KerikBalm

Except... it can get even more complicated. For example, consider the case of a final stage consisting of a command pod with 2x sepratrons, and a liquid fuel engine underneath on a decoupler. If you burned the sepratrons first, then fired the liquid engine, you'd not get much benefit from the sepratrons. But if you burn the liquid engine, jettison it, and then fire the sepratrons, you'll get more dV. In this case, it goes back to mass ratio. Also I'd say we should talk about engine efficiencies, not fuels. We could do another case with 2 stages of FL-T200's and an engine - assume a lander can or even a command seat. One is a nuke, the other is a 48-7s. Burning the least efficient engine first is only good if the mass ratios are equal. Due to the mass of a nuclear engine, its more efficient to burn the nuke, then jettison it, and then burn the 48-7s. Or we could do a more reasonable case of a 48-7s and 2x oscarB/round-8 toroidal tanks, and a FL-T400 tank + nuke. For such a system, you'd want to use the 48-7s last. Also, with RCS, you could put (a) RCS port(s) on a command pod, in which case you'd want to not use the rcs it carries for maximum dV (assuming its just hte command pod, and nothing else that you are trying to push) Its ok to have a lower ISP upper stage, if its mass ratio makes up for it, and you can't get a similar mass ratio with a higher ISP engine. However, given the mass of all solid boosters except sepratrons, there are better options. SRBs should only be in the bottom stages... pretty much just like mainsails

Well, you don't actually want to keep up with terminal velocity the whole ascent. Its most obvious in the upper atmosphere where escape velocity is lower than terminal velocity. Generally you want the dV losses of gravity drag to equal the dV loses of atmospheric drag. However, the dV loses of gravity drag correspond to the sin of your angle relative to the surface. When you thrust parallel to the ground, you have no gravity drag - of course in the case where you still have atmospheric drag, this is not good - they should be equal, so you should still be pointing up, rasing your apoapsis. But assuming a proper ascent path, at the higher altitudes, well into your gravity turn, gravity drag becomes quite small due to your angle with respect to the surface, and as a result, you should also be travelling much lower than terminal velocity. Also note that generally speaking, you need a TWR of 2:1 to maintain terminal velocity (whereas a TWR of 1.5 should get you 70% of the way there), as at that point the force of drag = the force of gravity. Once you're thrusting at 30 degrees from the horizon in your gravity turn, you'd only need half the thrust to maintain a given optimal velocity - however its true you don't need to just hold one speed at one instant, but you need to accelerate to reach the ever higher optimal ascent velocities. So I'm not sure what the TWR you really need for the upper stages is... if you were already at a given optimal velocity, you need less thrust to maintain it than when in the vertical part of your ascent, but you also want to accelerate quite rapidly

Yea, I'm doing full stock, so I'm just sticking a small docking port on there, and an extra oscar-B fuel tank, hopefully the docking port weight doesn't affect my dV that much, and the oscar B doesn't kill my TWR. I also modified the launcher - which has a core of 2 stacked orange tanks with a mainsail - so I can ditch the mainsail and refuel the core as an InterPlatentary (IP) stage, maybe even dock my lab-rover to the bottom (putting a large docking port, and then a mainsail which detaches), but now my launcher seems to break on the launchpad... I still haven't actually sent kerbals (just the lander with a probe core and empty seats), or a return vessel. I also haven't bothered with refueling the launcher core for the IP journey, and just burn my lander's engines for the IP burn, land, and then edit the save file to give it full fuel for the ascent trial. Still working on getting the whole mission together... the lander launch, the sciene package, the refuel for the IP burn, and the return craft... (should be pretty standard stuff) However, I can at least cross off the ascent stage and ascent launcher - even though I'm now tweaking it with the docking port additions

