Ziff

What now?! YOU get some rep points. And YOU get some rep points. EVERYONE GETS REP POINTS.

I am listening to this until release. My neighbors be damned!

90 pages is a lot when you view 50 posts per page.

This type of problem is typically a floating point error issue that occurs when timewarping across the intercept node. Always slow down to 1x time at the intercept, it is much more accurate that way.

Not at all! Glad to see another fellow Spaceman Spiff fan.

I'm out of popcorn. I'll come back later to see how this ends.

I didn't miss your point at all. I was just pointing out to the OP who is asking about spaceplanes to begin with. Perhaps he is not aware that it's possible to create an SSTO capable of flying from Kerbin to Lathe, landing, and returning back. All without staging. It also depends on what your definition of "efficient" is. If efficient means saving money (which is what it always means to me, now) then you're going to want to take a SSTO along anytime you plan on returning to Kerbin. Or some sort of reusable lander. On my Duna missions I typically launch 2 SSTOs to my orbital station. 1 carries a small transfer stage, the other carries the Duna lander. The lander and transfer dock in orbit, go to Duna, lander does it's thing and rendezvous back with the transfer stage. Both go back to Kerbin, and the SSTOs can land them again. All reusable, but the smaller craft are definitely designed specifically for the mission. Sorry, I was tired and misspoke. There is a mod that adds engines that are capable of using the other non oxygen or low oxygen gasses of Duna and Eve. It doesn't add oxygen to their atmospheres, and I'm not sure if those engines would function on Kerbin or if they have a switch mode on them or what. I'll have to find it.

Squad hasn't even gotten to optimizing the game yet. Maybe we can hold off on this conversation for a little while. While I would love to see more x64 support, I don't think Squad has reached a point where the game is being completely hobbled by the memory issues of 32bit.

And yet millions of people get on board airliners every day that are equipped with escape caps- er.. parach- er.. dang.

It depends on where you are going. Take a spaceplane to Lathe for instance, it has an atmosphere to run those air breathing engines. I think there is a mod that adds atmosphere to Duna and Eve as well, which makes certain designs viable on those planets as well.

Yes yes, I said planned when I meant theoretical/proposed. It may be unlikely to fly but that's not the point. The point is , MSTOs will always be the most efficient way to get to space if we don't try to build something better. They're only the best right now because it's the only option we have. I agree that it's an investment and that the problem is governments investing the money don't see an immediate need or return on that investment. They've got no problem spending billions and billions just to be prepared to kill each other though. There may not be a market right now, but that's because the cost is ridiculous. If the cost was reduced to be affordable you would have all kinds of people itching to go to space for the tourism. See the Earth from the heavens! Get engaged with the most beautiful backdrop ever created! Touch the skies and get closer to God so he can hear your prayers! (For those religious minded folk) Right now space tourism is resting on the hands of the very few and very wealthy. If we were less interested in developing armies and weapons to kill each other, and more interested in exploring and developing the research and technology for space travel, then we might be looking at more programs that would reduce space costs and make space tourism more viable for the average person and there would actually be a return on those investments. It's all conjecture really. Until some unstoppable global pandemic comes along, or some unavoidable catastrophe (Pick your favorite world ending movie here!) and then you'll hear people clamoring, screaming, and crying as to why we never developed low cost ways to get the hell off this rock.

Jumping the gun, are we?

I would take a guess that your Mun Satellite has a dish pointed at the Active Vessel, and so when you control the Long Range Kerbin satellite, it points at your craft and has a connection. When you control the satellite around the Mun, that craft would require a dish to be pointed at your Long Range Kerbin satellite. Make sure that both satellites have one dish pointing directly at each other.

The ancient mercury-atlas was an ICBM capable of delivering a payload of about 3,000lbs to orbit. The planned Skylon SSTO is capable of delivering 33,000lbs to orbit, and is reusable. 10x the payload and reusable hardly counts as "sucking at launching stuff". Again, the proposed Skylon's payload would be more than even the Falcon-9. The correct term is HTOL SSTO (Horizontal Take Off-Landing, Single Stage to Orbit). There are also reusable spaceplanes that would not be SSTO, such as the Space Shuttle Orbiter. It was certainly a reusable spaceplane but by no means was it an SSTO. When we are talking about efficiency in space programs what we are really talking about money. MSTOs aren't efficient when directly compared to theoretical SSTOs. MSTO stages have to be recovered and refurbished before they can be reused. For example, the Space Shuttle solid rocket boosters were often recovered and reused. However, over 5000 (5000!!!!) parts were refurbished in EACH booster. That inherent cost is not efficient. The Falcon-9 weighs 557 tons. The proposed Skylon has a weight of 303 tons, and has a slightly higher payload than the Falcon-9. This is the real reason. The cost associated with developing the technology for these HTOL SSTOs is seen as wasteful, unnecessary, and there is little to no interest in space anymore. The US Defense budget is over 700 BILLION dollars, yearly. The entire 50+ year running budget for NASA totals about 800 Billion. Think about that for a second. The US spends almost as much money, EVERY YEAR, on it's military, as it has on NASA's entire space program since it was founded 56 years ago. If we reversed those numbers we would have had HTOL SSTOs about 25 years ago.

Reuse-ability. It may not make any difference in your science playthrough, but it can make a huge difference in Career mode. A properly engineered SSTO spaceplane allows you to launch, perform a mission, and land back at KSC. This allows you to recover your entire craft for nearly the full amount it cost. You only lose money on the fuel. When rockets start costing $100,000+, and 95% of it gets dumped into atmosphere to burn up, spaceplanes can be a major savings that allows you to spend your money on other things. This will become more important in 0.90 when we have to spend funds on increasing the tech level of our buildings. Fact: If you want to be monetarily efficient you need to recover as much of your craft as possible. SSTO Spaceplanes win here, hands down. They aren't difficult to build, they are difficult to learn to build. There is a difference. Just like it took you time to learn the rocket equation and understand dV and TWR and other tidbits, the same goes for spaceplanes. Once you have the scientific understand you can easily knock together a bunch of spaceplanes. There are several mods that make building spaceplanes easier as well. I actually use the RCS Build Aid mod to see my center of mass with/without fuel. This lets me balance as I build so I never have to worry about fuel movement. Not true. The stock RAPIER and many other engines from other mods have a "Switch mode" feature that allows you to go from buring liquid fuel/air to liquid fuel/oxygen. Also, requiring two different types of engines isn't necessarily bad. It doesn't take much to finalize your orbit and you don't really need a high TWR for orbital maneuvers. You don't have to add separate tanks, they burn the same liquid fuel as rocket engines. If you design it correctly you don't need to add additional tanks. Often what I do is figure out how much dV I need for my rocket engines to complete my mission. Then I build a plane and if I have too much rocket fuel I just pull out some oxidizer. The remaining liquid fuel is now extra fuel for my atmospheric engines.

What exactly is going on with this craft. How'd you make the wings fold in like that?

There really isn't much sense in making these things work with the x64 version until Squad starts making x64 more stable. You said "From my personal experience it doesn't crash much" , heck , in my experience I can barely get the KSP x64 version to run for more than an hour or two without crashing, with no mods, on a $3000 gaming rig I built that runs everything else on the planet without any issues.

What is the estimated cost of this project?

The key to this is that Kerbals can take data from experiments and store them in a command pod, one experiment type per biome you explore. You land a pod with a Kerbal, get your EVA and Crew reports, transmit those back. Take your surface sample, goo sample, materials sample, temp readings, ect.. Then fly that lander back and dock. Have the kerbal get out and 'Take Data' from each experiment, then go to the command pod and get back in. All that data will get stored there for FULL science value. A science lab can reset those experiments now that you've taken the data from them, but it requires two kerbals to operate so keep that in mind. I run a lander for this that has 2 materials and 2 goo, and 2 landing pods. This way 2 kerbals can collect separate samples and store them in separate pods. (Since you can't store more than one experiment of the same type from the same biome.) When I dock back to the science lab, One sample goes into the lab , gets processed , and then transmitted to Kerbin. The second sample gets put directly into the other command pod for returning later for full science value.

I have never tracked a single asteroid and never had one show up on the map. It's really that simple, no need to lower their spawn rate.

I am sure both camps will be satisfied after the game is feature complete and all the stock parts are implemented. It's really difficult to balance the game until everything is done.

Certain parts like ladders and the handrails make sense to be massless. It would suck to have to balance a craft with useless rails on the opposite side just to balance the center of mass. It would take away from the design look as well. As for the batteries, that's probably just something that was overlooked.

That doesn't answer any of my questions. Wait, why did you even bother to post this exact same thread again? There is no reason for this thread when you already have this one -> http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/75324-Mysterious-Blue-Dot You shouldn't create multiple threads for the same issue.

Apparently you've never heard of Michael Bay. The man puts action above story telling and has been quite successful with it.

Same as Red Iron Crown. Landing on the Mun when it first came out was a huge challenge because we didn't have landing gear. It's serious business landing on just an engine or the tips of winglets.