wumpus

It doesn't work like that. Thrust adds linearly. Burning your SRBs at maximum thrust means that you get your delta-v back as soon as possible. Burning your SRBs and LFEs at the same time means that both engines are having their thrust divided by the mass of the combined rocket (F=ma). If you dropped your SRB early and coasted, your LFE thrust will only be divided by the mass of the rocket, not the rocket+SRB. You want to already have the delta-v of your SRB converted into velocity and coast on that, while getting the most from your LFE (even if you are steadily losing velocity overall). If you can't get the thing onto a decent pitchover and are losing delta-v that way, then by all means reduce your SRB thrust. Just don't reduce the thrust assuming that you are somehow saving delta-v.

After reading this thread, the only thing I can be pretty sure about: Once you leave kerbin's SOL, recompute your maneuver node. Your KEO maneuver node won't begin to handle an hour of thrust, while one in Kerbol should. This also lets you correct your mistakes early, where they cost the least to fix. What I'm not at all sure about: I'd think it would make sense to loop around Mun to get a hyperbolic escape trajectory (with multiple maneuver nodes repeatedly calculated), but most of that is to try to get the "circularization" delta-v back from the KEO orbit (it should be close to 400m/s) and very little from the Obereth effect. Trying to match windows that allow a "loop around Mun" and "Jool transfer window" to match up is likely not worth it.

True. I always point out that while theoretical efficiency increases when increasing SRB thrust (to a fairly high point), handling is often a reason to not overdo it. Note that if you are dialing back to 75% and have more than 8 SRBs, I'd often remove two and dial it back up and see if that works better (there are ways to remove one, but often take just too much time in the VAB).

Try it again with max thrust. Unless the excess thrust gets in the way of your gravity turn (and it probably will), you are likely better off burning up and ditching the SRBs as soon as possible, and then coasting on the way up while burning your liquids until they it gets to TWR>1. Consider the difference with two ordinary stages and how much more delta-v you get when burning out quickly and starting the next stage vs. starting the next stage at apoapsis. It doesn't matter if you are burning with TWR<1, just as long as you are adding to the delta-v.

I thought that was what you got through steam. I downloaded the "demo" around Christmas time on my father's machine and that is what I got. I later got the demo directly from the Squad website to get the 1.0 demo. Note that you might need a "dummy steam account" as I couldn't download the demo (from Steam) since I already had "KSP". Using either of them lets you relive a level of "pure kerbalness" that we tend to forget when planning a big launch.

Generally speaking, you never want to limit the thrust of your SRBs. If you are going to throttle anything (and unless you are leaving the ground with nearly 2.0 TWR you should do so only for control, aero losses will be made up by lower gravity losses) make sure it is your liquid boosters. If you have too much thrust from your kickbacks, you can usually just use less. If that doesn't work, things get weird (you might even have a second stage SRB. It is roughly the extreme end of the "poor man's asparagus". But that is an extremely rare situation). I suspect that adjusting the thrust of SRBs is a leftover from the pre 1.0 aero-[and heat] model. Adjusting power was critical in those times, now without the souposphere it really only matters on places like Eve. There might be plenty of advice left around for adjusting the thrust, but it is likely based on obsolete data.

It will take more fuel, but might have a chance of landing more often and more safely. One huge difference is that falcon can use the fuel for other things. Such as simply giving more mass the same delta-v, or perhaps avoiding a disaster in the Cygnus launch (ULA simply has huge margins. Falcon-9 could have simply dipped into the landing reserve. This craft would either need ULA's margins or simply fail). It also isn't clear *where* they would land. You would need fuel similar to space-x to get back to Florida (in addition to launching those wings). Launching over land has worse issues. They really don't look like they are meant for sea landings. Also, I thought there was a reason that they couldn't use X-15 style wings (other than the unused cross-range spec) for the shuttle, my guess is that when hitting the atmosphere wings perpendicular, the center of drag needs to go through the center of mass. Such things make for interesting design problems.

