aeronaut

You can make it to Eeloo and back (though I didn't quite get the back part) without using nukes or the bigger fuel tanks. Here is my Eeloo landing If you're bored with the Mun and Minmus then try new things, you'll be surprised what you can do!

Could you post a picture of your rocket so we can see what you are talking about?

Mission to Eeloo! Link to the rest of the album.

In KSP, 1 ton = 1000 kg

There was a book written about this called Truth Lies and O-Rings. I haven't gotten around to reading it yet but we did do a short case study on this in one of my classes. There were a few engineers at Morton Thiokol who expressed concerns about the O-rings being too cold and therefore not sealing properly. This issue was brought up to NASA however at the end of the day Morton Thiokol and NASA decided not to further investigate the issue and to proceed with the launch. The leaking O-ring was not a known issue before this event, the concern stemmed from the fact that the O-rings properties had not been characterized at the low temperatures that were seen the night before launch. The temperature overnight (18 degrees Fahrenheit) was outside the range of temperatures that the O-rings had been tested. It turns out at these low temperatures the O-rings become brittle and crack, this is what caused the leak and eventual failure of the SRB. Blame can be put in a lot of places, when it comes down to it NASA and their contractors had become complacent due to a string of successful launches which caused this concern to be downplayed and ignored. It's sad but sometimes it takes an accident like this to provide a wake up moment to realize that this is space flight and even though it may seem routine the danger is still very real.

Wikipedia isn't necessarily the best source but... "A single-stage-to-orbit (or SSTO) vehicle reaches orbit from the surface of a body without jettisoning hardware, expending only propellants and fluids." Source

Fair enough haha, depending on what your final mass is you may want to consider using more than one engine. For reference if your mass is 6t a single LV-N will give you 1000m/s in 94 seconds, 12t would take 188 seconds 24t 375 seconds.

Any reason for building it really wide?

One engine is enough to get the job done. However if you are worried about burn times to get the delta V you need, you may want more engines. EDIT: Ninja-ed by more than that...

I didn't think of this until just now, doing the calculation using your maximum and minimum Isp will give you upper and lower bounds on payload mass. Use the minimum Isp for a conservative payload mass estimate.

I don't think you will be able to come up with an expression to solve directly for the actual delta V. You can take into account that thrust is a function of the ambient pressure but then Isp becomes time dependent based on the amount of time it takes to traverse the atmosphere. Also I'm unsure how KSP actually defines thrust, is it set it as a constant and mass flow rate vaies as a function of Isp or is thrust (and Isp) calculated as a function of ambient pressure (and therefore altitude)? My math skills are a little rusty so I'm not sure I could derive an equation that captures this right now. An alternative would be to simulate the launch profile with a small time step to minimize error, that is more work than I want to put into playing a game though!

This was my solution for rocket bodies and other random stuff I left in orbit, worked like a charm!

Take the equation for delta V and work backwards. Unless I made an algebra error somewhere that should give you the payload mass. The delta V to get into LKO is around 4500 m/s according to the ksp wiki.

Got to the Mun, I think I had enough fuel to get back buuuut the crew module kinda came off on landing. At least Jeb looks happy! http://imgur.com/a/78h4m#4 Didn't get any pics of the launch, the staging was REALLY wonky but it ended up working out.

The third equation solves the second equation for v where v is the object's terminal velocity in free fall. GM/r^2 is the acceleration due to gravity and is still in the right hand side of this equation.

Tavert did an exhaustive analysis over this topic, check it out. The results are displayed in a slightly different manner than what you have here. His plots don't show the fuel volumes however if you were really interested in it,those number could be backed out of the plots.

As long as you keep the burn relatively short you aren't going to see a noticeable efficiency drop. If you relax the single burn constraint from your previous post you could shorten your burn duration and achieve a pseudo impulsive burn by completing several smaller burns over a series of orbits; this is probably the easiest way to achieve the greatest efficiency.

To find your space craft's weight use newton's second law: F=ma m=1 ton=1000kg a=9.81 m/s^2 Where F is the weight of your spacecraft, m is mass of your spacecraft and a is the acceleration due to gravity. F=1000kg*9.81 m/s^2 F=9810kg*m/s^2 = 9.81kN Thrust to weight ratio is your available thrust divided by your spacecraft's weight: TWR=T/W So if your spacecraft produces 20kN of thrust your TWR is: TWR=20kN/9.81kN = 2.04

Well I was about to post a short analysis but ^^this^^ blows mines out of the water!