Zeiss Ikon

That upgrade lets you track "unowned" objects -- which, seemingly, might include asteroids, as well as vessels and debris launched by "other space agencies" (the sources of those rescue contracts). In my 1.2.2 science save, I started with the Space Center fully upgraded, but didn't yet have the Klaw unlocked when I first spotted asteroids (er, "unknown objects") from Tracking.

Rabbits, mice, etc., on the other hand, never get anywhere close to the Hayflick limit. Humans might be the only species who do -- we live something like four times as long as any other mammal species, if you measure in a reasonable increment related to "how fast a creature lives" -- heartbeats. Asimov wrote about this almost fifty years ago. And even among humans, the only cells that normally get close to the Hayflick limit during a human lifetime (actual telomere depletion) are skin and blood precursors. If we could repeal the Hayflick limit and avoid giving a green light to dozens of different kinds of cancers, the most obvious result would be a rapid drop in the stock price of vendors of skin care products -- especially those linked to making skin "look younger". If your skin stayed "18 years old" for centuries, why would you buy Oil of Olay? Given that accident and lifestyle diseases account for the top five or so causes of death other than age-related disorders, we'd then begin to see the oldest members of society get older and older, while the average age at death barely creeps up, if it moves at all. As in Larry Niven's World of Ptavvs, in which the Struldbrugs' Club raises minimum age for membership by one year for every two years that pass -- and members appear less and less old because of constantly improving antiagathic therapies (Struldbrugs' Club was disbanded after the introduction of boosterspice, which, as long as you could afford to keep taking it, completely halted and even turned back aging) -- but most people don't live much longer than they did in the latter part of the 20th century. In reality, though, there is still a limit -- neurons don't seem to replace themselves efficiently, even long before Hayflick gets into the picture. The 200 year limit I mentioned before mainly has to do with the length of time the brain can last before the ongoing damage inherent with the passage of time puts too many holes in the neural networks. Cognition, memory, learning would all fade away over enough time. The very healthiest centenarians seem alert and mentally quick -- but they're still slower than they were eighty years earlier. Come back in another eighty years, and they'll show still more of that effect, because reproduction of neurons isn't directly limited by telomere length.

Might be because it really came about in relation to Asteroid Day, which was originally a mod. And the Klaw is genuinely necessary for asteroid redirect and capture missions. Not to mention extremely handy for debris retrieval (Kessler syndrome correction) and some rescue contracts.

Presuming you're referring to the Hayflick limit (chromosomes lose a little telomere length with each mitosis; when too short, the cell undergoes apoptosis). Some kinds of cells use telomerase to rebuild the telomeres (non-coding lengths of DNA that compensate for the inability of transcriptase to copy the last X nucleotides in a chain). Typically, these are single-cell organisms (and embryos of more complex creatures). Apoptosis and the Hayflick limit seemingly came about in multi-celled animals due to cumulative DNA damage that can make unlimited cell replication an invitation to disaster. Short answer, in humans and other mammals, and most other macroscopic animals (fish, reptiles, birds, amphibians, even invertebrates), if cells didn't apoptose after some limited number of mitotic cycles, the accumulated DNA damage would lead to descendant cells becoming non-functional, even pathological. This does happen sometimes; one kind of point mutations that can occur in a cell can turn on telomerase production and hence disable apoptosis. Now we have damaged cells replicating without limit: we call this cancer. IFF we could control the process -- restore telomere length without letting damaged cells continue to replicate without limit -- we might be able to prevent aging, or at least repeal the absolute limit on how long the very healthiest animals (and people) can live (currently believed, for humans, to be around 200 years before the Hayflick limit causes death).

Why would direct links work for some and not for others? Testing: https://imgur.com/cxHeEA4 https://imgur.com/cxHeEA4 Aha!! None of the links supplied by imgur work the way I'm used to, but if I'm viewing their preview, I can right click and "copy link location" (exact menu text is likely to vary in different browsers) and paste here, and the link embeds inside the editor as it used to do. BBcode works once saved, but doesn't show in the editor. Links provided by imgur's functions always show as links.

No, I didn't use the bbcode link. Last I heard, all I had to do was paste in the URL. That doesn't look much like an image... EDIT: In the editor. Apparently it only embeds when you save the message. Makes it hard to be sure you're getting your images in the right order...

I'm getting nowhere even trying to post individual pictures. See below: https://imgur.com/VGxxem6 That's the "copy" link from a picture I uploaded yesterday. Not an album, a picture -- unless imgur has started giving an album link when I mouse over the picture?