I started well before [science] career mode, so I stopped and googled for some sort of answer to "now what". There was a few helpful suggestions that more or less followed the space race and were somewhat similar to what career mode wound up as (with the exceptions that it started un-kerballed). From memory (it seems to have gone down the memory hole...). One of the basic ideas was that you should try to do each stage with the most primitive parts and lowest cost possible. Go into space! (much easier in the souposphere, although since it isn't manned this isn't a problem. I'd suggest career mode should allow unmanned probes from the start and introduce the mark1 capsule once you safely return the stayputnik. Bomb England/Russia (one just came down, the other had to hit a different continent). I think I ignored this one, possibly due to lack of maneuver nodes from the launch pad. Launch into orbit (unmanned makes easier: also stayputniks had SAS when I started). Manned launch into space. Again, souposphere makes this trivial. Manned launch into orbit. Manned docking: I wimped out on this one, and it would be a long time before I learned to dock. Mechjeb came in handy till then. Trip to Minmus (may have done probes before bros, too long to remember). I'm pretty sure Minmus wasn't inclined: maybe I just got lucky lots of times. I highly recommend Minmus before Mun, and putting Minmus back on the elliptic. Trip to Mun (presumably straight to kerbals, harder than manned Minmus but probes aren't). Duna calling: A new version came out with career mode before I got to Duna, and I started over. And over again and again with newer career modes. It took a long time before I got to Duna. One thing that I took with me from this program is a lot of designs based on hammers. With modern career mode, hammers are instantly obsoleted by thumpers and quickly replaced by kickbacks. There is little reason to use more than one hammer on any rocket. Still, I managed to get to Mun with little more than multiple "cake layers" of hammers and finally liquid rockets for throttle control for insertion and landing. There's a lot of kerbal missing without those cake layers, but I'm not sure I can be bothered to make them with the 3.75m parts available (although I'm pretty sure the mainsail was available, I was just saving that for Duna since I could make munar landers with nothing more than 1.25m parts (and no thumpers/kickbacks). I've always assumed that Realism Overhaul (with RSS) would be the center of any "serious" KSP. Face it, any game based on kerbals isn't going to be serious. KSP is an offshoot of Orbital (HarvesteR posted his ideas there and received some feedback into how to make a less serious game out of it). Squad doesn't want a "serious space program" and set out to make one that wasn't (compare KSP's success to Orbital's). Fortunately, the mod community can built lots of things that Squad won't, and this is one of them (I'd assume that RO *is* "serious KSP" as it stands).

I'm certain that while astronomers (and astro-physicists), learn all this, they will likely wind up specializing in a narrow-band of EMI that won't typically involve "light as we know it", and that narrow-band will be dictated by whatever telescope they have (any) access to. It might be already automated to the point of being ignored, but the last I heard astronomy had changed into more of a computer networking issue (the best might be working for google for all I know) than an optical issue. This was already changing over long before the web took over the internet, see Cliff Stoll's Cuckoo's Egg for details (basically a very 1990s story about finding a hacker in the dawn of the internet). As far as the electronics courses, I'd expect that they would more likely be about digital signal processing and less actual circuits. Note that my EE DSP classes had some early EE weedout courses as pre-reqs. You need to be good at *everything* in astronomy (and presumably astrophysics), and there is fierce competition for telescope time. Know what you are getting into (or at least be willing to fall back into computer networking. You should be able to do that asleep to be in this field).

My comments are in red.

Be careful where you put your flea. You might need to stack multiple girders above your capsule to maintain a sufficiently aerodynamic shape to come down the right way. This is obviously great for sepratrons (anybody done this on Duna?), but much more iffy with fleas.

That screams sensor failure to me, but there must be a ton of other possibilities (turbo pumps not pumping enough (possibly due to their own control failures). Software issue misreading the controls (or outputting the wrong values). Amazing they could recover with a failure like that.

It sounds like any attempt to sell it to anyone but Boeing would have to include $365 million, plus enough for Boeing to let go of it. I'd be fairly surprised if this went to anyone but Boeing. I'd also be fairly impressed if Boeing wants it for any other reason that to keep the IP away from patent trolls (or possibly troll spacex and other competitors).

Connect a modular girder segment to your [vertical] decoupler, then connect two more modular girder segments sticking out (so a green blob is facing outwards). Connect thumper to modular girder segments. Total extra cost: 75 funds. Optional: use 5 girders straight down and no sideways girders. If your thumpers are occluded by a sufficiently wide uppers stage, this might be helpful. Possible use: use this (or cubic octagonal struts) to "leave out" the center stage on larger rockets and possibly get better aerodynamics.

I was thinking manned Mars landing (assuming you bring down all the fuel needed for power assist on the way down and all the way back up), but I suspect even that won't be that big (although it will be going faster through a lighter atmosphere). Best guess is for asteroid mining delivery: it would be wildly easier to justify multiple practice runs with ISS parts than any other way. I just can't see anybody in mining far enough along in planning and funding to foot the bill for these tests.

Assuming you have the parts in space shuttle sized pieces (an unsolved problem), it would make an ideal subject for an inflatable heat shield test. No reason to bring up heavy ballast for the test, just grab some dead satellite weight. In fact, I would recommend finding and bringing home dead satellite (from LEO or otherwise dangerous spots) for smaller tests. Hopefully the de-orbit system would work with or without the satellite (there would be huge opportunities to fail in such a project), but it would improve the test for lower cost (more mass for "free") and help clean up LEO.

