el_coyoto

Congratulations on your landing! Just to concur with what the smart guys said up there, those radial thrusters do have an awful efficiency. I usually design multi-purpose landers and make sure that they can at least land on Duna. I have to check if that still works on 0.20, but it should be possible build lander with *a lot* of Delta-v powered by two nuclear engines that has enough thrust to land and take-off from Duna. I can't find my trusty 0.18 nuclear lander on the forums any more, so I won't be able to show it off... Plugins such as Kerbal Engineer are really helpful during the design process, because they can show you your thrust-to-weight ratio on all the Kerbol celestial bodies for example. Anyway, good luck on your rescue!

The Orion Project is a real study and relied on "Nuclear shaped charges" which sound really fun (and highly confidential because of their destructive power). Note that the usual solution to the "not-blowing-the-launchpad-on-take-off" is the use of ... solid boosters. So Kerbaly! More data on Orion : http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#id--Pulse--Orion http://astrorhysy.blogspot.fr/2010/09/project-orion-how-to-nuke-spaceship.html This site has many pictures of a fictional space cold war featuring the "Orion Battleship" : http://www.rhysy.net/OrionGallery/ Cheers! EDIT : Canopus was faster than me on this one lol.

I really like the idea of kerbals being more biologically suited to space than humans. It fits nicely with the theme of the game and permits fun and refreshing re-entries. Okay, I guess I played Orbiter for too long, because executing "fun" re-entries in KSP still make me chuckle every time...

I played Orbiter a very long time, and being an avid reader of xkcd, this entry piqued my curiosity. I googled "Kerbal Space Program", tried the demo, got instantly hooked by the possibility of designing your own rockets and the cartoon humour and then bought the game on the same day (0.16 I think...).