Well, I just made the attempt... I added av-8r fins to the outer asparagus ring, big mistake. I landed on a hillside, barely didn't tip over. ~1,300 m altitude.. saves me about 500 m/s I guess - still wasn't far from the liquid. Lift off was very difficult because the fins kept trying to bring my attitude to be in line with my velocity vector, which starts out more horizontal than I'd like due to the tilt of my landing site. Also, I had arranged it so that my outer asparagus stage was asparagused with the booster stage to get the lander into orbit, and I didn't action group my liftoff engines, so the engines fired as I was increasing the throttle, rather than set it to full and then firing the engines. I had to get creative with retracting certain landing legs, and locking/unlocking some suspensions, but I was able to finally launch without flying horizontally to my doom. Once the fins were gone, it flew much better, the single lv-t45 provided enough control. My lower asparagus ring had not quite enough TWR, so the ascent was a bit inefficient. The core of the lower asparagus had not enough TWR, but I had it asparagused with the twin FL-T200s+ 48-7s above it, which helped its TWR, and the TWR of the LV-909 stage. At one point around 30-40km I think I actually started overspeeding, but then again found myself under terminal velocity (although you don't want to travel at terminal velocity as you get more horizontal in the gravity turn. My ascent profile wasn't very efficient, I ened up with an apoapsis of 136km, and a perapsis of 36 km.... :/ It required less than 80 m/s to bring the perapsis above 100km. With a bit of optimization, I think it could get my 2 kerbals into orbit without using their jetpacks. Certainly, if I had just landed at a higher location, it would have been fine (while with that ascent profile, if I had landed at sea level, even jetpacking... they may not have made it into a stable orbit). *edit* just ran it again from the quick save, a more optimal ascent path got me into a 105 x 120 km orbit, with about 3.2 units of liquid fuel left in the top stage (sufficient for over 300 m/s of dV) I declare the lander a success... the only problem... ones gets science for bringing a ship/vessel back from Eve, no? I may need to design a lander where I can recover a part of it, to get maximum science...

Hmmm, I would have though that by the time I got to the Lv-909 stage, TWR wouldn't be so important, and I'd be in the upper atmo soing my gravity turn. Also, the dV seems uncomfortably low - I'm thinking either 1 more oscar B fuel tank in the upper stage, or perhaps on the Fl-t400 stage I could add 2 FL-T200 tanks on radial decouplers with 48-7s(?) Lv-909s(?) - no cross feeding to improve the TWR of the core (since when its the core alone thrusting, it won't have a full fuel load). I know 48-7s are more efficient than LV-909s for low masses (its better to push around a lot less mass at a little less ISP, than to push around a lot of mass with higher ISP), but I'd think with the stage above it, that 48-7s wouldn't be what I'd want here.... but if I only lose 4 m/s, its not such a big deal. This suggestion, and the OP's engine cluster, illustrate one thing that sort of bugs me about KSP. For gameplay considerations, bigger doesn't have to be better, but it certainly shouldn't be worse. By this I mean that using multiple small parts shouldn't be better than using one large part - if for nothing else than to reduce part count. I'm very tempted to go non-stock, and just do very simple mods using the rescale factor (and mass and thrust) to make proportionately larer "small parts" ie scale up the aerospike to be larger so I can use 1 large aerospike instead of a quad adaptor and 4 of them. Doing this with the 48-7S would improve computer performance even more, as all those cubic struts would be gone too. But a scaled up 48-7s (to the large size) would completely replace the mainsail....

Yes, it does need to be updated, as to the earlier comment, yes I know IRL lift is not a function of the mass of a wing. But then again... neither is the drag. Also IRL, any given wing has a fixed Lift/drag ratio (for a given angle of attack). I was operating under the assumption that the wings and control surfaces with the best lift rating/ drag coefficient were going to be the most efficient within atmospheres. I guess I was wrong, and I should be looking for the best lift rating/mass :/ I think that lift does not scale with the 2nd power of velocity, but drag does, can also lead to some stability issues with control surfaces that acheive active stability through varying their "lift" What may be sufficient at low speeds won't work at high speeds (now this may sound familiar to some IRL cases, but thats only in a very vague sense, when you get down to the details, its very dissimilar)

