zarakon

If my math is right, a 2000-ton asteroid would need to be going 1,263,180,850,000,001 m/s relative to Moho upon impact in order to change Moho's velocity by 1 (ONE) m/s. That assumes a perfectly inelastic collision (asteroid sticks to Moho). In a perfectly elastic collision (asteroid bounces off Moho like a superball) it would only need about half that speed, so only 631.59 trillion m/s There is no point in taking the planetary bodies off rails because nothing you can do, other than extreme cheating, can alter their momentum in any significant way. They are all far too massive. Maybe try editing your save file to make an asteroid weigh a few hundred trillion tons instead

http://www.spacex.com/webcast/

he means the sun

Being in Danny2462's game would be so much more interesting though! Just think of all the neat things you could do: - Survive being dropped on your head from orbit - Destroy Kerbin - Be landing gear - Be a propulsion source - Destroy Kerbin - Become a crazy stretch-mutant - Be a bowling pin - Miraculously survive plane crashes - Test out the latest abusement rides - Destroy Kerbin

Procrastinating I haven't done anything with them yet

I can see some things like ladders, lights, and small science instruments being massless so that you wouldn't need to counterbalance them. Plane landing gear might just be a convenience thing too. If it had mass it would be a pain to balance SSTOs properly to get the center of mass in line with the rocket thrust Batteries and solar panels don't feel right being massless though, since they actually provide resources. I don't think it gives the physics system any relief. Those parts still have to move around, and they're still connected to things. Put tons of them on a craft and it will lag as much as anything else

-deleted- Somehow editing this post created a new one instead? Or maybe it's too early in the morning and I made an oops

I got a very low solar orbit before using LV-N with droptanks followed by ion engine with droptanks. I think I used somewhere in the neighborhood of 40km/s dv. I could have done better if I had taken less solar panels, since you barely need any when you're that close to the sun, but I still got close enough that I think I was unable to timewarp and math errors resulted in constantly losing altitude

Those little delta winglets have the highest lift/mass ratio in the game. His whole concept is to keep the weight to a bare minimum. With low wing mass, no extra control surfaces, no batteries, and the small xenon tank (after dropping the first) he gets a very good TWR which can overcome the small wing area You can try, but it won't work without cheating in some way. The highest theoretical thrust/weight ratio you can get with ion engines is something like 0.81, which won't get you off the surface.

Does "without flight computer" mean never turning on SAS? Or does it just mean no Mechjeb or similar mods?

Based on the speed, altitude, and time numbers in the series of screenshots, it doesn't look like that was a major factor. Congrats on being the first!

I would say so His uses a drop-tank though, so I wouldn't call it an SSTO regardless

Sorry, the rules say no exploiting infiniglide, keep control surfaces to a minimum

I'm just in the habit of immediately reverting to the VAB to fix the problem, so it wouldn't serve much purpose for me

1. You can get almost all of the science you need without leaving the Kerbin system by sciencing in the large number of biomes on/above the Mun and Minmus. Crew reports, EVA reports, and gravity scans from a polar orbit can net you thousands of points in one mission without even landing. 2. If you don't want to send Kerbals and you don't want to transmit data, you can still send probes out with experiments and bring them back 3. Kerbals are meant to be expendable! Send them out there!

If I don't have wheels on a craft, I like to set the parachutes to the "Brake" action group I actually wish there was a way to remove them from staging entirely, and activate them only by action group

Hope they're using MechJeb. It makes powered landings super easy

It would be really nice if the bottom of the thread view page would have a link back to the board index, just above the Quick Reply box. For example, if you've scrolled to the bottom of a thread in the Challenges forum, a link back to the Challenges index. Or possibly just duplicate the path links from the top of the page at the bottom ("Forum -> Other Forums -> KSP Network -> The Forum Forum" for this thread")

Yeah, I'd like some more details/proof on that flight. It's more than double what anyone else has done with a single engine, and it just doesn't seem possible

impossible

I started with 3 engines, dropped one of them along with the first pair of xenon tanks Grenidus, are you able to post any more pictures of the craft or the flight? What you're showing there just doesn't seem possible. Are you using any mods, and are you sure you didn't use flapping control surfaces to gain speed?

I'd like to see what that looked like at launch

So ion engines don't get blocked by other engines attached directly behind them? Iiiinteresting. Veeery iiiiinteresting. Here's my latest attempt: 33524m, 1430 m/s. I actually ended with both numbers a bit higher, but the screenshot just didn't take. I think if it's going to be possible, it will have to start off as a very large glider, with a lot of staging to maintain a TWR above 0.5 the whole way

9hrs, 54min, 26sec (my MET is apparently set for Kerbin time, 6 hour days) 3 kerbals super cool screenshots

The particular one I tried worked that way