DDE

I hear you. Hm, can we Ploughshare the crap out of this thing with half a dozen shaped nuclear charges?

I'm afraid large-scale storeables are the past and not the future, everyone's terrified of UDMH-NTO, let alone more... advanced combinations.

Some claim that they already have.

@Bill Phil, almost same here, just my initials. I am not a destroyer escort.

If you had an actual Star Destroyer, with gigatons TT equivalent per each bolt of countless main guns, maybe. If no, GTFO.

True, but they seem to think a combination of payload reduction and refurbishment costs are actually making Musk's op less profitable than if he'd stuck to expendables, and threaten to make the [insert next launch system here] cheaper per kilogram than a reusable Falcon 9. Also, Russia isn't perfect for powered downrange landing. Russia's spaceports are either all-military high-inclination (Plesetsk) or have drop zones over the Pacific (Vostochny); Kazakhstan has overland drop zones, but any dependency on it would be a huge minus - Vostochny is largely just a very expensive demarche against potential Kazakhstani blackmail over Baikonur. Finally, while SpaceX does have to deal with water landing, it then gets the added bonus of water transport. How do you propose transporting entire assembled stages over the only realistic option available - the 1524 mm gauge of the Transsiberian railway? I'm not sure they can fit the 4.1 m diameter Soyuz-5 will be built around (Vostochny's limited to 3.9), let alone the length of an entire first stage.

Yet you still have many a denier of economical feasibility of reusable rocketry, and in pretty high places *cough* Dmitry Rogozin *cough*

Climb was good too, apparently. Maneuverability... thank Marx for having a country big enough to turn that thing around.

Unlikely. Starting with around the time the MiG-31 was ordered, fighters have been giving up maximum performance values (velocity, altitude) in favour of mid-altitude maneuverability, range, electronics and stealth.

Well, that at least avoids the usual trope of "abrasive astronauts nobody'd have let into space in the first place".

@MaxwellsDemon, space programs have a thing for that.

...probably because this designation has been used for four unrelated MiG-29 variants and the MiG 1.44?

No... we're the ones that sold 'em! Well, let's see - were any actual military fighters outfitted like that? The RCS replaced the freaking radar. Sure, there was talk of peroxide rocket "superperformance" systems, but logistics of having tens of thousands of gallons of peroxide on aircraft carriers killed it even before afterburners showed up.

Which? I'm guessing you're referring to the National Interest article describing it as a 5++ or 6th gen fighter: http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/mig-41-russias-wants-build-super-6th-generation-fighter-20064 The author fails to cite any sources, and for good reason: they appear to be pulling info out of their own rectum. Yes, the Russian military has claimed to be "envisioning" 6th and even 7th generation fighters with near-space or even orbital capability - but then it's the same military that has funded psionics and a 'special type' of radiation that instantly turns diesel fuel to goop, as late as 2004. And The Diplomat has previously claimed that T-14 Armata will receive nuclear shells, so the press is just as capable of spewing repurposed bovine waste. However, the statements for MiG-41 PAK-DP are rather tame: prototypes by 2020, with the primary feature of Mach 4-4.3 capability. As to propulsion, they could be betting on Energomash's pulse-detonation rocket program and its 10% ISP increase.

One of the reasons to throttle down is to keep acceleration under control, especially if you have strap-on boosters which, when almost empty, cause your TWR to go through the roof.

It was more than an idea; it'd been test-fired and flight-certified. It was Glushko's way of getting hydrolox-like performance (400 sec, only 8 sec fewer than the RD-401 ammonia nuclear motor) without hydrogen's deep cryogenics.

High-detail textures fail to load on approach to Mun, slightly more detailed textures pop in in grid squares directly underneath the craft. Observing additional visual anomalies only at a certain angle and around a certain region, but these remain even with SVT removed: Log: https://1drv.ms/t/s!AmlSZuL0ax7C4BI7PBmTJ1VPX2mv Modlist:

No supercriticality, no WMD.

Depends on the text of the document being argued over. E.g. UNSC resolution 687 defines them as

It only expressly prohibits WMDs. Lasers aren't WMDs.

@SchrottBot, CPU 27%, Memory 68%, Disk 11%. Although it's not unlike Windows. I think it's associated with the glitch I've previously observed, the one that produces a very blocky Minmus among others when you zip around with Hyperedit.

Formal bug report as follows: high-detail textures fail to load on approach to Mun, slightly more detailed textures pop in in grid squares directly underneath the craft. Observing additional visual anomalies only at a certain angle and around a certain region, but these remain even with SVT removed: Log: https://1drv.ms/t/s!AmlSZuL0ax7C4BI7PBmTJ1VPX2mv Modlist:

Actually it looks a lot like your 1.1.3-era crater wall textures, just not properly loaded and over-the-top washed-out. And it looks like your screenshots at a distance. Just for a screenshot, here's a surface landing: So, guess I'm back to chasing bugs.

*sigh* To avoid any further confusion...