sevenperforce

My entry is here: After I upload the rest of the images and add commentary, I'll score myself.

This mission report is in pursuit of this challenge: as well as: This was my first time ever going interplanetary. I knew I could do this easily enough with ISRU, but I wanted to try something different, since ISRU on Mars isn't nearly so simple as extending a drill into one spot in the ground. I decided I would use chemical engines only with a booster+tanker+ship arrangement. In lieu of Dunian ISRU, I decided I would send one of the tankers along for the ride, aerobraking both in turn but leaving it in orbit around Duna so it could refuel the crew ship for the homeward journey. However, after building my ship, putting it in LKO, and painstakingly refueling it, I realized that my not-very-balanced TSTO design and KSP's smaller scale meant that I had enough dV in my crew ship to get to Duna and back in one piece, so I dropped the tanker-along-for-the-ride plan. The only mod was Tweakscale, and I only used it to decrease part count and streamline aerodynamics. All crew-carrying parts are fully stock. With no further ado: That's the first part! More to come, very soon........

Bound rotation? The concept is a tumbling penguin rotation, nose over tail. Gravitational vector is, unfortunately, opposite the vector at play during the acceleration phase. This is not a problem if you do an Apollo-style cabin flip before you spin up for the outward journey. More on that concept....

Well there you go. The gap looks bigger here:

Dammit. On another note, I was wondering -- will SpaceX ever lose an RTLS booster? We've now had five successful RTLS landings, and we know that RTLS is only used when there is plenty of margin; otherwise they just go to a droneship. Every landing has been picture-perfect with plenty of margin. Is this going to be as routine as, say, Shuttle landings? On yet another note -- the wingspan on the X-37B is 4.55 meters; according to the Falcon 9 User's Guide (page 36), the internal diameter of the payload fairing is just 4.6 meters. That's cutting it awfully close. I wonder if it would launch without the fairing? Might give SpaceX some good aerodynamic modeling validation. Or will they build a specialized fairing for it?

WHOA! SpaceX is launching the X-37B in August. This is AWESOME. It's a 4-tonne comsat to GTO so it should be able to easily manage a droneship landing.

The only reason to do a flying saucer design is if you have a handwavium gravity rail device or something like that. [For the uninitiated, a gravity rail is a fictional device which permits a vehicle to be "locked" at a single point in a gravitational gradient, allowing it to hover without expending propellant. It is one of the few types of antigravity which doesn't violate conservation of energy or momentum.]

No, it's something on the very right-hand edge of the painted area, a panel or something. It is kicked away at 0:06. Also, just for fun:

"Common barycentre inside the larger body" seems like a good basis for what discriminates a co-orbit from a primary/secondary arrangement, until you remember that the Jupiter-Sun barycentre is (almost always) outside the Sun. Also consider that if the Sun were a white dwarf or neutron star, even Earth and Saturn and Mars and Venus would orbit a barycentre outside the primary. I, for one, wholly endorse the idea of dividing "moons" from "moonlets", both under the umbrella of "natural satellite". If it's not gravitationally rounded, it shouldn't be considered a moon.

New aerial footage of the last Falcon 9 landing: Beautiful, as always. Anyone care to guess what the debris is that gets kicked across the landing pad?

Then let's take the what-if out of the equation, and just ask the question. Exactly. Does anyone know whether the re-entry profile, thermal management, chute deployment acceleration, and splashdown speed are reasonably safe for one or more passengers?

What about the whole EDL process?

And if they brought their own air, and figured out a way to remotely unberth?

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that they figured out a way to remotely trigger the unberthing mechanism.

Very nice catch. I was actually going to ask this question myself. In a really, really ridiculously bad situation -- like, meteoroid impact that takes out the Soyuz lifeboat and the life support systems and gives the astronauts only a matter of hours -- would a docked Dragon 1 be enough to get the crew home safely? They'd need to bring their own air and such, obviously.

Ditto on what everyone else said about emdrives and fusion reactors. If you're going to go the saucer route, you should spin up the whole ship rather than wasting time with a separate rotating segment. A saucer shape is decent if you have rotating engine nacelles, because you can land and lift off vertically but then transition to lift-assisted forward flight. It also is nice and draggy with a good blunt shape for aerobraking.

Nope. I can easily get exoatmospheric with 100 units of liquid fuel and a jet engine, so getting to the North Pole that way will be a snap.

I'm absolutely certain I was the first to land propulsively on Minmus, the Mun, and Kerbin (no chutes) in the Demo with all-stock parts. Much part clipping follows, though.

I mean, you can just say "don't use wheels for propulsion" and leave it at that. Honor system. Note that under your current system, there is nothing to prevent someone from building a VTOL jet-powered vehicle and simply landing on wheels.

Technically the Dragon has bipropellant rocket engines and they were reused as well, so...officially a rocket.

The atmospheric aspect was mostly an afterthought, which is why I hadn't worried about the insane multiplier; if you can get 100 kerbals into orbit on a single engine, more power to you. But yeah, the multiplier was a math mistake; I was thinking of (Distance * (1 + (kerbals - 1)/2 )).

I was just going to use it for part counts and aerodynamics.

The name EXPLOIT 3 fits your craft, you came up with a great idea this scoring system has a serious problem; say one have 100 kerbals on a rocket, adding 1 kerbal to the rocket would make it so the rocket is only 1.01 times heavier (if it accomplishes the same task), but that persons score would increase by 1.5. I suggest that the scoring system should be distance*kerbalcount. Hah! Indeed. I should have simply specified that the craft be capable of actually flying. Didn't think that needed to be stated, but obviously it did.

I was excited for a second because I saw "ISRU".

You win all the internets. At least on Kerbin. Kinternets?