thorfinn

While flying through them?

I have this feeling that modeling rings in a good way will be very, very hard for the engine... hope Harv finds a way, obviously.

[shadow=red,left]Metal Gear?!?

That\'s a bit mild for a first stage, actually. Saturns reached 2.3 km/s at first stage cutoff, for example. Tremendous acceleration though, considering the sheer mass carried... I would REALLY like to see that thing fly. But the stability issues of a 36 thousand tons rocket engine.... :o Oh, I also recommend reading this article and this other one, for getting a very good feel of the quantities involved in orbital flight. It\'s rare to see a launch vehicle 'being built' with pieces easily comparable to one another... outside of KSP, that is

'Make it big enough that nobody will mistake it for a ballistic missile'? Could be a good strategy...

It\'s also Israeli, for geographical and military reasons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavit

You see? As with the real thing, one engine out isn\'t a loss of mission

Did I mention that I really, really like drop tanks? The whole mission made for lots of interesting images anyway, with one of my craziest rockets to date (yeah, I know, my 'crazy' is pretty tame for KSP).

Guys, I just wanted to thank you because you made this possible: Click to enlarge It\'s actually SAFE to fly! That terrifying 'staging event' on the top left goes off without a hitch every time! (Well, that\'s the fault merit of Harv\'s simplistic aero model, but anyway... ) The K2-X engine should really become an official part.... (I actually modified it .cfg to make it exactly like it was before.)

This is the job for us

I was thinking saving/resuming AND nuclear plasma engines (Or antimatter-catalysed microfission )

Mine too, strangely ^^ I still remember the engine plume 'lighting up' the terrain when I didn\'t really expect it... was going slow enough though. Then I reboosted the wrong way and ended up in solar orbit

Nice. Shouldn\'t 'Harvest' come closer to the star to be called a comet, though? Also, why not adding another inner planet? It would be a nice change from our solar system, be somewhat in line with what is known about dwarf star systems (which seem to have lots of large rocky planets nearer than habitable zone) and maybe more importantly, it would help to reach the Fire Star by making more gravity assists possible... (And what if there is another system at 30-40 billion kilometers away, around a companion star? )

YOURS IS THE ROCKET THAT WILL PIERCE THE HEAVENS! (had to say that. sorry.)

Long ship is loooooooooooooooooooooooong.

The OTHER way, Icefire ^^ And to make matters even more interesting, sea level thrust is 300 tons actually. Still, I believe the project can stand, at least for Kerbal standards. Four RS-68 would give a comfortable 1.56 TWR at launch: they might be even overkill, actually, considering the late stages of the launch (strongly G limited...) Three units would be quite feeble at the start, and both solutions probably approach a zero payload to orbit: but moderate boosting with SRBs should recover it. In the end, three LFE and a ring of strap-ons would probably fly, with the payload fraction required for man-rating provisions (airlocks, Whipple shields etcetera)

I trust your figures about Isp and the rocket equation, Nova, but a full ET weighs 767 tons (as you write) and an RS-68 has 343 tons of thrust :

Well, I just wanted to make a point that 'SSTO' usually refers to a reusable rocket, with the associated weight penalties (shields and wings do weigh a lot...) I didn\'t check Nova\'s figures, actually; now that you make me pay more attention to it, I can say that the idea is still sound, but one single RS-68 isn\'t going to get off the ground: he\'d need at least three And that means eating a lot out of the payload margin (seven tons remaining, I believe). Still, just strap a bunch of the usual Castor rockets around it and it should stop being marginal even in the real world. On Kerbin, well, as we all know by now....

Remember that it\'s SSTO without a way back: that\'s a substantial difference SSTO proposals are all about the reusability, that\'s the hard part. The old Atlas was almost a one-way SSTO, after all, and that was the fifties...

Excuse me... I didn\'t really understand what has become of my donation. I have the confirmation e-mails from the old jury-rigged system, but the new store page still offers me to pre-order the game and nothing else. Do I have to do anything? Is it fine this way?

FUCKING A. Old Werner would be proud of you, and docking can\'t come soon enough.

Wonderful, really. Payload to LKO/GEO/TMI? When malfunctions will be added to the game, engine out cases will be a breeze on this thing

Really nice. When 0.13X1 comes out with fuel lines, I\'m SO making a 9 Heavy with this... ...provided that my .NET problems are solved by now >

Absolutely temporary, like Foamy explained. It\'s not Nova\'s fault or anything: you can\'t make it really hard unless you 'cheat'. I don\'t suggest that you SHOULD make it hard, even: it\'s an aesthetic thing for me too, I\'d like to make the usual three or four stage rockets that we Earthmen use (Apollo-Saturn was six stages, in a sense) and as things are now that is just shooting yourself in the foot, but I am all for having a set of basic parts that allow the player to build a basic launcher very easily in the beginning, if he knows a bit of what he\'s doing. And if he doesn\'t, well, a good and brief tutorial will take care of that As for hard stuff, there is ONE thing that will be harder in the Kerbol system than on Earth: wait until multiple spacecraft support gets in, then we\'ll all experience the joypain of trying to make a manual rendezvous in such a steep gravity gradient... ^^

That\'s a big, big problem with balancing that isn\'t going to go away soon. I don\'t have easy solutions for it: if people use remotely realistic numbers, physics is going to show you that going to space from a body like Kerbin IS easy. If we are tantalizingly close to reaching SSTO capability on a planet with 8 km/s orbital velocity, it\'s not strange that doing it on a 2,3 km/s one is banal. The only thing that\'s really limiting us here is the extremely heavy engines, which by the way push us towards 2,5-stage designs at most (for lunar missions) because carrying unused engines for most of the flight is too much of a penalty. If we use numbers that force us to have three stages to orbit, like Earth rockets do, burn times are going to become VERY brief, so brief that they would probably feel off (exactly like SRBs feel to me now. The stock ones and most of the modded ones are practically useless.) I don\'t know what to do. 'Nerfing' stuff for the sake of game aesthetical variability doesn\'t appeal to me, since having simple but real physics is what makes this game unique and attractive in the first place. The best thing to do would probably be just making Kerbin a lot bigger, since we now have timewarp and don\'t really need a real-time orbit to be bearable... but we are probably too late for such a revolution. I don\'t know, really.