rdfox

One proposal for disposal of the meltdown debris at Fukushima Daiichi is to bury it in a vault in the subduction zone off Japan, so that it gets taken down into the mantle before it could pose a problem to future people. This might end up being the best solution for the "what the hell do we do with all this spent nuclear fuel?" problem, given that Yucca Mountain is now a dead issue...

Actually, the big reason Mike Collins decided to retire rather than stick around in the crew rotation was simple--he had spent the past seven years of his life at NASA, running full speed and hardly ever seeing his wife and children, and while he wouldn't have traded it for the world, he really didn't want to miss his daughters' ENTIRE childhoods. Since sticking around for one more mission would mean at least another two years barely ever at home (over THREE years, as it turned out, thanks to the post-Apollo 13 hiatus), he decided it was time to move on to a new job. In his first book, he stated that he'd told his bosses that if the mission aborted and dropped into the Atlantic, he'd be pounding on their door the very next morning to try and get another flight, but if the mission went off reasonably well, he would be retiring to spend more time with his family.

To boil it down: All objects have a certain ability to glide; the lift-to-drag ratio defines how good they are at it, and the glide ratio tells you how far you can glide from a given height. The Space Shuttle *was* a pretty lousy glider (one engineer claimed in 1980 that it had "the glide ratio of a pair of pliers"), but even it landed. For the record, the Shuttle's glide ratio was comparable to that of an autorotating helicopter (which, to the uninitiated, feels more like an out-of-control plummet than a controlled glide). Also, in general, the faster an airplane is designed to fly, the worse its glide ratio at best-glide speed will be, as it's designed to have limited low-speed lift to reduce high-speed drag. Also, the B-2 does NOT need its engines for yaw control; it uses "drag rudders" for that, split-surface ailerons akin to the Shuttle's split-surface rudder; they open as needed for yaw control and general drag-increase when you're trying to shed speed quickly; asymmetric deployment for yaw control and symmetrical deployment for general drag.

For the record, the Soviet space program was actually MORE risk-averse, regarding manned flights, than was the US program. NASA had the concept of "acceptable risk level," where they treated the manned spacecraft as being experimental aircraft, and, as was so succinctly put in the Apollo 1 episode of "From the Earth to the Moon," "People die testing unproven aircraft. We all know it; it's not pretty, but it happens." So NASA's attitude towards safety was to try and find every possible failure mode and come up with a solution for it, but ultimately, there were certain failure modes where the answer to the question "What happens if...?" could only be, "Well, it's a pretty bad day, then." (Re-entry is a fine example; if the heat shield failed, then life was going to suck for the astronauts--albeit only for a very short time.) As a result, they were willing to accept risk, so long as it wasn't considered undue risk--after all, you never really know if something will work until you try it for real. This is why NASA was willing to rely on a single engine for Lunar Module ascent from the surface, for example, and another single one for the burn to return to Earth, with no backups--the engines in question were designed for 100% reliability (and, in the case of the LM, could even be operated manually by the crew with hand tools if all else failed), and it was felt that the risk of them failing was low enough that they didn't see a likely case for the crew not being able to get back unless there was a screwup on their part. However, the in the Soviet program, risk to cosmonauts was politically unacceptable--whereas NASA felt that they could survive a certain number of crew losses due to the experimental nature of space flight, the Soviet space program knew that a crew loss would be fatal to the program, if it turned out to be due to a calculated risk. Therefore, whereas NASA was willing to accept a chance of crew loss, the Soviet program wouldn't fly a manned mission unless they were 100% certain that they'd get the crew back alive. Komarov was a special case; all the engineers on the Soyuz program had passed along word that they felt the vehicle was not ready to fly and wouldn't be ready for a manned flight any time soon, but Brezhnev (or his deputies--details are still vague) declared that this was not open to debate; the first manned Soyuz flight would occur early enough for the cosmonaut and spacecraft to be put on display as part of the parade celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Revolution, with predictable results. The Soviets' only other crew loss accident, Soyuz 11, was not fatal to the program because of the nature of the accident--the cabin vent had been jarred open by the shock of the explosive bolts blowing to jettison the service module after deorbit; the bolts were designed and set up to fire sequentially to keep the shock down to acceptable levels, but due to a part (which functioned properly in ground testing) failing, they instead fired simultaneously. Since the part failure was not something that was within anyone's control, there weren't any reprisals; the assumption that there wasn't a need for pressure suits during routine flight was an "acceptable risk" that was politically motivated by high muckety-mucks demanding that Soviet spacecraft carry crews at least as large as American ones, and as such, it was seen as proof that the "acceptable risk" concept wasn't acceptable at all...

