DerekL1963

I won't lie, I spent a good part of the final approach only mildly timewarped - I love watching the dance of the inner moons. Thanks!

Partly truth, partly nonsense. Even before the DoD came onboard, they were examining Shuttle designs with with lift (and therefore crossrange) capabilities - because it turns out that crossrange is a very handy thing to have. Crossrange increases abort capability and widens recovery windows (sometimes even creating a window where one wouldn't have existed otherwise). Assuming you have a landing site available within it's rather narrow (along-track as well as cross-track) landing ellipse.

Update 10/24/2016 Y48 D267 Aaand - we're underway for Jool! After completing the burn, I took @sdj64's suggestion and dropped two of the drive sections. It did drop my t/w (but not unmanageably so), I gained 300 m/s of d/V (12%), and there's plenty of monoprop in the remaining two drive sections. (I was running short during my dress rehearsal, and I'm counting on tanks in the drive sections to help out.) Plus doing so right after the burn means they have plenty of time to drift clear of the mothership, helped along by using their remaining mono for a retro-burn. A close encounter with the Mun on the way of Kerbin's SOI. Y51 D379 After three years in transit - braking into a 47,000km orbit around Jool with Vall in the background. The burn ended up in a slightly eccentric, slightly inclined orbit, and after a couple of quick burns I'm ready for operations!

They spread even faster in a pure oxygen environment. (Partly because the partial pressure is almost identical.) Fire extinguishers will help, but you still need the training to build and maintain the reflexes. Over all, your design needs to be much more compartmentalized than it is. And keep in mind that long term exposure to pure 02 environment carries significant health risks. (There's a reason why ISS is a mixed gas system - lower fire risk and no health issues.) Honestly, the problem isn't what you aren't. It's that you don't know what you don't know - and as a result you hang on to your ideas like grim death. And you don't grasp that there are people here who do know what they're talking about and presume they're pulling it out of their nethers like you.

I made four patrol on an SSBN - we put out some kind of fire three out of four patrols. Practically every sub sailor I know has a story about a minor fire. Now, I'll give and grant that one of the fires (somebody emptied an ashtray into a trash can) almost certainly wouldn't repeat at a Mars base, the other two (high temperature machinery and an electrical short) very much will repeat. My boat was much more like a Mars base then a house is, in that it was comparable to mid sized industrial facility with some living quarters attached. You need more of plan to put out fires than just "hope for the best, then depressurize the base and hope for the best" (if nothing else, because of the immense amount of damage that depressurizing can cause if you haven't prepared every single system onboard for periodic depressurization). None of the fires got very big because we attacked every fire as if it were big, basically swatting a fly with a thermonuclear weapon and because we trained and trained to respond fast. As radonek said, fires in an enclosed space are extraordinarily dangerous because even relatively small fire can crap up the atmosphere, they can spread very quickly, and you have nowhere to go. Sailors are, with few exceptions, much more afraid of fire than flooding.

That's not possible. The key problem for the Mars Climate Orbiter was they were on a shoestring budget, and so no navigational analysis was performed during the cruise phase. By the time they assembled a team and began analysis prior to orbital injection, in was too late. (Seriously, everybody hits on the image meme/soundbite part about the conversion error - but misses that the problem could have been caught and corrected.)

Maybe. Insulating it so it doesn't get too cold is going to be a bear though. (The "greenhouse effect" isn't a magic wand.)

Thanks! The orange and iron tanks are either LFO (for the landers) or LF (for the crew transport/fuel transfer vehicle), the MK3 tanks are LF for the main engines. I hadn't tried dropping engine stages, mostly to retain a decent t/w ratio at Jool insertion. And it's actually got a pretty decent mass fraction, the engine stages at departure are around 50% of the total weight, so I don't actually gain much by dropping a pair. The only real problem caused by keeping them around is changing attitude, but the monoprop left in their tanks (which will be used to refuel the transport/transfer vehicle) makes up for that. The Laythe lander was tested by Hyperediting it to Laythe. (Hyperedit was uninstalled prior to starting assembly in Kerbin orbit.) I avoid tumbling by flying an insanely lofted trajectory and not starting my gravity turn until it's into the upper atmosphere.

Maybe. Insulating it so it doesn't get too cold is going to be a bear though.

o.0 No they don't, they venture all over the place searching for food. They're also going to be very tricky to ship as you have to ship a complete functioning colony, feeding it and maintaining it during transit. Algae can be shipped as a simply starter culture, frozen or freeze dried. (And you can carry multiple starter cultures in a very small volume, handy if something goes pear shaped.) And unless you have a considerable amount of flowers for them to feed from, you're going to have to supplement them with a sugar syrup. And if you're going to harvest their honey, you're going to have to replace the honey with sugar syrup or ensure 365 days of flowering plants in excess of their basic needs.

Finally after twelve launches... tipping the scales at 711 tons, with sixteen LV-N's and 4300 m/s of of dV... The mothership is ready to depart for Jool. Final assembly details in this post of my mission report.

