Archgeek

I'm sitting pretty still here at work in relative silence, but the mental video of that has me rolling with laughter internally.

Hehe, no need for that -- If you've gone to that much trouble to make a super long-range space plane, just refuel the silly thing. If you've used a few big cans, just dock and transfer, and if you've used a lot of little cans and are impatient (if you're impatient why are you carrying all that xenon?), slap a port on the tankage, dump it out the hold, and dock a fresh set of tanks, possibly as an autonomous module with a probe core, rcs ports, and as little mono as you can get away with.

Yes. One of my earliest careers saw poor Bob get stuck after his pre-solar panel Minmus run ran out of gas, and getting out and pushing was really only good for getting his apo below the mun so he wouldn't get kicked out of the system while Jeb to headed up in a simple two-pod rescue boat. This was before kerbals could grab science from things, so another mission was sent to retrive that once it became possible. The mission profile for my idiotic heavy Eve lander (2 cans, an ion stage with 2 gigantors on the upper can, @Whackjob-inspired landing legs, and engines that had been accidentally designed for kerbin gravity...), involved leaving the be-probed transfer stage, with its surfeit of volume for fuel, including a bit of xenon (which ascent module was meant to top off from) in Eve orbit as a fuel-depot/observation station. The intended rescue craft will have the much-lighter ascent module pull an ion-powered return drive from the orbiting transfer stage instead. Meanwhile, the "I Was Dared to Fly This" ion probe that's been bogarting the screen time in my Bring-em Home project will be be recieving a mission extension package out at the mun with some more solar panels and bunch more xenon, to allow it go visit Duna, Ike, and Dres.

When you put a tiny atmospheric probe on a vehicle with with enough delta-v to exit the system repeatedly "so it can get there faster".

Almost exactly what @Gaarst does. In some situations I'll have a high-ish TWR lander up top which serves double-duty as the LES, then instead of hitting 0 to pop chutes and ditch thrusters, I'll just hit 'L' and land the thing nearby, on top of the VAB for extra points.

Dear lamps, did you take a picture of your screen with a phone? Welp, if we're tossing up our first intentional screenshots, then I think that'd be this thing here from August 4th 2013, instead of that barely visible thing I posted upthread: 'Looks like I thought the sunrise was cool. Disturbingly, that ship seems like it intentionally ditches a nuke.

Yes, but if you're going full brachistochrone, you'll need to start braking midway, giving the planet time to get away from you. ...and that got me too curious, so I started doing some Math. So it seems the delta-v needed for both burns is the square root of the straight-line distance times your ship's acceleration, and the time of the trip is twice the square root of the distance over your ship's acceleration. Interesting. With this in hand, you can find the straight-line distance, get the trip time from it, and then know exactly where to aim based on the known orbital parameters of the target body. Then you just set a node for the given dv, burn it, flip retrograde, and burn for the same time period, and you'll roll up to the target at about the relative orbital velocity of it to your starting point. So if Duna's at its periapsis of 21,783,189km and kerbin's at its constant height of 13,599,840.25km, and they're for some reason aligned, then that's a straight-line distance of 8,183,348.75 km. If our ship accelerates at 10m/s2, we get a burn time of sqrt(8,183,348.75km/10m/s) = 28606s = ~7.95hrs, and a trip time of 15.89 hours. Duna's orbital period is 17,315,400s, which is about 0.075 seconds of arc per second, so it'll move around 71 minutes of arc over the trip, or just over a degree, which is about negligible. So, we aim straight for it, burning at sqrt(8183348750*10) or about 286.1km/s, then flip around and do it again. Talk about a torchship! If we have a weaker drive, say 1m/s2, then we get a burn time of 90,461s = ~25.13hrs, a trip time for 50.26hrs, 113 arcminutes of Duna movement, and since a's conveniently 1, clearly 90.461km/s dv expended either side of turnaround. So, Slashy's entirely correct, you can ignore planetary movement when doing a brachistochrone transfer in a torchship.

Please forgive the necro, but there's an easy-mode solution here if you quite want a pressurized, rotating hab on non-rotating superstructure -- dont' pressurize the bearing. Keep your propulsion and service modules, your docking astrogation nice and steady, and have your rotating hub include its own, internal airlock to a non-pressurized interface section where astronauts and supplies can come in and out, around which the bearing goes, nice and evacuated. A few hand-holds to match apparent rotation when entering or exiting, with the rest of the non-presurized portion of the ship abaft. Power from the service modules can transfer via an induction interface in the bearing hub, and the hab can have its own darn cooling system, with friendly company, and gambling.

I'd pick a likely spot on the target orbit, set a node to eject that-a-way, and increase it until an intercept shows up. Then keep increasing it, such that you dreadfully overshoot. Then put a second node around halfway along your trajectory, and pull it retrograde until the intercept comes back. Then adjust the timing and burn amounts until you've "minimized" the needed delta-v and are still within your ship's thrust capability.

In fairness, a contract like that should have a high enough payout that it'll more than cover sending that ant out to Eve, so accidentally wasting a Kerbin-specced rocket shouldn't impact the profit much at all.

Does one need KIS to connect VAB-attached EVA strut connectors?

If you want it to mean something, you can try out wacky mods like Kerbal Construction Time. It turns time spent timewarping into time spent turning science points into real R&D, and building your creations. It also gives incentive to re-use workhorse designs, as things built before build faster. Er, if you're on PC or mac, anyway, which is probably what @ZooNamedGames was getting at.

