RoboRay

If you are forced to run your engines at greatly reduced throttle all the way up to prevent dangerously excessive acceleration, your engines are simply too big for the mass they are pushing. Use smaller engines, or fewer engines, or boost a bigger payload! Or, you may be able to keep the LV the way it is and change your launch-profile a bit for the best of both worlds... On a couple of my really big launchers that experienced some structural failures at the "6km resets", I've started throttling back as I approach 6k and 12k, much like the space shuttle throttled back when passing Max Q, then throttling back up after passing the danger point.

That would call for a seven-day release schedule, too!

Those fins in the middle probably aren't doing anything useful. They can control roll from there, but they need to be further toward one end to handle pitch and yaw. Maybe spread the SRBs wider so you can put the fin in between them, at the base? You may also want to tie all of the SRBs together with struts, not just the pair on each big tank. And maybe add struts from the outside top of the big tanks all the way up to the base of the command capsule to reduce wobble?

That looks amazing.

Yeah, I ran into the lack of aerobraking for debris early on... I left a bunch of spent stages in orbits that dipped down to 40km, expecting them to eventually decay and clean themselves up, but they just kept on looping round and round forever. I'd like to see the auto-remove height for debris raised to 40km or so, as that's about the point where aerobraking begins to become significant, anyway.

If the air-breathing motors won't work due to the lack of oxygen in the air, maybe we'll get an alternate fuel that will work. Hydrazine burns nicely in CO2, for example.

I'm thinking any visit to Eve, at least with stock parts, is going to involve aerocapture for orbital insertions and probably repeated aerobraking passes to lower apoev, then a burn to raise periev out of the atmosphere if you intend to remain in orbit.

Well, since you bring it back up again... You can either compress it or you can't. If you can, all the effects of that compression are going to be reversed when the source of the compression is removed. It's not going to compress and then just stay compressed. Uh, no. Zero G will simply not cause liquid water to evaporate. (If you are referring to being outside the spacecraft in a vacuum, that would be different, but it's the changes to the vapor pressure causing that, not the absence of relative gravitational acceleration.) But ok, as the mod has said, this is not the thread for elementary physics, so I'll just let it go.

The Earth's atmosphere is a gas, not a liquid. They are both fluids, yes, but compressibility is a defining characteristic about how they differ. You can compress gasses. You cannot compress liquids. The pressure increases with ocean depth, yes. But not the density. If the water density increased, submarines would find it pretty much impossible to maintain neutral buoyancy, for example.

If gravity (and the pressure it exerted) compressed liquids, every drinking water container carried into space would either explode or become a projectile when opened.

Right. If you could compress liquids, hydraulics wouldn't work.

No, the lack of liquid water on the moon is not due to the lessened gravity. The water is mainly a vapor because of the higher temperatures (in sunlit areas) and incredibly low vapor pressure (due to the lack of an atmosphere). The higher atmospheric pressure exerted on the surface will increase the vapor pressure (or boiling point) but it will definitely not compress the water and increase it's density.

Beautiful.

Flight Engineer looks like just what I need... I don't want to install MechJeb because the automation it provides might prove too tempting to not use it.

Oh, this looks very interesting! I play completely stock, for the challenge, but have been considering installing MechJeb just for the additional (and rather critical) data it provides. However, I was afraid that the lure of using the automation it also provides might be too tempting. This gives me exactly what I want... just the data, and it's entirely up to me to make proper use of it.

Not at all true. They are not as good in an ambient atmosphere as in vacuum, but are still at least as good as most alternatives.

There's a huge difference between a craft powered by a nuclear RTG and a craft propelled by a nuclear rocket. The first one sits there quietly, producing a small amount of heat which is used to produce electricity for operating the onboard systems. The second one blasts large amounts of radioactive reaction-mass out of the craft. Which if you do it in an atmosphere, is kind of bad for the inhabitants.