DerekL1963

New stock feature in 1.2.

That depends on your occlusion settings. That depends on whether or no you're willing to accept that you're going to lose a bird now and again - since these are spent stages, and presumably there are more than a few of them, that might not be a problem. (And you can also avoid the Mun by changing your orbital inclination.)

Just wanted to say how cool your illustrations have been.

Should be about the same proportion of Shuttles since to date there's been roughly the same number of Shuttle flights (135) as of manned Soyuz variants (124). So, either DDE is off in his estimation of the proportions, or Raging Sandwich posts fewer Shuttle pictures than Soyuz pictures. Unless DDE meant the Soyuz booster, which has flown more than 1700 times.

Thanks! (And isn't imitation the sincerest form of flattery? ) The T/TV provides some redundancy as it can rescue a crew stranded in orbit. Or I can go refuel the Laythe lander with the T/TV and use it for Val/Bop/Pol. So basically, unless they're stuck on Laythe or Tylo I've got some options. But really, nothing should go wrong (famous last words eh?) - that's the point of all the mission technique development and dress rehearsals. Like NASA, I practice and practice - then the real mission runs smooth as glass. It's a bit of an odd playstyle but I enjoy it. The unbalance turns out to be a non-issue as yesterday's test showed, the error is well within MJ's normal performance level. (175 meter miss in a 50km orbit? That's down in the noise) Doubly so considering the test vehicle is missing the mass of a couple hundred tons of Kerbin->Jool transfer fuel, which will pull the CG even closer to normal (it's less than half a meter off axis now). And duplicates of both landers would push my lander mass alone to 180 odd tons...

It's no less stupid than any other airbreathing "1st stage". Which isn't saying much given how abysmally stupid the idea of airbreathing first stages are in the first place. Because scamjets (and no, that's not a misspelling) and other jets are, compared to a rocket, really only useful in a narrow range of speeds and altitudes - and then you need to switch to pure rocket propulsion anyhow. (Which means in terms of SpaceMouse's question, a complex oxidizer setup.) Essentially you spend (tens of?) millions of dollars to save a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of LOX.

It does make sense - if you're familiar with the history of American railroads in the Midwestern and Western US. Long story short, if they weren't granted land along the railroad by the government for building railroads, they'd buy land along the railroad from the government outright - and then plat out towns and sell it for cheap. The idea was that people would buy up the lots, build towns, and then those towns would provide demand for the railroad's services. (Shipping in manufactured goods, shipping out farm products from surrounding farms.) It worked like gangbusters.

No offense, I've used RemoTech and love the challenge... But if you want realism - then RemoTech isn't what you want. In reality, spaceborne dishes don't get bigger and heavier as the ranges increase. In reality, most of the heavy lifting is done by the terrestrial DSN not a collection of relay satellites and spaceborne dishes of ever increasing weight. In reality space communications don't require the tedious micromanagement of relays - because there with rare exceptions there aren't relays in the first place. Remotech provides a significant challenge, but isn't really 'realistic'.

Not much action on the Jool-5 front today... busy with real life. My log, in my sig, has been updated - and here's a couple of beauty shots; A test to ensure that the off center CG wouldn't cause a problem - and it flew like a champ, missing the target orbit by only 175 meters. A test of a MK3 hull based mothership just to explore the possibilities.

Update: 09/30/2016 I found an error in my design in the very first thing I did today... When I undocked the Laythe lander, I found my RCS was 45 degrees off. Not a huge problem as problems go, but when every kg costs so much to deliver, I don't want to waste any of it. Since it was the first thing, I simply deleted the whole stack from the Tracking Station. Then, in the VAB, rather than redesign both landers I just swapped the stock RCS for 45 degree RCS from RLA Stockalike. I didn't get back to the dress rehearsal because Real Life intervened (stupid apartment won't clean itself) and I'm going to bed early tonight because I have an SCA event to go to tomorrow. I did get a couple of things done in the time I did have; Concerns were raised about the off-center CG caused by the different weights of the landers. I'd done some short burns to test, but never any real transit... So I slapped some LV-N's onto my dress dummy, and flew it from LKO to the Mun and it performed like a champ - missing the target orbit by only 175 meters. After reading @Aegolius13's Jool-5 Mission Report, I realized I'd never looked at MK3 parts.. I never fly planes, so it never occurred to me. So, I went into the VAB and designed a MK3 based mothership just to explore the possibilities.

