Temstar

Shenzhou is mostly indigenous I think. It uses the same layout as Soyuz because it's really the most sensible shape for a capsule manned spacecraft. It has 14 m^3 of habitable volume vs 5.9 m^3 of Apollo CM despite being about the same weight (not including SM for both spacecraft). Shenzhou OM is very unusual. Before Shenzhou 8 the OM is equipped with it's own solar panels, propulsion system and can stay pressurised after separation from Shenzhou RM. So basically the OM is its own tiny independent manned spacecraft and one mission even left the OM in orbit for 8 month after the rest of the ship has gone home. From Shenzhou 8 onwards the OM lost the solar panels and autonomous flight capability so it became functionally the same as a Soyuz OM, except being bigger and different shaped.

Fun fact: the original Soyuz-7K was in fact designed with a cylindrical rather than spherical orbital module: It was designed to be a part of the Soyuz circumlunar complex: So if anyone tells you it doesn't "look Soyuz enough" tell them it's a 7K design.

Didn't they say there's been too much focus on advanced features like resource mining lately in development and they're shifting instead to focus on career mode? Improved tracking station and flag sound very much like features targeting career mode to me. I highly doubt mining will be in 0.20

In the name of science let's do it! The KSP's PB-Ion Electric Propulsion System gives 4200s of Isp and consumes (correct me if wrong) 14.442E/s (or Z/s if you like) for 500N of thrust. NEXT ion thruster has 4190s Isp, drawing 6.9kW for 0.236N of thrust. In other words, if we tape 2128 NEXT thrusters together we get about the same thrust as one Kerbal B-Ion engine. All that NEXT will draw 14.683 megawatt of power. Assuming NEXT and PB-Ion are roughly equal in efficiency (clearly a shaky assumption, given the incredible TWR of a Kerbal ion engine) we know 14.442E = 14.683MW, or E = 1.02MW. What does this mean? a Giganator panel generates a maximum of more than 18MW of electricity, that's 64,800MWh per hour! The entire US generates only a bit over 1000GW, so about 60 Giganators at full power can power the entire US. a Z-500 battery holds about 34.62MWh of energy, or 124,632MJ, or about 30 ton of TNT in a 50kg package - an energy density impossible to achieve without going nuclear Conclusion: KSP ion engine is OP

We don't really know what units the energy in KSP are measured in so it's impossible to compare. I've heard of a humorous theory that the "100Z/400Z/500Z" part of the name of the batteries are not commercial part names but actually indicate their capacity in the Kerbal energy unit of "Zap". One zap being equal to the amount of electrical power required to singe an adult Kerbal. So yes, someone need to work out 1zap = ?kWh

Debris, particularly debris cloud created from spent boosters blowing up is a serious problem in real life so I imagine doing the same in the upcoming career mode would incur some kind of penalty. Never mind the fact that docking is hard enough without also having do a Han Solo at the same time dodging spent stages around your station. So I design launch vehicle with some kind of engineering to make sure all rocket stages end up on suborbital trajectory. To test this I need debris setting to be on.

Ares I is a whole nother can of worms. It was suppose to be cheap because it reused shuttle tech. But it turns out that to make it work you'll have to change every single part of it so nothing of it resembled the space shuttle stack in the end: five segment SRB rather than shuttle's four, plus it had different grain design, different casing, different nozzle, basically different everything from the shuttle SRB except the basic shape completely new J-2X engine have to be developed for the 2nd stage, rather than say reusing RL-10 2nd stage's fuel tank is suppose to be based on the ET, only it's actually different size and had a common bulkhead rather an intertank structure. The only thing that it kept from the ET was the spray on foam insulation. So NASA looked at this and thought "so we're building a whole new first stage, a whole new second stage, a new spacecraft and a new LES for the spacecraft". Everything about it is new and there's nothing really "shuttle derived" about it. So when it's over budget and behind schedule because it's running into all these unforeseen problems caused by using only solid for first stage for a man-rated launcher (never attempted before), NASA did the wise thing and pull the plug.

