Psycix

Tidus Klein is correct. The ISP of basic jets, turbojets and rapiers depend on air pressure (altitude) and the thrust depends on speed. This is why turbojets are worse than basic jets when flying slow and low, but basic jets don't help at all for supersonic high altitude flight. The rapier is like the turbojet, and thus, sucks at takeoff. I think it's nicely balanced. It's supposed to perform a bit worse because it is so light (compared to a turbojet + aerospike)

For the trip you can't properly shield. While you can shield against the sun's particles, you can't against cosmic rays. For the stay, you might need to construct a base in a cave to properly shield yourself.

Voted! Personally I'm fond of the smaller rovers because that's more in the spirit of the stock craft.

Awesome update, good job guys! Question: What kind of impact will .23 have on this?

Drills look awesome. For that reason, could you slash drill performance and mass by a factor 10, so that we have a legit reason for having a multitude of them?

I had a port that wouldn't undock as well yesterday. Undocking another port further towards the capsule fixed it. (Undocking the entire thing I want to undock from eachother from the top part.)

I think we should stop looking at the Saturn V, and start looking at more modern applications, like the Falcon 9. The first and second stage tanks of the Falcon 9 use the same design. Most of their parts are the same and the main difference is the length. With construction techniques like that, changing the length is a piece of cake. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Common_design_elements

Install remotetech and you'll be begging for manned flights.

But if you are building your own tanks anyways, it's not that hard to change the length of each can.

The answers to those questions are the very reason we should do it. Unsolved challenges spark research and development of new things.

Resizing a fuel tank is not hard. You use the same end caps, plumbing and intertank structure. The only thing that is different is the length of the cylinder walls. You can use the exact same joining techniques and assembly process. All that differs is the length of two cylindrical tubes.

I think those statements are downright nonsense. I'm presenting some points as an answer to what has been stated and other thoughts that come to mind: 1 - Economic Spaceflight costs money. Where does this money go? People. Everything we do in space has created hundreds if not thousands of jobs. If we didn't pay those people to build rockets, we would still pay their unemployment benefits. 2 - Health Studying on how the human body and other organisms behave in microgravity or other exotic environments is valuable information that contributes to the development of new medical technology. 3 - Environmental Spaceflight encourages the development of new technologies. These developments will help us create clean energy and transportation. 4 - Social Spaceflight unites people and countries. For example, the international space station is a combined effort of two large countries who almost nuked eachother a few decades ago. Secondly, watching a few of our own people walk across the moon is something that reminds people we are on this world together, and that our combined efforts can lead to the most beautiful things. 5 - Education Space exploration inspires our children to get interested in science. This directly leads to a smarter future generation. 6 - Look at the numbers People complain spaceflight is expensive. About 0,5% of the US tax dollar is spent on NASA, that's 17.8 billion dollar. At the same time they spend 672.9 billion on their defense department. The money is there. It is just very poorly distributed. Source 7 - SpaceX is changing the face of the industry The Falcon 9 rocket is already providing launch services for an extremely low price. When these rockets become reusable (which will likely happen within a year), this price will be slashed by a significant factor. Bringing stuff into orbit can easily become an order of magnitude cheaper than it used to be. A Mars colony WILL be affordable. 8 - Solving the problems on earth is infeasible. The problems we are having can only be changed if we change our way of life as a collective. This is very unlikely to happen, and making it happen would cost a lot of money. The 0,5% government spending that is being attributed to spaceflight is not going to help fix these problems. The most likely way to fix our problems, is to bring an innovative concept on the market that is commercially attractive AND a step in the right direction. An example of this could be Tesla: They're building electric vehicles that have exceeded everyone's expectations, and their existence alone has sparked a rapid acceleration in the development of EV's at other car manufacturers. So: Why spend money up there when we've got problems down here? Because the money is better spent and achieves a lot more in the long run.

Change the lengths of the two internal tanks. Done.

That was a beautiful mission! I love the way you used docking ports for so many different purposes: fitting the payload in a tight cargo hold & unpacking, re-using the same lander with four different science experiments, sending the experiments down on another spaceplane and more!

What's bad about it? Transparency towards the community is a good thing! About the people whining on the day of release: Squad should give themselves some space and announce a release date one day or several hours after their internally planned release date. This way they are sure to release on time. In the event of delays: Just post it. "Guys it is going to take at least 6 hours" Be transparent. Be informative.

I have found many applications (like rovers and heavy probes) where a full-size reaction wheel is overkill and a probe core simply doesn't cut it (unless I use 10, but they drain power even when not in use). Even when I can afford the extra mass, the big reaction wheel simply doesn't fit aesthetically in small crafts.

What's with the obsession with returning the materials to earth? Metal in orbit is worth more than metal on earth. Mine materials on the moon, and build the heavy frame and bodywork of large spacecrafts in LEO. Send up special materials, electronics, engines, equipment, etcetera from earth.

This is not realistic. People traveling to their work by car every day pollute orders of magnitude more than all rocketry on Earth, so why would Kerbin be different. A rocket may burn a lot of fuel, but that is nothing compared to the amount of fuel burned for daily use. Implementing this would cause unnecessary negative publicity for spaceflight.

I propose putting a teapot on earth escape trajectory.

The public interest that is created by such an absurd mission will end up generating much more funding for spaceflight in general. So instead of launching a space probe: Launch a bus, then get funding for multiple space probes.

Forget the SLS. Just wait for the Falcons to become reusable and change the face of the launch industry forever.

It would make sense as it would be a nice use for tweakables. SRB's would become a lot more useful. Can't wait! Does anyone know how long experimentals usually last until the patch gets released?

Logitech G700S owner here. I generally go for Logitech when it comes to peripherals. Peripherals are the computer related products that are most likely to break, and Logitechs warranty is just out of this world. I had a button break off my mouse and got an instant over-the-counter replacement. My G930 wireless headset got some issues after almost 2 years of use and point of sale did not exist anymore. Logitech sent me a new one after contacting them on their website (and did not even have to ship the old one back to them). If you buy logitech, you know that your product is covered by outstanding warranty services. If it breaks (and it's not your own dumb fault), you will not spend weeks waiting for a manufacturer to 'repair' your product, you will get a new one, instantly. Other than that, I owned a G5, G500, G700 and G700S. I can recommend all of them, with the G700 / G700S being my favorite. It has great ergonomic grip, lots of buttons which can be programmed to do anything, a beautiful scroll wheel feeling and a good sensor that can be adjusted to DPI settings of your choice with the press of a button.

A very foolproof and perhaps the most easy way to do it: 1 Equalize velocity Set the navball to 'target' mode Burn on the retrograde marker until relative velocity is (about) 0. 2 Approach Bun straight to your target (pink marker with circle) 3 Repeat When close and about to zip past it, go back to 1, equalize velocities, and approach again. Rinse and repeat. This is not the most fuel efficient way to do it, but it works just fine and the total delta V is not that much anyway. If you understand how the navball markers work, you can try to keep your prograde on the target marker to compensate for the orbital drift (be it with RCS translation or main engines) so that you approach in 1 go. Even better is to use the map view and create a closest approach from there using a maneuver node. With careful tuning it is possible to set up a <100 meter rendezvous from the other side of orbit, but it can be very difficult to set this up.

Try this: Drop entire ship in the parts list, then ctrl+Z.