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Just made a Phoenix-inspired SSTO with lots of margin(more LEO payload than dry mass). Powered by 10 Merlin 1D+ and two Vulcain 2 engines: http://imgur.com/iqC6f7V Being able to get back to building cool rockets is awesome.

Just made a Phoenix-inspired SSTO with lots of margin(more LEO payload than dry mass). Powered by 10 Merlin 1D+ and two Vulcain 2 engines: http://imgur.com/iqC6f7V Being able to get back to building cool rockets is awesome.

Out of curiosity, what is this ROMini thing that was mentioned on the previous page?

Install Principia on stock KSP?

That is incredibly cool! I'm guessing you can also observe Jupiter/Saturn multi-eclipses and get fairly accurate timings for those?

Any chance that this mod could get RO support? http://mods.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/239291-spacex-landing-legs It's easy to install using CKAN and provides the only key SpaceX part that isn't available as RO-modded stock parts or replicable using procedural parts which is great for low-memory installs, where single-part mods are king.

Eyeballed Farquhar transfer! I'm working on getting better at quickly putting stuff into good halo orbits so I can incorporate L2 comsats into my next career mode save with remote tech. With ion engine fine tuning I was able to get down to ~1 stationkeeping burn per munar orbit @ ~0.2 m/s.

First, get close enough to where you need to be. There aren't many visual references, I personally did it by picking an orbit that just grazed the Mun SOI and canceling my velocity relative to Mun surface when I saw Kerbin reappearing from behind the mun. After that, I performed a 20 m/s burn that gives you a bit of velocity towards the kerbin-mun axis and a bit of inclination, until I saw a corkscrew-ish pattern towards the mun or outwards which is round rather than elliptical. Incidentally, I had an easier time seeing it when the trajectory was falling outwards. When you have that, keep adjusting your trajectory with burns directly along the kerbin-mun line (use the plotting frame navball) every so often to make you fall towards the mun if you were escaping, or towards escape if you were falling towards the mun. To some extent you are spending fuel on hovering, but if you are close to the Lagrange point it will be almost nothing and you should be able to bring it down to single digit or less than single digit m/s per orbit. I had a much harder time doing it in RSS, since KSP needs all planet rotation axes to be aligned with each other, so the Moon's rotation axis relative to its orbit is wrong and Moon surface velocity is no longer helpful. = ( TLDR: Halo orbits are self correcting in the directions perpendicular to the Kerbin-Mun axis, but you need to stationkeep to not fall outwards or towards the Mun. Away from the lagrange points this is equivalent to hovering. Close to the lagrange point the delta-v cost of "hovering" is tiny. Also, staying in a halo orbit is quite a lot easier than trying to balance at the actual lagrange point.

A few neato Kerbin-Mun orbits orbits in stock KSP + principa: http://imgur.com/a/u41SA First one is a Mun almost-capture, where the craft goes far enough out that Kerbin perturbation turns a retrograde munar orbit into a prograde munar orbit. The second one is a Kerbin-Mun Halo orbit around their L2 point. Stationkeeping delta-v needed should be less than 2 m/s per month, but it needs constant baby sitting as in 4-5 stationkeeping burns per orbit. If you don't babysit it for half a halo orbit it will either fall into an unstable prograde mun orbit or get flung out into a solar orbit. First one is plotted in an inertial Mun-centered frame, second one is obviously Kerbin-Mun corotating.

Great work. Every time I've tried to do that, my flight planner crashes the game because I plotted a trajectory that intersects earth.

All right, tried it out on a fresh install, now the Kerosene works just fine.

Huh. If your install has kerosene working, I'll try this with a fresh install. Thanks again! If you are still editing the config file you posted, I'd suggest also swapping the thrusts in case someone else grabs this config. The kerosene-burning mode is supposed to have the higher thrust.

Thanks a lot for the config file! That is exactly what I needed! I'm having a weird bug though. It seems to require LqdOxygen twice instead of requiring LqdOxygen and Kerosene, even though the config file clearly specifies the latter. This doesn't affect gameplay too much since Kerosene and LOX have similar densities, but I can't figure out why the game does this.

Hi there! I've been playing around changing configs around to make historical engines for realism overhaul. One engine that I'd love to play around with is the RD-701, which could switch from a 330s seal level/415 vaccum isp mode which used a dense Oxygen + Hydrogen + Kerosene tripropellant configuration, and a 460 vac isp mode which used ordinary hydrolox. Basically a better RD-180 which can also transform into an SSME mid-flight. I've tried modifying the config of the stock RAPIER to do what I want(I don't care much about looks for now) but I couldn't get it to stop requiring inlet air even when removing intake air from the list of resources. How do I get it to work? Closed cycle works like a charm even with real fuels though. Is there a simpler way to make the mode switching work if I don't need/want air-breathing without messing with an air-breathing engine?

