sevenperforce

Underexpansion evident. MVac chilldown. Approaching MECO.

Rocket breakup at Max-Q! Kidding, kidding.

Love seeing the distant camera shake when the soundwave hits it.

LIFTOFFFFFFF

Should be no trouble recovering it then.

No one knows how heavy GovSat-1 is, right?

If I had a feature for each time I read that... ....compared to more complex things.

Cite?

HYPE TRAAAAAAIN

It is the second launch, not the third. The Block 3 and 4 boosters can't really be used for more than 1 reflight without extensive refurbishment. Block 5 will be a lot better in this regard They aren't washing the boosters at all now, though they do clean off the soot in lines to do weld inspections. It has landing legs and grid fins for re-entry and controlled propulsive splashdown, but it will not be recovered. My guess is that they'll use this flight to test their recovery margins with a shorter entry burn, just to see what performance improvements they have. The last few tonnes of fuel are always worth the most, from a dV perspective, so if they show that even a Block 3-4 booster can handle a 50% shorter entry burn and still touch down safely, that's a few tonnes of extra fuel they can push into the upper stage before separation.

If one simple part could be added to stock KSP to dramatically improve gameplay, it would be stock balloon tanks. Characteristics: Spherical 10:1 propellant to structure ratio Two varieties (LO and LF); no bipropellant tanks Ideally procedural/scalable; if not, then four sizes (tiny, small, large, and extra large) Only a single attachment node Low impact tolerance (~3 m/s), low heat tolerance (~1000K) Same skin as the ROUND-8 for the LO variety; zero-saturation grey skin for the LF variety Stock currently lacks any options for LO-only tanks, even though it does have options for LF-only tanks. Adding an option to have a tank with only LO makes a lot of sense. Plus, for any stages designed to operate completely outside of the atmosphere, having balloon tanks with a better propellant fraction than the rest of the stock tanks would mean a wider range of lander designs and transfer stages. However, the low impact tolerance and large cross-sectional area of these tanks would necessitate their inclusion in a fairing for ascents from Kerbin. You could also build more real-life-analogue stages and landers, since numerous real-world vehicles use spherical tanks.

Obligatory: If Congress decided to suddenly give NASA 100% of the budget it needed to do another flags-and-footprints mission to the moon, on the condition that it be done as fast as humanly possible, what descent and ascent stages would we use?

How hard would it be to add Joolian "storms" which are essentially supposed to represent gigantic hurricanes filled with updrafts, but are locally implemented as a significant decrease in local gravity, perhaps with additional science via atmospheric sampling? Dive into one of those, and you can get pretty deep without getting crushed, and still have enough dV to get back out since the "updrafts" are lifting you (though really it would just be a region of lower gravity in-game). Shouldn't be too hard to write.

WOW.

Don't want to hijack this thread, but when I saw the thread title it made me think -- what lunar descent stages would be available today?

The only way you could have this sort of thing happen, from a world-building perspective, is if the martial engagement initiates under fairly unexpected circumstances, where a lot of preconditions are met. For one thing, soft-boarding a vessel makes virtually no sense unless the target vessel has controls familiar enough that you can actually take control of it. For there to be any reasonable chance of encounters, the density of vessels has to be very high in the region of space where you are. There also must be an intrinsic value to taking over another ship, either because of some high-value soft target in the ship, or because the ship itself is useful to you. Finally, since it is fairly straightforward to harden a spaceship design against soft boarding, the available ships would need to have been built before the initiation of hostilities. The only way these sorts of conditions could reasonably be met would be if you had literally thousands of manned civilian ships already in a constrained region of space, all with a liberal amount of onboard dV. How could this happen? Well, suppose that the pure water ice in the rings and moonlets of Saturn turned out to be the best possible off-world source of propellant for a number of Saturnian colonies. Suppose further that numerous moonlets also contained precious metals and other vital construction materials. The rings of Saturn sweep out an area 50% larger than the surface area of Jupiter, but are constrained into a region of space only a few kilometers "deep". Under these circumstances, you could have a huge network of mining and trade vessels operating there, and each ship would only need a fairly small amount of dV to be able to visit numerous different locations over an extended period of time, since you only need a little dV to move from point to point in a ring system. All the vessels would have to be fairly standard so that crew could be swapped out. If some corporate mogul decided to seize control of the shipping lanes in the ring system, and one of the colonies decided to back him while others decided to fight, then you could find yourself in a situation where civilian vessels were being commandeered and retrofit to act as gunboats. In that instance, you'd actually have a decent reason to try and seize an enemy vessel, because building new ships is not a readily available option.

Make it a ringed ice giant with a moon in retrograde orbit, like Triton. Though, unlike Triton, its orbit should be a bit eccentric and fairly far out. Perhaps have another small moon close to the rings in orbital resonance.

Mechanically, the later LM descent stage engines were crumpled on touchdown, because they had nozzle extensions that impacted the ground. Don't underestimate the impact (no pun intended) of MMODs. Plus, the stages are on the surface, so you have spalling from impacts with the surrounding regolith.

Made it to Minmus and fully fueled. Gotta check and see how much dV I've got. I doubt I can make Moho, even with a stopover at Gilly, but Duna shouldn't be any trouble, and if I can get into the Jool system I should be able to kick around there for quite a while without problems. If need be, I can always drop back down into low Kerbin orbit, send up a tanker, refuel, send up ANOTHER tanker, dock, and then send both up into high elliptical orbit before deorbiting the tanker. That would surely give me enough to get to Duna. I may build a wimpy-engine SSTO to eventually bring the crew back home.

Siri is more-or-less identical to what the general population expects "artificial intelligence" to be like, but is not qualitatively different than Clippy.

Well, what's the difference between an advanced machine learning algorithm and "artificial life"? Is there some tipping point where machines suddenly gain a spark of consciousness? Is something "artificially intelligent" if it is able to learn in a way a human cannot, even if it never becomes self-aware? I, for one, prefer the use of "AI" to refer to things like this, because it bring these questions to the forefront and inculcates the general population with the idea that perhaps "AI" is not what they think.

Damn, that's some serious clippery. I was trying to make mine reusable which was...quite a bit more effort.

They flew the last Iridium from Vandy without landing legs, but with grid fins. They did a re-entry burn and a propulsive controlled splashdown. It's rather ridiculous.

The above system has been proposed before, and it might work, but it's very unlikely that SpaceX will ever try this. Very odd that they'd dunk legs in the drink for no reason, I think. Maybe they will just be pushing the envelope to try and see what kind of margins they can do and still come out successfully. For example, trying out a much shorter entry burn? They may have done something similar with their last west coast launch.

Still very hard to do without extreme clipping.