Temstar

They took away lock suspension AGAIN? Man maybe Squad just hate bases.

I think it's because the aliens have a crap load of "small" digit ships that Michael had to fight through. With Casaba howitzers you need to have one nuke per target, and you can't reuse the drive system's nuke. Michael's bomb launcher use gamma ray lasers pumped by the bombs that propel the ship, each of those bomb and release many many laser modules so you can engage many more targets at once. Aside from the orion drive they didn't forget regular nukes either. All that 16" naval gun and the little 5" gun equipped gunships fire tactical nuke shells.

The other alternative people have imagined is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Egg Life on the surface of the neutron star itself, based around the strong force instead of electromagnetic force like us.

The links still work, you just have to add the mediafire part yourself.

PAMs main advantage is that being a solid rocket it's quite reliable as there are very few moving parts, and being just a can o boom it's safe to carry in a shuttle cargo bay. If the shuttle have to do an abort you just open the cargo bay door, shove the PAM and its payload out, close the door and do whatever abort action you have to do. If instead you are carrying a liquid fuel upper stage like a Centaur you will need specialized equipment to first dump the fuel and oxidizer overboard before you can jettison the stage. Being solid fuel PAMs have lousy Isp just like their bigger SRB cousins. Also since the requirement is for them to be simple they don't have a gimballed nozzle, so payload + PAM have to be spin stabilized. The advantage of PAM doesn't apply to KSP so there's little reason to use them over liquid upper stages, besides RP of course.

No need to be that complicated, the landers can be launched from Earth and placed in position in orbit around the destination worlds before hand. Sending the lander unmanned before hand allows you to use all sorts of slowpoke propulsion methods like solar-ion when you don't have to worry about astronaut radiation exposure as you crawl your way through space.

Without waste product as input you won't be able to run the reverse reaction. Generally a manned long duration spacecraft (like ISS) will already have electrolysis equipment onboard so they can run it as long as the plumbing is in place. They generally won't though because water is already pretty useful for a manned spacecraft. There are proper regenerative fuel cells that can run the reaction in either directions equally efficiently but it's not very common yet.

One of the thing that bothers me a bit about the current in game fuel cells is the fact that they consume LFO and spit out Ec, and the LFO is just gone. In real life fuel cells mass is not lost, the fuel cell will produce some kind of waste product. If it was running on LH2 and LOX the waste product would be water which is actually very useful. I propose we make some small changes to the game to reflect this - make fuel cells generate a new resource - fuel cell waste product that's equal in weight to the LFO consumed. Assuming you have the correct waste product tank on board, the fuel cell waste product is then stored in the tank. If you don't have a waste product tank or if your tanks are full then the waste is simply lost as it is now. Then, the two fuel cells will have a toggle to turn on and off regenerative cycle. If regenerative cycle is active, the fuel cell is turned on and the craft have an excess of electrical power than the fuel cell will start to consume Ec and waste product to produce LFO, essentially running the normal fuel cell reaction in reverse. The reverse reaction will of course be much less efficient, perhaps needing 300% of the power to covert a set amount of waste product back to LFO compared to the amount of power you get running the reaction in the normal direction. This then essentially allows you to use LFO and Waste Product tanks to form an enormous low efficiency battery perfect for power hungry applications like ISRU or Rover or ion propulsion through the night.

First, turn on Cap Lock, this turns on precision control so you can use RCS more accurately, it also gives RCS thrusters thrust compensation depending on their distance from CoM, if you have more than one set of RCS that should eliminate unwanted rotation while translating. Then, don't worry so much about getting a 0.0km close encounter. You just have to get within oh say 5km and that's good enough. Minmus orbital velocity is so low that once you get close you can just cancel out your relative velocity to target and then point and shoot straight at it without worrying about orbital mechanics.

In my head canon all the crazy driving are done by one guy called Jenkins. Besides radical driving, his other hobby is moonshine making. He recently built his own canning machine for his hooch, the output are tall skinny cans like energy drink cans and he has the outside of the cans printed so that they resemble tiny versions of the orange fuel can. Where normal drink labels would be he has them replaced with humorous versions related to rocketry and space. So instead of "375mL" his can says "Propellant Mass Fraction 94%", instead of "80-proof" his can says "9-11 LF/H2O ratio". Understandably his buddies refer to his moonshine as "LFO", and fortunately for everyone he's smart enough to keep the two hobbies separate.

I know KSP like to joke about "parts found lying by the side of the road", but here really is a rocket built out of such parts.

As others have said, water doesn't expand so there's no need for the diverging part of the nozzle. But some sort of nozzle is useful! If you look at the video @magnemoe linked where they used det cord to blow wide open the bottom of their water rocket the rocket kind of just release its entire load of water in a puff and doesn't travel very far. If you instead look up videos of water rockets made from soft drink bottles you can see they get much more delta-V out of their propellent because the mouth of the bottle forms a nozzle that increase the Isp. In fact, because soft drink bottles have that handy thread on it's mouth you can create a range of nozzle attachments that screws onto the end and further constrict the water flow to further increase the Isp by trading away thrust. In a two stage rocket, I imagine the first stage will no nozzle attachment for high thrust low Isp, then your upper stage would have a constricted nozzle for high Isp low thrust.

I'm not a fan of arbitrary rules in challenges either (eg: land on the Mun and return, no Mun orbit rendezvous!) but in K-Prize's case I can see why the rule is in place. Tailsitter SSTOs are completely different animal. They generally climb to orbit using normal gravity turn trajectory, relying almost entirely on their engine power. This is as opposed to orthodox airbreathing spaceplane SSTOs that fly depressed trajectory using lifting surfaces. As a rule, SSTOs are most useful (read: cheapest cost per ton to orbit) when they take off with as low of a TWR as possible, as evidenced by the leader board from the payload fraction challenge. So from a practical perspective HTHL spaceplace SSTO is where its at and Tailsitter SSTO is a compromised solution that's trying to have it both ways. HTHL spaceplane SSTO is harder to make, so it's no surprise that K-Prize focuses on this. Now the challenge could waste a lot of energy as I did above trying to explain the differences, but people's eyes will glaze over reading it so it's easier to just say "HTHL only". But then again, K-Prize maintains a separate "gatecrasher" scoreboard for entries that complete the challenge by bending the rules like VTVL SSTOs. In some ways getting on the gatecrasher list is more fun because @boolybooly adds you entry with a witty comment about how your entry subverted the rules.

I don't think it will be a big issue. Long duration flights need spin generated gravity anyway to keep the crew healthy so they can just do the business like nature intended, no need to resort to frozen fertilized eggs (unless it's for genetic diversity issues) or iron womb. The problem is: you can select the first generation to all have "the right stuff" and be capable astronauts, but how do you ensure subsequent generations will be up to the job of crewing a generation ship? What if they want to turn the ship around?