Wanderfound

As per the first post: single stage to Minmus, but refuelling in Kerbin orbit allowed. So, no dropping parts on the way, but using all of your fuel to reach Kerbin orbit, topping up there, then cruising to Minmus and doing the run with whatever's left in the tanks is all cool. You'll need a docking port or other refuelling method if you're going for the orbital top-up, though. If your ship was in a possible-by-the-rules state at the beginning of its run (i.e. tanks not 100% full; even if you didn't need the extra juice, weight matters), the time can stand. Otherwise, have another go; see if you can do it even faster.

...which is what Fine Print does, BTW. Seriously worth checking out. Very impressive mod.

Yup. Able to create G forces: easier when lower. Able to survive them: easier when higher. I suspect that thrust-enhanced high altitude G's might be able to beat aerodynamically-generated lower altitude G. Still, should be interesting to find out. Challenge on!

Quite literally. Don't even need two.

We have indeed. Sorry, Ferram.

On the rare occasions when it glitches and refuses to release no matter how long you wait, I've found that sometimes just bouncing the nose a bit (engine gimballing is generally enough) can make them disengage.

You may want to put an altitude ceiling on this, BTW. It's a lot easier to get away with high-G daftness in the almost-vacuum on the edge of space. What's your view on vectored thrust? Vernors make it easier to slam things around, especially in thin air, but somebody is sure to try sticking an SRB on the nose or something if allowed. It'll be fun either way, but vectoring gives more emphasis to design over piloting. Might also be worth sticking up a simple "control" plane for a pure piloting version.

Just saw your "operational ceiling" post, BTW. Are you still getting high altitude supersonic nose tuck problems? There are an assortment of both design and piloting tricks to deal with that.

A while ago I would have agreed with you, but I'm increasingly swinging to the get-ISP-right side. Apart from the substantial pool of existng players who appreciate the relatively reality-based physics under the hood of KSP, Kerbal.edu is a strong argument against including misleading models unless there is a good reason to do so. Sure, breaks from reality are fine when there's a valid reason for them (patched conics, simplified fuels, somewhat reduced scale, etc), but I'm yet to see anything that comes anywhere near to being a good reason for retaining the ISP thing. It appears to be entirely based upon pointless inertia; the dodgy ISP model adds nothing to the game. It's not even a simplification; it's just plain wrong. And fixing it appears to be a relatively trivial task, with no significant downside.

...and pointlessness. We can send a thousand rovers for the cost of one manned mission, achieving vastly greater scientific output. The less white elephant footprints and flags daftness, the better. All that the Bush-era Mars nonsense achieved was to kill off a bunch of desperately needed climate monitoring satellite projects, along with a great deal of other genuine science.

I may be incorrect (oh, the horror...). If it isn't a spool-up thing though, it does seem awfully coincidental that the brakes (usually) release at just about the time that the jets hit full power.

This comes up a lot, but I really don't get it. Double the scale, double the maximum timewarp: impact on wait-around time = 0. Is there some limitation I'm missing that would make this not possible?

Woo! Happens to all of us. I spent nearly a month getting a fuel station and lander into orbit around Duna only to realise at the last moment that I'd put them into perfectly matched orbits...travelling in opposite directions. I'm seriously tempted to vanish some of my old designs down the memory hole. I was hugely proud of the D7 when I first got it working, but now it's just embarrassing. Still, it was fun at the time.

Yup. I like flying the milk truck to the Munar bases etc. Gives me a reason to go back to places without being driven there by science grinding.

There are a long list of ways that make acquiring vast amounts of √ trivial, many of them already mentioned: thermometer-laden satellites, scamming contract advances, budget reentry pods, Munar flag forests...but, really, none of them are necessary. Just do whatever you want, and if money runs short, go do a contract or two. The pay from a quickie Mun landing or similar is so generous that it's hard not to make a massive profit on it. And that's using rocketry; if you can do spaceplanes, you can deliver bulk cargo to pretty much anywhere for √10,000 or so. The economics of SSTO spaceplanes are massively broken; 100% recovery is much too generous. They're going to have to get a lot harsher in general (and, yes, make bankruptcy a genuine threat) if they want KSP to work as a Railroad Tycoon style game. As with Kerbal fatalities, funds lose their meaning when you know there's an infinite supply available. There's no blame attaching to Squad for this, because the contracts/funds/rep system of .24 was only ever intended to be a bare-bones framework...but that is what it is. The current funds system is the economic equivalent of soupmosphere aero; it's a barely-functional placeholder, which should (and will, I expect) be developed into something much better before 1.0. In the meantime, I'm having plenty of fun running a spaceplane design shop on the forums, creating silly screenshot picture stories in the challenge threads, and exploring the potential for what contracts should turn into by playing around with Fine Print. Fine Print's aerial survey waypoint missions are heaps fun; a much better reason to fly all over Kerbin and see the sights than biome science grinding ever was. Trickier than you'd think, too, if you want to hit all the waypoints in a single smooth pass; sharp turns at Mach 5 take a delicate touch. But although Fine Print is a big step up over the limited range of stock contracts, it doesn't touch the "rivers of gold" issue.