That was the link imgur auto-copies for me. Let me try adding .jpg at the end. https://imgur.com/VGxxem6.jpg Nope, no embed. https://imgur.com/VGxxem6 This is what auto-converted to an embedded image up until a week or so ago.

Hmmm. Everyone else's images from imgur embed correctly. Mine show as links. https://imgur.com/VGxxem6

Okay, as promised, here's the full report on Val's first-ever (in this career save) Mun landing. She flew the newly designed Explorer IV. The lander turned out to be grossly overengineered, which means the booster could have been reduced -- that'll be Explorer IVa, coming soon (Jeb is already pounding on the door at Planning, demanding to know when he'll get to land -- and swearing up and down he can do better than Val). https://imgur.com/aPX6aOc (and I see embedding from Imgur is broken again). Launch was spectacular, with six Reliants, one Swivel, and four Thuds (last minute additions, after some smart guy figured out the vessel had just barely enough thrust to lift off the pad). Staging (asparagus method) was uneventful, and Val flew the gravity turn masterfully, arriving in circular orbit with nearly full tanks in the booster core (this was intended, as that stage was now to serve double duty as the transfer tug). https://imgur.com/NNJ6aUZ The booster had about 1400 units of Lf/O remaining after circularization. The resource display also includes the (truly excessive, even by Kerbal standards) 2000 units in the combined descent and ascent stages of the lander. https://imgur.com/TvAuGMQ And, as intended, the booster core retained enough fuel to accomplish Munar capture (though the lander engine had to be used to circularize and lower the Munar orbit -- a lighter lander would have made a huge difference here). https://imgur.com/qVrXoFu Not much work for the descent stage, really. Circularize was a few tens of m/s, lowering the orbit another twenty or so, and then the combination of deorbit and landing runs around 800 m/s. https://imgur.com/Hrzvn38 As on the previous attempt, the Munar phase was such that Val had to wait through a couple orbits until the sun rose over the chosen landing zone. This time, in fact, the target was Twin Craters, about as far Mun-east as possible and still have line of sight to Kerbin for comms. Once there was enough light to see the ground, it was time. https://imgur.com/66MvJxU With Kerbin rising over Twin Craters, Val was on course for landing. Just a matter of waiting and watching the radar altimeter with its "time to impact", and "burn to zero" display in the inertial nav system. Because the "time to impact" doesn't take into account the acceleration from the burn, doctrine is to let that time get down to around 80% of the "burn to zero" before starting the burn. https://imgur.com/pDs1pq3 I didn't get any images during the landing burn or actual landing -- Better Burn Time came up with 102 sec to impact and a 102 sec burn, somehow skipping over the 120 seconds to impact it's supposed to start at. From there on, it was a matter of trying not to crash before Val could stop. That was, however, accomplished; the lander came to a virtual dead stop, Val cut the engine, and began to setting from a few hundred meters. Another couple short burns later, and she cut the engine at a couple meters altitude, going up at just over 1 m/s. The landing was gentle -- but sufficient for the landing legs to bounce the orbiter back off the (gently sloping) surface. https://imgur.com/FxUwEqk By the time I thought to capture any more images, Val had already been trying to upright the orbiter for a short time. At this point, she had the landing legs retracted, but that didn't help. All that fuel (more than 960 units remaining in the descent stage, plus 400 in the as-yet untouched ascent stage) was more than the reaction wheel and even the storage bay door motors could raise. Val stuck to duty -- it'd be embarrassing to do what she was pretty sure she'd have to, and not have all the science done beforehand, because if it worked, there'd be no going back. https://imgur.com/oAKDZES Once the science was all taken care of, Val hit the staging switch, and popped the ascent stage free of the descent stage. After it stopped rolling, she repeatedly flipped the service bay doors open, closed, open again, while toggling the SAS gyros in and out. After several tries, she managed to get the vessel near enough to upright, long enough, to fire the ascent engine. Once clear of the surface on a trajectory that had some time to apoapsis, it was easy enough to set up a maneuver to put herself into Munar orbit, and from Munar orbit it's easy to get to Kerbin. https://imgur.com/eG8SjlC The Munar orbit acheived was pretty bad -- inclination above 45 degrees -- but it was an orbit, and the nodes were close to the line of the Mun's orbit. Val burned for home from the point nearest Kerbin, where the orbit was nearly parallel to the equator, and the burn wouldn't kick her even further out of the plane. https://imgur.com/KqSTPXh Val had fuel left after her Kerbin transfer burn, so she burned it at her first apoapsis pass, lowering her orbit enough to avoid having to make half a dozen passes to keep from overheating the Science Jr. She kept the engine attached, as it did a better job than the heat shield of protecting that fragile experiment. https://imgur.com/tAJVQHR After two more aerobrake passes, her periapsis had fallen enough to be worrisome. She staged away the engine and tank at apoapsis, using the staging impulse to raise her periapsis a few kilometers, then set up for reentry in earnest. Unfortunately, there are no images of the reentry; i was too busy rolling the vessel, trying to keep the Science Jr. from melting. This was ultimately successful, and Val opened the parachutes with all experiments intact. Unfortunately, even with two drogues in addition to the main Mk. 16, the descent rate was too high, and I didn't see until after jettisoning the heat shield (which might have served one last moment as a crush zone) that the descent was over land -- the previous periapsis pass had been over the wide open Southern Ocean. On landing, the Science Jr. collapsed and was destroyed. The other experiments were saved, however, including reports from the Munar surface and the first ever samples from a celestial body other than Kerbin. After overcoming failure, Val had returned, safe, from the surface of the Mun.