Hmm, my plan was just to use two rings, asparagus staged, of FL-T800 tanks with aerospikes, the central tank with a LV-T45 engine (so I can stack it on top of a mainsail asparagus booster to get it into orbit and on its way to Eve). Drogue chutes on top of the inner asparagus ring + radial chutes (large chutes along the outer ring). On top of the central fuel tank, I've got a FL-T400 fuel tank with a LV-909, and on top of that I've got 3 oscar-B fuel tanks feeding a 48-7s engine. on top is a probe core, strapped to the sides in 2 fold symetry are two command seats. Of course, lots of struts and a ladder system to get them to the command seats. I was going to do just 1 seat for 1 kerbal, and maybe even use jet pack fuel to get into orbit, I don't use any mods that tell me how much dV the ship has, and I haven't tested yet. Then I decided I'm going to send down a lab based rover to get more Science!!! in case the return vehicle doesn't make it (and to get the Science!!! faster, and to provide a plausible habitat, so that they only need to breifly scramble from the labe module, and into their command seats, before leaving the densest parts of Eve's atmo), and to try and get some liquid readings as well. As I figure it, Aerospikes will basically always have 390 ISP, while 48-7s and skippers will basically have 300 ISP (since Eve's atmo takes a long time to drop below 1.0 atms). 30% more ISP is worth the extra engine weight methinks (meanwhile nukes won't have better ISP until nearly 14km, and are much heavier). Also the key to the most dV is to have the smallest upper stage, hence the tiny diameter stages. My eve mission in the planning stages involves 3 launches: #1) the lander as described above, that will descend unmanned to Eve's surface #2) The science rover that will descend to Eve's surface, and the return stage that will stay in orbit #3) an interplanetary booster stage that will dock with the lander (via a part held underneath the lv-T45 by a decoupler), and get it to Eve.

So the mass of a part does not affect the lift generated? I thought Lift/frag would be something worth considering... but thats not true? The drag coeffcient is multiplied by mass, but the lift rating is not?

I've had similar "encounter not showing up" things happen before... even with minmus, but especially with Duna, it also happened with moho. I will set up my trajectory, get an intercept, and then at some point along the journey, the encounter dissappears... yet if I continue on, the encounter actually still happens. This is a case of a planned encounter that is hard to plan for, I hadn't even considered an unintended encounter. As near as I can figure, the encounter predictions are unreliable

What about the ethics of contaminating potential alien biospheres with the goo? (ie Duna, Laythe) I always assumed the goo was some sort of bacterial/fungal sludge that you might find growing in some container left in the back of your fridge too long...

Slightly modified for brevity: I'd point out a couple things: *you'd probably get more dV if you don't fire the lv-t45 until decoupling the lv-t30's (I haven't checked the TWR, but assuming it is sufficient, you will) *Youd probably get even more dV if you fired 2 lv-t45s, followed by another 2. Or you can action group it to shut down one pair once you don't need the thrust (I don't think you even need more than 2 to lift off, all 4 firing may be beneficial in the first few seconds until you reach 110 m/s) - assuming you don't want to asparagus stage to keep part count down *RCS can help, I mount 2 RCS blocks on the capsule to use the 10 units of RCS fuel that it has. The RCS mount itself is only a little lighter than a full sepratron, but the ISP is better, and you have that fuel anyway. The thrust isn't that good, but its sufficient for deorbits (not much use on aborts, but I don't bother with aborts) *I Think your rocket is still more complex/bigger than needed My "just get a pod to orbit, no asparagus staging" rocket: *Top stage* Mk-1 command pod (a lander can would actually be better, but I'll keep the pod since it plausibly would survive reentry) 2 RCS blocks for extra dV Parachute *next stage* FL-T200 tank Rockomax 48-77s (or lv-909 for looks to maintain part diameter) *next stage* FL-T800 tank LV-T30 or 45 engine *next stage* RT-10 Solid Fuel Booster or BACC booster -optional: fins or launch stabilizers IIRC, these craft (since there are multiple combinations) can even do moonshots (flybys - not even using the large boosters) with dV to spare.

I also ended up using more dV than I intended getting to Moho.... almost aborted the landing or even capture burn... but Danbro Kerman had a high courage stat (and high stupidity stat), and went for it. I landed Apollo style (of course), and am now in a 45 degree orbit... not equatorial, not polar... I'm not sure I can get back now (been doing other stuff in LKO the moho->kerbin window hasn't come up) I do know that the interplanetary (IP) stage does not have enough dV in rocket fuel to get back to kerbin.... its packing 2 nukes and a lot of xenon. Due to the mass fraction, I'm going to bring the lander along, refuel it, and when the IP stage runs out of liquid fuel, I'll use the lander as a 2nd stae, and I hope to get back with the lv-909 (it also has 800 units of xenon gas and ions...) I might be able to take the IP stage back to LKO for aerocapture and refueling/use with ions...

