EladDv

A) i am using this from now on. B) there is an easy way to untangle multidimensional pasta- you go one dimension higher i mean how cant you see it? next thing you'll say you cant visualize 4d platonic solids pahhh!

might want to take a look on this thread 26.2 g's . slap on some more legs and it will be capable of over 500kN of force (but with lower acceleration) like HERE (sorry no pics but it looks almost the same) Oh and That post has some more info and good tables for these kinds of drives.

@BahamutoD have you been able to fix that weird bug with guards not doing so well in anti-missile missile interception while on the ground?

ahhh i remember the old nostalgia threads...those were the days

i agree- it'd make it much more realistic and easier to control with new aero

can you make the lava overheat vessels on touch?(or just emit heat)

i dont have a source for that, i saw that on the forum, but take into account that the landing reduces payload capacity by 20-40% and you can see figures around the 1/7-1/10 of the fuel left for the landing. right now it's just estimations nothing concrete but a falcon sure dosnt land empty and seeing how the rocket landed on the barge last time you can see the engine firing and the rocket not going upwards for about a second or so (engine response times are much smaller) from that you can deduce that the merlin is capable of making an almost landed falcon hover for at least a few seconds. i agree but when people say stuff like "BO beat SpaceX" i correct them, and when they say stuff like "the falcon 9 cant hover" i try to find whether it can and bring that to their knowledge, i am all for BO to succeed in the space business but comparing new shepherd to the falcon family is like comparing an apple to the moon and we are not newton my friend.

of an empty one no, but falcons don't land without fuel, at the last stages they probably have enough mass so the merlin has low enough throttle to hover, it'd take about 1/20 of the launch fuel mass to be enough for the merlin to be able to go low enough to make it hover, and taking into account that musk said that the ratio of left over fuel was 1/7 of the launch fuel mass i'd say they can hover for at least a significant portion of the landing if they want to

Double.

i had an idea to throw bananas out of the ISS window but when they tried it all the bananas were sucked outside with the air, concepts aren't something that you can say "well i thought it would work" and launch an entire multi-trillion $ (if not more) program with, they couldnt even test the fusion tech how would they consider building this?

Technically it can hover even at launch, the new merlin 1D+ engines are throttleable down to 55%. hovering isnt a big deal landing is much more demanding and the way spaceX does it makes it much harder with a lot more points of failure, i am also sure that the single merlin on the F9v1.2 can throttle deep enough to make it hover(it'd be way more risky to not have this capability, if you can you probably want to maintain speed at the last couple dozen meters) i just dont see why they'd want to do it.

I am not a rocket scientist and especially not an engine expert but from what i understand every engine has the capabilities to be a booster and a vacuum engine it mostly depends on the expansion rate and bells the engine has- take a look at the merlin 1D Vac

i guess so, you could probably calculate that up to a certain range at least. i'd guess they can do around 1 TWR since you can see they are coming in way slower now. can't wait for the raptor mate...

now

I think it's been revised to 55% with the 1D+ as opposed to the 70% of the 1D Engine Merlin 1D Full Thrust Engine Type Gas Generator, Open-Cycle Propellant Feed Turbopump Merlin 1 D Thrust Sea Level: 756 kN – Vac: 825 kN Engine Diameter ~1.0 m Engine Dry Weight 470 kg Burn Time 162s Specific Impulse 282s (SL) 311s (Vac) (M1D Standard) Chamber Pressure >97 bar (M1D Standard) Expansion Ratio 16 Throttle Capability 55% to 100% from http://spaceflight101.com/spacerockets/falcon-9-ft/

well you could make the landing legs with some stock hinges the main problem really is that the rocket will be OP for stock KSP

not without some clipping

well the air pressure and drag above 55km is very low so it wont really slow you down much, also if you use time warp from other crafts it will put all the crafts on rails which means physics stops being calculated for them and possibly you would be able to orbit at any height given enough speed (but then you might burn up at the atmo)

aluminium* (that's the correct way you rebel americans!) yeah tank butts should be procedural i would love make an accurate falcon 9 (at least to scale) but i can't because engines are either not strong enough at 0.625m or i can't fit them under the tank nicely (vector bell engines are huge and they are also way too strong) and 1.25m engines will fit without the butts. but on the other end it would end the joke of "i like big butts and cannot lie" of getting big engines on small tanks and i'll miss it...

Soontm

yeah i have a few new laws- The First law of Kraken Drives: the probability of a kerbal to be killed on a craft that contains a kraken drives increases exponentially in proportion to the time since the mission has started and the time since the last kerbal was killed by the kraken, this took many experiments to confirm and sadly no one kerbal has survived to tell about their encounter with the kraken so far, may they rest in peace within the great void between dimensions. Pk= 1-e-(Nk/(T+Tk)) Pk probably of a kerbal to be killed. N is the number of kraken drives on his vessel. T time since the start of the mission. Tk time since the last kerbal was killed by the kraken. The Second law of Kraken drives: a special case of the first law for single drive on it's own, a Kraken drive that has been activated has a certain chance to fail on the next activation, the more times you activate it the more likely it is to fail,and this is also proportional to the acceleration that the drive produces and the time elapsed since the mission started. This case was developed by schrodinger kerman after many "thought" experiments he conducted which involved a kerbal and a kraken drive inside a box. Pf =1-e -1/((N+1)/Ifr + (Ah *T)) where: Pf probably to fail. N is the number of times the device was activated. Ifr the intrinsic failure rate of the drives which has universally been confirmed to be [deprecated]. Ah acceleration in m/s2. T time since the start of the mission. The Third law of Kraken Drives: if a drive is active while it's orbital speed drops below 800 it will destroy the vessel. This was observes after the first few kerbals to not go insane from the kraken or just plainly die were blown to bits after they tried to land back at kerbin, they accelerated from orbital speeds back down and then blew off the radar and since weren't recovered, rumors say their bodies are still out there near the kraken's lair to fend off intruders and curious kerbals. Pd = { O*(Ah/|Ah|) *(800-|V-Ah |)*((800- V)/|800- V|)<0 Pd=1 { Else Pd=0 Pd the failure probability. V your current orbital speed. Ah the acceleration in relation to the direction of your current orbital speed. O a binary variable- if the drive is on then the value is 1, if not the value is 0. Please note that |X| represents an absolute value of a variable While the mathematical sentence looks very complex it's only to represent the data in the most accurate way, this can logically be broken down to a much simpler version as a chain of binary variables which correspond to different states.

actually it landed softly the only problem was a leg malfunction not a landing procedure malfunction, a hardware failure not connected to the barge landing and a cause that would have compromised any landing attempt even on land as it says on my sig- i am here there and everywhere

sounds like they have nailed the landing, the leg not locking all the way was the cause for the landing failure, very promising i dont want to say "mostly intact" but it is much better than i anticipated to go after a RUD

well seeing as they have the advantage of a more gentle landing g load profile it might be enough to justify if agencies want to get gentle and fragile experiments down from the ISS, also the ability to land on any conventional airport is a good reason too if you have time sensitive experiments to check on

well it could have fell on impact and not after stabilization and that's much harder, the confirmation sounds good but it could have toppled even with an intact leg, i guess they'll need some more time to crunch the data before we get a clear cut answer