TonboIV

Actually no. The spacecraft will always reach the same height, regardless of its mass. It's like Galileo's thought experiment in reverse.

I have a fear of heights (though hardly a severe one), and I've been learning to fly ultralights. The first few time up were somewhat scary; but familiarity, and being busy learning something hard, took care of that pretty quick. I'm still usually a bit anxious when I first take off. I'd say if it's the kind of fear you can control, then It wouldn't be a problem.

Yeah, I do that way too often. A few days ago I was cooking, and for just an instant I tried to turn on 4x physics warp! (You know, because if you put it on rails, it just sits in the pan not cooking)

Perhaps there are a few people who remember me from a long ways back. Then there was the big forum crash, and a few issues that kept me away from KSP Well I'm making my way through career mode now with disappointingly few explosions (maybe I've just gotten too good), so I'll be hanging around here again. Well... at least a little anyway. Never make promises you're too lazy to keep!

Infinite fuel to on! Here's my best attempt hand flying. It's actually very hard to hold altitude exactly and I could only get my g-force down near zero for seconds at a time. I'm in a near circular orbit here at 21km. G-force 0.065 and note my nose angle is zero since I don't need any lift! Added MechJeb, and using transletron plus smart-SAS I was able to maintain 3000m/s orbital speed at 28km. Note on my HUD, vertical speed is near zero, flight engineer shows g-force 0.584 and you can see I'm inverted and nose significantly below the horizon. All that g-force is up and I'm flying down to fight it!

Thank you Harv! Excellent explanation, and I quite like your point about centrifugal force being legitimate in a rotating reference frame. One thing that probably should be stated, is that we aren't actually talking about flying level (in a straight line) here. If you did that, you'd eventually leave the atmosphere. To maintain altitude, you must fly in a circle! A very big circle that goes all the way around Kerbin (or earth). Moving in a circle always requires acceleration, and if you're at orbital speed gravity will provide exactly the right acceleration and you'll fall in a perfect circle. If you use modded engines (or infinite fuel) you should be able to fly faster then orbital speed, and experience a net upward force within the atmosphere.

Now they should do the "Up-Goer Five" challenge ;-p From what I've read, the fuel used up returning the first stage will be substantial. SpaceX's next Falcon 9 launch will be an enlarged v1.1 to carry the extra fuel for that and they'll be flying the first stage down to a simulated 'landing' at the ocean surface (I mean, they were going to throw the thing away in any case, so why not have some fun with it >:-) In operation, it seems they'll be making a 'turn around' burn at altitude to land the first stage back at the same launch-pad. That's very fuel intensive and I think they said something about a higher payload in "expendable mode". The fuel will definitely weight more then a set of chutes, but SpaceX is rightly more concerned with economics then with fuel or weight. Fuel cost is insignificant in the space launch business compared to vehicle and operation costs. Landing with chutes means a water recovery, damage to the stage from impact, water; lot's of expense there. Even if they have to build a bigger rocket and burn more fuel, SpaceX will be laughing if they can bring a pristine stage right back to the pad it launched off.

Exploding on teleport? Interesting. I don't think that's ever happened to me. I have blown up a lot of ships this way, but usually I can trace it to something I did. Wrong unit for altitude in simple mode. Wrong mEp for an elliptical orbit with Pe below ground. Orbiting the wrong (larger) body. That kind of thing. Mind you, the current design does make errors of the type rather easy to make. Kind of fun even, but good to know you guys have had the same problems and want to see it fixed. Count on me for bug testing!

Yay! I'm very happy to see someone working on this again; and I totally agree with you, expand it's functionality until it becomes the MechJeb of cheating! Awesome! Now as you're asking for ideas... Complex orbit mode could use a little clean-up I would like to see Hyperedit use less SI prefixes. 2.50u is more legible than 0.0000025, but 0.70da instead of 7 is just silly. The rounding to only three significant figures can be a problem too. Jool has a SMA of 68,773 Mm. In hyperedit it gets rounded to 0.07Tm. That leads to a large error. I need to put in SMA manually to keep Jool in the same place. I think the h, da, d, and c prefixes should go and numbers in this range should just display directly. All numbers should show at least six sig figs. Epoch is a special case. It gets rounded to, say 0.30M, which means the error might be 5,000 seconds. That makes setting my mEp pretty much guesswork. It needs to be displayed to the second. Even better would be a button to just use the current time for Epoch. I can't see any reason to use an Epoch other than 0 or the current time.

Tartiflette is right. Those VTOL jets are rediculous! I did my best to copy his design from his pictures. My VTOL jets carried me to 43 km at 2419 m/s orbital speed by gradually lowering the throttle from 8 to 3 percent, before flaming out completely. By the time I got out of the atmosphere, my Apo had dropped from 135 km to 105 km, but that's still SPACE!!! Periapsis was only 33 km and my compressed air RCS did almost nothing to raise it before running dry, so I couldn't make orbit like you! Once I re-entered, I decided to fly all the way around the world back to KSC. Going ~2000 m/s at 36 km that didn't take long! I lowered my engines for a possible VTOL assisted STOL landing, but they proved unnecessary. This thing glides great and floated two thirds of the way down the runway before finally getting slow enough to settle onto the tarmac. Into space and around the world on 78 L of liquid fuel!

Hey Kizza, What mod are you using for your station?

I was pretty disappointed that the S3 cockpit doesn't retract. Much rather have that then the lights. It was said the animation for that still exists, so would it be possible to offer a version of that part with the retraction instead of the light? Is it something I can just modify in the part cfg somehow if the animation is still there? Thanks guys, and I'll say like everyone else here, epic awesome!