Pbhead

what? so you gave up?!? NONO!!!! You are supposed to: ADD MORE BOOSTERS!!!!!!!!

ok. so basically. there is a new Startrek movie coming out. and all. Logically, it follows that the Starship Enterprise must be recreated in kerbal space program. This is not an easy task, and it is definitely not really within my skill level whatsoever. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36550973/Enterprise.craft I know what you are thinking. no way such a thing can fly. but I have proof! ok. thats not really proof. And I am trying to figure out how to get this thing off the ground here. I mean. my thrust, center of gravity, and lift places are all totally wrong... so while it can go down the runway, thats about it at the moment. That and explode. It is good at exploding. I think it is actually lifting upsidedown... because my capsule is upside down? bugger. But basicly. I think a working, flyable, single stage to orbit enterprise look a like is possible. (with enough struts), but I am basically just noobing it up here right now, and I would really like hints/ideas from all you cool much more smarter KSP people. Thanks ahead of time for any help!

1.5 million for landing and returning a kerbal from eve? hahaha! I am reading that right, right?

THe first time i tried to dock, It was a "rcs tug" i wanted to attach to my space station so that i can dock more things. I think i burned through 2000 units of RCS (most of the darn thing's fuel) and multiple hours of dancing and near misses, and many destroyed solarpanels before i finally, finally, managed to connect the darn thing to ONE of the 6 docking ports (one in each direction) I had placed on my space station core. Since then i have gotten better, but dam let me tell you how awesome it was to make that first connection. despite it basically making my rcs tug useless.

see? you got it! seriously though, 2 nuclear rockets fed by a big orange tank can pretty much get you anywhere no matter how inefficient you are with your burns. If you can get that in orbit, you should be fine.... especially if your spaceship is nothing more than a manned pod.

More boosters!

this video of all the KSP videos has made me laugh the most:

Weight to payload ratio is important... but, for me at least, payload to lag ratio is more important. Also... Is it possible to asparagus ion engines? I cant seem to figure it out...

There is a reason why I only responded to that section of your post. other factors harder, yes. Spiraling because your fuel flow is not symmetrical? make it symmetrical. That is a bummer. Because really. in real life, a chariot style space ship would require significantly less superstructure than traditional push from the bottom, because you can use much much lighter materials if the force is tension, as opposed to compression. Extra superdeduper important if you have frail life forms on board which cant be too close to radiation sources requiring the engines to not be close to the crew compartments.

Ya, I realized that at the time, but basicly the thinking was this: If i figure out how many solid rocket boosters a solid rocket booster can lift, then while at launch that first solid rocket booster does nothing but neutralize the 'weight' of the other solid rocket boosters... but now i have solid rocket boosters higher up, which will contribute to canceling out the effect of dropping mainsails with the asparagus. I have also messed with jet engines, which are fabulous, but the TLR (thrust to lag ratio) is really high. The nice thing about the solid rocket boosters, is that while they only give 315 thrust, they usually only take 2 parts (itself + radial decoulper, less if you have timed your liquid fuel to expire right when the solid does, and you can drop them together)... while a liquid fuel 'booster' takes the engine, the fuel tank, a decoupler, and a whole lot of struts cause that thing is powerful. That is really easy to fix... sort of. Drop your engines in a 4-2-1 configuration, instead of 2-2-2-1. If that makes sense.

Keeping it simple for now. With this, I will claim all of the planets. All of them!!!!!!!!

Thank you for all the great replies! Especially Temstar and plur. And yes, oggylt, it is a beast. It is timed out so that the solid rockets and liquid rockets run out of fuel at approximately the same time... which is pretty cool, because it means every time you drop a stage you get a new fwooosh from new engines lighting up... something you dont really get with asparagus staging (no fwoosh is biggest problem with asparagus) I would imagine the "best" rocket, would be a rocket that uses a serial stage to get really quickly to 100 m/s (sepratrons?!?), drops serial stage, then slowly asparagus lumbers to 260/10,000, each stage having slightly less fuel to maintain TWR, then when the last one drops, the rocket once again shoots off on another high engine/fuel ratio stage. I also imagine some sort of chariot (or podracer)-like rocket... Engines up high, and radial to a central fuel tank column which can then drop each tank the second they empty. I think i am going to try that info mod, and try some new rockets!