Well, if that hadn't been in support of a Russian proverb, I might have thought the hut on chicken legs belonged to Sheelba of the Eyeless Face (from the Fafhrd & Grey Mouser books).

Well, none, any time soon. Most of the internal heat inside the Earth is due to radioactive decay of heavy elements in the core ("impurities" in the nickel-iron core material). Since your replacement doesn't affect the core, that heat source would still be present. What you would have is far more vigorous convection (millions of times the rate with a partially molten rock mantle). So, now you have the equivalent of a planet-sized pressure cooker, carrying off heat from the core under conditions where the water cannot boil (pressure is far beyond critical, so there's no phase change between room temperature and "hot enough to dissolve quartz like sugar"). The convection would bring hot water into contact with the underside of the crustal rocks, and in pretty short order dissolve away most of the minerals (did I mention quartz is soluble in water at something like 1000 C and 500 atmospheres?). Time frame for this "dissolve the entire crust" I don't know. I've gotten the impression that dissolution of quartz (which is what deposits the crystals inside a geode, among other less obvious effects) that this is a slowish process, so I'm going to say years to centuries. That would mean there'd be a period when the crust is precariously balanced, floating/not-floating on the less dense water beneath. Weak places in the crust (current spreading and subduction zones, at a minimum) would lead to blocks tilting, breaking loose, and sinking into the vast depths, events that would tend to destabilize the nearby crust. I'd guess the crust would break up and sink, plunging every human and animal into not-yet-boiling water, long before the core can heat the shallower water enough to even start dissolving the crust (water, after all, is a rather poor conductor of heat and has an immense specific heat capacity). Longer term, the mass of water in the new mantle would nearly equal the mass of the core. The core, high in iron and nickel, is a far better conductor of heat than water is, so it would cool through as the water heated. Over a period of a few centuries, then, the core would solidify as it cooled. Eventually, an equilibrium would be reached -- most likely one in which the Earth would have a small molten inner core, a much larger solid outer core, a deep ocean formed from the water mantle, and a water surface (presuming there's still enough atmosphere to keep the water from boil/freezing in vaccuum). All this upheaval might still not kill all oceanic life -- plankton and things that feed on it, all the way up to large sharks and whales, might survive if the water temperature at the surface doesn't get too hot. I'm inclined to think it would boil vigorously for a while, but it's time to go to work, so I'm not going to try to do the thermodynamics.

One thing to check is whether your tracking station is tracking debris. Go into the tracking station and look at the row of buttons along the top of the window. One of those will have an icon that looks like a fuel tank -- just a cylinder. Make sure it's on. Wheee! Where did all that stuff come from? If that isn't the issue, and the debris is really gone gone, you probably have another setting wrong -- even if you have max debris set, there's another setting to delete debris (don't have the game open at present, so can't quickly check where it is exactly). If that's set, it won't matter what your max is.

Just when you thought black holes couldn't get any weirder...