The secret is asparagus staging - without it your launch vehicle will quickly balloon to unwieldy size. Aside from that I'm an advocate of clustering 1.25m engines, particular in conjunction with asparagus staging and particularly for the core stage of an asparagus staging rocket where its high Isp really becomes important given the very long burn time of a core stage. Putting the above into practice I built the Zenith rocket family:

It's pretty uneasy to undock, you just go to each docking port and undock them in turn. Once the last port is undocked the two crafts separate. Docking ports that are undocked but brushing against each other do not automatically attempt to dock again because they're in this "undocked" state rather than "ready to dock" state. To reset docking ports to the ready state you either have to back the two craft away past a certain distance or go to tracking station and come back.

This? You need Subassembly Saver / Loader to build this kind of custom part.

I think the trick to this will be a rover/mobile launch pad. Land near an ocean, drive into the water, take the sample then drive uphill to a 6km+ mountain top for the launch back home.

I love the look of the S2 and S2 wide body parts but I feel there isn't enough of them for me to build my dream spaceplane. I think the following parts would be really useful: thin tanks for LF, LFO and RCS for S2 and S2 wide body, just like the Mk3 counterparts S2 wide body tri-coupler - instead of an adaptor to go from S2 wide to S2 (but without the intake), you could have a tri-couper where the two sides end in protrusions with a node hiding inside on each side while the centre body tapers down to a S2. We can then hide engines inside the side protrusion for that sleek inline intake -> engine look. For those who just want a S2 wide to S2 adaptor you could then make a wedge piece that can fit into the side node which gives a seamless connection back to a S2 S2 wide body crew tank - cos that's why you have wide body right? Two aisle for faster in flight meal service inline docking port - the main reason why I want them is I don't want to stick the stock docking port on that sleek fuselage and ruin the good looks. But rather than having another fuselage piece dedicated for this maybe something could be done about those cargo bays? Perhaps some kind of kit that fit inside a cargo bay that will extend out a docking port when doors are open?

I love the look of the S2 and S2 wide body parts but I feel there isn't enough of them for me to build my dream spaceplane. I think the following parts would be really useful: thin tanks for LF, LFO and RCS for S2 and S2 wide body, just like the Mk3 counterparts S2 wide body tri-coupler - instead of an adaptor to go from S2 wide to S2 (but without the intake), you could have a tri-couper where the two sides end in protrusions with a node hiding inside on each side while the centre body tapers down to a S2. We can then hide engines inside the side protrusion for that sleek inline intake -> engine look. For those who just want a S2 wide to S2 adaptor you could then make a wedge piece that can fit into the side node which gives a seamless connection back to a S2 S2 wide body crew tank - cos that's why you have wide body right? Two aisle for faster in flight meal service inline docking port - the main reason why I want them is I don't want to stick the stock docking port on that sleek fuselage and ruin the good looks. But rather than having another fuselage piece dedicated for this maybe something could be done about those cargo bays? Perhaps some kind of kit that fit inside a cargo bay that will extend out a docking port when doors are open?

Aerospikes are pretty bad for spaceplanes too, with the possible exception of the few and far in between "pure rocket" SSTOs. Most SSTOs these days can climb to 20km+ on their jets, by which point the air is so thin rocket engine Isp are pretty much their vacIsp anyway so aerospike's high atmIsp is no advantage. That said, if we compare aerospike to three LV-909s for vacuum operation, we get same weight, same Isp, same low profile but 25kN more thrust. So in the rare event that you're building some kind of huge Mun lander that need three LV-909 engines (or a poodle), consider replacing them with an aerospike and launch the lander upside down on the top of the rocket instead. That and Eve return vehicles, not only because aerospike can get 388s inside that 5atm atmosphere, but also because the engine is a 0.2 low drag part. Only downside is that it's low drag moves your centre of drag up, which makes the rockets a lot harder to control.

