Ralathon

A gravity turn isn't "Fly up straight and flip 45 at X kilometers". It means you give a tiny nudge at the very beginning and the rocket slowly topples over throughout the launch. You can optimize that push to make sure you never have to coast and you just fall into orbit. It saves a lot of fuel to do this since you need less course corrections. You can do this in KSP as well to save some dV, it's just a lot more difficult. Also, as others have stated the earth is a lot bigger than Kerbin while the atmospheric height is pretty much the same. Relatively speaking RL rockets need a lot less vertical and a lot more horizontal speed. Our 100km orbits are equivalent to 1Mm orbits in real life.

Do you have the dish in polar orbit pointed towards your minmus ship? Via the "list comsats" menu that is.

As far as I can see the Kerbals want to get of their planet rather desperately. So it is just preparation for when they colonized the system. A kerbal from Kerbin is called X Kerman. A kerbal from Duna will be called X Dunaman. And someone from Laythe will be X Layman and thus widely ridiculed in the system. That or the space program is a family business.

The problem is getting the fairing around the LEM right. You're stuck with 1x1 structural plates right now. I am yet to find a mod with fairings that allows open tops...

3 or 4 is enough for perfect coverage of the equator yes. But reception at the poles will be crap. If I want perfect coverage I always put 6 sats in 2 orbits. Both at a 45 degree inclination with the equator and a 90 degree inclination with each other. That way they back up each other and provide polar coverage. I presume espm400 does the same.

If I'm not mistaken DRE models surface temperature, which is quite different than internal temperature. You could use that to figure out how much heat the cabin loses with some effort, but you'd end up with the same differential equations. As I said, it is certainly possible. Just a whole load of effort for something relatively minor. After all, even if you can figure out the cabin temperature, you still need to write a control unit that proceeds to cool or heat the system, taking the appropriate amount of charge from the batteries in the process.

I try not to strand kerbals on other planets with no way of getting back. No such moral problems with probes though. So they save me the effort of building a return vehicle. Also, since I play with both Ioncross crew support and Remotetech, it's a trade off between oxygen tanks and communication dishes. And the dishes win mass wise.

I imagine that'd be rather difficult to model. If you run out of electricity in space the thing that'll kill you is either freezing or boiling to death. Since you're in a vacuum the rate at which this happens is based on radiation only. So it is a function of surface area. A mark 1-2 cabin is about twice as big as the mark 1 cabin, so it has 4 times the surface area but 8 times the volume and thus energy content it needs to bleed of. So a Mark 1-2 cabin should last twice as long as a mark 1 cabin. To make things worse it also depends on your distance to the sun. Something at the distance of Eello will freeze a lot faster than something near Duna. As you can see simulating that to any degree of believability is going to be somewhat nasty. It would look something like this: P(heating) = S*sqrt(mass)*(C*T^4 - 0.5*P(sun)/(4*pi*d^2)) Where S is the a constant depending on the density, C equals Boltzman's constant times the emissivity for spaceships (how well it approximates a perfect black body), P(sun) is the energy output of the sun per second, T is the current temperature of the spacecraft and d is the distance to the sun. And this is with the assumptions that the shape of the spacecraft can be approximated as a sphere, the density of all spacecraft is the same, they all have the same surface (so they have the same emissivity) and heat transfer coefficients inside the ship are infinite. And that just tells you how much watts the ship would need to keep it at a constant temperature. To actually model how it would change in temperature as a function of time you need to delve into differential equations. They aren't too difficult to solve for simple problems like this. But it is a lot of programming for a simple feature.

Temperature and pressure are pretty okay for Venus at a height of about 50km. Pretty close to earth sea level. But you're still dealing with harsh UV radiation, constant hurricane 5 winds and clouds of sulfuric acid eating your base. If we ever need to pick a good place for a human outpost in the solar system, Venus should be at the bottom of the list with big red crosses and text reading "Abandon hope all ye who goes here!"

We can infer a lot of things about venusian surface from those limited data points though. We know it is relatively crater free and we can see loads of lava flows. So we know the surface periodically refreshes itself via volcanism and is made of basalt. The sovjet probes detected massive lightning storms while going down and detected rain made of sulphuric acid. We know windspeeds are ridiculously high, like a constant hurricane. And we know there is no liquid present on the surface (again via radio images). All in all, it is a pretty bad place to live... Venus is a terrible, terrible place. As for the similarities between Eve and Venus, why should there be? The game world is fictional. It might look like Mars or earth on a superficial level, but they all have significant differences with their equivalents in our solar system. Mars has 2 very small moons instead of being tidally locked with 1 big one. Duna's poles are also much much bigger than Mars's. And last I checked we only have 1 moon, not 2.

Asteroids don't care if the mission takes years. Asteroids don't need food air or water. This means it is probably cheaper to move an asteroid into lunar orbit than manned moon and mars missions.

You explode when you get closer than 2000m of the surface or so. But it'll take a humongous rocket to provide the dV for circularizing.

I wouldn't mind a few stars at some stationary but ridiculous distance to be honest. They don't even need to add engines to reach them or planets to visit. Just something that is nigh unreachable with the available tech. I'd be very interested in seeing what people come up with just to go there.

IonCross only takes care of Oxygen, Carbon dioxide and climate control (At least, I presume that's what the capsule energy drain is). You don't have to worry about food and water.

I almost exclusively use probe bodies. I use both remotetech and Ioncross crew support, but I got a network set up around Kerbin so probes need less support engineering. I also try to avoid killing my Kerbals. So everything I make is brought into orbit and assembled via probes, and only when the entire thing is ready to fly I send up the crew.

It was made for Ioncross Crew Support plugin. It isn't part of the main mod but was a custom part made by one of the users. Here's one of the first mentions: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/26935-0-20-Ioncross-Crew-Support-Plugin/page20 Near the bottom of the page.

It doesn't in Real Life either. The whole "air on the topside of the wing goes faster" is nonsense, a wing generates lift because particles moving along the top of the wing experience more curvature. The particles curve because of a force towards the wing (surrounding air pressure causes this), Newton's 3th law shows that this results in an upwards force.

There are pretty much 2 ways to tweak physics so you can create the kerbol system. Either increase the mass of particles, or increase the EM interaction (or a mix of these 2 obviously) so electron shells are smaller. The speed of light is determined by the magnetic permeability and electric permitivity of empty space. To make atoms 10 times denser the permitivity needs to be 10 times bigger. c^2=1/e0u0 so our new c^2 would be ten times as small, and thus the new speed of light would be about 0.32 times our speed of light. This change in e0 would however completely destabilize most nuclei so treat this more as an absolute minimum. You need to mess about with the other constants to keep the whole thing stable (increase the strong nuclear force so the nuclei remain stable f.ex)

It's no more crazy than the things we use now. We place delicate machinery on top of a large continuous explosion so we can shoot it at a target millions of kilometers away with insane speeds... And this is the least crazy way we've come up with to go into space. Other ideas include giant rotating grappling hooks in low earth orbit and maglev trains that are held outside the atmosphere by the centripetal force of a giant spinning iron ribbon in the tracks. A machine powered by nuclear bombs is just a small step from what we do now.

Considering that they're quite small they should be capable of handling a lot more than humans. Less internal distance means the pressure differentials will be smaller and thus easier to deal with for the heart.

People have build space stations in orbit around just about every planet or moon. But do it nonetheless, it is a fun project to do and really convenient as a refueling station for interplanetary missions (You only need about 300 dV to get from low munar orbit to kerbal escape, as opposed to the nearly 1k dV from low kerbal orbit. So you end up in interplanetary space with more fuel)