ment18

This is still very easy to do in the stock game. Just get into a highly eccentric orbit around kerbin with your apoapsis around minmus and turn on max timewarp at apoapsis. In addition, there are several mods that allow any timewarping anywhere.

The reason the shielded docking port works so well is because it weighs 0.1t while the shock cone weighs 0.03t. Having a high AoA during ascent is very bad because it causes huge drag. During descent it is usually safe to pump all of your fuel to the back of you plane as PanzerAce said. Does skylon reenter much higher than where it goes mach 5? Also, skylon has cooling systems so it burns all of its heated fuel(dumps extra lh2/lox in orbit right?). Also during reentry skylon weighs very very little and has a much larger surface area.

Real rockets are very different than KSP rockets. 1. The engines have much larger vector ranges for the most part, including SRBs. This helps them fight flipping. 2. The rockets have RCS thrusters and use them during ascent. I don't use them in KSP and assume others don't either. 3. Most modern rockets have strap on boosters. These add drag to the bottom of the rocket during the beginning of ascent. The bottom of some rockets are also wider to accommodate the engine innards. (F9, S5, Atlas)

The point of the eject-able bracing is to allow launching them, it is also supposed to be 5m/s/s but I originally wrote it with gees.

Make fuel tank structure tweak-able. Players could add and subtract structure on their fuel tanks to change their mass ratios. The current structure could be the max structure (impervious to acceleration) and tweak down to a mass ratio of about 20 (currently 9) where and acceleration over 5 m/s^2 would destroy them. All fuel tanks would have optional discard-able structure that would weigh a lot, but would make the fuel tanks impervious to acceleration. The extra structure would allow launching of fragile fuel tanks but have to be discarded to get any benefit from the fragile fuel tanks. Reducing structure would also severely reduce impact tolerance. What do you think?

When the ARM patch came out (the one that added asteroids and 3.75m parts), I decided i would finally figure out how to rendezvous. Asteroid on an escape trajectory in a highly inclined orbit isn't exactly the best first target. I was excited when I got it. but it was still in a retrograde orbit, so I built a large rocket and flipped the orbit . It was only an a class. It was also cool to do my first rendezvous without tracking upgrades.

The engine also has the annoying spool up and spool down. This is not bad, but it is definitely a con. Makes precision burns very hard.

Orion mods are all OP compared to stock KSP parts. The main issue in KSP is structural integrity of payloads. Its easier to launch heavier payloads because they have worse t/w. I don't think it would be very dangerous in real life, especially compared to other things (like driving). Nuclear bombs won't detonate on their own. Couldn't we build a large barge, sail to the middle of some ocean and then launch with much weakened bombs because the atmosphere increases the thrust of the rocket?

Bats use sonar but radar works fine in space. I heard of a human that could use sonar because he was blind and his hearing compensated. What does blind mean though? Can see the 'visible spectrum' or can't see EM Radiation? If we couldn't see visible spectrum not mush would change, things would just look different. I've seen some documentaries about how adaptable human senses are so this would work, but getting to that point would be very hard, I think.

What is wrong with solar? The 'dark' side of the moon is just never seen by Earth, its light ~50% of the time just like our side, one just needs large energy storage banks. And you have to mine the fuel, helium 3. Anyway, countries are very likely to allow other countries to get similar fusion technology because they can sell it, for lots of money. They could probably also sell the electricity for less money than coal to countries that can't build their own reactors.

Car on car accidents wouldn't happen in a skynet world. The cars would all be communicating and would be able to 'see' possible accidents far into the future. In fact, the paths of all cars would probably be plotted for their entire journey and set up so that they never get into collision likely positions. The only problems would be pedestrians not following laws (jay walking) and if that were to happen all cars behind the front car would also immediately brake and prepare for the front car's evasive actions. In a case where a pedestrian is run over and killed, it would be 100% their fault because they shouldn't be in the middle of a road at that time. For example, if a bus and a car are going towards and intersection on an intersect path the computer would realize this very quickly and one would slow down immediately to prevent the accident. Also, the computer would know where the best place to hit a car is. For example, the car might aim for the rearmost for front most section of a car if an accident is imminent to lower the chance of causalities. These would all be vastly better than humans.

Ablator is odd becasue i've never built a vessel that used more than 50% of max units of ablator, even in extreme scenarios. Albator might be unnecessary for most reentries. I built a 13 ton lander that could reenter from lko with 4 1.25m heat-shields empty of ablator) and a nerv on the bottom. The heat-shields got a little hot but nothing exploded. My eve lander also doesn't use most of it's ablator, though I don't usually care.

