Temstar

Which inspired me to have a go at a fully reusable rocket: But it's not really a close analogy. Someone could probably do a better job with Stage Recovery to avoid having to make a SSTO.

Would it make you feel better about using command seats if I told you NASA in fact asked the Apollo contractors to look into building just such at thing in case the LM ascent engine failed to ignite? I mean basically, it's a rocket powered witch's broom.

In souposphere days you could easily use Duna's atmosphere to perform an aerocapture, thus saving some further 600m/s on arrival. Is that still possible?

In my career save I get Minmum, Mun, Duna and Ike contracts open all about the same time. Makes sense too. From hardware perspective, if you can make it to Mun then you probably can make it to Duna too. The delta-V difference between the two are not actually all that different. It's only the flight time and the actual piloting that makes Duna harder.

Do you have kerbal space EVA capability? If you do then it's easy - just EVA your kerbal close to the scientific instruments and you will get a "Collect Data" option where he/she takes the data out of the instrument and on their person. You can collect all the data from different instruments in one go and return to your capsule and all the experiment data will then be stored in your (heat shielded) capsule. You don't even need to dock the two vessels to do this, Just park them in close range next to each other in orbit and perform your EVA.

Since Tylo is an airless body why not just use command seats to cut the weight from capsules? That should cut the payload fraction by a lot.

I was assuming the way you worded that line that your satellite has the probe core as both the root part and the top most part with the rest of the satellite attached below it? After all when you save the satellite as a subassembly you have to drag it by a part (which becomes the subassembly root part) and that part has to either have a free node or be surface attachable. If instead you want your probe core to be sort of sandwiched in the middle then do what @Snark said above and change the root part to something on either end of the satellite before saving your subassembly.

You're already done then if you've figured out this part, now you just have to use the rotation gizmo to rotate your probe core 180 so the end with the body of the satellite is facing into the cargo bay rather than your carrier craft. Remember you can hit F while the rotation gizmo has a part selected to switch between absolute and relative rotation angle.

@Workable Goblin you are correct, my bad SSME is staged combustion. Is this the only one from the US though? I checked RS-68 and that's gas generator. I'm guessing the SSME preburner exhaust is fuel-rich rather than oxygen rich though?

But you can look at that problem the other way around though, doing it this way cuts 500m/s off the delta-v budget. Since our payload is fairly big this cuts down the size of the transfer vehicle by a fair bit which further escalate down to the launch vehicle and so on. ISRU setup doesn't have to mean a gigantic surface refinery. @Rune for example is working on an impressive tiny package where the tanker rocket double as delivery vehicle for the rover. You could very well have this package as part of the payload to Jool anyway and have it pull double duty landing on the Mun first to refuel. That said the point is moot for me because I do have both a gigantic surface refinery and huge orbital propellant depot because I find watching the drills working and hording ore therapeutic.

That seems like a lot for Tylo SSTO. Imagine this setup: 1. You have some kind of orbital facility in Tylo orbit, either a space station or a ship for going to other places in Jool system. 2. You have some ISRU setup on the ground on Tylo, a rover of some sort with at least one seat for an engineer So the SSTO is sorely for moving people between orbit and the ground repeatedly, and thanks to the ISRU rover on the ground it can be refueled on the ground. If that's the case you can have an incredibly small SSTO using command seats. Tylo doesn't have an atmosphere so there's no issue with "open air" landers. And for life support RP players since your kerbals will have access to proper capsules on the ground (via the ISRU rover) and in orbit (via space station / spacecraft) their EVA suits only need to support them for at most several hours between launch back into orbit and docking with the orbiting craft. Even real life human EVA suits can handle that kind of time.

The docking port idea is pretty good, but even if the craft stuck in orbit has a docking port I would never try to dock with it, it's much easier to just EVA the Kerbal across. Instead I like @pandaman's idea of spacecraft retrieval. As in instead of bringing a kerbal back, your goal is instead to return an existing spacecraft safely back to Kerbin, with much higher return if you manage to achieve 100% recovery by landing on the runway or launchpad. This means you either need to send up an "deorbiting package" to dock, deorbit and protect the target during reentry, or later with higher tech level a spaceplane capable of capturing the spacecraft in its cargo hold ala the space shuttle.

More economical crafts you say? Hurricane Launch Vehicle Family Low cost per ton of SSTO splaceplanes (well almost) without any of that cargo bay dimension / CoM / climb angle nonsense.

@Snark, I thought about what you've said and I have to agree. Still, that means for a burn over an arc you have: Always follow prograde - zero cosine loss, some gravity loss Always follow horizon - zero gravity loss, some cosine loss Always follow a point in between (eg node marker) - combination of cosine and gravity loss I wonder if it's possible to do analysis on each of these, to see if the loss in all cases are equal or is there some local optimum solution. Regardless for this particular case it may be easier to put the interplanetary ship into Low Mun Orbit. Fully fuel the stack in Mun orbit (via ISRU or otherwise) then when the transfer window comes up eject back into Kerbin with a low PE, reach the PE then complete the interplanetary burn. That way the outbound burn would only be around 1400m/s of delta-V divided into two relatively small burns, instead of the monster 1930m/s single burn directly from LKO.

