Spiz102

I ended up flying too much to the moon in that my second stage managed to get me to orbit and part of the way through my TLI burn, and then my NERVA TLI/Descent stage managed to land me on the moon iwth enough fuel left to return to lunar orbit and boost me to kearth return. I didn\'t actually have to fire my ascent stage (which would have ditched pretty much everything put the pod, a lightweight decoupler and the chute)

Surely we would be aiming for Proxima Kerbali which would be only about 9% of the distance between Earth and Proxima what with the scaling factor applied to our rather puny 1m rockets and the planet itself.

Zeus: thats not an entirely stable trajectory, you will eventually get recaptured by the moon, at which point the fun would begin again

Well if yuo could get into a parking orbit you might be able to an ion thruster to do all the maneuvring to lunar orbit, assuming ofcourse you can manage a transfer that doesnt leave you on an impact trajectory.

Surely, since your orbital period would be shorter than the Mun\'s due to the low altitude component of the orbit, you could simply remain in that orbit till the Mun is where it would have to be for this to work once you are already in the orbit, perhaps making small burns to enable capture at the optimum time.

You mean almost impossible? We are looking at something like 10kps of delta-v in each direction.

Im just glad we have no anti nuclear loons running around and I can use NERVA engines for all upper stages including my munar return stage (Im pondering liftoff with RCS though)

Well I was testing my new Otrag derived launcher for my standard orbital vehicle and ended up on an escape trajectory heading for the sun-ish at rather more than the planned 360m/s. Since I did this by direct ascent and not by orbital injection this means that the former is either more efficient or that I just suck at orbital insertions. As I was planning not to run this mission through I burned off too much propellant and ended up with ~1170m/s on the outbound leg and reached the sun handily. This shows what I estimate to have been my closest approach, this is not quite as close as you guys tend to get but this wasnt supposed to be an actual mission. I then proceeded to flip over and ponder whether I would have sufficient propellant to slow down. As it turned out I did have sufficient propellant to reverse my trajectory but only at a drastically reduced return speed. Returning to Kearth at a sedate ~168m/s is only possible because of the Kerbals apparent ability to photosynthesise in the conditions found close to Kerbal, with a final alignment for atmospheric approach taking place during the return leg to ensure that the atmosphere would be impacted. After over 1178 days in space, a blue dot was finally visible in the distance as the intrepid kerbonauts regained the ability to spot there home with the naked eye. This rapidly grew into a blue and green ball as the crew prepared to make final preperations for burning off the remaining fuel on the NERVA engine and for reentry. After nearly 1189 days of sterling service the thruster and support module was jettisoned as the command module pitched for reentry. Within minutes the crew of the OTRAG Testbed were crushed by forces that managed to peg the G-meter at the top of the scale as they plowed into the atmosphere far to the north of the KSC. But they survived as they always do to swing sedately under a triple parachute as they are visible against the sun that they have just returned from. Overall mission success although with an enormous mission time. Here is a screenshot of an identical spacecraft as I forgot to capture any of the original testbed on the pad due to this originally being a non operational mission. The outer ring of six SRBs fires simultaneously until they burn out at an altitude of several thousand metres and are then released en-masse at which point the inner ring of six fire as opposing pairs one after another, with each being released as the next is ignited. The NERVA powered mission stage then fires all the way to escape with RCS providing all stability control due to issues iwth the rigidness of the decouplers precluding stabilising fins.

As my computer cant seem to handle building sufficiently awesome rockets to reach the speeds you are going at Im attempting to do it at 360m/s. Should be able to stop at the destination but I have to wonder whether my return can be fast enough to prevent an overflow error.... We shall see.

Excellent, now to abuse the MMI Ion Engine to do a 25km/s flyby

Is the sun a solid object? ie. can we ram it and destroy ourselves by hitting it at the moment or will we just pass through and out the other side?

