Leszek

I am not sure why they did this. The basic capsule still has the shakes and kills your battery quickly, meaning manual entry sometimes. I thought that perhaps they didn't want to add weight to the rocket but the new aero makes it easier to get to space anyway so it should more than balance out. Perhaps some ballast parts should be made. (That way you can have off center balance, or not.) These parts should ideally be sandwiched between the capsule and the heat shield.

It came out 35 minutes ago here. no not really.

Question What is cheaper a single non-reusable F9 with 11 ton payload, or a reusable F9 Heavy that has only an 11 ton payload?

I agree it is less then ideal but it works. Regarding other craft, they are on rails unless they are within physics range. (2.5 heading out, 2.2 coming in)

I am always at least at 5x warp unless I need to be normal speed. When in time warp you are on rails and when on rails you don't deviate.

While you wait, instructions to do just hat can be found in this thread here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/112419-OMSK-Space-Products-Stockalike-Atlas-rockets-more!-Luna-3?p=1831764&viewfull=1#post1831764 The node isn't visually perfect but it works for this purpose.

Thanks guys. I have read the documents and the posts and I understand. Reading back, it might have sounded like I was a little ungrateful in previous posts. This is not the case, I was just thinking too much about the problem and not enough about how my posts might be interpreted. I do that sometimes.

I understand this sentiment, but I think it is counter productive. We will not have the technology to send humans to Mars until we try to send humans to mars. We took 13 years to do the Human Genome Project, the technology we gained by actually doing the project helped us complete it 2 years earlier and now we complete them much faster and cheaper than before. If we wait until the technology exists we will never have the technology, or at least not for a very long time. If we ever want to go elsewhere we will need to work towards that goal. That doesn't mean we defund everything else for that goal, but in my humble opinion it is a bad idea to just sit back and wait.

I never said nor meant to imply you didn't know about science and I think biology is AWESOME. Seriously I own perhaps 2 dozen books on biology and um "A Brief History of Time." My point was to highlight the real issue at play and to point out that skepticism has its place here. Perhaps I took your previous post to pessimistically but that is how it sounded to me.

It can seem that the naysayers are luddites and curmudgeons, but they aren't. Most of them will be just as excited as you if this works in the end. Many will be more excited. There are really good reasons to expect this to fail and and our continued pointing this out should not be taken as ivory tower arrogance. If this works, there is a chance (albeit remote) that even I could end up on Mars. WOW. That is awesome. It would be lovely if it worked. But all the hope and excitement in the world doesn't change the fact that there are really good reasons to expect this to fail. No one is saying we shouldn't test the idea out. In science Data is the only thing that matters. What is being said is that there are really good reasons to expect this to not work. (Yes I said it 3 times. I will say it 400 if I have too.) So we should not be betting anything significant on its success. If the choice is funding this or mundane engine development, we should fund the mundane engine development. However the budget for this is small, a test that is definitive is coming, so lets do it. Just don't be surprised when it doesn't work. The issue in the grand scheme of things is that we have finite resources, crackpots come up with an infinite number of ideas, we can't explore all the ideas on the table. So we need to filter out the crackpot ideas or we will never develop anything. The disagreement is where one draws the crackpot idea line. This drive is square in the middle of the disputed zone, and much of that is only because it was already tested with success in preliminaries, otherwise it was a waste of money to even try. Now what does that mean if it works? Does that mean the policy of not testing crackpot ideas is wrong? No, it means the crackpots got lucky once and it is unlikely to happen again. We can't test every idea we have to put our money where the best chance of success will be. This is a heuristic, not a law of nature. Heuristics are wrong sometimes but right most of the time. Don't stand holding an umbrella in the middle of an empty field during a lightning storm is a Heuristic. If you don't get hit by lightning, does that mean the Heuristic was wrong?

In the case of pressure difference, how does one avoid a sputtering and inconsistent engine?

Well there is also the RCS and Fins at the top, they have machinery that supports them as well. The fuel tanks one of which is on top will still have fuel in them. If the rocket legs has an 18 meter span, then a 9 meter CG would break even with the footprint at 45 degrees. The rocket was not that steep when it fell over. So the CG has to be higher than that. Also the height of the rocket will change when the legs are deployed a bit. How high off the barge is the rocket suspended?

I don't, I was able to find that the span is about 18 meters. For CG estimation I have the following data: Mass Legs is 2,100 kilograms. Each engine has a dry weight of 450 to 490kg. The hole booster has a dry weight of 18kg. The booster is 43m high. source: http://www.spaceflight101.com/falcon-9-v11.html

KSP is like pizza, everyone likes it, but with different toppings. I agree with you mostly. There is more than a basic framework that needs to be in the stock game though. Just the same way that every pizza has the crust, sauce, and cheese. Exactly what it needs to be a base pizza is up to debate but I think Squad has it about right. My two cents.

I expect it will be relatively low but the F9 is a tall skinny booster. However the rocket could have its normal outside its footprint and still right itself. The RCS jets at the top were going full tilt to right it. So you have to figure out what angle it has to be to be not just outside its footprint but also have enough imbalance to overcome the RCS. So we also need to know the strength of the RCS.

