Temstar

Yes Eve is by far the easiest place to drive rovers in the Kerbolar system. The high gravity give wheels excellent traction for uphill/downhill/braking/cornering at high speeds, the dense atmosphere help to prevent sideways drift (but at the cost of lower max ground speed due to drag) and the intensified solar radiation and relatively quick day/night cycles (not as short as Kerbin, but much shorter than say, a day on Mun) ensures plentiful energy during the day and nights that are not too long. I once drove a manned 5 ton rover 80km to the ocean, then 90km uphill to my return vehicle parked on a 5km mountain top. Both trips were done by simply putting pedal to the metal using trim control, then set ASAS to keep heading and then leaving KSP to run for an hour. That was done with the medium wheel and not the new tough wheels and at no time where there any sliding/potentially deadly jumps, the wheels stuck to the ground like glue.

One other solution is to just replace the 2.5m decoupler that connects the rocket to the payload with a 2.5m senior docking port. Right click on the docking port before launch will allow you to do "control from here" with the correct navball orientation. Then instead of stage to release the payload you just right click + undock or use action group..

Yes the probe core is either hidden between the decoupler and the first fuel tank of the core, or in between the core engine cluster if it doesn't have an engine on the centre node. I did seriously consider standardising the family so that all of them have a 2.5m probe core underneath the decoupler but in the end I decided not to do it. that 0.5 ton for a single probe core on the core stage seemed like too much of a weight penalty for a rarely encountered situation. You pretty much only needs to touch the probe core for "control from here" if you're launching payload upside down or horizontally (usually large rovers). For such situations I personally find it more useful to engineer the guidance solution on the payload itself, keep in mind that you don't need to have a probe core or command pod, docking ports allow "control from here" too. Worst comes to worst you could always just add a probe core to the booster on a case by case basis.

See the links at the bottom of the first post. The link that says "Zenith rocket family" are .craft files with the test payload, the subassembly files don't have that test payload and is meant to be placed directly into your subassembly saver/loader folder.

I'm in the view that the key to cheap access to space lies not in cutting edge technology and reusable SSTO but rather mass production. And I'm not talking about the logical extreme of the Big Dumb Booster that is the Sea Dragon . No no, I'm talking about MASS mass production. Building common components in the hundreds of thousand or millions per year and then assembling them into rockets. Obviously you can't possibly expect to sell million of individual rockets per year, hence OTRAG: So the idea was to develop a very simple Common Rocket Propulsion Unit which could be bundled in different quantities to produce any sized booster you want. The CRPU would be so simple as to be built out of ordinary steel, pressure feed so no expensive turbopumps, ablatively cooled engine rather than the more elaborate regeneratively cooling, no gimbling (steering the whole rocket will be done via varying the thrust of CRPUs on different sides of the booster) and flat bulkheads rather than the complex domed bulkheads of bigger rockets. Since each individual CRPU is simple and a single complete rocket will require a large number of them, the CRPU factors will be expected to mass produce a huge number of CRPU per year. Mass production of simple machines on this scale has been proven to drive down cost and increase reliability (eg, Merlin engine production during WW2) so OTRAG rockets are projected to reduce launch vehicle cost by a factor of ten compared to conventional rockets. The unit cost of CRPUs will be so cheap that recovering them for reuse will be pointless as the cost of recovery and refurbishment will be greater than just building a new CRPU. The idea was so revolutionary that OTRAG (which was a German company) managed to get Wernher von Braun interested and he became their scientific adviser. Von Braun however came to the company with a warning that rocketry is inherently a political process and he did not believe Germany provided a stable enough political environment for rocket development. Technical wise the project proved to be quite workable and OTRAG managed 14 suborbital launches with a four CRPU sounding rocket design. But the politics got in the way. The USSR and France were not interested in Germany achieving an indigenous long-range rocket activity. American rocket makers were not interested in having a low-cost competitor. A propaganda campaign began, alleging OTRAG was a cover for German and South African nuclear cruise missile development. Crude Soviet-source disinformation was eagerly picked up and given credibility by the American mainstream media. The government of the Congo (were OTRAG's testing facility was located) was pressured by the Russians to withdraw permission to use the site. OTRAG left the country in April 1979. OTRAG moved their testing to Libya but in 1983 the Libyan Government unlawfully confiscated all of OTRAG's rocket manufacturing and test equipment in the country for their own end and never returned them despite personal promises by Gaddafi. The company gave up and shutdown after those two set backs.

