Realism Overhaul Playthrough

[rsparkyc]

So I see a lot of videos of people flying rockets they build, but not so much of the design process.  I figured I would create a video series where I design and fly rockets using the realism overhaul suite of mods.  I'm going to try to keep episodes down to around 20 minutes.  Last night I did my game setup and first two missions.  Next goal: space.  

 

 

Edited April 27, 2016 by rsparkyc

[Bev7787]

Interesting... Subbed

[ShmikeTP]

Looks interesting; I'm gonna set this up in a tab for me to watch later | Pre-emptively subbing, as from the first 5 seconds I can see good FPS and good Mic quality.

[rsparkyc]

18 minutes ago, ShmikeTP said:

Looks interesting; I'm gonna set this up in a tab for me to watch later | Pre-emptively subbing, as from the first 5 seconds I can see good FPS and good Mic quality.

Don't judge a book by it's cover!  I'm no Scott Manley, and have some work to do to balance the audio while in flight, but plan to do another video tonight.

Edited April 27, 2016 by rsparkyc

[ShmikeTP]

Posted a helpful comment on the video.

[rsparkyc]

8 minutes ago, ShmikeTP said:

Posted a helpful comment on the video.

I saw that, but I think in this case the wet mass is the same as the dry mass, as I never put fuel in that tank, only the lower tank.

[ShmikeTP]

Ah. I didn't think about that; for some reason I always forget that RealFuels doesn't start out with anything within. My bad.

[rsparkyc]

Chapter 2 is up! Now with (hopefully) better sound quality.

 

[Kerbin vonKerbal]

Just watched parts 1 and 2, subscribed and commented. Can't wait for more. 

[rsparkyc]

Part 3 is out!

 

[rsparkyc]

Part 4 is out.  As a side note, if anyone knows of any Kerbal engineers, I fired my engineering team and need a replacement.  Bonus points if you can find their first mistake in this video.

 

[rsparkyc]

First of all, props to SpaceX for successfully landing a booster after a geosynchronous transfer insertion.  I got up to watch it live and it was amazing.  Secondly, I'm exporting my 5th video - Orbit and/or Bust.  It's a bit longer, so standby...

Edited May 6, 2016 by rsparkyc

[Kerbin vonKerbal]

24 minutes ago, rsparkyc said:

First of all, props to SpaceX for successfully landing a booster after a geosynchronous transfer insertion.  I got up to watch it live and it was amazing.  Secondly, I'm exporting my 5th video - Orbit and/or Bust.  It's a bit longer, so standby...

Saw this on the news! Kudos to them. Looking forward to your next installment as well.

[rsparkyc]

Well that took a lot longer than expected, but here it is. 

 

[rsparkyc]

So...Mission 6 has been recorded, though in my own admission it's kinda boring (maybe because I've had to watch it over and over while editing).  5 was pretty long (40 mins), I was trying to keep them at or around 20, but I also really wanted to get to orbit.  In other news, it looks like RO now works on 1.1.2, so I'm spending some time getting that up and running.  There's still a few mods that need updating that I use, the most important one being RP-0.  My plan is to continue the video series on 1.0.5 till I can get everything migrated on 1.1.2 (which hopefully will be soon), unless you guys just want a reboot on the new version.

[Kerbin vonKerbal]

I'm content with your 1.0.5 play through. I was sad that RP-0 isn't updated yet, it takes a lot away from the flow of the RO progression. I've hit a wall my first go around with science mode in regards to the tech tree. It's hard for me to get anywhere but LEO right now, but maybe that's because I'm not that great at it. 

 

But yeah, I vote your 1.0.5 play through continues.

[rsparkyc]

On 5/10/2016 at 5:24 AM, Kerbin vonKerbal said:

I'm content with your 1.0.5 play through. I was sad that RP-0 isn't updated yet, it takes a lot away from the flow of the RO progression. I've hit a wall my first go around with science mode in regards to the tech tree. It's hard for me to get anywhere but LEO right now, but maybe that's because I'm not that great at it. 

 

But yeah, I vote your 1.0.5 play through continues.

Don't know how I missed the fact that you replied (probably due to the fact that this week has been crazy with my real job), but in fact, RP-0 has now been updated!!! It was updated much quicker than I had thought, and so I might try to migrate the series over.  I'll still spend some time getting episode 6 up, but hopefully episode will be on 1.1.2 (considering it's a lot smoother).