Update on this stock non-clipping monstrosity: Not wanting to use finesse, or multiple quick saves, I delivered a small (<60 ton) payload to obit, and then burned up my excess rocket fuel to come in steep and light just west of KSC. I went a bit farther west than intended, not much of a problem though... I had checked its CG with tanks neary empty, carrying only 500 units of jet fuel, with payload, etc... everything should have been fine... but around 30-40 km on on reentry... I lost control, it started to yaw uncontrollably, and spun a bit... and then... stabilized... flying backwards - I've had that happen with other designs with a bunch of rearmounted engines and nearly empty tanks - ones that had survivable impacts by firing up the engines and doing a powered descent/vertical crash landing. This one, I wasn't going to be content to just have it splash into the water at low velocity travelling backwards.... there was no reason for it to be unstable, and I had tested it with more or less the same fuel situation I now had (a take off, 180, return and land), so I fired up the jets, came to a stop, and accelerated forward, and as it should have, it flew forward stably, and flew back and landed at the KSC just fine. Any ideas on what may have caused the spin on re-entry? or why it would stabilize flying tail first, but be stable when travelling forward?

In addition to air hogging.... do you start to reduce throttle at high altitudes? Your engine will flame out at a lower altitude if it is at 100% throttle, than if it is at 50% throttle. So keep an eye on your air intake resource, both the buffer remaining, and the consumption rate - as you get higher, throttle back, and keep throttling back until you are no longer raising your apoapsis/gaining speed. Then turn off the jets, close the intakes, and fire the rockets (or with rapiers, switch modes, close intakes) I don't air hog, or part clip, and put up with stock aerodynamics (it doesn't make real world sense, but once you get used to it, it is at least consistent and sense can be made of it). This one barely gets 41 tons to orbit, but it does: But I wasn't satisfied with its stability on reentry, its payload mass capacity, and its payload size restrictions. It was also rather inefficient (using a mk1-2 command pod... what was I thinking using that 4 ton behemoth?) So, I set about making a new heavy lifter. First successful test flight released a 54 ton payload, and had over 30 tons of fuel left (29.5 tons of liquid fuel and oxidizer in the right ratio)... so in theory, at least an 80 ton payload capacity It takes a lot of struts to hold together. I wish we had "rockomax" size wings to reduce part count directly and indirectly (don't need to many struts to hold many small parts together).

So far, I've only found 1 mun arch, and that was from low equatorial orbit

Indeed, its quite unrealistic. I think all these part clipping/air hogging or mod designs only make the problem worse. However, there are limitations of KSP that make things harder: The inability to have two craft flying in the atmosphere farther away than 2.5 km/under some form of control at once. You simply cannot do an X-15 or Spaceship1 style space plane without the carrier plane "despawning" Which means if you want to have a 100% recoverable system, you've got to take all your aerodynamic surfaces and airbreathing engines with you into space. I would much rather be able to launch a scramjet powered craft at 25km, and have an autopilot bring the "mothership" or "carrier" back to the spaceport. Basic jet engines: seem fine, I guess Turbojet engines: Function more like ramjets or scramjets.... not too unrealistic. consider the SR-71, A combination Turbojet/ramjet, reached speeds of nearly 1,000 m/s, which is the speed at which turbojets thrust starts to decline, but the speeds attainable are more into scramjet territory. But here we get into the problem of the scale that you mentioned: with such a small planet, orbital speed isn't that high. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-51A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet#Advantages_and_disadvantages_of_scramjets A scramjet in practice has reached speeds in excess of 3km/sec -> far less than orbital velocity for earth, but far more than orbital velocity for Kerbin. I'm not sure if its "reasonable" to scale that speed down to the roughly 1,500 m/s that is attainable in KSP (without air hogging with many clipped intakes, or cubic struts to put ram air intakes all over the place) Then we have the ISP issue. The ISP for scramjets (as stated in wikipedia) is between 1,000 to 4,000 seconds. KSP turbojets are operating at about 800 when high in the atmosphere. The problem (I think) is that they are listing *effective* ISP. If you halve the exhaust velocity, with the same energy, you can accelerate 4x the amount of propellant/reaction mass. IRL jet engines are so much more efficient than rockets for 2 reasons, and neither is a higher real exhaust velocity. This doubles the change in momentum per unit energy. #1) They don't carry oxidizer - No explanation needed, is there? #2) They don't carry much reaction mass to speak of -The mass of the fuel compared to the mass of air accelerated, is quite small Jet fuel is basically an energy source, not reaction mass. Turbofans are more efficient than turbojets because they accelerate more air, at lower speeds. For practical purposes, we can say they have a higher effective ISP "change in momentum per unit of fuel" The problem is... KSP takes this into account twice. The ISP value for Jet engines would be realistic as an "effective ISP". The problem is this ISP is then multiplied by ~15 to reach an effective ISP that is 15x higher. Jet engines consume intake air to jet fuel in a 15:1 ratio. If intake air were considered massless like electric charge, this would be fine.... but its not, it has mass, and I'm pretty sure jet engines have effective ISPs that are about 15x too high. Either they need to reduce jet engine ISP, and then play with the intake air:jet fuel burning ratios, or keep their high ISP, and treat intake air as massless. Of course, I think in this case, we'd also need jet fuel containers that contain more jet fuel (In KSP, rocket fuel tanks hold much more weight in fuel + oxidizer than the weight of liquid fuel that a jet fuel container holds. Rocket fuel containers are also much "denser") So the issues are:15x too high effective jet ISP, and kerbin is too small. (and the aerodynamic model is still pretty bad, I hear FAR can fix that though) As a first fix, I'd change intake air to be massless - that is the simplest fix, rather than tweaking the engine ISPs. Go into your file, set intake air to have no mass, then try to make SSTOs... its going to be a lot harder.

