DDE

Uhm, the original Pegasus is a total wimp, we can go bigger if needed with merely off-the-shelf equipment.

Because "Moar boosters!" is not cost-effective.

Technically it has separate configs to work with Blizzy's toolbar and with RPM also listed in CKAN.

I'm afraid that any active sensor would have prohibitively high power requirements. I'm also somewhat concerned with your choice of X-ray/gamma detector. Especially as it likely misses a fairly handy alpha-beta detection capability.

Got any good source? Russianspaceweb told me there was a dedicated backup thruster and I ended up trawling through a 2013 thread in some dank Russian forum.

I was surprised, seeing as there is a very engine-like hole at the back, along with a protective shroud animated in Tantares mods, and so I dug. So what we got on modern-series Soyuz is a KTDU-80/S5.80 common-fuel system with 14 x 11D428 coarse RCS (14 kgf), 12 x S5.142 fine RCS (2.5 kgf) and a main thruster with four throttling valves for up to 300 kgf. Otherwise it's a horrible mess of lackluster documentation and several dozen variants of spacecraft.

While I dunno about the proposed late short-SM Apollo I've seen mentioned, we have the Venus fly-by project, with an equipment container for the S-IV workshop in place of the LM requiring using a shorter dumbbell, leading to two LM engines proposed. The oomph however allowed the CSM to fully reverse its trajectory on the way to the Moon. By comparison, the Soyuz lunar mission stack had an entire fifth stage - the now-famous Block D - dedicated to lunar orbit insertion.

Yeah, but isn't it reaction mass-insensitive? Anything can be heated, but the Isp would plummet. I still thought we're talking about primary motors here...

See http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#id--Electrothermal--Resistojet ; seems like you're on the money.

Feedback: it seems to work, but the wireframes seem quite dense, and there is pronounced lag restricted to IVA with VV screen on. Could be Ven's fancy part meshes.

Agent Kirrim will return in Munraker.

