Hypersonic Was Taken Again

In all fairness, SME hasn't been updated since 2020, plus a mass driver in the Sterling Systems aesthetic would go hard.

I have a thermal nozzle, fuel, a whole bunch of radiators, and the solar thermal shield. Is there some other component that I need to get everything to work?

What is the meta for the thermal engines? I put a bunch of radiators, heat sinks, and a solar thermal shield, but no deltaV reading. What am I doing wrong?

To my knowledge, there is a fanmade forum at kerbal.forum that, in the case of forum.kerbalspaceprogram going down will reactivate. If that happens, this could continue there.

Are you considering any type of atmospheric engines and/or aerospike variants of the nuclear and thermal rocket engines? There was a master's thesis at San Jose that discussed aerospike ntrs, and Near Future implemented something like it.

Waterfall is probably the way to go here. Do the engines in this mod have Waterfall configs? I'm not entirely sure what the Waterfall development environment is like, but the mesh system would probably work. What issues are you having with it?

Would it not make sense to combine both into an emissive and animated texture (if such a thing is possible, I am quite uneducated when it comes to KSP modding), and then have that be toggled when the radiator is turned on or off?

I also looked into the Project Valkyrie starship, particularly Retro Visor's amazing series of renders on Artstation. A ramscoop would be a great addition to Sterling Systems, unless it already is part of the mod and I've forgor. How does the shader work with the panel radiators?

Have you considered a droplet-based particle shield? It could act as a radiator with the same efficiency as the droplet radiator panels, but also be able to attach to the front of a ship so as to act as a shield. I believe Orion's Arm has an article on the technology, worth a read.

I like the sound of this...

Do you have SpaceDust or a similar mod? If so, then you could launch a space telescope! Lots of lore (and images) to be had with that.

Perhaps interplanetary probes? It's a bit of a stopgap as writing for them gets repetitive after a while, but a few here or there can't hurt!

Nice! Glad to see the launch went well!

Thank you!

Works for me! Thanks!