I often do as well... but.... my over engineering would be something like: slap a bunch of parachutes on it, and land 1/4 (0.25) of an orange tank's worth of fuel, asparagus staged. 137 tons.... that weights more than 3.5 orange tanks, plus a mainsail and a mk1-2 capsule You and I over engineer to different degrees, that is for sure I've since gotten more efficient, though I still "wing it". I do things for efficiency, but I still overengineer. My efficiency results in the mission using less fuel, and returning with a lot - or I realize how much fuel I still have left when its time for the return trip, and I dump half of of it orbit in case I ever need it. For example #1: the science juniors, you can take the data and detach them (mount the goo on the science juniors so the goo detaches too) - no need to lift them back up, and the parachutes will help you set them down - almost no dV penalty to your lander that way #2: Your lander should be only that, a lander. Ie, go from a stable orbit to one with a perapsis in the atmosphere, and then get back up to a stable orbit. I do orbital rendevous now (except for the mun and minmus, not worth the effort and dV to dock when its so easy to get back to kerbin). No sense in landing the interplanetary stage only to lift it up again - leave that sucker in orbit. My first Duna mission was over engineered: I arrived with an orange tank's worth of fuel for the interplanetary stage (using 2 nukes, it also had ion propulsion for fine tuning orbits/intercepts). My lander consised of the 2 person lander can, 2x fl-t400 tanks, an X200-8 tank, 3 aerospikes, landing legs/aparachutes, science instruments, etc. Only 1/4 of an orange tank's worth of fuel. The 2 outer fl-t400s fed into the central 200-8 tank, intended to be aspargus staged... only I forgot the decouplers, so I quickly found myself with only 1 aerospike going, hoisting up dead weight of aerospikes that weren't firing(3 tons), empty fl-t400s (half a ton), landing legs and parachutes that were supposed to have fallen off (didn't bother calculating)... and I found I got to orbit just fine with fuel to spare. I docked it with the IP stage, refueled it left it in duna orbit, and my IP stage still had over 1/2 and orange tank's worth of fuel, and got back to kerbin with lots of fuel remaining. 3 aerospikes when 1 was sufficient, asparagus staged (intended, but I derped), overkill. I redesigned the mission and repeated it: the central aerospike was deleted, the fuel lines were reversed so the outer 2 aerospikes took from the central x200-8 tank (2 aerospikes was still more TWR than needed), slung a rover under where the central aerospike used to be, Then I added a docking port connection to the main IP fuel tank, so that I could jettison it as a fuel depot. So I ended up leaving a fully fueld SSTO lander in duna orbit, roughly 1/3 of an orange tank's worth of fuel in orbit as a fuel depot, and still came back with dV to spare. The old lander design (when properly staged with decouplers) could actually not only get to duna orbit, but all the way back to kerbin. -But I had a 2 nuke + basically 1 orange tank carrying interplanetary stage devoted to that (it was not initially designed with the idea of refueling the lander for reuse by another mission) so the IP stage was actually not needed at all, because the lander stage was over engineered. The IP stage was overengineered anyway, but coud have been entirely deleted. Yet the lander + IP stage still weigh less than your lander

