DoctorEvo

It also multiplies the total force available from the SASs. On my larger designs where the standard command pod lacks sufficient control authority to prevent a ballistic gravity turn into the ground upon launch, I often find myself resorting to several SASs on lower stages (but still as few as I can get away with). Note that this is not due to instability - I try to remedy that issue by shuffling parts around and adding winglets, if the problem arises - but due simply to the fact that I no longer have sufficient authority to STEER the ship anymore (especially in view of its massive positive stability).

We need to make some engines to go with this. Multiple engine types (pressure-fed, gas-generator, staged-combustion...) of varying efficiencies could be simulated by tweaking the fuel consumption parameters. Here, check out what I made in Sketchup: If I can figure out how to get it in-game, then configure it with the parameters you outlined in the other thread, it should be directly compatible with these fuel tanks, correct?

I downloaded Sketchup 8 (free), and it APPARENTLY includes a .dae exporter. I don't know what to DO with the mesh I make, but I know I can get a .dae file out of it.

Well, that was quick. I guess the only way to improve on that is to land without BREAKING anything (as in structural failures, not explosions).

You BE the bigger man, man! Well, if persistence is implemented by the time the Mun is created, then I personally would prefer it to have an orbital period of 1/3 that of Earth's moon, just like LKO seems to compare to LEO. That puts it at about 9 days, or a semimajor axis of about 39 megameters (~1/10th that of the Moon). As a side-note, a Munar Transfer should take about a day by this standard. If you wanna make the Mun the same angular size as Earth's Moon from Kearth, then once again it's a factor of 10 smaller than its real-world analogue... And finally, it should have enough mass to give objects in Low Munar Orbit a period of roughly 45 minutes, in 1/3 proportion to the 2-hour period of a typical Low Lunar Orbit. But that's just my idea of what would be appropriate. And Kearth is the size of a small Moon, so what of it?

So, how many stacks would it take to carry a 3xLFT+1xLFE to orbit, so you could SSTO twice in a row?

Me neither.

Perhaps he's 14 Jovian years old.

It's because I mentioned the Greek letter mu.

It says something about suits I think. Space agencies and their finnicky dress codes... :

If all you're trying to make is a short-range missile, you shouldn't need all that much propellant anyways... (well, by rocketry standards, that is). But if you're making new parts anyways, the first thing you should try is cutting back on drag. Oh, and I should probably have mentioned... most real missiles have engines that only burn for 2-4 seconds. Once the initial boost phase is over, mass is constant. Every Sidewinder ever made used proportional navigation. However, up until about the AIM-9L (I think), a tail-aspect firing position was necessary because the seeker wasn't sensitive enough for frontal-aspect firing. That doesn't mean the older ones used a tail-chasing pursuit algorithm, though.

I'm not sure you'd be able to feel the difference through the pumpkin suit anyways.

Hmm, that's a good point. How did I miss that? Well, if you're trying to maintain level-flight rather than a straight line, you COULD design an aircraft that had good positive-stability characteristics and roughly the proper amount of thrust to maintain level flight. I've attempted this, but not much can be done with stock winglets. Some .cfg editing could potentially make it viable though.

But, you see, that's the thing - lunar transfer IS a rendezvous. You're rendezvousing with the moon. It's a rendezvous, with a catch - pretty much every step of rendezvous must be done during or before the transfer, which is only half-an-orbit long. Also, there's the whole issue of your target having its own gravity well... Plane changes are - in one form or another - a necessary part of a lunar transfer as well. There are ways you can perform a transfer that don't necessarily require you to align planes with the moon until you get there, but these are actually even HARDER to set up than a normal plane alignment. But that's not even the hard part. The hard part is syncing your transfer with the moon, so that you don't end up at the right altitude but the opposite side of the planet from the moon. Of course, all of this suddenly gets easier when you have an obscenely excessive amount of delta-V to work with. The Buck Rogers method - simply pointing towards your target and blasting there as fast as you can - becomes a viable option. In that particular case, I could see lunar transfer becoming easier than rendezvous - but only because your target is so much bigger.

If you activate the SAS BEFORE firing, it should seek the heading you activated it at (unless it self-disables upon release). And your missile may fly with a nose-up attitude, but so will your launch platform. Adjust weight, and number and type of winglets on the missile to tune how it tracks until it matches the launch platform's flight attitude.