Chapter 11: All Your Base Yaroslav Kerbalov stepped off the SAR plane, water dripping from his suit. The rest of the crew crawled out, looking as enthusiastic as a wet newspaper; Slava’s eyes kept gleaming under the steamed-up helmet. “How long till next try?” he puffed in the direction of Jeb and his staff. “A week, tops,” Bill responded, “I’ve got plenty of data to fix the structural faults. We’re going to have to switch to your Kerbotserkovsky drag fins instead normal tail fins to maintain total mass, but this shouldn’t become a problem.” “There’s no way we’re going back there!” Lisgrid butted in. “Say that again, Pilot,” Jeb uttered, pinning her down with a withering glare. ---------- This time the launch occurred without a hunch. Hermes headed off towards a third Tunguska burn in the shadow of the planet. Another half-hour and half-orbit later, the final approach began. The Terrier engine sizzled as the relative velocity clocked down. According to their electronics, they were now in station less than one kilometre away from the station. Lisgrid returned the vehicle to manual control, and carefully spun it around. On the “upper deck”, Yaroslav and Roszie peered into the narrow forward windows. The station was barely visible, a tiny sliver of white in the distance. Lisgrid fired the Terrier briefly, and then spun the ship around. A minute later, she performed the counterburn. She inhaled deeply, and flipped the automated docking system switch. A fully kitted Hermes-A had 8 RCS jets around the base of the pod, 4 retrograde jets on the sides of the SM, and 8 more sideways translation and prograde jets around the Terrier engine, for a total of 20. Of them, the autopilot fired a full half at once. The autopilot aligned them parallel to the docking axis, and besides, the windows had a massive dead zone from their pretty low seating. Instead, they watched as the shadow of a solar panel, and finally the docking port itself, appeared on the docking port visor screen. The ship kept translating at 2 m/s until the docking port was in the crosshairs. The decelerating along the port-starboard axis was barely noticeable, the RCS thruster valves clicking softly. Finally, they gave it a good push forward. Twenty meters. Five meters. Three meters… The outer collars clicked together. There was a thud and a series of groans and clicks as the two ports achieved a hard dock. “Alright, I have the lead,” Roszie announced, and then paused awkwardly, before suggesting, “Helmets on.” “We don’t want to get hit by any metal shavings or whatever debris’s floated up in zero-G before we kick in the vents,” Kerbalov narrated, as he plopped on his camera-equipped helmet. The ship’s hatch was finally opened, and the exterior of the station’s matching hatch was exposed. It opened with some slight coaxing on behalf of a wrench. “The Athens station is composed of the forward interface section, the main vehicle body, and the aft power section,” Yaroslav continued, as he floated past the empty laboratory gear racks. “The front is a conical section housing radios, attitude jet fuel and a tunnel leading to the forward docking port. The central cylinder forms the core habitable volume, with three pseudo-decks and three portholes on either side. There are emergency access hatches, but those are forced shut by interior pressure. The actual hatch for regular spacewalks is housed in the aft compartment near the second docking port, behind an airlock system to avoid having to vent the whole craft. Opposite of it is the viewing cupola for surface and astronomic observations, although let’s be fair, it’s mostly for recreation because it’s just so bloody cool! “The station is powered by two oversized solar panel arrays, producing enough waste heat to necessitate coating half the station in radiators, and we expect to wear out at least one set of batteries, which is why the compartments holding them are also accessible.” ---------- “Alright, Orbit 3, biosig check in 10 minutes.” “Ros, I’ve got a package I don’t recognize, marked THX dash three-nought. Mind checking the manifest?” Lis being a pilot gave her a great excuse to slack off in the cupola while her crewmates unloaded the packages occupying every square centimetre of the Hermes’s interior. Above her, the Great Desert stretched across half of the visible hemisphere. She noticed a small spark. It wasn’t like any atmospheric phenomena she’d been taught of. “CAPCOM, Athens,” she called out. “Good copy, send traffic,” Jeb responded, sipping koffee. “I’ve got an unexplained flash streaking across the desert, around 10° north of equator, please advise.” “We copy,” Jeb answered, and picked up the phone, “Linus, Athens are calling in an anomaly over the desert, give me real-time data from Thor and prep Odin to lock on. In a few minutes, Athens’ radio came to life. “Athens, CAPCOM, we’ve got a major situation here,” Jeb sighed. “You’ve got an unknown craft on intercept trajectory. Expect visual contact in four minutes tops.” “You’re not going to evacuate?” Gene asked back on Kerbin. “They aren’t really safer in a smaller ship, and four minutes… Nope.” “Flight, target started deceleration burn!” They watched the flared-up infrared signature slow down near the small blot of the station. “CAPCOM, you see them?” Lis asked, scanning the blackness. “Odin’s in range, target is behind the Hermes at five hundred meters, closing in slowly.” Lis paused and squinted. “CAPCOM, I have visual.” She peered at the intruder. The top looked like a regular Mk 1 pod, but it rode atop a small cargo bay, followed by a flared, aerodynamic propulsion stage, with a trio of solar panels sticking out from behind it. The ship was moving towards her, in between the station and the planet. Its manoeuvring jets fired occasionally. It wasn’t just doing a careful fly-around. It was – rather sloppily – trying to take a position alongside the station. Slowly it edged into range, and closed in to below fifty meters, clearly in sight from Lis’s tiny borosilicate bubble. And then, it ran out of daylight. ---------- “Ros, can you scan the radio waves to see if it’s still around?” Yaroslav proposed. They’d killed all unneeded lights on-board. “I’m not seeing any interference that a docking radar would cause. He’s down to eyeballing it.” “Lis?” “I think I may see his window, dunno…” “No spotlight?” “Nope.” “Then he’s down to drifting near us, getting slightly ahead of us.” Ten minutes later, the sun began to break through Kerbin’s atmosphere. Lis pulled on the protective goggles, and quickly caught the bogie, two hundred meters away. It had its payload bay doors open, although she had no idea what was inside. It quickly began to pull back alongside the station. It briefly eclipsed the sun, and then began translating towards the station, aiming the cargo bay right at them, the pitch-black shadow concealing its contents. There was a sharp strike on the exterior. And then the bogie gunned its throttle, rapidly accelerating away. “I’ve got a coolant leak in panel 3!” Ros barked. “Lis! Anything!?” Jeb called out. “I think it had a cable trailing…” “Tow bomb!” Yaroslav growled, launching himself towards the airlock. They heard the hatch shut down, and then the alarm for an emergency vent of the airlock fired. Outside, Yaroslav quickly moved over to the opposite side of the cylinder. And sure, there was a first-sized chunk of radiator missing, a trail of glycol leaking from it. “Flight! We’re clear! He’s got a no-joy! The harpoon has not connected.” Behind him, there was a slight flash of an explosion in vacuum. ---------- Jeb leaned back in his chair, and exhaled for the first time in several hours. The bogie had slipped out of Odin’s vision before re-entering. That huge stage seen in Lis’s grainy shots would give it a lot of Δv leeway for confusion and concealment measures. “Walt,” he finally called out. “Yeah, boss?” “I’ve got a new job assignment for you. Covert B2G.” ---------- With no fanfare, Loki blasted off with its bizarrely-shaped fairing, and pushed into an inclined orbit. Jeb watched the launch from Walt’s new, secure station. An extra staff of three were also there, waiting for a chance to start doing their jobs. Above in orbit, the secondary payload fairing cracked open, and a colossal antenna spread open. The intercepted radio signals flowed in as a torrent that needed filtering and interpretation. The interns dropped their crosswords. “Just one more squeak, Fitz,” Jeb muttered, “One more stunt, and I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to endanger and destroy my brothers and my sisters. And you will know the heavens belong to us when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

