Sof

lol at "most of my landings are spontaneous and unintentional"

KSP In space no-one can hear you explode

Probably got a lot to do with the fact that there aren't factories pumping out parts like for example with cars. That, and designing a new engine from scratch costs loads of money, and getting it wrong results in a big explosion. Better to stick with the tried and tested.

You could do with building more economical landers. But even then, there isn't much point unless you want to have a grand tour in a single ship. Launching from the Mun is inefficient to go travel anywhere else apart from well timed Kerbin gravity assists to Eve. It is better to simply launch to LKO and add any fuel you need from Kerbin.

He means quickest in terms of time from launch, not the actual relative velocity. 11mins from launch is pretty quick. I'm not sure what my quickest time was, but when I was building my spacestation, I got pretty good at knowing when to launch my rockets. Average time was probably just over 20mins inflight time.

It is impossible to kill a Kerbal in a command pod and have the pod stay intact.

I don't bother with bases or giant slow moving rovers. It takes ages to do, is full of repetative tasks and you essentially end up with the same amount of entertainment as you would have just sending a small 1 man rover down. There is bugger all to do once you've landed besides drive a short way. May as well make that slightly more fun by building a racecar. The lander just needs to be big enough to get down and back up again.

Wait, you launched 1 orange fuel tank using only 6 nuclear rockets? No other staging at all? lol Use more traditional rockets on lower stages to launch your fuel tank with a single nuclear engine attached. Never launch rockets from the ground with nuclear engines.

On the surface of Moho no. But the mass is not down to the weight on Moho. It stays the same where ever you go, and that is the part that costs so much delta v to slow down and speed up. Possible, sure. Better fuel economy/lower launch mass, nope.

I'm thinking assemmbly in orbit so the rocket from Kerbin doesn't have to be as big. Would it be better to build one in Kerbin orbit then transfer to Eve, or use tugs to get each piece over to Eve orbit first?

Long story short, my mission to Gilly ended in a horrible disaster. Part of the lander is still there, but the rest of it, including the crew, crash landed on Eve. What kind of monstrosity is needed to land and take off from Eve?

Wait, so you intentionally glitched the game and then became confused when your computer was giving weird sensory output?

Typically, if you engine cluster your central stack with t30s and have mainsails on the asparagus boosters. With a properly clustered core, you can get incredible lifting power with >7 orange tanks on the first stage. ie, have 124 tons of fuel in each booster and the central core (with at least 4 boosters). I have found that this design can launch Laythe capable return missions in a single launch (Laythe orbit rendezvous)

My standard rover design is nigh on indestructable because I kept crashing. I've had rockets that didn't go right during launch, and the whole lower stage decided to explode and fly into the rover at max thrust. Everything but the cockpit (thanks to parachutes) and the rover (somehow) survived hitting the ground. A headlight did fall off though.

They need an engine between the Mainsail and Poodle. For your second stage orbital burn, there is currently no suitable 3m rocket engine. The mainsail is too heavy and its ISP is too low to make it fuel economical, and the poodle is too weak to push an average payload into orbit. All the other engines are half the size and don't fit unless you cluster them. And that just opens a whole new can of worms for anything that isn't the first stage.

I always start fresh each update even if it doesn't break saves.

I built a station, just to show I could do it. Generally, I just send missions to land a 3 man pod with a rover to a particular planet or moon and then try and return to Kerbin. I have a fairly standard design that can get such a ship to Duna, Ike, Gilly, Dres, Laythe, Bop, or Pol in a single launch. but it remains to be seen whether it can get back from Jool yet.

I couldn't help thinking I've had that happen to me when I watched it earlier.

You rotate the camera, and Kerbals always orientate themselves with respect to that.

The nodes work on the presumption that you are using the last engine fired. What tends to happen is that you use your first few stages with powerful engines to get yourself into orbit, then dispose of them. At this point you create the node for Jool or where ever before firing the NERVA rockets. The game still thinks you are using the really powerful engines you used to get into orbit. The NERVA engines have a much lower thrust so the estimated burn time is always much lower than the actual burn time that appears a few seconds after activating the NERVAs.

There are many reasons. The one thing Mars One has shown, is that there are quite a few people who would be willing to live on Mars, just because they "can". If people were willing to sacrifice some freedoms they get on Earth, there would probably also be large profits to be made from any unexploited resources, or even simply terraforming real-estate to make it more Earth-like. Then of course you have money to be made off tourism.

-snip- Sure there are issues to iron out with a launch loop. However, its main advantage over a space elevator is that is can be made using modern materials, and is a lot cheaper. I would be willing to bet this method would be constructed before a space elevator on Earth. That is to say if we don't find a more economical traditional rocket to get us into space, by the time humanity is ready to actually become a space faring species, we'll build a launch loop.

Not never go outside. Just limit the exposure risk. You could live underground while preperations for a surface base were made. Although that might as well be done by robots.

It was argued earlier in the thread that infinite C wouldn't make the sky bright. We don't see far away stars because light hasn't reached us yet, they are just too far away and aren't bright enough to see. Changing the speed of light wouldn't change its brightness.

So how about landing on Phobos, hollowing it out then spinning it to create your spacestation with resources you don't need to bring with you.