magnemoe

Think its simply is the speed. Note that I have popped kerbals by falling off an orange tank sized rocket during ladder testing.

Nice. I agree here, I would like one version for orbital use, perhaps also an small one with an 10-20 ton capacity to put on an mothership for spawning probes.

Far smarter to use an lander with an nuclear reactor, let it heat up and melt its way down through the ice. Far more control and you can put some small sub probes on it to explore while below.

Except that even IPCC agree that the world has not become warmer the last 10-15 years, is IPCC wrong? The models did not catch this, my conclusion is that the models are not good enough. The hockey stick was debunked even before the last 10 years stable temperature. Has been silent about it. In short this guy did not come up with anything relevant, just the same old: the deniers are idiots. I have no information about the antarctic ice and its also pretty irrelevant, Antarctica is to cold for ice to melt. The main factor is how much snowfall it gets, this is affected by climate and it don't snow if its very cold so an warmer Antarctica will probably get more ice. The ice will then get pushed back into the sea some hundreds year later. The amount of ice dumped in the sea affect sea levels, not how much water ice melts. ---- Now a few other issues: There is no consensus, yes its claimed everybody agree but the gap in predictions between the doomsayers Gore, Hansen, Greenpeace and IPCC is far larger than if we get cooler climate at 2100. However the doomsayers has stopped talking about 2030 and two meters increase in sea level as they did 10 years ago as it become to stupid 17 years before so the gap might be smaller. This is not an scientific discussion, its an political. No discussion about looking into this problem, yes co2 is an greenhouse gas. However its political as the discussion is not about using some pocket money billions on satellites, supercomputers and distributed sensors to figure out that is happening. Its about if its smart using an significant part of the planetary GNP on reducing co2 emissions. Anyway its unrealistic, all the climate politic so far has had two effects, it has increased governmental income because of co2 taxes and it make people feel good. Yes you get some secondary effects like shifting away from coal who reduce local pollution. (On the other hand diesel cars and burning garbage reduce co2 while increase local pollution. ) Kyoto had an hardly measurable effect on co2. To make things far worse, China and many other countries will endorse any program who shift industry from the west to China, it reduce co2 emissions in the west but probably increase them globally however it helps the Chinese economy who is an important goal for China. Russia agreed on the first Kyoto agreement as they was shutting down lot of old soviet industry and got money. Now they build up and is naturally not interested anymore. To make things totally impossible. We know one way of reducing co2 emissions a lot, pretty cheap and within 10 years: nuclear power, switch from coal and gas to nuclear. however the greens hate it with passion. Any politician serious about global warming has to be friends with the greens pissing them off and he will lose loads of voters.

Yes, you can never have to much solar panels, you need some static ones if you break the other and some RTG for nights, add some batteries. Mods make this far worse, like the backup KAS winch. No you can never have to much trust or fuel.

Orbital construction uses an spare part resource who is just an fuel resource like kerthane you has to launch and transport to the dock. Then it use something like hyperedit to move the ship from launchpad to the docks orbit.

Don't the debug spawn here change all kerthane deposits in the solar system? or is it just body wise now? It also mess up old scans.

Yes it made sense, another thing, SpaceX is building an launch facility in Texas, wonder if part of this it to make it easier to recover fist stages and later falcon heavy boosters at either Florida or the Caribbean?

Yes some of the big craters have very high gravity, this will actually deorbit low flying satellites pretty fast unless they use rcs. Read another article about it, on the edge of the craters you could get an .5 degree offset between vertical and gravity down.

Yes, I adjusted the speed settings on this, set the upper speed bracket much faster, but also doubled the starting speeds. As it's now you might end up in an setting where you are unable to brake as you commented. an bussard ramjet would have an upper speed but it would be very high, 0.8c or something. Would actually like to separate out the intake on it like on jet engines.

Mostly an question about patience, Did an two kilometer orbit with an ion probe, used moded engines but doable with stock. Main issue with the 100 part requirement is that you have to use the big and heavy solar panel who will give you an low TWR.

