RealKerbal3x

Yep. Look at the patch notes for 1.9.1.

I wonder how big it'll actually be. That space doesn't look big enough for an LC-39 sized pad, so maybe it'll be closer to the pad shown in the launch animation.

Smart Parts?

Yes, it is a mod called Environmental Visual Enhancements.

@Pds314 Just to let you know, the exploit that lets you use drain valves with intake air was patched out in 1.9.1. So any entry to this challenge will have to be in 1.9.0.

It's possible to delete old crafts by terminating them in the tracking station. You just have to focus on them and click the red X button at the bottom left of the screen. Alternatively, you can just hide them so they don't clutter up your map screen. Hover your mouse at the top of the screen and a row of icons will appear, corresponding to different ship types. You can click on these to hide the orbits and ship icons.

Cool drive-by video of the whole SpaceX Boca Chica site:

Looks great, consider me a reader!

I agree with you. As has already been demonstrated, an LES for SS is feasible for smaller crews. But crewed Starship could be 10 years out, which is plenty of time for them to fly it thousands of times and remove the need for a complex LES with pure reliability. After all, an LES for 100 people just doesn't make sense.

What about when you're returning from the Moon or Mars? I think a detachable escape pod is a better way to go as it enables a lot more abort modes, including during landing.

I'm going to have to test this in KSP

It's got plenty of thrust, but that's because it has to push 3600t of propellant and up to 150t of payload. Fully fuelled, it doesn't have the TWR to do a safe abort, even if you fire all of the Raptors at once.

Possibly, though if you have several abort SRBs then you run into some potential problems: 1) If anything goes wrong with Starship itself during its ascent burn then you have no way to escape. 2) You have to lug several large abort motors around, which are essentially dead weight after you reach orbit. You could detach them when they're no longer needed, but that goes against the philosophy of rapid reusability. 3) Any abort mode depends on the landing sequence working, which isn't good if you've already had a failure that requires an abort. As @tater already said, EDL with SS requires everything to work. At least for the first crewed flights, a detachable crew cabin is best. Given that it already would have heatshield tiles on one side, it could probably enter biconically and land via parachutes.

@Accidental burn Nice job, welcome to the forums! Are you sure that's Minmus? It looks a lot like the Mun to me...

Agreed. And 10 people is plenty for initial crew flights. If they're going to build a colony on Mars, it's going to have to be a small outpost with a few dozen people for a while before it gets big enough for a large population. By the time they can fly 100 people (it's going to be a long time) they might not need an LES anymore. I don't know how they would build one for 100 people anyway I feel like we're going to see SS getting a launch escape system at some point, maybe with a detachable crew module at the top replacing that giant window. We have no idea what the layout of the crew cabin is and I don't know if SpaceX does either.

I started reading a book about quantum mechanics... Wish me luck

A couple of detachable escape pods (similar to some early Shuttle proposals) could probably be used as an abort system. They'd probably be pretty heavy but since an LES is essentially useless on the Moon or Mars, they could just be used on a dedicated LEO crew-transfer variant, with the Mars/Moon bound ship launched separately and uncrewed. In order to work for pad aborts they might have to be launched from the ship at an angle, which could pose a problem. If done right, those pods could also be used as a last ditch escape system during Earth EDL, but any failure during EDL is most likely to be the flaperons, which (unless I'm mistaken) can't be too different to aircraft control surfaces. In that case they can reduce the chance of that kind of sketchy abort mode by just having redundancies upon redundancies, just like most aircraft do. If an aircraft's control surfaces lock up it's probably going to crash no matter what anyway, just as Starship would. I'm still not sure how a passively stable system would work without having aerodynamics that would be undesirable during launch, or having to pump a lot of propellant around. But then again, I'm just an armchair engineer and don't really know what I'm talking about. Plus, Starship's design is very fluid and we could see this landing system change very soon

@Kerbal Space Player Here's a few to choose from. This one is probably my favourite shuttle mod, as it bridges the gap between realistic and stockalike very well. It says 1.7.1 in the title but as far as I know it works fine in the latest KSP version. However, if you wanted something more realistic, I would recommend the Shuttle Orbiter Construction Kit mod. Once again, it hasn't been updated for a couple of KSP versions but it's just a parts pack so it'll probably work. SOCK only supplies the space shuttle orbiter though, so if you want a full stack Shuttle then you should also download reDirect: There's also KSOS which provides a much less realistic, more 'Kerbalised' shuttle: Finally, this one, which is currently in development: I've never tried it, but it looks quite realistic. I hope this helped, good luck

@Angel-125 Another great mod - the parts look amazing! I look forward to seeing further development! Also, thanks for including the 3.75m mount on the aerospike engine. It means I can build stuff like this: I know that these parts were designed with the Restock style in mind, but I found that the aerospike engine actually does still fit quite well with the stock 3.75m tank textures. (I prefer the stock textures anyway, please don't kill me ) One thing to note, though: it does still seem a bit overpowered for stock scale even if you empty the forward and aft tanks. Without anything in the payload bay, it ended up accelerating at 10g during ascent and had 1.5km/s dV left in LKO. I didn't actually test it in flight, but I put a 50t dummy payload in the cargo bay in the VAB and it still had enough dV to reach orbit.

Unless I'm mistaken, it looks like they've patched up the hole in SN7. Maybe they'll try for a true test to destruction and see how much it can really handle.

Grain silos rated for cryogenic liquids are pretty niche, but I'm sure they could make money off of it

@damonvv Is this compatible with a 2.5x scale system? I know the beta version is compatible with JNSQ but IIRC that mod is slightly larger at 2.7x.

So YouTube now has these tabs at the top of the page which allow you to filter your video recommendations. Since I'm an avid KSP player and interested in spaceflight in general, a lot of these are space-related. However, recently one of my tabs has been 'Silos' I clicked on this tab and was presented with a bunch of SpaceX Starship update videos, some of which I have already watched. I don't know if YouTube uses some sort of image recognition software on the thumbnails or what, but it thinks Starship is a grain silo. To be fair, it does look quite similar