Starman4308

What I did was probably a smidge over-simplistic: I used the burn time divided by the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) reported by TestFlight, and assumed all engine failures would be independent events. True failure rate will be higher, because: Failure rates go up at certain events like engine ignition. Simple pilot error. Unforeseen design issues. Speaking of failures, I'm now piloting the Mariner II probe destined for Venus... to Mars. An RD-107 on the original launch attempt failed, but learning from the prior... issues, I made sure to have a second vehicle ready before accepting the contract. Let's just hope this one doesn't fail too. EDIT: Attempt #4 and I finally have a flyby of another planet without resorting to the debug menu! Well, mostly, I need to run a ~30 m/sec correction, but unless a hydrazine 1 kN thruster and at least two hydrazine RCS thrusters fail, I'm in the clear.

Last time I saw Elon's car, it was right next to Russel's teapot. Anyways, more later, but with a successful pad-abort and launch-abort test of the redesigned Mercury capsule, it was time to select the booster used for it. The old R8-Atlas-Able had initially been slated for use, but with continuing reliability issues of the Able upper stage, our engineers decided to make a mathematical comparison to the new Agena-E launch vehicle using standard Test Flight reliability metrics. LV failure of the Agena-E estimated at 5.3%. Not the greatest, but the is a fully functioning abort system onboard. In the future, we may be able to switch to a more reliable first-stage engine, since the E1, not the Agena upper stage engine, is limiting reliability. LV failure of the R8-Atlas-Able was estimated at 24.4%. I decided to go with the Agena-E: while it has slightly less delta-V to support high-orbit operations, and the first-stage engine has not yet been extensively tested, the known devil of the R8-Atlas-Able just has too high a failure chance. Three tests are planned before the first crewed mission in any event: a mass-demonstrator of the Agena-E, a fully uncrewed Mercury-Agena launch, and one mission crewed by a space monkey*. *No, I don't have a mod for that. It'll be an uncrewed launch, and I'll just pretend I have Cheese the Space Chimp onboard.

There is a thread for the Boring Company: Back on-topic, are we sure FH booster sep will occur at a low enough altitude for atmospheric effects to be hugely significant on the separation? To help out with a clean separation, assuming torque gets induced at the upper end, I could see the booster main engines gimbaled a bit inwards to help push the bottom end outwards a bit. From recent KSP experience separating some Soyuz-style booster stages, I have sepratrons both towards the top of the boosters, and a bit below the CoM to help push both top and bottom away, if that makes any sense whatsoever.

I think there's a difference in philosophy and gameplay style here. I'm pretty sure GoSlash is one of those who custom-designs a launcher for each new mission. This can maximize cost efficiency, since that means you have the absolute least amount of booster necessary to get payload to the target, but can be a bit time-consuming. I tend towards designing a set of boosters for common payload ranges, saved as subassemblies, and grab the smallest one that I think will be able to execute the mission. This is significantly reinforced by running heavily modded careers (including RP-0 on my latest career), where there are a million things to remember when designing boosters. Ullage, restarts, maneuvering, communication, the works: much simpler to not have to worry about that for each craft, by sticking a pre-designed booster under each payload. The downside to this approach, of course, is that you can't absolutely optimize the booster for the payload and mission. If the payload is 5.01 tons, and you have a 5-ton-payload and a 10-ton-payload booster, you're either going to run the margins thin on the 5-ton booster or shell out for the 10-ton booster.