Remember I made an transfer stage for landing six small probe rovers on Mun. however the decoplers was the wrong way so I put the transfeer stage on impact path decopled the rovers and circulated. Then followed them down, as the angle of impact was very shallow one rover wheel was thrown back in an balistic path and crashed on the other side of the Mun.

Jool behaves strangely. You can land an airship anchor on it. However stuff blow up at -100 meter who is the actual ground. Here an probe who hit -100 meter and get destroyed. On the other hand stuff might survive, I dropped the decent pod and other stuff before leaving and it survived -100 meter crash. But then I switched to to it, it jumped around a bit and was destroyed. It look like its not an plain collision/ destruction zone but something different.

Quite true, end of the ice age caused an die-off. However it was not close to an extinction event. However the Siberian traps gives an very plausible explanation to the extinction something magnitudes more devastating, the co2 increase would come because of the insane amount of volcanism, but it would be an secondary effect the real killer would be all the smoke who would block out sunlight for years.

On the other hand the age of the dinosaurs was far warmer than anything after the ice ages, think temperatures was close to 10 degree warmer. Condition was stable for 100 million years, continents was also much more like they are today than 250 million years ago giving more similar climate. The real killer during the P-T event was probably volcanism, might be helped by an impact on the other side of the Siberian trap. The Siberian traps was no ordinary volcano, more like an moon sea covering two million square kilometers. I guess this had some impact on the environment, yes the impact on the other side would contain more energy.

Serious piloting skills. Anyway it does not take much to get an probe into orbit. This is true in real world to, think the Pegasus rocket is 20 ton and it carries 500kg. Granted its lifted to the edge of the atmosphere. For something real lightweight use an 180 liter tank, two radial orange engines, jet engine below, decopler between and drag fuel line to the jet engine, ram intake on top. On flameout shut down and drop jet, close ram intake and fire up the rockets. This weight less than 4 ton and you should be able to reach minmus with it.

Note this is more fun if you are about to do the burn to get into orbit around Mun or other places. Will not comment on all the probes I have launched for mapping kerthane and has to little battery capacity to map all of the dark side leaving an stupid horizontal band on half of the planet.

Did some testing of landable first stages in KSP, naturally to do an landing I has to switch back to first stage after decoupling. My experience was that landing again was pretty cheap, however if you dropped after gravity turn you had to use lots of fuel getting back. this could fast cost more than the 250m/s needed to land. Does not the same problem apply in real world?

Yes, they are nice then the TWR at launch is low.

Think of poor Jeb, give the man an Orion spaceship today. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/28428-Orion-aka-Ol-Boom-boom It kind of fit his personality.

Yes, using an mix of normal and nuclear engines works nice for this, keep nuclear off at liftoff, engage at 1500 meter on kerbin, start turning normal engines off during the middle of gravity turn and finish it on nuclear only. However I don't think this work so well on Eve because of the brutal TWR requirements.

The sabre has an worse exploit than the 800m/s isp in vacuum. The 23600 m/s in atmosphere, this is an normal isp for jet engines, however on Eve the sabre work like an normal rocket engine and would have an isp like one. Only way around this would be to use an nuclear jet engine like the pluto engine. You would need an small rocket engine to get you up to speed

I always mine and convert to fuel during drilling as drilling is slower if you don't use loads of drills. 4.5 orange tanks with fuel, just an small kerthane tank for drilling at night. This was used on the grand tour mission so it carries an rover for exploration. This is so large it can act as an mobile fuel depot, take it from Minmus to LKO, use it to refuel multiple ships and send it back.

Played a bit with this. One issue is that the trust is very dependent on SOI, this can be very confusing, however even 40kN free trust is nothing to complain about,

Correctly, an SSTO who is cheap to operate and can haul an useful payload is hard. Test in ksp, an mainsail and two orange tanks is an ssto, you can bring up an probe and have fun landing. Increasing the size a bit or using jet engines you can get something who take 3-7 kerbals to LKO and dock, making the thing two stages where both is able to soft land and you increase payload from 6 to around 20 with the same sized rocket. Yes but an well working scramjet would be useful for it.