Sometimes part clipping is hid rather well? did you do part clipping on the intakes there? I can see a little part clipping on the wings. I avoid that, and I don't use nukes on my SSTOs... perhaps I'm limiting myself too much... and have ungainly monsters that require way too many struts to hold them together (my above entry was ~500 parts) I try not to intake spam... but when I've got 22 turbotjets and 2 rapiers to feed... I need a lot of intakes even at a a 3:1 ratio or less

No, there is nothing to suggest that it is possible. There are a couple of speculative proposals about loopholes - to allow one to get somewhere faster than light, without actually locally exceeding the speed of light. The problem with the alcubierre drive and such is that the only way we know of to warp space time... ie gravity, travels at the speed of light. Thus we get "gravity waves". Then there is the general expansion of space-time, seemingly ongoing since the big bang... but that seems to happen uniformly, and for warp drives to work, it would need to be non-uniform. Lastly, there are wormholes, which would require negative energy to keep open... and well... those would require passing through a gravitational sheer (likea black hole) that would obliterate anything. However, if you could accelerate arbitrarily close to the speed of light, you could cross the galaxy in an arbitrarily short time from your frame of reference, but that also means things would change "in the blunk of an eye" due to time dialation.

1) Are you aware that 1 male is sufficient to impregnate many females - and for breeding purposes we humans often use 1 male and many many females, ie roosters and bulls. -by the way, I volunteer for a breeding program if you wish to establish a captive population. 2) Can I choose the females? 3) Can you study others on this planet well enough, fast enough to give me everlasting youth?

Well, I have a working heavy lifter now.... All stock (ish), no part clipping First successful test flight put a 54 ton payload into orbit, with over 29 tons of "rocket fuel" left (ie oxidizer+ liquid fuel in a 1.1:0.9 ratio) and nearly 500 units of jet fuel left for landing. So, by tweaking fuel loadouts of the payload/SSTO, I should get 83.5 tons worth of payloa to LKO, with jet fuel to spare for the landing. Issues: * Not completely stock: the radial intakes are modded to produce a resource for electric fans, unused on this design, and those 2ndary intakes are closed the whole flight The 80 unit jet fuel adaptors have been modded to have a lower drag coefficient - .15 instead of .2 ->largely irrelevant in this design, given their low weight reletive to the payload. I think I'll revert this, and try again just to prove it. * Short wheel base makes landing off a runway basically impossible, and stopping on the runway rather hard. You'll notice 2 pairs of radial engines mounted on top, they are action grouped to help it pitch down, but they were more than sufficient. I think I'll put one pair facing the reverse direction, and save...lets say 0.5 tons of oxidizer, and have retro landing rockets. I already have the brakes disabled on the front pair of landing gear, but it still pitches down too much on landing (so i have to tap the brakes, and can't hold them). Top mounted retrorockets would both slow it down faster, and give it a pitch up moment to counteract the pitching down from the brakes. * depending on "the drop", and maneuvering on the runway, when fully loaded, it has a tendency to collapse under its own+ the payload's weight on the runway. Although when returning with no payload and nearly empty (ie 400-500 units of fuel), it handles quite well in the air, and seems strong enough. Now to make som 80 ton mission packages to launch to orbit

Why oh why were you useing a 137 ton Duna lander? My greatest acheivements... Manned moho mission prior to unlocking mainsails and large orange tanks (skipers, radials, and the rockomax 32's) My 41 ton payload SSTO (stock, no part clipping), which I used in two launches to prepare my Duna mission: 1st launch: Nuclear +ion powered tug+small rover+SSTO Duna lander 2nd launch: Science lab+ extra fuel to refuel the lander/become a fuel depot in Duna orbit. Working on a 72 ton (ideally 80) SSTO, but its difficult. Either I place engine clusters at the back, and when it gets into orbit nearly empty (only 71 km...), its unstable on the return, if I place the engines on wings extending from near the center of gravity, they tend to tear themselves off either during takeoff, or at high altitude when I level off at around 22km and start accelerating to 1,000 m/s (when their thrust increases) I sill don't know how I'm going to get a surface sample from eve without losing a kerbal... I think that will be it...

