DancesWithSquirrels

Re: Swivels vs. Terriers and my previous suggestion: Ah, that would be the problem with my suggestion. I'll freely admit I'm not a spaceplane guru - I find it far easier (and faster) to burn a disintegrating totem pole than fly efficiently. That said, I'm envious of the skills required to fly SSTOs well.

If you are using the payload as the root (for example, pulling a subassembly SSTO out as a launcher), just re-root to the SSTO cockpit before launch, and your drop tanks should work properly.

More wing, give the wing a bit of AOA (rotate it up ever so slightly), and replace your two Terriers with a single Swivel for more thrust, TWR over 1.0. Wing angle and area should be such that you're flying with an essentially level fuselage at Mach 1 - perhaps not perfect, but that's a good starting point.

Right click and disable the Xenon tank, right click and turn on the fuel cell (it's off, or you would see consumption of fuel as well as xenon). As soon as you get probe power, shut down the engine. You should, when recovered, disable the (now full) probe core battery as a backup in case something like this happens again - the battery should be enough for a quick engine stop and a recovery.

I've had to build (mid-career) some ugly looking bundles of Mk1 liquid fuel fuselages - 6 around 1, lots of fuel ducts - to get around missing 2.5m tanks. They have a good weight fraction, just a lot of parts. A royal pain to refuel, too, as it's difficult to highlight the center tank as a target. I'm considering adding the TAC fuel balance mod just for this reason.

Set the deployment pressure, I like to use 0.5 atm - but do a quicksave before reentry, in case you set it too high/fast, or run into high cumulogranite clouds before reaching the deployment pressure.

Rescued a kerbal orbiting between Jool and Eeloo once - a single nuke pushing an asparagus set of liquid fuel tanks and carrying a Mk1, heat shield, and an octo pod. And in the process flunked a couple of expiring contracts waiting for that loooong orbit to finish...

I've also used multiple docking ports in the past, although the build techniques have to adapt to the tree structure describing the craft. Here's a mission using tricouplers: In that case (IIRC) I was running career (no, science), and wanted to go to Duna before unlocking the Clamp-O-Tron Sr. - with a reasonably rigid ship that could maneuver without smacking the CM with the trailing fuel tanks on turns. The trick to creating those multiple dockers is to fill the first tricoupler with single ports (no symmetry), add a single matching port and the bottom tricoupler rotated out, add the last two, and rotate the tricoupler back in to align (E/Q in the VAB). The unconnected ports will (should) dock on the launch pad right after loading. The craft part tree then looks like this, with no loops: ... | Tank | Tricoupler | | | port port port | port port port | | | Tricoupler | Tank | ... If you use symmetry or attach all three ports before the tricoupler, the tricoupler will only be hooked through a single port, and (ahem) there will be dangles.

Astern -> towards the stern, towards the back. It's naval terminology. I would suggest running the test with no control surfaces on the wings whatsoever, just to remove that factor.

If the discarded debris has a periapsis anywhere below 70km, I feel completely justified in deleting it from the tracking station, rather than switching to it and applying physics over what may be many orbits to drop it to destruction. Otherwise I use either sepratrons or a service bay/pod combo to drop the booster. The only point I find challenging is early Mun/Minmas career missions, where if I'm not careful I end up with tanks I need to discard in a transfer orbit, which will end up as long-term junk.

I use the trick (someone demonstrated it on a video, I would credit them if I could remember who) of creating hardpoints. * Build the stack without the fairing, using a decoupler smaller than the booster diameter. * Add some small 'towers' of small cubic struts (3x or 4x symmetry, 3 or 4 cubics stacked) to the top of the booster under the planned fairing location, outside the decoupler and near the edges of the booster. They just have to be a little longer than the fairing [base] thickness. * Then insert and construct the fairing, smooth is better even at the cost of a bit of fairing weight. * The cubic strut towers should now protrude through the fairing base, and you can solidly strut from the hardpoints to your payload. Ends up solid as a rock.

I have on occasion embedded a pair of "Twitch" engines into the base of my shuttle, pointed outwards in opposite directions. Deactivate the main engines and burn away...

Hibernation, definitely hibernation. Shut down the probe core until you get in the vicinity of Jool by turning off the batteries.

