Wanderfound

...as with most sailing ships through history. With all but the best square riggers, sailing upwind was mostly just a matter of trying to hold position while you waited for the wind to change. Leeway eats your upwind progress. When I was sailing HMB Endeavour, the highest we we could point was about 80° off the wind, and you'd actually go backwards at a fair clip if you tried to do that. Endeavour was admittedly a bit of a pig even by square-rigger standards, though. 18th C oil tanker, basically.

Actual payload fraction of my thing is roughly 10%, BTW. OTOH, given that it hits orbit with the centre tank nearly full, you could arguably consider the core booster as part of the payload, which would bring it to about 25%. Launch cost √733,102...so about 25 times the price of my normal Mun rockets. And roughly 145 times the cost of sending up my heavy tanker SSTO spaceplane.

We have now apparently invented Kerbal Paparazzi. Love it.

Wing/sail curvature, vortex effects, etc. have some influence. But they're massively outweighed by AoA, and are totally inadequate for takeoff. The main effects of the non-AoA lift forces is that they allow you to reduce AoA in level flight, thereby reducing drag. Ditto for sailing; a flat sheet of plywood works just fine as a sail, just not as well as a curved one.

Likely to be educational: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/803:_Airfoil

"The lack of a proper atmospheric re-entry model has enabled the latest KSP challenge  speedruns to the edge of space." Pfft. Burning off a few canards on the way up is half the fun of a speed run. I may not get both up and down in two minutes, but I could certainly do runway-to-circular-orbit in that time.

Like asparagus, but simpler to build and easier to balance. Build in concentric rings with fuel flowing inwards; dump one full layer of "skin" per stage. Like what I posted above; it drops four boosters at a time.

I never said it was only​ 80 tons.

The fact that it's tweakable in diameter isn't going to interfere with that?

Is there any way to adjust an NRAP to make it radially attachable? Or to lower the minimum length/diameter still further? They're absolutely perfect for use as gravity assisted seismic probes...

If you're interested in something a bit chunkier, I highly recommend NRAP test weights. Tweakable length and diameter, tweakable weight from 1-100 tons, and totally indestructible. No burst effect, but if you're on target the NRAP won't stop until it hits dirt. Not radially attachable though, unfortunately.

Cheers, thanks.

Atari 2600, Space Invaders, when it was shiny and new. I don't think that it taught me a lot about physics, though.

My main advice on fleets is: don't park the whole lot at the same space station at once. The totalled part count from a dozen ships is going to make your computer want to kill you.

Tonight's project took a little longer than expected, and I've gotta crash out now, but stay tuned for an update tomorrow. Got something special in the works. Y'all should enjoy it.

Nicely put. This why I want all the difficulty options as options. We can't adjust the players, so adjust the game instead. Something suitable for a 12 year old building their first rocket just ain't gonna work for an adult science geek who's been doing it for years, and vice-versa.

Like I said, I was in a hurry. Cost and efficiency wasn't really a consideration; sandbox.

I heartily endorse this idea; in fact, I suggested to Arsonide that he add something similar to Fine Print just a couple of hours ago. Think there's any way you could work some ghost scenery into it? Start/finish line banners, grandstands full of spectating Kerbals, that sort of thing? Team Kerbodyne Racing will be happy to heavily promote your mod once you've got it running.

See the post above; it's just something I threw together in a hurry when I needed it in sandbox. I didn't actually need it any higher than LKO. I don't really do serious rockets in my career game, apart from low-tech Muntrippers while I'm science grinding for RAPIERs.

Haven't done the math, it's just something I threw together in a couple of minutes when I needed a fuelling station in my sandbox save for the Minmus races. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/xu7b5nt56qwfwst/Monstro.craft?dl=0 Designed for FAR, of course.

BTW, a possible rules addendum: make sure that the F3 screenshot is stationary on the landing strip after getting back down. Quickloading wipes the F3 report, so a screenshot after touchdown proves that there wasn't any quickload between the G's and the landing. It's too easy to just pull a suicide manoeuvre and screenshot immediately before airframe failure otherwise.

80 ton payload can be done with a tolerable level of stability and part count, though: Onion-staged, everything above the white core is payload and full of fuel, hits 70x70 shortly after the last ring of boosters fall away, with the core booster still mostly fuelled. Instant orbital fuel depot, around any planet that isn't too hard to get to. Not cheap, though.

I had a good one nearly done (dive from 80km, 12G pull-out), but then did something stupid on the landing approach and trashed it. It isn't wing breakage that's doing me in most of the time, it's shattering the entire airframe when I hit the lower atmosphere at Mach 4. I should have a proper entry for you tonight, but in the meantime... The Kerbodyne Evangelist TJ. Love those RPM cameras. They do have some issues, though. Let's try sideways. Going okay. Oops. Try again. Nope. Maybe a dive would be better. Hmmn. Once more. Drat. Again? Going okay. Sod. Try, try again. And again. Ouch. Kerbodyne: built to last.

First: streamline. Nosecones are essential, pancakes are to be avoided. Second: start nudging the nose to the east the second you leave the launchpad, but do it gradually. Keep the nose touching the edge of the prograde marker. But keep doing it; it's a process, not an event. Get it to about 45° by 8,000m or so, and keep going. You aren't aiming for "climb then turn"; you want a smooth curve. By the time you hit 40,000m, you want to be nearly horizontal. Watch your climb rate, and hold it below 100m/s in the upper atmosphere. Pitch down to reduce it, but not so far that you start dropping. Do it right and by the time your apoapsis hits 70,000m your periapsis will be well above ground level. You'll eventually need to shut the engines down briefly, but your final circularisation burn should only take a few seconds.

Like "weeds" (AKA "a plant in the wrong place"), "pollution" is a purely human concept; it is not an objective, natural-law sort of thing. Yes, you can choose to define "pollution" in such a way that it includes everything, but by doing so you make it an essentially useless and meaningless concept. It's Humpty-Dumpty linguistics. Life is a part of the Earth's "natural state". The Earth isn't a static, changeless rock, and never has been; it's a constantly evolving dynamic system. By giving priority to some hypothetical, abiotic Earth, you're skirting dangerously close to the naturalistic fallacy. The question is not whether we can or should try to maintain the Earth as if human life had never existed. We can't, and it would be daft to even try. The question is whether we should continue to actively push the system towards a state [1] that is going to create consequences in the alarmingly near future that will make WWII look like a holiday picnic. We evolved intelligence, we should choose to use it. [1] Unambiguously, proven as close to a certainty as the natural sciences are ever able to get. Anthropogenic climate change is about as "hypothetical" as plate tectonics. And the primary driver of that change is human industrial CO2 emission. This fact is not in doubt by anyone who has the slightest genuine understanding of the topic.