DerekL1963

Welcome back! I hope most/all of them are... your have a very good version here. But is he really back?

My heavy tug launches the same way... with a .3 T/W ratio at launch, it's foolish to carry it as pure cargo. Instead, it's the core of an asparagus system. Tug, with the launcher wrapped around it, in the VAB. On orbit.

Why would you burn a periapsis? Doing so at apoapsis is far more efficient.

Correct, that's the Fustek Expansion pack. Fustek's original pack is now deprecated by Fusty in favor of the expansion pack.

ISA Mapsat lets you locate anomalies and gives you an ingame reason to use kerbalmaps.com to study planetary terrain for potential landing/base sites. It's not everyone's cup o' infusion of free radicals, but it's not without use. /derail

Since those aren't the expensive bits, that's like saving a penny a pound on the ten or twenty pounds of nails (at a buck a pound) that go into your $250,000 house. Well, since the only one of those actually built in quantity was the Soyuz (booster), your point is what exactly? Equally, as for "launching in one flight", that's precisely what they Russians did, many times. Heck, they even built two of the world's three biggest super-duper all-in-one-go launchers - N1 and Energia. (And quite a number further down the scale.) "Economy of scale" is a real term for a real effect, not a buzzword and it decidedly does not mean "stuff they built a lot of over the course of many years".

Which doesn't come cheaply by any measurement - it adds to the costs because you've made everything more complicated, and it adds to the weight and volume launched because every segment needs support (power, cooling, attitude control, etc...), it increases the programmatic risk sharply (not only because of the increased number of launches, but also due to the increased complexity and on-orbit assembly steps). And it does so for each and every mission launched and assembled this way, it's not a one-time cost. It's not nearly the black-and-white tradeoff you make it out to be.

In RL, NASA also inherited the Mercury program from the NACA and active rocketry/satellite programs from the Army's Redstone Arsenal and Naval Research Laboratory. (Plus a whole bunch of other odd bits and bobs.) That the whole reason that NASA was founded in the first place - to bring all these scattered bits and pieces under one roof. Thus, there is no historical justification for a program that starts based on just planes if your equivalent start date is the founding of NASA.

My current Duna architecture is based around a single (re-useable) lander and tankers in orbit.

Having been in a submarine torpedo room (underway, mumble feet under the North Atlantic), it's not at all clear they can be held at fault for not controlling the fireball. We don't really know how big the initial reaction was, how it manifested, how fast it spread, etc... etc... Witness the loss of USS Bonefish (SS-582) where a minor leak went from undetected to a disaster in only a few minutes.

If you limit yourself only to private boosters otherwise available, you end up being limited mostly to boosters optimized for delivery of heavy commsats to GEO/GSO. (And not being capable of being man-rated.) If you specify the booster capabilities (As NASA really needs to) and hire a commercial company to build it, you end up paying through the nose because of the relatively low launch rate. (This is more or less where we are today.) Thus, the 'common component' booster family is not without advantages if you want a wide(ish) range of boosters for a variety of missions.

From his post he seems to mean "every mission ever flogged by every fanboy who ever got access to a keyboard". Which isn't, as he calls for elsewhere, a "clearer vision". It's a mish-mash that will take much longer than the decade specified and cost much more than the doubled budget also specified.

I don't know if you've heard Trigger, but the excessive scene change times appear to be caused by a bug - slated to be fixed in .22.

I sometimes have problems with translation too... where do I turn this off?

I'd almost rather a new (IACBM/chute compatible) capsule than trying to further hack the awful MK1-2 design.

Which, in it's purer forms, is very nasty stuff indeed. Look how reactive the 5% solution you can buy in the store is. But, on the topic of the thread; Tripropellants are one of those things that keep being studied because they're such an obvious idea. They've however never (AFAIK) been implemented because the weight and complexity of the extra tankage, pumps, pipes, control systems, etc... eat up most if not all of the theoretical gains. (And real life gains are rarely as large as the theoretical ones.)

It's real. I'd link to the transcript, but the ALSJ is down because of the shutdown.

That's because white dwarfs don't produce sufficient pressure and temperature to kick off fusion in the materials it's core is composed of.... they're too small. However, those same materials are happily fused in the cores of larger stars, until you reach iron. When iron starts fusing, the real fun begins.

ASAS maintains attitude, not station.

Not that you need to have a view, other than for docking and landing, to fly a spacecraft. Other than those two, the crew is watching their instruments because looking out the window doesn't provide any useful information during (say) an injection burn.

You can launch a vehicle more than once...

And what *exactly* is your experience? Um, I hate to break this to you... but Deep Impact *crashed* (by design). Landing is a much different and much harder problem.

Way too many solar cells, way too many RTG's, and why would anyone take pictures in the dark and then post them?

Happens to all of us at one time or another. Thanks for stopping by and updating us! If you launch on a 0 degree azimuth, you shouldn't have to match planes. Most mismatch will be handled when you perform the insertion burn and the balance when you fine tune. If you really, really need to be in a particular orbit around your target, it's generally easier to set up with "change inclination" right after you enter your target's SOI.

It's neither idiocy nor stupid to point out a job half finished. That you uploaded the wrong part merely re-enforces my point.