Decent Weasel

Okay, so just testing that I understand the concept of a straight-up launch being more wasteful than a burn from orbit - You have to burn a certain amount of fuel to get off the planet, so we'll assume a start condition 80km above Kerbin. If you burn from 80km straight up to exiting SOI, you are doing work against Kerbin's gravity field the whole way, meaning at all times you need to be doing work to counter 1G and raising your apo has to occur on top of that. if you burn from an 80km orbit, you have to spend some fuel to accelerate into orbit, but once there you are orbiting and not having to fight against the work done by gravity. All fuel burned from orbit goes directly into raising the apoapsis. The fuel spent reaching an orbit 80km up is vastly less than the fuel spent fighting gravity directly from 80km to SOI exit. Am I picturing this right? I mean, I don't debate it, just want to make sure I'm picturing it right.

Thanks Reminds me of the scene in Primer - "What is that saying about how the best mathematician is a lazy one?" My list is all the expected stuff - Gustav Holst, plus the OSTs to Moon, Solaris, 2001, Gravity etc - but I've also got some Lights Out Asia. Randomly googling Arthur C. Clarke quotes I found out they'd made an album where the first three tracks were 'all these worlds are yours,' 'except europa' and 'attempt no landings there.' "That's it, this is making the list - I don't even know what it sounds like yet, but I don't care."

Does the percentage penalty vary by the type of antenna you use, or is it totally unrelated?

I always just took the stupid route by muting the game's music and running VLC in the background; that's not exactly an answer but it is a solution, depending on what's needed. ...Really I'm just curious what your music is. May have to add it to my playlist

Looks like I'm going to be the lone dissenting voice here. First, I'm assuming you're already close to your target vessel. In my experience, with proper targeting (control both ships from their docking ports, and ensure each ship has the other ship's port targeted) you can generally dock pretty well without RCS. I like to let Smart A.S.S. do the pointing, but that's just laziness on my part - you've simply got to point toward the purple orb. Move toward your target slowly, around, I dunno, 3m/s. Then, as you're just about to touch the other ship, throttle up a couple notches to exert a constant push. You don't want to smash into your target vessel, but once you get close, you've gotta mash 'em together to make sure they stick instead of just bouncing. So yeah, you can do it without RCS. It may be easier with it, though. Mostly I avoid RCS because I don't like the weight penalty. If you don't take RCS, you need an SAS module on each ship and an engine that can push at least one of the ships 'forward' with respect to the docking port. (That's the only way I can think of to reliably mash the ships together when they make contact.)

Solaris analog forever!! (Heck, Laythe is basically already Europa from Clarke's 2061.)

I'm guessing that the only real calibration will be against other engines included stock, with "OP" being "significantly superior to an equivalent stock engine" rather than "an extrapolation that fits with the general performance curve of stock engines, but covers a regime stock engines don't." (Radial nuclear engines might be a good example of the latter, I guess.) For the aerospike specifically, I seem to have heard that aerospikes are generally 80-85% as efficient as equivalent bell nozzles, but hold that performance curve across the pressure spectrum.

But wouldn't Jupiter's conditions lead to supercritical, not compressed liquid, conditions in the liquid hydrogen? I mean, I'm assuming that's the case, given how warm jupiter's supposed to be deeper down. In that case you'd have no sharp interface between liquid and gas, no ocean surface - it'd just sort of slowly blur from a gas to a liquid.

Agreed. My braking occurs between 17.5 and 18.5 kilometers, but I'm coming straight out of a Hohmann from Kerbal, not Jool orbit, so I may be moving faster relative to Laythe, and you may want to opt for my upper bound so as not to shed too much velocity. And of course, double-check intercept after entering Laythe's SOI, as periapsis can shift by as much as fifteen kilometers when you switch over.

Being bonkers and a bit amateurish I just designed all of my interplanetary ships to dispatch their own kethane mining systems, whether through a lander or through putting down the entire ship. This did have the advantage of some weight savings, letting me carry just enough fuel to get to my destination, then refine fuel on-site for the trip home. I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason not to do this...