I maanaged to get 21km but wasnt able to screenshot as Im in the development phase at the moment, Im running into some major controllability issues thanks to not being allowed to use fins If I can have fins I reckon I can make orbit.

Indeed, I did similar tests myself using an ion drive when I ran the computer for like 48 hours with no time acceleration, But with our new atmospheric model a shallower approach can survive reentry at higher velocities as the initial deceleration will not be as great.

They do, I need these for my Mun landing mission to save on delta-v, assuming we can make the pod always stop rolling the right way up, although we coudl just use lots of RCS thrusters to right it

Wouldnt it be possible to make it an absurdly powerful RCS system so that it can travel in all directions without pitching over if it doesnt want to?

Wait, if it has that little gravity, wont it make it feasible to use RCS for return to orbit after the lunar landing? You could always carry an extra RCS fuel tank that you jettison afterwards.

When I get a better idea of the moons scale I will build mine, but I will be using an orbit-orbit-land-orbit-return system so I can use an ion drive and save a hell of a lot of propellant and mass

Noone fancy taking up the challenge of calculating a precision shallow approach?

Right, now that we have time acceleration, Ive been able to finally run some ultra high impact velocity tests on the atmosphere with a view to discovering just how fast we can succsefully enter the atmosphere and land, this is ofcourse without any heat loading or g loading restrictions. I use a conventional rocket and ion engine rig to obtain orbit and then use the ion engine to burn out to above escape velocity and use time acceleration to reach a ridiculous distance from the planet, then burn all the way back in a half Brastrichrone trajectory to impact, tweeking as I go to remain on target (which is quite hard). I have succesfully reentered to a soft landing at roughly 25kps, although as I was on approach in empty space my crew died randomly: However I then decided to try again with an even longer run up and an impact velocity of 38kps. However, due to my rather steeper entry angle and far higher velocity, at atmospheric interface my parachute and engine were ripped off so the pod hit the deck at roughly 200m/s, which is depressingly sufficiently slow that parachute deployment would have been possible if it had remained attached to the craft. So how can you do? The challenge is to hit the atmosphere at the highest possible velocity and reach the ground safely with the pod intact, I will take images of the pod swinging sedately under the chute. Allowable parts are: Stock, Wobbly Rockets, a wierd triple chute I picked up somewhere and the MMI Ion Engine.

Surely we could do a flyby with less than that? Simply by having a 1KU x 0.1KU eliptical orbit or somesuch? Thats a huge amoutn of delta-v o.O

Would it be possibel to make the 3m engine cluster a bit more powerful in the next update? Currently its a bit weedy compared to the alternative of seven of the big 1m engines mounted in a cluster. 650 Thrust is a bit small for such a huge part.

Testing a Ion Drive engine I obtained orbit and burned for several hours to appear at some ludicrous distance and doing 22,000m/s. I then flipped over and began decelerating and left it over night to discover taht, due to a huge lie-in I had managed to slow to a stop, accelerate back towards Kerbin and end up at a similar distance in the other direction, so I braked it to a stop a second time and managed to thrust up to about 15kps towards the planet and cut out thrust, and then left it for a few more hours correcting lateral movement so I managed to impac thte atmosphere at 15kps.... was an interesting reentry at about 36 hours mission time. Unfortunately I forget to screencap and my parachute had accidentally armed several hours before so it ripped off on entry and I smashed into the deck having slowed to about 130m/s thanks to the old brick wall atmosphere.

If you modded an SRB to allow it to fire when already detached you could mount it on the nose of your craft and use a LES to pull it clear..... although you would have to mod the command pod to allow a 1m decoupler to be attached to the nose

Is it possible to attach 3m tanks to other 3m tanks sideways, so I can make an SSTO by the expedient of using 7 3m tanks joined to 49 NERVAs?

Do we get bonus points for massive deceleration on reentry achieved by coming in straight down really really fast to allow us to penetrate through any missile defence systems deployed close to the KS... I mean the target.