KerikBalm

Low "burns" above a star can increase hyperbolic excess velocity by a lot, much more than 3km/s So the question is how close can you get, and how much acceleration do you have? An Orion drive can give you a high acceleration, but it won't have a lot of radiators A fusion drive may have tons of radiators that let you get close to the sun (if solar irradiance is a small proportion of the total heat it needs to handle), but it may not have the acceleration. An end game torchsip drive like a matter-antimatter drive / "Epstein drive" like from the Expanse could probably handle the heat and achieve meaningful acceleration. Could be a way to save precious antimatter.

Or batteries are matter anti-matter converters. It is interesting that you make this argument based on battery mass. Mostly I see it based on presumed solar irradiance at Kerbin (I think the cfg file value is the same, assuming units of kw/m^2 or something like that), or the upper limit on solar irradiance given Kerbin's atmosphere and temperature, and the sizes of the solar panels. I remember when the ion engines produced 0.5 kN, not 2. That was OP Eve then, but without thrust during warp, they aren't usable at lower thrust

It is only 0.015 Earth masses. You can't hold on to water vapor with that little mass. It's the driest known object. Even if you heated Earth's surface to boiling, it would still hold on to it's water vapor. Venus is more humid than Io, it's not the heat, it's the tiny mass https://www.space.com/16419-io-facts-about-jupiters-volcanic-moon.html It's surface temp averages -130 C. Also note that it's proximity to Jupiter means little without other large moons to tug on it. The proximity means it tidally locked faster. It also means eccentricity led to greater heating (as constant rotation speed doesn't mesh with varying angular rate of change in an eccentric orbit), but it's orbit isn't very eccentric at all anymore. Take away the other moons, and it would cool down. Increase its mass, and it would have kept water vapor/ice. Increase the mass of it and other moons, and maybe it could have liquid water

Io lost all it's water because it's too small to hold on to water. That's not true for laythe. And the answer about bumping up eccentricity doesn't give specific parameters either and won't help the hellhole thing

This is actually true of real wings too. That will help, but it also must be noted that the center of lift is way too far behind the center of mass, and he effectively has no elevators. Using those fins as the control surfaces and wings at the same time is only good for roll. Deflecting them up or down will only change the total lift, but not move the center of lift as needed for pitch control

As I mentioned earlier: I will be giving the "challenge" a try as well, and posting my tweaked version... or if I can get it to fly with no tweaks, I will post pics of that... KSP starting now. *edit*, so for some reason the craft file I used only had one set of props giving thrust (even though I couldn't figure out what the problem was). SO I just removed the engiens and props, and rebuilt it exactly as it appeared to have been, and then it worked just fine. Alll I did was adjust the control to have manual control over blade pitch, and increase max rpm to 460: With manual control of pitch, I could even use the props as brakes/thrust revers to slow down fast. Just set throttle so that it consumes lf at 0.12 per sec, and adjust pitch to adjust speed. When manueviering and changing speed rapidly, its a bit hard, but I slow down before maneuvering and have blade AoA rather low so that it if increases during manuevering (as the plane slows down), the blade AoA increases in a way that makes it more efficient and generates more thrust. This keeps it managaeable to adjust pitch while maneuvinering.

Compare: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Io_(moon) To https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth It's not really about the eccentricity. You could put Io in a perfectly circular orbit (it's already pretty close to it, closer than Earth is), and the motion of the other moons tugging on it would make small perturbations and heat it up, and you'd have volcanic activity and lava pits, hotter than needed to melt water. Io is just too small to hold onto water vapor. To make the Jool system realistic, a lot needs to change, it's not stable. I ran a version of it in principia where I bumped jool's surfage G to 2.5 from 0.8 (to be more Jupiter like, less Saturn like), then I scaled down the large moons to about 2/3 their radius and surface Gs. Then the system seemed stable on principia's n-body simulation

As mentioned, the fixed relays don't break easily like the deployable ones So use an RA-2 if a 16s isn't up to the task. Consider having it decouple on landing to have a relay base station, and drive away with a 16s, or the deployable comm-16 (fairing is gone at this point), since RA-2s use a lot of power relative to a comm-16, it may be annoying to transmit science (assuming science gathering is the rover's function). Sure, it's .15 tons instead of .015 for the 16s, but it's still not very heavy. It also takes 4x the amount of EC to transmit the same data, but hey, it solves the problem. Of course, I think leaving a relay in orbit and using a 16s on the descent vehicle is the best option, it's what I do.

