fourfa

Something you might try - rebind the driving controls from default WASD to arrow keys. Then at high speed, using WASD only gives you reaction wheel forces - and their power can be fine-tuned with a slider in the right-click menu.

Might need rules to exclude this type of contraption... will be watching with interest though, I’d very much like faster and more usable prop-driven craft for career. The biggest problem for me is not raw speed but weird physics glitches when using physical time-warp

This sounds rather steep. Let's assume you're flying the standard caveman 12T single-Reliant booster, 6T single-Terrier payload/spacecraft. 6 tons being the mass that gets you 1.0 TWR at staging (which is just enough to keep the second-stage apoapsis moving away from you at all times on the following launch trajectory). And no draggy leading-edge mismatches in part diameter (i.e. no probe core right on top of a 1.25m tank with no adapter). What works for me is: straight up until 75m/s. Start the turn with about a 10° turn east, getting just to the edge of the prograde circle. Keep nudging it steadily east; the steering is never going to be hands-off for the whole flight. Halfway to the 45° mark at 4-5km. Hit 45° at ~10km. Keep steering toward the horizon but never outside the prograde circle on the first stage. Watch the TWR and start to throttle back as needed towards the end of the first stage. Don't worry about flames or reentry effects (a proper gravity turn will have plenty of both). Stage and throttle to max. At this point you should watch and guess about your time to apopasis - watching apo in the lower left corner (click the purple square) make sure it's increasing at the same or greater rate as your current altitude. If the apo is moving away in a hurry, turn harder towards the horizon to slow it down (this is better than throttling). If you're starting to get close to apo, turn upward away from the horizon to boost it momentarily. I find I'm halfway between 45° and horizon by 25-30km, and fully flat on the horizon at ~50km and nearly at orbital speed. Keep the throttle at max until your apo is above 70km - max throttle gets you going faster down lower where it's most efficient; use your pitch above horizon to control your vertical speed instead. Once the apo is in space, throttle down to fine tune to 80km (or your desired final altitude). At this point you should have a fairly long coast to apo, make sure you're staying prograde (have to steer it by hand on probes). That's it. If it's a smaller probe things can be different - throttling more, turning a little harder. But in my game there's very little that needs to be more complex than one Reliant, one Terrier, and decent aerodynamics. Bill jetpacked to orbit from Minmus surface but neither he nor the spacecraft had enough dV to match orbits. Sent a rescue mission with a single empty Mk1 seat and full RCS, picked up Bill, docked with Jeb, staged away Jeb's dead propulsion module, and burned for Kerbin with plenty to spare. And forgot to get a screenshot

Regarding airplanes with Breaking Ground propellers... it’s been my experience that at any given speed, there is one blade pitch that gives maximum thrust. Seems to change more or less linearly with speed up to a max around 53*, and seems not to matter much (or at all) which size of blade. Corrections welcome if you’ve found differently, of course... I’ve searched a lot on the topic, many guides to manual pitch control but haven’t found anything on auto pitch control outside of real-life mechanisms. This seems like an excellent opportunity for a mod to provide an Automatic Blade Pitch Controller, which when engaged would automatically set blade pitch proportionally to forward speed. This would greatly simplify takeoff and stall recovery, where speed changes rapidly and the pilot is often stumbling to find the correct pitch manually before crashing... Then disengage auto-pitch for landing (perhaps bound to landing gear deploy?), where manual control gives you excellent control over approach speed. Questions: 1. Can this already be done with some existing smart parts mod that can sense speed and control sliders in closed loop? 2. Would this need a gain control? Is there enough variation between parts to need it? 3. I talked about maximum thrust, as I’ve been looking for max speeds in my planes. But are there other modes of interest, like best efficiency? 4. Altitude? So far it seems that the same pitch angle for sea level also works well at altitude... but I wouldn’t be shocked if the controller needed altitude compensation as well 5. Advanced controls for feathering (min drag), braking (max drag), compound propulsion (ie props to reach altitude then light rockets etc), etc. @Stratzenblitz75 has found an interesting exploit using heat shields as props, and there are other supersonic builds out there that might have special needs... Open to discussion I put this topic here since it seemed right for general mod musing, but if it’s so specific to Breaking Ground that it needs to go in the graveyard of the BG sub forum, so be it... Additional thoughts?

Still running NCD-level + reverts. I had good success with ladder rides on Mun flyby. Scaled up to ladder rides to Minmus, with juuuuust enough dV to drop into elliptical orbit. But Bill, after years of next to no missions or accomplishments, decides... to be the first Kerbal* to set foot on another world * [in this save] (now I hope I can get him back)

Maybe trve cave kerbals are only allowed to send things to launchpad/runway in containers... Build on the lawn, refuel planes by swapping out drop tanks, etc

TL;DR: KIS/KAS Lite in stock. Inventory system moved into the base game from BG, ability to construct on EVA on the ground or in space, possibly rebuild ships in orbit with fresh fuel tanks, get around part/weight limits in all sorts of ways. Going to mean significant changes to the Cave clan. Might even need to figure an even harder challenge, or just disallow things to keep the challenge static.

I believe it's time for some Hype Train on this one

I think what was meant is that there's a natural limit of single-launch inert payload mass, given the restricted parts, part count, and pad capacity in Caveman. It's not anything specific to the rules, just the implied limitations. Though by the time you max out the Cave tech tree, that limit is somewhat higher than 2.5 tonnes.

