SinBad

Had a quick look at wikipedia. The use you describe (efficiency at low altitude subsonic flight = run as long as you can as little fuel as possible) sounds like looking at cruise missiles for inspiration. Most of the subsonic ones use turbofan or turbojet engines and get a couple of thousand miles range out of not a lot of fuel. The old german V1 cruise missiles used a type of valved pulse jet that got reasonable subsonic efficiency. As far as i know, ramjets only get efficient at supersonic speeds. Like mach 2+, in subsonic flight (even ones designed for it) they are often less efficient than rockets.

Try rolling the rocket in the vab to change the launch orientation, handy for skipping that roll manouver. For the tipping over, pics of your rocket, please?

Have you considered sand casting the fiddly copper parts?

Sorry, I didn't see. Note to self: don't look at screenshots on mobile phones if you want to comment

For take off and landing stability, have you considered a set of retractable aircraft landing gear? If its placed to extend below the rover wheels when lowered, you won't have to fight the rover wheels speed limitations. When landed, retract them and use the rover wheels. They should be strong enough to lift the aircraft up when transitioning.

Its fun If you can manage a tail loading spaceplane it will make your life easier. Launch you payload on a clamp, drive a loading truck under it, and drop it on. Secure it however you can contrive, then roll it up, clamp it in and off you go. Um, dont forget to remove the truck. Alternatively, if you have top loaders, look into infernal robotics and kas. The idea is a tall n shaped vehicle that can drive over the plane and drop the load into the bay. This gets tough with heavier loads. A switch on those is to have a bottom loading cargo bay. The plane lifts itself up (landing gear on IR pistons) or parks on a platform with a payload sized hole in it. Then either the plane lowers, or the payload rises. This one is made trickier with the way wheels are, as quadricycle undercaŕiages are needed, but they dont steer straight at the moment. Ive been playing around trying to get a vertical launch ssto loading figured out. Its tricky, because you generally need to handle the payload vertically, and either lift it higher, or have a rocket with a gaping hole in the side. If you want to try that out, have a look at modular rocket systems mod. Some good inline bays that work with far properly.

Its easier if you are refueling space planes on the grass. I've got a save with a runway marked out with flags next to the real one. Spaceplanes line up on the aprons, payloads get spawned in on the runway, picked up with an infernal robotics mobile gantry crane and loaded into the payload bays, then the kas refueling hose is connected to fuel the spaceplane (and payload if required) off the back of the apron is a trunkline connected to an isru setup with a tank farm of 7.5m spaceY tanks. Unplug the hose, get a tow to the starting line and go to space. That save was great, after the infrastructure and space planes were paid for I only had to foot the bill for payloads. It really makes you appreciate the loss of a spacecraft when you don't throw away 90% of them every mission.

Have a google of Kevin Warwick at the University of Reading. Promising. I would say we are approaching a tipping point when people start looking at medical prosthetic/therapudic implants and deciding to get them without a medical requirement. For example: an arteficial limb that performs as well as a meat one, and is just as fragile? No thanks. But one that is stronger, faster, and more durable? Bring me a saw.

But time isnt real... Its just something our minds made up so that we can make sense of the world around us. The only defenitions we have of time are self referencing. It all comes from our way of splitting the universe into two catagories, 'me' and 'not me'. Things you remember are 'me' things. Things you see now are 'not me' things. Things you speculate may happen are also 'me' things. The 'me' catagory is mostly imaginary, yes it includes your physical body, but any current perception of your body puts it into the 'not me' catagory. The only concept you really have of it is remembering it and imagining that you will retain it. Time is our minds way of reconciling what we remember with what we currently see. Without a mental construct of time, we couldnt speculate on the future. The rabbit was there, it is now there, so in the future it will probably be there too. Without that, there is no distinction in our minds between past and present, and no scope for speculation. An infant has not created a concept of time yet, which is why 'peek a boo' is so entertaining. As far as the baby is concerned, recolection and observation are concurrent. Meaning the baby remembers you while it can see you. When you cover your face you disappear. As its not observing you, its not remembering you. When you reveal yourself, observation begets recolection and you exist again. The baby has no catagories of me/not me. It only has 'is'. At some point it can anticipate your reapearance, the child has defined you as 'not me' and can now remember something without observing it, and speculate about unobserved events.

You have to admit, it would be fun to watch. Either gravity, or remove the nutritional content from all grasses, one of the two.

Universal settings? I would turn off gravity. Wait, if the system kicks us after the first change... Yup, still turn off gravity.

Ive seen this. It looks like the planes making up the surface dont meet at the edges, like one plane is elevated slightly. Through the gap you can see sky box. Sometimes its just a graphical artifact and the physical surface lines up correctly. other times the physics matches the graphics, but its not like hitting a wall. Its like the engine considers the two planes to meet as intended, but one is a meter or more higher, so when a wheel crosses the boundry, the game thinks the craft has had one end elevated by a meter or more in one physics tick. The resulting velocity and rotation is assigned to the craft in the next tick and off it goes. I have not seen one of these since 64b became a thing, but i used to get them on kerbin, mun and minmus. I learned to drive around or hop over.

Thanks for the reply, taniwa. Ill redirect my space program in this direction tonight. Also, thanks for mentioning stage lock, 500 hours and i didnt know about it

Ive been trying to set up a rather distributed uks resource operation to support EL, mostly involving skycraning mining landers (about 15 of them) to hotspots all over minmus. Only one problem though, they dont stick to the ground! They go sliding off downhill until they explode. Has any one built something with stakes and survey station that uses launch clamps on a body other than kerbin? I figure building on site with launch clamps as a foundation would anchor bases quite well and avoid many physics oddities. Im asking in advance of trying because i dont currently have anything manned on minmus yet, and what i do have isnt set up for the long term mobile life support needed for a roaming base factory. I suppose i could just throw some supplies into each rocket part shipment...