So it was all over CCTV last night that the crew conducted a live "lesson from space" thing via video conference to school kids all over China. Experiments where demonstrated to explore microgravity. I didn't catch the actual video but in the news I saw them do: 1. Pendulum experiment 1 - the crew set up a pendulum and released the weight, instead of swinging back and forth like a pendulum would do on the ground the ball just hang there slowly drifting towards the pivot due to tension in the string at the moment of release. 2. Pendulum experiment 2 - instead of just letting the weight go, this time the crew give the ball a push when they let it go and the ball just goes round and round around the pivot. 3. Gyroscope experiment - the crew took out two toy gyroscopes, spun one up and released them both. As the two gyroscope drifted they poked them with the fingers. The non-spinning gyroscope will start tumbling when they poke it but the spinning gyroscope maintains its orientation and only changed the direction it was drifting after poking. The crew then explains that this property of spinning objects to remain aligned to a fixed orientation in space is what spacecrafts use to keep track of direction. And in fact there are devices similar to the toy gyroscopes onboard this very space station that uses this property to control the orientation of their spacecraft 4. Water film experiment - the crew took out a metal ring and stuck it into a bag of water to make a thin film of water that acted much like a glass lens on Earth. They then keep adding droplets of water to the film until it grew to a large sphere of water kept together purely by surface tension. Then they had a live Q&A session with a group of school kids to answer questions like if they could see stars out the window and did they twinkle and so on. Nie Haisheng and Zhang Xiaoguang worked the camera and lights, Wang Yaping (the lady) did the presentation.

Hmm people say better drag model would be the end of asparagus staging but I'm not so convinced: Here we have Angara-7, a heavy lift member of the new Angara rocket family that Russia is working on. Angara rocket family is based around a common Universal Rocket Module design where different numbers of URMs are combined into one package to produce different sized lifters. The current planned versions have 1, 3, 5 and 7 URMs. Angara-7 as the name suggest has a seven URM bundle first stage in the classical KSP asparagus layout - only without fuel cross feed. But still, the fact that thousands of engineers and rocket scientists are working hard on this suggest that this kind of form factor is not a issue with realistic drag model.

I'm pretty sure the "There can only ever be one full-strength pair of docked rings between two assemblies" only applies in VAB. Outside with physics on you can indeed have circular structures (and so docking with multiple port at once) on rockets. I've seen plenty of ring stations and even some rocket boosters built via multiple docking ports.

That's wrong, you can dock without targeting any docking port at all, all you have to do is to approach the docking port close enough for the attraction to kick in. Weather you target a port or not has nothing to do with docking. Back in 0.19 I came up with a quad docking port for heavy duty space construction and I could consistently connect all four ports at once and each port will have a "undock" option. As a matter of fact the two docked crafts will not separate until I've undocked all four ports. Two crafts coming into dock with quad docking ports. A propellant depot, quad docked with engine section and habitation section along with two spacecrafts doing trans-Munar injection Here a mothership is carrying an Eve lander using quad docking.

In KSP, if you orbit Kerbin on the exact same orbit as the Mun then every point on Mun's orbit outside of Mun's SOI is a Lagrangian point, since unlike in real life Mun's gravity cannot affect you unless you're inside the Mun SOI.

Yes it does, observe: Here is the thermometer on my Kerbol probe, hidden in the penumbra of the sun shield. Here it is again, this time with the probe turned so that the thermometer is directly facing the sun.

Actually this isn't true. The LM could enter a prograde Lunar orbit and land on the terminator fine with the CMD and LMP able to see the shadows out the windows. The reason why Apollo inserted into Lunar orbit retrograde was for safety. On the way to the moon the Apollo stack would fly in a free return trajectory so that they enter Lunar SOI retrograde. When they go behind the moon (and so all alone and out of contact with the ground) they need to fire the service module engine to insert into a retrograde lunar orbit. If something goes wrong and the SM engine does not fire then their retrograde motion means the moon slingshots them back to the safety of Earth, hence free return trajectory. If the Apollo stack enters Lunar SOI in prograde direction and the SM engine does not successfully fire to insert them into Lunar orbit then the moon will fatally slingshot them out to a solar orbit. Hence for the reason of safety a retrograde Lunar orbit was chosen despite the fact that it means the LM would have to pack a little bit more delta-V in both descent and ascent stages.

Subassembly Saver/Loader, after that KER. Subassembly will revolutionise the way you play the game.

What's your current orbital altitude? Where do you want to go after you've changed to a prograde orbit?

I haven't tested myself, but I hear the quad is still more stable than a senior docking port. The price is higher part count of course. Quads is a bit harder to dock but I find that its ability to snap the docking angles to 4 different fixed possible orientations to be pretty useful. With a single docking port you're never going to get a perfect alignment of things like ladders and solar panel orientations were as with quad you know you're pixel perfect once you have all four ports hard docked. Quad is also useful once in a while when you want to use it as a single normal docking port: So I say senior docking port doesn't make quad obsolete, it's a matter of engineering choice.