A station/fuel depot at 80km orbit would be a great way to practice launching to direct orbital rendezvous. Makes it easier to have fixed landmarks for when to launch... Maybe this is what I need to get my crewed Mun landing program underway. Doing fine with single-launch return probes, but I want those sweet sweet crew reports

OK, that's actually helpful info @Popestar - it tells us it's a trajectory issue. I just built that exact craft (Mk1 pod, 16x FL-T100, Swivel, chute, no decoupler, no fins). I'll try to be detailed here but not obsessive... Following a simple gravity turn (straight up until 75m/s, halfway to 45 ° at 4km altitude, 45° at 10km altitude, go horizontal around 45km when the flames stop, never let the navball direction indicator get outside the safe zone of the yellow prograde indicator circle, and watch the throttle to keep thrust-to-weight ratio [TWR] below 2) Watch the apoapsis readout carefully! Click the purple square in the lower left for a real-time readout of apoapsis - without doing this it's all to easy to end up wasting fuel on setting a very high apo too quickly. Throttle is critical here - keep the TWR under 2 remember, which you can see on the G indicator on the right side of the navball, or click the orange bars in the staging list on the left side of the screen during flight. The simplest single thing to ensure an efficient gravity turn is slowly reducing that throttle by keeping TWR under 2. And actually closer to 1.0 above 30km, as you're nearly flying horizontally. If done right, you'll float up slowly to your apo and only need a few puffs of thrust to circularize (maybe 50m/s or less). I made a 80km x 80km orbit with 450m/s to spare. I didn't use advanced SAS modes, just steering by hand. It's all too easy to inefficiently blast full power at the beginning of the flight until the apo is in space, coast all the way up, then blast sideways. Throttle down to decrease the rate of climb and give yourself time to nurse the trajectory. Regular KSP modes have the luxury of upgrading the pad very early, letting you use all kinds of high-delta-V designs. In Caveman you *really* gotta make the most of what you got. That's what makes it such a great level-up learning challenge. OK I was able to deorbit the whole rocket holding retrograde through reentry, with the engine exploding on landing. But often enough the engine explodes from heat and the remainder will lawn-dart into the ground/water without slowing down enough. So do suborbital test flights first until you can get the decoupler. Hope that helps and happy to continue working the issues! Other things you can try if the margins are still just too small - go up to 18 FL-T100 tanks with the Swivel, or use the Reliant (the mainstay of most Caveman careers) but you'll need to use a lot more steering input with the Reliant since it doesn't gimbal - you'll be relying on the weaker reaction wheels of the pod.

IIRC the Mk1 pod, 16 FL-T100 fuel tanks, and a Swivel engine will SSTO with safety margin, deorbit and parachute to a safe landing (well, safe for the pod and pilot at least!)

Coming soon in stock KSP update 1.11: Would be a fun mission to go line the runway with guide lights

Fastest in game time will vary a lot depending on difficulty level! At the easiest settings, I could probably get there in an evening or two of low-stress play. Nano-crystalline diamond level takes months of consistent gameplay.

Yes each one at X^0.75. KSP doesn’t make it easy to figure out distances between celestial bodies, or frame it in terms of available parts, so that doesn’t help. But lol I guess that’s the point here in this thread

Man, how many HG-5 antennas is it going to take to get a constant comm signal to Minmus? I'm up to 28 at keosync opposite KSC and 28 at Minmus, and still no link when KSC is behind Kerbin (no spoilers, I can make a spreadsheet if I must. Will just keep docking up 8 at a time)

Well, Matt Lowne featured Parallax so get ready for the flood

I fine-tuned a super reliable crewed Minmus lander. Super safe with a healthy safety margin. No MH/BG parts. With a fairly aggressive gravity turn at launch (radial out to 75m/s, turn hard to ~15 degrees off vertical, then follow prograde) the topmost drop tank should run out right before a tiny circularization burn. Transfer/descent fuel should run out right before final landing burn. I usually have 300+m/s left over back at Kerbin to slow down before re-entry. It's weird; I'm way more proud of this than the most complex and fashionable SSTOs I ever made * ask me how I know about collecting the Science Jr data before decoupling

Yes, odd - the mass specs had escaped me until this post. The RV-105 was traditionally 0.05t, rebalanced to 0.04t in 1.07 (?), but here increased to 0.1t. The Place Anywhere should be half or less the mass https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/RV-105_RCS_Thruster_Block https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Place-Anywhere_7_Linear_RCS_Port very odd indeed

This is terrific! My favorite way to play KSP is with reaction wheels nerfed or turned off (easily done in PAW or MandatoryRCS) as it feels a lot richer and more lifelike. These smaller thrusters will be most welcome. There was a comment about the lack of 45-degree thrusters; at least with these you can build them yourself with fewer parts And I'll pile on that it would be great to expand the Vernor line in a similar fashion

Small upper stage rocket with small wings, maintaining 69 x 69 km orbit @2300m/s... falls within the rules as I read them

I’m muddling through half-remembered Italian in the screenshot... could the “total resistance’ figure be including thrust? Does the number remain negative if you shut off the engines?

Totally random glitch I've noticed lately. If I have a probe with an extending antenna (ie HG-5), launch on a decent gravity turn, the circularization point is way around Kerbin out of line-of-sight of KSC. I have a relay network at keosync but the simple stick antenna can't reach them Anyway if I get to the apoapsis having lost probe control as usual, I don't have the ability to extend the high gain antenna and get control back. HOWEVER, if I pin out the right click menu for the antenna before launch or during controlled flight, the 'extend' option remains there and still works after losing comms! Outside of Caveman I'm not sure anyone would notice or care but it sure helps here! I guess the second piece of advice is put your relays as low as you can (while still seeing each other) so this won't matter in the first place

This gave me a good chuckle this morning, thanks. Kerbals are born mysteriously in orbit and have to be rescued from their incubation chambers when they grow to full term - this is immediately going in my KSP head-canon

TIL: Baikerbanur is still there in 1.10, and it's got two microbiomes (launchpad and touching the old VAB) that give unique science.