Only time a LES was actually *used* for its designed purpose. The LES on Mercury-Redstone 1 was activated due to a wiring glitch that saw the booster engine shut down at an altitude of one inch... but due to a glitch in the LES sequencing, it also blew the tower jettison bolts when it fired, but still fired the parachute-deploy mortars. So now you had a fully fueled, slightly crumpled Redstone booster sitting on the launch pad *with two parachutes hanging off the side, waiting to catch the wind*...

There's no reason that SLS would be the pinnacle of chemical rocket technology, except for there being very little call for lifting locomotives and (maritime) ships into LEO. It might be less efficient than building a "bespoke" single-core rocket to do so, but there's no reason that clustering cores can't provide what is, in essence, unlimited lifting capability (albeit with some nasty infrastructure costs and ugly engineering to create the payload bus). In 1968, NASA was looking at possible post-lunar Saturn derivative boosters. One of the wilder ones was a proposal from Marshall Space Flight Center (i.e., Huntsville) to build a Saturn-derived booster capable of putting 500 tons into LEO in a single throw. How? Take four(!) Saturn INT-21s (Saturn Vs without third stages--essentially, the configuration flown to launch Skylab) and bolt them together side by side in a cluster. The idea was that this could launch a manned Mars mission in a single throw...

Based on the contractor that designed it and the model number, this would presumably be the Lunar Module's Ascent Propulsion System engine--the engine used to leave the lunar surface and return to orbit. According to Wikipedia, the APS engine was actually derived from the main engine (Bell 8247) used in the Agena upper stage (famously converted into a docking target and orbital maneuvering stage for the Gemini program), with an emphasis on 100% reliability through simplicity (because if it didn't work, two men would be left on the lunar surface to die). As a result, it was one of the two simplest liquid-fuel rocket engines ever flown (the other being the Service Propulsion System used on the Apollo Service Module, which needed the same reliability--because if it didn't fire, the crew would be stuck in lunar orbit for all eternity). It was pressure-fed rather than using any form of pump, it relied on gravity feed (if the Descent Propulsion System failed in a way requiring an abort from a free-fall, the RCS thruster quads would be used to provide ullage for startup), it used hypergolic propellants (which were so corrosive that it required a complete rebuild after each firing, so each lunar liftoff was with an engine that had never been tested) that required no ignition system to start the burn, and it had exactly TWO moving parts--one simple ball valve for each propellant, with two positions, open and closed. No throttle, no gimbal, no nothin'. If the valves failed to open, the astronauts could, at least theoretically, take the engine cover off inside the LM and manually open the valves to fire the engine. (This, mercifully, was never tested in flight!) For the record, all steering of the LM Ascent Stage was done through the RCS, since the APS had no thrust-vectoring capability (because gimbals can break). It meant a less-efficient gravity turn profile, since it wasn't quite as smooth a turn, but it was felt that the reliability was more important than squeezing an extra 10 m/s or so of delta-V out of the vehicle. The SPS, by comparison, did have pitch and yaw gimbals, doubling the moving parts count (to four!) over the APS, because when it was designed (as an ascent engine for the entire Apollo CSM during the "direct-ascent or EOR" days), it was felt that thrust vectoring would be critical to its mission, while the SM's RCS thruster quads had enough control authority to be able to cancel the torque if a gimbal locked hard over on the SPS, allowing the burn to be completed anyway. Further historical note: the APS engine was revived as the RS-18 in early studies for the Constellation program's lander, not intended as an actual flight engine, but instead with a stored APS engine restored and converted to run on methane/oxygen as a study/development engine for that propellant combination; the SPS, with a shorter nozzle, went on to be a very widely used upper stage engine for expendable boosters, and, in another variant, the OMS engine for the Space Shuttle. (The OMS variant was something the engineers were particularly proud of; of the initial batch of actual flight articles, only *four* ever had to be taken off the flight roster--the two lost with the Challenger, and the two lost with the Columbia. They were just that bulletproof reliable; all you had to do to turn them around was clean 'em out, reline the tanks and propellant lines, and they're ready to fly again, with seemingly unlimited lifespan...)

