Leganeski

Yes; that is what I was describing. A Kerbin year is 3.43 times shorter than an Earth year, so using light-Kerbin-years would place the systems at 1/3.43 times the real-scale distance, rather than the full 1/10 or 1/11 found within the Kerbol system.

Why not? There's a perfectly rigorous way to do so, which is what is used in infinite decimal expansions. Why? Infinite decimal expansions represent the limit of converging sequences of finite decimal expansions, but different sequences can converge to the same value. The number 1 already has many different representations, such as 1/1, 3 - 2, and 50. There's no reason why there can't be another one. In particular: are there any nonzero infinitesimals? In the hyperreal numbers, there certainly are, but when we're talking about numbers without further context, we mean a real number, not a hyperreal. In particular, decimal expansions such as 0.999... always represent real numbers. One very important step in constructing the real numbers is taking all the things that would have been infinitesimals and setting them equal to zero. In the hyperrational construction, the infinitesimal hyperreals are explicitly unified with zero. In the Cauchy construction, all the sequences approaching zero are set equal to zero.

Does this mean the speed of light times four Earth years, or times four Kerbin years? I don't know enough to say either way, but four light⁠-⁠Kerbin⁠-⁠years ("only" 11.0 Pm, compared to Proxima Centauri's distance from the Sun of 40.2 Pm) would fit in better with the Kerbal scale.

That's probably the main reason. Engines from mods like Atomic Age are much better than stock ones and have practically no downside, so using them means you're not really doing the same challenge. As long as you're not changing Jool's physical properties, this shouldn't matter unless you're doing a run on Jeb's Level. If you are, adding biomes to Jool does nothing but give you an unfair advantage over the other competitors because you have access to more science. On the other hand, if you used the mod to add additional challenge by doing something like gathering low atmosphere reports from all the biomes, that would probably merit a spot in the gatecrasher leaderboard.

Bifrost appears to be larger (in terms of equatorial radius) than the star it orbits. I don't think I've ever seen a planet like that before!

0.999... is not a process. It is a single number, in the same way that 3.14159... is a single number. It does not "reach" 1; it is 1, and then that's it. This is not to say that there is no infinite process going on. In fact, the notation "0.999..." references an infinite sequence: 0, 0.9, 0.99, 0.999, and so on. This sequence indeed approaches 1 without ever reaching it. However, 0.999... is not part of the sequence; it is the number that the sequence is converging to. This number is 1. That is correct. 0.9 is not 1, 0.99 is not 1, 0.999 is not 1, and so on forever. But 0.999... is not any of these numbers: it is the limit of all of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999...#Skepticism_in_education covers this exact topic.

For Kerbin to Sarnus specifically, the route you describe saves about 100 m/s over direct injection at the destination unless you're going to Slate, in which case directly injecting into Slate orbit is better. (In all cases, both routes are cheaper than arriving at the destination from low Sarnus orbit.) In general, burning at apoapsis from an eccentric orbit is usually the most efficient route. However: It has a significant risk of accidentally encountering a large moon (Mun, Laythe, Tylo, Slate, etc.), which is why I don't usually use it. It's never much more efficient than burning at periapsis (for distant orbits) or direct injection at the destination (for close orbits or large moons). In the stock system, you can save at most maybe 250 m/s, and even that's only for really weird situations like going from Jool to Kerbin-synchronous orbit. When the destination is a large moon, it can be less efficient than direct injection because you're effectively making detours to irrelevant locations. For example, when going from Kerbin to Tylo, you spend more Δv capturing at Jool than you actually save from the better approach to Tylo. Absolutely! Slate is huge; it's about as big as Laythe and will easily get you captured.

The wave physics can be disabled in the Scatterer menu, in case you want to keep the graphics (although you should probably make a note of it so that others won't confused by what appear to be waves).

You could even just move Ike to a different longitude (something like "@meanAnomalyAtEpoch += 1"), which would make the contract possible but maintain the usual complications of Ike being in an unhelpful orbit. This is certainly true. On the flipside, you'll often get contracts that are easier to complete because of a technicality in the fine print. For example, the "extract ore from Eve and deliver it somewhere else" contracts don't require the ore you complete the contract with to be the same ore that you mined on Eve. You can mine the ore on Eve, immediately jettison it, do the already difficult ascent without extra payload, and then just get more ore on Gilly or anywhere else.