Pressurization. A non-answer. If you are a blob of fuel floating in the middle of a tank, and you double the pressure of that tank, you are still in the middle of that tank. Triple the pressure, raise an order of magnitude, another... Eventually you will burst the tank but the blob of fuel will still be in the middle of it until then. Once the gas is at the intake the pressure helps push it through, but you would still need an ullage motor or equivalent to get it there. That is why I guessed a bladder above, the bladder would hold the fuel to the pickup while the pressure squeezes the outside of the bladder. Architeuthis, I see. So the surface tension part is the mechanism that holds the fuel to the PMD?

Ok so, I understand that with the main tanks in a rocket stage, the fuel needs to be pooled at the bottom instead of floating around if you want to light the engine. Some rockets, (Titan, Soyuz) do this by lighting the next stage while the first is still burning. Some stages such as Saturn V stages use ullage motors, solid rocket fuel motors that keep the stage in a state of acceleration while the main engine lights. Ullage motors are solid and the fuel doesn't move so zero G is not an issue. Some stages such as Centaur (As far as I know anyway) use RCS to push the stage and function as ullage motors just before the stage lights. So far so good. How is the RCS fuel kept from floating around the tanks they are in? My guess is that inside the tank the fuel itself is in a bladder and that you can pressurize the inside the tank but outside the bladder so that as the fuel is used it can't float around. But I am not sure such a system works in the cold. My next guess is that if the line is large enough, the fuel in the line can be used to bootstrap the rest of the system as needed. If this were the case I would expect RCS systems would need to sometimes do and then undo pointless maneuvers to keep the lines pressurized. I haven't heard of any such maneuvers and it also seems wasteful. So I Googled it, and then Youtubed it. Actually I did that in reverse order.... Anyway, my Googlefoo isn't good enough apparently, or I found the answer and just don't see it. (Even after looking at this text for example, I find that it is a lot of dry text for a simple answer that may not be in there: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/technology/sts-newsref/sts-rcs.html) Then I figured there is probably someone here who knows. So, why don't RCS tanks need ullage motors or equivalents of their own? _______Update________ So in the same text page I linked I found this: "surface-tension, propellant acquisition device" Which doesn't sound like any of my two guesses. I have read more about it from the text but I am having a hard time visualizing the text. It would be nice if there was a video but "surface-tension, propellant acquisition device" and similar doesn't find it. Any ideas?

Elon Musk says on Twitter: "Droneship is fine. No hull breach and repairs are minor. Impact overpressure is closer to a fast fire than an explosion." And the Space X music Video is back up in Canada at least.

Parody's are protected so it should be a false claim, it might have been a bot that flagged it.

Now it seems that this video is blocked in my country (Canada) due to copy right concerns by SME. Is that the same for you guys? I am confused because the video was a parody and it was made my Cinesaurus. I wonder who SME is?

Got to try out the Atlas V / Centaur in my new career. Made a Atlas V heavy. Very nice. Took off, wobbled and crashed right away. Had to rebuild my runway. It was over controlling. A quick look and the engine has a gimbal range of 3 degrees. Wow. In real life that would be modest but KSP likes to over control. Changed my gimbal range in the CFG to 0.5. Does it fly good with 3 degrees in stock aero? Also, what is OMSK stance on alternate cfg's? I have remote tech and the Centaur upper stage is in many ways like a spacecraft itself. So I have been clipping probe cores so they are hidden inside the tank. It occurred to me that I could make a CFG that would turn the Centaur fuel tank into a probe core. Then I could offer the RT alternate CFG's for anyone who wanted them but I don't want to do things like that without consent from you guys.

Looks really good, you just need the strutting and you are good to go methinks. Just so the engines don't look like they are hovering in air held by the fuel lines.

Watching the video, it looks like it was over controlling. The engine was gimbaled all the way over until after the rocket was past vertical. This then required another hard correction. It should have eased off as it approached vertical. I wonder if it was trying to hard to get exactly in the center of the barge. It pushed past vertical because it was just a little to far over past the target and because it was close to the barge and moving quickly it needed to do a hard correction to accomplish the adjustment. If this is the case then it would have been better for the rocket to accept being off target but within margins when below a certain height, or it should throttle to hover for a moment to perform last second maneuvers.

Well, I can't say because I don't know how much it slows the computer down. What is the average poly count on other parts? As you probably know it isn't the level of detail that makes things stockalike but how many parts they take to build in game and how many of those parts are readily useable elsewhere. With an engine that means that as long as it is one part to stick on the bottom of a tank, it is stockalike no matter the level of detail. So the question is reduced to computer performance. How much does this engine slow down the computer? I lack the information to answer that, so I will just say if the games runs fine with this engine below it, it is cool with me. Also it occurs to me that this engine, being without a shroud and having two bells, should have a higher polycount than a simpler engine to begin with.

That is the question. SSMEs are 30 something odd years old technology now. So I guess for both SpaceX and Blue Earth the question is how much have they advanced the technology?