Busyish last few days. First, I launched the first of four stockpiled GEO communication satellites on an R8-Atlas-Able-202. This... didn't quite have enough delta-V, the contract timeline was ticking, and the R8-Atlas-Able was my heaviest booster... that was in current use. A second Soyuz mass demonstrator mission had been planned, but it was cancelled, and five production-ready Soyuz boosters were ordered: four for the contract and one spare. The lessons learned from the first Soyuz mass demonstrator must have been enough. Time after time, Soyuz reached orbit with a beautiful Korolev cross. The first production geostationary satellite over Asia: I'm really quite happy with how the Soyuz booster turned out. I initially wasn't sure it would work: there was some real risk, because the mass demonstrator hadn't even gotten far enough to check that the booster stages would separate properly... but they do, and the resulting Korolev cross looks so good I had to revert-to-launch once because I accidentally clicked staging again, too distracted taking a screenshot. In other news, the Mercury program, already criticized for being tardy to carry our astronauts to orbit, has been delayed once again as abort systems proved insufficient, and a test article crashed, necessitating redesign of the abort and landing equipment. Additionally, a contract to place a communication satellite into a tundra orbit has been cancelled, as two attempts failed: once because the R8-Atlas-Able was once again insufficient to the task, and a second time because the Soyuz S1.5400 second stage failed. Between this, and the recent failure of a lunar orbiter mission to even reach Earth orbit due to AJ-37 shutdown, the Able-based R7 and R8 upper stages are slated to be cancelled as soon as practical, potentially replaced with the Agena upper stage engine. This necessitated a more ambitious mission plan for LRP-1, which was originally to collect farside photos of the Moon from a free return trajectory, but instead was tasked to enter an elliptical orbit and remain at the Moon for half a month until the return vector was favorable. Seriously, those AJ-10s have failed me for the last time... and the upgraded Agena looks like a wonderful engine, with 15 restarts, no ullage, and a specific impulse of nearly 300 s-1. It's already slated for use on some of my newer Soyuz flights as an optional 3rd stage. I'll want to redesign at least the R8-Atlas to use a different upper stage, since that's slated to carry the first Mercury missions. Though, speaking of replacing old hardware, I keep some sounding rockets at Palmachim; I will often accept sounding rocket contracts before orbital launches, and if those fail, I need a quick backup before the 90-day contract expires. I've designed a new sounding rocket based on the new NK-33 closed-cycle engine, and tested to see how it would stack up to my old Lightning series. It hit 18 Mm of altitude for just 750 funds. I was skeptical because the NK-33 engine was more expensive than what I used to use (A4 and RD-100 engines, which cost a mere 150 each), but the sheer performance of the NK-33 won out, letting me use a single liquid-fuel engine to reach altitudes higher than any other sounding rocket... and I can probably make it cheaper now by eliminating at least one of the Baby Sergeant upper stages which are clearly unnecessary to hit the 6 Mm top end of sounding rocket contracts..

I'm going to quote myself a bit here: In the end, there is a lot of dependence on mission profile, payload size/mass, available engines, and what you're trying to optimize for. For example, if optimizing on mass, you'd tend to use all liquid-fueled engines... but if optimizing for cost, first-stage solid rocket boosters are often an excellent choice. They have mediocre specific impulse and full/empty ratios, but they're cheap. In the end, a lot of it boils down to trial and error: design your payload and work backwards through the mission, trying out several different choices until you're satisfied with it.

As with many questions of optimal booster design, there is simply way too much "it depends" and non-analytical math going on to make absolute answers impossible. In general, what I've heard is that if two stages have similar efficiencies (specific impulse, fuel-to-not-fuel fractions), they should have similar delta-V, and if they're inequal, put more delta-V into the more efficient stage. In practice: design from the top down, figure out what you need for each part of the mission starting from the last part of the mission. A good example of this would be designing a Mun lander. For that, I would care more about having the Mun lander have a wide base for stable landing than about the mission having a 100% optimized delta-V distribution.

Ship Manifest will do it, including for some uncrewed vessels. Been useful on my recent RP-0 career.