Several options that I use: * Stage before orbiting. * Boost to orbit, then retros on stage separation. Usually sepratrons, but I sometimes use reversed (and tilted to get spin) 24-77s by staging them one step before separation, and using whatever leftover fuel I have in my booster to deorbit it. Don't forget to deactivate the main booster engine(s), though! * Add a cheap pod and some batteries to the discarded stage, deorbit with booster engine. Worst case, if lacking RCS or sufficient reaction wheels, deorbit half an orbit later when facing retrograde. Main challenge here is a pod 90 degrees to the engines, if you have to build it that way.

TheBigSwede has a video showing an unguided rocket to orbit with continuous burns, see here.

Your prograde kick is far too aggressive - I place fixed tailfins (not the tiny ones) just above the 1st stage engine, and I find that if I push over to somewhere between 5-10 degrees at 30-50 mps I can leave everything else alone for a gravity turn. At that point I only have to start steering when I stage to 2nd, and 3 or 4 tiny fins on the second stage make that pretty worry free as well.

To echo, struts. A single docking port is too flexible, and your cargo will wag around - you want at least 3-4 points of support for stability.

Tilting a high engine down to point more towards the CoG and CoL greatly reduces any pitching moment from off-center thrust. And having raised engines on the A-10 keeps the engines from breathing nothing more than smoke from the 30mm canon the plane is built around...

If it's intended for deep space it's going to need to be launched - IMO that all but requires a bottom stack node and/or side attachments on the Orion module.

IIRC the charges for a ground launched several thousand ton Orion were to be on the order of 0.15 it, while the space charges were more like 5 it, as the atmospheric shock wave would greatly amplify each charge. An inverse pressure/ISP relationship, more Isp with more atmosphere... I think I need to build a single stage Orion Eve lander/return ship...

I've been wondering that myself...

The below text is from a digital copy of the General Atomic study on Orion, with emphasis added. Note that the pulse module was partially self-correcting and stable for small errors, and that reaction control using even monopropellant estimated a mass of 0.5 to 1% that of the nuclear fuel for a normal mission. Various methods of flight control during propulsion have been considered in previous nuclear-pulse-propulsion studies. One method of directional control was by fine adjustments of the position or attitude of the pulse units at detonation, which requires no auxiliary propellant. In this study, however, a chemical-rocket, lateral-thrust attitude control system is used. Its size is relatively small, since the basic propulsion system, for most over-all configurations at least, is stable and partially self-correcting for pulse misalignments that are within tolerances. Although this system is located in the payload section of the systems considered in this study to attain a long moment-arm, its description is included with the propulsion-module description because its function is so closely related to the operation of the propulsion module. Preliminary estimates have been made of the amount of attitude correction required for various sizes of propulsion modules and overall configurations. The four rocket motors used in the flight-control system are positioned near the nose of the over-all vehicle; they are 90 degrees apart and thrust slightly aft of normal to the longitudinal axis. Simple "bang-bang" motor control is assumed, with the input suitably damped to take advantage of the propulsion module's selfcorrecting tendency. The amount of propellant required, based on the use of relatively low specific impulses appropriate for easily storable liquids (or in one case, the monopropellant H202), varied from about 0.5 to 1 percent of the nuclear-pulse propellant consumed during the same propulsion period. For the performance calculations of this study, therefore, chemical control propellant (and its tankage) was provided, and it was presumed that the quantities consumed would be equal to 1 percent of the nuclear-pulse propellant.

4x detonations per second??? I thought the 4,000 ton reference version topped out at 1x per second, mostly to give the secondary shock absorbers time to rebound and to smooth out the acceleration (my references and books on the project show acceleration max as cycling up and down about two of three G's every second, quite a ride...).

Those aren't stock RTGs, are they? A dozen stock units should only be able to power a single ion engine, not four...

Manned (Kerbaled): Mun, Minmas, Duna, Ike, Gilly, Dres (0.90). Probes to Eve surface, ion probe to Joolian moons. Rescued from an orbit between Jool and Eeloo in 1.0.4, which was a fun challenge - orbit predictions are really jittery at that distance, and I spent a lot of delta-V chasing the poor guy.