Yeah... But if you look at any Western rocket family and compare it to the R-7 family, the difference is night and day. To the West, the rocket doesn't deserve to be renamed until it's had a complete ground-up redesign. The diversity within the R-7 family is on-par with (and even that's being overly fair) the diversity amongst the different variants of the original SM-65-based Atlas rockets (ignoring the later Atlas I-V redesigns). Yeah, the Russian's haven't fully man-rated a single rocket that wasn't based on the R-7. No, Korolev was still in charge during the design process of Soyuz. He died before Soyuz-1 though, and in some ways it seems like everything suddenly fell apart in his absence. Yeah... honestly, I think Korolev was by far the better rocket designer. Von Braun's conservatism was almost crippling during the Sputnik era... he just didn't want to let go of Redstone and accept the developments of other American and paperclip'd rocket scientists. Korolev was all over ideas like trying alternative fuels and the radical new engines Glushko was cranking out. Glushko was brilliant, but he was in some ways the most hard-headed and defiant of the three. He was insistent that hypergols were the greatest thing on planet Earth, and refused to accept LH2 as a viable propellant until the end of his days. This single issue was enough to tear their Moon project to pieces. Korolev, with his gulag-weakened body, would've been the first to go. But from then on, the battle between Von Braun and Glushko - between a former Nazi who used to run a slave camp; and a cold, ruthless Russian who willingly denounced his co-workers and competitors as counterrevolutionaries - would be quite fierce indeed.

Spaces, huh? This smells like wikipedia cut&paste.

Yeah, with such limited instrumentation, a brick-wall atmosphere, and effectively no option of a controlled lifting reentry, I prefer to use much shorter, steeper deorbit profiles. If I'm trying to hit the launchpad and I have enough delta-V left, I won't deorbit until I can actually SEE it. My FURTHEST landing using this method was on that little peninsula just to the North - Barely out of sight from the space center. Ideally, a full Hohmann transfer to the upper atmosphere is the most EFFICIENT deorbit, but it's not the most accurate and you shouldn't be caring about 'wasting' propellant at the end of your mission anyways unless that's literally all you have left.

Should be half the orbital period, which can be determined from the semimajor axis, which can be determined by averaging your apsis (from the center of Kearth, not the surface) and Periapsis. Here's the formula I came up with: Ttransfer = 3.14sqrt(a3/u), Where 'u' (because Greek letters like 'mu' aren't recognized) is Kearth's gravitational parameter (5.29x1022 km3/s2) and 'a' is the semimajor axis.

SAS modules, my equestrian friend. SAS modules.

More importantly, tell us how you'll set it up to use proportional navigation instead of that obsolete tail-chasing nonsense.

Haha. They're not light-seconds, they're 1337-seconds!! Erm...? It'd be MUCH closer for a 24-hour period. Orbital velocities are much slower around Kearth than Earth. For a Kerbostationary orbit to maintain the same distance above the ground as GSO, Kerbin would have to spin at the ponderous rate of once per 203.9 hours.

It really hasn't evolved much at all... The biggest developments have been changing the engines, and development of Fregat as an upper stage. Oh, and I guess the change of fuels in Soyuz-U2 was pretty significant as well, but they still reverted back to RP-1 anyways. To suggest that any rocket derived from the almighty R-7 would be a disgrace to Korolev's name. And where the heck did you get the idea that Glushko designed the Proton? That's like saying Von Braun designed Atlas, or that Thiel designed the V-2. Glushko didn't really design any rockets himself - though he did build some marvelous engines for them. Probably... nah, I'm sorry, but that's just TOO absurd of a scenario for me to even imagine. And it's not that Western and Russian rocket scientists working together with a near-unlimited budget that sets it off... it's the idea that they could cooperate that I find impossible to believe. They all had their own sticking points, and clashes were simply inevitable.

Yeah. It all trickles down from that ancient language I studied in high school for some reason I can't remember...

No, I've memorized eleven digits of pi. 3.1415926535. You've only memorized ten - the first 9, and then the 11th. (And the only reason I know 11 of them - no more, no less - is because that's all my calculator shows. )