That's not a free return trajectory. A free return trajectory is a specific type of translunar injection that leaves you doing a figure-8 around the Moon, returning (for free) back to Kerbin/Earth. You typically need to burn a bit earlier than usual and a bit more than usual to get a free return. Usually in KSP, even a rough translunar injection is good enough for flyby missions, since you can make corrections, often at perilune, to put your Kerbin periapsis back at ~30 km. The reason they went with a free return for the Apollo missions was in case the service module engine failed, something that isn't a concern unless you use a parts failure mod. EDIT: First, what Streetwind said. Second, a cislunar injection puts you into a prograde orbit around the Moon; your lunar periapsis is behind the Moon, and you wind up orbiting eastwards. A translunar injection puts you into a retrograde orbit, with lunar periapsis in front of the Moon. Translunar injections are generally a bit more expensive, and landing from a retrograde orbit is slightly more expensive, since when starting from a retrograde orbit, the Moon's rotation is working against you, not with you. Cislunar injections, if you don't brake into an elliptical orbit, will cause you to slingshot out at high velocity,/energy helping you escape Kerbin/Earth. That's what the Apollo planners wanted to avoid. Translunar injections help you stay in Kerbin/Earth orbit if you don't brake, with free returns being a specific case where you wind up returning to Kerbin/Earth atmosphere.

There have been some significant changes. You don't get the RT-10 at the start node anymore, and I'm not sure if explosive decoupling works anymore in stock, so it's vastly harder, if not impossible, to hit a Mun flyby on your first flight now.

Some excellent information there: seems like the root cause was an azimuth error that started from T=0, though the cause of the azimuth error is unknown. I'm moderately surprised range safety didn't terminate the launch; while the azimuth just barely skirted outside Korou's safety zone, the boosters were dumped way off-target, far outside the declared zones in the notices to airmen and mariners. I suppose falling on somebody in the ocean is relatively unlikely, and Ariane 5s do not come cheap, but that was still a very significant deviation from the intended flight trajectory.

Today was a better day. Lots of stuff designed, and two rocket launches. The brilliant success was the launch of my first lunar orbiter. Omens were good, with the Moon almost directly above the launch. The lunar injection was almost dead-on, meaning minimal correction on the hydrazine monopropellant thruster, leaving me around 700 m/sec for lunar insertion and lunar maneuvers. Almost all of the low-mass science has now been collected from lunar space, with just low orbit over the south pole remaining... which will be a job for a second copy of the mission. After that on the itinerary was the first mass demonstration of the Soyuz-1 booster! Glorious new rocket rolled out to pad among triumphant traditional music! Upper stage powered by new staged-combustion S1.5400 engine with amazing specific impulse of 338 s-1 in vacuum! First stage uses reliable workhorse RD-108 engine, with four boosters powered by its cousin RD-107 engine! Behold the majesty of nearly 3.9 MN of thrust on the pad! Glorious Soyuz rocket ascends! Now watch as rocket gloriously... um... INITIATE RANGE SAFETY PROTOCOLS IMMEDIATELY! Incidentally, I think I accidentally almost-copied a real Molniya booster configuration. I wanted to use these wonderful new staged-combustion engines, and I wanted to do a proper Korolev cross. The primary differences are that I don't have access to those beautifully tapered Soyuz booster tanks, and I think the real Molniya configuration with the S1.5400 has another RD-108 stage above the first stage-and-a-half. EDIT: Also, see the little white section on the top, in between the also-white interstage fairing and the upper avionics core? That's the entirety of the second-stage fuel tank. I wanted a 3-meter fairing with a >4 ton payload capacity, and the S1.5400 doesn't have a hugely long burn time, so that almost absurdly short upper stage tank is what I got.

Probably means a more efficient landing. The most efficient landing would be basically a suicide burn with all nine engines at full throttle, but that leaves very little margin for error. Anyways, now that I think about it, there's a reason SpaceX would want to quickly retrieve the booster, preferably with in-house assets: so none of their trade secrets get exposed if somebody steals the booster from them.