Ok. I am really new here, but I wanted to post some !!science!!. So. I was looking at trying to figure out the best rocket configuration if your payload is fuel. So, after a whole lot of winging it: (more at bottom of post), i decided to try study up, and be a bit more scientific. I learned about asparagus staging, but... something seemed off. so i did some tests. I created 3 designed, the only difference is the fuel lines and struts(which shouldnt affect things), 3 orange fuel tanks on top of a 32. Below are the fuel line layouts, the height and speed when the outer stages are dropped, and the craft files if you want them for whatever reason. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36550973/asparigus%20test%203.craft https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36550973/asparigus%20test%204.craft https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36550973/asparigus%20test%202.craft As you can see... I kinda messed up. that last image, while i took a frame or two after jettisoning the last stage, as you can see, and you should be able to predict from the fuel line set up, that unlike the other rockets, the fuel will start depleting from the inner stages before the outer stages are completely gone. so here is a picture of where the rocket is right after jettisoning just the first outer stage... note the quantity of fuel remaining, speed, and height. So here are the results, nicely tabulated Standard Asparagus, 2 tanks dropped per stage: Height Speed Liquid fuel left 18400 216.9 69996 Double Asparagus, 4 tanks dropped per stage: Height Speed Liquid fuel left 19.7 km 287.1 70308 Serialish outerstage stage, 4 tanks dropped per stage dropped in pretty short succession: Height Speed Liquid fuel left (after all outer stages dropped) 32.3 km 560.0 59177 Height Speed Liquid fuel left (after first outer stage dropped) 16.7 km 319.8 76869 So basically, I am a little curious on what you much more experienced players think on this. I mean, there are two conflicting forces here, one is the serial stages are keeping more engines on longer thus having a higher thrust for longer, but also means having more empty tanks. It also makes me wonder about like, ok, what if some of the inner tanks were transfered to the outer stages so that the outer engines burn longer before dropping... Or, have the outer stages have less tanks so that they act like 'boosters' helping the rocket to achieve that first 100 m/s as fast as possible. these designs have about 400 parts... mostly struts. I have no idea if that is good, bad, or par, but I feel like, why used boosters when mainsails just have a much better power/part ratio... at least before the struts. So please, I want want your knowledge! or... maybe just see your massively massive rockets! Like this! which is insanely fun to launch... and gets quite a large quantity of fuel up into space... about 50% of the time. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36550973/Tanker%20mark%206.craft (does placing RCS thrusters on large arms help with turning? It should... but does it?) Or this. 1700 part monster which. did not quite work out as intended. (the middle was, in theory, for a payload.)

Not ok with FTL drives. but I would LOVE interstellar travel as an option. not necessarily a viable one, but an option. perhaps add on a few more time warp levels... who cares if our kerbals are 250 years old when they get there! I would also be ok with fusion rockets, If you have set up duetarium or tritium mining operations on say, laythe... or you somehow can harvest jool's atmosphere for it. how cool would that be, to have to take your interstellar rocket out to jool before you can even put anything into the tanks! (or, perhaps you managed to bring the stuff back to kerbal) and even antimatter rockets, like described here: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/slowerlight.php#valkyrie but only after say REALLY ridiculous time and effort, like covering Moho with solar panels and particle accelerators, and "mining" sufficient quantities of antimatter.

been demoing through the weekend and omg this thing is a horrible time waster. So clearly, I needed to buy it. A bit annoyed that paypal is like, the only option on the ksp store. I mean, its like, what about a dollar in transaction fees there? and that doesnt include the credit card fees... not quite as bad as steam i suppose, though. Y'all should really look into bitpay. Probably would not get much volume though it (though, the bitcoin community has a tendency to go wild anytime someone does start accepting bitcoin taking the ~1 hour to set it up and then making an announcement would mean a front page /r/bitcoin reddit post in front of ~30,000 people for a day in free advertising), but the transaction fees from that avenue would be 23 cents. whatever. I got to go launch some rockets.