zarakon

Delta 4 Heavy, because orange tanks

I agree, the feasibility of this challenge is questionable. A sun dive requires an awful lot of delta-v. The 47km atmosphere requirement seems awkward, and would probably necessitate a lot of intake spam.

Yeah, I'm just curious what the trick is to actually get thrust from it, as shown in the OP screenshot

True that.

Alright, there must still be something I'm missing. I put on some stupid number of intakes, giving me a capacity of 200 air. On the launchpad, it was jumping around between about 60 and 75. At liftoff (jet engine off, just using rockets), it started to go up a bit, but after reaching about 90 it started going down again. By the time I left the atmosphere it was down to 0. So I set up an action group to CLOSE all of the intakes. After they reached 90 during liftoff, I closed them and they stayed at 90. Out of the atmosphere, that 90 air allowed my turbojet to run for 30 seconds. It consumed fuel and air, the status said Normal (not Flame-out), and my throttle was 100%, but the thrust generated was 0. What's the trick to make it generate thrust?

I think it's just using the air stored in the intakes

There were no orange tanks!

But the engines are what allow the explosions to be controlled...

I started in 0.8.5 I think (that's the earliest backup folder I have). There was nowhere to go but orbit or escape, since the Mun didn't get added until several versions later. The atmosphere ended around 35km, but was much thicker. There was no map view, so you had to do math or check your speed on a lookup table to see whether you were even in orbit. There were a total of only 11 parts in the VAB. For propulsion there were only 3: fuel tank, LV-T30 engine, and RT-10 solid booster. There were NO STRUTS and no fuel lines. Fuel tanks couldn't be placed radially, only solid boosters. Getting to orbit was actually quite hard. I can do it in my sleep in the current version, but I just tried in 0.8.5 and failed miserably. The terrain looked like ass, and the water was just a hard surface with some kind of pixel shader to make a ripple effect. Up close the water actually looks quite nice!

"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

Yeah, they are pretty annoying to work with. The nodes are so close to each other that they often try to go on backwards, and even when they do attach "properly" they clip into each other. You can't radial mount engines to them or attach fuel lines because they're not set to enable any surface mounting. If you want to run fuel lines, you'll have to run the fuel to one of the attached cubic struts instead. To attach engines, you'll have to point the nodes up/down and use inline instead of radial engines. On top of all that, they have a worse mass fraction than the normal sized tanks.

Ping! Do any of these yet?

I use the equivalent of a 360 controller (Logitech 710) when flying planes. The controls I use for planes would be simply awful for rockets, though. Would need to swap the roll and yaw assignments, at a minimum. Left stick: Roll and pitch Right stick: Camera Triggers: Yaw (requires manual config edit to work properly) Y/A: Throttle up/down X: Brakes B: Cut throttle LB: SAS toggle RB: Stage Back: ESC menu Start: Map D-Pad up/down: Also throttle D-Pad left/right: Nothing

XKCD did a what-if a while ago about how well you could fly planes everywhere in the solar system: http://what-if.xkcd.com/30/ He didn't go into much detail on Uranus though.

The ultimate test will be whether or not we have the will to stop ourselves after realizing that our own exponentially-increasing power would eventually overwhelm and destroy the universe.

New problem: How did those "small" neutron stars get there, and how do they continue to not explode, when the minimum mass for a neutron star is around 1.4 suns?

You still need to fix the speed scores You list the bonuses for 50, 100 and 200 m/s as 5, 10, and 20. In some cases you've counted them like that (such as Othuyeg's score), but in others such as your own example you've counted them as 10 times as much.

This is what I do. You can also adjust your thrust to keep with it. I find this the easiest way to get near-perfect circular orbits

What about parachutes like this?

Alright, here's the full gallery for my new one, also level 5. The good pictures are at the end! - 2 simple vertical stages per level - No asparagus, onion, or drop tanks - Used tweakable fuel tanks to reduce weight of upper levels (and flew them with the reduced fuel, of course) - Level 5 is about 2.5x the weight of the Saturn V and has 2.8x the first-stage thrust - I had to use DynamicWarp to slow down the game for level 5

Alright, completed my level 5 with only pure vertical staging (no droptanks, no asparagus). I still need to go back and refly all the levels for screenshots, but here's a peak at the first stage of level 5... I have to use DynamicWarp to run the first stage at 1/4 speed and the second stage at 1/2 speed

Finally managed to squeeze by under 30 seconds with a parachute-assisted landing Of course it took 3 landing attempts (plus a whole bunch of high-speed failures) before I actually remembered to LOWER MY DAMN WHEELS FIRST. Speed under the bridge is 115, cockpit view, and under 30 seconds should total to 225 I made some attempts at 200+ speed, but it's really really hard. I made it under the bridge several times, but could never avoid becoming one with the buildings on the other side. There's one angle where it would be possible to thread the needle and do it, but I'd need a skinnier and more stable plane (and maybe some slow motion...) If you add another bonus for flying upside down under the bridge, I will totally do that

That's what I would suspect. Either that or you just don't have enough thrust

Aw, unfortunate. I'm quite glad that games don't make me motion sick.. I totally look forward to doing some of this stunt flying in cockpit view when I get my Oculus Rift!

If you use chase-cam mode (hit V twice) you don't have to worry about directing the camera