Temstar

So we know the kerbal currency has the symbol √, is there any canonic info on how this monetary unit should be pronounced? Like say if a kerbal were to sign a cheque to buy a house, you would expect him to write "four hundred and twenty five thousand roots" on the cheque?

I would say out of the games currently floating around the closest to KSP in terms of game play is actually Besieged

How big are we talking here? As others have mentioned ever since docking was introduced long before Sr docking port came about people were already doing multi-port docking for heavy duty on orbit construction, here's an Eve mission using quads: Alternatively to avoid the wobble you could also use tractor configuration for your mothership.

A decent gravity turn and first stage with decent combined Atm Isp should be able to put the payload into orbit with 3500m/s of vac delta-V.

Well capsule falling heat shield side first is already correctly orientated for maximum drag, so not much you can do there. You can however change the shape of the capsule at design time to change its drag profile, for sample: This hilarious shaped capsule is part of the Japanese Fuji spacecraft design. The reason why it looks like an Apollo capsule that's been run over is because Fuji was designed with space tourism in mind. And since your average space tourist cannot tolerate as many G as astronauts who were basically selected because they were superman the capsule was designed to be extra draggy so it loses more speed higher up and experiences lower peak acceleration in the lower atmosphere.

Edit: an updated version of this launcher, the Nova IIB UHLLV has been released. This version is now considered obsolete. Tired of launch vehicles that barely register as a blip next to the monster rockets built by aliens from the Sol system? No longer! Presenting: Nova II Ultra Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle Craft file: http://www./download/92j7fo82d2ecfj1/Nova_2_UHLLV.craft (Craft file contains proofing payload) Specifications: dry weight: 181 tons wet weight: 849 tons cost: √234,004 part count: 181 payload: 229 tons to 75km x 75km orbit payload fraction: 21.25% Cost per ton to LKO: without RHEUS recovery: √1022 80% average RHEUS recovery rate: √824 50% average RHEUS recovery rate: √898 Features of Nova II: usability focused design targeting a balance between payload fraction, cost per ton to orbit and part count asparagus staging with fine tuned stage separation and TWR reusable upper stage for precision orbit insertion, space loitering capability, clean space act compliance and reduced launch cost Typical mission profile

With spaceplanes it's actually safer to reenter at steeper angle than it is to try to reenter at shallow angle. The reason for this is you accumulate a lot of heat plowing through the upper atmosphere while hardly slowing down at all. When you reenter at shallow angle you spend a long time in this region and by the time when you actually reach dense enough atmosphere for some serious braking you are ready near max heat capacity. Reentry at steeper angle means you quickly punch through the upper atmosphere and end up with plenty of heat capacity left when you reach the deceleration zone. In either case, reentry with very large AoA will help. Large AoA decreases your ballistic coefficient and spreads the heat load over a larger area instead of focusing it all at the leading edge and nose. Powerful aerodynamic forces will try to pull your plane prograde when you reach denser air, I leave my RCS system on during reenty to fight against the aerodynamic forces to keep large AoA for as long as possible.

With the new heat model and atmospheric entry being quite the dangerous phase of the mission I think it's time we get some more options on cooling. Radiators are nice and all but I propose a more active cooling method: the Regenerative Cooler. Essentially a regenerative cooler is the same idea as the regenerative cooling system built into rocket engines - cryogenic liquids as pumped through lots of thin pipes that are built into the part need to be cooled and take away the heat. In a rocket engine the heated gas is then piped into the engine to be fired, but in a stand alone regenerative cooler they would be simply dumped overboard. To implement it in the game you basically have a small radial attached part similar to the fuel cell. Turn it on and it starts consuming liquid fuel using the standard fuel flow logic and give a dramatic cooling effect to the part it attaches to as well as sucking away fuel from a few part away, similar to a radiator. The idea being that generally, only a few part on a craft experience huge heat loads - nose cone and leading edge during reentry, ISRU converters, engines during long burns etc. A small, powerful and togglable cooler specifically designed to cool these hottest parts at the expensive of fuel would give people more options on thermal control without all the fiddling around with max heat. You want to make a mark 1 sized SSTO? Now you can by actively cooling the cockpit during reentry so it doesn't melt. This would also open the way for special science parts such as IR telescopes that must be actively cooled to very low temperature before they would work, thus simulating things such as Spitzer space telescope with its limited coolant load.

This tidal effect is also the exact same thing that causes spaghettification around black holes. Only around a black hole the gravity gradient is so enormous that not only does it rip apart your body and your spacecraft (overcoming the electromagnetism that holds molecules together) into ribbons, it eventually overcomes even the strong force and rips apart the nucleus of all the atoms falling in.

It's white for a good reason though - highly reflective white paint tend to reflect thermal radiation while black absorb them. Aircrafts (nevermind spacecrafts in atmosphere at near orbital velocity) experience a lot of heating during supersonic and hypersonic flight, hence why they have the white paint. Look at the Concorde for example.

In real life a very long ship in LEO will orientate on its own so that its long axis points in radial direction. This is called gravity-gradient stabilization. In higher orbit the effect will be weaker and at edge of the SOI you will notice negligible tidal effect so nothing special will happen. You orbit will be easily perturbed by other stuff and you will tend to go into a sun orbit or go further in into Earth's gravity well.

You can't make 1.25m engines too good across the board though, back in the days when LV-T30 and LV-T45 had better Isp than 2.5m engines every man and his dog who knew a thing about clustering clustered 1.25m engines instead of using 2.5m engines. Nerfing them made Skipper and Poodle useful again. Vector is toeing a pretty good line being nearly identical (although slightly worse TWR) to 1/4 of a Mammoth, so if you consider Mammoth acceptable then Vector should be acceptable too. It outperforms Mainsail in all stats except thrust per dollar. If all 1.25m engines were this good then once again no one will use 2.5m engines.

It's true, done around 0.19.1 if I remember correctly. The ship was launched from 4974m, hence the rover as I wanted to go to the ocean. I know of course the current aerodynamics are different, the main point I was trying to make was that there's a way to stack small stages vertically and still get the same effect as asparagus staging, which might be useful to wring some extra delta-V out of the last few stages.

Once you have your return payload shaved down to as light as possible asparagus staging becomes unwieldy because some of the later stages will be tiny. One way to get around the form factor is a technique called Vertical Asparagus Staging. Instead of a normal ring shaped asparagus, you can arrange each stage on top of each other. Each stage have its own pair of radial engines and fuel lines to move the fuel up the stack. Once the bottom most engine runs out of fuel you can just ditch with with a regular decoupler. Here is the craft on its final stage climbing to orbit: Here it is jettisoning its on the surface: So 3 pairs of normal asparagus staging boosters, then centre core, then the single vertical asparagus stage stacked on top of the core stage. All engines firing at lift off.

Use command chairs inside cargo bays to save weight on pods. It may not be pressurized but at least it's got doors that can close unlike Mark Watney's MAV convertible superleggera.

I think Vector is pretty good, it reflects its real life counterpart the RS-25 quite well in that both are high Isp, fairly powerful, high gimbal range and catastrophically expensive if you use them as disposable engines. Which then ties in well with RS-25E / Mammoth as these are cheaper versions of the same engine designed to be expandable. If you are using Vectors in expandable rocket stages then you are basically throwing money at a problem to solve it. The only thing that really throws you off about Vector is it's small size. RS-25 and RS-25E are not super duper powerful engines in a small physical package, and I have no real problem with Mammoth either because it has an enormous superstructure above the engine nozzles that you can visualise in your head contains all the thrust structure and turbomachinery. The problem is on its own the Vector is only represented by its engine nozzle, so in a physical package about the same size as a Reliant it packs five times the thrust. That's the only part that's really jarring. Perhaps the solution is to make it really long like the nuke engine with all its turbomachinery out on display. Then have a special hollow adapter for shuttle clones that you can attach to the bottom end that will hide all the engine innards when it's attached.

You could move all the heat vulnerable part of the ship to a separate module that is in itself a small autonomous spacecraft, then harden the rest of the larger spacecraft for aerobrake. Then have the two detach before aerobrake. The larger, heat resistant spacecraft aerobrake as usual while the smaller spacecraft with all the heat sensitive parts can use rocket power to brake into orbit. Then the two can meet up again in orbit and dock again. It works better for interplanetary motherships since you can separate early (say upon entering target SOI) then space out the two ships a bit so that the aerocapture and retroburn happen at different times.

Is it possible to aerobrake into LKO from Mun/Minmus without using a heat shield? Of course I know the answer is yes if you do a billion pass through the atmosphere to achieve the aerobrake, but i mean practically, say with 2 passes. Supposedly interplanetary aerocapture to Kerbin is possible, which means aerobrake from Minmus is possible too. Question is if it can be done with a reusable craft without resorting to the complexities of replaceable heat shields using docking ports.

