Winter Man

A few gravity assists with Eve and you're set though. See: Messenger probe's route to Mercury.

It is, in a kind of convoluted way. If the moon had enough more gravity, it'd be bigger and likely hold an atmosphere.

...and for people who don't go back more than a page, it's there like 6 times already

It does look like Minmus, but it could quite easily be an orbiting monolith.

Then add another stage between the two.

How does a launch button defeat the purpose? Not sure I'm following you.

So there's no compatibility issues with that old pack? Cool.

Problem with gravity assists is they're a bugger to work out for the layman. We need flight/mission planning before we can do it properly.

Dunno about that, there's an awful lot of space, and if you're not within 50m of the thing you're not going to see it (bearing in mind in a Kerbol orbit you can't really get that sort of accuracy). Also if you've got a difference in speed of 200m/s or so, you're not going to see it pass you. Doubt it would ever get found.

This. A thousand times this.

Yup, I do it with RCS too. More effective on lightweight 1 man craft, but still.

At least putting the active flight above the others so you can see it among the debris.

The blue, orange and purple are all the same flight - that's just a patched conics thingy. There's only two flights on there, the multicoloured and the grey.

Are those them tiny SRBs folk were on about?

You can export to .obj from 2011 using a plugin, dunno what KSP uses but .obj's are pretty much convertible to anything.

You evil man, post clearer photos! Where is it? What's that in the sky?!

And don't forget to pack it with spare boosters... just in case. Edit: and you can add more orbits to the patched conics, it's a cfg edit.

I know, right. I tend to carry a pack of post-its around with me so I can draw what I mean. I don't think it'd need to look any different, just get scaled to the atmosphere of the planet you're landing on. You might be able to aerobrake then slow yourself finally with a little rocket, Ares 1 from the Mars Trilogy style.

Lower volume, yeah. But the same mass. My point was, the air doesn't move down ultimately - you then get a lower pressure on top which causes it to recirculate.

You're right, there aren't. But I was talking about level flight, where nothing goes up.

Well, something doesn't have to move down to keep the plane in the air, just to climb. The force generated by the Bernoulli principle is really quite high, about enough to keep the plane in the air in level flight. The climb is performed by the angle. But you're right, KSP doesn't do anything like that, but it should

So basically, it has both 1.7 times the surface gravity and a 100km larger radius. We've successfully proven what we were already told

Well. Kind of both for surface gravity because it gets weaker at distance. But you're right about the atmosphere assuming it has the same quantity of gas there. Which it might not.

It does, the drag mentioned is 'induced drag', not total drag. There's parasitic drag too, which is the skin of the aeroplane slowing the air down. This is true, but it depends on the aerofoil. The high speed jets and aerobatic planes rely more on the angle pushing the air out of the way, but slower planes rely on it quite a bit due to the lower thrust-to-weight ratio and their much lower stall angle.

It does indeed, it's what causes it in the first place. The shape of the aerofoil causes an uneven increase in speed of the air above and below itself, which causes a difference in pressure (the Bernoulli principle stating that an increase in velocity comes from an decrease in pressure and vice versa). This difference in pressure results in a force perpendicular to the wing, manifesting as the lift and drag forces.