Nibb31

This is not possible. Orbital altitude and speed are linked, so an object orbiting at an orbit below the Mun will always be going faster than the Mun. A higher object will always be going slower. In real-life, we have Lagrange points. EML1 (Earth Moon Lagrange 1) is located between the Moon and Earth, where the gravity of both bodies cancel out, making a somewhat stable orbit possible. EML2 is similar, but on the opposite side of the Moon. However, KSP doesn't do Lagrange points because n-body gravity calculation on rails is too computer intensive for a personal computer.

1) Make the lander stage smaller. A single grey tank and two radial engines should be enough you need. 2) Add a stage underneath the rover for the Kerbin departure and Munar orbit insertion burns. 3) Your mainsail core stage is ok. Get rid of all the SRBs and replace them with liquid boosters, identical to your core stage, arranged in asparagus style. 4) Why SRB's on top? 5) Why winglets on an upper stage? They serve no purpose in space.

Well, the Wikipedia article answers your question.

Doesn't wikipedia give you the answer?

Self-sustaining life support has never been done yet, even here on Earth. We have theoretical models, but we haven't even experimented them. It's a tough nut to crack before anyone can be sent on a one-way mission to another planet. 30 years locked in a 10m² hab module, eating only hydroponic tomatoes and drinking recycled urine will make anyone depressive. Also, a sustainable colony means that people will have to start making babies in space. We don't know if that is even possible with the radiation and gravity environment on Mars. There is simply no knowledge on the subject and it's certainly not ethical to start performing human pregnancy experiments before we have a certainty that there is no risk for the mother or child. Colonization or one-way trips simply make no sense. They are pointless, dangerous and unethical. The first missions to Mars will have to be round trips for exploration and science. We hardly know anything about Mars.

Already posted several times here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/32670-Check-this-out!-Kickstarter-has-a-Publicly-Operated-Space-Telescope-Project We don't really need a new thread on this every week.

An hour seems unreasonable. That's less than a single orbit to catch up. It means that you would have to perform the insertion very close to the target, which is dangerous, and that you would be manoeuvering around the target at high relative speeds, which is also dangerous and fuel consuming. There isn't much point really. Even in KSP's scale, it would be a stretch. There are a whole lot of procedures to perform on orbit before you can dock: deploying antennas, solar panels, reconfiguring the spacecraft, and so on... One hour seems unrealistic.

No, orbital rendez-vous usually takes several days. In KSP it takes less time because we usually thrust around and burn a lot of fuel, because fuel is cheap and the distances are much smaller. The usual technique in real life is to inject into an orbit as close as possible to the target, but slightly lower, and to take time to catch up with it slowly. This saves fuel (which allows more payload), and prevents coming in on the target at high speeds and doing last-minute decelerations KSP-style. However, in March, the Russians actually performed the first ever direct rendez-vous where they took 6 hours instead of several days. This was possible thanks to higher precision in the orbital insertion and improved processes. http://www.spaceflightnow.com/station/exp35/130305rendezvous/#.Ubgu0_nwlKJ Interestingly, a quick rendez-vous is less comfortable for the crew, because they have to stay seated and suited for the entire flight.

No because the ISS is still in the Earth's gravity field. You can't have a perfectly stable orbit in real-life. A solid ring is not possible, because each part of the ring will be under slightly different gravitational forces. Even if the Earth was perfectly spherical, the ring would be under the variable forces of the Moon, the Sun and the other planets. It would be ripped apart. What would be the purpose anyway? It's easier to build lots of smaller colonies, or just to stay on the surface, than something that huge.

Yes it would. Of course, the station at the elevator's CoM needs some sort station-keeping. That can probably be provided by SEP thrusters because you don't need high thrust. You can also adjust the counterweight on its own cable to compensate somewhat. Personally, I find the Space Elevator a bit too ambitious, and the atmospheric part of the cable too problematic to be practical. I kind of prefer the "orbital trapeze" concept. This is how it works. Instead of having your space elevator in GEO, imagine a rotating version in LEO. Its Center of Mass would be, for example, on a circular 200x200km orbit, with two 100km long cables extended either way and rotating on its axis like a giant cartwheel. It doesn't have to be equatorial. The end of each cable comes down to an altitude of 100km, at a suborbital speed, where a suborbital spaceplane (something like the XCOR Lynx or SpaceShipOne) would catch it, or dock with it. From there, you can climb a 100km elevator to the CoM station and get to orbit, or wait until the trapeze slings you up to your 300km altitude at a much higher speed. I made a crude diagram (yeah, I suck !) You lose some energy in the process, but again, you can use SEP to raise the orbit of the station because you don't need a high thrust and you can reboost over a longer period. Some energy is also fed back into the system by returning vehicles. Yes, it's wacky, and the actual engineering is complex, but it seems less ambitious than the space elevator.