I find this unlikely, due to issues of angular resolution. It's generally agreed that the highest-resolution photographic reconnaissance satellites out there are the NRO's Advanced KH-11 and its derivatives, which are essentially Hubble telescopes aimed at the Earth (albeit with somewhat different sensor packages). Orbiting very low (~100 miles/160 kilometers--and thus requiring frequent replacement as they deorbit due to orbital decay), they have roughly the same angular resolution as the HST, and while I'm not gonna go through all the math to show it, this works out to a resolution, under ideal conditions, of about three inches (7.5 cm) in their imagery. That is assuming you're looking vertically down at the site of interest, and that the atmosphere is perfectly transmissive on that day (it never is). While higher-resolution cameras are possible, there's no actual advantage to using them, since atmospheric refraction is enough that you wouldn't really get any better imagery than that--even with theoretical angular resolution for the camera that gets you down to the atoms-per-pixel range, the turbulent "soup" of the atmosphere would still blur it down to about that same level. At a low oblique angle, like you'd need to see through a window (or, more usefully to a recon satellite, read a car's license plate from orbit), angular resolution and atmospheric refraction combine to give a net resolution of about one foot (30 centimeters) or so. So an NRO spy satellite could make out that there's a person in the window, but wouldn't have enough resolution to make out whether they're male or female (it'd basically see a string of five or six roughly person-colored pixels, one pixel wide). Commercial mapping satellites tend to be no better than about 25 centimeters resolution when shooting vertically (most of them actually go for 1m resolution), partly because their customers tend not to need spy satellite-level resolution, and partly because the lower angular resolution requirement allows them to cover a much broader area with the same amount of CCD sensor, allowing them to get full coverage on a more frequent basis and to cost less. (It's like the difference between binoculars and a telescope--the binoculars don't give you as much magnification, but they give you a much wider field of view, whereas the telescope gives you a lot more magnification, but at the cost of essentially looking through a drinking straw, in terms of how wide an area you can see...)

Actually, Freeman Dyson and the rest of his team were very shocked to find out that, due to the need to keep the acceleration down to levels that were survivable, nuclear pulse propulsion actually *gains* efficiency with increased mass (to a point--I believe they found that the break-even point was a 500 ton SSTO design using 1 kiloton devices, but don't quote me on those numbers). This is because the vehicle's increased mass reduces the acceleration from each force pulse, and thus reduces the amount of shock absorption required to keep the G loadings in the tolerable range. Once you reach the break-even point, where your maximum acceptable G loading won't be exceeded even with a fully rigid system (no shock absorption), THEN heavy becomes bad, but up until then, counterintuitively, a heavier Orion-type ship is MORE efficient, because it spends less of the mass budget on the shock damping, freeing that up for payload. (As a side note... I will always tear my hair out at how ST:TNG convinced everyone that it's "dampener." It's not. A damper is something that reduces the effects of something else--indeed, the car parts known as "shock absorbers" in North America are generally referred to as "dampers" elsewhere. A dampENer is something that gets other things wet.)

This actually came up in the first "Iron Man" movie, when Tony mentions that his first-generation version of the miniaturized arc reactor (the one built IN A CAVE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAP! ...sorry, couldn't resist.) puts out "two gigajoules per second" power output. (Of course, any real engineer would have just said "two gigawatts," but hey, rule of cool.) As it turns out, if you do the math, two gigawatts *is* pretty much enough power to run any of the systems you saw the Iron Man suits use in the first movie (though not all at once). It also roughly works out to the average electrical consumption of Los Angeles. All in a package the size of a can of mixed nuts, with no real fuel requirements and seemingly such limited waste heat that it can be carried in a cavity in the human chest without serious harm. This is the point where anyone with a brain would be patenting the HELL out of that technology so that he could sell it as a replacement for every kind of power supply on the planet (from batteries to engines to power stations)... and where any engineer just chuckles and notes that the job gets a hell of a lot easier when you've got that kind of energy density available.

I *think* that with the Shuttle, the horizontal movement at liftoff was more an unavoidable function of the net force vector not being perfectly vertical, due to the SSMEs being gimballed off the vertical to have their thrust vector pass through the stack CG; this meant that it was going to "slide" horizontally a bit at liftoff, until they could pitchover a little to adjust the net thrust vector to a vertical position. (Hooray, torque!)