To the best of my knowledge: no. On currently owned property*, you can't even try to salvage it without permission from the legal owner. If you do get permission, you are automatically entitled to a reward, either specified at the time by the owner, or later by a court, so if SpaceX wanted to, they could offer a salvage reward. *Not sure what the legalities are for stuff like ancient shipwrecks. Otherwise, I doubt that booster will ever fly again (not only is it an old version of the first stage, it's now hit saltwater), but I expect Musk's engineers to inspect every square millimeter of that thing to divine the secret to booster immortality.

Today was an unlucky day for me. Real life didn't go so well, and I had three mission failures. I've got to admit: for the last of those failures, I used the debug menu to cheat a little. RP-0's contract durations are brutally short. My first attempt at a Venus flyby fell short by ~100 m/sec, and I couldn't wait for another optimal transfer; waiting for the next window would take almost all the remaining duration, and the travel time would push it over the limit. Mariner I, first probe designed to get a Venus flyby, was short maybe 100 m/sec. It's on a heliocentric orbit now, with a full suite of instruments. Thing is, it probably would have had the raw delta-V... if only I'd launched it five minutes later. The booster didn't have quite enough delta-V to reach orbit, and the kicker stage based on an RD-105 had only one ignition, so I was forced to start the burn early (to avoid reentry) and badly off-target. I actually wound up overshooting Venus, and wasn't able to brake enough on the hydrazine propulsion system. Emergency Mariner II was stripped down: 45 kg of scientific payload removed (leaving just 4 kg of the lightest instruments), and the hydrazine monopropellant system was replaced by a more expensive, higher-performance UDMH/NTO system. On top of that, I put 4x Castor SRBs on the first stage, which was enough to get the upper stage to orbit. I had to rush its production for over 4k funds to meet a sub-optimal window, which on paper, it had more than enough delta-V for. In reality, the 28.5 degree latitude of KSC meant the Earth ejection burn was 1.5 km/sec more than what Transfer Window Planner reported, and both times I tried the ascent, I wound up a little short. I got frustrated, and just turned on infinite fuel for a bit. I'm thinking what I'll do is only activate one experiment to fulfill the contract obligation, and then try again at the next transfer window, to pretend the contract window lasted a little longer. Only once I get a successful, non-cheaty Venus flyby will I accept any further Venus contracts. At that point, though, I should have access to better engines; Staged Combustion with some glorious Russian staged-combustion kerolox engines is coming off the stack in about 100 days, and the specific impulses are amazing: 345 s-1 for an upper-stage engine, and 338 s-1 for a restartable orbital engine. Rewinding the clock to yesterday, though: The wonderful Agena bus comes built-in with an orbital camera, so I was able to put a satellite based on it into a polar orbit from Vandenburg, and return lots of science from over every Earth biome. On top of the Agena bus was an early probe core, into which I stashed all the science results, since returning the entire Agena bus would've required a fairly large heatshield and parachute. I also snapped a screenshot of my primary limiting factor in advancing my space program. My final Moon flyby probe made its pass low enough to get low-orbit science from three biomes. Like the prior Moon flyby, I was then able to set up a maneuver to also complete an impactor contract. Now all that's left is orbiter and lander contracts. My initial attempt at an orbiter will be made using a very slightly modified version of the flyby probe, that should have enough to get into an elliptical Moon orbit. Back to today's chain of failures. First up was the second mass-demonstrator mission of the R8-Atlas-Able booster. This time, no UDMH or NTO were dumped in the ocean! Shown is ignition of the LR 105-5 sustainer engine form the Delta E/F rockets. It even could have gotten to orbit, if it weren't for a combination of a bad decision on my part and Test Flight demonstrating why that was a bad decision. On ascent, I set the gimbal limit on the AJ-10s down to about 25% to reduce overcompensation when steering, an issue I'd had before. However, one of the two AJ-10s went to 50% thrust, sending the Able upper stage into a loop. I was able to recover once I put the gimbal limits back to 100%, but by then, I'd wasted too much propellant to quite hit orbit. Despite the failure to reach orbit, I'd call this a partial success due to thoroughly testing the entire rocket, and discovering that, at 100% gimbal, the stage can recover from a 50% loss of thrust on one engine. Then came my first attempt to launch a Molniya satellite to orbit from Vanenburg AFB. It's not an ideal place to launch into a Molniya orbit; launch range azimuth restrictions mean you can't quite launch far enough east, so by necessity, it involves some doglegging. The first stage was nominal. The second stage... guess which engine failed? You guessed it, an AJ-10. Completely, this time. The wild spinning this induced made it very hard to reach any orbit, nevermind a highly eccentric Molniya orbit. I resorted to very brief pulses of the AJ-10 when it was roughly pointed prograde, which got my perigee up to maybe -30 km. The SRBs weren't much help, winding up being roughly neutral since I was still spinning, but once those burned out, I was down to the 200 kg probe. I was able to stop the spinning, and finally get into a stable orbit, completing a weather satellite contract. Mission failure, with a small compensation in completing an unrelated contract. I've got a copy of this mission rolling out to the pad now, with only a couple weeks until contract expiration. To be extra sure about it, I replaced the original R7-Castor-Able-222 with the -242 version, which should give me a little more delta-V to deal with a poor launch azimuth situation. And here's Mariner I, going off into heliocentric orbit. The Ranger core is really fun to build small probes around, even if the 300 kg control limit is difficult to work with.