[Sarcasm] Confirmed, playing stock KSP is cheating. At a minimum, you must play at a 3x scale to not cheat, preferably 6x or higher, and RP-1 or RO or whatever it is called to. And FAR... All that, otherwise it is cheating [/Sarcasm]

I wouldn't accept that argument, as nothing is discarded. It's not like a rocket (such as an eve SSTO) that uses vectors/a mammoth initially, and then LV-Ns once in thinner air can't be a SSTO, even though it used 2 different engine types. That's not what is meant by the term stage in rocketry afaik.

I don't see why we'd want time travel or how they could implement it anyway....

Do you have some wing incidence? At least have the nose point up a little when just resting on it's gear I don't know about that mod. Generally, I set RPM to max, and use an axis group for blade pitch. I apply a little throttle to spin up the blades at 0 AoA, then I increase blade pitch, and keep increasing it as speed increases, adjusting throttle (having torque linked to throttle) to keep RPM up. It is much more complicated than just using a wheesley.

Not cheating at all, and still SSTO. My SSTOs don't leave kerbin orbit. They stage to go beyond it.

The only resources shown are EC and monoprop, I guess that you have a kraken-drive on this thing?

No, it doesn't

Regarding Junos, I have found an additional benefit for them, only since the update where engineers can add and remove parts. The benefit is simply that they can be added and removed by engineers (and not too many kerbals are needed to assist). I oftne make 2 stage craft, where the 2nd stage craft is a rocket-glider. When it lands, its empty or nearly so, with no really suitable propoulsion system. If I want to move it around to re-dock with its first stage carrier, its a pain in the cheeks when only the 1st stage has airbreathers/ fuel left, and I'm going to need to get both of them to an ISRU fueling station ot re-use them (such as when playing on a scaled up system and/or with alien space programs which move KSC off of Kerbin). Wheeseley are nice for thrust reverse, but I'd rather not use them as they are useless dry mass for most of the flight. Well, now, my ISRU fuel truck/first stage craft/recovery craft can just carry some Juno engines. Upon meeting the glider/craft that I want to be able to back up, I have an engineer mount some Juno engines and small fuel tanks, and now I can move my glider around, have my first stage craft back up, etc. I can also add enough Junos to allow the rocket-glider to fly on airbreathing power, and remove the Juno's before the next orbital flight. Their small size and mass that is compatible with the new engineer construction mechanic make them very versatile. They don't work like that. Air hogging is not a thing anymore. You don't need them to get past 20k without flameout. The benefit of precoolers and engine nacells is their high "static suction". I can use one shock cone intake to supply 4 or 5 rapiers at supersonic speeds, but going fulll throttle from a stop on the runway with such a setup will result in a flameout. Using a precooler/engine nacelle solves that problem. Goliath? tbh, I don't use it except on novelty airliner recreations. TBH, I almost never seriously use the wheesley or panther engine either. THe panther may see use as an early space plane engine before the whiplash is unlocked, and the wheesley may see use on a laythe sub, or some laythe airplanes that I want to be able to back up - where the thrust reverese is convenient for ground handling. The RCS/vernor engines, those are great... for RCS (esp if you don't want to rely on OP'd reaction wheels), they really help with docking larger ships, and are just handy for small maneuvers in space, as well as final maneuvering just before small on spaceplanes landing on Duna for example (particularly control during VTOL landings). tail connector A. I don't use it much, but it gets some use for light kerbin exploring planes early on, can also be used as a very low drag nosecone. The winglet and basic fin are usefull on expendable rockets for stability purposes Extra large landing gear? Oh I use that frequently on my large spaceplanes: The big drogue chute... yea, I rarely use it. Its aesthetically supperior to the radial ones, but really, just one radial chute is almost always enough to slow descent enough to use the main chutes. If its not, you may not want all the force going to one part, and distributed radial mount drogues may be better. Drogue chutes in general aren't so usefull except on Duna, and for stabilizing planes when landing (again, particularly on duna to keep them going straight), and here, the radial mounts are more versatile. Work lamps are useful if you don't want to wait until daylight to do certain things. The lights can be very useful, but are generally redundant with each other. I use the illuminator mk1 the most for landing at night, but the smaller lights could be usefull on rovers... again, if one insists on driving them at night rather than waiting for daylight. They are also just usefull for making your craft look cool.