As noted, most globular clusters are so old the stars don't have enough heavier elements to form planets, never mind livable planets. They predate the seeding of the galaxy with supernova remnants that contain even significant amounts of elements like carbon and oxygen, never mind silicon, magnesium, and iron (and without iron, you won't get a livable planet -- period). If your stars contain hydrogen, a little helium, and even less lithium, but effectively no boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc., you won't be able to live in the cluster -- and this is what "low metallicity" means. To astronomers, a "metal" is anything other than hydrogen. Beyond that, stars don't stay in the outer part of a cluster -- every star orbits the cluster's center of mass, and is perturbed by other stars, especially when it passes near them (which happens all the time in a dense globular cluster). No star in such a chaos could ever develop a planetary "system" -- anything that forms that's too small to ignite as a star will be in an orbit like one of the stars -- brown dwarfs, super-Jupiters, rocky bodies -- oh, wait, there won't be any rocky bodies. Not even ice moons around the substellar objects, because those depend on rocky cores to hold the ice during formation. And while there's little or no evidence of actual stellar collisions in globular clusters (because the stars are far enough apart relative to their size to make that rare even in the densest clusters), it's very possible that most of the substellar objects have been "eaten" , or even more likely ejected, by larger stars over the eons since the cluster formed. Beyond that, there's some evidence that the stars within a globular cluster are of similar mass -- not identical, but within a fairly narrow range -- which argues against the formation of substellar objects at all. If there was a mechanism in operation during the gas cloud collapse that formed one of these clusters which evened out the masses of the stars that eventually formed from the cloud, there's no reason to believe it would make an exception for really tiny masses. In fact, the population density of many globular clusters is so high it's hard to see how anything smaller than the average cluster resident could avoid being torn apart by larger mass concentrations nearby (which is a good candidate for the mechanism that seems to even out the stellar masses in any given cluster). There are clusters that would make good places to colonize -- but they'll be what astronomers call "open clusters", a half dozen to a couple dozen stars of similar age in relatively close proximity (Pleiades is a bad example for this, as the stars are young and too large/hot to be good candidates for habitable planets, but it's the right kind of cluster), as opposed to globular clusters, which are usually older than the Milky Way, hence their low metallicity.

I'm reading this as your second stage with payload tumbling -- you might wish to edit the question to clarify if that's not the case. If the stage is aerodynamically unstable after staging, it may be unable to hold heading if it's more than a couple degrees from prograde -- and your probe core will be switched to "stability assist" (i.e. "hold constant heading") when you switch focus away from the second stage, which inevitably happens while you recover the booster. During this time, the stage tries to hold heading, but it's coasting, so its prograde vector will point more and more downward -- and if the heading gets too far off prograde for an unstable stage, it'll often will have enough aerodynamic destabilizing forces to overcome the reaction wheel(s) and start to tumble. The dead simple solutions to this are: 1. Stage high enough that aerodynamics no longer matter. For Kerbin, that's above about 40+ km. I've got a vessel with a spaceplane orbiter, and the second asparagus staging event leaves this orbiter with only a single core engine/tanks assembly and a Swivel engine, but I have no trouble with it because by the time the I stage away the boosters with fins on them, there's not enough air left to matter. 2. Make the stage aerodynamically stable on its own. Teeny bitty fins ("Basic Fins") can do this, if the COM is far enough forward. Beware, however; any fins you put forward of the vessel's launch COM must be compensated by larger and /or steerable fins at the bottom/rear end of the vessel at launch (if the fins are really tiny and COM is far enough forward, you might be able to get away with just engine gimbaling, or by adding RCS, but usually you'll need fins for this). My Taxicab family vessels, with the spaceplane orbiter, get along okay with just a pair of AV-8 steerable elevon surfaces at the rear and the same surfaces acting as canards for the orbiter at the nose, assisting three Swivels at launch and last-staged -- as long as the pilot doesn't let the heading get off the prograde vector above 100 m/s (I have to set up the gravity turn between 40 and 100 m/s and then go to prograde hold, or the vessel will flip in pitch, unrecoverably).

Yesterday, the Program fulfilled its promise to Val, following her abort decision (due to low fuel) on her last flight, that she would still be the first Kerbal on the Mun. Short version, with a newly designed spaceship (Explorer IV), she made the landing (with a ridiculous amount of excess descent stage fuel -- probably could have lifted from the Mun and made a transfer to and landing on Minmus with the available dV), tipped over the lander, planted her flag and did her science anyway, then staged the ascent stage and used the service bay doors to flip it upright long enough to launch from the Mun. Made four aerobraking orbits, and finally managed to get the Science Jr. through reentry intact, only to have it collapse on impact under a main parachute and two drogues (apparently, Science Jr., plus a Service Bay with two goo canisters and two batteries, plus the command pod, is too much weight to give a descent velocity compatible with the fragility of the Science Jr.). Full version, with pictures, coming soon. Also, launched the Taxicab V (the conjoined twins Munar orbit tourist bus) on a four-tourist mission to the Mun, co-piloted by Jeb and Adeny's (now fully trained) clone (Jeb is Command Pilot, Adeny is in the cockpit of the "secondary" reentry spaceplane). Vessel still in parking LKO, but confidence is high -- everything about it handles identically to the reliable Taxicab IIIm.

