sojourner

In space combat even railguns are slow and their projectiles can be dodged. Lasers are near instantaneous by comparison. Remember, space is BIG. You guys need to read that link to Atomic Rockets I posted.

Falcon 9 1.0 did stage separation at mach 10. 1.1 is expected to do stage sep at mach 6, so the first stage will be much closer to the pad on the newer rocket.

Elon is trying to eliminate most of this refurbishment cost. He want's it to be basically "gas and go". Something the shuttle never was. As for costs of "fancy R&D recovery system", what are they? Engines? already paid for. Tanks? paid. Legs? yeah, not an exotic new technology there. Software? while it can take a while, it's not a big cost monetarily. Grasshopper 1 and 2 are both built with spare parts that would basically be collecting dust right now. Essentially researching first stage recovery is costing Elon fuel and man hours from his employees. He doesn't have much to lose by trying.Grasshopper 1 is mostly about testing software if that tells you anything. The hardware was never in question. Grasshopper 2 will actually include flights that will see if the hardware is up to questionable parts of the flight regime. Landing the stage is actually the easy part. The hard part is getting it to survive return to subsonic speeds and then get it back to the landing/launch site. They may achieve both, but it could end up impacting payload capacity too much, or stress the vehicle to the point that re-use will not be practical. Regardless, it will be quite an accomplishment. Now, the interesting work will be stage 2 reuse and recovery as it attains orbit. A much more difficult situation since every pound you add to the second stage takes a pound from the payload while on the first stage every 10 pounds you add removes a pound from the payload.

But still not worth the current costs to bring it back. Hopefully those costs will come down.

Go about half way down on this page and start reading. Then clear your schedule as you spend the rest of your week reading the rest of that great site.

Ah, of course there's a mod. And after I went through the trouble to make a suggestion thread.

I had this idea while watching a rocket destroy itself due to an engine dropping off which caused a thrust imbalance. It would be nice if we could still affect parts when the pause screen is active. Being able to do things like toggle gimbals and alter fuel flow. It would actually be more realistic seeing as in real life computers make changes like that on rockets in microseconds. So, imagine if you launched a rocket but something goes wrong, maybe you misplaced a fuel line and don't notice until the rocket starts to veer off course. You could hit pause, turn off fuel flow from an opposing tank, maybe shut off an engine or something in order to try and save the rocket. Then unpause and see how it goes, hitting pause again to make adjustments in a continual effort to save the rocket. I think it would add some challenge to the game as opposed to "oh crap, it's going sideways, revert to VAB".

Fun fact: The ISS will most likely be extended to 2028.

Yeah, he does it the long way there. You can just save it with subassembler if you include the root part. Save yourself all that hassle of copying files around.

It would be nice if we could pause the game and change settings on parts inflight. It would more closely mimic the split second responses of computer control in real life.

^parachutes for something that large are actually fairly heavy. They also offer the disadvantage of not allowing precise landings. If you think about it, they still needed most of the fuel in order to return to the landing site to begin with. When you factor that in, the remaining fuel to soft land vs the weight of parachutes becomes a no brainer. I would guess that Spacex probably did a fair bit of research into using/not using parachutes. And the Shuttle is about the worst example of "reusable" you could come up with to compare to Falcon 9 considering the external tank is thrown away, the srbs were dropped in salt water and had to be refurbished/repacked and the orbiter itself had thousands of heat tiles that were hand placed and inspected requiring thousands more man hours of wages. Spaceplanes in general only exist in KSP. To ask why nobody uses them is to ask why they don't work. SpaceX is trying to take a tried and true technology, tweak it, and make it better. A much more sensible approach business wise. Even if re-usability does not pan out they still have a damn good rocket that is cheaper than their competitors. very similar in that it takes off and lands vertically, yes. But in every other way, not so much. The problem with reusable SSTO is mass fraction. By the time you try to get the entire mass of the rocket to orbit there is no room left for payload. Reusable TSTO improves mass fraction immensely and even making that reusable has been a feat no one has accomplished. We need big breakthroughs in materials since and propulsion before SSTO and Spaceplanes become possible.

Yeah, I'd like to hear that too. The F-9 launched 5 times successfully, even proving it's engine out capability. The Dragon has been a complete success and fulfilled all missions to date. Hell, it worked so well that NASA let SpaceX combine COTS 2 and 3. OK, on the mission with the engine problem the secondary payload (a small test satellite for Orbcomm) was placed in the wrong orbit. But it was never meant to be a long term satellite and Orbcomm did retrieve useful data from the mission. And before you bring up small anomalies like the RCS issue on the last Dragon mission, please point out a series of missions that hasn't encountered any issues. As noted above, the Falcon 1e was cancelled due to market issues. Not a problem with the rocket. So you can't really count it as a failed. In Fact, I believe all of the payloads from those launches were relisted for Falcon 9 with the first f9 1.1 launch (scheduled for next month) being one of those.Your personal belief is also wrong as Elon has stated many times that he's trying to change the industry. He wants to make a profit through volume (number of launches) and force the rest of the industry to innovate to keep up. Hell, he started the company because he originally wanted to send a probe to Mars but was shocked to find out how much launch services cost.

A tip on using subassembly. Always save the "subassembly" with a root part attached. This will keep struts and fuel lines placed correctly. When you import the subassembly, attach it, then remove the parts you want to keep and delete the root as described above.

Time for you to build your Station Mark 2. Just pretend you're Tony Stark. Always building a better suit.

Then again, the engine that failed was a Merlin1-c. Which is no longer in use. All future launches will use the 1-d which is, I think, %40 more powerful while also having fewer parts and easier to produce. In fact, with the 1-d they have taken to building the turbopumps in house as opposed to using a third party supplier.

This is incorrect. Falcon 9 is being designed as a two stage RLV. Not a single stage RLV. Grasshopper is the test version of that first stage. At some point they will start development of the reusable second stage. Watch this video from SpaceX to see how they hope it will work:

Hopefully we'll one day need all that helium 3 on the moon.

SpaceX now has around 3000 employees. Not exactly a "one man operation".

Do a search for Sarbian. He has a link to an updated .dll in his signature.

You can do that with stock parts.

This thread needs an Elon Musk thread bomb.

This is incorrect when dealing with monoprop and batteries. monoprop tanks and batteries drain at equal amounts on your ship with (obviously) the smaller tanks/batteries running out first. You can deactivate the tanks/batteries as you describe.

Which was part of the SRB.

Mechjeb 2.09 gets installed to the gamedata folder. NOT the separate parts/plugins folders.

I have always heard to use an orbit above 150km because it reduces the rendering needed for the planet.