K^2

Yes. It only gives a short burst of air at these speeds. No idea how long exactly, though.

This extra energy will be stored as extra mass energy, so it won't go to waste. And if you figured out how to make anti-matter efficiently, you can probably fuse stuff efficiently too.

Life doesn't have to be exactly like ours, but there are several key elements we can pin down. Most importantly, energy flow is critical for maintaining low entropy, which you can't have life without. So we only need to look for life either on planets/moons that orbit a hot enough star, or these that give off its own thermal energy. We also know that some form of phase transitions will be required. You cannot manipulate entropy otherwise. This puts upper limits on temperatures. Id est, surface of a star itself is not a good place to look for life. Finally, and this is more of an extrapolation, we assume that evolution takes its time. That means the stable environment should exist for a long period of time. This effectively leaves us with planets orbiting stars or their moons as the only places to look for life. As that, in itself, places constraints on types of environments we deal with, we can make further statements on the types of life possible. Long story short, while the habitable zones, as currently defined, are somewhat anthropocentric, reasonable limits for where we should look for life aren't that far out from there. Of course, all of this assumes life that has naturally evolved in that environment. If we consider pan spermia or artificial life, a lot of these restrictions disappear. We are suddenly looking at any number of asteroids, comets, gas giants, rogue planets, and maybe even some dwarf stars as potential safe harbors for some kind of life. But that life got there from somewhere else, so looking for potential cradles of life is still a very good strategy. We might know two. If we confirm methanophiles on Titan, it'd be a huge breakthrough in our understanding of life in this universe. It'd take us from total uncertainty about life elsewhere and bring us to an almost absolute certainty that universe is filled with life. Forget Mars. This is where we should be looking for life. Even if we find evidence that life existed on Mars, big whoop. It could have come from Earth. Or Terrestrial life could have found its origin on Mars. We have chunks of rock filled with organic materials being bounced between these two planets all the time, and possibility of one of these bringing in some archaea bacteria is far from remote. Titan is in different category all together, however. Life there would be unlike anything on Earth. We find life there and we have two planets in one solar system with very diverse environments given rise to life. That would be the end of any kind of discussion about whether or not Earth is special in the universe. We'd know with certainty that it is not.

Nu should have been one of the metric prefix symbols. Then I could claim that Newton is a unit of mass. νT.

A mach 15+ wind tunnel?

Yes. I've adjusted it slightly since taking that screenshot, though. I moved the hard point onto the actual jet tank in the middle and got rid of the line between hard point and jet tank. It wasn't pulling fuel quit right otherwise. But yes. You can take the lines directly to engines so that they all feed from the same point. Makes managing fuel much easier.

I wouldn't know how to film that even if that was the specific goal. There is no way to actually get up close, and tracking something going that fast from that far away with a telescope? Sounds very tricky. Theoretically, I would expect most of the glow coming from ship itself, plus additional glow coming from atmosphere where it becomes ionized. The later is most likely to happen in the shock wave, so it should be a bit closer to the second set of images you link, but not quite right on any of them.

There are basically two things you need to understand about SSTO. 1) Don't try to design it as a plane. Design it as a rocket. Fly it like a normal rocket. You simply use the first stage that's air breathing and you don't separate it out when you switch to second stage. This is the lightest SSTO I've ever built. As you can see, it does not have any wings. The fins are just for extra stability. And while it has separators, it cannot actually drop the tanks, since the rocket fuel tanks are on the outside. It does separate to land. This is just experimental craft, and I didn't want to add weight with parachutes big enough to lower the whole thing. All you need to make this work is about 1.5 - 2.0 TWR and about 3 ram intakes per jet engine to get sufficient altitude. You should also do gravity turn a bit earlier than with the normal rocket. It increases time you spend in atmo, but that just lets you get more work out of your jet engines. And don't forget to close them intakes when you switch to rocket power. 2) If you want to actually land it as a space plane, you'll need to make sure your SSTO is well-balanced regardless of how much fuel it used up. This is an illustration of how I usually do this. Since CoM is aligned with centers of tanks, as the tanks drains, CoM stays put. That means that CoM is always just a touch ahead of Center of Lift, and that lets you aircraft stay well-balanced throughout the flight. This particular design, while still being a work in progress, has been successful at taking off from the runway, climbing near vertically at full jet thrust, performing gravity turn, switching to rocket power, establishing orbit, doing a turn around Kerbin, perform de-orbiting burn, and use jet power to land at KSC landing strip. Note also the long "neck" of the ship. I'm using that to counter-balance the engines, so that the center of mass is where I want it. Naturally, you don't want to waste this space, but if you need such a bit ship, you probably have the payload to put there.

Ah, well, yes. That would be a good reason.

I wouldn't be surprised if the main systems run a custom kernel that's based on Linux. There is no good reason to write a kernel completely from scratch for such a task.

It is not, strictly speaking, energy. Energy is not a terribly convenient metric for a rocket. But if it makes it easier for you to think of it that way, then that's fine. Just keep in mind that there is a distinction.

Precisely. Which means the only way to get around that is inhomogeneous structure. A fractal in 3D does not necessarily scale as a 3D object, which means it can have a different scaling law for strength to weight. And I have seen some patents, along the lines of carbon fiber or even aluminum alloy skeleton with a mylar skin, but I don't have any links saved.

If you ever need to build custom fins, what worked out great for me in the past is making them out of balsa wood. Sheets about 1/8" thick, cut into shape, superglued on the sides. Usually, I'd also add a line of hot glue along the seems to make it hold better. With the right design, I've had these fly more true than the store-bought rockets. Balsa isn't terribly impact resistant, however, so you'd have to fix the fins after nearly every launch, depending on how good your recovery system works.

