Grither: Hm...I wonder... does a Saturn V style massively huge single rocket design work in Kerbal Space Program?

Kinda... there's no direct equivalent to the first stage engines of the Saturn V. I always forget to put struts inside the cell... sometimes the centre stage flies up thru the middle of my ship.

bbfreak: bromah: I remember a rumor a few years ago that NASA had literally lost the capabilities of making those super rockets.   That blueprints had been thrown out, scientist died/retired, new engies couldn't read the old blueprints since they were in CAD.   Essentially, that is why we had to outsource to russia, we could no longer produce the specific rockets we needed for the heavy payload missions.

I guess now we can.

Not exactly true, we after all still have Saturn V's around. We also have a good idea how the Saturn V worked after all because we're still using the same tech more or less if on a smaller scale. So the idea we couldn't build a new heavy lift rocket without knowing anything about the Saturn V is odd. It would be more work, but not impossible. That being said, since we do have Saturn V engines/Saturn V's around we looked at them to figure out how we could apply that tech to SLS by examining them.

Not to mention most rockets like the Soyuz, Saturn V, Atlas V use essentially the same fuel. Kerosene. So again, its not at all like the Saturn V is some lost technology.

and mostly more to the point is that these things are made by a bunch of companies and assembeled and intigrated. So you got a master assembly drawing, and a billion drawings and details of all the little bits that were made by many differnt contractors many decades ago, many of which are no longer in operation and the engineers involved are lost or dead.

one could certainly backwards engineer all the lost bits of information, but at that point, its cheaper and easier just to start over from scratch.

one of the most critical sections of the satV was the control and guidence ring. it was huge, expensive, and the hieght of its technology at the time.

And every thing it did, the phone im typing this on can do and more so, withen reason.

with all that said.. I DO like the idea of reclaiming the rocket sections that make it up intact as building material. its a no brainer when you get down to it.
I loved the space shuttle when growing up, but as I got older and wiser, it became quite appaernt to me that further developing the appolo command modules, and its looking like we are heading back in that direction. and the space shuttle should have been a compliment to that tech, not a replacement.