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Not been to Moho recently so not the most knowledgeable on the subject. However - you say the rocket had 14500m/s in total, and then had 4000m/s left at Moho - with around 3500 to get into LKO, I wonder how your ejection burn used 6000m/s of dV. That may be the issue - the initial ejection gives you an excessively fast encounter, and then it is difficult to capture afterward because of the excess velocity. Maybe try the transfer planner: http://alexmoon.github.io

20 minutes? It takes about that long for a deorbit burn, atmospheric entry and 'land'* at KSC (especially if gliding/powered flight is needed), given that it's over the desert by the last panel.... *possibly not the correct term for a warhead.

Remember that everything in KSP (and just about everything else) takes time. It took me ages to get the hang of this game, and I'm only just getting SSTOs built reliably now - rockets are easier, to be fair. And if part count limits your designs, and you have the memory for some mods, get some mods - KW rocketry fuel tanks have, I think, got a slightly better mass ratio = more dV = fewer parts. Or you can use Procedural Parts to get bigger fuel tanks in one part. Kerbal Joint Reinforcement removes the need for struts = fewer parts. That's how I make my ksp run nicely - got a 2012 era Vaio running Windows 10(Arrggghhh!) - up to about 100 parts is good, 200 ok beyond that it gets bad - but that is enough for most things. And honestly, KSP takes the longest to load - but look what it does compared to other games. And my other computer can't even run KSP - it's a Raspberry Pi 2.

Right, after this I'm going to play seriously again.... With KJR: Something exploded, not sure what. Without KJR, prior to entry interface.... Ummmm..... Thats not good.....Maybe Timewarp will help????? Nope. Not sure exactly what exploded, I'm going to do a quick approximation and say, about 10% of the craft.

Maybe I should fly it into Jool, like the Jupiter Submarine XKCD?

Continuing on from my post on the last page; Shuttles: Full size, 'gunships' Full size. Bottom fuel tank, as big as tweakscale will let it. Along with the panels, RCS, RCS fuel tanks, etc. Seriously, the Michael is huge. And by SciFi standards, it's small and actually buildable.

Fair enough. The Nuke engines are double scale, the fuselage is huge (I think 13m across), the shuttles are down to about 10% of original, along with the SRB 'gunships', and the Heat Shield was tweaked up twice. And a RoverDude Orion drive was about twice the radius of the engines, so nowhere near big enough. And looking at it now, those stabilizers on the shuttles need decreasing more.

WIP, but inspired by the Michael from FootFall: Based on images found here: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/realdesigns.php#id--Michael_Nuclear_Pulse_Battleship May make a different one, if I can get either the RoverDude or Nyrath Pulse Drive mods working, especially if I can tweakscale them bigger, rather than tweakscaling everything else down . Not to mention actual guns from BDArmory.

Go lead climbing on an overhanging rock face/artificial wall, fall off, experience freefall, get caught by rope, experience up to 7 or 8g (ropes typically give about 7kN impact forces on big falls), repeat if needed. Bring your brown pants.

Not a directly science related point, but it bugs me. In Iron Man 2 ( I think), Tony Stark asks Elon Musk (in a cameo) how his Merlin Engines (or some such) are getting along, while having a technology that renders every propulsion system known to man obsolete. And generally, putting a Fantastical element as MCU into reality - awkward for continuity. At least Doctor Who can just blame 'Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey'.

Hmmm.... A quick look at the rocket equation says that an Ion drive ship in KSP won't get more than 33.8km/s delta V, so yeah......... 4200g * ln(0.938/0.413) = 33,787m/s. (0.00011c) That's for just the 1.25m fuel tank, but add enough (a near infinite number) to your pod and engine and batteries, you'll get towards that. So, regret to inform you that your challenge is actually impossible with stock craft. That being said, if you can clip a craft through a planet you could get some absurdly fast slingshots judging from this Danny2462 video:

Ah, but the alternative is boring to the average person, isn't it? Space combat done realistically would look something like Children of a Dead Earth, and the average person doesn't get enough orbital mechanics to know how that actually works. Or, you get unrealistic combat but at long ranges, such as combat in the Culture series where things get fought across solar systems, instantaneously. Of course thats not a movie, but still. To do such in a movie would be difficult. A realistic space combat would be like Das Boot, along the lines of; "I hope the enemy doesn't spot us first" "Damn, they saw us first" "Evasive maneuvers/Dive, etc" BOOM! "Wow, we survived"/or not.

If you're bored and always getting to space on a traditional rocket.... Build shuttles (not a dreamchaser style, or any other spaceplane on a rocket, an actual STS style one.). I got way more satisfying, high part count, disastrous flights doing that. Also trying to build big spaceplanes with Interstellar engines on them. I even got some of them into orbit.

Unfortunately it's in the desert, part of the idea was to do it all with just the one Saturn V(ish) launch, in the time taken to go to Mun and back.

