Brun

Sputnik made it to orbit so it was the first orbital flight. Given all the ICBM development throughout the 50's by both the US and USSR, I don't think there has ever been any debate that there were suborbital flights prior to 1957, since ICBMs are by design suborbital.

A while back someone made a map of Kerbin with detailed (fictional) country borders. Ah, found it - it's here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/71685-Most-Detailed-Kerbal-Border-Map-in-History.

Time to name my next Asteroid Tug Preparation H.

Ah yes, I see now. Thanks!

You might want to make it more clear exactly where that taurus-patch.cfg is supposed to go, or if it needs to be renamed to anything special. Great pod though, I've been waiting eagerly for the Internals .

The Shuttle ended up being very financially inefficient (i.e. it ended up costing more to operate than expected), in addition to technically inefficient, and it's this financial inefficiency that people often talk about when criticizing the shuttle. The biggest reason for the added expense is that the Department of Defense (which helped fund shuttle development and had considerable input on its final design) was expected to make regular use of the shuttle and, by doing so, partially subsidize its operations. When Challenger happened in '86, the shuttle fleet was grounded for over two years. This meant that several DoD payloads that only the shuttle could carry were also grounded, and that frustrated the DoD greatly. There were also other high-profile DoD launch failures around that same time (a Delta and 2 Titan failures, both carrying DoD payload), and combined with Challenger it really made the DoD worry about its ability to reliably deliver payloads to orbit, without long downtime caused by mishaps. So, the DoD bowed out and pursued their own launch vehicles. Without DoD money coming in the cost for all future launches went way up. (Not to cast the DoD in a bad light here - they didn't just wait for the first mishap and bail on the shuttle program. The exact situation caused by the Challenger disaster had been something they had feared since the very beginning.) EDIT: I know you asked about the shuttle's design specifically, but the operations side of things was also hugely important to the Shuttle's efficiency problems. While it was technically overdesigned for civil and science work, that alone didn't really kill the Shuttle's efficiency, since those tradeoffs were expected to be paid for by carrying DoD payloads. The DoD dropping out of the program is really what hurt it most, more than any single design aspect.

This looks great - I've been looking for a good pod for interplanetary missions (I've been using the cupola and hitchikers). Can't wait for the IVA.

That's because its glide ratio on final approach was about 4.5:1. In the early phases of reentry it was even worse, closer to 1:1. Those are atrociously bad glide ratios compared to regular aircraft, hence the flying brick nickname.

While I'm completely unfamiliar with Macs (my specialties are PC and Linux), I do know Macs are UNIX-based and have a (mostly) POSIX-compliant shell language. Is there any way you could use the terminal to do something like: cp -Rf KSPRC/* KSP Where KSPRC is the extracted KSPRC folder and KSP is your normal KSP directory?

Haven't been to Moho yet myself (either it or Dres will be my next target), but I know some people try to grab an aerobrake/gravity assist off of Eve to help slow down during Moho approach.

Indeed, I imagine that there's a very narrow sweet spot you'd have to hit, which might not be possible with the stock decoupler forces, even if you mix and match different decouplers to fine tune your force at launch.

You'd be surprised - regular rockets get significantly less efficient in atmospheres, so you will use up a lot more fuel just due to engine inefficiency on ascent from Duna, not to mention the extra to counteract drag. This really would be a lot easier if you could dock with that mothership.

I think that by the time you're able to get a Kerbal out of the atmosphere with this technique he'll already be on a interplanetary or even interstellar escape trajectory. In my the tests that didn't result in vanishing debris/Kerbals, the decouplers would accelerate the debris to tens of thousands of m/s (found by viewing the flight status page) but it would very rapidly decay in Kerbin's atmosphere, so they'd really only be going that fast for a fraction of a second. His trick was to get the debris/Kerbal going so fast that the travel distance during that fraction of a second would place it outside of Kerbin's atmosphere.

Best way to do it would probably be to get clever with Eve gravity assists.

He can also (theoretically) get gravity assists in both directions (from Ike and Mun), and maximize those by thrusting at his Ike-ar/Munar periapses. He could shave off 2km/s (500 m/s for each gravity assist) if he managed to catch both Ike and Mun in the right place, but that's getting very very lucky.