I will fully admit: your writing style has influenced some of my writing style. I suspect it's because overblown totalitarianism, when not taken seriously, can be quite funny, and Americans have a hard time coming up with an amusing American stereotype for a space program.... so we use the Russians. I hope they one day forgive us.

First, the Ministry of Truth would like to remind citizens that previous news reports of some "Jebediah Kerman" and "Valentina Kerman" are in error. Our astronaut corps is led by Natalya Tsydlerina and Laura Lawrence, whose daring suborbital flights definitely did not land them in the hospital. Also, if you're playing RP-0, and are wondering why the Original 4 are hanging around: visit the astronaut complex. That gets them renamed. Anyways: Launch of the R7-Castor-Able-242 proceeded semi-nominally, by which I mean "I grossly overestimated its payload capacity and barely got the test payload of 1.19 tons to orbit". I don't think I've ever had a launch with that slim of margins. If you look closely, you'll notice that only one pair of Castor SRBs is lit: in the 242, 262, and 282 versions, not all SRBs are ignited on the ground. The R6B-Able test proceeded more nominally, however, with good margins left. Natalya piloted the X3, a Mach 2-capable, high-altitude research jet. I don't often fly jets, but this was kind of nice... at least once I decided that the only way I could get it into the air was via the debug menu. I'm having severe runway issues if I try to take off normally. There have also been three missions to launch commsats into orbit. The first one, described in my last post here, was... well... I forgot the attitude thrusters on the probes. Technically it put a couple into orbit, but hardly what was intended. The second one switched over from the R6B-Able to the R7-Castor-Able-242 launcher, and... well, I suppose it went better than the first. I seriously goofed, underestimating the necessary perigee for the contracts and not using the booster as well as I should've, and outright forgetting to fuel up the last of the three relays. This has meant three relays in very... different orbits. It was only the third commsat launch that I really hit my groove: I used the Able upper stage to get all three to 900x900 km orbit, and dispensed one at a time separated by roughly 120 degrees, after which they hit about 900x5000 km orbits. It's hardly an ideal constellation: highly inclined, weakish omni antennae, orbital periods not synchronized, but at least the eccentric orbits mean they'll spend a lot of time near apogee. An important pair of launches on my heaviest-to-date booster, the R7-Castor-Able-282. The mystery payload was a 200 kg probe with just 4 kg of instruments (Geiger counter, thermometer, orbital perturbation, micrometeorite detector)... and three Altair SRBs to push that 200 kg probe to a lunar injection. I didn't have any really good, low-mass liquid engines in the "really small" category, and there were no real mid-range probe cores, so I decided to use the Able upper stage to line up with the Moon transfer burn, then light up the Altairs for a spin-stabilized SRB burn, with mild correction on the 1 kN hydrazine thruster. The Altair SRM stages provided almost exactly enough dV for a Moon transfer. The first of these two launches was just an impactor, but the second mission is still technically in progress. It's fulfilled the flyby contract I have, and is now swinging around after about 120 days in Earth-centric orbit for an impact. Funny thing about all this: I think one of the things I like the most about that design was the use of solid kicker stages. You don't really see a lot of them in stock or RF-Stockalike games, because you usually quickly get access to small, high-performance liquid engines, but at this point in RP-0, my best choice actually did wind up being a spin-stabilized SRM kicker. I also got Vandenburg up and running, with the first launch being a sun-synchronous satellite (that also hit a weather observation satellite contract... and a medium sounding rocket contract*). It was initially giving me fits, because it said "eccentricity 0.020-0.040", and I mentally though "oh geez this is going to be a very tight window". I mucked around trying to get my eccentricity down with the clumsy tool of a 1 kN thruster... only to realize a couple minutes later "oh hey, the problem is that my eccentricity is too low". *Seriously, completing sounding rocket contracts when I'm doing orbital launches is actually subsidizing a fair chunk of the costs. The final big thing was testing the R8-Atlas-Able 202 booster, which has an estimated payload to LEO of a whopping 2.75 tons. The first stage has two RD-107 engines (higher-performance but shorter-burning versions of my previous RD-108s), the second stage has an LR105 sustainer engine from the Atlas E/F, and while the engines on the Able upper remain the same (a pair of AJ-10s), the avionics have been updated to the new, merely 100 kg Titan II ICBM guidance package! Whose built-in antenna only reaches 3 km. Rumors that 6.5 tons of toxic UDMH and nitric acid have been dumped over the Atlantic Ocean are utter fabrications.