If you're using Swivels or Reliants for your Mun craft, you'll get shorter transfer burns than Scott would with a Terrier engine. That's because the larger engines have much more thrust -- but they burn more fuel for each unit of impulse (impulse is thrust times time, has the units of momentum, mass times velocity). Thus, if you have two identical craft (say, a Mk. 1 command pod, with parachute and heat shield, decoupler, FL-T400 tank, and some kind of engine), one with a Reliant (slightly more efficient than a Swivel, and you don't need the gimbal for this part of the mission) will burn more fuel for the same transfer than one with a Terrier. This occurs both because the Terrier has higher specific impulse (the measure of efficiency for rocket engines), and because the Reliant is much heavier. That said, over time, you may prefer a Reliant or Swivel over a Terrier for some missions, because the Terrier doesn't have an alternator and can't charge your craft's batteries -- and running out of electric charge can make it almost as hard to get home to Kerbin as running out of fuel. The difference in efficiency is noticeable, but it may not offset the extra weight of having to carry two or three extra battery packs for a 3-4 day mission profile.

Presuming RCS to be either catalyzed hydrazine or catalyzed high test peroxide (the only monopropellants with significant representation in the real world -- and hydrazine is winning by about a factor of twenty), the catalyst packs are expensive to manufacture. Hydrazine uses, IIRC, nickel catalyst, which is at least cheaper than the silver or noble metals used to catalyze peroxide -- but pure nickel, manufactured in a form with a large reactive area, isn't cheap, even by rocket engine standards.

Sounds as if you want to mirror in a plane other than the "waterline" -- is that right? I don't know of a way to do that. Mirror symmetry assumes you're applying wings etc. to a spaceplane type build, and want them mirrored right and left. There's no other plane you'd want to mirror from in spaceplane construction. Wouldn't make sense to have upper and lower fins applied with a dihedral angle.

One question -- when did stock get a central monopropellant engine? I just opened the one I have on this computer (1.2.2) and don't see anything like that. The only monoprop engine I have that answers throttle (instead of RCS controls) is the Puff. I do have 1.3.0 on my laptop, but it's a little precarious trying to use it at my desk (limited space) -- and I don't recall any added engines in that version.

A gun type nuke (works at nuclear yields only with uranium, not plutonium) is well within the capability of a knowledgeable munitions tinkerer (who doesn't mind the high probability of dying soon after the job is done from radiation/chemical poisoning due to exposure to the bomb metal). It isn't super-science. Fortunately, highly enriched uranium hasn't been made in decades (in most of the world, anyway) and there likely aren't any old weapons around that were built from it (plutonium has been preferred since Fat Man went off; it's likely that if there's still a uranium bomb around it's 60+ year old, which further complicates efforts to either detonate it as is or extract the pit -- radiation from the pit has had a lot of time to damage stuff inside the bomb case). Nuclear power (in general) runs on plutonium produced in breeder reactors, which can use natural-ratio uranium as breeding stock (it's the 238U you actually want in that case, because it absorbs a neutron and emits a beta to become 239Pu) -- and as noted multiple times, reactor fuel won't work for making bombs. Even partially spent breeder rods would require reprocessing to recover the plutonium -- and there are only a half dozen places on Earth that can make bomb metal from that stuff (most of them in shutdown for the past 20-40 years). Over the past 30 years, many new nuclear fuel assemblies have been reprocessed from decommissioned bomb cores as arms limitation has taken hold. Making a bomb out of the pit of an existing bomb is the much taller order, requiring an implosion (very hard to do successfully) to assemble the critical mass fast enough to get anything you'd think of as a nuclear blast -- try to make a gun type bomb with plutonium and you'll get a fizzle -- lots of soft X-rays and neutrons, and "explosive" disassembly of the core as bomb metal fragments and vapor; in essence, a really, really ugly "dirty bomb". You'd quickly kill a relatively small number of people close to the detonation, and the scattered bomb material would very heavily contaminate a small area, with reduced contamination potentially running to many miles downwind. To get a high-yield detonation with materials terrorists might be able to obtain, you'd need someone who has extensive knowledge of nuclear physics, explosives, and rather specific knowledge and experience from a nuclear weapons program. Folks like that tend to have little use for the "blow up the world" mentality -- but presuming you found one who was an ideologue of the right flavor, it's a possibility. Ever read The Sum of All Fears?

