Temstar

@Snark is getting to the core of the issue. The issue is not reentry but flight stability. Cargo spaceplanes that are probe controlled with no cockpit is particularly prone to this. The actual name for this problem in real life is "CGCP mismatch". CG stands for center of gravity which is the same as CoM in our SPH. CP is center of pressure which is approximately the same as CoL in SPH, it's the point where all the drag forces on different parts of the aircraft sum up to. CG needs to be in front of CP for the aircraft to be dynamically stable. Problem is in a spaceplane with engines at the back and very little weight at the front (ie fuel tanks empty, no cockpit) the CG is very far back. CP and CoL is complicated because they are constantly changing as the airflow around your aircraft changes. The CoL indicator in the SPH is calculated assuming airflow coming straight ahead, which is not a bad assuming for most airplanes. However as soon as you introduce some AoA the drag on the fuselage generate will change and there's no rule of thumb how it will change since it depends on the shape of the fuselage. Just like how rockets don't handle sudden large AoA change very well and tend to flip if you do that, if you have a very long, light weight fuselage in front of the CoM and your plane goes slightly sideways against the wind that fuselage suddenly introduce a huge amount of drag that's no longer aligned with the CoM and the plane will want to flip. The solution is as @Snark says: move your CoM forward. Besides shifting as much heavy stuff to the front of the plane as possible one other solution is use the same strategy that Skylon's design used to counter CGCP mismatch - put the engines at the middle of the plane.

It doesn't take that long, I can get pretty much any craft up from the Mun surface to hard dock with in 5-10 minutes. For Mun TWR of something like 2 just wait for target is about 5 degrees over your head in orbit and launch. Get to the target AP, warp there and then match velocity. I've done so many up and down trips with landers now most of the time I can launch to my Mun station just via eye ball and end up with in 500m of each other right at the lander's AP. The important thing is to get a feel for these things so you don't have to mess with setting up nodes and all that nonsense. Just aim and shoot, even if you miss by a little bit Mun orbit is so forgiving it's trivial to manually correct to get a closest approach - target in front of you at closest approach, 45 degree prograde radial in burn; target behind you at cloest approach, 45 degree retrograde radial out burn.

I quite like the design for Iris: Looks like a cross between ESA's ATV and Japan's H-II, except with some MONSTER engines for a cargo ship: H-II ATV. I wonder what power system Iris run on though, maybe RTG?

What type of fin are you using?

Well, the Orion bombs (for the small 10m version) have really low yield, 5kt per bomb in space and a lot less in the atmosphere. Where as Starfish Prime exploded a huge 1.4Mt bomb. A full load of 800 bombs for the Orion is "only" 3Mt, or just over two Starfish Prime bombs.

It could be but it seems unlikely since staging is a significant source of potential failure and you would want to avoid it as much as possible. Plus as we know from KSP docking doesn't really require that much agility, as long as you can translate in three axis without rotation it shouldn't be very hard. If I were to guess, I would say the OMS name implies that it's either designed to provide a final burst of delta-V to put the capsule into low mars orbit to join with Hermes, or maybe the OMS is reserved for emergency situations like the start of the movie were the MAV's two rocket stages might need to do a dog leg during boost to align inclination with Hermes and OMS will make up the difference to get the capsule into orbit. This would require the Ares IV MAV ascent scene to include a shot of the OMS firing after separation from the upper stage. The CG artists might have had this in mind when they designed the movie MAV but was probably cut due to time. Plus I suppose to the average movie going audience they probably won't get that excited over weather it's a two stage or three stage vehicle ;). You're probably right that if Iris is launched to rendezvous with Hermes then it can't also coast to mars. There's a scene after CNSA decided to give NASA the rocket where Vincent Kapoor was on the phone with someone where he said something like "we can jettison any kind of landing system, we're only sending rations to mars, we can crash land on mars" just before Rich Purnell barged into his office. That might be clue that the Chinese rocket is a bit underpowered compared to Iris's normal launch vehicle.

Yeah I asked the boss this quite early. We did have some measure in place regarding static when assembling new computers but when fixing old computers we never really bothered. The boss knows about potential damage from static discharge too but he's never bothered to take much care about it and there hasn't been any incidents in all his years servicing computers, and he started when Windows 3.1, 486 and 5.25" floppy was the state of art. Either we're exceedingly lucky or it is in fact exceedingly rare. Although it must be said, it's kind of pretty hard to not ground yourself to the case when you open it up, at some point you have to touch the bare metal and it's usually before you touch anything inside.

