DDE

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:

My preferred self-consistent drive design is a warp drive based on advanced graviton manipulation tech. It allows a pocket of space - including the ship - to travel at FTL speeds; said pocket's cross-section in non-curved space is microscopic, eliminating the threat of FTL collisions with minor particles, while large gravitating objects cause the field to collapse; thus FTL kinetic kill systems are out. Furthermore, an FTL jump results in no change of velocity relative to normal space, thus creating the non-trivial issue of settling into a reasonable orbit. I'm basing that behavior on KSPI. Sure, Einstein gets defenestrated, but I'm more concerned with conservation of energy.

Back-up solution is through a save file editor like

Just how much did you have to grind to get a reasonable fleet (incl. a III battleship to unclok the carrier, presumably) just in PvE? I mean, they made the F11 prompt precisely to deal with those accidental torpedoes.

PVC ablation... that reminds me... @Streetwind, using a resistojet doesn't even restrict us to water. Some of them are solid-fuelled, e.g. Teflon; while an electrolytic hydrolox system has capacity for short, high-g pulses, a resistojet could be capacitor-powered. Both would put a constant drain on the solar panels. We really need to see those numbers.

I'm not sure it's a smart idea. Can't they just build a water resistojet and do away with gasses altogether?

Yeah, because we all know the Apollo moon landings were all shot in a soundstage. On Mars.

Unfortunately, "cold" means "all electronics are off". Including, quite likely, radios, and most certainly all sensors.

Chapter 15: Minty Ice-cream, Scanned Linus glared at Gene over his shoulder, so the Deputy Director of Operations took a few steps back. Jeb had already carried a folding chair and table to set himself up in the corner. The former intern, now in charge of the Satellite Group Control unit, had been getting very territorial, even though his little empire encompassed three shifts of four: launch, comms, astrodynamics and payload engineer. Walt and his “black” division managed Loki from a different broom closet. “Booster, initiate launch procedures,” Linus noted with poorly-concealed self-importance. “Copy that, Flight. Pad, please confirm firing readiness,” Bobak responded. Since that time hiding under the table, he’d become slightly less neurotic. “SGC, Pad, pad clear, fuel line drained, ready for launch.” “Flight, Booster, Eagle 0 ready for launch.” “Booster, proceed.” “Copy that. Initiating launch sequence.” Thanks to the latest upgrade to Vector’s computer systems, Bobak had an immensely complicated mission of turning the launch key, and then pressing a red button if everything went south. Because this time, everything was supposed to go north. The Eagle was mounted on a regular Vector stack and Terrier upper stage. When Bobak turned the launch key, the expected happened. Thirty seconds of inertial guidance platform calibration. Then the automatics fired the two side boosters, and the rocket careened off the pad. The SRB stages were dropped as usual. The Terrier burnt out entirely on the horizontal part of the flight, however. Once the last bit of fuel was gulped up by the pumps, the separation sequence began. The probe left the booster behind, adding a bit more velocity with its own Spark motor until it reached the trajectory taking it into a high polar orbit. “FIDO, please confirm circularization burn,” Linus repeated several times at the fidgeting subordinate. Nervous bosses and automatic flight sequences were a pretty bad combination. “…and that’s without the signal delay,” Jeb noted to Bob. Finally, the confirmation arrived. “Alright, PME, begin operation.” The Eagle was engineered around mounting a new, high-resolution radar array – and rather long one – along its side; the elongated hull contained a plentiful supply of fuel for the probe’s own motor, enough to manoeuvre to Minmus on its own steam. “Data coming through,” the Payload Management Engineer responded, as the massive reels of magnetic tape began spinning. The KSC was already knee-deep in those things, but Eagle’s radar was feeding a massive, constant stream of data. One reel was filled up in under five minutes; there were two rookies from the Academy just to keep the machines fed with tape. Jeb took the first full tape, and shoved it into SGC’s massive mainframe in the next room. “I’m sorry Jeb, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” a jittery, metallic voice from within the machine announced. Bob furrowed his eyebrows. Linus jumped. Jeb stepped back and applied his vintage leather aviator boot vigorously to the side of the machine. Someone seemed to run out through the service door in the back. Finally, the processor did its job, producing a map of a small patch of Kerbin. The magic of Eagle’s radar was that, while it only had slightly better resolution, the computer processor back on Kerbin integrated that data to create a virtual antenna about 500 km in size, allowing highly precise radar altimetry – to the order of one meter. ---------- Eagle 0 tested its all-seeing eye on Kerbin. Eagles 1 and 2 were unsurprisingly headed off to use their arrays on Mu and Minmus, and were launched into equatorial parking orbits first. The astrodynamics of these missions were, however, quite fussy. Not only did the Eagles require a burn to eject them out of Kerbin’s equatorial plane, but the orbital insertion was split into three burns – initial injection, circularization in high orbit, and a final inclination correction. With the mission to Minmus, similar gymnastics were required on departure as well because of the target's inclined orbit. ---------- With the other probe program, Prospector, Gene managed to wrestle the control from Linus, and took the opportunity to train up his FMC crew. The Prospector was a bigger cousin of the Eagle, clocking in at 3 t at parking orbit. That was exactly at the upper limit of a combination of a Vector – 7 Sickles total – and a slightly elongated Terrier stage. Bill had been given it his very best. The first four Sickles ignited at blast-off, and burnt until 7 km. “Ripple-fire!” the new Booster guy laughed as the first separation event occurred. There was no pause in this design – as the empty cans fell off in between the numerous tail fins, the net set of two boosters ignited. At well over 20 km the second set of boosters also fell off, leaving the last Sickle to struggle against the mass of the payload. Once it was done, the Terrier joined the fray. With the loft complete, the last stage was ejected, leaving the Prospector on its way to its circularization burn. The Prospector was a pretty unusual craft, surprisingly aerodynamic for a deep space payload. Prospector 1 was also testing the new motor for the Gadfly lander; the twin-nozzle Thunder was fitted to Spark’s thrust frame, but unsurprisingly packed more wallop. “Flight, GNC, got minor oversteering here… RCS kicking in, we’ve got a minor drift… this thing is pretty overpowered.” Gene just shrugged. A day later in low polar orbit over Mun, the Prospector pened its payload bays. The radio source on top began to spin, and a tripod antenna extended out of the side bay. This was the most powerful weapon in Bob’s water-detecting arsenal – and L-band radar mounted alongside a multispectral scanner. Prospector 2 blasted away hours later and departed as expected. This time it wasn’t carrying an overpowered engine; that engine was going to get into action later that day, though. ---------- The second Hermes-C launch blasted off normally as well. “Say ‘hello’ to our audience, Jeb,” Yaroslav Kermanov asked, sticking the camcorder through the gap in the seats. “Potato!” Jeb responded, and pretended to be busy with the post-TDE correction. Said audience had spent the entire pre-flight press conference asking him whether Minmus is made of minty ice-cream. Ice-cream, to a person who’d spent the preceding week on salted cardboard – sorry, flight rations. Monsters. “I still don’t get it,” Raygan Kerman, the rookie flight engineer from the Silver Crew, “Aren’t you the guy who thinks Minmus is shaky?” “If you mean I don’t think that a probe can keep shaking with a moderately stable amplitude, for five hours, with the reaction wheels off, yeah, that’d be me, Raygun.” “Raygan, not Raygun; Newgun’s a whole other guy.” Slava shrugged. “PhD in cryotectonics, here I come,” he added quietly.

