DDE

Honestly, I just always cheat and edit the save file even with MechJeb.

I agree with @klesh; I only have had success building 0.625 m launchers with Ven's pack, which throws in 0.625 SRBs and decouplers.

Captured object?

Not the story Wikipedia gives. Popovich wanted to fight through the cold caused by a heating malfunction, but he also reported seeing thunderstorms from orbit. Thing is, "I see thunderstorms" was the code-phrase in case the space sickness that plagued Titov had come back, so mission control began the return procedure... even though he meant it literally.

This should be emphasized. The lab is supposed to have a shielded vacuum exposure section.

That reminds me... http://www.astronautix.com/s/sassto.html

@shynung, interesting, I thought it didn't do anything to drag and only kept the really hot plasma away.

KSP jetpack has around 600 m/s of dV, too, which is stupendously more than the MMU. However... the MMU uses cold gas thrusters, which are simple, but pretty derpy; this is because its predecessors were tested inside Skylab. On the other hand, Gemini 9 and 12 were supposed to test the USAF AMU, which used peroxide monoprop and had a dV of 76.2 m/s (and came with woven steel pants).

@Bill Phil@StrandedonEarth@Frozen_Heart, what if we try to factor in a magnetic reentry shield?

These words usually lead to a pretty pointless conversation. I'm outta here... for now.

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/oka_t.html I had no idea that there's YET ANOTHER part of Roscosmos that is riddled with political maneuvering.

@Bioman222, I found another case of the RD-170 being a miracle worker. That would be an augmented Zenit.

Closest approach within several kilometers, matched inclination, and slight difference in apogee-perigee (166x218 compared to 159x211, leading to period difference of 18 seconds). Sure, no stationkeeping, but in KSP terms it was within RCS range.

I wonder how much gimbal is needed to achieve the same effect. I think it really depends on what those engines are. Anything SSTO-capable might be adapted to stupidly high heat fluxes anyway. I used to make my orbit-capable Falcon 9R rip-off reenter engine-first. And yeah, @Veeltch, it involved a trailing Kermageddon ballute. And even then it was a very tight balancing act.

Let's assume we have an honest-to-Heinlein VTVL SSTO, with a bell-like shape for optimized hypersonic aerodynamics. How would you go about landing such a machine? Would you aerobrake engines-in, or aerobrake with your bow and then flip?

All of my three-man Apollo-Soyuz equivalents end up being named "Hermes". All of them.

You don't consider an entire Vostok launcher, going from Baikonur to orbit, to be active?

@Firemetal, excessive forum digging can lead one to necromancy. As to what "4" is, that's the fairing size. The RD-180 comes from the RD-170, which in turn also has an interesting, asymmetric story to tell:

See also

Hey, it's worked for David Weber! As to "high drives", you can always replace the wear with radiation and/or toxicity. That way, you get a long list of very real thrust systems. Open-cycle liquid-core and gas-core rockets. Orion drive, depending on your safety thresholds. Salt water nuclear rocket, definitely. Antimatter drives, arguably, due to high gamma emissions. Any chemical thrusters using fluorine, beryllium and boron. And, if you ask me, I'm just not letting FTL ships land pretty much ever. Take off, Convair Nexus-style, maybe. Encasing a large interplanetary dV and an FTL drive into an aerodynamic hull with enough TWR? Just use shuttles, unless you really need to transport a large single piece of highly sophisticated equipment; basically an An-225 Mriya, and note how they only ever made one of these.

I wouldn't go that deep; I never even studied the wave-particle nature of light, so I'd like to avoid making a fool of myself. Which means that it's plausible, in my universe, to conduct an FLT jump, and then fire up a hydrolox or UDMH-N2O4 sublight "drive".

OP, the convention in Nertea's mods has been to depict it purple, as seen with the plasma above. If you could somehow contact the guy behind Children of a Dead Earth, he's got a model for calculating exhaust appearance in vacuum: https://childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/why-does-it-look-like-that-part-1/

If we maintain conservation of momentum, give the jumps a somewhat low accuracy, and keep the torchdrives reasonably weak, then we can pad the story due to all the sublight velocity match ops where conventional orbital mechanics are involved. At least, that's how I made my drive.

Don't you dismiss my religion! I wholly intend to have a space helmet photo on my next driver's license; if the Pastafarians can, why can't I?

I have no idea what you have on that photograph. That isn't a four-stage Proton variant, and it seems to be burning kerolox, not UDMH-N2O4. It's also interesting to note that Luna-24 was the last Cold War-era lunar landing, and that the Soviets claimed to have found water in the returned samples. Here's your generic Ye-8-5 probe: