Thor Wotansen

The livestream has the time pushed to 8 right now.

The Mindri is a cute little SSTO I made a few months ago that can haul 30t to LKO in a Mk 3 form factor. Due to an optimized design, it uses only four Rapier engines, which helps keep the cost down. The Mindri had no crew accommodations, relying instead on a probe core for control. It handles well in flight and is quite controllable during reentry and landing. Attitude control on orbit requires planning, since the onboard reaction wheel is quite small and the RCS system is intentionally under-powered in order to keep propellant requirements down. The Mindri has no provisions for docking to a space station or fuel depot, but it can be used to recover hardware with either a Clamp-o-tron or Clamp-o-tron Sr., as long as it fits in the cargo bay and isn't too heavy. The max downmass for this design has not been tested, although it should do fine with anything less than 15t. KerbalX link

LERX create vortices the same way that wingtips create vortices, by having higher pressure below the surface and providing an avenue for the high pressure air to leak around the tip. The vortex caused by the LERX improves life over the main wing by disturbing the boundary layer and reducing flow separation at high AOA, much like vortex generators you might see on small planes or things like the V-22 Osprey.

I guess this is a Gen 4, although it is certainly not a Navy plane, more of an F-15 competitor. Presenting the F-49 Wolverine It has a low takeoff speed and is quite responsive in flight above around 80m/s. it is a tad slow at low altitudes, but that goes away higher up. It is remarkably stable in flight, to the point where it should b flyable without SAS. The engines are not gimballed, but maneuverability would be greatly improved if they were.

I think we'd have a better chance of terraforming Venus than Titan, although with Venus's rotational period I don't much see the point of terraforming it. If we do build up Titan, I see it as a computing center and data storage, since, as has been mentioned above, the temperature of Titan makes it pretty great for that. As for building things on planets when it's much cheaper to build O'Neil cylinders and populate them with biosphere cultures from Earth, I really don't think it's something we'll be focusing on when we do start expanding. Of course there are exceptions, like the nitrogen problem and perhaps some less common elements, but most of what we need to colonize the solar system is already floating about in the asteroid belt. Also, the environment around gas giants is'n particularly inviting, when you consider the amount of radiation they kick out.

Looks like the got all the hard parts with compound curves and landing legs, and all they need to do is make a cylindrical bit to fill in the gap, shouldn't be too hard to make a cylinder.

I think you may have forgotten something there.

Maybe you could try the C-130 Hercules, to go with the F/A-18 Hornet. A Blue Angels paint scheme would be nice too, if you can manage it.

Yeah, but who? Will we train some plucky gamers because of their unsurpassed skill in Things™, regardless of the fact that they're dumb as rocks in everything else and probably can't handle the physical stresses of space travel, or are we doomed to have to train highly educated and adaptable astronauts?

After a mysterious anomaly destroyed the fuel pod from the first launch of the HSTSS Momma Kerman, the suits in the Administration building decided to try again with 50% less recklessness in the form of no Jeb. Instead Frank Kerman piloted the Momma, with mission specialist Serena Kerman. The second fuel pod was delivered to a 150km orbit. Album.

It seems I have completed the STS 1a and STS 1b missions in one launch with the good ship HSTSS Momma Kerman. Piloted by the notorious Jebediah Kerman, with mission specialist Bill Kerman, the Momma Kerman successfully deployed some fuel tank thing or something. Album. Below is a selection of images from the mission. Don't ask how we got them. And the proofs

Working on my first STS mission, had some technical difficulties with docking ports so I'm having to relaunch, but here's a teaser.

I believe that counts as some sort of parallel staging. If I'm understanding it right, the two outer bits have crossfeed to the central bit and are dropped when they're empty. If the main core has it's engines running from the pad to final orbital insertion, then it's a parallel staging type deal.

Must be the H model then.

Here's a refueling SSTO I made. It's a redesign of something I built a year or so ago, now using the bigger Making History parts. KerbalX link

whoopsie

I think you're asking the wrong question. Does the ISS improve the life of the kind of people who get into fights at sports games? Probably not, but they don't really want their lives improved, do they. One could definitely argue that dollar for dollar you can do more science in space if you leave humans out of it, and judging purely from that perspective, you'd be right. I think the ISS will more than pay for itself, not because the US government got a direct return on the billions of dollars spent putting a bunch of station parts in orbit, but because of the inspiration and the almost unattainable goal the ISS and astronaut program provides to young children. Does this fall under "cool"? Maybe, but I would say that if a young kid grows up with the dream of becoming an astronaut, and spends their formative years getting the kind of skills and education such a vocation demands, even if they do not go to space, they will contribute greatly to the fields of science and engineering, simply because of the kind of person they will become. You don't go through that kind of training for that long to become a slobbering sports fan, getting into fights at sportsball games. I think the better question to ask is "Is the ISS significant to the scientific and technological future of humanity, and would science and technology be better or worse if it never existed?"

