Accelerando

23-26km is my usual Laythe insertion altitude. This was for insertions at both 5000 and 7000 m/s if I recall correctly.

I've landed on Eve and Ike. I could probably land on Laythe already, and have designed a surface-to-orbit-and-back shuttle capable of full refueling, but I have this feeling I really want to establish some sort of orbital infrastructure before I set down...

Duna and Eve are about the same in terms of propellant required to reach them (although you will need to do more normal/antinormal burning to intercept its orbit), but the thick Evotian atmosphere will allow you a bit more leeway in designing one-way landers as you will need less parachutes to slow down. Building a returnable vehicle is another story, though. If you're not looking to land people on there for good, Duna is a better bet. It also requires less correctional burning from Kerbin orbit IIRC, as long as your starting orbital inclination is near 0º. As for rocket design, your basic interplanetary bus (orbiter) only needs 1 long 2m propellant tank and a nuclear engine to get 3 kerbals to the planet's orbit, whether it be Eve, Duna, or Jool, or any of their moons. A basic lander might perhaps be: Command pod Half-length 2m tank LV-T30/T45 engine Landing Legs (optional RCS) ----- Half-length 2m tank LV-N

I've only ever had to burn a little bit in one direction or another, preferably when you're about 5x further than the orbit of Bop or some distance similarly great, to bypass Tylo and perform direct Laythe or Jool aerocapture.

Please punctuate your sentences and run a spellchecker over your posts every now and then, PV.

They're orbiting Laythe along with 2 other spaceships and 6 of their buddies from home. They've been out there for a few years now, and the stations' checkers boards have seen a lot of wear and tear.

Personally, I've spent most of my time so far on the launchers rather than the actual spacecraft, trying to make them as small and efficient as possible for as large a payload as it can manage to move. It helps that all it takes to get 3-8 Kerbals with a large pod + crewtank expansion/living quarters and storage to Laythe and most of the planets is one half-size large fuel tank and a single LV-N. (Precise landing is another matter, but I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out without too much trouble.) Once I manage a launcher that can efficiently lift at least 30 tons, I'll start working more on the IP vehicles.

I've done this maneuver before at such speed, and perhaps had more incentive to reload after an insertion that took me directly to the ground because I was piloting orbiters. If you had dipped into the atmosphere at 16-26km, you probably would have been able to make it into a stable orbit prior to descent. Laythe's atmosphere is a lot tougher than one may think on first approach.

No, it wouldn't.

You might be able to make it even smaller! It's possible to get into 70km circular orbit around Kerbin with just 1 LV-T30, 1 LV-909, 2 FL-T400s and 1 FL-T200, so with the nuclear engine I'd imagine you could make it back from Duna with something on that order, but I haven't tried it myself.

I launched 3 missions to Jool (warning: somewhat unorganized album) almost at the same time - at least, in the range of about 1 ingame month. Had I handled the initial burns better I could probably have had enough propellant to return home, but as it stands, the 9 brave Kerbals who made it out to Laythe orbit will serve as the precursors for the next salvo of missions meant to establish an ORDA space station and permanent surface base at the ocean moon.

I almost never drink. Everything but mixed drinks and Baileys taste like urine to me. My parents didn't really care that much when I was a transfer student in Deutschland.

Personally I never use Mainsail, unless I just don't care at all. Mostly LV-T30 and 45. Going easy on 45 to save on excess mass.

My old standard ascent booster requires about twice as much fuel now to lift a bit less than the original payload, and I was running the fuel bug fix. The Isp for the engines I'm using hasn't changed to my knowledge. What's going on here?

I have a somewhat difficult time believing that electrical power-generating solar panels would actually be viable options for Kerbals.

Oh, I don't know  a component inside the TV could have broken? It's not as though electrical components don't wear out eventually...

Since I know little of the physics behind the Alcubierre system, I would not suppose offhand that the orders of magnitude drop from the older energy estimates to the new ones are necessarily going to relate to the amount of required energy that can be shaved off in this new theory.

I'm also interested in knowing how low the required energy can probably be for a viable spacecraft  a probe, at least  to make the trip. The energy contained in the mass of Voyager is still well over a quadrillion joules, as outlined in one of the later comments on that article. At a power generation rate of around 1 gigajoule per second, a large Earth-based light water nuclear reactor does not even begin to make up that amount of energy: it would have to keep running for multiple gigaseconds, periods of about 32 years. For humans to launch an Alcubierre ship any time in the next century or two, I think it would have to be probable that the energy requirement be pared down by at least six orders of magnitude.

Even if politics delivered the killing blow, Orion wasn't a very powerful contender for space exploration from the start. Any and each Orion booster would be titanically more expensive than any launch system to date as it would be a commitment to building a miniature space program in itself for questionable returns. Orion's high cost- and propellant-efficiency at lifting thousands of tons of payload and lower efficiency at smaller tasks meant that the only real way to get the most bang for the space program buck would be to launch (a significant fraction of) the maximum load, ideally a crewed mission. A 40m diameter Interplanetary Orion could have delivered 1200 tons of payload to the Lunar surface  about 10 times more mass than the third stage of the Saturn V. A human presence in space can only do so much actual research before the costs of keeping lots of people and equipment alive and running up there start to outweigh the benefits, at a time when space habitation technology was still largely in its infancy (and it remains so today). Launching robotic payloads might be a little better, but would still require building an order of magnitude more new equipment than has ever been launched beyond Earth orbit to date, setting aside the R&D that would be necessary to build Orion's spaceframe to the capability of withstanding over 1000 hammer-blow accelerations once a second for extended periods. On topic, that engine really is sexy, but I feel that Nova's parts aesthetic clashes a bit with the textures of the 1m fuel tanks. I hope those get some reworking sooner or later.

I thought this was going to be a B-2 Spirit bomber that could make orbit. Not bad for a somewhat-new-person rocket! I'd bet with some minor tweaks it could make the haul to the Mun.

"And here we have a specimen of the famous Moho obsidian..."

Well, that second one certainly bears resemblance to an ironclad. It could use better forward armor, though. Generally, I like to see vehicles that are fuel/propellant efficient  perhaps you could run some math on that bomber, try new designs, see if you can get a great ratio of tons fuel/tons weapon loadout and maneuverability.

I guess my vehicles still need work to send more than one Kerbal at a time to Laythe.

Only the beautiful people get comments on the Spacecraft Exchange. Nice warmachines, btw.

• Interplanetary Lander Zeno Small Interplanetary Lander + Orbiter With 2 SRBs, one liquid-fuel bus, and 3 rings of linear port RCS thrusters for a final stage propulsor, this one-Kerbal vehicle can just make it off the surface of Kerbin and into a low-medium orbit (recommended 100-140km circular). It's hoped that this will be enough to escape Eve, Laythe, or Duna. Just remember that if the target world's gravity is anything like Kerbin's, you won't have enough propellant to make it back home alone. Hope you brought friends! (If not used for landing, it is capable of very deep-system voyages and returns.) MechJeb: For controlling the discarded stage. Mass (Lander): 10.5 Tonnes Mass (Lander+Interplanetary Bus): 28.75 Tonnes Download: Without boost stages: http://www./?a887jwssgaazdms With boost stages: http://www./?w4599356ubr332a