magnemoe

Nice, now add an docking port, and you can drive in, dock and fly somewhere else.

Yes I do not understand the exclusion zone, during the accident it was an good idea as things could go wrong, but afterwards? On the other hand areas around Chernobyl are still radioactive, this is because of all the reactor fragments around.

Yes more struts, you want to connect parts in long stages together. you also want some up to the lander on top. Do you have an engine in center or is it just an drop tank? One tips to make the lander easier to handle is to put small tanks in the gaps between the four large, then put the engines on them, pipe from center tank to small tank, and from side tanks to center. This should not only let you connect landing legs on tanks but even let you drop the side tanks after takeoff, at least two of them.

When you say it yes, I wonder that the cargo was, looked like a lots of struts on top of an probe.

Why should we, we would know it was an machine or at least something alien. Some stone age people would not know, anything who moves around would be an animal as only animals move. Add the issue that if we had alien civilizations going interstellar they should have run into us long ago, one option is that they already did but somebody ate the rover so they moved on. Or perhaps this: http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1400/fv01349.htm

On the other hand, nature copy itself, fish, dolphins and sea living dinosaurs looked pretty similar, yes water put down some restrictions, however the Tasmanian wolf was an marsupial and looked like an wolf. Many of the wild alien ideas does not work well, they would lose out against animals with more conversational designs. Yes you could get land living octopus, but they would not be dominating if you had animals with skeleton. Yes its lots of things we don't know, why has we four limbs and not six, fish with six fins would work just as well, this would have the benefit that the front legs could easy have other use like gathering food or fighting. However I guess its an decent chance an intelligent alien would look humanoid. Walk on two legs, two arms, two eyes. One other body plan who could work would be the dinosaur ones, think an raptor with better arms. huge tail who counterbalance the forward body, same body plan but not like the human one. Follow the symmetry and no unneeded parts however not humanoid. How I guess first contact will work out, we used 100 billion$ and 50 years going where and they try to eat our probe.

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?