wronkiew

I'm prototyping my stock space cruiser, which I will launch and assemble in orbit after 0.21 comes out. 15000 L of fuel, eight LV-N engines, crew of twenty. 9 km/s delta-v between refuelings. Lag may be a problem.

It was fascinating to me to watch Orbital's Antares first flight because the video feed had several windows of information that were very similar to what you would see in KSP. Sort of a combined staging view and map view.

"Wrong" is a bit strong here. The examples you cited are very old and may be irrelevant with today's image processing technology. Surely there are ways of cross-checking roll control that don't require sacrificing a few tons of payload. And foam strikes should be less of an issue with nothing bolted on to the side. Of course, given how many miracles are needed to get this thing off the ground, why not add another: anti-gravity paint.

Maybe they were talking about Kerbal LiveFeed: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/24926-0-20-Kerbal-LiveFeed-Passive-Multiplayer-Plugin-Client-Server-v0-6-6 Obviously, real multiplayer KSP would be huge. It's not the kind of thing you can tack on to a game with a plugin, it has to be designed in from the start.

Buran's payload was about 30t, not 100. If you're not counting the mass of the orbiter, which you aren't for STS. Its weight on pad would have been 2500t. You have to include Energia by itself, which had a 100t to LEO payload capacity.

Some pointers I've picked up from elsewhere in the forum: - Keep your target speed set so you're always 100 seconds away from ramming your target. So if the target is 100 m away you should be approaching it at 1 m/s. Maybe 200 seconds since this is your first time. You are approaching your target when the yellow circle on the navball is centered over the purple circle. - Set the view mode to 'chase' and line your view up so your docking port is facing away from you. That makes it much easier to tell what the RCS thrusters are going to do.

Here are some speculative rocket designs from SpaceX from a few years back. http://www.parabolicarc.com/2010/08/06/15941/ The Falcon Heavy numbers are from before they opted for fuel cross-feed. These designs are realistic and interesting but now they are working towards MCT instead, and no one outside the company knows what its specs are. Also I agree with tavert and others that Ares I is never built.