You'd have to be quick, and the tug will need enough delta-v to brake into the suborbital trajectory, push the rocket, plus its own mass, to orbit. You will gain nothing in terms of energy, because you still need to get the mass of propellant for the tug to go up, down and up again, plus the tug itself into orbit.

The whole point of the space elevator concept is that it uses the properties of a GEO to stay up and to keep the cable in tension. If you're not in GEO, then you have a tower, not an elevator. A 200km tower cannot work, for (at least) two reasons: - A construction material capable of supporting the weight of a 200km tower simply does not exist, and probably never will. It would have to be thousands of times larger than the largest thing we have ever built. It's simply impractical. - Reaching orbit is about speed, not altitude. If you go up 200km with 0 velocity, you fall down. If you want to get to orbit, you still need to accelerate to 25000km/h from the top of your tower. You have solved nothing. The space elevator, as it's usually envisioned, must actually have its center of mass in GEO, which means that it must reach down 36000km over the equator, but it must also reach up several thousand more with a counterweight on the end. The counterweight reaching up must have the same mass as the cable reaching down. The idea is to use a very thin carbon nanotube fiber, which is the lightest and strongest material that we know of. You would need several tons of it on a reel to make up the first 36000km strand. You launch the reel to GEO, as well as a counterweight reel (which must have the same mass, but doesn't need to be carbon nanotube). You unreel the fiber down and the counterweight up, until the fiber reaches the ground, then you attach it to something solid. After this, you can start building your elevator by sending up climbers. Each climber carries more fiber strands, wrapped around the first one, until you've built a solid cable. Then you can build 3 or 4 more adjacent cables for redundancy. That's the idea, and it can only work from a GEO orbit. The only problem is that the longest carbon nanotubes that we have made in a lab are 1cm long, so the technology isn't ready yet. There are still a lot of details to be ironed out, like anchorage, station-keeping, static electricity, reliability, climber design and transit time. It actually takes quite a while to travel 36000km, even if the climbers are fast... However, as soon as we get the nanotubes figured out, the concept will be much more practical than a tower, a railgun, or some of the other wacky concepts out there.

The vertical cabin lander was the latest Constellation design reference. The horizontal cabin that Bobcat has modelled was from the old ESAS/VSE study from 2004, before Constellation.

I hope they have ironed out the problems with their docking system. They had quite a lot of trouble with it not latching properly. They have to basically slam into it to make it engage, which can be problematic when they start building their large space station.

Have you tried adding scale = 1 to the cfgs, as suggested?

That's what I was thinking. However, if the boosters fall down ballistically, they would still be closer to Texas than to Florida. There is also a lot of naval traffic in the Gulf of Mexico, so it might be tricky to establish the drop zones. Maybe they could convert an old oil rig into a landing platform, refuel the F9 there, and then fly it back to Texas on its own power? However, I think the plan is still to fly the booster back to Texas to reduce turnaround times. As for the Hyperloop, it's still pretty mysterious... It sounds like it could be some sort of modernized giant electromagnetic version of the old pneumatic tube delivery system. Not sure how realistic it is though...

Beautiful!

Thanks, but don't bother making a separate engine part just for me I'm not really convinced that part count is much of a factor in fps lag compared to the actual polygon count and texture size. The only significant contribution to lag in having the engines as separate parts is 3 more Unity joints, which is probably minor compared to the total number of joints on some people's rockets, or the number of struts. polygon count and textures should be pretty much the same. On the other hand, separating the engines from the tanks allows for more combinations and "lego" rockets, which is what makes KSP so much fun compared to Orbiter, where mods/addons are pretty much all prebuilt and "take it or leave it". Anyway, it's your choice, and I respect that

These things are pretty much everywhere in the solar system. They are just glitches with the terrain mesh.

Wouldn't it be better, for the sake of flexibility, to make the engines separate parts from the tank? That way we could build 2, 3, or 4 engine variants.

I think it's probably easier to dock things in munar orbit and land them together. This is what Bigelow wants to do with his modules. I have to try out this theory, but this can only work if the base is symetrically balanced. If you want to dock them on the ground, you should fit them with wheels or with some kind of crane/tractor vehicle.

Show us a picture of your ships so that we can figure it out.

It's pretty much in the same class as Proton and Delta IV Heavy, which are considered heavy launchers.

Beautiful! Thanks!

No, the LER was only a rover. The SEV is a multi-role exploration habitat that can have wheels attached to it, but can also be used in other roles. It has LIDS docking rings on the side and a more realistic design. But yeah, it's Bobcat's choice on which one he wants to make... Bobcat, I love the chassis of the LER. Does it really drive sideways as in your picture? If so, it's really a shame that you don't put a docking port on the side so that it could dock to a hab module or to make a mini-base with 2 or 3 of them. It also needs some sort of ramp to drive it down from an Altair landing stage.