This would actually make it *more* likely for LEGO corporate to be willing to do a KSP set, despite it's theoretically "limited sales potential." After all, if all they have to do is package parts that they already make in KSP-themed packaging, then there's virtually no cost to them, and each sale is almost pure profit.

A bit late, but these have been tested on every single launch of the Minuteman ICBM (i.e., all the development and testing flights, the launches used to provide ICBM RV targets for BMD tests, and at least one qualification test per year where a randomly selected missile is pulled from its silo, taken to Vandenberg, and launched down the Pacific Missile Range to Kwajelein for a full-range test flight with inert warheads--now usually combined with BMD test launches to save money). NASA was considering them for the Shuttle's SRBs, but they were cancelled partly to reduce weight, but mostly to reduce cost by eliminating the engineering needed for them.

What's more, not only were the aerodynamic surfaces locked into a neutral position until they were activated during re-entry, the SSMEs were locked into a default "neutral" position aimed at the approximate vehicle CG from ignition up until SRB jettison; until SRB burnout, control was entirely by thrust vectoring of the SRBs. (This apparently reduced structural loadings, and since the SRBs provided sufficient control authority, there was no reason to expose the Orbiter to additional stresses.)

I'll give you Delta (every single one of them is still a derivative of the old Thor IRBM), but Atlas, not so much. The Atlas III was the last one derived from the ICBM; Atlas IV and V are clean-sheet designs that retain only the name, not even the Atlas's two signature features, the stage-and-a-half launch stage, and the balloon tanks.

To some degree, that's kind of necessary in the early days. Nobody actually knows how to build a rocket until someone's built one that works. Until then, you just bolt something together that you *think* will work--the less expensive, the better, because you're gonna be doing this a LOT and you know it--and then you light the fuse, then go pick up the pieces to see what went wrong, so you can fix that for the next attempt. For that matter, much of rocket design is STILL that sort of iterative process; it's just that we've A) got the experience to eliminate 90% of the blind alleys from the very start by knowing that we can't make THAT idea work, have now got the data needed to shake out a lot more of the blind alleys on the test stand, in the wind tunnel, and in the computer, and C) have reliable vehicles we can fall back on until/unless the new vehicle is working properly. (Witness how Orion OFT-1 will be launched on an old reliable Delta IV booster instead of a prototype SLS; rather than bolt together a very hastily-done SLS prototype and hoping it works, we can now give the SLS design time to mature and launch the Orion test article on a known-quantity booster instead.)

To get back on topic, the original question is like asking, "Why so many different kinds of cars? I mean, a Rolls-Royce, a Ferrari, a Ford Fiesta, and a Kenworth will all get you where you need to go, so why should all four exist? Just build one of them." Nobody would consider that a logical statement--all four vehicles have very different purposes. The Fiesta is Cheap Basic Transportation; the Ferrari is a race-bred speed machine; the Rolls is hyper-luxury that's almost more about making a statement than about transportation; the Kenworth is a heavy-haul semi tractor designed to lug cargo from point A to point B. None is all that good at the other's job--the Fiesta is slow and about as luxurious as a park bench; the Ferrari guzzles fuel and, while comfortable, isn't exactly poshness; the Rolls costs more than any of the others; and the Kenworth is large, unmaneuverable (relatively speaking), incredibly fuel-hungry, and only moderately comfortable. The whole reason for having different spacecraft is to have vehicles tailored for different purposes. The US actually did try to build one spacecraft that could do everything--and ended up with something that was horrendously expensive and, while it could sort of do everything, it didn't do anything particularly WELL; that was the Space Shuttle. (Another example would be in the 60s, when Robert S. Macnamara tried to make the F-111 the Everyplane for Every Purpose, "like a car that can take Dad to work, pick up the groceries with Mom, carry the kids to school, and mix cement on weekends, except in May when it would be busy practicing for the Indy 500," to quote Michael Collins. The result was a number of very good single-purpose airplane designs were cancelled to fund the F-111, which ended up being a money pit that was really only of any value in the penetration bomber role and as an electronic-warfare platform.) We learned from those mistakes, and now, we design our vehicles to do one primary job well, as epitomized by the early motto of the F-15 program, "Not a pound for air to ground!" We may add in the ability to do other things, too--the F-15E Strike Eagle is one of the best air-to-ground aircraft out there--but that's going to be bonus capability added on top of the original purpose, which is NOT to be compromised. Is it inefficient? Maybe, to some degree, but at the same time, to go back to my original analogy, try hitching a 10-ton trailer loaded with 20 tons of freight to your Festiva and see how well you can move it...

