Bluejayek

Sure, go ahead and use mechjeb What.

The problem with all docking ideas is that as soon as you defocus the craft (as when you go to the launchpad to launch a new one) physics modelling ceases, and whatever clamp you are using to hold them in place will let go, allowing the crat to drift apart. By the by, a dyson ring specifically refers to a ring around the sun, not another body. A more possible endeavour would be a dyson swarm; thousands of disconnected sattelites arranged in an orbiting sphere around the sun.

The rescaling was intended at one point, but they later decided not to apply a global rescaling, and instead rescale parts manually. Also, it irritates me when people confuse mods/devs. Mods are responsible for moderating the forums, and don't necessarily have any direct knowledge of the development process. Often, they are slightly better informed, but if you information about parts in development its the devs you go to, not the mods.

Struts. We use them constantly when our ships get too large to stand without, but too many causes all sorts of lag that we would rather avoid! Therefore, I introduce the following challenge. Design the largest possible functional craft without struts that is able to burn through all of its stages without breaking apart, or losing any parts unintentionally. I imagine to do this you will have to make a very symmetric craft, and in particular no rotation imbalance will be tolerated (I find that any time rotation starts up, outer stages flex outwards and can break off). Hopefully by the end of this challenge we will all have a better idea of what situations struts can be left out of, allowing us to have much less lag on launch. Requirements: Entries will be separated into modded and unmodded varieties. Show a screenshot of the ship on the launchpad, and enough screenshots to prove that it did not break up. Avoid extreme abuse of the fuel bug. I won't require full throttle or anything; you know when you have gone too far. Mechjeb is fine to find the mass of your craft for either modded or unmodded entries. Two categories: Maximum strutless delta-V, and maximum strutless takeoff mass. Delta-V is to be measured by a vertical takeoff in the direction of kerbins orbit, with no turnover. Speed at burnout gives your ranking. Happy building Leader boards: Stock: Launchpad Mass: 1) 311.4 ton Bluejayek 2) 3) Delta-V: 1) 2) 3) Modded: Launchpad Mass: 1) 2) 3) Delta V: 1) 2) 3) I'll kick it off with a 311.4ton entry. Note that this thing cant be flown on a single burn, at about 40,000m it will start rotating for some random reason and you need to throttle down.

For the longest time I ran vanilla, but I recently added one mod, the Crew Tank mentioned above. It is very nice for rescue missions, and I have plans to launch a number of rescue ships in 100km kerbin orbit as lifeboats for stranded kerbins to make it back down safely.

I don't see an album How many of you plan to use a double ship method to land on the planets? (One transfer ship with lander that flies back into orbit, one ship to rendezvous and bring them home)

True. It will be cool if they add like "Entertainment Modules" just for kicks in the next update A lead in to proper IVA's

Well, we shall see The thing lags like nothing else on the launchpad.... And second through 8th stage or so each last <10 seconds (That entire second panel of liquid fuel tanks is asparagused in groups of three). The only way I know to eject them is when I see the engine nozzle turn gray again, watching the fuel tank indicators is useless. That aside, my intention for the planetary landings is to do a two ship profile. One ship will hold a lander (probably a 1 man capsule) that will have enough fuel just to get back into orbit. Then, the second craft will rendezvous, and the lander pilot will transfer over to an empty seat (Kicking a kerbal off on the launchpad, or using the crew tank, the only mode I have ever installed). This second craft will do the return back to kerbin, leaving the lander orbiting eve or whichever. I highly suspect my first successful landing mission will end when I try to do a victory lap landing on the Mun on the return voyage.

I see your massive rocket, and raise you an even more massive rocket. 19 stages of raw power. I reached 24,000m/s on an escape trajectory from kerbol SOI with this thing, so it has upwards of 20,000m/s of delta V. More once the krakensbane kicks in... Controlled the second and third last stages at 10,000m/s is impossible.

Below is a graph showing the delta V required to attain a polar orbit at kerbins altitude as a function of the apoapsis of the bielliptic transfer. As you can see, 100Gm is around where you hit diminishing returns. The second graph shows why you dont go out as far as possible. That is the time in real life minutes you have to wait while at 100,000x time warp as a function of apoapsis altitude. Below pictures show me attaining the polar orbit using the described bielliptic transfer out to 100Gm. I was easily within fuel budget, and in fact jetisonned about 8000m/s Delta V worth of fuel when the kraken was being annoying. Oh, just a note about these delta V requirements. These are over and above whatever it takes to escape kerbins SOI, which I do not have a good handle on. If somebody could enlighten me that would be great.

Lol. Can you reupload the picture? It isnt working and I really want to see it. Also, what was your fuel remaining on landing?

