Temstar

Don't be so sure about the cheaper part. I'm getting numbers approaching √800 per ton to orbit using a recoverable upper stage in my Nova II. The fact that asparagus staging is efficient, particularly it's efficient in number of engines a rocket need works to drive the cost down by a lot. These days asparagus staging rockets are much easier to design than the bad old days. One of the key problem with asparagus staging rockets back in the days was lack of roll control, and modern KSP has made this issue trivial by: Stronger joints, so booster around the core flex much less under thrust. Previously you need to be know a lot about the art of strutting to make the whole structure stiff, now just a few struts radial coming out from the core to the boosters will do Vector thrust can now be used for roll authority, Previously to control roll you could only rely on reaction wheel and RCS. Control surfaces don't work for roll when you needed them the most (after gravity turn) and roll authority vectored thrust wasn't invented yet.

Hurricane Duo Block II was always intended as a intern solution intended as a test of economics for a fully reusable vehicle. The excellent cost per ton figure it was achieving shows that despite the ET being much cheaper than the Auroras, recovering them still improved the economics noticeably. However the parachute recovery was not a workable long term solution - its incredibly fiddly to setup and it did not achieve high enough accuracy being a purely ballistic return craft. A better solution is needed... I give you: the Block III: The ascent part of the vehicle still flies the same so I won't bore you with too much details on that, refer to the first post for ascent flight. Instead let's look at the interesting part of Block III, the ET recovery: The craft files are in the first post.

I think the most amazing part of the design is the synergy between nuclear pulse propulsion and bomb pumped gamma ray laser, which unfortunately doesn't really translate into KSP. Without this it's kind of just an interplanetary mothership carrying several smaller spacecrafts. That and we need a mod for proper nuclear fireball for the atmospheric flight.

This, you cannot make a game that allow player the freedom to do almost anything, without also giving players the freedom to make mistakes.

If you insist: http://www./download/ec8hxsnfwqc271h/Ore_Tanker.craft I threw it together pretty quickly.

The blue-print view is created using KVV.

Back in souposphere days it took 4500m/s of delta-V just to make it to orbit, your average asparagus staged launch vehicle back then had a payload fraction of 15% with the absolute limit around 17%, and this is with more powerful engines than we have today. These days it takes less than 3500m/s of delta-V to make orbit and asparagus staging rocktets can get over 26% payload fraction, even normal two stage serial staging vehicle can reach more than 20% payload fraction. So it is now so much easier to reach space that serial staging is perfectly fine. You only need asparagus staging if you really want to chase that last 6-7% of payload fraction.

KER can't calculate jet engine (or even RAPIER on closed cycle which is really annoying). It's something to do with the fact that jet engines pull fuel with a different logic compared to rocket engines. Rocket engines drain fuel using the familiar "furthest tank first" while jet engines do the "drain fuel equally across all tank". That different logic confuses KER.

Here's something I threw together: Here's something that you could use to move ore between surface of the Mun and Mun orbit. It burns 25 tons of liquid fuel to move 60 tons of ore up to orbit with plenty of delta-V for both the descent and ascent.

4000m/s delta-V is a lot, I'm guessing this is headed for Moho? What does this mean? Does it mean the launch vehicle for the mothership also has to be fully reusable? Or are you saying that just the mothership itself has to be fully reusable (staging or otherwise)? One suggestion I have, you won't happen to have any D or E class asteroid on your radar near by do you? Go see if you can find one with high ore concentration. People have found things like this: That's basically a better fuel tank than actual fuel tanks.

No, even on places like Duna you can easily build a surface to orbit tanker that can carry up much more ore than the fuel it uses to land and take off. Remember also that the tanker doesn't have to be fuelled on orbit from the orbital refinery using the ore it carried up - it's easier to just have refining capability on the ground as well and refuel the tanker rocket on the ground while you're filling it with ore. That, and because atomic rockets.

I got another one for recoverable rocket, Hurricane Trio Block III: 146.795 / 942.350 = 15.57%. Only a hair higher payload fraction than my previous entry. But I thought it was worth entering this as it has a much more advanced ET recovery system which means now the whole launch vehicle is 100% recoverable. I haven't run through the numbers but I suspect since the fuel is now the only cost we're looking at under $400 per ton to orbit, so certainly we now have a rocket with the same ballpark cost per ton to orbit figure as your garden variety SSTO spaceplanes.

Oh god it actually works, you can indeed fly a plane with its ass missing: Those shielded docking ports have outrageously high max temperature. And yes the superfluous extra nose landing gear has been fixed.

The question you should be asking is "why shouldn't the player be allowed to use fairing this way?".

If you think one is bad, when your rocket is made up of four separate spaceplanes - each requiring an orientation reset once it orbit, it gets really confusing. Let me tie back this line of conversation back to the topic at hand. In the SPH/Runway, the pitch axis is lined up E-W In the VAB/Launchpad, the pitch axis is lined up N-S I don't see any chance of changing the default orientation in the SPH (imaging hitting A to take off from the runway!), so VAB/Launchpad must be made to fall in line. Otherwise importing vehicles between the two facility is endlessly confusing.

