KerbonautInTraining

Dragon is gonna be reused... so why not? Also paste just the link and then hit enter. It should embed automatically.

Granted, orbital maneuvering systems are low thrust, but not that low. According to an addon I played with in Orbiter, the Soyuz can accelerate at a crushing 0.05 G's. They burn over the course of many orbits not because they have to but, as others have said, it gives more time for decision making.

The launch to orbit is where 7800 m/s of that velocity comes from. The burn to take you from orbit to the Moon is "only" 3200 m/s.

Where? I know it would be possible to get the fuel/engine setup pretty close to reality, but come to think of it I don't think it would be possible to make the landing system without mods.

Slightly off topic: I just realized you can build a full scale Falcon 9 in stock KSP using a cluster of vectors. Also no, there's no chance in hell any of the engines are getting re-used. The kraken is obviously not satisfied with this batch.

Oh god, I remember showing KSP to somebody, I think he was 7. We built a rocket powered by 4 twin boars and made it to duna in a single stage. Landing? That's a different story.

I don't know why, but the pulling force measurements were pretty sobering, 150+ lbs (70kg) of force to pull out of the first dive!

Oh for the love of... I just spent 30 minutes reading some very interesting documentation, the entire time thinking "why would an MD-80 need to carry things up and down in an elevator???" As somebody who has loved airplanes since the age of 7 I am dumbfounded.

@Nefrums Same goal achieved with a rocket 71x smaller than mine. The LV I used could put your entire stack into orbit with fuel to spare... I give up at efficient rocket design. [flips desk]

Flight controllers are silent. That's not a good sign. Still no word on the 1st stage. 2nd stage successfully inserted into orbit.

Successful liftoff, on board footage looks looked so pretty!! Whoa, the Mvac nozzle rim is heating up, glowing white now. Never seen that before.

10 funds says the rocket blows all the fog away No but really, if the fog is that bad at the barge I'm gonna cry

And here it is! Seriously though, sound warning at 1st stage burnout. Sadly the 4 cores around the lander did go off into solar an elliptical orbit. I forgot about that part of the challenge

Okay so I decided to inaugurate my new Nvidia graphics card by recording the mission. As of right now I just landed. (Image) @maccollo The vessel weighed 435t in LEO, and sent the 73t lander to TLI.

Wait, maccollo is doing this now? Looks like I'm gonna be staying up late... Will update with Imgur album (assuming it works this time) Edit: Well, it's 1:30 and I just flew it into orbit... only to find that the design changes I made left me 300 m/s short of TLI. The original rocket had tons of extra delta V and I trimmed it down a bit. Anyway, here's the rocket. Once I manage to complete the mission I'll make a lengthy mission report. Nice and sleek ain't she? Yet again I can't embed the image I'm sure maccollo will have something much less boring.

Until I can actually refly the mission, here's a little teaser: [x] Embedding isn't working. Awesome.

Mounting engines radially and dropping tanks behind you, I think.

When you use over 300 of them they aren't too small

I'll have to re-fly the mission to get screenies but I did a 3 kerbal direct ascent lunar mission launched on a 22 kiloton stock part only launch vehicle. I'm not at home right now and I'm really hoping I still have the craft. If I don't respond with pics in 24 hours feel free to scream a reminder at me

Who said it needs to be pressurized to 1 atm? This might be worthy of its own thread but can't people easily survive in 0.5 or even 0.3 atm?

A few questions on this mod and SLS in general: 1. What's the expected payload capacity of the different versions to, say, TLI? 2. How does the quad F9 booster setup compare to the F-1B boosters? 3. Is there a configuration optimized solely for LEO payloads? 4. Could you show us what RCS setup you use for attitude control/ullage on the EUS? Edit: Why does it look like the font size is changing?

Well, you just need to know which part it is so your can put it on a vessel, once in flight you already have the part and just need to test/use it.

Huh! I would've assumed something similar to a fuel cell would be better (no moving parts...) I wonder how easy it is to replace the batteries in a Falcon 9 first stage, or if they would need to be replaced at all. Assuming they're using Li-On, the batteries would outlast the rest of the stage in terms of charge cycles. But that's assuming 1 charge cycle per launch... Why are the little things always so fascinating?

At the very least the contract should include a picture of the part. Some parts don't have very intuitive names (i.e. ones that are just model numbers). Or you could copy the interface from the VAB. (mouse over the part, it starts spinning and shows a description etc.)

That's something I was thinking about. The mass fraction on the upper stage is already pretty huge (something like 10x heavier wet than dry) decreasing the empty mass too much would murder a lot of efficiency.