Guys, a very dumb, very flamebaity question: What, in your opinion, is going to happen to ESA and BSA in case of Brexit?

They say the basic NERVA had an unusable TWR from the start; they need more liberty on the core design to be able to push it into surface launch class. Generally the preferred reaction mass was ammonia. Not as difficult to store, and dissociates from the heat. ISRU water could be a low-efficiency alternative.

http://www.gazeta.ru/science/2010/02/22_a_3328272.shtml http://www.mk.ru/science/2015/10/30/aura-kolbasy-i-gravicapa-na-sputnike-samye-gromkie-nauchnye-falshivki-v-rossii.html If references to the liquided-off head of the Russian Academy of Sciences and is Commission on Anti-science are insufficient for you, go hug a gator yourself!

Sadly, from what I heard, the NERVA would quickly burn through its fuel rods. Almost as quickly as one long burn.

You first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yubileiny

Well, we don't really know about China, do we? Plus developing indigenous technology and buying the Buran wreckage is more expensive than just grabbing relatively off-the-shelf tech.

It looks like the S-N stage. It doesn't seem to have been given any serious thought, though. An interesting Apollo-esque interplanetary vessel, however. And I love the pre-Mariner canali-adorned Mars. But I also think I'm beginning to understand the Isp measurement unit. Finally.

Well, duh! The best anti-hackers are the White Hat hackers, the best safe makers know their way around a lockpick, at cetera ad infinitum. And they should be on the list, of course.

I can't answer your question directly, but there are two notes of interest. Firstly, you've forgotten the more funny situation of the entire satellite being stolen and then the rocket intentionally crashed. This falls under the old criminal offence of barratry. And the sources that mention it, such as Atomic Rockets, claim that it may have already happened. Another is, dunno about explosives, but someone managed to strap a 280 mN gravity torsion field inertialess drive (a glorified https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_drive ) to the Russian scientific microsattelite Yubileyni under the guise of a trimming weight. The launch provider (Roscosmos) pretty much overlooked it. Which means you should probably be on a terror watchlist for having overly brilliant ideas.

It's on CKAN, marked for 1.0.5, with configs for 0.25 (!).

Yes, but it is, as the OP complained, disproportionately less than what one would expect from EU. At least they aren't hung up on Muslim outreach. Yet.

Actually, it's even worse than NASA because it's a "common cauldron" situation of multiple donors having fairly tenuous control of where their "hard-earned" money goes; it's a general EU problem, and I hear some dank island is trying to quit it because of that. It's the same for many other international organizations.

Well, not at the same time, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rikhter_R-23 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TP-82 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_laser_pistol