sevenperforce

I've been writing for years and years but until this point I had only had an abstract published in a journal. As of today, however, I've officially had a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal! https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-020-00124-w It's a paper about new developments in the science denialism of the cult I grew up in.

Don't just make random claims; show your work. SpaceX can turn around a Falcon 9 booster -- a vehicle NOT designed from the ground up for reuse -- in well under three months. If it can merely match this with SS/SH, vehicles which ARE designed for rapid reuse, then at most the boiloff will be 7-8%. With at least three operational vehicles, it's 2.4%. "Oops, this service module is too powerful because we changed to a more efficient mission configuration, oh well" is very different from "Oops, this service module is not powerful enough because we changed to a less efficient mission configuration, oops." The former gives you excess performance; the latter doesn't give you enough. Ready and waiting? If Orion was ready today, you could put it into EEO on DIVH, throw up a stripped-down Crew Dragon on a FHe, and send it on a lunar flyby with ease. Artemis 1, no SLS required.

SpaceX chose not to man-rate Falcon Heavy for the same reason SLS should never have been man-rated: it turned out to be too powerful for any crewed LEO application and not powerful enough to send anything useful BLEO. If SpaceX took the Dragon 2 intended for the ISS mission next week and slapped it on top of the FH intended fr the USSF-44 mission, it could send humans to the moon in exactly the same way that Artemis 1 could. Dragon 2 has enough excess dV to do a powered lunar flyby and enter a lunar-phased earth orbit with much more lunar observation potential than Artemis 2. Your point? Saying SLS "will send man to the moon" is like saying that my SUV can take me to Europe because it can take me to an airport where I can board a plane to Europe. Technically true, but I can also get to the airport on my bicycle. Just revisiting this to point out that it takes 346 days for half a methalox tank to boil off. Almost 700 days in LEO. Wow, it's such a shame that no one has ever invented a metal tube that can transfer cryogenic liquid. Just think of all the high-performance rocket engines that would be built if you could surmount this insurmountable problem. Imagine how much people would have scoffed at Von Braun if he had claimed the Saturn program was the only way to get to the moon when only the Saturn 1 had ever been fabricated (and not even put together) while the N1 had already launched payloads BLEO.

You just said, "By comparison, Apollo's Saturn V only did the TLI kick- relying entirely on the CSM to do the work. Whereas here SLS does the work." What exactly is special about SLS's TLI that Saturn V's TLI lacked? NASA published GR&As decades on how much boiloff you get for any given prop type. It's a solved problem. On a fast transit it's miniscule for hydrolox and negligible for everything else: LOX/LH2: 0.35% per day. LOX/CH4: 0.20% per day. LOX/RP1: 0.20% per day. Just barrel-roll the SOB.

No, SLS does not provide insertion at NRHO. Just a TLI kick. Wherever did you get that idea??

With all the buzz about Dragon 2, looking again at Dragon XL. Getting to NRHO at 300 s isp means it needs to be 18% props. FH's side-core-reuse throw to TLI is what, 18 tonnes? I am surprised it only delivers 5 tonnes of cargo.

BOE but I would say 70% or more. If it breaks up during max heating, that's a LOT of exposed surface.

SLS cannot do anything within 5 years because SLS does not yet exist. If SLS exists as designed within 5 years and passes man-rating, then it can do things. None of those things it can do are things that other currently-in-dev LVs cannot do, if they exist as designed within 5 years and pass man-rating. Delta IV no longer exists; Falcon 9 has obviated it. Delta IV Heavy is dying -- it only has five missions left. Atlas V is being phased out in favor of a lifter designed for partial reuse. Imagine that. Falcon Heavy doesn't fly very often because Falcon 9 kept getting upgrades. If your contention is "why build a large rocket with low cadence when a smaller rocket can do the trick" then apply that logic to SLS. Which is what, exactly?

Correct -- except that at that point in the flight, they didn't have enough velocity to make even a contingency abort without at least two engines. If a second engine had crapped out it would have been LOCV.

There were numerous aborts prior to SRB ignition, when startup transients on the SSMEs were off-nominal.

No, but you can hit M for map view, click the island, and select Set Navigation to put a beacon on the navball. No, nothing that alters part performance since some of those might not be stock-balanced: e.g., a nosecone w/ ridiculous heat resistance and low drag, or an engine with an ungodly TWR. That would be a cool challenge as well but tough to pull off without piloting mods.

yes yes Update: sooooo close

You may or may not have heard of it, but KSP and NASA have challenged us to simulate the mission to the ISS in KSP: Let's do it! EDIT: Just to be clear, I am not a member of Steam or KSP management or NASA or anything like that. I just wanted to have a place on this forum to categorize all the entries.

You can taxi to the runway if you like. @mystifeid Latest attempt below. I got the heading perfectly right but didn't scrub enough altitude.

Nah, you gotta at least show that you can fly the plane back. I would drop the warhead, quicksave, show that it hits, and then revert back to the quicksave to fly the plane back to the KSC. One reason for this is that actually landing the plane is non-trivial. If you have a big cruise missile, for example, then flying the plane back and landing it safely isn't necessarily straightforward if your centers of mass and lift have shifted.

Sure, go for it.

It's a rounded nose cone, so the sepratrons fire in a ring around it. I don't think it would be an exploit to put an air intake on the back as long as you weren't getting tricky with the placement of your sepratrons. The point is to reduce base drag on the rear node of the fairing.

How is that an exploit? It's a nose cone on the tail. No weird tricks.

Thus far I have enforced a requirement of hitting the actual runway (or the actual tower). So I will hold myself to the same rule.

Here's how close I've gotten so far: Your carrier plane can be a pure bipropellant rocketplane for all I care; it just can't use solid fuel. If you want to earn Supercruise you can use the RAPIER but it has to be in airbreathing mode. Technically the RAPIER, if it is like the SABRE, is a rocket that uses superchilled air injection rather than an actual jet cycle, but that's beside the point.

I have a Kold War entry which reaches 31 gees of acceleration and impacts the island at Mach 6.4, 31 seconds after liftoff, but thus far I have been unable to get sufficient accuracy to actually hit the runway.

I suspect that the maximum possible speed (of all three varieties) would be in Modern Kombat and involve a liquid-fueled rocketplane which boosts to about Mach 1 and then air-drops a truly massive two-stage missile.

That's what's shown. What is that? S-IC had a burn time of 150 seconds; FH's side boosters on the first test flight had a burn time of 152 seconds. You can design solid boosters for any burn duration you want, but the 4-seg and 5-seg boosters do burn out at approximately the same time, yes. Adding more segments adds more burn area, which adds more thrust but does not increase burn duration. These are center-burning SRBs (technically they burn out a 12-finned star but close enough).

Whoops, my bad. Fixed it! This post is precisely why I love challenges on these forums. Note that No Kill But Overkill only requires that the total bomb load dropped exceeds 300 ore. I really should have made that higher, I think. Also, Maverick and Breezy both would require each pilot to be in lawn chairs with forward visibility, like a WWI fighter. If you are going for a bonus like laydown delivery then it is definitely necessary to actually hit the target. I love it! That's precisely the sort of multi-engined monstrosity I was imagining people would build. You were pushing Mach 0.9 in level flight. I wonder if you could score No Warning if you dropped the warhead in a dive. Both DLCs are fine. You do not have to make a video -- just show enough via screenshots that I can confirm the record and any bonuses.

Bravo! Adding you to the leaderboard. Was rewatching your entry for Aces High. Imagine how fast you could have made that run with 10% fuel.....