Something to keep in mind next time you hear the claim that Ferram makes aircraft too fragile: It's not the plane, it's the piloting.

Cool, thanks.

TAC-LS is also unrealistically forgiving, BTW. Stick a couple of small radial-mount parts on the side of your capsule and you can keep your Kerbals alive for years. The only real killer in TAC-LS is running out of electricity; that'll kill 'em within hours. I don't think anyone has come up with a remotely challenging LS mod yet. With you on that. Emergency situations and desperate rescues are some of the best bits of KSP. We shouldn't be trying to discourage them. Half of the reason I have EVE installed is because I love popping out of the cloud bank on reentry only to discover that I'm face-to-face with a mountain. Tons o'fun.

On a similar theme: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

Unfortunately, like a lot of top-flight physicists, Hawking is a very smart man who frequently says very stupid things to journalists. Could the Higgs destroy the universe? Well, yes, in the same sense that snapping your fingers "could" destroy the universe. Ain't gonna happen. It's just a throw away comment mentioning the LHC in the middle of an interview on another topic, but this might be of interest: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/03/brian-cox-scientists-climate-change

The Higgs was originally dubbed "the God particle" because the scientists working on it had got into the habit of calling it "the Goddamned particle" but they didn't think that was a good look when they were speaking to journalists. The other version, which is apparently apocryphal, is that the Higgs was dubbed "the God particle" because both God and the Higgs "are the reason why we have Mass". (hardcore atheist here, but I can appreciate a good Catholic joke as well as anybody)

That's fine; just so long as it can get to Minmus, and that you don't use more fuel in your run (and getting back to a stationary landing on the flats) than you would have left in the tanks after doing so. The 805.2m/s I posted above that was disqualified (due to inability to return to the flats after the run) would have been able to make it back if it had started with full tanks, but the amount used in getting to Minmus in the first place made the difference. Fly it to Minmus once, and post a pic of it at your race starting position (in orbit or on the flats, depending on how you did it) with the resources tab visible to show that it doesn't have less fuel than your run (including stopping on the flats afterwards) required. You're free to refuel on the way from as high a Kerbin orbit as you can place a refuelling depot, though. It does need to be something that can get from the KSC runway to Minmus, though; if it's never done that, you should do it at least once just to confirm that it can. I can build a ridiculously fast rocket sled on Kerbin, but making one that can also fly to Minmus and have enough fuel to race when it gets there is a significantly harder trick. I must confess that I've been using Hyperedit myself to get some of the scenery in place; I did land the first of the "starting posts" manually, but I couldn't be bothered doing it three more times, particularly as my computer was being a bit crash-happy at the time. And, as I said to Kasuha earlier, if you don't have any good crashes then you obviously weren't trying hard enough. Go faster. (and remember to have fun while you're doing it)

Endorsed 100%. Skywalker has it right.</snip>

Incidentally, swap out the standard jet for a turbo on the Evangelist and it turns into quite a quick plane: Just the thing for doing Fine Print aerial surveys. Got the aerodynamics damned near perfect, too; just one trivial niggle in the yaw/roll relationship that I can't quite eliminate.

Not really, no. The angle of attack generates lift. Airfoil shapes are about reducing drag, not generating lift; a bare plank will lift off with sufficient speed and angle, and the best airfoil won't generate any lift at all if it isn't angled up. If you're still grounded at 700km/h, I'd suspect that your wings are working to generate downforce rather than lift. Get the design right and you'll lift off with no control inputs as soon as you break stall speed; get it wrong, and you've got a rocket sled rather than a plane. I know a few pilots, and I have a long-standing interest in WWII aviation, but I'm a neuroscientist rather than an aeronautical engineer. I do believe that Ferram knows what he's doing, though. Have you had a poke through https://github.com/ferram4/Ferram-Aerospace-Research/wiki/An-Example-SSTO-Design-Process ? The bit under the second image about takeoff speeds may be of interest. Speaking of large planes performing as they shouldn't, check out Alex Henshaw's book Sigh For a Merlin. He was quite fond of doing barrel rolls in Lancaster bombers. The main reason for that is because professional pilots are trained very carefully to avoid doing the sorts of things that might cause structural failure, and the sorts of aircraft used by less-trained pilots are built so that they can't do the sorts of manoeuvres that would cause them to fail. Plenty of desperate pilots broke their Spitfires and Messerschmitts during WWII.