I won't just tell, but show as well: Mars, but with Oceans, a larger relative size to kerbin than to Earth, O2 in the atmosphere, and some evidence of life: Olympus mons: Olympus mons in the distance: I made it a double planet with Duna: https://imgur.com/8wqyBkD (that one has a terrain "decal" that I haven't been able to remove when using Kerbin as the template, to get the better terrain shaders). Its gone through many iterations, played at different scales (1x, 3x, 4x, 6.25x), with different visual mods and atmosphere colors, in addition to surface G, atmosphere thickness, etc.

I would suggest that twin engine contra rotators are "simpler". IRL, yesm they are mechanically more complex (2 engines instead of 1, or complex gears to make one engine drive 2 contrarotating props), but in KSP, they are just so much easier. FWIW, I have barely used the turboprops, and instead mostly use the electric rotors. Turboprops just don't seem competitive with turbofans in KSP (haven't compared fuel efficiency, but its so much simpler to use a wheesley/panther/Goliath, all of which already have excellent fuel efficiency). If I'm using props, its for extra-kerestrial worlds without O2, but I also test them on Kerbin, they can go quite fast. Note, I have found that the "blades" give much better performance (at least at high speed) than the "props" I haven't compared efficiency of using fuel cells + electric rotors vs the air breathing turines. One would hope that LF consumption is similar, and its just the Oxidizer consumption that differs significantly, but I have my doubts. Never used it, seems like such a think would be convenient, much easier than manually adjusting blade angle. I suppose it depends what you are trying to do. Maximize fuel efficiency for a moderate speed cruise? or maximize speed - as seen above, you can get to nearly mach 1 with these props, but according to the part window, the blades are going super-sonic, and we've seen thats really load IRL (Tu-95 had prop tips going supersonic, and the XF-84H Thunderscreech was ridiculously loud) Generally speaking, I try to have RPM as high as possible, you can see in my screenshots that i have a rotor window open to monitor RPM. When RPM starts to fall, I increase torque (at least now one doesn't have to match the RPM setting to the actual RPM, before if you set max RPM at 460, but only achieved 230 rpm, it would consume power as if it was at 460 RPM, so reducing max RPM setting would reduce power/fuel consumption without affecting power output). I figure I want the lift vector from my blades to be pointing forward as much as possible for maximum efficiency, and that means higher RPMs (at least at significant forward speed, doesn't neccessarily apply to slow speed planes (helicopters). Also, I noticed that different types of blades have different optimum AoAs. Generally speaking, you want to keep the blades inedned for use in ducted fans to between 4-5 degrees AoA, but the standard propellor blades do better at higher AoA (I forget what AoA exactly, I think its more around 10). Similarly, the Helo blades have a different optimum AoA, I hope the mod takes that into account. You can use helo blades, I tried to use them in tilt-rotor craft: but so far I've had the best results with the ducted fan blades. The downside is, of course, higher part count relative to the massive helo blades.

Started planning for Rald colonization in my 6.25x game: A simple shuttle, with a cargo bay that an engineer can put seats in, extra fuel tanks, science, etc But margins were low, and after I finish modding the system, fueling craft in orbit will come only from Duna or Rald (Ike gets booted to the asteroid belt). Duna is.... not ideal for atmosoheric flight and landing the fueling ships. So I started working on a 2 stage solution for Rald, that can take more mass to orbit reusably: It needs to get over 150 m/s to take off, I'm hoping it will be more docile on landing, when tanks are empty (it does haev a lot of wing area). The thin air required using the closed cycle mode to lift it off the ground after it got airborne a little after a bump. Then I switched to testing on Kerbin, and trying to make a fully reusable (as opposed to recover at 100%, and launch a new craft from the SPH). cargo vessel based on it. Stage separation: Its not really meeting performance goals at the moment.

I've never used the https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/R7000_Turboshaft_Engine Generally, I only use the EC powered stuff.

