FinalFan

Thanks for all the details, and the link! I checked it out. One reason I asked my question is because I was intrigued by your vessel and decided to try test-building and launching an equivalent. It was based on eyeballing your picture and description so naturally it did not have the NERV transfer stage that you had already jettisoned. It made orbit fine. I have a lot less experience than you, and I'm still working on my first interplanetary experience (though I've done some "proactive asteroid intercepts"), but it seemed on paper that the core vessel itself ought to have enough to make it from Kerbin system either directly to Eve or refueling at Gilly. (The massive fuel tanks compensating for the lower efficiency.) Is there something I'm simply not seeing, or is yours heavier than mine, or just a thematic choice? How many drills does your plane have? I only put 2 large drills in mine. On second thought, this might be going off topic, so I think I will put this post in your Project Intrepid thread.

Wow, that's impressive! But what about using such a huge atmospheric craft was good enough to outweigh the drawbacks for you? Was it just the fact that it has enough delta-V to make orbit on Kerbin?

300 units per ton would make the Big-S wing an antigravity device. I don't think that's the sort of "lift" it's designed to give. According to the figures I have access to, the wing strake would score 167 and the wing would score just 150. This makes sense as these parts do not have the disadvantage of wasted oxidizer storage, but the wing has weight devoted to its lift function. The parts dedicated to liquid fuel storage are the best at storing liquid fuel.

Ore definitely doesn't refine into more mass than you started with. You might be thinking of the fact that you get more units of (lighter) fuel. But the ore cans are, as I recall, significantly denser than fuel tanks, so you can pack more "fuel" into the same size vessel with ore (size meaning volume). Of course, stock ore cans only go up to 2.5m.

Do you just mean you'd like to build a station the same way the ISS was made, launching it piece by piece and docking the pieces together, or do you also want the end product to look as similar to the actual ISS as possible?

I agree that the game tutorials are probably overlooked a lot. I personally feel like they serve a slightly different purpose from most YouTube videos (Scott Manley). I virtually ignored them until I wanted to practice for an asteroid capture, and then got slapped in the face with the concept of radially attached NERVs which had never occurred to me. YouTube can teach people how to fly, how to build, etc. It's great for "tips and tricks" or showing the general idea of something. The tutorial lets them practice and experience those maneuvers and those vessels themselves without having to design, build, and launch it already.

I like to use SSTOs for ferrying kerbals around. I did it with rockets before I unlocked the nicer spaceplane stuff. But on the few occasions I do mess with spaceplanes I tend to get bitten hard by Obsessive Redesign Disorder. Not that the design I settle on is necessarily some kind of masterpiece but it sure as hell has had a lot of previous versions.

KEO?

If I understand your post correctly you are saying that Zeiss's post in some way contradicts bewing's post and you agree with bewing. What is the contradiction or disagreement that you see? I see bewing as saying "almost everybody coasts to circularization from "deep" in atmo and that costs no dV so hold onto it while coasting" and Zeiss as saying "blow if you are still accelerating at 50km, unless your stuff needs the fairing very much."

All I see is a smiling Chinese child and a "broken picture" symbol.

I was expecting "without a hitch", but I suppose landing "without a hit" is the most important part.

That's very true: if you're already coasting then never pop in atmosphere. But I have doubts that I am coasting from "deep" in the atmosphere, and the question of the OP still applies in the case that you still plan on doing significant burning in atmosphere—I suppose the answer would depend on how much burning you have yet to do as well as how high and fast you are going. I guess your final advice still applies—I could quicksave at a certain point of the ascent and blow it at different times and see where I end up fuel-wise. It's a pretty straightforward idea, but one that hadn't occurred to me for whatever reason, so thanks.

Like a glacial erratic, only better. I love it.

I've occasionally used fairings when the stuff I was putting on the top half of the rocket got too blatantly unaerodynamic (or had gained a forest of doohickeys), but I've never really been confident of when the "best" time to get rid of it is. I mean, I guess I'm working on the underlying assumption that fairings are not always counterproductive. But if that's true, then presumably at some point the equation changes to where future delta-v savings of being aerodynamic are outweighed by the future delta-v losses of the mass of the fairing. Obviously this happens before you get to space, but is there a rule of thumb to follow here? 40km, lower, higher? How much do variations in speed matter compared to altitude thresholds if you are more or less following the usual type of ascent path for a large rocket? P.S. Do fairings help at all in reducing bending? I've always sort of imagined that they do, but without concrete reason or evidence.

I decided to make a mining lander probe (engineer optional), rated for Munlike bodies, for which a Rhino is not massive overkill. It holds 24,000 ore. The inspiration was basically, "the first mining probe I made was okay, but what if I quadrupled it?"

What would you say the percentage is of jettisoned heat shields out of all the missions you fly with heat shields?

I do it just because it's fuel storage capacity. Never even occurred to me not to, even when I was trying to nudge the CoM forward and had fueled wings in the back. I guess I'll keep that in mind in the future, but I'm still loading those wings up any time it's not a problem. In fact, I'm still a little disappointed any time I see the "fuel storage" thing in the description of a part that doesn't let me do it. It hasn't yet bothered me enough to get a mod to do something about it, though.

I stand corrected! Another thing I did in KSP today.

Dessert ... ice cream ... Minmus ... get it? haw haw very punny. Desert is what he meant to say.

Hey, that's not Minmus!

Today I did my first inclined launch (Minmus). I didn't realize at first that one needs to wait for KSC to get close to an inclination crossover point, although it was obviously necessary once I considered the question. It was annoying to have to keep correcting to stop the inclination from drifting away again, but it was really nice to put myself in a pre-inclined LKO orbit for transfer.

Today I finished the tech tree for the first time. The last node to be filled in was Miniaturization, because of a joke someone had made after I posted about how my rockets seemed to be growing ever larger. Plus, I didn't really feel the lack of anything in there—Clampy Jr. was the only thing that really mattered and I was perfectly happy working with the standard model.

You'll notice that I haven't entered any foreign planetary SOIs. I've sent out a couple of asteroid missions where I didn't wait for them to come to me. (No contract, but exciting! It's the first time I've made serious decisions on a mission with trading off time and delta-V. I sent a giant refueling station-miner to a C-type and then to an E-type (currently en route, to then return it to Kerbin), but the C-type didn't have as much fuel as I expected.) I'm waiting for a Duna transfer window right now. I'm spending my time before then sending Duna mission prototypes on shakedown cruises around Kerbin sytem. My first one had fuel cells but no oxidizer (until I launched a retrofit).

Well, there were no Kerbal lives at stake, but I just had what is probably the closest shave that I've ever unknowingly experienced in KSP. I sent a mining probe to Minmus. To get some extra fuel, I had filled the ore tanks before launching and refined it en route. I landed with the green fuel bar at about 5%, no problem. But when I looked at the fuel tanks I had about 5 units left of oxidizer. Turns out I didn't refine the fuel types equally. (The reason I almost ran out of fuel was that I was also transporting a pod of klaw probes on top of the miner, that I was burning for some extra engine power. Only it turns out that my solar panels were blocking the thrust so I was just wasting fuel until I noticed it on the Minmus deorbit burn. I had been burning them since before Kerbin circularization.)

Funds—huh! What are they good for? Absolutely nothin'.