magnemoe

The bulkheads was watertight up to an some height, this is common also on modern passenger ships, hard to build otherwise. Any ship is very vulnerable to glancing hits who create long rifts in the hull. Yes titanic had weak rivets who made this issue worse. Sound plausible, it would not taken out so many bulkheads so the ship would not have sunken.

This is an kethane miner who is in regular use, landed everywhere except Jool and Eve, weight is around 150 ton, currently using an slightly larger one. However I tired to land this. 1500 ton. cargo was 1200 ton of rocket parts for Minmus. With this result Amazingly both the crew and cargo survived but it was an pretty messy landing.

So they will not backup parachutes on the pod? Depending on design you don't need to be that high for parachutes to work, yes if engines dies 50 meter over ground you are toast but this would be an pretty unlikely failure.

Somebody said that they mainly use the fuel reserve to land, extra fuel if something goes wrong like losing an engine. Add that it don't cost so much to land, rocket is only moving at terminal speed perhaps 400 km/h. Main downside of parachutes is that the landing is harder and you get an horizontal speed unless its perfectly calm and this will topple the rocket.

One weird issue regarding Pol, tried to land two landers on it with totally different design. Both started to rotate fast shortly after starting final decent. Had an simelar experience with an lander on Minmus but thought it was because the engines was above the center of mass as all other landers works well on it.

I tested this, 400 m/s isp is more than enough to land with in KSP. this does not have to be much fuel as you stage is almost empty. I found it far more expensive to return to launchpad from 15 km attitude with an 10 km gravity turn, however I saw some burn plans for the reusable first stage so its probably that I'm an bad pilot and used to long time turning, you want to cancel the horizontal moment as fast as possible and reverse it. Anyway they plan an new launch center in Texas, this would make the return to launchpad unneeded. Yes probably more as second stage is smaller and only have on engine, future plans is to also make the upper stage reusable, this will be harder as it has to survive an reentry burn. This will also give a great flexibility, you can use an reusable second stage for light loads and an light one time use if you need to lift something heavy.

KSP don't have achievements, Skyrim has steam achievements and come with an editor making it trivial to make overpowered items.

Wings act as stabilizers and will help. never tried winged rockets but you might want to try an jet powered fist stage probably with some rockets to help you get speed and attitude, then you fly the thing as an plane until you reach 20 km. This might be an good idea for an SSTO should potensialy be able to lift more stuff than most planes as you are more free in designing,

Yet another rescue mission however on an kind of different scale. Finally doing aerobrake around Laythe after creating an kethane miner and docked it to the mothership(the four orange tanks to the left). Used the kethane miner as tug to get the mothership Jool express into Laythe orbit. Some complications, Jool express weight close to 2000 ton, its an orion nuclear pulse rocket with an cargo of 800 ton spare parts for orbital construction, 18 kerbals to put up an base on both Laythe and Pol. Some problems first two of the chemical engines fall off because of metal fatigue. Yes it uses mainsails for precision movement, then the orion engine failed after getting into orbit around Jool. So after going to Jool in 30 days, I used 4 to get an minimum power intercept with Laythe. The ting was horible to rotate and had ion engine like twr. Currently setting up infrastructure to mine on Pol to produce more infrastructure.

Sound plausible, ammonia would probably help life to. The volcanic activity probably produce lot of the heat on Laythe. So no life you could see, however an sample mission become an high priority.

I miss the between images so I just do some before and after ones. Underway http://imgur.com/WgXbEsI Minmus http://imgur.com/sENkhmo Mun http://imgur.com/aehCCl2 Low Gilly orbit http://imgur.com/aDWFr5e

Yes, so you can start the career with an bussard ramjet with an skylon first stage in the wab unless the mod has some metadata about career. Its also legal to use your head then it comes to mod. Some like the skylon, the bussard and the orion is designed to be totally overpowered.

True, however its fun On the other hand you should be able to salvage you mission even without the nervas unless your ship get way to side heavy, try to shift fuel, worst case drop one of the landers. Might even be posible to run the odd nerva together with the orion to balance. Even without the extra engines you just lose precision control.

Welcome to the world of programming

Guess you are right, I use balloons to get my Eve landers out of the atmosphere, however an mountain landing work well enough for this plant the flag mission.

It might be worse, I use some KW rocketry super strong trusses, six from orion to tank and two from tank to orion and it still broke. So unless the struts are weaker than they say they are we have other problems.

Will do some testing in orbit to see if its orbital construction. However first I will construct an huge kethane miner it should be usable as an tug and get the orion into Laythe orbit.

Easier now with the command seat you can get below 50 ton.

I did an run with kethane refueling. it include an Eve lander using balloons in front, an small lander mounted on the side, the main mothership and an huge kethane miner at the bottom. The miner was also the main lander, able to SSTO on Laythe and Tylo. One idea to do this stock might be to haul an huge fuel depot to low Eve orbit together with the Eve lander. Use this to refuel after going to Moho. You could even leave some of the stuff needed for Jool like the Laythe and Tylo lander in Eve orbit and only bring the medium lander. For landers I would probably use one lander for Laythe using jet first stage and a multi stage lander for Tylo. One other lander for other places or perhaps an very small one for low gravity moons.

Designed that lander to be able to land anywhere. Very wide with an low center of mass. But yes I did not realize how hilly it was or I would landed at the bottom.

One strange issue, My current ship orion engine has gone dead after loading the game. Restarting the game does not help, chemial engines work but the two remaining is on the same side. Only thing odd I did was spawning an service module with orbital construction close to the ship, this module spawned to far away to reach it with rcs, probably the long and non circular orbit created problems, next atempt did not leave launchpad because of some bug but this should not affect the other ship.

You have the exact same problem as I had, first I lost one engine during boost then an second during braking. The upper parts however holds up well, makes me wonder if its some issue with mounting stuff on the orion engine. Some chance of the nuclear blast hit things on it. One option might be to mount the engines higher up. one the magazines or higher. Downside of this is that mechjeb tend to get confused by this. The Minmus landing failed because of this. On switching to chemical for final decent it tried to rotate the ship, I switched to manual but was unable to kill all vertical speed.

That made sense, some fool designed an adapter to be able to make an mess of an foolproof design. Almost scary.

Stellar sized black holes stay around for an very long time so if the supernova created an black hole it would still be around. However sun circle the galaxy once every 200 million year so it could be pretty much everywhere today 25 orbits or more later.