Bluejayek

You should step up this challenge. Land at both poles, and return to KSC. I will attempt this later today!

I was only usaing the inline cockpit in the first place because it has something like 0.04 less drag then the mark I. Having to add anything to it in order to land completely negates that benefit.

Sidenote: Do not use the \'inline\' cockpit. For whatever reason, it makes steering in atmosphere with the pod ASAS completely impossible: the ship will always just automatically align with with your diretion of flight, which is problematic for slowing down when the direction is straight down. The majority of my flights, munar and otherwise, are parachuteless. I despise the waste mass that is the decoupler in front of the command pod, and even the mass of the parachute. A while back I was trying to achieve stable orbit, deorbit, and then safely land a craft that consisted of: Mk1 Pod, halftank, fulltank, lander engine. Orbiting at 70km ispossible, as is deorbiting, and somebody else demonstrated landing is as well. Sadly, I was never able to stick the landing (I dropped the velocity to 0 once, but did it too early so my kerbals free fell that last 100m ), but somebody else demonstrated that this was possible. Either way, this is the upper stage in most of my rockets, and you can land it with absurdly small ammounts of fuel left. Like, 2kg of fuel in the case above.

My most recent common mistake is immediatly going full throttle afer jetissoning a lower stage. On my most recent creation this results in a massive fireball as the upper fuel tanks/decoupler heat up from the rocket plume and inexplicably explode. The solution of course is to burn at very low thrust for a second or two to disengage.

When you can\'t lift off, add more boosters. When your ship falls apart, add more struts! If you don\'t know what part is failing, add them everywhere. It can\'t hurt.

Well, the impact tolerance is almost 3x higher (40 vs. 14), and it has less then half the drag (0.08 vs 0.2). I don\'t know why anybody would use the mark I apart from aesthetics really. And those are some really awesome explosions.

This was so rediculous, it just had to be posted here. Just to be clear, every part used in this spacecraft is 100% stock, and there has been no cfg editing. The cockpit I am using appears to have way to high tolerances! The absolutely massive explosions of my entire rocket crashing to earth seem not to even scratch it, leaving my kerbals safe and sound. http://imgur.com/a/FLYXz#Fgwi4

Doesn\'t that make him about 20 sol years?

Same deal.. The fuel tank on bottom has tolerance that are exceeded because of all the mass above, causing big boom. Because metal explodes, we all know that.

Cluster or galaxy depending on how big. Having a much larger universe would always be fun, but we REALLY REALLY need a faster time warp factor. I\'m currently trying to hit absurd velocities with stock parts by doing a high altitude sun dive (Apoapsis 277 billion meters. The 9 year orbit takes forever to complete.

How did you go up to x3 time warp after you were that close to minimus anyways?

Yeah. I don\'t want to know what might happen if you try to drop off rails when they have partially drifted through the door! Cool project though

As far as I know that is true.

Your avatar is epic.

I am not entirely sure what you mean, but when you go into a time warp past 2x, all ships go on rails and collisions are no longer simulated, meaning that the ships can drift apart. This may explain what you are seeing.

Well a couple of things. Canards and other atmospheric control surfaces do nothing in space (nothing to push against!) so you will be much less maneurverable. However, in space you dont really want to turn all that much, you just set up and orbit and that is it, so it is alright. As per not being able to breach atmosphere, jet and turbojet engines are air breathers, so they cease to function at around 8000 and 15000m respectively. You will need rocket engines to break this barrier. Good luck.

Good job! I have yet to successfully land a plane. The closest I came was a glider landing where I touched down safely, and then was slowing to a stop, but I crashed into the runway (I had missed and was touched down directly beside. Incidentally, the engine on the plane had broken off earlier when I did a roll which was why I had to abort and land.

All fuel is the same, no efficiency changes. I believe in future versions only jet fuel will work for jet engines and vice versa.

I got lazy and cut it short to a ~9 year orbit. Still about 3 hours to go until I do the sundive. Since its 2am, that will happen tommorrow. Or later today, depending how you look at it.

What can I say, bad typo day when I made that post.

Ah. This could be so useful... Thank you.

I must have missed something. How do you mirror in the VAB?

I decided to try to see how high a velocity I could get with a stock craft. The best way to do this seems to be to dive at the sun, as you get an incredibly high velocity with a low periapsis about kerbol. However, doing this I get a velocity of merely 130,000m/s or so. Far lower then I would hope. Hence, I decided that the way to increase it would be to first drive out to an orbit ridiculously far from kerbol, and dive in from there. So I give you the following. My orbit with the apoapsis at 65 trillion meters from kerbol, the furthest I could get before the kraken munched me, and the apoapsis still at kerbin orbit. The program claims a time of 68 years to reach apoapsis, but I fear this to be far incorrect. The time seems to cap out at a 32 bit integer value of seconds. This leaves me with my kerbals sitting a long, long way from home, so far away right now that the sun is only a dim point of light far in the distance. This sort of mission really leaves me wanting a time warp factor of at least 1 million. I will update with progress if I ever get to the sun dive part of the mission. Attached is my craft file for doing this.

Another thing I like to do is that asparagus design. Rather then having all 6 of those tanks on a single stage, make two sets of three for the same orientation. Then, take fuel lines and connect those two stages in series, and then to the inner rocket. When the one stage is depleted, eject it and you will still have the full second set of three. This lets you burn that half of the fuel with a significant amount less mass on the craft, giving you a higher delta V. My hyperion class V craft attached demonstrates the concept. V0.15.2.

I was just talking in general. It appears that you get a more kinetic energy per fuel at higher speeds, so then all manoeuvring should be done at as high a speed as possible...