This is very possible, and I have done it, and even the more extreme reverse direction kerbol orbit. One tip: Brute forcing it will take a lot more delta-V than if you use a bielliptic transfer orbit. The principle of the bielliptic transfer is that you first burn out to a high apoapsis (100 billion meters works very well), do your orbital correction (in this case perpendicular burn to polar orbit), and then bring your apoapsis back in. The reason this works is what is called the Oberth Effect (look it up on wikipedia if you are interested). The Oberth effect essentially states that you get more energy out of your fuel when you are in a higher energy orbit (Larger orbits have higher energy). Therefore, even though you waste fuel by burning out to the high apoapsis and back in, you gain a huge amount by turning the orbit while that far out. You can see simply how much less fuel it takes to turn to polar orbit by your velocity at apoapsis compared to at periapsis (say, Kerbin altitude). For example, the maneurver I used this for was to go into a reverse Kerbol orbit at Kerbin altitude. To do this by brute force takes about 18,000m/s of delta V (twice kerbin's velocity), which is very difficult to achieve with stock parts (The highest I have managed is around 15,000m/s). However, burning out to 100 billion meters requires about 3600m/s delta V, and the same to return. At apoapsis your velocity is ~1000m/s, and so it takes 2000m/s of delta V to reverse the orbit. Adding these up, the total delta V for the bielliptic maneurver is about 9200m/s, just about half of what it takes by brute force. For the polar orbit case, the most efficient brute force burn (single burn at 135 degrees to orbit plane) requires ~13,000m/s of delta V. Doing the same adjustment at 100 billion meters requires ~1500m/s of delta V. After acounting for the two transfer burns, the bielliptic method requires 8700m/s of delta V while the brute force method requires 13,000m/s, a gain of ~4300m/s. Bottom line, use the bielliptic transfer for most non time critical missions in kerbol SOI!

Nice video zpox

If you really want it, it is available on amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Carrying-Fire-An-Astronauts-Journeys/dp/081541028X/ref=lh_ni_t It appears they will ship to Poland, standard international shipping is 11-32 days. I input a random Polish adress and it seemed to accept it. I didn't pay and check out of course, so it might reject it there, but chances are good. I have never had a problem with amazon orders; they are always a good bet for online purchases.

As far as I'm concerned, you know whether its OK or not. You bought the game, you can use it for yourself however you want, even if its on different computers, same as you can if you say buy any game on steam. I personally have KSP installed on my laptop for when I want to slack off at work, and on my desktop at home. However, if you start feeling guilty about it, squad certainly won't mind if you buy an additional copy

The 68 years you see is actually infinity. Its sort of a bug left by 32 bit signed integers being used to represent those times in seconds. Also, there was nothing efficient about that rocket! It was pure brute force (Note the 19 stages...)

Does this qualify? This was for another stock challenge a little while ago, reach 1Tm as fast as possible. I ended up going 20,000m/s at 1Tm and decelerating at like 1m/s a day or less, so this is a fairly straight trajectory.\ Edit: Launchpad screenshot

Tip if you intend to do the reverse kerbin orbit. Bielliptic transfer. You won't make it otherwise.

Like this you mean? http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/18275-The-Rocketplane-Challange

These are all amusign stories, but a lot of people seem to be referencing the kraken at any rocket failure here. The kraken specifically refers to explosion effects at high speeds! Therefore, those 0 speed exlosions are something else entirely

The ship is called the "Shinra Mark XVIIC", which from the OP I must assume refers to the company Shinra in Final Fantasy 7 (the main bad guys). There is a rocket in this game, and I must assume this is meant to be a replica of it, although if so, it is a poor replica. Final fantasy games are available for playstation, so I must assume this was what the OP referred to. Note, the ships name only appears briefly twice, at about 4:00 and 4:30 when he is in map mode, so this was not at all clear: Your confusion is justified. I have never played final fantasy on playstation personally, as PC is much more versatile, but FF7 (PC version!) still stands to me as one of the best games of all time.

Then go ahead and try to beat his fuel level Or, use those legs, and return! Most amusing in regards to this was when I had a slightly larger craft, over in the "smallest craft with the largerocket parts" thread. I was launching off the moon on a return trajectory, and had around 450L of fuel remaining. "Great!" I thought. "Plenty of fuel left. I'll just speed things up by doing a quick full thrust burn". I did that quick full thrust burn, and used 400L of fuel in just a couple seconds, when I had previously been burning more on the likes of 1L/minute of fuel. A clear indication of how rediculously efficient engines get with the fuel bug.

It would seem that it would be in unstable equilibrium on the pad since it is symetric. Kind of like how you can balance a bar pendulum pointed upwards, but any force will move it. So, as you say, it probably will sit there until something pushes it. Nice craft wired, but you can go smaller I really don't think you need that full double size tank, try with half that.

Nice rocket Soralin. I just have one small question. How on earth did you launch that? Rockets tend not to be stable sitting on an aerospike Is there one of those new launchpad detachers that your not showing? (Not a problem, just wondering)

softweir, I'd say this is the kind of this that gets transmuted into cheat codes in final versions of single player games So it will probably still be available.