Switch to docking mode and use translation only controls, that way you don't send any pitch/yaw/roll command when you drive. See picture for example:

Oh I thought of that too. Those sepratrons double as retro-rockets to slow the core stage down upon payload release so that it falls back on Kerbin on a sub-orbital trajectory.

Every manned space program needs at the very minimum a manned spacecraft. And unless we're dealing with the very earliest days of a space program we're talking about a spacecraft that could at the very least hold multiple crew members, can dock and can perform some orbital manoeuvres and then a re-entry. In real life we currently have Soyuz, Shenzhou and Dragon (kinda sorta) in service with Orion, CST100 and PPTS in development along with a few spaceplanes. Given the importance and ubiquity of this piece of hardware I thought we should a thread dedicated to it. So show us the space taxi your space program is based on and tell us a little bit about it. We're bound to pick up some tricks from each other. I'll start. I have three manned spacecraft I commonly use. The one I use this most is this: Crew Excursion Vehicle Demeter II 800L of bipropellant for 1442m of delta-V 240L of monopropellant two solar panels to support the electrical system for probe core service propulsion system made up of two LV-909 Like any good space taxi its got a LES system that can save the spacecraft and crew during all stages of descent despite using SRBs at lift off (for cheaper launch cost): When abort is triggered the following happens: launch vehicle liquid fuelled engine shutdown core stage retro-rocket fire deploy SRB recovery chute as drag chute to slow the booster down (in the event of an abort before SRB jettison). The SRB is not decoupled from the rocket itself since the dead weight of the rocket serve as ballast to slow the SRBs down emergency separation between spacecraft and rocket LES abort motor fire Spacecraft SM engine fire LES tower jettison after gravity turn. Two Demeters docked with my Munar propellant depot.

Inverted rockets are no more stable than conventional layout rockets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendulum_rocket_fallacy

When you load a subassembly with staging already setup it merges the existing stages on the payload with the stages in the subassembly according to stage number. To over come this what you can do is insert x number of empty stages in the Zenith model you want ABOVE all the existing stages, then save that as a subassembly before loading it to payload.

What the, that's a lot of cool stuff you have crammed inside that capsule, I'm afraid I might have to steal that idea. I take it the capsule's engines are Rockomax 24-77?

Oh, so it lands tail first on pure rocket thrust? It's a pretty good idea in KSP but would be hard to come up with a heat shield solution in real life to be able to get the whole thing to survive re-entry. I have three space taxies I use in my space program. Demeter is the "middle of the road" one of the three with 1442m/s delta-V, used for general purpose missions with in Kerbin SOI, similar to Orion. For very large missions like Apollo style landings or Interplanetary trips I use the CEV Apokee IV with high TWR SM and 2117m/s of delta-V: Here it is integrated into the Apokee Munar Sortie stack: So this is like my take on a Mars capable version of Orion. For cases where I only need to go up to LKO to bring crew back (station, interplanetary ships coming back, etc) I use a light weight Crew Return Craft Dragonfly (ala SpaceX's Dragon) with 542m/s of delta-V: You can see a Dragonfly docked to Olympus II in some of the screenshots.

Rocket nozzles actually make pretty good heat shields since they are already designed to handle high pressure high temperature gases. If you have a look at the Falcon 9 grasshopper concept: No heat shield is required for the first stage at all.

You could just load up the particular Zenith rocket with the proofing payload you're interested in and have a look at the fuel lines.

Might as well post mine: Not very useful though. It carries up a lot of fuel to orbit instead of something useful like say passengers. If only we can get some 1.25m, Mk2 and Mk3 fuselage shaped crew tanks.

That's the Radioisotope thermoelectric generator. It's a vital part for rover building as it provides some power day and night independent of the solar panels. It's under the utility tab: