UmbralRaptor

Store because it was all that was available at the time. Also, the more manual installation process seems to have less breakage.

It's difficult to say without seeing your craft, but the acceleration is probably lower. 66 ions mass 8.25 tonnes (and depending on how you designed the craft, there may be quite a few more tonnes of batteries and/or solar panels), while the LV-N masses 2.25. So the LV-N variant is probably lighter and has a higher TWR. (Well, depending on how you chose propellant amounts)

Ion engines, RCS, and O-10s do not have thrust impingement, so it doesn't matter. They'll work fine no mater what's "in the way." For "normal" engines (at least jets, SRBs, and liquid fuel engines), it only matters if the exhaust stream is pointed at another part (in which case you get no thrust, and that part gets damaged.) If there's nothing in the F3 log, then don't worry about it.

They most likely are being hidden by filters. In the tracking station: move your mouse up to the top of the screen, and click on the various icons. One of them probably has a 3 by it.

Within a certain high ÃŽâ€V low TWR design space, the ions outperform everything. But there are only a few cases that need that much ÃŽâ€V, the engines require building smaller than most people are used to, and the solar panels are not well scaled to the size of the engines (even after the electricity requirement was reduced) Though if you're feeling silly, ion craft work as landers on lower gravity worlds.

I'm not sure what the big deal is, when expendable LFEs are so cheap* This can get 6.6 tonnes into LKO, runing you 1114√/tonne. My less trollish answer is ~2 to 4 kilofunds per tonne because I'm rarely in a position to optimize for price, and am bad about reusability. *Mk3 parts are... odd.

Your undergraduate school doesn't matter that much, as long as it has a decent physics and/or geology program. Grad school, though... Note that it's easy to get overspecialized into an area where your degree is really for teaching and research only. (Neither of which is expanding) If you want a career in industry, some form of engineering is far safer, though still not guaranteed.

Depends on details of the craft design. Given recent part buffs, 13-15% is plausible for 2 stage (and sometimes single stage) liquid fuel rockets. Single stage ones can run anywhere from ~5-15%, depending on choice of engines, tankage, and ascent profile. Mixed solid/liquid designs might well get down to or below 10%. If you go the asparagus route with 3-4 stages, I would aim for 15-20%. Turbojets make a mockery of this, with payload fractions of up to 70%.

If I'm not comfortable spending an extra few hundred a year on shoes, I'm definitely not putting over a thousand a year into a gym membership.

Pushups and situps don't require much equipment (aside perhaps from a padded floor), but running tends to burn through shoes. In principle I have a pullup bar, but the current place has no doorways that are appropriate. It's increasingly feeling like I am a(n) (astro)physics robot, with excursions into math and engineering, but not even enough $interesting_thing like gaming, SF, or martial arts to hold up a useful conversation.

Well, this was about as useful as expected. Being interesting (or at least having interesting hobbies) is expensive. Back to working on having a career, I guess.

Asparagus is widely used because it's hard to get high TWR and mass ratios in KSP, but fuel lines are easy. In real life it's the reverse.

I like them a great deal for the subsets of parts they can reveal but in some cases there's an annoying amount of setup required. And yes, I'm the one person who selected "I use the custom menus, and I don't use mods."

Write a script to do a bunch of physics simulations, or a bunch of empirical testing. There are no analytic solutions once you consider the various drag effects. Although if you *want* a few differential equations that throw in all the terms...

A simple but silly way would be by boiling water. My understanding is more of a compression than oscillation, at least at the macro scale. Though oscillations more or less make sense at the particle scale. (More or less because the density near the center is a bit high for that) polywell designs are supposed to solve this. It seems like work on it has stopped, though My limited understanding is that they've been able to get some of the shots to output enough neutrons that the pellet probably produced more energy than impacted it. It's no longer a complete failure, but the value is ambiguous, and all sorts of details of the design are orders of magnitude too slow and expensive for commercial power generation. Smoke and mirrors. I'm not optimistic about any of them, but given that Polywell and NIF seem to be failing, I guess my hopes lie with ITER now. (Nevermind the half century of tokamaks failing to produce enough power) My sarcastic response would be one of the city sized interstellar Orions. A more serious one will have to wait for a reactor that can be declared a success.

Stock solar panels do not follow the inverse square law, and are >1/3 effective at Eeloo's distance. At Jool they're ~1/2 effective.. Actual reserve when you have panels amounts to having enough charge to reach drain/max_frame_rate. The rules for minimizing jet engine flameout should also apply if you have a bunch of engines. (place a panel, then an engine, then another panel...)

Radar cross section reduction. It's optimizing for something that isn't an issue in KSP.

Since no one has mentioned it, in stock, boosters are draggy, suffering 50% more drag per unit mass than most other parts. As such, needing somewhat more ÃŽâ€V that those charts (which tend to assume all liquid designs due to their age) is unsurprising. After some playing around, I was able to get what I think is your ship into orbit. That said, what are your goals? Replacing the BACC with a pair of RT-10s that use explosive staging would likely reduce costs and enhance performance. If you're merely acquiring science from near/far kerbin space, I would lean towards an all-solid suborbital design. If you want a long term science return sat, I would skip on the materials bay and if crewed thermometer. Crew reports are adequate. Edit: ninja'd by numerbois.

You aren't throwing that many boosters at a problem until you break the 18 t mass limit, so there's a real chance of getting jet engines first at low reward settings. And of course, once you've debugged a design, it'll stay reliable...

1) A moderately advanced and highly primitive heat transfer model that looks at what parts are nearby. Spacing out the engines or having more non-engine parts (including struts) in close proximity helps reduce the heat load. lso notable is the orange tank bug where its center of mass is so far from an engine that it cannot effectively transfer heat away. 2) If they explode there's quite a bit of effectiveness lost. But as long as they don't, you get 100% performance. The orange bar filling up is more of a guideline than anything else. 3) If they explode, you'll want to throttle down slightly, use a thrust limiter, or rearrange the craft. If they don't then it doesn't matter.

Admittedly if you're careful at mission choices ultrahard modes aren't so much hard as grindy. A sounding rocket for kerbin space science contracts is notably effective if somewhat slow. Of course once you unlock panels, it's not hard to have a permanent station for that (both in Kerbin orbit and in Munar orbit). But do keep in mind the need to climb up a ~1200 rep wall to run the strategy you mentioned.

The intermediate steps don't get you extra XP. If you do a suborbital mission, than an orbital one, the kerbal gets 1 XP and then another and levels. If you skip directly to orbit, then on recovery the kerbal gets 2 XP and levels.

Yep, the Science Jr is also called the Materials Bay.

In some cases, this is a bug

The quad KS-25 is a bit expensive for the performance that it offers, but if you're throwing around payloads of that size (presumably at least 25 tonnes, and possible several hundred) I'm not sure money is *that* much of an issue. As far as efficiency goes, have you considered a KR-2L core with KD25ks or LFBs to help lift it?