You are pulling up too early and too violently. Just fly at you angle of 2* and you should get up to 1400m/s and only switch rockets when you are losing speed. Pulling up adds huge amounts of drag and 1km/s is rather slow for jet mode.

I was aerobraking over Duna with a simple lander that was a nerv with a bunch of fuel tanks and science. I had Bob and simple probe core that could barely do SAS. My ship tilted slightly of center and the big science experiment exploded, tearing the ship in half and causing bob's capsule to be destroyed. This was fine because I quick-saved just after entering Duna's SOI, but I accidentally tapped F5. Guess I should start using named quick saves. Spent the rest of the night designing a lander that can reenter from Kerbin orbit, ascend from Duna, and has 5km/s dV. Other than that, my kerbals don't die. Testing is revertible.

An inline engine would be nice but I'm not sure how these 'monopropellant' engines work, their isp(250s) is way to high to be compressed gas(68s). The only possible explanation is that monopropellant is really two different substances combined by the game. Even the blocks have 240s. The name is misleading. http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs-wm/37528.pdf http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/O-10_%22Puff%22_MonoPropellant_Fuel_Engine

http://www.nss.org/settlement/moon/LANTR.html I have seen several people asking for an engine between vacuum engines(terrier, poodle, rhino) and the NERV. LoxAugmentedNuclearThermalRocket would be realistic device. Basically have a NERV that runs on both liquid fuel(or hydrogen if that happens) and oxidizer what gets 500-600 isp and has a bad t/w. I don't know what t/w would be balanced, maybe 5-6. Terrier gets 12 t/w, Aerospike has 18t/w, Poodle has ~14. It could me mainly used for high DV medium t/w reusable vehicles. Maybe have it be an additional setting to add like 0.2 tons to NERV to convert it. What are your thoughts?

I've done a little testing and found that the Panther vastly out performs the wheesly. It spools up faster, has afterburner (which is instant) and has gimbal. Intakes work weirdly at low speeds not though. At about 0m/s they produce max air and the engines are 100% fuel supplied but them when one gets to about 7-8m/s it suddenly drops to about 75% abd raises again one you reach 15m/s. The panther is a lot less affected than the wheesly by this. The Panther has the instant after burner making VTOL much easier as you can set a t/w of .95 and then use after burner to gain altitude. The only pro of the wheesly is the reverse thrust and the fact its exhaust is very cool, It could land VTOL on my steel plate aircraft carrier while the panther vaporized the deck in either mode. Rapier is also the best space-plane engine because it goes faster.

[quote name='KAL 9000']Yes, I considered that. We have them manufacture tiny amounts of antimatter inside them. Then, when we trigger self-destruct, the turn off the magnetic confinement fields stopping the antimatter from interacting with normal matter. BOOM![/QUOTE] Why don't you just make a huge slug of antimatter and smash it into the target planet? Would be cheaper and easier than making a bunch of extra nanobots. You could also have you grey goo build rail-guns and shoot the bits of planet into very different orbits, powered by those magical reactors. Edit: Ninja'ed

The last mission in space agency requires the user to dock with a slowly spinning and translating space shuttle.

I'm trying to make an entry for my challenge, but my 38 ton aircraft has a hard time stopping on the runway and taking off. It can carry 32 passengers and I should be able to make an entry tonight. I need to replace the BigS wings with normal wings because they weight a lot more than normal wings and I only use about 100 units of fuel.

I don't like the heat shields, the ablator doesn't ablate fast enough. I accidentally came back from Jool wrong and hit the atmosphere at over 9km/s:D. The heat shield over heated with over 100 units of ablator left and with ignore max temp the heatshield got up to about 130% heat and still had a lot of ablator left on landing. It was a mk1 pod, a 1.25m heat shield and the parachute. Had to use a really low reentry, like 20km. On one reentry I was able to bleed off about 3km/s without cheating, but that would still have me shooting out of the Kerbin system at 6km/s. Edit: This is stock physics with kerbal engineer and a few other parts mods

It is 9-10km/s into LEO when you include drag and gravity losses I think. Kerbin orbital velocity is about 2km/s but is takes like 3.5km/s to orbit

I started working on an aircraft carrier (more a mobile helipad) that floats well and goes 30+ m/s. Also built an aircraft that flies underwater, with negative wing incidence.

Nuclear Power is safer than anything else. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/ http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html I think that the media is more to blame for showing everyone everything and blowing it out of proportion than the nuclear industry doing pro nuclear propaganda. Anyway, general public tends to believe propaganda almost as much as the believe media.

He had a Nerv as well