GoSlash27

Ahh, but whether or not *you* are all for it is immaterial unless *you* are going to foot the bill. You can't afford to pay for it. Even if you got together with everybody on the planet who thinks it's a neat idea and you all pooled your money, you still couldn't afford it. What you're really talking about is forcing people who don't like this idea and think it's a waste of money to pay for it against their will.

saabstory, This looks very much like the sort of thing I used to come up with when I was a teenager back in Pittsburgh. Small world! IMO the answer is yes and no What you basically have here is an afterburner. good for thrust, but bad for efficiency. Now... if you were to use the diffuser not to slow the air, but rather compress it, I'd imagine you could inject fuel into that and have very high efficiency. The trick would be keeping the shock wave stable over a wide range of mach numbers. I'm not sure how badly that would screw up the Isp of the core rocket, but it can't be good. Suppose you were to start with an aerospike design. That works by creating a small pocket of vacuum in the center of the exhaust stream, thus making the exhaust flow laminar. At low speed, the aerospike is doing all the work. At supersonic speed, your baffle introduces a shock wave behind this, creating a high pressure combustion chamber. This reduces (or more properly wrecks) the efficiency of the aerospike, but introducing fuel to your high pressure pocket of air would probably make up for that. I hope I'm describing it properly. No diagrams Best of luck! -Slashy

This is what I was thinking. Any bacteria we're liable to encounter in our neck of the woods would almost certainly have originally come from Earth. It wouldn't have to be "alien" in order to be something we haven't seen before.

Photos of the TR5.0 SS going from Kerbin surface to orbit in a single stage... On the pad Showing off a little Liftoff Gravity turn Transstage checkpoint 1 Transstage checkpoint 2 Beginning injection phase Injection complete It doesn't actually take much to pull off an SSTO like this if you don't have any payload. Just a matter of doing the math and designing accordingly. This thing won't take a Kerbin into orbit by itself from sea level, but if you use a pair of them, dock them to a lander pod with clamp-o-trons and drive to a suitable altitude then they will. It works for every body in the system except for Eve. And as shown, even this small amount of fuel is adequate for a deorbit burn and landing without 'chutes for a drive home (although any realistic mission would have you refuel while in orbit). Winning! -Slashy Cruise on over to the stock vehicle thread and pick one up while supplies last!

Dupe post...

No dark magic, honest! It's just 4 wheels, 4.66 tons of tanks, 3 48-7S engines, 2 light landing gear, a couple medium clamp-o-trons, an okto-2 RGU and assorted "massless" parts. The rocket equation predicts that it will work and it does *shrug*... I did take the liberty of folding the engines inside the tanks for a lower center of gravity and improved clearance in rough terrain (it drives like a Baja buggy), but the SSTO thing is just straight math. Best, -Slashy

I didn't forget, I just didn't bother since they're boring pictures. But I have supplied the vehicle file itself so that anyone who doubts it can download it and prove it themselves. That's the best proof. Regards, -Slashy [edit] but just for you, I'll do a photo-shoot

Likewise, if we were to commit to building unique roads from every building on Earth to every other building, there would never be any traffic and transportation costs would plummet. There are concepts that are so outrageously expensive at the outset that they can never pay for themselves through use. Regards, -Slashy

Just posting this because it hasn't been discussed yet. Say we send up a probe to collect interstellar dust/ samples/ whatever. And it comes back with something really bad. Maybe a virus or an invasive species of space amoeba. It wouldn't even have to be detrimental to humans to cause our extinction. Anything involved in our food chain or basic chemistry could be a calamity for all human life. What precautions would be adequate IYO to guard against inadvertently bringing back a virulent space bug? -Slashy

Reminds me of a couple more minor things: 1)Hydrogen balloons and 2)propellers. 1) It would simplify things to launch your space vehicle from the top of an atmosphere instead of the bottom 2) It would really suck to have your LV land offshore and have no way to get it to solid ground...

A space elevator is the future equivalent of a bullet train: In theory, it's the best possible solution, but in practice, it's the next thing to worthless. Ultimately, space is about dollars spent per pound of cargo in orbit. Even if the space elevator puts cargo up there for free, you'd never get enough cargo up it to justify the R&D cost. JMO, -Slashy

Now having said that, I should point out that I don't personally subscribe to it. I don't believe that exceeding the speed of light is actually impossible and I don't believe that relativity is a logically sound construct. It happens to work, but so do a lot of other irrational arguments. /going to geek hell -Slashy

Unfortunately, "life" is a pretty huge assumption. Therefore Occam's razor would have us reject biologic origins of phenomena in favor of inorganic chemical interactions.