Here is my spacecraft climbing to orbit with my preferred orientation. The root part is the 3.75m decoupler between the payload and the payload adapter which I have rotated in VAB to ensure no funny business. Here is the launch vehicle with the payload and payload adapter released, notice the navball in an unexpected orientation. The root part for the launch vehicle is the Mk3 to 2.5m Adapter Slanted. Since I want to launch this stack facing east I had to rotate this root part 90 degrees so the flat side faces east at launch. By default the Mk3 to 2.5m Adapter Slanted has the flat side facing north because it assumes that's the orientation you want to launch in. In order to fix this I have to open up the cargo bay and pick out my probe core (the only pod on this vehicle) and select "Control From Here" Here is my launch vehicle now with the corrected orientation. The launch vehicle is the subassembly that was added to the payload. The Mk3 to 2.5m Adapter Slanted has to be the root part because the payload adaptor must be attached to the nose of the launch vehicle. you can imagine it won't fly very whell if you try to attach the launch vehicle off to the side. Keep in mind too the launch vehicle was built in the SPH, where the default orientation for Mk3 to 2.5m Adapter Slanted is flat side facing the sky. That means if the navball was set assuming the default SPH orientation for this root part that I should see the sky and ground inverted in the navball, instead of rotated by 90 degrees. Inverted at least feels better to me than this wierd 90 degrees thing. Here is the launch vehicle in the SPH, with a Mk3 to 2.5m Adapter Slanted in its default orientation Here is the launch vehicle in the VAB with a a Mk3 to 2.5m Adapter Slanted in its default orientation. See what I mean when I say there's a 90 degree twist? There's no "get use to it and use D for gravity turn" type solution here, you can't launch a spaceplane shaped vehicle vertically and expect it to turn properly if you have to yaw to start your gravity turn. The only way around this problem is for me to launch my launch vehicle in North-South orientation and then immediately do a roll to change my pitch axis to East-West before gravity turn starts, but that seems like a rather unreasonable thing to impose on the player.

It causes problems with subassemblies too. If the root part of the subassembly is a cylindrical part (say a fuel tank in the middle) and you didn't rotate it when you place it then when you stage away that subassembly it's going to have a dodgy navball alignment compared to the other half of your craft. This is specially problematic if the subassembly is actually a plane of some sort.

I would think basic cosmological questions like "what does the world I stand on look like from a distance" come across most kid's head so I'm not sure if I buy that excuse. Besides, you can't argue on the one hand "Pluto was a planet according to mnemonics they taught us at school so change it back" and then on the other hand "well they never taught us that Earth went around the Sun", Americans are afterall the loudest bunch about Pluto's demotion.

I'm a big advocate of using subassemblies back when you need a mod to do them, now that it's stock I use them all the time. Not only do I reuse launch vehicles via subassembly for different payloads, I even have the launch vehicles themselves built from subassemblies of standard parts:

The clustered version has a gimbal with a much narrower range in exchange for lighter weight and cheaper cost.

Oh wow, it's got the little jet engines and everything.

RL-10 is a vacuum engine, and this example you have here is fitted with the enormous nozzle extension that is typical of vacuum engines. H-1 is a lift off engine, and as with pretty much all lift off engines they have a much smaller nozzle. Using a big nozzle on lift off engine will cause over expansion. If you remove the RL-10's nozzle extension then their size would be comparable, and that's because H-1 is working with RP-1 while RL-10 is working with liquid hydrogen, ie the thing with the lowest density liquid phase in the universe. To move a reasonable mass of hydrogen every second the plumbing has to be vastly bigger than plumbing for RP-1. Vector and Mammoth only have a little bit better Isp than Reliant and Swivel so it's unlikely they use different fuel. The slightly higher Isp could easily be explain by the fact that Vector is a staged combustion cycle engine. On that note I thought that was a really cool thing that Squad did, mentioning specifically that Vector is a staged combustion cycle engine. Now if only Squad could add a turbopump exhaust animation to the Reliant and Swivel:

Could you describe a bit the parameters around this reentry? Most important numbers are your AoA, original orbit, deorbit burn delta-V and SAS setting. I usually just set AoA to 40 degrees and put SAS on hold heading, turn on fine control and just make minor adjustment to AoA to keep it between 30-40 degree range and then wait till around 1300m/s before i transition to level fight. Oh another thing, if you are reentering with fuel remaining, pump the fuel to the middle of the craft, say the adapter between 3.75m tank and mark 3 tank. Generally if you have fuel left it will be at the most rearward tank and that will upset the CoM too much. Since the craft is already tail heavy as there's nothing heavy in the nose to counter balance the extremely heavy engine it wants to flip in the air. Having the CoM a fair bit in front of CoL allows control surfaces to counteract this tendency to flip but if you upset the CoM by having fuel in the rear then you run the risk of aerodynamic forces overpowering the control surface's ability to keep it straight.

PSA: The big space shuttle wings and associated flaps can survive been flown through the air at six times the the speed of sound, backwards. Now I just have to make sure the external tank can actually survive reentry and be flown to a safe landing at the runway. Credit goes to @sgt_flyer for trying the "Winged ET" idea first.

Space shuttle roll and then pitch up (and so fly a bit inverted) to point its antenna at the ground. If it ever launched from Vandenberg it would actually do it the other way around and pitch down to point its antenna upwards at a satellite. But yes the important part is they pitch up or down, they don't yaw to start the gravity turn.