So, I was perusing the challenge forum and came across this: Now, I thought about doing this to the specifications of the challenge, but it seemed a tad simple (though you can judge if I did any good), and focused on the normal aspects of fake Moon Landing accusations - faking the photos. But I've spent enough time on Conspiracy forums to know there can be more to it than that. So I decided to mix things up a little: So here is my mission; Liftoff! Dropping first stage, ignition of Orbit/TLI stage: Abort tower was ditched shortly afterward, and after some preparation the burn toward the Mun was begun: After use the transfer stage was ditched into the Mun: Shortly afterward the first images were received from the Mun (camera location not disclosed): After some discussion between Bill and Jeb of what that strange object in the "Mun's" sky was (Probably a hologram of some kind), they realised their craft had no ladder to climb back on with. However, their jetpacks proved more than up to the task! (They really, really didn't :)) Three days later the capsule was spotted entering Kerbin's atmosphere and was shortly thereafter recovered: Various people wondered if the Kerbals really had stepped foot on Mun, but all signals bounced at their landing site returned, courtesy of the small retroreflector placed there: Arguably, this was much harder than just landing on the Mun.

In all fairness, I'm not sure how it flies so well, it all worked first time It has 2 sets of large wings at the back with the BigS wings ahead of that and further forward for lift, with the FAT-455 tail as a canard at the front, and how that provides enough lift is beyond me. Surprisingly, 12 Turboramjets don't do all that much for raw power - the 'takeoff' from the island runway involved some weird semi touchdown on the hill just past the runway - I thought it was going to be a reload, but it seemed to use it like the ramp on an aircraft carrier.

He used FAR, doesn't he say? So He did get that leaderboard right? Anyway, I've made a bigger craft, Provisional name "Me, I'm Counting": 183.94 tons at landing back at KSC - after only 7 minutes (Game time). Capacity is 320 passengers, if only I had remembered to load them/had patience to hire them all. Whoops.

Well, this was what I tried, unfortunately on the newly updated leaderboard it doesn't come close, in either way - 127 tons at takeoff, 144 Kerbal Capacity: Landing on the island runway was probably the hardest thing I've done in this game, it took maybe 20-30 tries. Original design had more engines but used a spaceY 3.75m to 7 x 1.25m adapter, so had to be changed. Top speed achieved was something like 400m/s on the return trip. It could probably get faster but then the airbrakes explode. No mod parts in the final design, just using NavHud and Engineer for flight data. Glideslope is absolutely terrible. Honestly a shuttle clone would probably glide better than this thing.

Just looked it up in a book: 'Mountaineering; The Freedom of The Hills': It states that for every 5 C drop in water boiling temperature, cooking time doubles. It lists heights up to 7km, and says at that altitude time to cook something is about 13 times longer than at Sea level.

Found my old saves on a backup disc, thought I'd lost .23.0 etc. This was my 'Sopwith CamelRocket' so called due to the number of struts, and I see I was very much taken with early KSP's Moar Boosters Design Philosophy. I just tried it, I do not miss the souposphere. It took 5050 or so dV to get the top of that rocket to orbit. I also tried to make that even bigger and lift more, though I think it didn't load properly, a lot of the struts were missing: Launch and the first 20 seconds of ascent went well, the next stage.... Oh so very Kerbal.

If the question were launcher only it would be a Falcon 9, but spacecraft? The LEM, but specifically the Aquarius It did serve to support 3 people rather than the two it was designed for (with some improvisation), amongst other things that meant Apollo 13 survived. Now fictionally - the ship Nostalgia for Infinity from Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space. If we're going for more ridiculous levels of Sci-fi - A Xeelee Nightfighter.

"Fly a Vessel Anywhere Near the Sun" Sounds a bit vague.... and easy, probably doable with a single stage. But that just wouldn't be kerbal enough! I Hope this has enough Delta-V [img]http://i.imgur.com/SOsxUya.png[/img] Yep! [img]http://i.imgur.com/1z2JPiy.png[/img] Contact lost with the probe, I hope it got close enough: [img]http://i.imgur.com/KkzId7F.png[/img]

Mach 1400? Not if FAR and the heating model have anything to say about it.... [img]http://i.imgur.com/OfY1gMa.png[/img] And I'd only just taken off as well.

I think the problem lies in the medium being used, more than any other issue. Most 'Space Opera' or Sci-fi in general in TV/Film doesn't seem to be overly concerned with the impracticality of what it portrays or how unrealistic it is - the strange way the main character of Gravity gradually deorbits being a good example. The problem really being how you explain how something happens in the setting - no one wants to really have it shown to them how something actually flies in space - such as the space shuttle depiction in Armageddon, to take a terrible example. Of course some shows might state they are in orbit but they never really expand on it, any Star Trek episode would be a good example of that, or Star Wars' "Orbiting the planet at maximum velocity" of the Death Star - because somehow they picked the exact opposite side of a gas giant to drop out of hyperspace on. Compare such things to Literature Space Opera such as 'Ringworld', where the protagonists ship gouges out an enormous chasm as it decelerates from orbital speed by crashing into it, or 'Revelation Space' where ships with near infinite Delta-v take months to reach .99c cruises. Even more unrealistic settings such as that of the 'Culture' still seem to understand how utterly huge space is. Also, while I am yet to catch up on all of this seasons Doctor Who, I am amused by the fact that the OP is nitpicking about Spaceflight in a setting where the main character teleports around in a time travelling, sentient spaceship that is disguised as a 1960's Police Box. That can also be used to rewrite causality.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/28428-Orion-aka-Ol-Boom-boom Unfortunately it isn't compatible with 1.x, apparently.