magnemoe

Yes but you need to use the prograde or retrograde handle to tweak it. You should put your node at equator, simply drag the normal arrow who would make your orbit more upright, then adjust orbit with prograde or retrograde handle, this will change your tilt so you have to tweak a bit here.

True, the Apollo mission probably selected the place as the probe showed it was interesting. This might easy happen again. Also if I was to send an manned mission to moon or mars I would send some rovers first as an recon, no not for an month long stay but for an short visit it would be an good idea. Testing of materials and other systems can easy be done on IIS or on an satellite you can land again.

I see, grappling hooks attach themselves then ejected, this leaves the question how to get out? Rocket engine?

With an ship capable of 10 AU at a continual 1g acceleration, the planetary speed does not matter much, Moth in the goods eye used similar ships and had jump points. In short you locate the target, decide how long you will burn and brake as in how much fuel you will use, this gives time and position of target at arrival, you burn, cruise, then brake and at the end of braking adjust speed to match target. For an low power aproch you would slingshot around Jupiter to change you direction.

yes three sexes don't bring any huge extra bonus, and will complicate stuff. Hard to imagine how it should work anyway. Would it require two sort of males and one female? More practical would be an system where all was bisexual or actual trisexual but required two different other partners. Would probably require some dna like structure who used three ropes in the ladder, or rater the triangular structure would demand (dna) from three creatures. Interesting idea, any other ideas how this could possible work? Danger with an bisexual animal is that if it is able to inseminate itself this will have an short term benefit in that it could get many children but an long term risk that some disease or other change in conditions could whip it out as its has to lite variation.

Yes outside the atmosphere it would be no difference, however the atmosphere would roughly follow the rotation speed and you will reach it while landing. On ground you will weight less at equator than at the poles, if you want to orbit again it would take less energy going with rotation than against. All this effects exists on earth but would be far more noticeable on an planet who rotated faster.

You can just burn and then transfer fuel to boosters. Or simply use the tank as upper stage and drain it while circulating, an 1.25 meter decopler and pipe back to small fuel tank and engine, probe and rcs. Dock tank, disconnect and deorbit the engine stage.

I thought you had landed safety then you blew up. probably to high horizontal speed but it appeared low. One problem was probably the high profile of your lander This should not have any problems tipping over during landing. The wide footprint is for driving. as its 20 ton then full I needed to keep the center of gravity low and have many wheels, reason for all the fuel is that I can land and take off again on places like Mun,

Think this is part of the problem, at the game is not done some people suspect Squad will cut the game in two. Say we get resources, reentry heat and an good drag models, an new gas giant with moons and some extra planets and asteroids. Career mod and plenty of other features and cosmetic updates. Everybody is happy. However three months later they release an expansion who let you go interstellar and explore other solar systems. Many will think that this was cut from the base game and it would be hard to prove its not. Its not like the dawnguard for skyrim who is not related to the rest of the game, in an sandbox game that is pretty much impossible unlike you make another game.

I'm testing out an class of new probe rover now, basically its an small fuel tank with wheels. Upside is that it only weight 500kg and with 900 m/s dV I can even take it back to orbit. This might be something to think of for an landercan lander to. Might be an idea to landing legs in addition to medium wheels to handle hard landings better.

I managed an two stages who was both able to land safely, first stage drops straight after gravity turn, second reach orbit and land. The first stage need work as its hard to land. I even tried an recoverable falcon heavy, downside with this is that I need to get the main stage to the next continent to land it.

Perhaps it can work, the wing will act as structure for both solar pannels and engines. However you have one day, of both reaching 30.000 meter and get your speed up fast enough to reach orbit. Did an test with electrical propels and nerva, idea look plausible, it has two benefits, the electrical engines will not get you very high but high enough for the nerva to get close to 800m/s, the wings let you gain speed with an twr of less than 1 then speed is high enough and you have used some fuel you go for the gravity turn.

First, unlike real world KSP rocket engines has low trust for weight, mainsails has 25 real world engines something like 70, this force you lift a lot of engines, the asparagus design let you drop engines as you go. However with KW rockets it's no problem building an Saturn 5 copy. Start with an large 5 meter tank and the 5 meter engine, default 3.5 meter engine and small tank, next an 3rd stage with an poodle or an fiting KW engine, large gray tank. lander with lander can, medium 2.5 meter tank and an fitting engine, poodle is overkill here. simlar engine and medium gray tank under the command module. Strut this good and you are off to go. 3rd stage should take you to orbit with enough fuel to reach Mun or Minmus. Downside is that you could replace this with an orange tank with an grey tank under and mainsail, four similar boosters in asparagus.

