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Comment by azernik | Hacker News Reader

You could actually get a payload into LEO with an ICBM, as long as it was lighter than your average nuclear warhead (or for MIRVed missiles, lighter than your warheads plus bus).

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Could you? I mean if my KSP knowledge is anything to go by, yes you could, but KSP isn't reality and I can imagine the rocket itself is already too heavy or doesn't have enough thrust / fuel to bring itself into orbit.

KSP is close enough to reality here.

Also, isn't US fond of using old ICBMs to launch military satellites?

Usually just on the 4th of July (give or take a week)

It's considered a valid way to dispose of excess missiles under disarmament treaties like START.

We've used old ICBMs to get stuff to the moon. LADEE most recently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Atmosphere_and_Dust_Envi...

The principles that KSP teaches are correct except for the bit where in KSP you're only under the gravitational influence of one body at a time, which doesn't matter for reaching orbit. The specific numbers in the KSP parts are totally fudged to make the game more fun but parts with those numbers would work like they do in KSP if they existed. For instance in real life jet engines have a lower thrust to weight ratio than rocket engines.

EDIT: But you can download the realistic solar system mod to get a sense of what real world thrust ratios and orbital delta-v is like. And Children of a Dead Earth has multi-body physics for Lagrange points and so on.

If you really want a realistic but still playable sim, there's also Orbiter which not only uses real numbers as much as possible, but actually goes so far as to model non-spherical gravity sources like lumpy asteroids.

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