I know of course MAV did not come with Hermes - given that MAV for Ares IV was already on planet when Hermes was still busy with the Ares III mission. However if the crewed part of the MAV only needs to dock with Hermes and then discarded in Martian orbit then the separation between the capsule and its upper stage seems a bit pointless - that would be like having a separation event between the Apollo LM and its ascent engine before docking with the CSM. I figure if I was to design the mission then when Hermes return to earth after mission complete then there will be an exchange of crew with something like an Orion (or a smaller manned spacecraft, if Hermes actually returns to LEO) where the Ares III crew will hand the ship over to the Ares IV crew for refurbishment before their mission, and the Ares III crew will then ride the capsule back to earth. Actually I just remembered something - at the very end of the movie it showed the Ares III crew looking at live TV coverage of a launch for Ares IV and it showed an Delta-IV Heavy launch, so the crew exchange could very well be done with something like an Orion. Seen as the Ares III crew is already on the ground, if the Delta-IV Heavy was carrying a manned spacecraft that would probably be an exchange of crew between Ares IV crew and caretaker crew that mans Hermes between Mars trips. Don't get me started on MAV's OMS, if it's powerful enough to resist a storm that could topple the ship then surely it would be powerful enough to make up that 20m/s. Anyway one thing I thought was really cool was that throw away line by the deputy head of CNSA who said something like "I've had our engineer run the numbers and our Taiyangshen boosters is powerful enough to boost their payload to Mars". I thought that was actually a very important thing that's probably not apparent to someone who's not familiar with orbital mechanics or play KSP - although Hermes and Iris docked above earth, the Iris probe was actually already on a course in the general direction of Mars after it separated from it's booster (plus any delta-V added by Iris's own engines). If Hermes shutdown its engine then Iris and Hermes will actually drift side by side for a very long time to near Mars orbit. Conversely if Hermes wasn't able to dock with Iris for some reason then Iris might still be able to land on Mars to supply Mark while four of the five crew kill themselves to allow that girl to return to Earth alone on the Hermes. IIRC, the original launch vehicle for Iris was some kind of Atlas V, one of those big ones with lots of SRB but not a three core one.

It would be just an very intense burst of light, like the flash of a lightning. That's all. Without some medium (like air) to absorb that energy and then graduate release it over a longer time frame in the form of a fireball there's really nothing much to look at. The bomb fragments does absorb a lot of energy, but those get blown apart at such high velocity that the human eye can't detect them if you are looking at them up close, and from a distance the fragments are too small to be visible.

This is actually a legit issue in real life too - gas turbine engines, which is basically a jet engine minus the high bypass fan is rubbish when used to drive a car because turbines just don't respond to sudden throttle changes very well unlike piston engines. Planes both in real life and in KSP just don't care - they run their engine on one throttle setting for most of the trip. Where it does matter in KSP is when you want to use the jet engine for VTOL and you want to have precise control over the hovering. For this I use panthers as my hovering engine and set it so that on dry mode the panther engines give about 0.9 TWR, so if i stay on dry mode the VTOL will slowly start falling. Panther can switch between dry and wet mode instantly, so by rapidly toggling between 0.9 TWR dry mode and some TWR higher than 1 in wet mode you can fairly precisely control vertical ascent and descent.

If you shut intakes the engines also more or less come to a crash stop immediately.

For those of you who read the book, can you explain a bit about the MAV to me? In the movie, the MAV is depicted as a six man capsule on top of a two stage rocket. When the upper stage burns out the capsule separates from it. But what's the idea here? Is the MAV capsule also the capsule the crew will use to return to earth once Hermes is back in earth orbit? Seems like a waste if that's the case, having to haul MAV capsule with its earth reentry rated heat shield all the way to mars, land it on mars, then haul it all the way up to martian orbit then haul it all the way back to earth for splashdown. Wouldn't it be much easier to ditch the MAV in martian orbit and do the Hermes crew exchange with a spacecraft launched from earth when Hermes returns?

No definitely not. Laptops are aircooled just like desktops. And because laptops have a rather confined case the dust build up problem is actually much worse than desktops.