I recall they very briefly did, and kerbs on EVA displayed mono as their resource. In which case, I'll bet a kerbal's dv is findable by their mass and the isp of an RCS block. They've got I think 5 units of the stuff, but I don't remember if their mass goes down when burning like it should. So it's either ln(kerb_mass/(kerb_mass-5u_mono))mono_Isp*g, or RCS_block_thrust*(5/RCS_block_flow)/kerb_mass.

SSTOs, so dull. Weary of the acronym, really. For lulz, how about a silly Buran-style shuttle on a Falcon-ish recoverable booster that goes and lands itself while the shuttle coasts to apoapse? That sounds amusing.

Nope, better efficiencies are to be had by drilling through the sound barrier and going a little bit hypersonic. Gravity losses tend to trump aero drag unless you're doing something silly. Fear the temp gauge, but don't fear the flames.

Some, but possibly a lot less than Kerbol had. ...Maybe. The ship I designed is set up to run its engines at full throttle out at Kerbin orbit. However, depending on the strength of the target system's star, the sphere of insolation sufficient for running full throttle could potentially be annoyingly small. The proffered ship would take around 18 hours to counter burn back down to as far as it can, and only 10 of those hours are at full power, you could wind up in Problem town. (and even with plenty of Oberth in play, the same fuel outlay will not slow you as much as it sped you up if the new star's not as heavy as the one you accelerated around, excepting dense things like neutron stars, where you can get real close). I do so hope that enough energy to sail out to Kerbin's orbit around Kerbol isn't more than the amount needed to escape the target system. That'd be inconvenient. I probably should've mentioned that wrinkle to the OP when I blithely said you could just burn nearly half your fuel each way to get there fast. Of course, the target star could be brighter, in which case I've just overbuilt a bit. As luck would have it, the vehicle I'm using as an example would have around an hour from TWR .088 to .098, before promptly dropping to .033 and wandering up from there, having dropped that plate with 6 engines on it. Though that is of course, at full throttle.

That depends a lot on how massive the target system's star is. If we're coming out of the Kerbol system like a bat outta heck with however much speed we manage to pull by burning ~46km/s worth of gas as close to the star's surface as we can, either the target system's star needs to be as heavy or moreso than Kerbol, or you're going to to want to start burning a bit early, like when coming in towards Moho.

Oooh, Kronal still works in 1.1.3? Very nice, I haven't used it since .90.

Do keep in mind, the OP has no need for 100km/s to reach their targeted extra-solar system -- that's only there to cut transit time by going a lot faster than needed, then doing a turn-around burn to slow down for intercept, like an under-powered torch ship. One can sac a few years to save a few km/s getting to the sun if they like, but the point of bringing all that gas in the first place is to get there faster. Turnaround's going to be kinda slow going at first, since the target system's star will still be pretty far off, leaving the burn to have to throttle down enough to run largely on RTG power, but it'll crank up as the star looms closer.

No, they are payload effectively. You use them later in the launch, when they work better. Using them earlier is inefficient, as it'll make you bring extra fuel. I do that too, it works a treat, but the plumbing costs extra, and may not be available depending on carreer progress. It's also not as cheap as a purely solid stage, though it can be a lot easier to control. You won't actually have low thrust all the way, as even SRBs get stronger as they approach their vaccuum Isp. I think you mean SRBs are cheap, but heavy. Expensive definitely doesn't describe 'em. It's definitely feasible, just annoyingly tricky.

At last I have done it -- a feasible stock-part interstellar probe. 100,270m/s in 22 stages for only 170.4 tonnes, in a not-too-evil 466 parts. The XenonBreeze Extra-Solar Explorer variant c: This thing is staged in a manner actually consistent with current 1.1.3 fuel flow, meaning it really does have 100km/s on board. In fact, s11 and s12 actually take advantage of a quirk it possesses, dumping empty 700 unit tanks on the outside while a center column of 5200 unit tanks remains mostly full. This saved enough mass to get away with only 12 extra engines in the last 5 stages, allowing for a quartet of 1x6 panels to be used instead of a 4th pair of gigantors. Since this thing is actually flyable if you can get it upstairs (sectioning and orbital assembly may prove necessary), here's the breakdown of dv, burn time, and TWR per stage, plus some other stuff from the main design document: And here's the .craft file: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/59091477/Monstrosities/XenonBreeze Extra-Solar Explorer - c.craft

Impressive! I've had similar designs with a heatshield fail miserably. I'm thinking the cubic octos I was mounting the chutes on were transmitting heat too directly, cooking the poor kerb. Good job on yours, though!

Heheh, "decided". Here's my first: An accidental and terribly-lit shot of some little probe craft from .19.

Knowing things about how docking ports do, I'd rather have a down-facing in-line or shielded port, with room underneath it, and a special service landing craft that has rover wheels which engage when the landing legs are pulled in, plus ports on little tabs stick out beyond the wheels and main body. Manuever the port under the base's port, then hit the landing gear to raise the service port to meet it. Wheels are pretty buggy right now, but I think that's aircraft wheels and not rover wheels.

I think it used to be "undock" and "decouple node". Undock would leave focus on the craft the port belonged to, while decouple node would give it to the other craft. I didn't actually know it'd changed.