Since I've made a fair few of these things, both recently and many moons ago I thought I'd make a suppository repository of them so that others can completely ignore them on purpose instead of just not knowing about them. I will put images in spoilers so as to not make you look at ones you don't want to. All links are to the relevant pages on KerbalX. Recent Craft: These will probably all contain Making History parts, simply because (as many have griped) the Wolfhound is a fantastic engine, and since "realistic" stuff is already out the window..... The Atseta flagship carrier My magnum opus (as far as this type of thing goes). This behemoth will do just about anything you ask it to, as long as you stay in space. It doesn't have any science equipment, but you could probably park the R&D lab inside it's hangar bay, so I don't see a problem there. What it does have is a whole crap load of docking ports in those six full sized cargo bays around the back that can hold just about anything you can come up with. Really, you could do a militant Jool 5 thing with this and, I don't know, subjugate the Jool SOI with just what this ship can bring. Really, as long as your computer can handle the part count, the skybox is the limit. The Dinja scout/patrol corvette This little beauty can pack quite a wallop. With three small ordinance bays that can hold two 0.625m missiles each and three forward facing docking ports that could house fighters, rocket pods, 1.25m guided missiles, or racks of 0.625m missiles, it doesn't lack for firepower. It also has a science lab, so you could use it for exploration as well. Older Stuff: This stuff is all 100% stock with no DLCs. It should all work in the current version, none of it is really atmospheric and they haven't changes stuff too much since then. The Gungnir carrier and research vessel This bad boy is actually pretty versatile. It has two science bays, because they look cool in the back, a Convert-o-tron 250, and space to house all manner of weapons and fighters. It can also play host to several of the mining ships. The Mjolnir assault frigate Purely an in-your-face brawler. It has 6 small guided missiles and two short range, high yield semi-guided rockets. It also has a pretty decent range. The Sindri asteroid miner This ship was designed to mine asteroids (duh). It has an onboard refinery and a respectable ore hold, but it's main purpose is to tow asteroids somewhere useful and act as a temporary refueling base. The Dvalin planetary miner This ship is designed to land on low gravity worlds and mine or to bring back to the fleet for refining. It has space for two kerbals, a pilot and an engineer. It was designed to work on Dres, the Mun, and everything with less gravity. I will continue to update this space as I make more stuff, as well as include work in progress stuff below.

A four 'engine' plane I've been toying with. All the engines spin in the same direction for now, they have 5 small reaction wheels apiece and use RCS ball/thermometer bearings with two RCS balls on each end for stability. She won't do 80m/s in level flight, but she cruises above 70m/s happily. The stall characteristics are downright horrible. Thankfully the engines have quite a lot of power at speeds between 35 and 65m/s so once you wallow through the inevitable wingover, you'll be able to pull right out, provided you don't encounter the ground first.

Try to balance the craft for both full and empty fuel tanks. If you can get the wet and dry CoM to be in the same place you can get the CoL where you want it and not have to worry about things flipping out on reentry.

@Phantomic Nice design. How many bearings are you running per 'engine', three?

I might be building a fleet. Too bad I'm bad at names.

Got to fiddling with stock props today, I found myself trying to build multi-engine planes, which gets tricky when you don't want adverse torque effecting handling, so I started fiddling with contra-rotating propeller engines in tidy packages, and now I have this. The two engines in the fairing both have two RTGs and two of the smallest reaction wheels apiece. This is not designed to be fast or powerful, just to work reliably and produce some thrust. Of course thrust changes with speed, so this is the static thrust position, with the blades fully deployed. I have yet to test this in motion, but I expect to be able to adjust the deploy limit to get some respectable speed from it. [Edit] In testing with a rather unimaginative plane I got to just over 50m/s. I'm sure it would be possible to get faster with more of them, but I didn't want to fiddle with differential thrust and the control problems that come with it for the first flight test.

Build something light with a whiplash and balance it good for both full and empty fuel. You can travel at around 20km altitude and 1000+m/s burning very little fuel, like 0.05 units per second. You don't really have to worry too much about lift, since the ice shelf is as flat as the runway and a lot longer, so you can pretty much land at mach 3 without bouncing (if you're really careful).

That looks suspiciously like a RUD event. May I suggest using the KER suicide burn readout in the future?