Zaran

The explosions are a part of Romfarer's plugin used for the Docking Cams, not sure if it has been updated for 0.20 yet.

Hey Borklund, I am currently playing around with re-balancing the Falcon 9 (having a 2.5+ TWR take off when "fully loaded" was a bit much) once I am done playing with it some more do you mind if I post the new config files here for people to try? If you would rather I didn't then I shall not. Trying to keep to the same base specs the F9v1 has of about 10mass to 100 km orbit with a little wiggle room. I am also thinking of adding a little monopropellant to the second stage, while the original F9 second stage didn't have this the F9R should have it and it is proving to be useful in testing to be able to throw some RCS thrusters on the second stage.

It does, the only thing it uses KAS for is the re-locatable solar arrays on MIR.

Wanna see some sexy leg?..

Fregat upper stage, used mostly on Soyuz-2.1a flights to put satellites into geosynchronous orbits. Its an awesome little stage, glad to see you doing it BobCat!

I should note, its $200,000 of fuel for the whole rocket, both stages fully topped up not JUST for the return. Also they tried parachutes on flight 1 and 2, those rockets are at the bottom on the ocean in little pieces were they broke up on impact.

It is, the rocket costs about $50 million USD to make, the fuel costs $200,000. All these margins and factors for return are built into the new Falcon 9, take the new Merlins, they have the best thrust to weight ratio of any rocket engine in the world, the first stage tank, as far as I know, weighs less than an Falcon 9 v1.0 first stage of that size would thanks to clever engineering techniques and materials used. Simply put, the Falcon 9-R is the most technically advanced rocket ever, in both the fact that it will return to launch site and the underlying engineering used on it.

Normally for rockets such as the Falcon 9 you get 1-2.5% of your pad mass into orbit, the Falcon 9v1.1 in disposable mode can take 3-4% mass to orbit, they use this extra 2% margin for return systems in the F9-R. Overall the rocket still has more mass to orbit capability than the original Falcon 9 even in -R mode taking 1-2.5% to orbit.

Other news, SpaceX PR sent out an email, warning locals to the Texas test site that starting Tuesday 30th April SpaceX will be making "a lot more noise" than usual from their test site in Texas. The first Falcon 9 v1.1 core is ready to be tested.

Not all Rockets work in the same way like they kinda do in KSP. Antares has such a low Thrust to Weight ratio at liftoff (something like 1.2:1) they have to run the main engines at 108% power for the first 30-40 seconds of flight to get the thing off the pad. I have this noted down from launch day, Orbital stated all this:

It went 250m up or just over 820 feet. Source is L2 on NASASpaceflight via a SpaceX employee.

Bork was ill and Stinger was busy last we heard. Grasshopper testing is ongoing, we were waiting for texture work mostly for Grasshopper.

Your premade Odin Launcher is rather wonky, as in, the strap-on boosters are not centred and the two fins are not centred properly either. (The fins also cause wobble that causes the boosters to blow up sometimes as their engines collide with the main stage tank!)

Odin 0.16 feedback: Had a chance to play with the ship this afternoon, first look seems good overall. The fuel consumption of the engines seems a little high perhaps or it could just be that I am still not really used to the new fuel "balance" yet. The nose cone construction seems to wobble a little if my launch stages make a sudden turn or jolt and I managed to break the fuel tanks a few times. Granted these times were when I had collisions with spent stages or that PowerSat I had orbiting the Mun that needed "taking care of" and when it must have gotten crushed in a decoupler while I was launching.

Are you sure they feel over powered due to high numbers or due to the fuel usage bug?

After trying with a fresh install of MechJeb this still happens, but now I cannot even throw open my parachute to land the pod, space bar becomes totally inactive and refuses to trigger anything in the final stage of the craft, going to roll back to 1.9.0 and see if this still happens. After some testing with MJ 1.9.0 it seems that something in the 1.9.1 update is making staging bug out like it is.

So on several of my ships my MechJeb part gets disposed of during re-entry and is no longer a part of the pod that lands, however this seems to make it so I cannot end the flight without ALT+F4ing the game, this also causes all my MechJeb settings to get reset (inputs back to default and all windows back to their default positions.) Any clue how to stop this happening?

Something I wanted to ask, would you be able to add another 3m engine splitter plate? I was thinking a 3m > 9x1m plate might work well with the new standard size. (Totally not a Falcon 9 fan, no not at all.) And also, thanks for keeping this pack alive and all your hard work towards it Tiberion!

Checked spam folder nothing there, had this problem when the initial pre-order came out too and had to wait for you to resend my email before

I have not recived my email about my store account

Adding to the 'I got the 'If you've contributed 7.00 USD or more, you will receive an email confirming your pre-order in the next 24 hours'' email and had no other emails. Ordered on the 13/08/2011