@The Raging Sandwich @vonBraun That's what you get for calling your rocket "fog". Also on August 3 2004, the launch of MESSENGER.

By popular consensus among hard sci-fi experts, stealth in space is nigh-impossible, with some very small possibilities primarily revolving around trying to confuse the enemy rather than hide outright, or becoming invisible across a very small angle. This is because even with our measly current sensors, we can still detect the ~6 kW signature of Voyager-1's RTG and perform a general whole sky survey in 4 hours, which will reveal an anomalous signature. You can't fully get away from the thermal signature without breaking the basic laws of thermodynamics, whereas the need to reflect its own signal from the target gravely cripples active sensors (e.g. RADAR) in comparison.

Great. My taxpayer roubles at work. Already have noticed three typos.

I meant their rotation, similar to the solar panels. I have checked. And here's another clueless player: http://steamcommunity.com/app/220200/discussions/0/360670708795448585/

Hey, sorry for piggybacking the thread, but are you sure they still work this way? They don't for me (while solar panels do), and I think I remember seeing a mention of such an issue.

@Frozen_Heart FYI, the new lunar lander the Orion could have been combined with has been axed. So, it's Apollo 8 Mark 2, at best.

So, basically, I'm considering a Mun Buggy (pun attempted); and I'm thinking what the better choice of power source is. RTGs are excluded at the start, and I have great doubts about solar; if I can have enough gas to outlast my own patience, then why bother with infinite power?

I particularly like @adsii1970's statements imply that the Orion is the last and only hope for the totality of human manned space exploration.

Oh, look, another supposedly revolutionary crowd-funder! These things should be banned already.

Nope; even if verniers are part of the primary engine (e.g. RD-107/108) they apparently still are heavier than a gimbal.