Nefrums

Just bring enough batteries on the landers, the mothership can have a couple of solar panels. I'll try this if I can get outer planets to work. Edit: ckan ftw!

I think this looks very cheep for building a mobile network. I work for a Swedish network company, and we sell HW for mobile networks for around 15B$/year at 28% market share. Thou I don't see how a few thousand satellites would be able to handle the amount of data transmitted over mobile networks. Edit: The more I think about it this looks more for internet of things than for regular mobile users. Good latency and limited amount of data.

China is following their CLEP plan. And are in the last stage of the unmanned part. They have sent landers/rovers and tested reentry. Next step (planed next year) is a apolo style sample return mission (still unmanned) called Chang'e 5. Their plan includes maned moon missions in 2025-2030. Nasa will not get there before then, but spaceX or Blue origin might.

Not entierly true. That was a Rapier/ion lander, and those engins where used for other things as well, like kerbin ascent. A dedicated Laythe lander with a panther as a first stage and a spark as second stage would probably be the lightest. It is sometimes better to land on low autetude on Laythe. As the airbreathing engins get alot more thrust on sea level than they do at 5km. And it is easier to get to the speeds where engins like panther/whiplash/Rapier works best if you start at sea level.

You would need 3 nervs to land a ship this size on Eeloo, 2 might be possible as you would burn most of the fuel to get there. A SSTEeloo would need around 6km/s dVif you do direct transfers, with gravity assists you could probably do it for half that.

Yes even the Mk2 bicoupler is very draggy.

I made a try with 8 rapiers and one nerv: http://imgur.com/a/QF2OA Got 8456 m/s dV left in orbit

That is an inpressive amount of dV. You should be able to go 1650 in airbreathing mode. I suspect that the canards transfer heat to the cockpit.

I tried this using spaceY and KW. Still couldent get to otbit. Best try got me to 4,5km/s at 80 km. So about 3km/S short.

This looks fun, I might give it a try

I also tried this. It is very hard. I managed to get a probe core to about 40km...

even with my limited understanding of this the vidio appears to be missing some crucial elements. Like that the shape of the cavity causes the Vg so decrease towards one end. This decrease in Vg should (in my uniformed opinion) cause as much momentum transfer to the cavity as the difference in Vg. So the resulting thrust on the cavity should be 0.

the log function from the math python lib can use any base. the default is natural logarithm ref

Add: from math import log And change to: Delta_V=log(mass_full/mass_empty)*isp*9.81 Then remove everything related to "g" Edit: This should probably do it: from math import log mass_empty=int(raw_input("Enter dry mass ")) mass_full=int(raw_input("Enter wet mass ")) isp=int(raw_input("Enter Isp ")) Delta_V=log(mass_full/mass_empty)*isp*9.81 print Delta_V

One crazy theory is that we are looking at a Artificial gravity generator...

The heat shields of ICBMs are designed to survive reentry from a shallow suborbital trajectory. They would burn up on reentry when being launched straight up.

1 W = 1 Nm/s So you get about about a 1/10^6 of the energy you put in as kinetic energy.

When they figure out how it works thre will likely be able to build something that have several orders of magnitude better thrust/W

it is about two orders of magnitude less than an ion engine but two orders of magnitude more than a Photonic laser engine. It is very interesting that not even Nasa where able to disprove this engine. So Newtons first law disproved? Not likely, but what is making this work then?

Well it hardly takes a math whiz to put 1 MW into: 1,2+- 0,1 mN/kW you get: 1.2 N

Are EVA landing on kerbin allowed, or do the reentry pod have to survive the landing?

You should rename the challenge to biggest speedboat or something like that. As the scoring (speed * kerbals) have nothing to do with distance.

Of course I'm very clever, how else can I have unfounded opinions about something on the internet? But you misunderstand, I don't presume to have any idea of what low gravity will have for long term health effects. I'm just pointing out that as you say space is dangerous and death is a likely outcome, but that that will not mater to the people who will want to go. And what level of confidence is that? And why would "we" need it? We are all used to living in a very safe world. This have not always been so and will not always be so. We have no right to tell other people what risks are acceptable for them. Risks will be huge and people will want to go anyway.

There is only one way to know for sure. Send a couple of thousand people to live there for 20 years. Sure they will probably all die, but what is the problem with that? It is not like anyone will be forced to go. And there will still be hundreds of thousand of people that will what to go on the next trip.

The cancer risk is irrelevant. What is relevant is the life expectancy. And this will be very very low for early colonists, space is dangerous. If we disregard he obvious dangers with space travel, (like the rocket blowing up, craching into mars, pressure failure of the habitat, power/oxygen faliure, etc.) and only look at the other things that affect life expectancy, it would be fairly easy to get better life expectancy even with the increased cancer risk from radiation. Banning smoking and rationing food would have to be done on a mars colony, and that would more than competence for the increased radiation exposure, in terms of life expectancy.