Caiaphas

Cool, thanks.

You'd be surprised at how often you want structures to bend and flex in mechanical engineering (provided you're working with materials that don't suffer from excessive fatigue cracking); for one thing a mildly flexible structure will often easily absorb forces that would crack or shatter a much more rigid structure. Back on topic. Could you please tell me at what altitude you aerobraked the asteroid?

You'll note that his main point is that GRAVITATIONAL force is acting equivalently across the rocket. This isn't the case in interplanetary space. EDIT: okay, that's not as precise or helpful as it could be. Suffice it to say that out at Kerbin's orbit and outside its SOI, gravity is negligible compared to everything else acting on the rocket. Also, Mr. Manley doesn't really get into the root cause of why pendulum rockets are unstable, which is outlined here (https://web.archive.org/web/20091018232320/http://geocities.com/jim_bowery/pendrock.html) but which basically boils down to the assumption that the rocket motor is going to be fixed relative to the mass that it's dragging, which isn't necessarily the case, since you can free the gimbal on the Klaw.

...cannot believe I didn't think of that. Thanks!

So I'm attempting to design my first >20 km/s dV orbitally constructed nuke rocket to intercept an E-class asteroid, and after browsing through some people's designs I decided to go with a puller-type rocket with the propulsion bus up top and the propellant down at the bottom. What concerns me is that my propulsion bus doesn't angle the rockets, and when it's fully assembled some of the propellant tanks and the asteroid might be in the way of the exhaust. At what range does the exhaust start to affect other objects? At present there's a separation of about 10 meters from the nozzle ends to the top of the first propellant tank, and I'm wondering if I should add in another spine to increase that separation.

...ah, crap. Reading comp fail. Thank you.

Well, title says it all. Picture is linked below. I'm getting the message that I'm entering the zone in question and the message that I'm exiting the zone, but I can't seem to get the little checkmark telling me "hey you measured the temperature there good job". So far I've tried measuring it and storing the information and measuring and transmitting the science back to Ground Control; neither seems to have worked. My altitude at both attempts was below 9 km. Could someone please help with this?