magnemoe

I think a bit over an a year is standard for the cheapest burn to Jool. You do an orbit between Kerbin and Jool where Jool is the highest point. Guess you went outside Jool orbit and meet it on the return.

Jool, 12.000 m/s dV after balloon launch, atmosphere up to 200km, 5800m/s to orbital speed, big planet so you spend a lot of time in atmosphere after gravity turn at 60km. Think I dropped 8 unnmanned ones from the Laythe shipyards. Know now that the accent profile was wrong, I should aimed for an 300km orbit to spend less time in the atmosphere.

Old joke about the guy who sold his car to buy a garage. Problem is that an SSTO does not work with today's technology, Skylon or scramjet might change this. Venture Star had this problem to, yes the small suborbital worked but to get the huge one to work they had to use bleeding edge technology and push it to 110%. Things like oxygen tanks of carbon fiber, as carbon fiber will ignite at contact with oxygen you cover it with an nanometer thick layer of metal. Not something who is reliable and have an fast turnabout. An two stage spaceplane would work. downside is that you need an mach 5-6 passenger jet sized first stage for an decent payload, yes it can be build with existing tech but cost serious money to make. This also give the option to use an upper stage reusable shuttle for passengers or light cargo or an rocket for heavier load. In KSP I have an two stages who lift 150 ton to LKO. Yes it use four boosters but the boosters can also land themselves. (switch to booster after separation, activate mechjeb landing autopilot, turn on rcs to rotate and move fuel from landing tank to main tank (this to not use fuel for landing))

I see, had an similar scifi idea, in atmosphere you can heat air, and you can inject water to generate steam, useful to get high trust for an vertical landing and high up in the atmosphere before you open the reaction chamber, after flare-out in KSP.

Have you looked at KAS and the airship mod, it mostly for this sort of things. Kerbal atatchement system let you lower an magnet or claw and pick up things with an winch.

You can "land" on jool using the airship mod and the old airship ancor from KAS. This will let you save and return to spaceport. You can also drop an probe or pod from low attitude and it will often survive, however selecting and go to it will case it to blow up after short time. Return this chalenge with another, bring one kerbal to 0 attitude on Jool or below and return him. No rules of engagement except debugger, hypedit or obvious cheat mods.

An point, however as the empty fuel tanks for xenon is less than half the weight of the smallest decopler I don't think this is so practical. Using larger ion systems from mods and it start making more sense.

Nice, main benefit of building ships from scratch is that you don't have to launch them, just launch standard 100 ton loads of spare parts.

One issue in KSP is that many ships are hybrid, they use an combination of nuclear and chemical rockets, my kerthane miners is an good example, they typically land on take off on all engines but uses the nuclear elsewhere. It will have an totally different profile if mining on Gilly and Moho. One feature of LANTR is that you has to have the oxygen, for the sort of hybrid use it makes sense. On the other hand I think we will start to having far more fuel than oxygen on ships later.

This is an KSP shipyard. The huge bay is just to make it look like an dock, this has the capability to build over 300 tons ships, dry weight if I fuel them in orbit who I would do for anything larger. Huge engines as it weight over 600 ton filled with spare parts, if empty I can send it to Jool.

first will an fusion engine work in the atmosphere? if you use an beam of charged particles from an polywell or the classical torus they will be generated in an vacuum chamber air will get in thought the hole and the process will stop. The second idea is an pulsed drive, it might work however the air might mess thing up, its also pretty low trust and require an separate reactor or solar panels to power it.

take an series of pictures during launch, pad, booster separation, main stage separation You will probably want to do an night launch as you can then remove the black easy. Now take an picture or Kerbin from orbit. Reduce size of the launch pictures and add.

Yes and it make it interesting that they selected this design, it probably made the stage lighter and cheaper with the higher drag less of an issue.

One problem with high trust is that it might cause structural faults. main example is telescoping main stage during circulating orbit. as the stage is almost empty and have an huge mainsail it causes an high g-force, this might get the rocket to collapse. as with 5g the cargo is pushing 5 times as hard on the main stage than it did at the pad.

I really love the execute node function. I wanted to go to the Mun, mechjeb set up an path. I modified it to get an polar orbit with an nice and close pe, execute. inside mun soi, I made the pass more polar, then I made an node to get into orbit. executed it, close to ap I was in correct height so I circulated.

