Temstar

There's no reason why a LV-N lander originally intended for the Mun can't be reused for say, Ike or the smaller Jool moons. In fact a lander like this doesn't even need an interplanetary transfer stage. With the relatively high TWR needed for landing compared to interplanetary burn it's a simple case of putting an extra LF tank and heat shield on top and you can fire it to Jool all on its own.

NSWR also has the advantage that since its propellant is water, it could be fairly easily refueled since water ice is everywhere in the solar system. That is, of course, assuming you have spare stashes of weapons grade U-235 salt on board as well as a mixing machine.

This functionality was removed. For the better in my opinion since the new MPL mechanics actually put some relevance to the passage of time, and there's not nearly enough things in game that actually care about time, the only other things that depend on time are ISRU and contract expiry.

Nah Heinlein came up with the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torchship The touch here doesn't refer to using the engine as a weapon (although it's certainly beefy enough to be used as a weapon) but rather to the fact that the ship has an engine that's unreasonably powerful: In fact in most of his books the spaceship crew are divided into two types: torchers who fly torchships and rocketeers who fly rockets (chemical or NTR). The torchships never land on planets and rely on rockets to transfer people and cargo between the torchship and the planet. Landing and taking off from a planet's surface as the above picture depicts will cause environmental catastrophe.

I design my craft for touchdown on land. Since dry landing is generally harder, if it can safely land on land it most likely can also safely land on water, therefore it's safe to land anywhere. It's like how Apollo/Orion are designed for splashdown and Soyuz is designed for dry landing. Both can survive the opposite scenario just in case they miss.

In piston engine the water is a coolant for the intake air. After the supercharge/turbocharger compress the in coming air it becomes really hot, and if you then try to mix petrol with that it can cause problem with pre-detonation. The water gets injected after forced induction and before the engine so the intake air cools down, so for a given engine and fuel octane rating you can compress the air more without pre-detonation. It's conceptually similar to Skylon's engine precooler or a normal engine intercooler, except it works on an open cycle so the cooling effect is very strong at the expensive of using up the coolant quickly.

1G acceleration for 34 hours is a honest-to-Heinlein touchship, we're talking a ship with 120km/s of delta-V in its tank. That exhaust is a weapon of mass destruction.

I'll like to add: the advantage of nuke increases dramatically when the lander is intended to be reused. Despite making the lander heavier, nuke engines potentially allow the lander to use much less propellant per trip to the surface than chemical rockets and that means much lower running cost as you need to launch fewer tankers to feed the lander.

The maximum a ship can take is about 10m/s per detonation. Above that the ship will break apart. Not to mention the people inside will be jelly.

2 Stage? As in Falcon Heavy style?

So what's going to happen when you cluster 1.25m engines on 2.5m or 3.75m tanks?

It's a non-trivial problem because centre of drag depends on AoA, particularly AoA of the fuselage. As a result the centre of drag is dynamic and subject to extreme changes during flight. In fact centre of lift depends on AoA too, in the SPH they just assume head on and level flight and give you the centre of lift based on that. But as you can see when you turn the aero overlay on the arrows will change in flight depending on AoA.

It looks like Athena II has a solid powered core stage. I'm guessing both the StarBooster 200 and Athena II have gimbaled nozzle with fairly wide gimbal range.

Curiously while researching flyback boosters I ran into this design: http://buzzaldrin.com/space-vision/rocket_science/starbooster/ I guess Buzz Aldrin and I came upon the same idea

We need a slide rule mod for KSP. Have a KER style button that toggles an onscreen slide rule window that you can slide around with the mouse to do calculations. When you upgrade tracking station to T3 the slide rule then changes from a basic one to a K&E 20" Log-log Duplex Decitrig model.

It will be hard, but it should be doable. I can think of three such designs proposed: Flyback Zenit booster for Energia II. Energia II also has a winged core stage that returns from orbit. Baikal Ariane 5 liquid flyback booster Notice something? They all have nose mounted jet engines to allow them to return to launch site. Clearly gliding alone is not going to cut it. And jet engine and it's associated jet fuel will unfortunately boost the dry weight. I did try to make this concept work in KSP, but since KSP does not allow you to control lower stages while upper stages are burning I had to change the concept to a SSTO or stage and half design and recover the boosters from orbit. Since the boosters reach orbit in my design the jet engine is no longer required as coming back from orbit with a winged booster means huge cross range capability already.

No I disagree with that sort of thinking. The idea behind rendezvous and docking can be derived from first principle, that's why Buzz Aldrin was able to write a thesis on the subject and became known as "Dr Rendezvous". Specific details relevant to each vehicle (and I mean, there's really only two things that are different: location of docking port and RCS placement) can be trivially compensated for which is the whole reason why a machine like mechjeb can handle it. Mechjeb doesn't teach you from first principle, rather it rigidly follows algorithms and encapsulates the knowledge away from you. To really get a feel for rendezvous and docking you need to either do it the old fashion way from reading books or watching instructional videos, or do it yourself and get a intuitive feel for it. Looking at mechjeb only teaches you how to mimic mechjeb's algorithm which is much worse than a human pilot.

Yes, hence the "may" part Another way to look at it is a nuclear ramjet that's circling the polar region ala Project Pluto. It's also continuously modifying its "orbit" by sucking air in at the front, heating it up in its reactor and shooting it out the back. It also uses its wings to deflect air to create upwards thrust to counter gravity. Nuclear power means it's really good at this which allows it to "orbit" at way below normal orbital velocity and way deep in the atmosphere for months. Rather extreme example right? But the idea is the same: if you use thrust to modify your trajectory constantly you can go into all sort of funny orbit.

Well I can definitely agree with that point of view. Someone need to do a "Stock cheapest payload per ton challenge". That said the economy doesn't seem that bad. I manage about $800 per ton to orbit with my large asparagus launcher and I can see development paths that will further decrease this to somewhere in the region of $600 per ton with recovery of the Mammoth ULA Vulcan style. This doesn't seem all that bad next to the best reusable rocket which is in the region of $400 per ton to orbit. I suspect the reason why asparagus cost per ton is decent (besides the obvious it uses fewer engines for a given payload) has to do with the size. By their nature they are big rockets and so there's more room for fine tuning various aspects like TWR curve, engine combination, fraction of the dry mass of the guidance package and so on.

No it's not possible in KSP, your orbit always cross the equator at two points. In real life it may be possible with fun tricks like statite, which continuously modify its orbit.

I rather doubt that. In the stock payload fraction challenge the pure vertical climb rocket with the highest payload fraction is a 7 core asparagus. If you can hit more than 26% with one or two stages then you should enter a design. Even if that was true, asparagus staging is still the better design because a lower proportion of the rocket's dry mass is engines and more of the wet mass is fuel. And we know that's good because engines are expensive and fuel is cheap.

I think mechjeb is cheating so I don't use it. And when people say on the forum they used mechjeb to do something I feel they are cheating. I have enough tact to not be in people's face about it though. But rest assured I'm silently judging you from the other side of the internet.

I did when the docking mode first came out, I don't find it any better or faster than my method, Now that SAS no longer waste nearly as much monoprob as during the beta there's even less reason to.

No I don't use both hands. At the start of the docking process I align both ships using the artificial horizon and cardinal direction as the guide and turn SAS on for both ships. Then for the remainder of the docking it's translation only.

If you use glue to improve the structural integrity then many purists would consider that cheating.