Temstar

No rocket can be constructed perfectly. Inevitably, the engine's direction of thrust will not be perfectly aligned with the rocket's center of mass, so the rocket will have an inbuilt tendency to turn. In order for any rocket to flight straight it either needs to be aerodynamically stable or have active guidance. In this case in particular, KSP has a lot of problem flying a vehicle where the direction of the thrust is not aligned with the orientation of the controlling part. Notice how on the ground your rocket's navball indicates the heading as horizontal where as your thrust is actually upwards? KSP can't deal with that situation EVEN IF you use active guidance from that orientation.

BF3 can run in both x86 and x64 mode, it picks the correct mode automatically according to your OS.

Well... for one, a S-IVB won't fit in the shuttle cargo bay, not by a long shot. The shuttle cargo bay is long enough for S-IVB but the shuttle bay is 4.6m in diameter and S-IVB is 6.6m in diameter. Remember a S-IVB is big enough to build an entire one piece space station out of it. Then, even if you somehow got an empty set of S-IVB, CSM and LEM in space, that still leaves the problem of carrying 90 tons of fuel up to them to refuel. And let's not forget that S-IVB runs on LOX and LH2 while CSM and LEM run on UDMH and N2O4. Plus CSM can't be launched manned but unfuelled since the service module may be required for launch abort after LES tower jettison.

It's actually better to launch to equatorial orbit, wait for Minmus to raise above the horizon, burn prograde until your AP is at Minmus orbit, then wait till you're about half way to Minmus (ie, some point beyond Mun orbit) THEN adjust your inclination to meet up with Minimus. This far out from Kerbin your orbital velocity is much lower, so it's much cheaper in delta-V to change inclination. This sort of half way plane change could be as low as 20m/s.

N1 blowing up has more to do with how Russians build rockets, they prefer to do their testing with "all up test" - just stack the damn thing, light it up and see what happens. N1 didn't have any real testing before it's first flight, in fact the people who actually worked on N1 said they only really felt the rocket to be complete for the cancelled fifth flight, the first flight of the upgraded NK-33 engine. Look at the Proton for example, when Proton was still called UR-500 it had terrible track record from all the growing pains and its repeated failures killed off any chance of the Zond spacecraft beating Apollo to a circumlunar flight. Yet Proton has grown to be quite a reliable and popular heavy launcher today.

1. Attach some number of BZ-52 Radial Attachment Point on the bottom of your tank 2. Attach engines to radial attachment points Also works with Cubic Octagonal Strut:

For sample return from the orbital lab you can use a small purpose built craft instead of a more general purpose spacecraft: Of course using such crafts make having a orbital lab kind of redundant, but I like to RP it and pretend I HAVE to do analysis for the sample on orbit before returning. I like to think that the Kerbals are testing samples for harmful microbes that might invade Kerbin's biosphere. One further way to cut down the fuel cost for mass science collection is to use an open air lander: Go down to the surface, do your science and then take off to meet back with the orbital lab when it comes around on the next orbit. The Apollo EVA suit has 6.5 hour of life support, so I figure it's quite reasonable to expect Kerbal suits to be able to last at the least 2 hours required for a quick mission like this. If you have multiple biomes close together you can even do a thing where a large lander goes down carrying one of these open air landers. Then once the science is done on the primary site the Kerbals hop onto the small lander, take off and do a suborbital hop to a nearby biome, do science there, do another suborbital hop back to the main lander and than take off: Instead of driving for hours with a rover, a suborbital hop is only 3-4 minutes each way, that's quicker than a run to the shops!

I don't know if I would say N1 was badly engineered. Using 30 engines was not so much an engineering choice - it was more a lack of choice since Glushko refused to build the large hydrocarbon engines needed for N1. Even so, NK-15 / NK-33 was and still is a marvel of engineering and remains on the cutting edge of hydrocarbon rocket engine 40 years after they were built. The engines are so good that companies like Orbital Sciences have decided to just buy those 40 year old surplus N1 engines and use them on their rockets. Baikonur Cosmodrome Site 110 is definitely not on an island: https://www.google.com/maps/place/45%C2%B057%2752.9%22N+63%C2%B018%2717.6%22E/@45.9634791,63.3065631,1863m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x0?hl=en But yes, assembly is a problem for Russian rockets since the complainants have to be able to travel by rail to Baikonur. Hence why Proton has that strange shape for it's first stage to simplify onsite assembly.

You have something like a 30 year gap between the oldest to newest spacecraft on your list, it's a bit like comparing Orion to the Apollo spacecraft, it would have been pretty damn disappointing if Buran didn't outperform Mercury Redstone. That said I have to vote for Buran and its Energia super heavy launch vehicle. Buran is basically a more advanced space shuttle capable of fully autonomous flight. But shuttle aside the big advantage of the Buran system is that you also get the Energia in the same package, and Energia is a bonafide, 100-tons-to-LEO Saturn V class booster rocket fully capable of being used for moon missions. If your mission didn't need a shuttle you just fit your alternative payload to the side of Energia and it will happily loft anything up, unlike the shuttle where you're either restricted to 24 tons to LEO and the dimensions of the shuttle cargo bay, or you fork out even more money to develop Shuttle-C. And of course Buran - Energia uses all liquid fuelled rockets, so no possibility of failure due to SRB. And I'm not just talking about O-rings, there are many more ways for the shuttle stack to fail that we haven't encountered but nevertheless is possible. For example if one SRB lights and one fails to ignite or if one shuts down early you will immediately get a cart wheeling spacecraft. Where as with Buran your boosters are Zenit rockets, which happens to hold the current world record for cheapest kg to orbit ratio of all space launch systems and is rather reliable to boot.

If it's already landed without being designed for surface docking then you're only method is to use some kind of mod like KAS. If you're thinking about how to build a ship that support this by design, then: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/50685-Modular-Base-Creation-Kit

Woah woah. That's in no way true. NK-15 is an extremely reliable engine, as evident by the fact that NK-33 built more than 40 years ago is still considered cutting edge hydrocarbon engine today and still in use. It's the N-1's 30 engine arrangement for the first stage that causes reliability problem. If you look at the reason why N1 failed: First launch: metallic debris in the turbine of one of the engines, probably came from fuel tank Second launch: a piece of slag in the fuel tanks or debris from a faulty fuel pump ingested by one of the engines Third launch: fuel filter added to prevent the same type of issue as the first two launch, this time the problem was aerodynamic Fourth launch: cause never identified None of them were really caused by the NK-15. N1's layout was just a bit too novel and required test to iron out the bugs. It didn't help that N1 first stage was originally designed for 24 engines and they had to try to fit in six more since the spacecraft turned out to be overweight. Glushko was Korolev's nemesis, so even though N1's fifth flight was to have the upgraded NK-33 and had a good chance of being a success, he was not going to tolerate Korolev having the last laugh on him with his magnum opus super rocket. And you have to remember that Glushko's thing was moon bases, so had N1 being a success under him he would have the tool to actually build his moon base. Even so he cancelled N1's fifth flight only to design his own super heavy lift vehicle 8 years later, after back tracking from his pro-hypergolic position. Now as for oxygen rich, I don't think NK-15 / NK-33's exhaust is any more oxygen rich than other hydrocarbon engines. The "oxygen rich" part refers to it being a staged combustion cycle engine as opposed to the more common gas-generator cycle. Take for example Saturn V's F1 engines. To pump all that fuel and oxygen into the engine requires a very powerful turbopump. The turbopump is driven by what basically is a smaller rocket engine that burns some fuel and oxygen to generate hot gases, these hot gases spin up the turbine of the turbopump and provides the energy to pump vast amount of liquids to the main engine. Once the gas has going through the turbine blades it's just dumped overboard. Thus for a given level of fuel and oxidiser flow into a F1 engine, a small amount is spent driving the turbopump and thus do not contribute to thrust. In a staged combustion engine, instead of dumping the turbopump exhaust out the side, the exhaust (which is still relative rich in oxygen, hence oxygen rich) is instead ducted so it flows into the firing chamber of the main engine, mixed with fresh oxygen and fuel and is fired again. Thus all of the oxygen and fuel that is feed to the engine eventually flows through the main firing chamber and out the nozzle. That's why staged combustion engine has higher Isp than gas-generator cycle engine - it's able to use all the fuel and oxidiser and shoot them out the back for thrust, instead of having to sacrifice a small amount to drive the turbopump. The catch is oxygen is an oxidiser, which mean it really likes to react with things, weather that be RP-1 fuel or the metal walls of your engine. Oxygen as a hot gas (such as say, the turbopump's oxygen rich exhaust) is extremely corrosive and is likely to produce what rocket engineers like to call "engine rich exhaust". So in order to build a staged combustion engine you must have much better understand of metallurgy and gas dynamics. The Russians and only the Russians for some reason has mastered this technology. On the other hand Russians are pretty poor at building cryogenic engines unlike Americans (you can probably blame that on the stubborn Glushko and his insistence on hypergolic fuel), hence why no one has built a staged combustion cryogenic engine - the Americans don't have the staged combustion technology and the Russians don't know how to work with hydrogen. Diagrams on staged combustion cycle vs gas generator cycle, notice where the orange turbopump exhaust goes: Gas generator cycle Staged combustion cycle

Ion engine do have use in game currently. If you want to deploy a probe to Low Kerbol Orbit for example you need an extreme amount of delta-V to circularise and you have incredible amount of solar radiation to take advantage of. Ion becomes the obvious choice in this instance. Even with three ion engine at full power my probe had way too much electricity than I know what to do with with just two 1x6 panels. And I'm fine with ion engines having very limited niches like that, that is after all how they are used in real life too.

Launching interplanetary ships from Mun orbit using the perikee dive method. I mean theoretically I understand the principle behind it: 1. Wait for correct phase angle (minus 8 hours head start, since that's how long it takes to reach Kerbin PE from the Mun) from Kerbin to target planet, just like transfer from LKO 2. Wait for the Mun to be 180 degree out of phase with the normal ejection angle. That way the Kerbin PE will be actually at the correct spot to eject to Kerbol orbit 3. Eject out of Mun orbit to Kerbin at the correct ejection angle so that Kerbin orbit AP will be at around Mun orbit and PE is at the correct point for Kerbin ejection So basically one will have to line up three points on three separate orbits (Mun orbit, Kerbin orbit, Kerbol orbit) correctly so that by using two burns, you shift between the three orbits and get to the target planet. I can get my head around it but it feels like it will be difficult in practice. I mean the Mun orbits Kerbin once per month (munth?), so instead of one correct ejection window per 45 minutes or so in low Kerbin orbit, you get one correct ejection window per month. So unless you're very lucky you're going to be off a little bit either with planetary phase angle or ejection angle, plus whatever error you're already carrying with your when you eject from Mun orbit.

I built this in 0.21, but whatever. The same construction method will also work in 0.23 now that landing legs have the "lock suspension" action: Permanent Mun Settlement – Von Braun City Some key features: housing for 30 kerbals (not including that shuttle) rover docking station capable of handling up to three rovers at once. Currently there's just one heavy propellant tanker rover docked at the base (can carry one driver) two launch complexes with a trio of crawlers to handle landed spacecrafts two solar power towers with backup RTGs and batteries to sustain the base during the munar nights 3,000L of monopropellant storage and 12,800L of bipropellant storage capacity base "tracking station" and "radio mast" for communication with Kerbin and vessels within Mun SOI. So that's what? 72 points? Some more pictures, firstly of the construction of the base. It's all done with stock parts and each part is hand launched and flown from Kerbin to Mun: The first piece of Von Braun City arriving at the Mun, composing of the first four truss pieces and two construction rovers The second module: the base tracking station making its powered descent to the building site. Note that three other pieces are already on the ground, these were two sets of truss packs and one habitation module Construction of the city itself begins via the construction rovers. They driver underneath each piece to dock with the downward facing docking port. The module then retracts the legs and the rover drives it to position Attaching the first module to the truss pieces This orbital view I think illustrates pretty well the frantic pace of construction required to build a base of this size in reasonable time. Munar night falls but the construction continue unabated. Here the centre hub of the city makes land fall. Here the first two crawler transporters land at the growing city. Von Braun City will eventually have three such rovers. Two rovers are required to move a compatible landed spacecraft, they work by driving up to the spacecraft and attaching themselves to the side of it with docking ports. The spacecraft can then retract its landing legs and let the crawlers drive it around. The crawlers have another docking port compatible with the base truss which then allows it to dock to the city. The crawlers transport a nuclear crew shuttle to the city. Once refuelled, the shuttle can simply undock from the crawler and take off back to orbit. Von Braun City, still growing. You may notice that the configuration of the truss pieces are different to the final completed form in the top picture. That's another advantage of modular base construction - you can reconfigure the base any time you want. The heavy tanker rover landing near the city. You can see Von Braun City just to the top left. Von Braun City nearly complete. This is a good picture to explain the configuration of the base. As we can see the base consists of a centre raised hub with three arms radiating outwards. The North Arm is the habitation sector. It holds five habitation modules each capable of housing five Kerbals and two solar power towers which power the base. The South-West Arm is Launch Complex A, it contains the home docking ports of two of the base's crawlers as well as the base's tracking station and communication centre with its radio mast. You can see a four man crew shuttle currently docked to the city. The South-East Arm is Launch Complex B, it contains home docking port for one base crawler as well as the base's fuel storage tanks and the rover docking station.

You're suppose to line up your approach to your target LZ in orbit before you start your descent burn. When you're in shallow orbit near your landing site the only choice should be "land now" vs "land long further down range". Neil Armstrong ended up landing further down range in order to find a clear landing zone, he did it by thrusting upwards to cancel his downward motion. He didn't cancel out all horizontal motion and fly cross range to find a LZ.

You don't even need to do Hohmann transfer orbit to dock with something in Gilly orbit. You can simply shoot straight up towards the target when it's overhead, then kill relative velocity once you're near it. You can even do this with EVA suit.

Oh man, it was back in 0.14 I think. Back in the days the only other body was Mun and persistence was the best thing since sliced bread: I was already all over asparagus staging then. For the actual spacecraft I came up with the idea of an "inert crusher stage" where the lander would pull a stack of fuel tanks without engines behind it. That lot of fuel will be feed into the lander engines with fuel line and be used for trans-munar injection (and TMI back then were terrifying because orbital view didn't tell you change of SOI before hand, so each TMI was a shot in the dark) and deorbit burn. The crusher stage runs out of fuel shortly before touchdown and is cut loose early to crash on the Mun's surface. Here it is, safe on the surface. There wasn't EVA (or IVA for that matter) yet so there was little you could actually do on the surface.

I second the LRLF idea: Chairs allow you to build a spacecraft weighing less than 900kg, capable to taking two kerbals down to the surface of the Mun and then back to orbit.

The point is that aerodynamic drag is not a big factor in preventing rockets from reaching orbit, at least here on Earth. It takes around 9,200 m/s to reach LEO. Out of that, around about 150 m/s is usually the amount spent in overcoming aerodynamic drag. 1500 - 2000m/s is spent overcoming the gravity drag and rest goes into your orbital velocity. In other words aerodynamic drag accounts for less than 2% of the launch to orbit delta-V budget. That's the real reason why people do design tubby rockets in real life - aerodynamic drag is just not a big deal. If we are to have a better aerodynamic model that more closely mimic Earth than wide rockets is still viable as ever.

SERV was 96ft in diameter and 83ft tall. In comparison the Saturn V was 33ft in diameter. It's not the only time that tubby shape has come up either. JRS once proposed the Kankoh-maru: On the less extreme end there's the Delta Clipper:

See unlike in real life, people in KSP tend not to think "I have a launch vehicle that can put 60 tons to LKO, what missions can I do with that kind of payload". It's more a matter of "I've just built an 100 ton spacecraft, are there any rockets around big enough to loft this up?" Payload is really only limited by your imagination and your CPU. I've seen plenty of ships weighing many hundreds of tons on the spacecraft exchange with people asking "can anyone build a launch vehicle for me to send this up". With larger parts around the corner it's only natural that payload size will increase too. So it's never going to be a case of "100 tons to LKO should be enough for anybody". As for asparagus being aerodynamically unrealistic because it's wide, I'm not sure so about that. I present you: The Single-stage Earth-orbital Reusable Vehicle, Chrysler's submission for the space shuttle design. Chrysler is not a bucket shop, they built the first stage of the Saturn V rocket and they spent some good money coming up with this design, so obviously in real life the tubby shape is not really that big of an obstacle in getting to orbit.

I think I saw a piece from C7 once on this, I would like KSP to tone down a bit on the whole "Kerbals are idiots and build rockets by bolting together bits of metal and fill them with rocket fuel" vibe. In my mind Kerbals are only marginally worse or even as good at engineering as mankind, evident by the existence of things like NTR and ion engines, RTGs and even an instrument that can measure gravitons. Sure they are not as safety conscious as us, but that coupled by their unbridled enthusiasm for space exploration is why they're all over their home star system and we are not.

Aside from being able to lift 110 tons to LKO, there's something about that wide 12 engine tail end that I find pleasing to the eyes.

Apollo style open air rovers, open air landers, <10 ton Eve ascent vehicles

Your SSTO bit is unnecessarily complicated. The sample return craft from the Mun can be built to a very small size, meaning you only need a small launch vehicle: This guy goes to the Mun on its own, dock with my Mun station, load up all the SCIENCE, dumps it's small amount of remaining fuel INTO the station and then returns to Kerbin for splashdown on pure RCS power. Using small ships like this cuts out all that mucking about with LKO station and SSTO and is probably cheaper than running a SSTO too.