Falcon 9 was able to launch with one engine out once. Falcon heavy will fuel 3 of it main engines with fuel from boosters. should still have engine out while crossfeed however it complicate stuff. Engine and dry weight is main reason why its so useful in KSP in short you have low twr. Try to put something like an orange tank in orbit and you find that an serial stacked rocket will be far heavier. Parallel stacking in real world is mostly used as an cheap way to get more cargo capacity on an rocket. In real world you can also use different trust on boosters and main stage, launch something with mechjeb with plenty of solid boosters and watch mechjeb pull the throttle far back to reduce drag loss. Now think if you could do this with liquid boosters.

Yes you can, downside is that you have to transfer fuel manually to inner stage and drop the outer. However its pretty pointless. most of the mass of an ion probe is engines and solar panels and you main problem is low twr, you might want to drop empty tanks, going close to the sun you might also want to drop unneeded solar panels.

Yes I was thinking delta clipper then I saw it, I always add decopler and chutes as an emergency function if I use to much fuel and is unable to land or other problems. I was testing the jet design and found that the basic jet engines work better for jet first stages then the turbojet. Probably as your speed is pretty low all the way and your main concern is trust at takeoff. With two ram intakes I was able to go to 17 km before switching to rockets.

Elegant design, much lighter than my jet ssto. That engines are you using?

Yes, he also used an nuclear ramjet to get out from Jupiter again. Probably used that one to generate heating for the balloon to, this has some issues like the configuration of the intake so this work from low speed up to escape speed. An simple balloon probe should work well, but you would be under time limit, inflate and heat the balloon before going to deep. In KSP I have used balloons to get out of both Eve and Jool, sendt down an probe to try to mine for kerthane on Jool, it did not work, Planing of doing an large Eve mission with an airship. My first mission used the balloons to get up to 20km, but with an electrical propel I would have an airship.

Yes, typical use is like then I landed on Moho north pole while the mothership was in equator orbit. Raise AP high where your orbit intercept, burn to align them and burn to circulate at PE, a bit more complicated as I wanted to match up with the mothership

Why, unless its a manned mission or you want to see how fast you can go or similar its just as well to keep it small. However it look like you forgotten the solar panels?

Thanks, and yes I have sent multiple probes, and perhaps 10 tries with unmanned exit burns. I had an deck with an probe and pod to lower down below 0 attitude. Later I found it was not dangerous to go below 0 meter except camera issues. Think I needed over 10.000m/s, ejected everything not needed to get out, used balloons to over 40 km and activated engine. One benefit over Eve is that gravity is only 0.7. Main problem is that atmosphere goes to almost 200km, and you need an orbital speed of 5800m/s at 200 km. As Jool is so huge the gravity turn is long and you spend long time in the upper atmosphere. I should probably have put me in a 300km orbit or even higher to reduce time in it. If I do it again i will use more nuclear engines, Probably the kspx 150 Kn nuclear engine, as center stage, then some asparagus with LV-30 for more trust. Current design was based on my Eve exit rocket with an larger upper stage. I even tried to send an probe down and tried to drill for kertane on Jool. it did not work. I did the ladder tricks to get in and out of the decent capsule on my Jool lander it worked well.

I always use Protractor as an guide, then to launch and estimated angle, then I make an node and burn after it. Trying to burn blind with low TWR is likely to be expensive to fix. The important thing with moho is to get the intercept at the pe of the solar orbit to reduce the speed as much as possible. Going to Eve its not so important as you will aerobrake, for Dres and Eeloo you move pretty slowly anyway but putting your orbit inside Moho's give you an serious speed. My first attempt came in in over 6000m/s, no chance of getting into orbit so I tried to land

Had an Laythe encounter who was over 6000m/s, main issue with it was that mechjeb landing autopilot was unable to find an attitude who put me in orbit, either I would pass or land and I did not want to cut it to close, however I started to brake at once I was out of the atmosphere, a 500 m/s burn put me in orbit and the next aerobrake gave me an low orbit. An Jool aerobrake with laythe encounter whould be more expensive. Its best to slingshot around Jool so you catch up with laythe but this is not always posible.