MaverickSawyer

Far right is the Ranger bus. There's a deployable (but non-retractable) panel, battery pack, and antenna for it, as well.

I, for one, am deeply appreciative of that one... The stock version is FAR too bulky for my tastes.

So.... It has enough dV to do some pretty spectacular suborbital hops, doesn't it?

There's RCS on the bottom of the booster for full pointing control when the fins are not adequate.

Spent half an hour buried up to my ribcage in the left wheel well of a Beechcraft King Air, S/N LJ-35 (I.E. 35th King AIr ever built) safety wiring the turnbuckles for the aileron control cables... and I have to go back and do it all over, because it wound up being not exactly the neatest job. But, it was ina terribly awkward spot, all the way at the back of the nacelle, behind the aux tank feed line from the outer wing and the trim tab cables, so... Eh. Good practice, I suppose. I'll bring pics for y'all tomorrow.

Hmm. I guess I misunderstood ablative cooling, then, as I thought it was more prevalent in older engines from the '50s and '60s. I know from second-hand experience that building modern regeneratively-cooled chambers and nozzles can be an absolute hunchfuster, depending on the process used. It either needed extremely precise machining and advanced bonding techniques/facilities, or it's manual labor intensive. (Additive manufacturing could seriously upend that equation, but that's not germane to the discussion at hand.)

One last glamour shot, this time from the VAB... Technically, it's an Atlas Muo V 53x, as the second stage is not a Centaur Inon, but you get the picture... Thrust offset is actually pretty managable. RCSBuildAid says ~35 Kilonewton-Meters of torque in the downrange direction with the boosters lit, which is well within the vehicle's ability to compensate for.

Wait, lemme get this straight... You're worried about a combustible gas being used for cooling, and turn around to suggest that instead, they should create a high temperature, pure oxygen environment... One so hot that, if memory serves, can actually turnm molecular oxygen into atomic oxygen. Disregarding the fact that oxygen has terrible thermal absorption properties, you'd be exposing the entire vehicle to a HIGHLY oxidizing environment, and even stainless steel has its limits... Just look at the exhaust stacks of a Cessna. Flaming methane is actually preferable, as that would keep it from becoming trapped in the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.

Y'know, just had a bit of a brainwave... Ablative heat shields outgas to carry away the heat, right? I can't remember if the outgassing has an impact on the shock front, but if it does... Maybe there's an advantage to the venting of methane on the windward side... Something like gas film cooling in a rocket engine, perhaps?

I strongly suspect after. Think about it... Rocket engines use actively cooled walls in the hottest areas, right? It'd be easier from a production standpoint to use ablative cooling, but they use regenerative cooling instead because it's more reliable.

And that is precisely why Thiokol went for the segmented motors as early as Titan III: they had to ship the segments from Utah to either Canaveral or Vandenberg. Shuttle SRBs built on the knowledge base built up on those boosters. I think the largest segmentlrss SRBs that are currently in service are either the first stage of Minuteman III or the AJ-60s used on Atlas V... And those are transported by truck and trailer when they have to be surface transported. I think they airlift Minuteman if they need to go to Vandenberg, but AJ-60 is trucked from Sacramento, CA to Canaveral.

Huh. I did have trouble with docking last night using the previous version... I've downloaded the current version and I'll let you know how it goes.

Benefits of a gas generator cycle. If they tried that with Raptor at full power, I personally guarantee they'd have nothing left of the test stand in under a second. Staged combustion is EXTREMELY intolerant of errors or flaws... just ask the teams behind the NK-33 and Aerojet Rocketdyne's conversion of them for use on Antares... According to the incident report... That was an ox-rich staged combustion engine. Full-flow, like Raptor, is likely to be even less tolerant of abuse.

Basically, if it'll fit inside of a 1.875 meter diameter cylinder, has a 0.625 or 0.9375 m base, is less than 3 tonnes, and needs 1-1.5 km/s dV after reaching LKO, I'll use Delta. If I need a relay after arrival, the upper stage is generally perfect for that... just slap on an antenna or two and some deployable solar panels, and tada! Instant relay satellite.

Autostrut to grandparent, good sir, and you don't need KJR.