[rsparkyc]

Good news/bad news, followed by more good news/bad news.  The first good news: I got my new mic in.  Bad news: there seems to be some sort of beeping in the background (my guess is caused by a flashing LED on the mic), so I'm working with tech support on that.  EDIT: Adjusting gain levels has seemed to resolve this.  More good news, I've migrated my save file over to 1.1.2!  Bad news: flights that were steady on launch (https://youtu.be/B1RMaTW6IDM?t=10m37s) now have a hard time staying on target, as they wobble around my desired heading.  Hopefully we'll figure out what's up with that soon.  In the meantime, I'm going to work on editing Episode 6 (hopefully my last episode on 1.0.5).

 

Edited May 13, 2016 by rsparkyc
Mic is working

[rsparkyc]

Part 6 is out!  In the interest of time, I cut this one at around 25 mins, so Part 7 will be the 2nd half to this recording.  (thus still on KSP 1.0.5)

 

[Dman979]

I haven't watched the mission yet, but I liked the other ones I saw. You've earned a new fan.

I have a question about the payload in Mission 6, though. Do you really need to have 3 engines on it? It seems like once you're in space, TWR doesn't matter as much anymore. I would think that you could get more ∆V by dropping two of them.

[rsparkyc]

58 minutes ago, Dman979 said:

I haven't watched the mission yet, but I liked the other ones I saw. You've earned a new fan.

I have a question about the payload in Mission 6, though. Do you really need to have 3 engines on it? It seems like once you're in space, TWR doesn't matter as much anymore. I would think that you could get more ∆V by dropping two of them.

That's a great question!  There's actually 4 engines on the third stage (one is in the center).  There are actually two reasons I went this route, none of them involving TWR.

1) Once I fire off the 3rd stage, I no longer have control over the rocket.  I can't adjust pitch, or even point prograde for that matter. As the earth curves under me, I'll effectively pitch up, and the longer I burn, the more my thrust vector differs from my velocity vector.  Burn too long, and I just won't be aligned property.  Thus I need a quicker burn, and hence I use more engines.

2) Those engines only have a rated burn time of about 70 seconds (IIRC).  If we solved problem #1, we still run into this problem, since we're only going to get 70 seconds worth of thrust out of it.  4 engines gives me 4x the ∆V in the same 70 second window.

Edited May 13, 2016 by rsparkyc

[Kerbin vonKerbal]

3 hours ago, Dman979 said:

I haven't watched the mission yet, but I liked the other ones I saw. You've earned a new fan.

I have a question about the payload in Mission 6, though. Do you really need to have 3 engines on it? It seems like once you're in space, TWR doesn't matter as much anymore. I would think that you could get more ∆V by dropping two of them.

Also you're fighting time. You want to circularize before you hit Ap and start falling back into the atmosphere. My launches tend to be brute force affairs, trying to circularize fast and fine tuning my parking later on when I'm not worried about falling back down. 

 

TL:DR: With a low TWR during initial launch, you have potential to fall back to earth before achieving orbit.

Edited May 13, 2016 by Kerbin vonKerbal

[Dman979]

7 minutes ago, Kerbin vonKerbal said:

TL:DR: With a low TWR during initial launch, you have potential to fall back to earth before achieving orbit.

To be clear, I do play RO.

I don't really see the need for a TWR on the circularization stage of more than .7 at the start. If you want to get to X orbital height, but you don't have a high TWR, all you have to do is launch into a suborbital trajectory with a higher Apogee, and then do a lofting trajectory. It saves some mass, IIRC, because it works well for low TWR stages. It's what NASA does, and it's worked pretty well for them.

[rsparkyc]

1 hour ago, Dman979 said:

To be clear, I do play RO.

I don't really see the need for a TWR on the circularization stage of more than .7 at the start. If you want to get to X orbital height, but you don't have a high TWR, all you have to do is launch into a suborbital trajectory with a higher Apogee, and then do a lofting trajectory. It saves some mass, IIRC, because it works well for low TWR stages. It's what NASA does, and it's worked pretty well for them.

Yeah, I know the early rockets with no control over the final stages used 3 stages of SRBs in clusters of 11, 3, and then 1.  As we get to larger (controllable) payloads, we'll use something more like what you mentioned.

In other news, here's part 7 (really Part 6, Part 2)

 

[ShmikeTP]

Watching Episode 6 as we speak. So far so good.