They pretty much have to. The precision required is something like 8 orders of magnitude. They have to correct for gravitational time dilation, among other things. Atmospheric index of refraction is not insignificant at this point. That's easy enough to correct for, however. What it probably doesn't correct for are pressure fluctuations due to weateher and some lensing effects in upper atmosphere. These will be some of the factors that will result in limited precision of the GPS system. But they do average out between multiple satellites, so the more of them you have the lock on, the less of a precision loss this causes.

There's a plugin called Subassembly Loader. See if you can find it. What it does is it lets you save part of the ship and load it into another ship. So basically, save everything attached to your small command pod, start a new ship with a larger pod, and load the rest of the ship as a subassembly. Keep in mind that it doesn't always handle struts and fuel lines perfectly, so you'll probably need to re-check these. But that's better than building the whole ship from scratch.

It's not about the size of the part. Just number of parts.

This solution still gives you two parts where there is one, and it seems that OP's problem is specifically with part count. If you attach mainsails directly to jumbo tanks, you will have to cut throttle a bit. But that's not necessarily bad, depending on how good your TWR is.

Yeah, it's not that hard. I have a rocket capable of makign a round trip to Duna. Three chemical stages get it to a high Kerbin orbit, a nuclear stage gets it to Duna and places it on a reasonable entry trajectory into Duna's atmosphere. What lands on Duna is a small two-stage chemical rocket capable of making ascent and the return trip to Kerbin.

Oberth effect is described purely in terms of kinetic energy, and kinetic energy is a frame-dependent quantity. In other words, it all depends on what you are trying to do. For operations around Earth, all you care about is kinetic energy with respect to Earth's center of mass. In which case, it doesn't matter where you are in relation to the Sun. If, in contrast, your final destination is elsewhere in the Solar system, and you'll be fighting the Solar gravitational well, then it is motion relative to the Sun that's most relevant. Frame-dependence of energy is something you have to always be very careful with. If you pick accelerated frame of reference, you even lose the conservation of energy as a principle. It's a big part of why Oberth effect exists in the first place, and why you shouldn't be just taking it for granted. You shoudl work out the entire problem as a whole, and not just be trying to find the "fastest" place to burn. Because fastest relative to what?

I'm not actually sure if it's me or Stochasty that should be explaining that. But there are two factors here. First of all, there is no such thing as a graviton in the standard model. It's a particle that shows up when you try to quantize gravity, but you should also keep in mind that no successful quantum gravity theory exists. In other words, if such a thing as graviton really exists, we have no theory to properly describe it. Though, there are some indication of its properties if it does, in fact, exist. The slightly more relevant comment is that what you describe is relevant to on-the-shell particles. These are particles that satisfy E²/c² - p² = m²c². (This is called a mass shell, because possible values of (E, p) form a hyper-shell in 4-momentum space. This is true even if m is zero.) Any particle that freely propagates through space must satisfy this relationship, but a force carrier particle does not. These are virtual particles, and they generally exist off the shell. A particle off the shell can, in principle, propagate across the event horizon, traverse untraversable wormholes, and do many other interesting things. This is where I kind of run into limit of my own understanding, because I don't deal with paritcle interactions in curved space-time. It's more of Stochasty's domain. But any description of quantum interaction in curved space-time would have to take this into account, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is the explanation for how black hole interacts with stuff.

I like the way you think. I'll start saving.

Probably. I've done one launch with a 2 stage rocket, 3 engines at the bottom stage. Even with synchronized ignition, which was not easy, the thing went flying in a loop. Second stage still managed to launch, but it fired horizontally, so it never even had a chance to use the recovery 'chute. So I wouldn't wast a rover on this one until you can test the rocket itself and know that it flies true. Also very dangerous. You practically have to use metal parts for that one, and they will explode, send out shrapnel, and set things on fire. What are you planning to use for oxidizer? That stuff tends not to be friendly either. If you have no experience with it, I would strongly recommend starting with an air-breather. A valveless is relatively easy to build, and you can even find some instructions and demos on Youtube. These aren't as likely to go boom, and aren't as likely to severely injure you if they do. Plus, you only have to worry about fuel with these, and you can just buy a small propane tank used for cooking or welding. Then you don't even need to worry about a complicated pump or injection system.

You don't get any extra delta-V. Delta-V is fixed by engine and fuel. You get extra energy, however. You get extra energy because the power output of a rocket engine is Thrust * Velocity. The faster you go, the higher your delta-E becomes.

I'm in good shape. I should be able to squeeze in lengthwise. I imagine they'd have to cut down on fuel, but there should still be room for one or two minutes worth. And yeah, I'm a good enough swimmer. I hope they land this thing on a parachute, so that they can recover it. Otherwise, I might need a small one of my own. I would also need a wet suit so that I don't die of hypothermia while waiting for a recovery boat.

I'm not sure you understand how pressure and buoyancy work. Increasing thickness increases weight by same amount that it increases strength of the balloon. At the same time, pressure increases stress by the same amount that it increases buoyancy. In other words, even if the pressure is lower, all that it means is that you have that much less lift, and have to make the thing that much lighter, losing just as much strength to fight the said pressure. It is very near physically impossible to make a vacuum balloon that would work in nitrogen-oxygen mixture. It is physically impossible to build it out of a single shell, but there are approaches with fractal structure that work on paper. In practice, it has never been done. Air provides the same amount of pressure, and therefore stress, as hydrogen would. But the later provides a lot less buoyant lift. A vacuum balloon that can float in hydrogen is, in fact, impossible to construct. So your only option for floating in Jupiter's atmosphere is a "hot" hydrogen balloon. That will not provide nearly as much lift as helium does on Earth, so you'll end up with an absurdly large and delicate structure that will not be able to float anywhere near as high, and we're right back to being torn by the winds.