The USSR won all but 1 round in various races into space and the Russians are the only one who can performed manned launches. Nothing they learned in all their skill at rocketry could hold that empire together. An easy answer to the question "is 1000 years enough for the Romans to get into space" would be "no." Pretty much all the technological advances the Romans had were in Byzantine areas as well as traditionally Roman areas. Constantinople survived until 1453, which is 1043 years after Alaric sacked Rome, the date I typically use for "Rome's Fall" (as mentioned above, the collapse was complicated). The Byzantines didn't go into space. The Ottomans didn't go into space. If you want to argue that the Cyrillic/Orthodox following Russians used "[Eastern] Roman" skill to get into space, go ahead. In the end, it took twentieth century tech to do it. Most of the tech required to go into space isn't developed unless labor is at a premium and people are willing to sink time and effort to optimize labor. The single most important aspect of rocketry is the harnessing of mind-boggling amounts of power (just to get into orbit). In Roman society, there was almost no motivation to do so, for more output you simply bought more slaves. While there *were* the occasional exceptions (huge milling projects), I suspect that such things were simply make work projects (somebody needed to sell a ton of slaves) to simply spend the huge taxes Rome was collecting. Rome had some amazing technology, but it wasn't ever directed at the type of things that rockets need.

I haven't heard a peep about the Spacex January 6, 2014 launch that had "unacceptable margins for USAF launches" (this was a launch for Thaicom, but didn't help spacex get any US DoD contracts). Spaceflight looks pretty binary to outside observers, either everything works or you pick up pieces.

While the claim is that it is far easier to push releases/bugfixes/whatever on Steam, am I the only one who has downloaded the .18 demo (or whatever the old one was) from Steam but the 1.0.0 demo from KSP/Squad? I suspect you can't get the 1.0.0 from Steam (note: you might need to create a dummy account: It wouldn't download as "I already had KSP").

As long as the 22nd amendment exists and Then every time the President gives NASA a goal, the next president will change it before anything can happen. Of course, unless congress is willing to fund SLS to do more than exist, it won't go anywhere, either. It shouldn't be a surprise that Apollo was more or less shut down by Nixon as it was remembered as "Kennedy's project" regardless of whose signature is on the plaque on the Eagle['s base].

The suggestion was made for something closer to the Shuttle's OMS system. That thing provide 1000lbs of propellant as part of an RCS. You wouldn't want to have to burn such a thing for every rotation, but you also wouldn't want to generate any significant delta-v with most RCS.

Some I have recommended: Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship: by George Dyson. Freeman Dyson's (the guy behind Orion) son covers the project. Not all space opera is sci-fi. Space Flight: by Carsbie Adams. Extremely dated (it was rush-written after Sputnik and shows it), it is one of the few books I've ever seen that covers space flight from basics to fuels and delta-v, and orbital mechanics. If you need one book to take you from STEM undergraduate to budding rocket scientist (and boy was that an issue post-sputnik) this is for you. Available used on amazon.

goals: Since career won't even give you maneuver nodes, I'm guessing that sandbox lets you hit your goals from the start. planning: I'm not sure how you can get to another planet without a plan. Certainly nothing I've seen in career modes builds a plan that you couldn't build in sandbox any easier. efficiency: I've spent a lot of time using SRBs and trying to recover boosters in career. Stock (default setting) throws so much money at your for most contracts to make any efficiency argument moot. You build efficient rockets for pretty much the same reason in career as in sandbox. Nope, none of these are reasons to prefer career mode. I've pretty much done my main play exclusively in career mode (using sandbox for testing and otherwise simply launching simple rockets due to avoiding the complex launches my career mode required). I may have spent more time in sandbox after all, but mostly in orbit or on Minmus and back. I'd hope that Squad could do more for career than the "remove features from sandbox and add grind" that it has always been (and the milestone feature is a great one), but further suggestion would be to supercharge the R&D outsourcing (there is little hope. People figured out how to game the system and it was nerfed. One of the goals Squad has recently shown is to maximize the required minimal grind). Being able to trade money for science would at least give an in game reason to build more efficient rockets. When career mode dropped I think everybody recommended new players start with science mode. The learning curve is just nasty (that whole survive the way down and open your parachutes fast enough) on the suborbital flight is a killer.

Note that this only works for LEO. Not so much because of focusing (all that probably limits it as well), but because it only acts as an "avoid hitting a particular satellite in a single flight". The assumption is that before the debris has a chance to hit anything else, it has long since burned up in the atmosphere. I can't imagine the cost of the laser broom vs. the cost of simply using on board guidance to simply move out of the way. I'd expect the laser broom would presumably be developed to deflect space junk from hitting defunct satellites. I'd have to wonder how difficult it would be to build "deorbiting cubesats" that could latch* on to a satellite and de-orbit one. * latch is the key word. I doubt that iron-based materials are sufficiently popular that a magnet would work. Adhesives might be interesting if you attached during the day (temperature shifts would make things hairy). "grabbers" just seem out of the question, but might work for certain antenna types (can't see a general solution based on grabbers.

One big advantage in KSP is that the terrier and poodle rockets are cheap, light, and extremely efficient (how often IRL can you choose all three? In KSP you only lose on high thrust). You can load them up with delta-v until you run into issues of having enough TWR to circularize before heading past aposis (less of a problem with shallow launches and low TWR). Centaur is LH/LOX, so has spectacular efficiency at quite a cost. It costs less to heave it more delta-v than to redesign it, so that's what they do.