I don't think this will work. In order to complete a contract like this one, all the conditions have to be satisfied at the same time. Even disregarding the "stability for 10 seconds" condition, the other conditions include "be directly above Area C-N1" and "be in a stationary orbit". Among other things, these conditions each require a craft to be in a specific volume of space. The "directly above" condition defines a conical volume extending from Area C-N1 out to Duna's SOI limit, and the "stationary orbit" condition defines a thin circular tube around the stationary orbit line minus the part in Ike's SOI. These two volumes of space never intersect, so it's impossible to be in both of them simultaneously. It's not possible to satisfy the location conditions at any point in time, let alone for ten full seconds.

If you only use nuclear engines on a stage, your TWR will be a lot higher, both because you can fit more of them and because you aren't carrying as much dead weight in the form of other engines. NERVs alone can comfortably land on Mun, and can lift a small payload off of Duna with some difficulty. I somewhat recently built a rocket powered by more nuclear engines than I probably needed. Towards the end of its mission, it was almost entirely fuel tanks and engines with very little payload, but it could take off against a surface gravity of 0.4 g and had over 8000 m/s of Δv in its single stage. I've run into this problem so many times that in quite a few cases, I just gave up and stuck a pair of parachutes on the wings. If you want to to do a grand tour where you land on multiple large planets or moons in one mission, SSTOs can be a good way to do that without having to build a separate lander for each one. (This is more relevant in modded systems with more atmospheres. For instance, I built this plane as an SSTO so that I could use it for not only Kerbin and Laythe but also two other similar planets from planet packs.) Outside of that, I don't really see much use for SSTOs either.

Keeping the RAPIERs attached decreases the range of the plane somewhat, but it allows you to make multiple trips without having to rebuild it each time. Once you set up some mining infrastructure, you could even take the same plane to Laythe!

Definitely not during launch. NERVs are much less efficient than RAPIERs in air-breathing mode, so the purely air-breathing stage of the ascent should last as long as possible. I usually turn the NERVs on when the RAPIERs drop below about 4 m/s2 of thrust on their way to flaming out. The exact altitude depends on the ascent profile, but it's usually at about 22-26 km.

Start with both, but turn off the RAPIERs as soon as the TWR you need to continue circularizing drops below what the NERVs provide. Optimally, it would be "run out of oxidizer" rather than "turn off the RAPIERs", but it takes quite a bit of testing to get that to happen at the right time.

4900 m/s is well within the range of survivability, but it needs to be just a crew capsule and a heat shield (and maybe some other small parts, such as a parachute or an experiment storage unit). Any large parts except for a heat shield will increase the ballistic coefficient significantly and usually end up hurting more than they help. If you need to recover two crew capsules, consider sending them down separately at different times, each with their own heat shield.

Yes, this is critical for saving Δv because it lets you reduce the amount of oxidizer. Every kilogram of oxidizer (and oxidizer storage!) is wasted mass unless you absolutely need it to get into orbit. At 2.0 m/s2, a Mun landing is very difficult but not impossible. However, your TWR will increase by 25% or more from LKO to the final landing burn, and even at 2.5 m/s2, landing is much more manageable. It's still not easy to do with a plane, though, and a fifth NERV would make landing much easier at the cost of some Δv. Also, if you manage to reduce the amount of oxidizer storage by using NERVs for more of the ascent, that would improve TWR as well.

I'm not sure how exactly FAR works, but this is probably because you're flying really fast through dense air. The dynamic pressure on your plane at the time of the screenshot is about 132 kPa (assuming you're at the equator just before noon, which is what it looks like to me based on Kerbol's reflection in the water). In comparison, a typical rocket launch in real life reaches a maximum dynamic pressure of about 30 kPa, and even that's enough to cause significant structural concerns. When you're flying against that much pressure, slight pitch adjustments will cause the wings to start producing a huge amount of lift, and in this case, it's more than they can handle. There's a reason why planes don't normally go supersonic until they're high up in the atmosphere.

In case it's hard to tell from the picture, that spaceplane has five NERVs (with their shrouds still attached). To add to what @camacju and @Lt_Duckweed have already explained: from the picture, it looks like you're getting the 1500 m/s remaining Δv figure in low orbit from closed-cycle RAPIERs alone. If you managed to get the same payload fraction with a NERV vacuum stage instead, you would have over 4000 m/s from low orbit. Of course, the increased dry mass means that you wouldn't actually get as much payload fraction, but it would most likely still be a large increase in Δv. In terms of stability, replacing three RAPIERs with two NERVs won't really change much.

