CptRichardson

TOUCHDOWN, MOTHER-- "Mommy, Mr. Jeb said a bad word!" GTO LANDING!

Tenth of the cost?

*Puts on 'iz Orky hat.* 'Ere we go, 'Ere we go, 'Ere we go! Dis time we're gonna land dis thing from all the way up!

Well, as you said, it's... not needed anymore. They've bumped up the power enough that it's not really necessary. They've reached the target mass they originally wanted to launch. No need to complicate things if they can get the same performance without it.Cross-feed would probably be more useful for increasing the mass that can be sent farther, flattening out the mass launch profile. You'd be seeing closer to 30 to 40 tons to mars, for instance, instead of 15-ish. And, with the MCT... well, look at how much the FH can launch. It'd be easier to jump up to the '100 tons to mars/ohgodwhy to LEO' step instead of incrementally stepping up.

I have a suspicion that all the talk of causality violation/time travel involved with FTL travel is basically people getting too drunk on their own cleverness. It relies on light still being magically the fastest reference frame in the universe while still being exceeded. In that case, it's no longer the fastest reference frame in the universe, and whatever you're using would be/is the 'true' reference frame. Or, to a blind person, a sniper bullet from a mile away seemingly violates causality. You're hit by the bullet before the sound reaches you. BUT, that's not true, because there is still light, even if the blind person can't interact with it properly. They can't see light. They might be able to understand that there is a heat/energy hitting them, but lack enough information to realize what's going on. Hell, FTL energy might well be a good explanation for 'dark energy'/'dark matter'. We can see the effects, see what's going on, recognize that there is something, but lack the reference frame to explain it. So yeah, almost certainly not. Lots of very weird effects, but not time travel.

Excuse me, but thirteen metric tons to Martian transfer orbit? Please excuse me while I change my brown pants for something more suitable for the occasion. That is mind-bogglingly insane. That's literally 'more power than god' grade crazy. Forget Red Dragon, we could probably land a bus on Mars with that kind of power. Hell, even the 50 metric tons to LEO is just mind-bogglingly insane, especially given that we know Falcon Heavy will fly consistently (compared to the probably soon to be canceled SLS). I'm actually rather terrified of just how over the top insane the MCT is going to be if these "NOT EVEN MY FINAL FORMS" Falcon-family rockets can actually deliver on these promises.

What I'm taking away from this is that the F9 is in fact an anime character which gets to repeatedly say "AND THIS ISN'T EVEN MY FINAL FORM" whenever someone thinks its run out of margin for improvement.

I'd actually rather see you include Simple Construction, which is basically a lot of EPL, but with most of the cruft stripped out and turns some parts into workshops through which to build.

About right. The drive imparts energy into the electrons using a quirk of physics we've known about for a bit from the flyby anomalies, which makes them try to run away to the lower energy densities and causes a thrust from conservation of momentum from the electron movement. A good portion of them return to the device as they de-excite from passing through the back wall, tricking back up to the front along the hull of the device, where they meet with new electrons and the cycle starts again. It's a really fancy ion thruster, basically.

No, not really all that crazy, or hard to scale up. Granted, at extreme power you'd probably strip electrons, but it's basically an electric sail if this is the case. Electrons on one end resonate at ultra-high frequencies, the other not so much. Electrons get bounced free of the high end, push through the low end and impart momentum in the process before getting drawn back by the electron-friendly nature of the copper and drawn down along the shell back to the UHF end. Makes sense, but is unintuitive enough to be an utter pain to comprehend.

Well, not having the Atlantic Coast Shipping Lane right freaking there and in the way would particularly help. That, and being able to go 'we told them to get out of the danger zone' and launching anyway. I doubt the rigs (whatever remains ATM) are nearly as much of an issue as idiots driving around in boats and ignoring danger zones. That alone massively eases the launch considerations, even if the number of potential inclinations available decreases.

No. Sorry. Don't believe it. SpaceX could probably pull it off (maybe even this year if they felt like being insane), but Blue Origin? They have yet to make orbit.

I'mmmm back! Anyway, finally got around to testing the latest version, and found an annoying hole in spacecraft design. Namely, I've built myself the most unholy and kerbal answer to the Dreamchaser (namely, sandwhiching a teeny-weeny Mk2 plane between two gigantic rockets to offset that whole pesky 'uneven thrust' thing, and I found on reentry that the basic jet engines... don't really cut it. Well, I say 'teeny weeny', but that really means 20 tons empty. Granted, she flies like a dream and is nearly stock-only save for a few parts from you (OMS pods, cockpit, big and teeny-weeny tricoupler), but... it's still kind of annoying to try and build a craft that will do better than 'brick' when flying back to the runway after successful orbital maneuvers.

[quote name='DarthVader'][url]https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3udj5s/looks_like_part_of_a_f9_first_stage_was_found_off/[/url] some redditors found a falcon 9 interstage off the coast of the UK.[/QUOTE] Oooh! DATA! Maybe not quite the data he was looking for, but they can still learn a lot about what the water landing did to it. It's almost certainly one of the 'soft' water test lands.

Because the US government is fickle and stupid with funding, and because it has to pass through a presidential handover. It will most likely get canned in 2017.

Fallout 4 is MUCH better about that. A lot more unique designs, much more variety in places, enemies, and ways to fight, a lot of just... well, visual polish. I can't say overall polish because the settlement system needs a lot of development still, and the companions (while each vastly more characterful than before) have issues with controlling them, but the the world is much nicer. And yeah, they've got more radio this time. Classical station with loads of songs, the song choice on the main station is much larger (borrowing from NV, FO3, and a few new ones), and even with the radio off there's a very impressive soundtrack that is quite moody and suspenseful.

See: Everything by Dmagic in his Orbital Science pack. Just all of it. Ported straight in.

Ooooooh. That will come GREATLY in handy for my designs. Mostly because of madness.

Or the object rotates, so we got another axis that had a different shape to it compared to the original form.

Whatever you call it, make sure to mention in its fluff that Val and Jeb wanted to call it the TURBOZOOMGOINATOR, to the objections of everyone else in the space center.

Easily done by the 'Lustrum Hawk' cockpit.

No... because it would badly fit with the geometry of the existing hull.

That's more because they're using unrefined designs, and because they're using less power than you put into the average lamp to test it with. BUT, for the power put in it's still twice the thrust of an equivalent ion thruster. @Suicidal Insanity: For the Mk3 inline cockpit, I might suggest doing a particularly interesting variant: An Instrument cockpit/side docking port and/or coupala-ish. A four-kerbal instrument-primary (designed with two big screens for using cameras at the front), with either a docking port placement node on either flat of the hull, or set it up with retractable shutters on as many surfaces as possible to act as a high-visibility control module for managing traffic around a large spaceplane/ship/station and/or observation. The Mk3 profile doesn't make sense to have a Mk2 style upwards blister. It would just look awkward. At the same time, with the size of the Mk3 hull it easily makes sense to have an in-line design for a command module to protect it from debris coming at the ship from the front in flight, and giving it a 360 view around the curvature of the hull would make for a unique and useful cockpit for guiding in vessels or managing kerbals on spacewalks around the ship. And, you know, look cool as hell.

Wow. You can see hints of that same bright stuff all over the place now. A pair of faint dots to the right of the main occurence in the faded crater, another set down below that set next to the edge of the image, another grouping on the crater inside a crater up and to the left of the big crater... This raises many more questions.

I--uh, may have teensy-weensy overupgraded for the game, and rebuilt my PC to be able to play Crysis by accident. So, yeah. It'll run FO4. While simulating all of KSP at the same time.