Absolutely. Any idiot with access to explosives, medical radioactives, and a detonator can built a dirty bomb that will render a small portion of a city uninhabitable until either a very expensive cleanup is completed, enough time elapses (60Co has a long half life and emits neutrons, making everything around it radioactive as well), or people just forget living there is a death sentence. Making an actual nuclear fission bomb -- the kind that could "destroy" Sarajevo -- is a good bit harder, as noted in the "medieval nuke" question up thread a bit. IFF one had access to enriched uranium, a gun type bomb is relatively easy -- easy enough that the United States military didn't bother to make and detonate a test article before dropping Little Boy on Hiroshima. They were that sure it would work. All that's needed is suitably shaped uranium slugs, explosive propellant (reloading powder would work, they used cordite in Little Boy), and tampers to keep the uranium together long enough to get an acceptable level of reaction. Making a plutonium bomb is harder still -- you can't assemble the critical mass fast enough to get a reasonable reaction level with a gun type device (likely because plutonium is all fissionable, where only the 235U part of uranium is -- around 3% in bomb metal), so you need some kind of implosion trigger, and those are far more difficult to build. Implosion was tricky enough that the the original builders -- including some pretty danged smart people, Fermi, Oppenheimer, and so forth -- felt it necessary to explode a test unit to be sure they had it right. If you had a modern nuclear physicist on your team, and access to something that will pass for a supercomputer (Bitcoin mining rig, maybe?), it might be possible to be reasonably confident in building an implosion device without a test article. Further, either way, you need suitable bomb metal. 3% enriched uranium required a national effort (in 1944) to get enough to make one bomb. It's not something you'll do in hiding from the world, not in today's world. Reactor fuel, of either type, would require extensive reprocessing to turn into bomb metal. In fact, the most likely source of bomb metal for a terrorist bomb is, well, a bomb. There are (after 70+ years of the nuclear age) a number of "missing" nuclear devices that could potentially come into the possession of folks who, even if they couldn't resurrect the electronics to be able to fire the bomb as it stands (or couldn't depend on the fusion core due to age), could use the bomb metal to make another bomb. Or were you referring to the "total surveillance state?"

Not a matter of how many or how few G at surface; it's what the orbital velocity is. A "typical" drive, good for 250+ meters (I'm no Tiger Woods, and neither are you) leaves the tee at around 70-80 m/s. Periapsis, in this case, will always be at the location of the tee, though rotation of the body will drag the whole surface under the periapsis over one rotation. Well, what bodies have an orbital velocity around 70-80 m/s? Minmus is fairly close, Gilly's too small, Ike may be closer than Minmus (IIRC Minmus has an low circular velocity under 50 m/s). However: keep the surface gravity constant, and expand the body (like running a rescale mod in KSP) and the escape and orbital velocities both increase, because the larger surface radius gives a slower gravity reduction (remember, gravity drops off as the square of radius). One example: Kerbin's orbital velocity is close to 2300 m/s; Earth's, with the same surface gravity, is just over double that figure. So: you could have a body with 1 g at surface and drive a golf ball into orbit, if the body was small enough -- it'd be roughly 18% the size of Kerbin (1/30 the velocity requires square root of 1/30 radius). Better delete the atmosphere, or your ball will still show as "suborbital" and it'll come down before it's gone all the way around...

With this, I can completely agree. Back to the original question, of whether you could (with a hand-waved "adequate engine") push a B-52, 737, or DC-8 into orbit , well, of course you could. IFF you keep speed low enough to avoid breaking up the airframe until the air is thin enough not to matter, and can support the weight by other than aerodynamics for a while during the period when stall speed exceeds maximum safe speed and air is still thick enough to cause damage (i.e. too thin to hold you up, too thick to ignore). A simplistic flight profile, given TWR => 1, would be to pull into vertical climb from normal flight, and stay vertical until air is no longer a big concern, then tilt gradually into horizontal to "transition" (more or less like a VTOL) from vertical to orbital flight. If TWR < 1, you'll never get there with an airframe that can't take high Mach numbers. Getting the aircraft back down will be left as an exercise -- I don't want to be anywhere near a B-52 during reentry.