Well, once we have meat paste, maybe we could use it to 3D print steak? I bet we could grow fat cells too, layer that in with the steak. I wonder how much of the unique flavor of different cuts comes from fat:muscle ratios.

And think about all the extinct animals found under the ice with decent dna left in them. No one wants to eat an elephant, but mammoth burgers? They pretty much market themselves. Of course, at what point does someone ask "is it really cannibalism if the meat didnt come from a human?".

5/10. (0/10 for the ends, 10/10 for the means) Ive got one. Ive been toilet training my son recently. Seems he is a slow learner with the whole 'its gross to sit in feces' concept. I took away his nappies (diapers) so he has been doing his business in his pants. Absolutely refuses to use the toilet. The other day i lost my cool (it happens) and yelled at him when i had to scrape out his pants and put him in the shower for the second time that day. It seems the thing he took away from that experience was not that its bad to poo in your pants, but rather that its bad to poo at all. The last week he has been corking it for 3 days at a time so he doesnt get yelled at again. Ever seen a 3yo trying so hard to hold back a turtle head that he is sweating? I made a toddler ashamed of a natural bodily function.

Ah, you want to be able to retrofit, not just build. i get it now. There is always the option to dock, shut the door, load the mk2 craft file to the shipyard, then it converts your ship to generics, and builds the new one out of those generics adding or subtracting the difference to the storage. You would still be doing the modification in the VAB, but you wouldnt have to launch the mk2 and deorbit the mk1.

What about a close integration of kis/kas and infernal robotics? All we really need is a kas capable robotic manipulator. Have it remove the limitation of engineers per ton as well. Then we could all build gantry mounted 7 axis manipulator arms. and build our rockets out of kis containers. On the subject of packability, i remember something from the 90's about nasa testing aluminium extruders in orbit. Most of the large pieces folks are worried about are the most packable. Jumbo tank is just a bunch of extrudec struts welded togeter with sheeting welded over the top. You can squeeze quit a few square meters of 2mm thick sheet metal into a cubic meter. Then you just extrude your pipe work, get some cables off the reel and a few sensors an selonoid valves out the bottom drawer and get to work fitting it. Im not saying that we as the player should have to do all of this manually, just that when you put a jumbo into one of the huge inline kis crates, what you are putting in is the materials required to fabricate it (it weighs the same, and takes up about the right volume for disasembled struts and sheet metal). That fabrication happens automatically when you take it out again, otherwise it would be a pita to do anything. EPL works the same way, just allows you to keep a stock of generic materials. So instead of having a stack of sheet metal that can only be used to make a jumbo tank, you have a lump of metal that could be extruded into struts, or sheets, or pipes, or cables. To avoid pita, its just callled rocket parts.

Foxster has a point, drop the tanks you dont need, twr increases as you burn fuel and drop tank mass. Simplest way to arrange it is as a pendelum rocket as you can drop one tank at a time and shed the weight sooner than the pairs that radial tanks would require. Maybe add a single seperatron to each tank to ensure its vector diverges from the main ship though. You dont want the last one you dropped to catch up the first time you burn retrograde.

In that case, check out near future propulsion for a few variants of high isp electric drives. bigger ions, resistojets, etc. some have decent thrust. as far as op engine mods go, the k+ torch drive isn't an easy solution. its at the end of the tech tree, needs a rare resource that can only be gathered at the top and bottom of the sun's gravity well, as well as rock, as well as lots of ec. and its heavy. and its very expensive to build and fuel. but it is cool to do a duna transfer by burning at duna for half the trip, then flip over and burn retrograde to slow down again. 1g ftw!

If you have some of Roverdudes stuff, check out Karbonite and K+. A karborundum torch drive with a full tank will get your 35 tons there and back again with a few dozen km/s spare. Latest release makes solar harvesting of karborundum far easier than before, no more chromosphere surfing!

Maybe an inflateable pressurised droydock? Like a big sack that you put the ship in, then zip it up and inflate?

You have 3 triangles in your avatar. 3 Triangles Do i even need to say it?

So, EPL : extraplanetary launchpads. makes use of the stock isru mechanics with an extra step to make generic construction materials from ore. Allows orbital construction, as well as surface construction. To add a layer of difficulty, EPL + MKS lite (from the USI catalog): base parts and extended isru chain in a nice linear package. Surface and orbital. Replaces/disables some EPL models and mechanics. One more up, EPL + UKS (USI): same as MKS lite but with Roverdude's fully realised extended isru chain, as well as logistics mechanics that eliminate most of the grindy resupply flights. Very complex. Resource utilisation chains have branches, loops, byproducts, wastes, all of which go into something elses input. For top notch brain melts, EPL + UKS (USI) + USILS (USI) : adds life support to UKS. Open or closed loop (loop makes it sound so simple. 6 dimentional mobius strip maybe?), same room syndrome simulated as well. Bases and long range craft built with this installed become very complex as you try to find that sweet spot between deciding if 5 tons more supplies meets your needs better than 4.8 tons of life support recyclers. The only thing it doesnt do (yet) is generate new kerbals. But it does have a mechanic where a kerbal can train other kerbals star rating up to one level below their own. But, once you have that 30 crew minmus mining/refining/parts factory/fuel plant built, and a shipyard in low (like 8k low) minmus orbit, the solar system is yours for the taking. All you have to do is ferry the ship crews out from kerbin, maybe spending a few months in an orbital acadamy first to train them up to 4 stars.