I was under the impression patch 1.4 would be separate from Making History, so even if you didn't buy the Making History DLC, KSP would still get a little better (hopefully) with the patch.

Those are actually diametrically opposed goals. By placing center of drag behind center of mass, your vehicle becomes dynamically stable: drag effectively "pulls" your CoD behind your CoM, so any deviation from going straight forwards tends to get damped out. By placing it in front of center of mass, it becomes instable: drag is effectively pushing back on your CoM, and it becomes difficult to manage as aerodynamics wants to pull your ship off the forward vector. If you want it to stay maneuverable, I'd put CoD a short distance behind CoM (stuff can change in flight; I lost one large spaceplane because I didn't recognize that, with fuel tanks drained, CoM went too far back).

According to a few articles, an amateur astronomer named Scott Tilley, while searching for ZUMA, spotted some errant radio signals coming from the location of the IMAGE satellite, which failed about ten years ago. https://gizmodo.com/over-a-decade-later-nasas-long-dead-image-satellite-ma-1822479068 The best speculation I've seen suggests that IMAGE was briefly eclipsed by the Earth, draining its batteries, and once outside of Earth's shadow, went through a full system reboot, and cleared whatever error state had shut it down in 2005. Also reported was that the telemetry suggests at least one of its six instruments is functional, and NASA is apparently digging through its archives trying to figure out if they can restore communication with IMAGE. While the scientific return would probably not be huge, since IMAGE's primary mission had been a complete success, it could definitely be a neat story. And if they do bring it back online? Hey, free science satellite!

It sounds like it might be a GC issue. You might check out MemGraph: Do note that RAM available when you open the task manager is a poor metric: operating systems tend to leave occupied memory occupied, even when no longer strictly needed by the program that allocated it, because it takes CPU time to de-allocate that memory.