Either. You're already using large wings, though, so more wings would be easier to practically accomplish. This is a tough one. Spaceplanes have an inherent tradeoff between Δv and flyability, although limiting the amount of oxidizer definitely helps. Stability issues are caused by improperly positioned centers of lift and drag relative to the center of mass. These centers are not visible in your picture, but make sure that your center of lift is just behind your center of mass, not only when the fuel tanks are full but also when you've used up some liquid fuel to power the jet engines. I've heard good things about TAC Fuel Balancer for that purpose, although I haven't tried it personally.

Whoops, you're right. For some reason, I thought that you did some significant theoretical work on it, but I was probably just getting that confused with Eve Optimized Engines (which is also great, by the way).

Welcome to the forums, @GradientOGames! From what I can tell in the picture, the plane needs a lot more wing area. When I built a Mk3 SSTO that was somewhat smaller than your plane, it had five pairs of Big-S Delta Wings, and even then, it could only barely take off from the runway or land on the polar ice caps.

Are you sure that your pilot is in a command module (which provides control) and not a crew cabin? If the astronauts are in a crew cabin (or some other kind of habitation module), then there are no controls for them to operate. Also, the mission elapsed time is negative. I'm not sure if that's related to the problem, but it's probably not good.

Personally, I felt like a stock system grand tour with no additional restrictions doesn't provide enough motivation for creative designs. Anyway, I just finished my grand tour of Galileo's Planet Pack, Grannus Expansion Pack, and JNSQ (rescaled to stock scale). I'm pretty sure I followed the intent of all the rules, but I would like to confirm these cases. Rule 1: the main parts mods were Near Future Launch Vehicles, ReStock+, Simple Fuel Switch, and Explodium Breathing Engines, all of which I believe to be balanced with stock parts. Rule 2: I did have to use the debug menu twice, once to circumvent the landing leg sinking bug and once to circumvent a bug where Lindor's entire SOI was heated to 7000 degrees, but neither of those times did it let me gain any advantage beyond what would have happened if the bug weren't there. Rule 3: I could not plant a flag on Tellumo because I landed in the middle of the ocean, but I did collect a surface sample there, which of course still required Valentina to touch the surface.

Part 30: Everywhere and back again That was all the targets. Vall was the last one. Wait, really? Let's go check. (30.1) All the flags Yep, that's all of them. I guess it's time to go home. (30.2) Return to Kerbin Theoretical Δv: 1608 m/s Actual Δv: 1723 m/s (30.3) TGGT returns to Mun Theoretical Δv: 2556 m/s Actual Δv: 1900 m/s (Oberth assist at Kerbin) (30.4) Descent to the surface This concludes my grand tour of the JNSQ system, and completes all the goals of the mission. (I landed a kerbal on the surface of every solid body and returned home, without refueling on the same body twice.) When I started exploring GPP, I thought I could never go back to the stock system. But now I can! JNSQ fixes so many problems with the stock system, has much better terrain, and of course adds a bunch of even more interesting planets and moons. Thank you, @Galileo, @JadeOfMaar, and @OhioBob, for making yet another wonderful system! Craft files: Team Galileo Grand Tour mothership Oxygen plane Methane plane Eve plane Nara plane Tellumo plane Ion tug and Taranis lander (30.5) Epilogue The crew capsule and crewmembers are safely transported back to the KSC. While emptying one of the compartments in the capsule, Jebediah notices a flag at the back of the drawer. There's a label attached that reads "Tellumo". Thinking back to that part of the mission, he remembers Valentina carrying a flag back inside the crew capsule after she couldn't plant it in the water. Well, it's a flag, so it better get planted somewhere, right? It is only thanks to the efforts of countless people over a decade that KSP modding has reached its current state. However, there are a few people in particular without whose work this mission would not have been possible. Thanks to @linuxgurugamer for maintaining Better Time Warp. Thanks to @Gordon Fecyk for creating Explodium Breathing Engines. Thanks to @Snark for creating so many small mods that improve gameplay significantly, most notably Simple Fuel Switch. Thanks to @OhioBob for his dedication to maintaining the quality and consistency of all his mods. And last but certainly not least, thanks to @king of nowhere, whose OPM Kerbalism grand tour was what initially inspired me to do a grand tour mission.