CPU cooler is a block of aluminium or brass, it's not affected by electrostatic discharge. I use to do the vacuum thing at a computer shop all the time as a part time job. Often the "my computer restarts all by itself after turning it on for a while" issue is caused by dust build up on the heat sink. Despite vacuum being a easy fix you'll still get billed $300 though

There are two ways to approach this problem as seen above which is why people have been asking for more specific requirement on this $200,000 launch business. if you don't care for reusability then it's just a case of fine tuning big asparagus launchers, which is the top example, capable of putting 229 tons into orbit with room for improvement to specifically tailor for this challenge, that should cost you somewhere around $800 per ton to orbit if you instead allow $200,000 for a single launch, but you allow the vehicle recovery value to be dedicated from the initial cost then the solution would be the bottom, where an even bigger fully reusable design can launch something in the region of 500 tons to orbit with a cost per ton of $400 (the example only lifts under 150 tons to orbit, but can be fairly easily scaled up to any size your computer can physically handle) In either case, fine tuning a launch vehicle to a specification is a time consuming business, which is why before I commit my time to fine tune a launch vehicle for a challenge the rules needs to be very clear what's allowed and what's not.

This rule seems rather unusual, what's the rational behind it? Minimize part count? IIRC if you strut from the part that will be thrown away (say, the upper stage) to the part that you want to keep for long term (ie the payload). Then if you separate the two and go to the tracking station and then load the payload again the nubs on the payload will be gone. It won't work for payload-to-fairing struts though as those can only be created from payload to the inside of the fairing and only if you know that intercept trick.

Okay in that case you better post a screenshot of that warning message.

It means your CPU is getting too hot. You probably need to open up your case, take out the CPU cooler, unclip the cooling fan and vacuum the top of the heat sink. Over time a layer of dust builds up over the top of the heat sink (especially if your case is in a dusty environment) which greatly reduce the cooling capability.

I don't use FAR so I don't know, but I can't imagine why one couldn't design something similar with FAR since Energia II was suppose to use something like this concept. Besides wings, people have also designed rockets that can lift 600 tons to orbit in one stage and still return in one piece to Kerbin with ballistic reentry.

There's a documentary on this topic called Evacuate Earth which posits a scenario that a neutron star is set to plow through the solar system with 80 years advanced warning. Thus its not possible to survive by moving some fraction of the human population to another planet or moon within the solar system as they too will be messed up by the passage of the neutron star. The documentary goes on to say that it should be possible (but just barely) in this case for mankind to build an interstellar ark consisting of an O'neill cylinder mated to a large orion drive and head for an earth-like planet around Barnard's Star just under six light years away. The trip is estimated to take 80 years which means the ark have to build up to something like 10% speed of light on the way and coast.

You just have to combine the best features of both: I like to flog the fully reusable rocket idea because I want to see other people's take on it.

Do you have to do it in two stage reusable SpaceX style or would you accept SSTO reusable? Delta-V requirement to LKO is so low compare to LEO and the sort of issue you are running into are so annoy that in KSP it's actually easier to just make your launch vehicle SSTO and recover that rather than splitting it up into stages.

I don't like space junk. Everything that gets launched must have a plan to eventually come down somewhere. Upper stages are either reusable or have simple deorbit equipments. Injection stages generally crash into the body that they payloads are traveling to. In addition no crashing RTGs and cold NTR engines into Kerbin or Laythe. Once NTR has been fired it's considered a hazardous object and I won't deorbit any of those into Kerbin, Duna, Laythe, Mun, Minmum or Ike. In the past I've built recovery vehicles to safely return fired NTR engines back to Kerbin to simulate "end of life" but I'm rethinking this. This might seem like a good idea at first but it's probably less practical than just leaving it in high orbit for geological time. When this thing lands in the ocean you basically have an unshielded warm reactor core irradiating everything around it. And there's really not much you can do about it expect mark that spot on the map with "Here be dragons" and never go near it pretending it doesn't exist. I'm considering designing my spacecraft and mission to take into account the need for shadow shield with NTR engines. So basically if you're not behind the shadow shield and have line of sight to the nuclear engines and you're within 300 meters of them, you're probably already dead. So anytime a nuclear engined craft approach something else it has to be from a shallow angle. And when the craft want to leave it has to back away to several hundred meters distance before it can flip around and fire up the NTR engines.

Even for Apollo flag-and-footprint style missions an open space ascent stage still makes sense. To RP the life support aspect you just put your capsule / hitchhiker on the descent stage so they have somewhere to live. Then when it's time to return to the orbiting spacecraft you take off in the ascent stage which is a super light open space craft. For Tylo you will always have some kind of orbiting spacecraft, you wouldn't want to make your ascent stage be the craft that return you to Kerbin since that will make the ascent stage and therefore the descent stage huge.

No it's not true, your pod can hold an infinite amount of data, as long as each piece of data is unique. Eg no two surface samples from the same biome.