You just import your late tech design from sandbox into your career. You don't even have to wait till end of tech tree to do this, you can just copy them over right at the start and when you load them up in VAB/SPH it will tell you you can't launch them because the design use parts that are locked.

Is Whiplash good for SSTO? I was thinking a SSTO that relies on nuke engines to get into orbit could benefit from using Whiplash as its jet engine stage to get to the upper atmosphere, seen as you don't need the more complex and heavier Rapier with it's closed cycle mode. Yet from recommendations I see from others even if you are only using Rapier for air-breathing mode it is still better than Whiplash for SSTO spaceplanes.

Isn't that a bit like saying "what's the best fuel for light water reactors? Uranium or coal?" Of course fusion is better. But we're not even close to self sustained D-T reactions yet, never mind even harder fusion fuel.

It's interesting to see everyone argue that the winged orbiter idea is dumb and a waste of payload - that's exactly what Glushko himself was saying to the soviet bosses. The response was something along the line of "if it's such a dumb idea and Americans are still building them then there must be some military advantage that we are not seeing, therefore we must have one too." Glushko's pet project is a base on the moon, and to do that you need Saturn V sized rockets. He figured at some point in the future the Soviet space program may go through another shake up and switch direction back to the moon (seems reasonable, since he himself just got Mishin fired and N1 cancelled and have the focus switch to space stations at the time). To prepare for that change he designed the Energiya rocket so that it could carry other payloads - in order words he managed to hide a Saturn V class rocket in his STS-clone! So to argue that Buran was a waste of payload is kind of a moot point, the Chief Designer himself considered Energiya the real deal and the Buran was just something of a Trojan horse to appease the bosses. Of course you're probably thinking: if Glushko had to run a space station program and plan for a future moon base it might have been better to get N1 working (it was very close, the engineers felt the upcoming 5th launch would be the first real "finished" N1) instead of starting over and make his own moon rocket. Afterall if Saturn V could be repurposed to launch Skylab then surely a working N1 could also be used to launch giant space station parts. Glushko didn't go down that path since N1's failure was the very excuse he used to fire Mishin and in any event he wasn't about to see Korolev's dream rocket finished under his watch. Ironically Energiya's main engine RD-0120 was exactly the kind of engine that Korolev wanted for N1.

Hmmm I figured it was something like that. There's quite a few XKCD strips that mention KSP, eg: https://xkcd.com/1244/ There are lots of fan made Up Goer Five style diagrams, here's one I did:

Can I gatecrash? Presenting the SKRV - VTVL, SSTO, air-breathing fly back booster. Takes off vertically like a rocket, but under combined rocket and jet engine power Climbing to orbit under pure rocket power Releasing 25 ton deadweight payload to 75km x 75km orbit Reentry over KSC with airbrakes deployed. This picture was taking just after peak heat load. Depending on your reentry angle airbrakes may not need to be pulsed as heat load is manageable. At just above 14km altitude the jet engines kick in. Opps look like we're gong to overshoot KSC... Not to worry, the SKRV isn't called a fly back booster for nothing! Final descent phase with parachute assist Safe landing back at KSC, besides the runway. Why gatecrash? Because Chrysler came up with this concept (their one is called of course SERV) for NASA's space shuttle bid. When NASA put out request for proposal for STS all the aerospace companies already know they had in mind some kind of spaceplane. Chrysler being makers of the Saturn V first stage only has experience in making rocket boosters so they came up with the lone proposal that was different: Notice the size of SKRV compared to Saturn IB and the size of those other absolute colossal shuttle proposals. Just like in KSP spaceplane turned out to be really hard and had NASA picked SERV instead of the Space Shuttle that was eventually built the SERV may still be flying today.

The reason for this is the same both in KSP as well as real life: a rocket is a dynamically unstable system. Nothing in real life is in perfect mathematical precision. Even the most precisely built machines like rockets have imperfections. The surface of the rocket is not perfectly smooth, the fins are not perfectly symmetrical, the center if thrust moves around and is not always perfectly inline with CoM. In a dynamically unstable system any of these tiny deviation from the perfect model causes the deviation to build up until you end up with a hugh deviation, eg rocket flipping. To get a dynamically unstable system to stay in equalibrium (eg rocket staying on course) it must be actively controlled so that small deviation are constantly compensated for. KSP doesn't need to go out of its way to make sure in game rockets are dynamically unstable - the very fact that things like velocity, acceleration are stored as floating point numbers in finite blocks of memory mean calculations cannot be done to arbitrary levels of precision, and so such loss of precision in calculation results in instability - ie dynamically unstable.