Terwin

Cool idea, but you are not using it to it's full potential. Why not add some horizontal speed as well? Above 14000m it should not be too difficult to get a horizontal velocity of around 1000m/s and that would put you at nearly half of orbital velocity... With more air intakes you could probably also get higher and faster. I'll need to look at building one of these as a first stage money saver...

Was this ever done? I am using contract pack v0.5.0, Contract configurator v0.7.9, and SCANsat v10.0 (all up to date according to CKAN) and every time I go back to my scan probe it says I have 1 day 29 minutes and 59 seconds to go, even if it was lower the last time I left.

What exactly is the distinction between a vehicle with full self-repair functionality and one that is 'organic' or 'alive'? What if it can fully develop from a small pod, and such pods can be produced from a fully developed vehicle? Could we even tell if an advanced alien ship was alive vs having really good self-repair without a detailed examination? What if the ship started as a lithovore that exudes a metallic shell? I think the distinction is not so clear as we might think, and as our technology gets better the distinction will get to be less and less. (which is more 'alive'? The self-repairing vehicle that can bud off new ships like itself with no organic heritage or the heavily modified, but still technically 'alive' giant crustation that has an exoskeleton currently in use as the outer hull of a ship with no ability to reproduce or even repair the outer hull?)