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Showing results for tags 'max dv'.
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So, in my game I have as my far distant-dream target Valentine, the red-dwarf from the Extrasolar mod (which seems to work fine on my install btw). However, I have *not* installed any interstellar mods, and wanted another star around more just to represent what the closest other neighbor in space would be. Well after playing a while I decided to attempt to send something out that way, just to have a try. The famous top speed video (without breakage or cheats) I think illustrates a ship hitting 80,000 m/s. I figured if I could get a ship to 300,000 m/s it would take only 1,000 years (3400 Kerbin years) to get there at 9.5 trillion km away. So, I could launch something, play my Kerbol system exploration out, and then before restarting I would just leave it run at max warp for a few days to get there. 300,000 is only 4.5 times faster than 80k, so that had to be doable, right? Wrong! The first stage sported 17k dV, and I thought "no problem!" The second stage only lifted it to 25k dV, and I thought "hmm..." The third stage- well, you know where this is going. Its not just that successive stages have to be Bigger, its that each stage does less and less *work* per ton. I know this is what the math says, and I know it has been discussed frequently & intelligently in these forums, but until you come face to face with the diminishing returns of the Equation... its just hard to realize how tyrannical it can be. That being said, if anyone has a craft-file for something approaching 100,000 dv, I'd love to see it- if only to pick it apart and have its engineering inform my own decisions. I will upload pictures if I am satisfied with my final result, but- if we don't keep trying to design impossible things, how will the magic happen?