So, the USAF just gave SpaceX a major grant to develop their Raptor engine which "requires shared cost investment with SpaceX for the development of a prototype of the Raptor engine for the upper stage of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles". In other word, future Falcon 9 and FH variants will have a Raptor upper stage, and having access to the Raptor US variant will be necessary to make a Falcon 9. Is there any config available for the Raptor engine? Expected stats are 2300 kN thrust, 380s vac Isp, and an O/F ratio of 3.8. T/W ratio hasn't been mentioned by any SX employee but should be >100. EDIT: made one myself, where I added a config to the J-2X engine from AIES. Will share soon.

Kerbol-synchronous orbits are not currently possible as I understand it because of no J2 moments for the Kerbin system. For RSS and sun-synchronous orbits around Earth, you have this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit with a formula for the inclination with a given semi-major axis. For L1, I suggest playing around in cis-lunar or cis-munar space for a while with a ship that has lots of fuel available as you build intuition. Beyond the lagrange points, distant retrograde orbits are also fun to play with. I have a question myself: since planetary orbits are integrated just like spacecraft orbits, is it possible to move small moons around with a big enough ship?

I was being fairly conservative, and thus mentioned only near-term technologies that can safely be expected to launch within the next few years. 4 kg/kW arrays is what you get with deployables, most of that is structural mass that has to survive launch. Thin film solar can have a mass as low as 0.2 kg/kW, excluding the structure that holds it. If you use something like Spiderfab to make a good truss frame in space that does not have to survive launch to orbit(which would then weigh less than the solar arrays themselves), there's at least an order of magnitude improvement over the technologies that I mentioned in my previous post. I am a big fan of the SAFE-400 and similar reactor designs for outer solar system exploration, since it'd allow to do things like a Pluto orbiter. For manned inner solar system exploration, solar is way more reliable and higher T/W ratios are possible.

Suggestion(pretty please with sugar on top): Could you add at least one conformal map projection(mercator, stereographic polar, ect)? That would help immensely to know the bearing of a flight path relative to the north, which would be useful for correctly launching into the plane of an orbiting spacecraft from the surface.

Is there a config available for the announced Merlin 1D+ with the increased thrust over the 1D?

Is there any option for using Ion engines at the moment? These were by far my favourite craft in .25 when orbit manipulator was available. If there isn't any orbit manipulator replacement, how should I go about to change thrust values on SEP without breaking everything?

The Delta II failed once in the 90s. A single failure suddenly coming out of the blue says nothing about whether the manufacturer cuts corners or about the long-term safety of the rocket. If anything, the security argument is not really in favor of SLS/Orion. The heat shield needs a complete redesign meaning that the data from the earlier Orion test flight won't be of any use. This effectively amounts to sending astronauts on a vehicle that will only have flown once before, vs on a rocket that would have flown 40+ times by the time commercial crew gets going.

Some news: Highlights: 1. Ions and electrons in the same plume, no neutralization needed 2. Primarily using argon, 6N thrust level achieved (estimated isp 3000s) 3. More than 10000 firings of VX-200 4. 70% efficiency with argon and ISP of 5000s. 5. With krypton, they could reach 75% efficiency. 6. CDR milestone beginning 2016. 7. ISS flight milestone beginning of 2018. 8. ISS reboost currently requires 7t of fuel and 210 million USD per year 9. Smaller 80kW unit would require 1/10 of this cost 10. various application specific animations shown The improvement in efficiency is probably the most important thing. Its improved from low-end to fairly high-end. ---------- Regarding power, people on this thread are severely underestimating solar power, which has seen huge improvements in recent years. Essentially, nuclear reactors are never going to get better than flexible blanket or thin-film arrays in the inner solar system, period. With DSS megarosa arrays or ATK's upgraded megaflex arrays, the power can readily be scaled up to multi hundred kilowatt levels, at about 4 kg/kW. With 2 MW of these arrays and either nested halls or Vasimr, you have faster than chemical transits to Mars, in the 4-5 month range. 800 kW is enough for ~8 month transfers with one third of the mass needed using chemical. Regarding payload, this is assuming an architecture similar to the one outlined in the Nasa DRM 5.0. 40 day transits are made of pixie dust and Ad Astra is imho ill-advised to mention them, but shorter transits with far less mass needed in LEO are definitely possible, and probably the best path to Mars at this point.

Question: RO includes many launch pads on Earth. Is it possible to also add launch pads on Mars (such as a future SpaceX base) to get a feel for launch profiles on Mars, or is that hardcoded into the game?

Real life jet aircraft were never thrust limited, the bottleneck has always been aerodynamics and heating. Practical supersonic flight became possible due to the discovery of the area rule. After that it was limited by materials technology due to heating issues. Getting into orbit is still very easy with rapiers. Even without them, the stock aeris 4A gets into orbit with a lot of margin assuming a proper flight profile.

I took the stock Aeris 4A and replaced the rocket engine with an areospike. It easily got into space with a lot of margin.