That's the beauty of my scheme... Once the (extremely heavy) mothership settles in Jool orbit, it's done. It never maneuvers again, all the orbital transfers are done by the landers and the refueling/crew transfer vehicle. The refueling/crew transfer vehicle also doubles as the Kerbin return vehicle.

Plus, IIRC and if the RCAF is like the USAF and USN - you don't actually get to pick. Based on all the exams and workups, the results of your training, and the current needs of the Service - you'll be assigned somewhere. Could be a fighter pilot, could be flying a transport. And heaven forbid you manage to wash out, you still have a service commitment and you'll end up JOOD on a tin can somewhere. Had a Division Officer like that, washed out, went to an oiler, and volunteered subs to get off the oiler. He was lucky, they closed the boats to non nuke officers about a year later.

If you look at the pic in my thread, I carry one on each side of the mothership on top of radial fuel tanks. (Another reason why two landers is attractive.) With the huge size of the mother, the CG isn't pulled that far off center. Some preliminary testing shows she flies just fine.

Nice mission! I had originally penciled in a dedicated Bop/Pol lander, but I deleted it once I determined that the core of the Tylo lander could do the trick. I'm already using orbital refueling and a tanker, so why not go for broke? Not only does it save on parts, hitting all five moons with two landers just seems to be cool since most everyone else uses three or more. I tried like you wouldn't believe to do it with one since my Laythe lander actually overperforms... But I just couldn't master a Tylo landing that didn't require that crasher stage. You did give me a good idea though, I haven't looked at Mk3 parts for the mothership - and I really should.

In my current Jool-5 workup (see my sig for a link), that's actually exactly how it's working out. Laythe got a dedicated lander. The core of my Tylo lander gets refueled and lands on Vall, Bop, and Pol. It can actually self-ferry from the mothership to Bop or Pol and back.

Well, being a pilot isn't as good as being a submariner , but congrats on your continued progress!

Nice use of the new parts.

Jeez space fandom is fickle... For nearly half a century I've been watching people complain that we needed to get off our butts and get to Mars, and now that someone is doing just that - everyone is complaining that he's doing it wrong! /me shakeshead

Nit - Edwards AFB, not Edward's.

However your SMA, and therefore your period, can match without precisely matching Ap and Pe. Some people find working with a single number to be easier.

This - in my sandbox dress rehersals I've found and fixed a number of issues. And I'd skip Tylo before I'd skip Laythe based on my current practice runs for a Jool 5.. Laythe is far easier.

The trick isn't matching Pe and Ap - it's matching SMA. Use KER or MJ to see that value. And it takes a little practice, and a very low t/w ratio, to get them positioned properly.

As they say - [[citation needed]]. What makes you think they "cannot stay" and will "die quickly" there?

No shortage of jobs once they get there... the real trick is keeping the knives away from them in transit.

Exactly. In the long run Musk seems to aiming at reaching airline levels of performance in costs, reliability, and efficiency. Having a bunch of different vehicles is precisely how you don't go about attaining that. Having as many thoroughly debugged identical vehicles flying as often as possible and maximum use of a minimum amount of fixed infrastructure (overhead) is the most straightforward path to that goal. The main problem with the Shuttle's per flight costs wasn't that it cost so much per flight but that it cost so much per annum (the two things are not the same) - basically it didn't fly enough to amortize out the enormous fixed costs. Musk seems to aiming to avoid that trap. He's doing two things that I've screaming my lungs out about for a couple of decades now. First, rather than the "classical" model of individual vehicles and individual missions, he's looking at the system as a pipeline. Continuous systems are almost always cheaper and more reliable than discontinuous ones. Second, and in support of the first, he seems to have brought the bean counters into the fold, analyzing the system in terms of cost and cash flow rather than shiny engineering. When you're serious about reaching those airline levels - counting beans is as important, if not more important, than sliding rules. I still think he's a lunatic - but he's a very intelligent lunatic. Eventually - yes. True, as far as it goes. (Been there, done that - USN Submarine Service 1981-1991.) But there is a key difference - submariners are crew, we're busy 24/7 keeping the lights on. Most of 100+ onboard the ICT are passengers.