Given how Vladimir Putin is acting like even MORE of a comic-book/James Bond supervillain than normal, I'm not at all surprised. If he keeps stirring the pot in eastern Europe, there may be open warfare going on in that part of the world by September--and if that happens, we may well be dragged into it, should he attack, say, Poland (a full NATO member). This has ALWAYS been a possibility with launches from CCAFS and VAFB, which is one of the reasons why NASA chose to build Complex 39 on an entirely separate piece of property (the Merritt Island Launch Facility) that was entirely NASA-owned. While they still would use the Eastern (now Atlantic) Missile Range tracking facilities downrange, those could easily support NASA missions and Air Force missions with minimal turnaround time (i.e., virtually none); launch pads, however, had to be occupied for an extended time before each launch, and refurbished after each one, meaning that the Air Force-owned launch complexes needed to have the option of the Air Force commandeering them--and the boosters on them--for military use at any time. The advantage of renting facilities from someone is you don't need to pay the full price to buy, build, and maintain them. The disadvantage is that if their owner needs them, then you're gonna get bumped down the priority list. By choosing to fly OFT-1 on a Delta IV, NASA knowingly accepted this possibility. (And honestly, I'd have been shocked if the OFT-1 vehicle had been ready to fly in September, anyway; I don't think ANY NASA manned spacecraft has been ready for launch on its original schedule date for the first test flight. Shuttle, for example, missed its target by two YEARS...)

NDT is actually the reason that we have the OSX version of KSP; a couple years back, someone asked him about the game on Twitter, and he replied that he thought it looked like a great idea and would probably be eating up far too much of his time, except that (at the time) there wasn't a Mac version. After someone linked to the tweet on the forums, porting to OSX became one of Squad's top priorities!

A thought, Frizz--on the S-IC for the Saturn V, are you thinking of including the retrofire package in its real place? (The top third or so of the engine fairings was actually installed at the VAB, because it contained two solid-fuel retrofire separation motors for staging on each side.) Also, I admit, I don't know much about how difficult it is to do this sort of thing in 3D modeling software, but would it be too difficult to do stretched versions of the S-IC and S-IVB to match certain of the proposed "evolved Saturn" variants that were studied in the late 60s for Apollo Applications and the projected '84 Mars mission? Most of the versions that proposed using strap-on SRBs (either Titan 3 or Minuteman models) would have used the stretched first and third stages, too. (I'd also suggest tankage for the proposed S-N nuclear third stage, but that could basically be handled by a pair of S-II tanks, IIRC.) I know, I'm not suggesting much. These could, of course, always be later-phase additions to the pack. (And it's not like it's as crazy as the proposed "500 tons to LEO in one throw" version that clustered four Saturn INT-21s under a single massive payload bus...)

Actually, the SR-71 was insanely efficient in both specific fuel consumption and miles per gallon, compared to most jet aircraft, almost entirely due to its raw speed. Yes, it burned 21,000 pounds per hour in cruise, while the 737-800 (comparable in maximum takeoff weight and fuel capacity) burns about 6000 pph in cruise. However, this works out to about 0.094 miles per pound (or 0.63 miles per gallon) for the SR-71, and 0.085 miles per pound (0.57 miles per gallon) for the 737-800, which has literally forty years of Boeing and CFM spending a fortune to try and improve fuel efficiency that the Blackbird didn't have. So in terms of miles per gallon, the Blackbird was about 11% more fuel-efficient than the 737-800. Going by specific fuel consumption (pounds of fuel burned per hour per pound of thrust) and correcting for speed as per Wikipedia's recommendations, I get a result for the Blackbird of 0.309 pounds per hour per pound thrust, and 0.220 pounds per hour per pound thrust for the 737; correcting for speed by the method they recommend (dividing by speed), I get 1.572*10^-4 as the SFC for the Blackbird, and 4.305*10^-4 for the 737. (The units are pounds of fuel per (pounds thrust times miles), which is a hideous thing to write out.) So in terms of specific fuel consumption, the Blackbird was about 2.75 times as efficient as the 737! The reason for this is simple--the Blackbird's engine was actually designed to do some very unique tricks at full speed. The J-58 turbojet was actually a unique engine; it operated as a straight turbojet at subsonic speeds, then it started to add more and more bypass air as it got faster, akin to a modern high-bypass turbofan, except that instead of using the engine fan section to move the bypass air, it simply used ram air pressure and inlet shaping to compress it instead. Above about Mach 2, most of the thrust was coming from the afterburner, fed by bypass air, and the engine control system actually started reducing power on the gas turbine section of the engine, since it was no longer needed to compress the air. By Mach 2.5, the engine had transitioned over to being essentially a straight ramjet, with the turbine merely running at low idle power to keep the alternators and hydraulic pumps running, and to avoid trying to windmill-start it during deceleration/descent. In fact, by that speed, the inlet alone was generating a significant amount of thrust; the Air Force has stated that at cruise, 60% of the Blackbird's thrust came from the intake, 35% from the afterburner, and only 5% from the turbine itself. With the gas turbine just idling and not spending much of its energy output compressing air to make thrust, this translates to a significant reduction in fuel flow and, even with the afterburner running at all times, the net is surprisingly low fuel flow for the thrust generated...

