Jarnis

This has been rehashed several times over; The main reason why Asparagus staging is not used in real life is the complexity of plumbing. While in KSP the fuel lines weigh zero and transfer as much as the next tanks down the line can gobble up, in real life such plumbing and inevitable pump hardware weighs real kilograms and add quite a bit to the complexity. Large number of engines is not such a huge deal. Large number of engines interconnected to each other through fuel crossfeed is much more complicated. Still, Falcon Heavy is planned to do so at some point (side boosters also fueling core engines until staging so core continues on at full tank) so I guess we'll see how practical it is at that point.

Do not buy pro or ultimate. They offer nothing of value to home user. Pro is needed only if you wish to join an Active Directory domain (and it is actively missing media center features). Ultimate is "pro + home combined" plus few totally useless bells & whistles. Win 7 Home is the sane purchase unless you wish to give extra money to Microsoft just for fun.

Why not use parachutes? Same reason why no passenger planes use braking parachutes any more (there actually used to be a few in the 1950s that did...). Parachutes are extremely finicky to make and pack (and repack), needlessly complicating and delaying the turnaround for next flight. SpaceX is aiming for "Fuel up, stack up, apply payload, fly again". Yes, in the real world the turnaround time will probably still be weeks - it takes easily 4-6 weeks to integrate a rocket at the launch site from pre-built stages and prepared payload and obviously if you are reusing previously flown hardware, any checks and repairs have to be added to that. But why add something that definitely needs to be constantly repaired/replaced? Also parachutes are dead weight when going up. Coming down using the engines only adds the weight of the legs (which you'd need anyway) and needed fuel (which is incredibly small percentage of the total fuel). Besides, chutes scale poorly when the size and weight of the payload increases (like, say, a large rocket stage).

Neil Armstrong used MechJeb (Apollo Guidance Computer). Read Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight and you'll never babble about MechJeb again. That's how real astronauts do it, so that's how it should be done. That book sure cleared a lot of misconceptions *I* had about how Apollo era spacecraft were flown. They actually tried fully manual moon landing in the sims. Astronauts crashed it every time. Even the famous "manual dodging of big boulders" on Apollo 11 wasn't really manual - it was automated, with landing target coordinates changed by the astronaut using the hand controller. (and even SAS is partial automation - comparable to "ATT HOLD" mode of AGC, so don't cheer how you have l33t skillz by landing to the mun using just the SAS. Real manual landing is without SAS and for proper "Apollo" difficulty you should have asymmetrical fuel tanks that drain and move the center of gravity of the lander along the way...) Real Astronauts fly the computer which flies the ship. Go MechJeb!

For gaming, none. Get a desktop. You get far more power at that price point.

Two reasons; - Closer you are, more detailed the planet is and high timewarp + high detail ground = recipe for crashes - At those altitudes if heading directly at the planet, a higher timewarp would place you inside the planet between "hops" of game simulation causing all kinds of havoc. Note that if you want to timewarp while on low orbit, just switch to some other vehicle that is either landed or at higher orbit and timewarp away... then switch back to your main one.

None of them are very good; all feature Integrated graphics and midrange processors. Intel ones (first two) have a faster processor, the AMD one (third) has a better GPU. All are marginal. Sure, they'll run KSP, but will struggle when you start piling mods and bumping up graphics. If I would have to choose out of those three, I would pick the third due to the best GPU but honestly I would not accept any of them. regex's HD 6750 GPU is many times faster than any of the graphics chips integrated into these laptops.

Wild guess; The quadcoupler model has a tiny imperfection so it isn't properly balanced. I've done tons of "manual" quading-up using strut plates and they never cause uncontrolled rolls when installed precisely.

Next to launchpad? Hope no randomly loose booster flying out of control hits it...

...and that's why any new games begin with hiring of some fresh meat! Star astronauts will be used only on highly tested and verified-to-be-safe contraptions. Until then, Scott Kerman and his pals get to try them out! I prefer to use the ones that are exceedingly stupid for first flight tests.

Like this? Already did that a while ago... and note that it was filmed in one go which is bit complicated as you need to go back to driving 1st stage before it falls down..

