More Boosters

Pol is already sort-of yellow; I'd like to see a cyan Dres, like Uranus. Of course I can't explain such coloration. Lots and lots and lots and lots of ice? Then again it's supposed to be a stand-in for Ceres so IDK. That would further reduce the utility of the 1.25m engines.

Hey, So I've never actually bothered with *mostly recoverable* spacecraft or full blown SSTOs with rockets being so much more effective and simpler. However, I've also installed a few mods that ask rather high sums for the parts in the career mode, so it would seem I should start taking recovery more seriously to both save my money up and to recover the expensive engines and I would like to ask about the practically of this. On average, what's the operating cost of a shuttle in percentage? How much of the starting sum do you never see again? Should I just go with SSTOs? I've tried before but I could never build one, admittedly not having tried much, but there's also some charm in the Space Shuttle; after all however impractical was at times it's still one of the most iconic spacecraft and one of the first you learn about as a kid. Are such systems sensible in KSP? Maybe I could just take some of those oversized SRBs from the SpaceY mod and recover them with chutes and slap them on something with no other detachable parts? Let me know about your ways to deal with recovery and efficient operation.

There's an orbital factory in the UKS mod so you may want to check that out.

3/10 A distant type M star.

You can also name it after your mission, Probing [insert celestial body name here]

You should also get Precise Node as the maneuver node system is a bit too simplified at times. You'd be surprised by the amount of awesome gravity assists you can pull with them; like placing yourself on a polar orbit using the Mun. Oh and get Trajectories.

Well if it's on 2D you can use the cosine theorem, using their distance to the center of the earth as the sides of the triangle. You'd need to have a polar coordinate system to base your angles on and then take a triangle from that with their relative angles, then calculate the longest side.

Well I poster meant it for whatever rare metals or crystals the poster claims are more abundant on Mars. I think making a profit out of exporting iron ore from Mars unless Earth really ran out is quite a stretch too. Plus if you have noticed, at the closing section the poster doesn't even mention economical reasons as the reasons we should colonize Mars. Rather it is just an attempt at rationalizing it from a business perspective, which admittedly falls short due to the massive costs and impracticalities currently involved. If a solid case for colonization of Mars for business existed we would have already been there as the technology to go (NTRs) were there many years ago; everything else including better NTRs and the tools to actually live there and utilise Mars could have been developed in the half a century since if we wanted to go to Mars, so nobody is saying Mars is profitable in any predictable sense.

Perhaps, but one could also argue that if we have the means to build extraction facilities on the surface of Mars, it is also likely that a round trip is to be considered economical by then. Let us not forget that Mars has a far smaller atmosphere and far less gravity compared to Earth. But yeah, the post mentions in the end that it is mostly for the challenge and for advancement of the humankind, and while I do realize that a good business case needs to be made, returning these items to Earth will probably be within realm of reason if we can get ourselves in a position to extract them in the first place.

Here's something I came across on the Spore forums a few years back: Clickey I'd like to hear opinions from here.

If you're not alone you're close to it. KSP on stock works just fine and I'll admit to getting crashes somewhat regularly with all my mods (30+ really) but that's nothing quickloading can't fix.

Meh, not really. People seem to be attracted more to hypothetical combat situations, the only other science labs threads as popular as these are the real life mission ones.

Okay man you post some interesting stuff but please, make a PB666 megathread. Less of what you post will get lost and it will be more orderly.

Well, yes, I would have it rather high up as otherwise it's going to be impossible to get to. Just imagine the like 30k delta-V you'd need to get to something around Moho but rotating the other way. The comparatively little DeltaV you mentioned is still roughly around 2k or more, not that much smaller than twice Eeloo's orbital speed, what's Eeloo's orbital speed again? You're right about Jool but it's an expy of Jupiter whose major moons are also almost all on equatorial orbits. If we ever get that second gas giant I'm all for eccentric outer moons. Right now just reversing Pol's orbit should spice the place up enough.

Yes, they weren't, my point was that a retrograde orbit planet wouldn't need to form at the start to begin with. And you don't need to look as far as the Oort Cloud, I'm talking about Pluto, Eris, Makemake, Haumea. And yes, I realize how unlikely a 180 inclination planet is, my point was that regardless of the chances it is not implausible to the point it would invalidate the gains in gameplay variety. I think KerikBalm wanted to put emphasis on his statement that there's no object in a retrograde orbit around the sun by mentioning comets but that is untrue as the most widely known comet, Halley's Comet, is itself in a retrograde orbit.

Highly inclined orbits for dwarf planets in the solar system are not unprecedented however. Retrograde is a stretch but not by that much.

A single question: Will I have to start over in my save if I want to use this?

QFT. I mean it's not like the calendar isn't accurate.

Perhaps even Eve itself so not only you can't take off from it, you now can't aerobrake either. In all seriousness I can see it working for Gilly; the dV to take off and land isn't much there anyway. Though I would still prefer Pol to go the other way first!

To be fair he did mention that we could have retrograde moons, a pretty good idea as he said would be to convert Bop or Pol to be retrograde.

The confusion mostly comes from the fact that Kerbin's atmosphere (also the gravity does start at 9.81m/s^2 but is reduced more quickly I believe) allows a vertically launched rocket to be an SSTO whereas the only "plausible" (using that term very loosely) design in real life (for Earth at least) is a horizontally launched spacecraft that makes use of the higher efficiency of jet engines.

I thought Halley's Comet was pretty well known. And yeah, Jool has a lot of moons and Pol or Bop could certainly be far more interesting in a retrograde orbit! Edit: A quick googling gives me this. Artifact in a binary system (would be cool to have in KSP as an option!), but possible nevertheless. Also a lot of ways for something to have been captured.

Hey, I had an idea for a mini-pack of 3 planets that would be compatible with just about any planet mod out there due to the ridiculous (but still possible) orbits. Here goes! 1. A planet that's in a retrograde orbit with 168 degrees inclination, between Kerbin and Duna. 2. A planet that's in a polar orbit around the sun with 80 or so inclination. 3. A planet with extremely eccentric orbit that stretches far beyond Eeloo, with the periapsis similar to Dres. Better catch this one while its close to its periapsis!

The amount of astrology-related stuff that came up when googling... Ugh. This is probably not very likely considering the accretion disk the planets are formed in spins in one direction so they would have to be a captured body or something, but it would still present an interesting gameplay challenge with the relative velocities involved. I mean we could at least have retrograde asteroids.

Alright, fair enough and I see the get-bored-before-interplanetary bit for sure, but you can alternatively send probes on less than optimal missions as they don't need to return to begin with. Personally it's about the mission count; I don't mind skipping long chunks of time if I have multiple missions going on, I mean otherwise I could fire my sounding rocket and grind science from Kerbin space every 5 seconds; which is an exaggeration but not that dissimilar to going to the moons over and over again. Alternatively use that time to build infrastructure, fuel depots, stations, and stuff.