Count me as the latest last to know... and I've been playing since 0.8-ish!

Gates: Yeah, apparently the switch to external initiation was because it didn't just allow them a much higher neutron flux at initiation and thus a faster initial reaction rate (and thus many more fissions before the core blew itself apart), it also allowed much higher compression before initiation, since they could wait until compression is complete before initiating instead of it just happening when the initiator compresses enough to get the neutron flux up to the point of starting the reaction. This was a major step in increasing the size of the stockpile, since it meant you could use much less fissile material for the same yield.

...actually, the initiators aren't really classified any more, at least in generalities. The early weapons used roughly spherical polonium neutron sources coated in a beryllium reflector that were located at the center of the "physics package" and compressed with the fissile material to start the reaction. Later designs (as in, 1951 or so) switched to using external initiation with a miniaturized betatron neutron source contained within the bomb case that would provide extremely precise initiation timing. Reactors are not designed solely to maintain exact criticality (if they were, they couldn't be started up or shut down), but instead to have highly controllable levels of criticality. During the startup process, a certain degree of supercriticality is maintained to bring the core reaction rate up to full power levels; during a shutdown, subcriticality is created to stop the reaction. The big thing about a weapon is that it goes prompt critical, generating enough prompt neutrons to acheive runaway supercriticality and, rather than have the reaction reach a level of stable criticality, instead just keep generating more and more power until the released energy blows the core apart. The major aspects of nuclear weapon design that are still "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you" level secrets are things like the precise geometry of the physics package and the mechanisms by which the radiation implosion process for fusion ignition works. That said, I could *probably* construct a highly-inefficient gun-assembly weapon that would yield a fizzle in the 250 ton to 1 kiloton range in my stepfather's garage, solely using what I know from open-source materials... but now that I've triggered a dozen NSA red flags, I'll specify that I'd first need to get my hands on enough fissile material to build three or four proper Little Boy weapons, and that this is entirely theoretical. As for published descriptions of the operation of nuclear weapons in fiction, all of the ones that go into detail deliberately leave out one or two critical steps to make sure that they can't be used as a how-to manual by terrorists or rogue states... and according to actual weapon designers, there's one or two items that they've kept hidden from all the open-source literature all these years, too, just in case. As for exactly what those items are, I'd rather not publicly speculate, even regarding the open-source stuff left out on purpose.

Get Procedural Fairings; all that would be needed then is to scale up one of the existing bases to the 3.75m S-IVB diameter. BTW, Frizz, just was checking on the S-IB thrust structure; I can easily workaround it with struts. That said, do you think it'd be possible to do a quick and dirty rescale of the stock 2.5m SAS or reaction wheel part, with a .cfg edit to turn it into a probe core, making it work as a representation of the Saturn Instrument Unit and assisting with unmanned missions? It's probably no more than 15 minutes of .cfg editing to do a quick-and-dirty version... Also, I'm having ENTIRELY too much fun abusing the Saturn IB and Titan III parts to send a Gemini to Laythe's surface and back. Now I've just gotta figure out how to strap the paired seven-segment SRBs onto the core stage with the strap-on S-IBs and NOT have them knock the S-IB strap-ons off when they jettison, but still have them all mounted rigidly enough that they don't torque around the decouplers and destroy the whole thing in the first ten seconds after launch... that, or break up my transfer vehicle into two separate modules mated on orbit, but that's not as awesomely impractical as the beast I've assembled already...