Decided to update my planet configs, particularly Rald, to go along with the 6.25x game I'm playing. Increased Rald's surface G from 0.53g, to 0.637g. I accompanied this with an increasse in the atmosphere pressure at sea level from 0.2 atms to 0.25 atms. I also gave it a higher atmosphere height, so the pressure doesn't fade quite as fast. So... planes fly a bit better now in the thicker air. Rovers handle a little better in the higher gravity, and its generally a little more kerbin like. As its tidally locked to Duna and vice Versa, the days are a little shorter now (they were rather long). I found out that the orbital velocity is now about 4100 m/s (at 6.25x), and only about 100 m/s comes from the planet's rotation. I designed a non-nuclear SSTO crew shuttle with a science equipment bay. It made orbit, just barely, after a few attempts to get the ascent profile right. I may decide to do a 2 stage solution. I also think I want to resdesign it, to have the science bay located at the CoM, and make use of the ability of engineers to build on site to make the bay a bit more modular, perhaps carrying an extra fuel tank one time, a cargo container for small parts another, or science equipment yet another. A funny thing happened in testing the new configs though. I omitted a decimal point in the numbers of the atmosphere curve defining the slope at a certain altitude. I found that the atmosphere abruptly went away and became a vacuum at a pretty low altitude. (this was after I reached maximum airbreathing speed though and had gone closed cycle), I had to pitch up and use engine thrust to maintain altitude, and accelerated to nearly orbital velocity before I started climbing again (and also ran out of fuel). As the plane coasted up to apoapsis from a very low altitude, the atmosphere abruptly came back, and I hit pretty thick atmosphere pitched at like 30 degrees, at nearly 4,000 m/s. The plane disintegrated nearly instantly. Its completely unrealistic, but it did give me an idea for a novelty challenge. A planet whose atmosphere goes from 1 atm, to vacuum, back to 1 atm, then finally to space... Its quite an unusual launch challenge... but not what I wanted for Rald, so I fixed the problem.

No, just no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_Stratolaunch#Specifications_(Model_351_Stratolaunch) Performance Maximum speed: 460 kn (530 mph, 850 km/h) That's a maximum speed of just 236 m/s Well, the Sanger design did propose using ramjets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saenger_(spacecraft)#Design The 2nd variant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saenger_(spacecraft)#Variants would release the 2nd stage at mach 7 (I suspect the hybrid turbboramjet/air turbo rocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_turborocket would have a closed cycle mode like the SABRE, but without any of that precooler business, or the 1st stage would have rocket engines itself to boost higher).... that works out to roughly 2,100 m/s. That's a whole lot more dV than the stratolaunch gets you. The stratolaunch gets you freedom to launch into different inclination orbits, and simplifies nozzle design allowing one to stick with a more vacuum optimized nozzle without compromizes for high air pressure of the first stage. The 2 stage spaceplane designs like sanger (or even early STS concepts) have the carrier plane contributing large amounts of velocity to the 2nd stage.

Not exactly, I have managed to make 2 stage systems work... but they require getting the 2nd stage to orbit before the first stage falls too far back into the atmosphere. I find SSTOs on stock kerbin are plenty easy, that the added complexity of 2 stage designs is not worth it. On scaled up systems though, I often go the 2 stage route.

Alpha Centauri is 4.37 light years away. This it takes over 9 years Earth relative time at .25c Ship relative time is nearly 97% of that at .25c https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/time-dilation But a hohman transfer to Eeloo apoapsis takes a similar amount of time, so we only need another 10-100x more time warp for ships traveling at .02 c or even 0.002c

How does this mod work with boats and breaking ground robotics? I want to install this mod because I am now playing on a 6.25x rescale, and, well, flying or driving or boating anywhere on electric rotors takes a long time (6.25x longer, to be precise :p). It's somewhat OK with rapiers and 4x physics warp at 1,700 m/s surface velocity, but forget about boats or planes using electric rotors (they don't work well with even 2x physics warp). Some rovers I made go >100 m/s and handle ok on 4x p-warp on Kerbin with 1 g, certainly not minmus)... But that's like travelling at 16m/s stock. This mod is really needed for the higher rescales It awesome if it could support BG electric planes. I'm imagining flying fuel tankers now going out to a splashed down dropship to refuel it, or a cargo plane going to transfer payload, would be great