Totally understandable, I've really cut down on my mods for the same reason. Still, Hooligan is really worth a try; it's every bit as fun as it sounds and it's one of the few mods on my short list. (Scott Manley coupled it with B9 Aerospace so he could use the intakeair-powered RCS thrusters to move the ship without having to carry onboard fuel, but B9 kills my game speed.)

I wholeheartedly agree. An airship is the ideal solution for a place like Laythe, too - a boat can generally only explore the body of water it lands in, a rover can only explore the landmass it touches down on, and while an airplane can reach the entire planet theoretically, it has to be babysat every mile of the way, and it has to have a smooth place to land and refuel. But an airship can go anywhere at all and land on virtually any terrain. While rovers are ideal for airless bodies, airships are ideal for ones with atmospheres and seas. You've used Hooligan's airship mods, I assume?

Yeah. When I started I had no idea how to use SAS, no idea how to work the throttle, no idea I could manually steer. Nevertheless my first really successful rocket had a final stage basically like yours - a capsule on a small SRB - but it pointed toward the pad; the SRB's nozzle was covered with a fairing that had three more SRBs bolted onto it at slight angles to induce a spin. Yes, the craft took off backwards. When it took off its center of gravity was too far aft, but since the ship would spin it was stable in the manner of a rifle bullet. As the top SRBs drained, the center of gravity went further and further aft, until finally the craft began to porpoise violently... and the moment it flipped over was calibrated to be the moment it ran out of gas. Once the capsule's nose was pointed skyward, I'd jettison the fairing and light the second SRB stage. Got me to space, at least. Never had to touch the controls. Yes, it would be simpler to not have the craft fly backwards at all - but this way was so fun I was unable to resist.

I'm studying Engineering Physics in Aerospace, just getting toward actual aero classes this coming semester. However, most of my experience with celestial mechanics came from Microsoft Space Simulator and Orbiter, honestly.

At first I couldn't get this mod to work (resulting in much anguish, since it looked so cool) - then I came on here and it was cleared up in about five minutes. I don't know what to be more thrilled about - that you're great at supporting your mods, or that I can bust out all Baumgartner now. THANK YOU!!!

Hey, recently downloaded this mod (I flipping love it) and I wanted to ask if anybody's tried gravity-powered designs. http://www.damninteresting.com/the-gravity-powered-aircraft/ The concept is basically "build a glider that can become lighter-than-air and thus launch itself. Repeatedly." All the sites online see it as environmentally friendly, but my motivation was a ship with functionally unlimited flight time. Since I didn't want an aircraft that was limited to an onboard fuel supply or tied to kethane-rich surface regions, I first tried something electric, but the FireSpitter engine took more power (and hence, massive nuke reactors or acres of fragile solar panels) to work than expected, so I gave the gravity-powered option a try. Since I'm a doofus noob and don't know how to add pics, the recipe is as follows: one small lander can, some FireSpitter airbrakes, a MechJeb module, four canards arranged symmetrically around the can, and two dodecahedrons - one each on the top and bottom of the can, to keep its center of lift neutral in relation to its center of mass. (Add a couple ladders out the sides of the hatch if you want to get out and then climb back in.) Turns out my design didn't need wings (since it already had lifting gases) and was able to fly forward whether rising or falling. I used Nyrath's Orion to catapult Jebediah to Eve and he grinned the whole way; I'm currently trying to put together a similar craft that can fly on Duna (>0.00 buoyancy - weight in 0.042 atmospheres - this is kinda hard). Full disclosure - I'm not using any realistic aerodynamics mods, so I'm not sure how legitimate my designs really are! EDIT: I don't think this is an infiniglider, properly - it will stagnate if it hits an altitude where buoyancy - weight = 0. I did run into some that would break mach in level flight if I used 4x warp, and knew I had something wonky there.