Update 10/20/2016: The last component, the T/TV which shuttles propellant and crew around the Joolian system, is launched. On orbit, the T/TV passed over KSC just minutes before the crew is launched. And finally... the big launch, the ferry flight of Jool-5's flight crew. After docking with the T/TV, the crew is transferred... (Doesn't Valentina look pleased that's she's just ferrying the crew and not going to be stuck in space for years?) And the ferry returns to Kerbin... (I was coming in pretty steep, from a 250km orbit, and so when the service module was jettisioned when I hit atmosphere it hung close to the capsule for quite awhile.) And the T/TV rendezvouses with the mothership... This was a really white knuckle docking, somehow the Quad lander had gotten rotated slightly and I wasn't 100% sure that the T/TV would clear the lander's radial stages. A final visit by the OFV tops off the T/TV's monopropellant and fuel tanks. Plus it's just a really cool shot. And finally after twelve launches... 711 tons, sixteen LV-N's, and 4300 m/s of of dV. The mothership is ready to depart.

AFAIK, there is no solid oxidizer. There are mixtures that burn oxygen rich (that is, their combustion products are enriched with oxygen) though.

I haven't posted progress on my Jool-5 in a few days because RL has been busy, and because the flights I have been able to fly have been pretty boring... Flying my tanker back and forth, loading up at a fuel depot and fueling the mothership for the upcoming mission. The various vehicles were launched with only oxidizer and monoprop onboard to save weight and simplify on-orbit logistics. Even so, and even with TAC Fuel Balancer it was tedious as heck to keep track of all the tanks.... The fueling is now finished, and all that's left to do is launch the crew transfer vehicle and the crew, one last fueling mission to fuel the transfer vehicle and we're off to Jool!

I haven't posted in a few days because RL has been busy, and because the flights I have been able to fly have been pretty boring... Flying my tanker back and forth, loading up at a fuel depot and fueling the mothership for the upcoming mission . The various vehicles were launched with only oxidizer and monoprop onboard to save weight and simplify on-orbit logistics. Even so, and even with TAC Fuel Balancer it was tedious as heck to keep track of all the tanks.... The fueling job is now complete, and all that's left to do is launch the crew transfer vehicle and the crew, one last fueling mission to fuel the transfer vehicle and we're off to Jool!

You don't need a crewed vehicle - you just need patience in making your burns when you're in comms. Back when I used RemoTech, I could put up an entire geosync constellation w/o a crewed vehicle.

As Damien points out, the failed tanks are on the second stage. But if they were on the first stage, they'd handle it just like anyone else handles failed components - they'd simply go in and replace them. If their reflight plan doesn't include regular preventative maintenance and allow for occasional corrective maintenance, then they're in big trouble in the long run. That's long been my concern about SpaceX's whole scheme, that they've designed for maintenance and factored it in and that they can work their way through the infant mortality phase of the bathtub curve. (And determine when they reach the wearout phase and schedule a major refit or retire the vehicle as appropriate.) There's a lot of talk about how flown stages have "proven" their reliability in the same way aircraft and cars do... But aircraft and cars have decades of intensive engineering behind them to reach the point they are today. Rockets, not so much. Being able to re-fire a stage that's flown and been recovered once with minimal/no maintenance is great, but that says very little about ten, twenty, or a hundred flights down the road.

No offense, but I think it's more like you have trouble understanding that MechJeb doesn't play the game. It automates certain tasks, and executes those only when specifically activated by the player. This whole "plays the game for you" is nothing but a gross mischaracterization and silly nonsense.

No, Cape Kennedy (the NASA facility, formally known nowadays as the Kennedy Space Center) did not exist. The NASA launching facilities were located at and borrowed from CCAFS - Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. *sigh* Whatever.

Or the misspelling of "totally batstuff insane" as "hard".

I'm more of a manager and an engineer than a pilot, so MJ does the piloting for me. (Not to mention it does it better as I'm off on the low end of the bell curve when it comes to twitch reflexes and eye-hand coordination. ) And yeah, I too am amused by the folks that think MJ "does everything". MJ doesn't design my mission architecture, flight techniques, or vehicles. When it successfully docks, it does so because I balanced the RCS (and nobody ever calls RCS Build Aid "cheaty"). When it avoids hitting Ike on my way down to Duna, it's because I was monitoring the trajectory and determined the need for a burn to do so (and nobody calls watching your orbital trajectory in Map mode "cheaty"). When it executes a landing in the Northern Basin biome, it's because I chose the landing site (and nobody calls Kerbalmaps.com "cheaty"). MJ is a tool, no more, no less. Even with MJ, you can't play a successful serious campaign game without knowing quite a bit more than just which buttons in MJ does what.

Ayup. As for for the Manned Spaceflight Center - in 1960 it was outgrowing the existing facilities at Langley and Goddard and needed a new home, so they went looking. Sure, it's in Texas because of politics but it's not at Cape Kennedy because Cape Kennedy didn't exist at the time they were looking for a place for a new Center.

[[Citation needed]] as they say. That facility has been there since 1940, and used by NASA since 1961.

Yep. And most of their launches take place from facilities borrowed from USAF in the first place, which has been the case since the day NASA was founded. Why do you assume it's not efficient to do so at Michoud? The floor space is there (and long since paid for, back in the early 40's to be specific) as well as the experienced workers. Shipping the tanks is pretty much dirt cheap.

o.0 Vandenburg is a USAF facility, rarely used by NASA. (Not that it's a duplicate anyhow, because it can't reach the majority of the orbits that can be reached from the Cape and vice versa.) The majority of NASA facilites pre-date NASA and are scattered about for a wide variety of reasons, not all of which are politics. Michoud for example is making SLS tanks because that's where big tanks have been manufactured since the 60's - they were manufactured there in the 60's because it was an existing facility that could be repurposed far cheaper than building a new facility.