First, are you close to the edge of the atmosphere? If your orbit closely skims the atmosphere, even small changes in velocity could send you suborbital. Second, please read this:

You have no idea how often stuff like that happens when people overengineer their craft. For example, Terra 1! First payload launched on new R6-Able booster! First satellite in polar orbit! First satellite with advanced Geiger-Muller tubes and impact detectors! First probe to be controllable while in orbit! First probe to reach outer edges of Earth system! Completed all mission objectives perfectly! Also first probe to be accidentally sent into heliocentric orbit! No scientific data could be returned from this fortuitous event, however, as Terra I, now renamed Helios I, ran out of battery power. Other achievements by mid-1955: Probe adapted from Able upper stage returned from LEO to surface with live biological payload. Incidentally, I'm now convinced I need more RCS propellant for my rockets. After two unmanned tests, the Moho I spacecraft has succeeded in a pair of suborbital flights with Valentina and Jebediah at the helm. Rumors that both went to the hospital after recovery from a 25G reentry are utter fabrications. Incidentally, I thought in RP-0, the Kerbal names were supposed to be replaced with real-world names? That's the impression I got from Scott Manley's series. There are also some exciting new missions coming up. Two mass simulators: the R6B-Able and R7-Castor-Able-242 rockets. The R6B-Able is an extended version of the R6-Able used for Terra 1 and the reentry tests. The first stage is stretched, until launch TWR is 1.4 instead of 1.8, and the upper stage is at 1.5m diameter instead of the narrow 800 mm diameter of its Able avionics. My best estimate for that rocket is 500-750 kg to orbit, massing 50.544 tons on the pad. The R7-Castor-Able-242 is the second of its series. This series has a larger upper stage, with 2 AJ-10 engines, a 2-meter payload fairing, and a stretched RD-108 powered core of about 57 tons. None of this series can get off the pad without Castor SRBs: it ranges from the -222 with just a pair of boosters and an estimated 1.1 tons to LEO, all the way to the -282 with eight Castor boosters (fired 4 at a time), having an estimated 2 tons to orbit. The basic R7-Able core is 75.65 tons, with each Castor booster adding 3.86 tons. While I could have gotten even more payload to orbit with my original R7 design, that had 4 RD-100 liquid-fueled boosters instead of the Castors, those early RD-100 engines aren't terribly reliable. I also just like the idea of a family of rockets with some actual lineage to them. I also have 3 commsat missions and an orbital imagery mission on the itinerary. Each commsat mission carries a pair of lightweight, solar-powered (a first!) communication relays to LEO on an R6B-Able. I was originally considering a true GEO communication relay, but between poor avionics technology and the need for a lot of solar panels, I scaled that back to LEO communication relays. The orbital imagery mission is based on the Agena bus with a 200kg return vehicle, launched on an R7-Castor-Able-222, and will be launching out of Vandenburg in about 180 days when the launchpad there reaches level 2.

The rocket segment was not in that video. It's in this video, from about 2:06 to 2:54. Notice: no orbital planning (requiring multiple midcourse corrections on a very approximate Hohmann transfer), and they had infinite fuel turned on like a scrub. EDIT: And on even closer inspection, time warp capped out at 16x, which suggests to me they don't have on-rails timewarp, which suggests to me they don't have orbits properly coded in yet. It's looking less and less to me like a "KSP clone".

I'm not sure I agree. The videos were 95% about aircraft, with a token rocket thrown in there, probably to demonstrate that the engine could be extended to spaceflight, even if the game is currently lacking a huge number of support features such as an orbital map. In short, I'm not sure they're trying to make a better Pepsi, I think they're trying to make Mountain Dew. Some similarities, but the products are distinct enough to not be overlapping. In the other thread, I suggested that this would really appeal to BD Armory players: Flyout will have the design-your-own capacity of KSP, with more realistic treatment of jet engines, built-in support for weaponry, etc. While it's too early to tell for certain, I suspect KSP and Flyout will be complementary, with different strengths, instead of being strict competitors.