Interesting conundrum! Technically a) is false. the Newtonian model works well enough to get by on, but it's not actually true according to relativity. The presence of something outside the kinematic realm (such as a black hole) distorts time and space so badly that the Newtonian model no longer holds. In fact, according to the eggheads the errors of the simple Newtonian model are already quantifiable. So a black hole doesn't add any energy, but simply warps the space and time around it. Best, -Slashy

I don't know how the program decides that, but in my experience it seems to work out that way. I'd guess that it's order of creation in the save file. -Slashy

What "technicalfool" said. 2Gs should be your goal during the vertical boost phase. Less than that and you're wasting DV fighting gravity. More than that and you're wasting DV fighting drag. I taper that off as I tip over into the gravity turn transstage by the function 2sin Pitch until I leave the atmosphere. Best, -Slashy

I know it's already been answered, but I have some additional pointers to help you along... If you can lift 5 tons to orbit then you can do just about anything in this game. Your transfer ship will need at least 1 LV-N engine, so that's 2 1/4 tons, leaving you 2 3/4 tons for empty tanks. You also don't need your orbital insertion stage with all it's attendant extras (RCS, guidance, solar panels, engine, etc) since your transport already has all of that stuff. So that means you can put it right on top of your booster/ transstage and use the leftover payload for even more tankage. Just be sure to leave enough fuel in it to attain and stabilize LKO. You don't need more than that at launch, since everything else you launch will be rendezvousing with it. Then you can fuel it up, bring up a payload, and you're all set. If done properly, you can build a transport that will move 5 tons of cargo anywhere in the system without having to lift any more than 5 tons at a time. This is the transport I'm using based on the 5 ton limit: Best, -Slashy

Hell, just delegate the job to China. They can set up production for cheap. I'd definitely buy a Jeb figurine! -Slashy

Loose connections and distributed reaction wheels/ controllers. They can set up a parasitic oscillation wherein they detect the wobble and make torque corrections that make it worse instead of better. Your station is already built, so larger clamp-o-trons and additional bracing are no longer an option. Your best bet is to therefore go around the station and disable any reaction wheels that are on the opposite side of a joint from the controller. Likewise, disable any unused controllers. When docking a ship, disable SAS just as soon as the connection is established. Best, -Slashy

It may be beyond the realm of possibility, but I'd just like to have Kerbals climb a ladder and step forward onto a ledge without having to jump! Other than that, minor gameplay improvements like being able to see your apoapsis in the nav ball in the staging screen. I'm really pretty low- maintenance...

Yeah, I think you're right. It still looks highly doable, tho'. Especially since structure, batteries, and solar panels are all massless and the wings provide a convenient surface for them (panels on top and batteries beneath). This suggests that swinging more towards wings is the way to go, so you don't run out of juice during the ascent. I'm thinking it would (very) slowly climb up out of the atmosphere and then limp into orbit, but you'd better bring a Snickers, 'cuz you ain't going anywhere for a while! *edit* crap! I grossly overestimated the DV for Ion engines! That's what I get for quoting figures off the top of my head instead of verifying them The Ion engine generates an absolute maximum 36,000 DV, not 69,000. The mass ratio to make 8,500 is 1.229, not 1.114. So that definitely tightens up the margin. A sane DV budget to pull it off is nearly half the theoretical maximum, so it looks a whole lot less doable. Can't say for sure it's impossible, but it doesn't look promising IMO.

Glad it worked out. That was a squeaker! Congrats, -Slashy

This discussion has my wheels turning... We would have to define "mathematical proof" of what is possible and what is not. The case of a vertical launcher is fairly straightforward; A lifter generating 16.7 m/sec at the start can lift a fixed mass of fuel and tankage. This represents the upper limit of what is possible with a single stage composed of an infinite number of engines. If it is at all possible, it would involve the aerospike (although you can use the same method to check other possibilities). The aerospike generates 175 KN, which translates to roughly 10 1/2 tons at 1 G on Eve. Subtract the mass of the engine (1.5t) and that leaves 9 tons of tank & fuel, 8 tons of which is fuel. Our "dead weight" is therefore 2 1/2 tons and our fuel is 8 tons. Plugging that into the rocket equation generates less than 5,500 m/sec delta vee. Not enough, so we can confidently state that a vertical lift SSTO from Eve is mathematically impossible. The aircraft is a different beast, since thrust is no longer a going concern. Here we assume no mass other than the Xenon tanks and try to guesstimate how much wing we need to lift them. The absolute limit of an infinite number of xenon tanks and a single PB-ION is 69,000 m/sec delta vee. Easily over the limit. Reversing the rocket equation, we can figure the minimum mass ratio that will still do the job. For 8,500 DV, it's 1.114, which means that 11.4% of the total mass of the vehicle needs to be Xenon. Accordingly, 4.8% of the vehicle's mass needs to be Xenon tanks, thus 16.2% is xenon and tanks, while 83.8% is not. Assuming zero mass other than engines and wings and assuming a pair of delta wings for each engine (why not?), this is .39T per engine/ wing combo. This would require 63.2 kG of xenon and tank. But of course our tanks weigh 120 kg, so we're looking at 2 engines and 4 wings per tank of xenon. This combo should be just enough to pull it off, and it looks like there's plenty of leeway to juggle that and even add payload/ control surfaces/ etc. I'm gonna call it possible, though watching something that slow get to orbit would be about as exciting as watching paint dry. Thoughts/ corrections/ criticism? -Slashy

True, but they allow you to use a much more efficient engine without worrying about t/w. I'm thinking that if there's a legit SSTO for Eve, it'll have wings and be Ion powered.

Okay, so your orbit is more or less perpendicular to Kerbin's surface? I would say set a node over whichever pole has you going away from Kerbin and burn prograde to escape Munar SOI. After that, burn retrograde for the atmosphere. I'm just not sure if you can do all that and get out of the can within 10 hours. Hopefully the burn will generate enough electricity to give you some breathing room! [edit] <-- pun definitely *not* intended! Any nonessential systems you can shut down to conserve electricity?