That was so "real life imitating KSP" that it's almost funny. Shame about the loss of pricy satellites... "and that's kinda why manned rockets really need the launch escape system"

Doesn't mean you should litter the place on purpose. Missions these days almost always go for safe disposal of stages and other unavoidable debris (ie. it won't stick around long and will re-enter harmlessly)

You can certainly fill a common orbit, say, equatorial 100km "parking orbit" with enough debris so that flying on that exact orbit becomes risky. Granted, to get deadly hits you probably need to do this on purpose; spread debris on retrograde missions then fly exact that orbit prograde. That's because relative velocities on objects in same orbit are roughly similar. Alternatively you would need to fill the sky (again, on purpose) with stuff that has orbits that intersect with a specific orbit to coax an accident. Space is BIG and since on-rails objects cannot collide with each other, there is no way to get "runaway" debris field that would cover any substantial amount of near-Kerbin space. You would get KSP game performance issues long before that anyway (from map view having issues drawing all those orbits)

Let's see... approach Jool in retrograde transfer (so as you get closer, Jool is not behind you - it's smack in front of you and closing you from the other direction) and hope for a suitable moon gravity sling or two (with some adjustments, if needed)... Carry lot of fuel for some bonus delta-V. Another variant of this might be "how fast can you get Jool to sling ya out of the Kerbin system after the closest (peak speed) approach?

..or using copyrighted music?

Doing a grand tour without refueling requires a fairly ridiculously sized ship.

Yep, tho I guess for this first one the attempt is more like "Try to get the stage down without it breaking up when falling down". Kinda-soft water landing would be icing on the cake. Recovery of anything even more so. Probably will take few flights before they get it all right but hey, the stages were going to be tossed anyway so "free testing", so to speak.

My original video actually worked around the KSP limitation by using a very steep trajectory; During the time the upper stage is being driven to a preliminary orbit, the first stage is still going uphill and I get to return to control it around the time it reaches apogee. The fuel required to return to pad from there is less than 10% of the total fuel load of the first stage (both boostback and landing)

Won't that design cause you to lose one of the side stages? I mean I assume you ditch them simultaneously but cannot steer both to a landing? Or are you madly switching between them while keeping them within 2.5km of each other? Also I guess that your plan kinda doubles up as the potential flight plan of the planned re-usable Falcon Heavy. (Falcon HeavyR?) - two side cores ditching early and crossfeeding to the core, then returning to launchpad while the center core goes much further downrange and lands... somewhere else. Floating barge? Across the Atlantic?

:ChallengerGoingBoom.jpg: I believe they know. Had that been a liquid engine booster, first of all it would not have had a joint to leak and had any problem developed, the engine would have been shut down. Would still have been a bad day but at least there would have been a theoretical RTLS abort scenario that would have involved some highly untested procedures. At least such an abort could have, in theory, saved the crew. ...and the reasons for using solids (both on the Shuttle and on the upcoming SLS - if it ever flies) are not entirely due to cost or technical reasons. There are politics involved (Thiokol/ATK being a big well-connected arms manufacturer, solids being a better idea for long storage times and required rapid launch capability of ICBMs and all that). At least SLS/Orion will have launch abort capability with the escape tower. But that's already fairly off-topic...

No parachutes is my motto. SpaceX doesn't plan to use them for landings on the ground (except as backup for the capsule) so I won't use them either. Also solid rockets and human rated rockets don't mix very well

Jeb got seriously envious of Bill and his rapidly re-usable rocket and wanted to have a go as well. To avoid a fight, KSP engineers decided that they needed a three-man capsule. That meant a bigger rocket. So... after a bit of tinkering and some test flights that ended up with massive stages going "splash" just short of the KSC, here is the upscaled rocket, a "Heavy" of sorts. No separate side stage recovery because, well, KSP can't manage that (side tanks would have to go away far too early and no way to control two things at once). But this thing manages a three-man pod with enough fuel to do a simple "recrew space station" mission with every stage (including the capsule) capable of powered landing at KSC. Same flight plan, except first stage arcs only to 67 degrees after 10km altitude and stages at the instant the velocity indicator auto-switches from "surface" to "orbital" (~920m/s which suddenly flips up to 1000m/s+ orbital). Need a bit steeper climb because the stage is so much larger - all that drag. Both stages recovered; Rocket on the pad; Still a fairly small payload but nothing says this couldn't be upscaled further. The only real limitation is that you need a massive first stage as it has to be able to get high enough to give you a long enough "lob" upwards after staging so you have enough time to deposit the upper stage to a provisional orbit before first stage goes "poof". As KSP is lacking the oh-so-needed "medium" large engine, had to resort to a fairly exotic dual-engine config for the upper stage. On the plus side, the girder contraption that allows attachment to the lower stage also provided a nice place where to stick a pod core, batteries and MechJeb

It's a separate "new game" just for this experiment so they litter the pad area only in this save. And they sure look cool.

Hadn't noticed this thread before, but someone pointed it out. I didn't do SSTO because, honestly, SSTO isn't as cool as the real SpaceX plan. Falcon 9R - KSP Style Guess it doesn't qualify for the challenge but it's fully stock (save for the mechjeb) and returns everything to a powered landing - even the payload. And yes, it manages 1st stage boostback to the pad by running a steep initial trajectory and flies the 2nd stage to a good enough transfer orbit before the first stage re-enters too low. Video included.