Gaarst

Solar luminosity flux at Earth is about 1300 W/m2. To get your 600 GW of power (from my calculation above), you'd need a 20x20km sail still weighing less than 10g. The Sun is really good at radiating all over the place but that's pretty much it. Using a more reasonable 10m2 sail (order of magnitude), you'd need to get within 22 000km of the Sun. Even if your probe is built to resist the temperatures there, it will not survive a long time before the magnetic field screws up everything. That, and the fact that going through a solar flare at 0.2c is not going to do you any good.

Photons carry momentum: p = h / λ. Photons hit the sail and are reflected, part of their momentum is therefore transmitted to the sail. (Or you can say that they are absorbed and re-emitted through BB radiation, but that pretty much adds up to the same thing). Because I don't want to bother with complicated physics and maths, let's just assume 100% of the photons momentum is transmitted to the probe. Say you need to accelerate a 10g probe to 0.2c in 5mins. Ignoring relativistic effects, that is a 600 000 kg.m/s change in momentum. They plan to use infrared photons for their lasers, so take the wavelength of a photon to be 1µm, its momentum is then 6.63e-28 kg.m/s and energy E = cp = 1.24eV. To accelerate your probe you then need to use 9e32 photons, or a total energy of 1.8e14 J. In 5mins that makes the required power 600 GW (or a thrust of 2kN like that ion thing you never use because it is so weak, interesting isn't it?) which represents a hundred big nuclear plants or 30 Three Gorges Dam (or one Ninety Gorges Dam). For the sail size, it's just a matter of how accurately you can aim your laser, or how much diffraction likes to mess up with everything you're trying to do. Now this is overly simplified and ignores a whole bunch of things that should not be ignored. Also your probe will be on fire. Putting a lot of lasers at one place is a very good way to vaporise things or trigger nuclear fusion.

For Fallout 4 I think there were special agreements made between MS and Bethesda to allow external content to be added to the XBone game. I don't really see this happening for KSP: Squad is far from being as important as Bethesda is from MS' pov.

It is not you

It will look like this:

Haven't read the 10 pages of discussion but here's my 2 cents: SLS is the only super-heavy lifter there is (there's also that Chinese rocket maybe, CZ9 I think). Having a heavy lifter is nice, but being willing to spend money on missions that will use and require its power is another thing. Unless the US govt decides to suddenly increase NASA's budget (not going to happen unless the Chinese start to shoot people towards the Moon/Mars, and even then...) and collaborations with other space agencies, SLS will be a waste of money.

Pics Don't beg for popularity

Bi-elliptic transfers would like to have a word with you. In many situations when going from a low orbit to a higher one they are more efficient. Usually not by much, but a small bit of nitpicking never hurt anyone.

Probably NecroBones' Sea Dragon first stage engine from his Real Scale Sea Dragon mod: Though a 360MN engine might be overkill (that is 10 times the thrust of a Saturn V). Edit: if anyone has a mod that beats that, I'd be more than curious to see it If you want to stay reasonable, I think you could get a F-1 engine from one of the many mods that include them. If full scale, you'll get 7.5MN of thrust.

I don't own a PS4, but seeing the things crawling around in the PSStore (the same kind of "games" that have already taken over Steam) I really doubt KSP was not approved because of quality.

So thinking SpaceX is doing better than someone else on a single discussion and you're a SpaceX fanboy (I don't know if you often read what I post, but most of the time, I'm the first to say that Musk is a delusional dreamer). Also, despite not being the only difference between SX and BO missions, the "significantly higher re-entry speed" is, as it states, significant. So I still believe that BO's work on subscale launchers is not going to allow them to recover and reuse the first rocket they will launch to orbit. Really? So because I don't agree with you, I'm defending St. Musk? I was just having an opinion but I might as well keep it to myself if you're going that way. I won't call ad hominem because this is my interpretation, but you won, I'm out from this discussion.

Date of thread Forum update in November 2015 changed everything (links and ways to post albums), so not applicable anyway Posting Imgur albums is currently impossible because of a recent update

SpaceX is recovering launchers from orbital flights but not reusing them. BO is recovering and reusing launchers from vertical flights. The fact SpaceX started with Grasshopper and is now recovering its Falcons shows that SpaceX is more advanced than BO. Learning to recover on smaller launchers is fine, but BO has yet to prove that its multiple recovery "tests" will be useful for orbital missions. Learning to reuse a smaller launcher doesn't make any sense because even though you can get some general procedures by testing, the hardware is simply different. Once again, BO has to prove that its reuses will be applicable to their larger launcher. SpaceX is not reusing anything but is getting more and more experience on their Falcons, giving reasonable hope that they will eventually reuse them. (Before than BO which hasn't even built its orbital launcher, let alone test it)

It's written: As I said: they don't know.

On millions of years BC, a man (or whatever was around at the time), jumped off the ground for a time and then landed softly. On 17 December 1903, the Wright brothers used a plane to jump off the ground for a time and then landed softly. Might be a little extreme for an example but I hope you get what I mean: you might want to care about these "little" details when talking about stuff that could change the entire space industry. More truth: recovering a flight from an orbital launch is nothing like recovering a flight from a vertical launch. I believe SpaceX's approach of first recovering, then reusing, in real flight conditions is more prone to eventual success than BO's approach of recovering + reusing in vertical flights with a test launcher and then switching to a totally different launcher with totally different launch parameters and hoping stuff works the same way.

It's written somewhere here: They don't know.

That is the longitude of the ascending node (or descending, depending on which way you're going). KER has it, MJ probably has it too. EDIT: to change it, you'd have to burn normal/antinormal at the highest point of the orbit in terms of latitude (not apoapsis). For example, the point on top of the blue line on the image above.

Translations are planned for some time in the future. Probably soon™. I don't want localisation if it means being stuck with the game in non-English. Shouldn't happen with anyone who has a little bit of common sense, but I prefer to say it.

Falcon 9 is not reused (yet). BO recover and reuse their launcher near the launch site from vertical suborbital flights which are made precisely to test it. SpaceX recover their launchers from actual missions, sending stuff into space at the same time, on barges in the middle of the ocean. I'm no SpaceX fanboy, but BO is not even close to SpaceX.

inb4 lock. Making it short: discussed many times, matter of personal opinion, do what you want in your own game, thread will be locked eventually.

Yes. 100% stock (99.9% if you consider I used KER to design it ).

I probably will enter the challenge. Not now though, more work is needed on the upper part (spacecraft+LES assembly) and despite being 1.5x as heavy as the actual one (full scale) it can't make orbit.

Just happened to start my first stock Soyuz replica earlier today, give me time to tidy things up and I'll show it.