the runway

I'm pretty sure it changes the net vector, but if your prograde/retrograde speed is zero on your new heading, oberth applies as if your speed was zero. It's why inclination changes are so Deltav expensive- despite being close to a mass, you dont get ANY oberth to help you out.

I'll try that. My one worry is that it may put too much weight/drag on the rocket, but I'm not using FAR, so that shouldnt be too much of an issue. This is more for a "today I refurbish a rocket" attempt, where I do a SpaceX lower stage landing after getting the upperstage to orbital velocity, land the upper stage after dropping the cargo, then reassemble them at KSC, and "Launch" a new cargo and enough fuel tanks to top off the launcher for another run.

Not directly related to this challange (though the result will qualify) but I'm having problems managing my skycrane. Due to the particulars of the rocket I'm building the skycrane uses large docking ports, and I cant seem to manage a docking without breaking one or both sides of the docking connection.

Posted this on the blog, but posting here as well in case you dont check comments: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/27556-Falcon-9R-KSP-Style-Reuse-Everything This is the flight path that is proven to work.

Cell phones are a human organ these days, right? You could function without one, but it would be like functioning without ears- you miss out on so much else.

If there's no rush, using a solar sail to deorbit an oort cloud object would probably be more efficent. Instead of heavy nuclear material, you're shipping miles upon miles of reflective material, and letting it sit there.

I've got a reusable, reassemblable orbiter that can lift about 5 tons and land both parts back as KSC. What I cant do is dock a skycrane without crushing the docking ports. :/

is Lestat still talking about interplanetary trade? Not going to happen. Any planetary mining (of ANY body) is not going to be profitable enough to ship to other worlds. Small asteroids might be profitable because of the lack of gravity, but even the large ones like Ceres and Vesta are too big to economically mine.

Hermite crabs use found shells for protection. Otters use rocks to crack open shellfish. If these things count as evolutions, so does your Driver's Licence and your Credit History- while they are not intristically part of your being, they shape human behavur as part of social evolutionary pressure.

The next "level" of evolution would be life that could not have naturally formed out of the organic soup- only possible now by emergent properties and ever increasing complexity. If it is possible, it would have beeen a mutation at one point. If it was benificial (at the time the mutation occured) it becomes part of the species. The only things left are that which was not possible... not natural. In a sence, your Facebook, cell phones, and credit records are all aspects of your evolved being, as a form of hivemind comunication. At some point, we will deveop an enitely Synthetic life (probably related to Siri), and THAT will be the next life form to evolve.

When I did this, I overshot to around 12000m, then quicksaved just outside atmo. After many hercuean tries, I managed to pull off a complicated chain of micromanagement (including uneven fuel pumping while engines were running) to pull out of a crash, using some of the original kerbin circularization engines that were still attached but unfueled. It is now in Layth orbit waiting for a rescue mission.

I'm having a problem "landing" my skycrane without breaking one or both of the mating docking ports. I use mechjeb transltron to stabilize me while I line up the dock, but I cant slowly lower power to dock- turning off "maintain height" drops the throttle to zero instantly.

Since Xenon works like RCS fuel (tanks dont have to be connected to the engine) I would be comfortable with moving Ion engines to Control. Also power storage and generation, to keep the reaction wheels spinning.

On your way up, have you tried burning 45 degrees downward and laterally? The idea being to both lower your absolute velocity, and give yourself slightly more atmosphere to slow down in.

Not EVERY chance they are more advanced. If advanced civilizations need elements heavier than Iron to exist, and cannot form too close to the sterilizing radiation of the core, their suns would be about the same age (in stellar terms) as our own- new enough to form with the debries of the first supernovas, close enough to the core (where stars age faster) to get that material relatively quickly but far enough away for life to not be snuffed out by a nearby supernova.

Saturn would have closer to 1G, I believe...

I'm tempted to try my 1-stock-ion superglider, but 1) the wings wont fit under the bridge, and 2) that would take like 2 hours

Solid fuel engines are much more vulnerable to overheat staging if it's done while the solid stage is still burning. This usually means wasting some deltav by killing engines before they're empty.

So it sounds like a high orbit at the lowest fastest timewarp is best then? (assuming your kethane lifter is optimized for payload ascent) Or is it better to be on the bleeding edge of minmus's SoI? Also, how much harder would it be to have a station tailing (or leading) minmus in orbit, just outside it's SoI?

Interesting. I may be interested in the craft file, as it sounds easier than the skycrane reassembily I'm currently expirimenting with.

Alright, so I believe I have the bugs worked out of my reusable lifter (5 ton payload). Now I just need to figure out how to reassembe it for the next launch.