Kerbart

Contract calls for testing a Mk 25 contract. With no other "device test" contracts available, I slap something simple together that will get me at the desired altitude and speed. All goes well... and then I realize that the mk 25 is a drogue, and not a true chute. As this will not land well, I reason “sod it†and go for max time accel to quickly end the mission and get over it. Well.... Mr. Probodobodyne OKTO decided that the ocean is actually bouncy instead of deadly. As I'm wondering what's happening and take a good look at the remaining spare part I notice its speed... over 52 km/s. It's quite impressive to see something move fast towards Minmus orbit in real time. Curious to see what Kerbol orbit I'd end up with.. Yeah, about that...

Not cost effective is not the same as impossible. It's quite doable to get the booster to 480 m/s at 4800m. It just won't be one of those days where you go to space.

Strap a Kerbal in a command seat on top of it and see how far it goes!

I see would you mean; Dunfred is smiling instead of looking shocked. Very strange indeed!

It's about what you can research. Once you hit the limit you can't go further down the right of the science tree, so to speak.

Just remember that doing a close-range fly-by on a parabolical curve might on paper give you zero-g inside your spacecraft (you're on a ballistic trajectory after all) the close proximity to the neutron star might result in tremendous tidal forces. Even a General Products Hull will not protect you against that.

I would think it's better to burn any fuel first; the less mass you have to carry upward the better. As long as you're not exceeding terminal velocity burn anything you can. Now, if you are exceeding terminal velocity you still want to shed mass as quickly as possible and those empty booster do weigh something. So in order to get rid of the boosters ASAP run those first and then light the LFE when terminal velocity < 100% (or when you drop the boosters, obviously). That's what I would do. When Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for $7000 he went through great pains to deal with the fact that two key props (guitar cases) had different colors but were supposed to look the same. “Of course the whole problem could have been solved painting the brown case black. But then I would have had to buy black paint. And that's how these Hollywood productions go way over budget†Being a real tight-ass on your DV requirements can make for massive reductions at launch time. Willing to cut your reserves down to nearly nothing goes a long way. I'm way too leisurely for that, and too lazy to plan my missions that tight, so I usually end up with these Whackjobian monstrosities on the launch pad. But the few times I did run these white-knuckle missions I was amazed at how much lighter and smaller things can be. Who needs 2.5m tanks, anyway?.

I would think it's better to burn any fuel first; the less mass you have to carry upward the better. As long as you're not exceeding terminal velocity burn anything you can. Now, if you are exceeding terminal velocity you still want to shed mass as quickly as possible and those empty booster do weigh something. So in order to get rid of the boosters ASAP run those first and then light the LFE when terminal velocity < 100% (or when you drop the boosters, obviously). That's what I would do. When Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for $7000 he went through great pains to deal with the fact that two key props (guitar cases) had different colors but were supposed to look the same. “Of course the whole problem could have been solved painting the brown case black. But then I would have had to buy black paint. And that's how these Hollywood productions go way over budget†Being a real tight-ass on your DV requirements can make for massive reductions at launch time. Willing to cut your reserves down to nearly nothing goes a long way. I'm way too leisurely for that, and too lazy to plan my missions that tight, so I usually end up with these Whackjobian monstrosities on the launch pad. But the few times I did run these white-knuckle missions I was amazed at how much lighter and smaller things can be. Who needs 2.5m tanks, anyway?.

Dude has a point. The whole point of sandbox is that you don't have the career limitations. All kerbals should be 5-star "multi-taskers" (a class that combines pilot, scientist and engineer) in Sandbox.

THIS. And if you're able to combine three or four contract into one mission, Funds and science flow in with abundance. Of course that's very hard to do, but that's why it's called... hard.

Tell me more about this “family†that you speak of.

What about the codecogs editor? They seem to make it freely available for use on other sites, and the quality seems quite good.

Doesn't the reduced drag factor of the nose cones (providing they're pointing upward) somehow help in making the rocket more stable? I vaguely remember that there was an effect along those lines.

That cycles the active vessel, not the target you want to dock with. The OP wants keys to cycle through the various docking ports on the target vessel. At least that's what I read into it.

But that would be the implementation of struts and fuel lines. That doesn't mean that the craft file interface has been redone. Those parts might just show up the same way inside your craft file, it's just that how KSP handles them internally that's streamlined. And maybe how they behave but that would only be a subtle difference and not fundamentally different like “from now on struts are fuel lines and fuel lines are struts.†Anyhow as you mentioned there's no official word, so why start panicking when we even don't know if it will break anything?

While the Intel graphics card is not top of the line it should do fine for KSP. I have an Intel 4600 and I'm not running into any problems. KSP puts a bigger load on the CPU than on the graphics card, after all. Finding a laptop optimized for KSP is easy; finding a laptop that can run KSP well and meets many other requirements is a lot harder. Hence I ended up with the Intel graphics. The i5 will have a bigger impact than a high performance graphics card. My previous laptop had a very decent geforce card but an AMD processor and the processor ran extremely hot when running KSP (to the point where I needed ice packs to cool it; I suspect that KSP actually fried the computer). In my current i7 setup the computer isn't nearly as stressed running KSP.

Thank you for pointing this out. I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned before!

Which can be countered by “is it really that necessary to mimic Space Engine?â€Â

As Brethern pointed out, your mass increases with your velocity. At light speed, your mass would be infinite, and since acceleration is proportional to force divided by mass, your acceleration would be zero, regardless of how powerful your engine is.

Start with wide angle shots, it gives the viewer a sense of location and situation Use tighter cropped shots to bring focus to what you're showing Shooting becomes a lot easier when you realize how much our brains fill in. Once you've established "the engine is running" with a shot, all you need to do is to supply the sound. Which means you can record a lot of "burn" shots without actually using the engine (which makes it a lot easier) Pay attention to sound and sound effects. The difference between a good video and a bad one is usually not the video (or editing) but the sound in it. You want to spend at least as much time on sound editing as on video editing.

Isn't this why we have rocket engines in the first place?

One can be cynical here. Three years will be wasted on bickering over that this is only a "theory" and that we should not waste tax payer money on this scientific dream project as we need jobs, not rockets. If proof of the looming impact can no longer be denied, we'll be able to build an ark to save the most important people to humanity -- the senate and the house of representatives. And maybe a governor or two.

Just make it watch a Jets game. That'll suck the life right out of it.

Knowing that all units are based on metric units is enough. If you can't tell from the answer if you're off a factor of 1000 then I doubt the TWR calculation is going to be meaningful in the first place.

I like the though. It would be easy to implement; KSP would create a new sandbox game on the fly with a simple launchpad at the planetary body of choice and lets you launch your craft from there. There'd be no other craft but you can test staging, it's ability to reach orbit, etc. Of course there's tons of mods that provide most of that information and let you do those kinds of things hyper edit comes to mind) but it would be nice to have such a feature in stock.