The trashcan solid boosters are nice for increasing twr at liftoff. And yes using turbojets as first stage work very well for small to medium rockets. feed them from an central fuel tank. If you send off something with nuclear engines and the nuclear stage has decent trust its an idea to use the nuclear upper stage as center of the asparagus, for an small probe you might want to use an mainsail or jet first stage then use two 1.25 meter boosters with T30 with fuel lines to the nerva. The nuclear engine improve overall isp. For an large mothership, put dropable booster engines on the ship to increase TWR you use the mothership as an second stage, it arrives with little fuel left so you have to refuel in orbit but its an easy way to get 200 ton or more motherships to orbit.

I found that rockets who are to wide tend to roll. That is wider than the 1+6 asparagus. Using KW rocketry huge parts tend to give this effect unless the center stage is larger than the boosters. For roll problems during the start of gravity turn, especially then using mechjeb, activating rcs for an short time help, some deactivate gimballing on boosters as it might cause overcompensation. For roll right after takeoff, this is usually because of errors in fuel piping or damage to parts. One easy way to check fuel piping is to just run the engines and not release docking clamps. Now you can inspect the fuel use over time.l Another problem is wobbly rockets, however this often result in spin or the rocket fall apart.

You don't use much fuel to deorbit, very lite if your PE is at 100 km and AP outside Gilly. I wonder if electrical propels would help, no they are not stock but not very overpowered. They would be able to take you to an decent attitude where you could switch to nuclear.

I use the airship mod, makes things far easier, even let you get out from Jool atmosphere. Main problem is that an rocket plane combine the worst side of rockets and planes, jet engines has an isp 10 times ion engines as they mostly heat air using a lite fuel to do so. This compensate for the drag, an rocket plane would face both the drag and the poor isp from the rocket engine. Now a plane using an mix of normal rockets and ions might work, use rocket a second for takeoff, use ions to raise as far as the wings can lift you, use rocket for gravity turn and ion to circulate. Main problem is the low trust of ions. Electrical propels from another mod would work better, they should be able to take you from ground to an decent attitude. now switch to rocket. This would work pretty much like balloon launch. You gain attitude but not much speed.

Stack Seperators don't leave anything on either mother ship or probe. if you use standard seperators you leave both the seperator and the engine faring if you mounted it at the engine. You also avoid the problem of putting the seperator on the wrong way blocking the landers engine.

Well it worked well for the curiosity rover and all the deep space probes.

Yes, on the other hand I have no more faith in getting Tokamak fusion to work than polywell or focus fusion. Note that both of this would be an far simpler and cheaper reactor design. So many fusion projects going on that some of them will work. And fusion works problem is to getting more useful energy out of it than you put in. You could make an fusion rocket engine with very high isp today, downside is that you would have to feed it energy so it would work like an heavy ion engine with better isp. The demographic challenge is indeed unique, dropping birth rates and aging population worldwide is unique. The effect will hit china far harder than the west. Most of the arab world and south america is also below replacement birth rates.

Main problem with nerva today is the lack of missions, current deep space missions involving sending probes of a couple of tons to Mars or less than a ton outside Mars. This can be done with chemical engines, using an nerva would increase cost without reducing weight much. For manned missions past the moon or something like asteroid mining we need something like nerva. In ksp something like pluto would be perfect for an Eve or Jool accent. It should be possible to modify an pluto so it switched to stored fuel at some height making it work like an nerva and you have an SSTO Eve plane.

The do not update function does not work for Skyrim. at best it delays the update some days. Now for Skyrim this is not an huge issue, it only affect the SKSE script extender who is updated pretty fast. For KSP its far more who can break during an update.

The space shuttle is only in back is down setting during launch, circulating orbit and deorbit burn. rest of the time it's in microgravity. During landing its an plane. as you can not move around during launch but might need to get out fast after an landing the plane configuration makes sense. For an spaceship under trust for days to weeks you would want the skyscraper design even then having anti gravity as any unstable in the trust or gravity would throw you sideway not make you lighter or heavier. In star trek where technology regularly fails this would be dangerous.

I always use the phase angle for burn in protractor as an hint of where to put my maneuverer node and nudge it until I get an intercept or at least an close pass. Also remember you can add an second node along the projected path this is very useful for target out of orbital plane like Moho or Eeloo

One tips is to turn on rcs just before doing the turn and turn it off afterward. Adding an lander can for more torque might also help, bonus is that it make the ship optionally manned. Finally never make an loop out of fuel lines, you can however use two lines and make it bidirectional against an central hub. kerthane generator will feed tanks who are directly attached over or below the generator or connected with an pipe going from tank to generator. I would used line from upper tanks to the six bottom tanks then to the six small for the nuclear engines and then to the kerthane tank. Only downside of this is that the top tank would fill first making the ship very top heavy. One change might be to use six small tanks on top of the orange.