thorfinn

And to stay inside the fuel constraints, which will be without a doubt strict, you have to fly a difficult maneuver in an extremely short time and have no engines quitting at the wrong moment, or you are done for. And no backup parachute will save you if they die at 30 meters from the surface: not enough time to deploy. Seems to me just a little less brilliant than strapping a vehicle with a heat shield made of extremely fragile silica tiles to a towering, shaky, icy tank dropping frozen chunks into the supersonic wind.

Why no drogue parachutes? I suppose they made their calculations, but they would make a powered landing much less time critical. Maybe they\'re thinking about winds. But couldn\'t you just land on the salt lakes at Edwards AFB? Powered landing for the CAPSULE also seems too much of a gamble to me. It\'s just too easy to kill everybody with even a minor malfunction. Also, to land the first stage at Kennedy you would have to launch over the United States, and that would put a lot of undue pressure on the range safety officer IF they ever even allowed it. AND who knows if you could retain engine-out capability without losing the stage or failing the mission. It\'s a nice plan anyway, and I think that somebody WILL get there, but just strapping legs to a Falcon 9 seems a bit of an oversimplification to me

Same problem here, I got only the Paypal transaction receipt as of now. Donated $9.

MOAR BOOSTERS

I think that the video shows clearly why nobody else ever tried. Had they gone through the mission, though, they would have made Col. Hannibal and Murdock proud...

I have encountered a curious phenomenon using your parts: a rocket I made, which admittedly is quite heavily stressed during launch, will shake itself apart half the times or worse when I try for a polar orbit, while launches due east and due west fail much more rarely (and show less spikes on the G meter). The rocket is shown in this post, I\'m using two of your flared decouplers, 1m-to-2m and reverse (also, two lightweight decouplers, two mini SAS and your mini solid inside the fairing, but that always survives.) Disregard, it was just my piloting probably.

Continuing from yesterday... This is the model I had in mind: You can see one hanging from the ceiling in the London science museum, next to some engines and to the old british rocket Black Arrow (which has a certain KSP je ne sais quoi, actually ) I\'m a bit partial to it also because it\'s the rocket that Italy bought from the Americans in 1964 to launch our first satellite. Since 1967, we have launched some of them from our own 'spaceport', which was two old oil platforms bolted together off the coast of Kenya. Also quite Kerbal, I\'d say. This is what I could come up with: The dynamics are 'more or less' like the real thing. If I had the time and the skill, I would use the numbers from your part (modified, as I said: thrust=3000, fuel burn=7000) to make a SRB more similar to the real Algol first stage and post it here. Could you tell me about some easy program for making simple textures?

Thank you, Killerhurtz, I used your booster to make a thing that I wanted to see in KSP for quite a bit: a 'recreation' of the Scout all-solid four stage carrier rocket. I had to nerf it somewhat, though, otherwise it would just tear apart the stack (max thrust decrased to 3000 and fuel burn increased to 7500). Currently on the downward leg of a 92x558 orbit, with a command pod and a retro pack (the small solid engine from Wobbly Rockets). Let\'s see if it\'s sufficient for a pinpoint landing... I\'ll post some pictures, maybe.

Curious. Might be evidence of some lift, of the quite unphysical variety that we have today... but I\'m not really sure. And I understand that capsule lift isn\'t yet implemented, so it would be an unwanted side effect... should test it myself, I suppose.

Never, obviously: gravity does not have a limiting range It does have a finite potential though: which means that if you get above a certain speed, the gravity of Kerbin will never manage to bring you back, even if you will continue decelerating ever so slightly (you will have 'a finite velocity at infinity') The escape velocity from the surface of Kerbin is about 3300 meters per second, if I remember correctly. There are tables on the wiki and in this forum. The wiki also has this: http://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/~kerbalsp/wiki/index.php?title=Orbital_Mechanics_for_Kerdummies Happy flights

You are a lucky fellow, I\'m majoring in physics and I had to wait until the first masters\' year to get a lab coat! 8) Some had it even better, though: back in my teenage years, the friends in chemistry trade school got lab coats at 15. They also got to blow up stuff with elemental sodium and such. Lucky bastards.

I vote for a red sun. So, when the Kerbals will discover warp drive and come to Earth, they will get superpowers. (Slightly more seriously: the map says it\'s a K star, orange dwarf).

But the graph of apoapsis and periapsis at page 8 shows both apses decreasing throughout the aerobrake; the only anomalous interval is from about 21 to 27 July. From cursory reading of the document, I suspect influence of thruster firings and maneuvering on that. Less cursory reading finds the reason explained at page six: gravity field inhomogeneities acted to raise the perigee in that period of time. Since gravity anomalies are obviously not modeled in KSP, the bug seems to be still there. (That, or the vanilla command pod does have some lift even though it shouldn\'t.)

BRILLIANT! :D (Though I have doubts about integrating interstellar travel in a setting like KSP. Once you have real starship drives, everything else becomes too damn easy, doesn't it?)

This is quite interesting and well done, but if I were you I wouldn't make the system so... normal. Kerbin is already quite unrealistic after all, with its enormous density (even if it was made of solid uranium it could not mass that much...) so I believe that we are quite free to go overboard a bit with the science fiction and unusual configurations. Tidally locked planets, for instance, with a small habitable zone between a sunburnt side and an icy one; or fast-spinning giants with variable gravity, like Hal Clement's Mesklin in Mission of Gravity or the prison planet of Outlaw Star. Also, truly binary planets, with the center of gravity far out in space between them, that would create some really easy AND really hard orbital mechanics at the same time; and those with more SF culture of me surely will point out many more ideas. A little thing that I've always liked was the idea of thick asteroid fields, or even a small 'moon', at Lagrange points 4 and/or 5 as early interplanetary targets.

The best way to leave an orbit, at any altitude, is slowing down The most fuel-efficient orbit change maneuvers are performed at the lowest point of the orbit (perigee) and the highest (apogee). A change in speed at these points reflects at the opposite end without changing other parameters; acceleration at perigee equals to raising apogee, deceleration at apogee equals lowering perigee, and the other two combinations. A burn which isn't oriented directly towards your current velocity vector (empty circle on the 8-ball) or opposite to it (retrograde burn, crossed-out circle) will act on many orbital parameters at once ad will take you nowhere near to where you pointed, since gravity will distort your trajectory in time. Real astronauts stop thinking with orbital mechanics and go back to 'aim where I want to go' only in the last hundreds of meters of a rendez-vous. So, for deorbiting, the least expensive maneuver is a retrograde burn at apogee. A change in velocity of a few tens of meters per second equals to tens of kilometers of perigee height change. Burning nearer to perigee gets progressively more expensive, though upper stages in KSP usually aren't short of delta-V for such simple maneuvers (the usual LFE+1LFT+decoupler+CM has ten times the delta-V of a Soyuz...)

After dozens of orbits in KSP, you watch this video in a different way (And it makes one wish so much more for cities on Kerbal, sooner rather than later...) The sodium glow in the upper atmosphere is amazing, I wouldn't believe it was so visible.

Didn't they understand that putting people, not Kerbals, on top of a rocket that has solid motors anywhere outside the LES is a BAD IDEA? .....