Nearly stock.... No part clipping, moderate amounts of Air Hogging... There are a lot more radial intakes on the underside. I modded the nose cone and nose cone adaptors to hold fuel, same capacity to part weight as other jet fuel parts. Its mainly a "for looks" mod. Also, the radial intakes have been modded to also produce "intakeAtmosphere" which is useless on this craft (for use with an "electric ducted fan", which is not on this), but the 2nd air intake module is closed on the intakes before flight (in this case, all the mod does is make the intakes produce 2x as much drag until you shut off the intakeAtmosphere and only keep the "intakeAir" open). It can take roughly 41 tons to LKO. Basic jet engines are used during takeoff and climb to ~15km, I keep them on even when they become inefficient, simply for better acceleration. They stop working completely at 1000 m/s, so I shut them off just before then. Depending on my ascent profile (I don't use mech jeb, its all manual), I get to between just over1500 m/s 28km to 1600m/s at 30km or so on jets. I think if I had action groups for pairs of jets, I could get a little better (If I end up just running the inner rapiers-- they do have the advantage of flaming out at a lower threshold, and with my placement, they won't create so much torque from an imbalance) The rapiers are used with aerospikes during the 2nd climb phase (after jet engine cutoff), since I'd be chasing my apoapsis, I need to accelerate and put it into a climb again. Also due to oberth effect, I think I should keep them on a bit longer, but at some point I shut them off, and circularize with the higher ISP aerospikes (I would have a nuke pair on there, but I want to limit myself to only using those outside of kerbin's atmosphere, in orientations where the exhaust is on a kerbin escape trajectory (given that the exhaust velocity is ~8,000 m/s, thats not a problem in most cases once in orbit) Here it is in the VAB, loaded with the Duna 1 mission main payload. The "Tug" and crew capsule An earlier launch brought up some more fuel (half an orange tank's worth), and a science module (with landing legs, de-orbit/landing thrusters, and parachutes) Its named the Mk3, but it should really be the mk 4 My 1 had basically the same cargo cradle and inner wings, and got to orbit in just fine, but when a payload was added, it was underpowered, and didn't carry enough fuel. So the Mk 2 was built, basic jet engines were added to help during launch, and toroidals to help in orbital insertion, more fuel was added It launched with a 40 ton payload, but it was a little underfueled, and had to burn 2 tons of the payload's fuel to get to orbit. The mk3 was built, adding FL-400 tanks to the nose, and some other minor changes (part position adjustments, additional intakes), it successfully launched the duna science package + extra fuel to orbit. It lacked a power source, and exhausted its electrical charge operating reaction wheels. It also proved to be unstable when nearly compleely empty, using the RCS fuel in the nose only exacerbated this, it barely was able to make it down for a safe landing. The mk4 was launched, including supplementary battery packs, solar panels, and additional lifting/control surfaces to the rear. The payload was near the upper weight limit, but more importantly, was too wide... it wouldn't fit horizontally in the cargo cradle, and when rotated vertically", some parts scraped the ground, and the payload parts interfered with the strutting of the cargo cradle. The former was solved via a minor payload redesign. The latter was unsolvable, and it required an extra soft landing, because it was extra flimsy (although not so bad when its so light after returning) it also took a lot of wiggling and rcs use to dislodge the payload, with parts that didn't fit so well through the gap in the cargo cradle. - still the mk4 is stable, reliably launches 41 or so tons to orbit, although that payload is subject ot certain dimensional restrictions. I'm considering widening the caro cradle for a Mk5 variant, or designing a completely new "Heavy Lifter" I also made a small piggyback lifter for launching small payloads, but it is a bit... meh, the payload must have its own rocket engine (fuel will be transfered to top up the payload tanks before release) (its an SSTO, made for launching a SSTO spaceplane for use on Duna, which makes use of the aforementioned ducted electric fan part to get the spaceplane to about 200 m/s and about 7,000 meters altitude before firing its rocket) * will add pics when I get home, and of the "SSTO mk1"

Also relevant for eve I heard. The way I see it... it lets you use 1 science junior and one goo can over and over again - but at 3.5 tons, you could take a lot of science juniors and goo cans... so... I'm not sure it's worth all that much. It is nice to transmit for higher values, and then run the experiment again. I made a science lab rover on the mun, landed it on a crater near a canyon, grabbed science for the crater, canyons, the surrounding highlands(or was it midlands?), then one of those small highland/midland craters, and returned to the lander and blasted off. In theory, one of those rovers could max out the science on the whole Mun/minmus... but ain't nobody got time fo' dat.