Opting to do a new post rather than updating the previous one, as the report is rather extensive... Succeeded in launching the experiment container (without crashing KSP this time )... In flight, transferring to the Salyut 1 station... Docked, with Bill inspecting the reinforcement cables it brought along with the experiment. God I love KIS... Shortly thereafter, the TKS-ER arrived at Minmus with Val, Maucal, and Stelgun Kerman aboard. Rendezvous and docking were no issue, and the three ladies happily moved into the spacious Bigby module... Maucal proceeded to remove the RCS clusters from the solar telescope that had been used to transpose and dock the telescope after orbital insertion, stowing them in the docking hub for later transfer back home. Maucal then deployed several preloaded science instruments for both current and future usage with the MOLE experiments. Following this, there was a few days delay while the next elements of my Minmus exploration program caught up with the much faster TKS-ER.. Starting with the "Mossie" single-seat scout lander arriving and performing a flawless rendezvous with Minmus Station. Val EVA'd over to the lander and detached it from the transfer stage, then docked it to the waiting ventral docking port of the station. There was some rather pungent curses issued in this process as the docking ports didn't want to work for a while, but it eventually clicked, and Val returned to the station's main habitat module. The transfer stage was then dispatched towards an eventual 400 km x 400 km orbit to serve as the second of three commsats over Minmus. Following less than a day behind the Mossie was the Minmus Sample Return mission. Using another Delta II upper stage as a transfer stage (which has also been put on a transfer to a commsat orbit) , it successfully inserted into low orbit around Minmus, detached, and began its descent to the Greater Flats... Courtesy of MechJeb's Translatron, a readout of time to impact, and a projected suicide burn start time, the lander happily decelerated, hovered, and automatically shut down its engines just above the surface. After a few seconds, the lander's solar panels and antenna deployed, and promptly ran a total of 13 experiments. Controllers then commanded the collection of all science into the return capsule, and the craft automatically fired the "punt" stage... This stage first kicked the return capsule and its integrated propulsion bus upwards at 4 m/s, then tipped it to a 45* angle and lit the second set of solid motors. these accelerated the probe to 50 m/s and lofted it over the nearby hills. some 30 seconds after the command to collect the science, the return capsule deployed its own solar panels and antenna, lit its ion engine, and proceeded to orbit, and from there, ejected back to Kerbin. Back on Kerbin, the experiment delivered to Salyut 1 had completed, so the crew packaged it (and some now-unneeded RCS clusters used in the docking of the lab module) into the delivery vehicle and sent it back to Kerbin on a punishing 9.8G reentry... The intense reentry was a (successful) attempt to put the capsule down just off the coast of the KSC... final splashdown was some 24 km off the shore of the Center, well within reasonable distance. Again, automation via SmartParts automatically ejected the heat shield and deployed the airbags, keeping the capsule afloat... if not necessarily upright. All in all, a highly productive evening for me, although there are certainly some lessons learned from these missions. Next up: Launching more experiments (and a crew rotation) to Salyut 1, a second crew flight to Minmus Station, recover the sample return mission via rendezvous and an EVA recovery from Salyut (before crew rotation, probably... ), and Val gets to follow in Jeb's footsteps by landing on Minmus to prove out Mossie before Stelgun gets to fly solo. Maybe toss in a shipment of some science experiments for the station, as well.

Delta = Seriously, I find myself using Delta II for many missions I run that require 1-1.5 km/s dV after reaching LKO... I just love that rocket. I may need to go so far as to add the slight delay between groundstart booster jettison trios, tbh... it just looks weird to have all six come off at once.

Launched a heavily automated sample return mission to Minmus... Liftoff! Airstart motor separation... Completing the push to orbit BECO-3 and upper stage ignition partway through the transfer burn to Minmus. Fairing jettison, 5 seconds into upper stage burn. Cruise mode enabled. The upper stage will be converted to a comms relay after releasing the lander on a suborbital path towards a promising biome. The lander itself is a one-time-use vehicle, as the engines will permanently shut down just before landing. At that point, the automation really kicks in, deploying solar panels and an antenna for the lander proper after a short delay to allow the craft to settle onto its landing legs, followed shortly thereafter by activating the scientific instruments. There is a hold built in to allow mission control to sort through the data and decide on which experiments to transmit, and which to transfer to the sample return capsule at the top of the stack. Making the transfer activates a short countdown, which then fires a decoupler and a pair of short-burn, low-thrust rockets to kick the ascent/return vehicle clear of the lander, then after a 5 second countdown, activates the twin solid rockets used to provide the initial kick clear of the surface before an ion engine takes over. While the above craft coasts to Minmus, chasing the single-seat lander and crew transfer vehicle launched previously, I also delivered another module to Salyut 1: The module in question is a Mark One Laboratory Extension lab from @Angel-125's excellent MOLE pack, which allows for even more science to be generated by running experiments over time within the module. I had planned to launch an experiment to it aboard a resupply capsule, but KSP chose the moment I hit the "Launch" button in particular to CTD (Crash To Desktop). Reboot of KSP is underway as I type this, so I may add to this later tonight with the follow-up report on that mission.

Yep, looks good. Could hardly tell where the merge happened until I went back and re-read the last page.

*coughs* Canonical, Disney Approved Data. The movies are FULL of inconsistencies, especially in ESD and RotJ. These have sparked endless debate about the *real* size of ships, yes, but almost exclusively the Executor, not the ISD. Back on topic, though... I'm increasingly curious as to how this is going to shake out. Part of me remains deeply skeptical, but I was also deeply skeptical of their plans to reuse the Falcon 9 first stage, and we all know how that turned out. It;s a shame they decided not to attempt reuse of the second stage as well... they've got a heck of a product with the Block 5 Falcon 9. It'd be a shame to just throw it away when they get their (literally) shiny new toy.

Hmm... What changed with the OGO solar panels recently that's save-breaking? Is it something that's easy to fix on my end, or will I have to wait until my in-flight missions using that panel no longer have them attached to update that particular part?

Second the suggestion of using BDB Apollo. The style is pretty much identical, and you get an absolute boatload of other parts as well.

Dude, I've been playing for 7+ years now, and even I sit back and look at what people accomplish and go ".... HOW??!?!?"

I have a bad feeling about this... Sorry, couldn't Resistance... Okay, I'll stop now. On a more on-topic note... launched the second vehicle to my Minmus station... Gotta love BDB. Also, tested a tilt-rotor design made of Airplanes Plus parts in an attempt to meet the requirements for the Kerbal Express Airlines "Hopper" class... Those darn KT-6 tilt rotors are horribly inefficient AND cannot get above 130 m/s to save their lives. There is NO way I can use them in a viable entry into that class... I lack both the speed and the range to meet required performance figures.

If you need help with the mirroring, talk to blackheart612, who made and continues to add to the Airplanes Plus! pack, which makes heavy use of that feature.