tater

Slashy, the Lagrange points L1 and L2 work for the counterweight.

Do not answer! Do not answer! Do not answer!

Because the movie was absurd?

No kidding, this is incredibly important work.

Thanks for this post! Awesome.

There is another thread not terribly old about the same subject. You have to remember that the devs have limited manpower. Honestly---and I play exclusively with rockets, not planes---I think that any new rocket parts should have unique capabilities, so there are trade offs choosing one or another. In a perfect world we'd have complete sets that were Kerbal analogs. The stock pods certainly have the NASA design sense, but they are not direct copies. SO a set of Russian-inspired parts would be good, but they do not need to be direct copies.

Yeah, it's incredibly tight, I agree. Of course Kraft Ehricke was no slouch, so it's fair to say he considered the obvious drawbacks. There is a 2d volume as well (Dynamics).

A few things, the slider shown is just the art in the book. You could just as well have multiple thrusters on that as well for failures. I think this technique was proposed exclusively as a lifter for lunar-mined propellant transfer to orbit, so the whole thing is an ascent stage (so if it lands partially full, it has an abort mode built-in). As such a cargo vehicle, it has no need of a crew, so no crew is at risk. Honestly, any reusable vehicle designed to lift ISRU propellants should certainly be unmanned anyway, as every kg of crew compartment hurts efficiency. Clearly you'd arrange this runway such that any failures would result in the debris missing the base. For this forum it seems pretty relevant, though, as it's kinda kerbal. As for the slideway maintenance, yeah, that's an issue to groom it, but it's predicated on a lunar mining base that requires robotic bulldozers that scoop stuff up, anyway. Perhaps they dump the tailings as a layer? Again, it might be not worth looking into, I just remembered reading it, and thought it might be interesting to discuss, and it has been.

Yeah, I know, I wasn't gonna type out all the components of regolith on my phone

Thruster fails on normal lander. Boom. The surface would be prepared, it's sort of a runway. Computer fail would kill any lander.

You seem to be under the impression that the vehicle impacts normal to the surface at that velocity. The idea he posited was that the craft could impact the surface at a tiny vertical velocity because it's at such a shallow angle. The same can be said of, say, the Space Shuttle. Shuttle landed at about 100 m/s, and did just fine. If it had done so in a vertical dive, the outcome would've been somewhat different. The idea was in fact a rolling landing, minus the wheels, which would be replaced with large skids. Whereas an aircraft uses lift combined with throttle to control sink rate, this craft would use rockets to control the sink rate, and would use them continuously during the skid to keep the nose up, and the skids optimally contacted to the surface. I'm not even suggesting it works, we have no idea. It was a novel suggestion, however, and interesting to consider.

I think that in addition to normal "Sandbox" mode, there should be a sandbox mode where you can place a KSC on any world, or even in orbit around any world, as well as the option to have a ship created at whatever VAB appear in orbit (yeah, sorta like hyperedit). Note that to not look awful, they could make an extra-Kerbin version of KSC for this purpose. It would be a dome habitat/facility and a VAB with landing pad. The orbital station would be a big station (a few meta-parts to avoid lag).

A lunar elevator would involve trips of possibly weeks.

Regarding the USILS habitation stuff. One, I actually like the idea of rating habitats not based upon "seats" but in fact volume, or even the multiplier he added. A "public space" that otherwise has no function makes bases look/feel more realistic, but if they are just dead weight... A gym might be a good multiplier. Now the remarks in his cfg say to use the non-habitat (basically parts without beds implied) mass as the multiplier. This is odd to me, but that's what you'd have to do to be compliant. It seems like anyone making a parts mod could instead use the internal volume if that part as a multiplier using some formula (i.e.: perhaps the stock cupola has a multiplier of 1.1 based on volume, then scale to that). There is also the recycler, which could either be a pod like the other USILS consumables, or the battery parts, or it can be assumed as part of another unit.

No, none of it is cheap. It's just that seeing the talk about ramps, raglans, and other novel ideas instead of an elevator made me remember the slider, and I thought people might be interested in it. Dr. Ehricke died shortly after that paper was accepted, so the idea sort of died with him.

This particular idea was proposed in the context of a regolith mining base. Such a facility would be scraping off large amounts of regolith anyway to separate the Oxides that form most of the regolith. The idea was an 80km long runway of fine sand. Again, pretty kooky, but not entirely impossible, I suppose.

Crew? Why would you even use a crew? It's not like the guy would be micromanaging the slide, the computer would do it. As I recall from the class, as well as all the stuff at various Space conferences (Space '90, '91, ... etc) they were all concerned with the fact that mining doesn't actually supply excess propellants. In fact, it can only really offset landing costs. Ehricke's goal was to try and make it possible (from a propellant balance standpoint) to deliver net propellant to LMO. I'm not saying it's even possible, but it's certainly an interesting concept that is outside the box.

This is strictly speaking not true, particularly in the original NERVA design. They lost about 17kg of the solid core due to ablation as I recall. The later work in nearby (to me ) Los Alamos solved most of those problems, however, and newer designs indeed have very little radioactive material lost in the exhaust. You are right of course about the hydrogen being just fine.

Krafft Ehricke proposed a Lunar Slide Lander. they'd prepare a long landing strip on the surface (robotic bulldozers, basically) and land via a very shallow approach using a tiny fraction of the dv required for normal landings on the Moon. They'd then, to borrow from KSP, lithobrake, using skids and sliding along the surface. The craft would have apply radial thrust to control the slide, he figured about 120 m/s worth of dv over about 90 seconds. It's kind of kooky, but a novel idea. Note that the point of this lander is I think to land empty tanks to haul off ISRU derived propellants. It's in the last chapter of the textbook from a class I took in the 90s (Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century).

Crash tolerance of 45 m/s is pretty high, but the pod could survive and the crew not... that said, why is the mk3 cockpit 60 m/s? And it's lighter. And it has more monoprop and a bigger flywheel. Talk about needing to be nerfed. Oh, I forgot, it's a spaceplane part

That still rotates, it's just bigger (any given XX meter wide cross-sectional slice is a torus, basically).

It's odd seeing that design, and "Beowolf" in the same place, because that design looks rather a lot like like a Traveller scout ship variant. It's even about the same size (within 2m)

Rotate the whole thing and make the docking craft match, as per the Pan Am spaceplane docking in 2001

I'm just a realist.

Not really, for most of them. Some of them the government shouldn't even do at all, frankly.