Corona688

Best engine all around: The swivel. It unlocks early, generates power, vectors, has enough thrust for lift-off, and is efficient enough for orbital stuff. The only other engine even close is its unvectored twin. Best engine by weight: The "spark" engine. Only a few bigger, stranger engines can beat its thrust-weight ratio. It's not bad efficiency-wise either. And this is after it was nerfed. Best engine by efficiency: The terrier(and the poodle, its rockomax-sized clone). For long burns out of atmosphere it's hard to do better. (I'm not considering weird things like NERVA or ion.) Best engine by compactness: RCS thruster. Nothing else lets you build self-guided probes quite as tiny. NERVA and ion are only good for interplanetary burns, their super high efficiency is hard to make useful otherwise. All just my opinion of course.

I'd argue that the mk3 cockpit weighs too little. As I recall it, the mk1-2 weighs so much because of its insane impact resistance. They bumped its weight up and up until re-entering without a parachute stopped being survivable. The mk3 cockpit also has much less drag, though, which also makes re-entering without a parachute less practical. It might balance after a fashion. Not sure. They both have impact resistance over 100 miles per hour. That's crazy! Given airbags, seat belts, and crumple zones, you might hope to survive that sort of car crash, but your car certainly wouldn't.

Nothing wrong with asparagus + sustainer engine. Cool. Are aerodynamics still calculated per-part instead of some sort of cross-section? Because large asparagus things were always incredibly draggy.

If that were an aircraft, it'd be a drop-tank. So, drop-tank. Why not use the radial engines, so you can stage fuel tanks below them?

So, an ion engine which depends on liquid fuel? That's a bit of a waste. With enough solar panels, it could keep going long after the NERVA's are exhausted.

Well, nuts. Though I'm not surprised. They always want to do that but it's hard enough to make welds which hold liquid gases, let alone a self-sealing quick-release mechanism.

When your stages are all mainsails, that's a lot of big engines being wasted! Asparagus let me throw away more tanks than engines. It also let me control more conveniently and exactly when staging happened, just by making the side pods shorter or higher. Also, the rocket equation is a tyrant and no design can really be "converted" that easily. A stacked design blindly converted to asparagus will end up under-engined, requiring more fuel more engines to carry the fuel, I don't know why she swallowed the fly, perhaps she'll die.

That's exactly what I thought. Until they nerfed the little red engines, I could make orbit with two of them and the lander engine -- but only in an asparagus arrangement. With that little thrust, it was a fine line between being able to make orbit and being able to lift off at all. Mathematically speaking, you can balance things kind of like asparagus by making your outer stages smaller and moving more fuel tanks into the core -- but the higher you go, the more dead-weight empty tanks the core must carry. Stacking stage atop stage lets you ditch empty tanks, but then you carry dormant engines instead, which amount to literal tons of dead weight until those engines finally become available. Asparagus lets you do both -- get rid of unneeded engines and empty fuel tanks simultaneously, without forcing you to carry any engines which don't contribute thrust. In real life, of course, asparagus is very difficult, you can't just pipe lox around like so much beer from keg to tap. All the same I bet it'll happen sooner or later. The benefits are obvious. [edit] Actually, it has been done actually, hasn't it -- in the Space Shuttle. The external tank didn't have its own rockets, but otherwise the idea is similar. Not that the space shuttle is any example of great efficiency, but much like many monstrosities here, the wondeer is that it managed to orbit at all.

Is "asparagus" just a synonym for "wide", these days? As I understand the term, my smallest and most efficient rockets are generally asparagus. Even my mammoth superlifter got smaller when I converted it from traditional to asparagus staging, needing to discard fewer engines on the way up. Of course, people can and do use this principle to go even heavier and larger, but asparagus certainly doesn't force you to do that.

Another oldie. The bottom stage went up. The top stage did not.

"KSP physics" made me LOL. That's... impressive in a way, but your super mini mars lander? Imagine if you'd made that entire gigantic craft at the start, out of JUST those. How many mars landings could you have made then? Dozens?

That pic was the split second before the solar cells shattered, right?

OK Laythe, that is a screenshot to do Michael Bay proud. Oh, one more time: This was way back in 0.8.x when the stage editor lied. I built a massive mis-staged rocket and the top stage lit first, destroying everything beneath it. Hitting space caused a massive explosion which all but froze the game for several seconds, during which it showed nothing but a 1FPS slideshow of atomic flame. When it was all over, the orbiter stage was just kind of hovering there. Everything else was gone. I landed it.

Childlike optimism.

Perhaps the magic boulder is a piece of Pol, ejected from some primordial impact and lurking in the solar system forevermore, hunting for the rest of its body.

Right now I'm struggling with science and getting my astronauts trained. I suspect I'll have to cook up a training routine / route for them unless I just want to cope with their basic abilities forever.

I was sending Bob to the north pole for science reasons, and his lander decided it wasn't stable going heat-shield first. I had to leave the engine section, which had fins, still attached on re-entry and force the entire craft to tumble to spread out the re-entry heat enough nothing important exploded.

My largest to date is the Jaekelopterous 3 superlifter, I probably won't build this big again: Six FULL orange tanks and change to LKO with 249 partsand zero mods. Original thread: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/52769-jaekelopterus-heavy-lifter/ Part file is there if you want it, but is going to be mundo outdated by now and may no longer work.

As wide and flat as it is already, I wonder if the landing legs are really needed. If you stack all your instruments beside the cockpit, you don't have to let go of the ladder to retrieve data during a spacewalk.

You can literally see why its happening -- just look at it! The shape of the 3 man cockpit isn't symmetric in that direction, your cockpit attaches to the "left", as pic #1 shows it. This isn't a bug, just the way the 3 man cockpit is built. Put the 3-man inline cockpit behind it instead.

Oh... Well, you might be able to scrape out a little more oxidizer by taking off with less fuel. The decreased weight should in theory allow you to get farther on less rocket thrust, but it'd be a fine line. You could spend longer in air-breathing mode for much the same effect.

A couple epic spacewalks later Skylab has a full complement and I am free to deorbit this empty, obsolete station: ...managed to re-enter without damage by sliding sideways the entire way. Fortunately it only hit the ocean.

If you can get those engines pointed perfectly parallel that will save some fuel. Right now they're wasting some fuel trying to tear your wings off your plane. My space station received an impromptu upgrade of solar power and battery packs as I'd vastly underestimated how much the science lab needs. Now he can get to work.

You're not exactly wrong, but... svchost is a container process which windows uses to run a lot of other things. What it's actually doing is seldom obvious because they run as the name svchost, rather than -- for example -- audiosrv, dhcp, wlansvc, or the 10 million other things it's used for including printer queues. One person solved svchost problems by messing with windows update. Another did so by reinstalling their printer drivers. etc. If you don't know which svchost you killed, it could be really worthwhile to find out. It doesn't have to be mysterious, and sometimes isn't even Windows screwing up at all but just something someone installed somewhere along the line which happens to use svchost to launch it. One way

svchost is used for almost everything. Your problem with it is almost guaranteed not to be the same as his. When you catch it in the act, you need to dig deeper and find out what svchost is actually running. How to do this depends on your version of windows but some versions of task manager let you peek.