You can have liquid fuel tanks on top of SRBs feeding liquid engines so that at the moment of SRB separation you still have all the liquid tanks fully fuelled. You just can't asparagus stage solids in pairs.

So I built this on the Mun: Base was built up over 11 launches including the crew shuttle. The crawler transporters turned out to be a great success in handling spacecraft on the ground: The big kethane tanks and the heavy converter should give some clues as to how I'm going to use this base. Yes it's going to be a fuel terminal where kethane trucks drive the harvested gas to be processed at the base. Tanker rockets are then to land near the base and be carried back to dock with the launch complex, filled with kethane-produced fuel and then launched back to orbit to ship fuel all around the Kerbin SOI.

Here is my take on colonisation: For moving a sustainable population to another planet I would first launch this: Fill it with 134 crew, either on the ground before launch or later on with shuttles. Then launch this deep space rocket engine: Dock the two together and we get this: Fully fuelled, we get delta-V = 3026.95m/s, enough to send it to Laythe. As for actual surface colony, I've just completed building my first one on the Mun: Complete with a pair of crawler transporters capable of ground handling of landed spacecrafts so they could be refuelled on the ground: The colony was put together with 11 launches including the crew shuttle. So if a interplanetary mothership was used to haul the pieces this base could probably be sent in 2-3 shiploads. Alternative if the location for the base was somewhere with low delta-V like Duna then the 11 pieces could just fly them themselves.

If there's no requirement to closely mimic the Saturn-V stack itself then I've made an Apollo style craft using all stock parts: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/28133-0-20-Apollo-style-spacecraft-Apokee-MS

Moar struts No seriously, struts bridging the two parts being separated by decoupler will result in zero decoupling force.

No the station is moving at (someone correct me if I'm wrong) 1009m/s, there is a difference of 835m/s (did my maths wrong the first time, sorry). To get an idea how powerful an impact at 835m/s is, have a look at this video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSVfYwdGSsQ See that, but three times faster. Or alternatively two rocket sleds going 50% faster than the one in the video in a head on collision.

Static firing seems kind of pointless. You do static firing as the engine maker during the development process to get a handle on the engine. Once the engine is all tested it becomes available on the market. The space program then tells the rocket builder they want a rocket with these specification and they go out and find suitable engines and buy them to install in their rocket stages. A space agency might static fire the entire rocket stage to make sure all the integration stuff are fine and the stage don't blow itself up. But it seems like there isn't much point in KSP since we know the components will work every time. Them Kerbals test rockets much like the Soviets. Rather than testing them on test stands they just stack the rocket and fire it. If it flies then great, if it blows up then they pick up the pieces and figure out what went wrong. So rather than static firing I suggest "all-up" testing mission of unmanned version of the spacecrafts ala Apollo 4 and the N-1 launches.

How do you know KSP doesn't already take place in a Dyson Sphere and all the stars and galaxies in the sky box are not just points of light installed on the inside surface of the sphere to fool the Kerbin's into thinking there's an universe outside?

Your misconception comes from thinking that orbital velocity at KSO is the same as your "orbital" velocity on the surface of Kerbin just standing still due to Kerbain's rotation because an object in KSO is just hanging motionless overhead. In reality there's some 780m/s difference between the two. Imagine a small circle, a dot traces this circle and goes around it once every 6 hours. This is a person standing on the surface of Kerbin at the equator and he is rotation around the centre of Kerbin at 174m/s. This is Kerbin's rotational speed. Then imagine a much bigger circle. Another dot traces this circle and also goes around it every 6 hours. This is a Keostationary satellite. This satellite is most definitely not flying around at 174m/s because it makes the circle in 6 hours and its circle is much bigger than the person. This is satellite's orbital velocity is much higher than an stationary object on the equator. If you shoot a spacecraft directly up to KSO it will be still at 174m/s. If you do this in a way so that the Keostationary satellite and the spacecraft arrive at the same point in space a the same time what you'll see is the satellite slamming into the spacecraft at 780m/s, or 2808km/h, or about mach 2.3. This kind of velocity is about as fast as a bullet from a handgun and the "grab" docking is going to look pretty violent.

Maybe with the upcoming improvements to crew management we could have some different EVA suits to differentiate crew with different capabilities? So if a guy was picked as mission commander he gets a suit with red stripes. And rookies get some different markings and so on. Then we could give the original three a unique EVA suit, say a bulkier backpack to show that they pioneered space walking in the more primitive suits of the early days.