IncongruousGoat

Science mode lets you see the cost of your craft, same as Career... and same as Sandbox, for that matter. The number's in the same place in all three modes, at the bottom left of the screen when you're in the VAB/SPH. Post a screenshot of your VAB-if the cost number's not showing up for you in Science mode it's probably a bug.

Coming in out of left field, the XLR81 model 8096B engine. A gas generator engine, running on storable propellants (MMH+HMZ/N2O4, to be precise), with thrust of 71 kN, a vacuum specific impulse of up to 330 seconds, rated for up to 200 restarts and 1200s burn time... and not subject to ullage. Unfortunately, it never got used for anything. The Agena upper stage that used the XLR81 fell out of use, and the AJ-10 was picked over the XLR81 as the STS OMS engine. It's a shame-it was a good engine. There just wasn't any demand for a storable vacuum engine with that much thrust.

It depends. If I'm playing stock, it's easy enough to slap together a launcher that I mostly use custom launchers. If I'm playing RSS/RO/RP-0, however, I start building launcher families, just because of how much work it is to design a functional LV.

In stock? All of 'em. Several times, with Kerbals. Heck, I even visited them all in one mission once. At this point, my efforts have been redirected towards dealing with RSS, where I've managed manned and unmanned lunar landing and return, orbiters around Venus and Mars, and a Mercury flyby.

The point of BFR isn't to be a launcher for super-heavy payloads. It's to be a launcher for anything-including heavy payloads-at a fraction of the cost of an expendable, or even partially reusable launcher. The whole point is that you don't need to care about payload efficiency all that much when your only costs are fuel, range maintenance, and minor refurbishment. The real question is not whether there are payloads for BFR, because anything can be a BFR payload. It's whether SpaceX can get the marginal cost of a BFR flight low enough that the economics make sense, and that remains to be seen.

I'd probably go and visit Utopia Planitia. There's evidence for lots of underground water ice there, and I'd love to investigate that firsthand. Plus, I could say hi to the Viking 2 lander.

I'm currently in upstate NY, i.e. the part of New York that everyone who doesn't live in NY forgets is there most of the time. I fully intend to move to another part of the US once I can, however.

It can be, and it already has. Easy Vessel Switch handles consistent camera angles, among other things. But, yes. This should be stock.

Wait... how in the anything did you manage to land on Venus? My attempts in 1.2.2 RSS/RO/RP-0 have ended with the lander being destroyed by pressure while still ~20 km up from the surface.

Because people have mass? If you've got 100 people, and (rough estimate time) approximate everyone's weight to 65 kg, that's 6.5t of cargo, not counting the mass of chairs, and ECLSS stuff. That's definitely not a zero payload, and Elon will probably want to have more than just 100 people on any given point-to-point flight.

My first Eve mission, clocking in at 6,167 t: https://imgur.com/XNBeNnX

My biggest planning failure turned success is probably the Dres-Eeloo mission I flew recently for the Caveman Extended challenge. Now, I didn't have maneuver nodes unlocked at the time, but this had been accounted for. The problem with this mission stemmed from the fact that the only crew member along was Bob-and that the only probe core was in the lander. The lander that I ditched in low Eeloo orbit when it ran dry. So there I was, in low Eeloo orbit unable to plot a maneuver and unable to hold a stable heading. What ensued was a mad bout of orbital shenanigans, as I haphazardly lowered my periapsis to near Kerbin orbit and then set about (somehow) establishing an encounter. The final orbit I ended up in had a periapsis well within the orbit of Eve, an apoapsis somewhere between Dres and Jool, and a Kerbin re-entry velocity of 6500+ m/s. It took countless reverts to get the re-entry lined up properly, since high-speed re-entries tend to fry your capsule if you come in a hair too steep, and fail completely if you come in too shallow, but in the end Bob made it home safe. Thank goodness.

Yep, all of them(more or less). It's got to do with the way melting and boiling points are affected by pressure. For any substance, you can shift the melting and boiling points closer together or farther apart by changing the ambient pressure, which means there'll be a pressure at which the boiling and melting points are the same, i.e. the triple point. There are funky edge cases when you deal with things that have strange phases (Helium-4's triple point, for example, is between the H-I liquid, the H-II superfluid, and helium gas), but by and large everything has a triple point.

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That's not quite how special relativity works. The speed of light isn't a cosmic speed limit, at least not the way we think of speed limits (like on roads). Rather, it represents a fixed velocity-the speed of light will always seem as fast as it is, regardless of how fast you're moving. That is to say, the speed of light will be the same relative to you, regardless of whether you're moving (from the perspective of an outside observer) at 1% of the speed of light or 99%. What happens instead as you approach the speed of light, relative to the resting reference frame, is that time begins to pass slower for you than it does for an observer (among other things), and that your rate of acceleration relative to the resting reference frame decreases. In other words, if you start from 0 m/s and accelerate by 2.8x10^8 m/s, light will still appear to move away from you at 2.998*10^8 m/s. And, to everyone looking in on your spacecraft, time will be passing slower for you than it is for them. Make sense?

The Titan III-E gets my vote, because of the enormous fairing. I mean, come on-look at the size of that thing! Also, struts.

Wow. Just... wow. I wish I had more than one like to give.

On the subject of where to find ice, I seem to remember reading that there's a large amount of underground ice in Utopia Planitia. And, as a bonus, Viking 2 landed there and operated for well over 1000 sols, so we know the region is safe for landers.

How does one go about building a Venus lander in 1.2.2 RSS/RO/RP-0? There aren't any parts with a pressure tolerance of more than 4 MPa, which is a problem, seeing as Venus's surface pressure is somewhere around 9 MPa.

Keep calm and click on

Ah, fair enough. When I said that, I was trying to make a point about the elements present in the regolith, not about what can feasibly be done with said regolith. I see what you mean now.

Er... what? "By pure physics"? How do you propose to do this, exactly?

Aluminum and LOX? Build me such a thing IRL, and then we can talk about the manufacturing difficulties. Which are extensive. Aluminum is manufactured by the Hall-Heróult process, which involves electrolysis of an alumina-cryolite molten salt bath. Have fun pulling that off on the Moon, where power would be at a serious premium. Not to mention the effort required to extract oxygen from oxygen and silicates in the regolith. EDIT: Apparently, Al/LOX has been made to work in an engine, so that at least isn't a problem.

Mine the regolith... for what, exactly? Ions need xenon, or cesium, or other heavy stuff you don't exactly find in lunar regolith. Hypergolics are even worse-they're nitrogen compounds, and you're definitely not going to find nitrogen in the lunar regolith. About the only thing that has any utility as a propellant that you'll find in the lunar regolith is oxygen trapped in oxides and silicates, and even that's no good without an appropriate fuel to burn.

So... The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress? Seriously, though. It would be way, way too expensive. Prison costs are already something of a problem, and you want to increase them? Nobody would agree to that, regardless of the benefits.