No I don't think that's correct, consider Newton's cannon firing on the Mun. If you fire the cannon ball out at horizontal to the surface at a mountain top at orbital velocity the cannonball with have an AP of X meters, and it suffered zero gravity loss (since the acceleration is instantaneous) and zero aerodynamic loss (since there's no atmosphere) to get that orbit. Now instead of a cannonball out of a cannon, we launch a spacecraft horizontally from the surface from the same mountain top and follow the prograde. This spacecraft will take some non-zero time to reach the same orbital velocity as the cannonball, yet because it was launched horizontally and it always followed the prograde it also didn't suffer any gravity loss. Yes sure the spacecraft's AP is in a different location to the cannonball's AP, but that change in AP is not because of radial burn but rather because of gravity curving the trajectory differently under different flight perimeters. It's the same with spiral burns - you don't suffer any gravity loss because you are always burning prograde and so unlike radial burn you never actually thrust against gravity.

Just always burn prograde and start your burn earlier, so that when your burn completes you hit the correct ejection angle in either prograde or retrograde Kerbin-Kerbol orbit. Either that or do multiple periapsis kicks. Yes you lose some delta-V because some of the burn is done at higher orbit, but you also reduce your TWR requirement. Taken to the extreme you can get an orbit like this with electric propulsion in real life were the ejection burn takes months: That said I personally favour TWR of between 0.3-0.5G. Any lower and the early burn time compensation becomes too much of a hit and miss.

How did you come up with that 4 x LV-N number? Is it a personal minimum TWR requirement?

That's why I said switch to docking mode first and put "pitch axis" in quotes. I'm not actually sure which axis (port-starboard, fore-aft, zenith-nadir) W and A correspond to in docking mode actually because I always dock in staging mode. I only ever use docking mode to drive rovers.

It's also used for cruise control on long range rover trips. Switch to docking mode, trim "pitch axis" all the way forwards and the rover will drive itself. You just have to point it in the right direction.

37.6 ton payload rocket cost $35,600 Looks like $946.81 per ton to me, unless you want to go into those of those "is S-IVB part of the rocket or part of the payload" type argument. Anyway to nudge this line of conversation back towards asparagus. If it's cheap price per ton to orbit you want you want your craft to be reusable. And just as with the space shuttle if you want reusable and done well you'll probably need to know how to use them fuel lines: Can't do fancy stuff like this with out fuel lines, so better get some training by playing around with asparagus.

Using an Orion or some kind of Orion clone for LEO work would be overkill, since one of the big reason why Orions are really expensive is it's designed for BEO work. If in the process of cloning Orion you make all sorts of changes to it to make it more suitable for LEO, then you might as well design a whole new LEO capsule to start with. Or look at it another direction, in the past Russia has gone to ESA to propose a joint project on a mini spaceplane called Kliper: ESA said no thanks because they didn't want to just pay for a manned spacecraft, if they are to cough up the money then the money has to be spent in Europe on European engineers.

I still want to see, the numbers seem so good that it's a bit hard to believe. If the numbers are true surely there will be something I can learn from it.

It's bomb pumped x ray laser, or in the book "spurt bombs". What happen is you have a package which has a bundle of x-ray gain medium rods, each with targeting mechanism. When a nuke goes off near the bundle of rods each rod is energised by the flood of photons from the bomb. The gain medium then focus all that energy into a laser beam just like conventional visible light laser, only this is a beam of x-ray capable of doing tremendous damage. It has to be powered by a nuclear bomb because as with regular visible light laser, you have to pump the gain medium with photos of same wavelength, and there's not that many good source of x-ray or gamma ray. Fortunately nuclear bomb is an excellent source and a ship with orion drive has nukes on tap when it's thrusting. So with Michael, it would fire a bundle of these x-ray gain mediums in between detonation, each of the rods then get pointed at a target. When the next bomb goes off it both propels the ship and energise the spurt bomb. X-ray laser shoots everywhere blowing up enemy digit ships all around Michael. After firing the gain medium rods would have been vaporised by the bomb, their job done.

I've been working on a series of workhorse SSTO spaceplanes, here's one of them, the STS Starlifter BP: Fully fuelled this spaceplane costs $168,064, empty it's $158,340. The cost of the propellant delivered to the depot was $2,906.74, so the cost ends up being $215.57 per ton to orbit. Being a workhorse design, it's also available in LiquidFuel tanker for refuelling atomic rocket engined powered crafts: Cargo carrier, capable of carrying 34 tons to orbit: And a orbital passenger plane variant, with a capacity of 32 passengers:

Can you show me this rocket design? I want to asparagus seven of them