SmallChange

I know there is a challenge in here, but one glance at the thread, and I knew I had to crank out some terrible Star Control 2 ships. Seriously.. That game got a good chunk of my childhood! Alright, here we go, all in their terribleness! This one is supposed to be a VUX Intruder. Here's a Druuge Mauler. It actually shoots a projectile at around 500 m/s. And by projectile, I mean a decoupler with some sepratrons glued to the inside. (Also, I didn't really want to put engines on the pod thing, but the craft wouldn't come close to flying without em.) This one is kind of cheating, but it's supposed to be an Ariloulaleelay (yeah, had to copy and paste that one) skiff. Human and Syreen ships were extra crappy.

Zephram... You really scared me there. For the past couple months, there have been 3 things that have occupied pretty much all of my free time. Seriously, 1. KSP 2.Niven and 3.TNG. Your post references all three.... I'm going to have to make sure all of your posts don't show up while I'm asleep!

Wow... Really one to talk there, pugs.

Not trying to be a wet blanket here, bloproby, but why should we spend 20+ hour on a nearly impossible challenge that the OP (you) was so excited about he couldn't even be bothered to even give it a try?

Where along the way did the flying magic man fall out of the picture?

I survived, but only just barely. I had signed up for the forums back in .8.X days, and had a whole 1 or 2 posts before taking a long break from KSP. So, pretty much the only thing that survived was my join date. I don't really care about losing the post count.. it's the reputation points that kinda bums me out.

Watch out, this thread might run afoul of the forum's "No Conspiracy Theories" rule. That being said, however, one could argue that the entire early Soviet space program could be considered a conspiracy due to it's secrecy. Though, think that rule might have been put in place to keep the Moon-Hoaxers and Nibiru-loonies off the forums.

So, here are the results of a quick, not so scientific experiment. All numbers shown are max altitude. All flights switched to max throttle at 10km. Test configuration was the Mark 1 Command Pod, one FL-T400 tank, and an LV-T45: Full throttle: 16040 Hold at 150m/s before 10km: 22694 (141% of full throttle) Keep at 100, raise to 200 (1km - 100, 7km 170 etc): 23917 (149% of full throttle) So, as you can see, the fuel savings are pretty significant. In my previous post mentioned the "rule of thumb" that I use. Anybody else have a trick?

Tried this Water Wheel recently as a proof of concepts. Worked great, cept for the part about it being pretty much unsteerable and never going over 35m/s when floored :/

My current WIP space station. One thing that I am a little proud of is that I got both of the solar arrays up in a single launch. The garbage scow looking ships are a couple of docking practice craft. Last count has 10 or 11 Kerbals, with my my homeboy Dilrod commanding the mission. Still playing with ideas of making it reconfigurable into a starship.

This is the smallest lander I've actually used. It's designed to sit on the end of the Mk 1-2 Command Pod. Able to land and take off from Minimus easily, but I recall not having enough fuel to get off of the Mun.

One of the biggest gains in performance I've had came from learning to lay off the throttle in the lower atmosphere. You'd be amazed how much fuel gets wasted from atmospheric drag, which I think increases exponentially from your speed. I'm sure my numbers are far from optimal, but the rule of thumb I go with is 100 m/s plus 10 for every km of altitude, so below 1 km keep it around 100 m/s, 150 at 5km, and 200 at 10km. After 10-12 KM I usually run pretty close to full throttle. I highly suggest following Sal's experiment. You'll be shocked at how much fuel you are wasting, especially on your higher TWR craft.

First orbit was just the other day. I'm pretty sure had I shown patience and just left our intrepid trio alone on multiple previous flights it would have been a good orbit, but for some reason I was of the mindset that either gaining altitude or losing it meant that I wasn't orbiting. It hadn't clicked that even though the altitude and velocity numbers were right, there was going to be eccentricity in the orbit that would be trading altitude for velocity and vice versa. I guess that's what I get for majoring in social science.

Awesome design. I was trying for a bit to land somewhere cool in the space center, but the subtleties of a soft landing seem to elude me. The only thing that struck me as odd about the lander module was it's impressive fuel capacity for such a small package. Strap a vanilla liquid fuel engine on there and you can go pretty darn far! Chaining a couple of those puppies together makes for a quite passable, albeit somewhat shaggy, rocket!