Senior Slaphead

@svendii this looks similar to the phantom torque issue I mentioned earlier. That it's related to the CoM would make sense in that I never get the issue on fully loaded rockets held up by legs on the launchpad... it's always been when I've landed after expending most or all of the fuel weight, or when testing something with empty tanks on the launchpad.

A much more expensive reusable first stage (due to the vector engines) returns to the KSC at orbital speed. Although of course, it doesn't matter how expensive it is if you are getting the pricey components back. The slight sideslip prior to deploying the gridfins is what put me the other side of the runway... just as well really. There are very marginal benefits to having this engine configuration. It can deliver about 25t to LKO without mishap, rather than 23t with the previous launcher. I do have a more powerful vessel available in my career but it has not proved necessary yet. Make this thy mantra!

Had to do an emergency return due to radiation sickness (Kerbalism) so ended up inclined to the KSC... not ideal conditions but all the gold was recovered again. I'm getting used to the gold weight but it's too much for the small legs, even with my mistimed retro boosters. So time for another redesign. So now I'm using this Hardened Gold Returner... carries 1.5 mil in gold and the ratio of chutes to leg strength should mean no more mishaps. RCS engines for docking and final de-orbit burn. Hitchhiker is fully radiation hardened with a radiation force field part above it for added protection (Kerbalism... I got sick of getting sick). Hollow SAS unit contains batteries, plus enough food and water for one month. Design definitely gets easier once you have the larger gold tanks... but I don't think we need to go any bigger than this.

Loving the stuff NecroBones. Take a look at these screenies... these vehicles are based on stock 3.75m and your 5m tanks with a droptank removed in each instance so you can see the configuration. This first one uses stock BZ-52 Radial Attachment Points to put the engines where I want... Whereas this one is using radially attached C7 Brand Adapter Slanted parts on your (inverted) 5m-3.75m fuel tank... Remembering of course that in my particular use case I'm constructing re-useable vehicles... there are various reasons why I am doing it this way, rather than using adapters. It can be due to available career tech, or because the adapter I need does not exist, or because precise positioning is necessary to avoid over-heating engines due to adjacent heat when under power or from atmospheric heating during re-entry. Finally - and most importantly early on - it's because you need a probe core on the first stage... and the logical place to put it when you only have small ones is in the centre under the main tank, with engines clustered around it. TLDR... KSP needs good looking surface mounted engine housings with fuel content so you can position engines exactly, have room to set up the fuel lines and fit a probe for reusable vehicles.

This is progress... have some rep.

I approve of this product and/or service... even though I mostly disapprove of prefigured engine clusters... I'd rather just have the tanks and the engines, plus an assortment of ways to combine the two.

I had an issue with KAS struts that you may like to set me straight on. Basically I had a docked payload that I had secured with additional KAS struts due to the weight (about 60 tons of gold). Obviously I'm used to struts between two docked craft just disappearing when you undock, but in this instance the struts remained in place so I could not maneuver the vessels away from each other. The struts were evidently still in place although the visual effect had gone... I also had to disconnect the struts at both ends before it finally separated the craft (actually, as you can see, only two of the four struts... weird, eh?). I don't know whether this is a thing or not... maybe they just have to work this way and if that is the case it's not that much of a problem in most situations (where you have kerbals to EVA and unlink stuff and there is no time imperative)... but all feedback welcome.

Saturn 5 was 10m... therefore not excessive... must try harder

Says a lot when 2 second lag is a massive improvement... pretty miraculous either way.

I dunno if this has been discussed, but... when calculating solar radiation on a crewed part, why not use the solar array code to establish which parts are occluding the sun and add their mass to the equation? This is presumably already a background process for solar arrays, so would it add that much processing overhead? It would also add a gameplay element in that you would have to angle your vessel to take advantage of parts that would provide good shielding. E.g. I had a vessel a while back that was shipping pure gold... I'm assuming that 1.25 meters of pure gold is reasonably good radiation shielding.

A bit more value would be fine I guess... or maybe you could link it to difficulty level, or something. As has been established the extreme weight of gold is a design challenge I enjoy. My most recent return was something of a heavy ground landing but fortunately I was able to recover all the gold... ...and all the Kerbals, after taking advantage of a well timed quicksave... Now that my R&D is upgraded I might do one last mining mission on Minmus to pad the finances, then I'll be off to a more exotic destination. I suppose I had better build a sturdier lander...

Pressurisation system? Uh-oh... new opportunities for suffocating kerbals?

On my way back to Minmus for the third course of gold. The docked liquid tanks at the pointy end will be discarded but the take-off weight on Minmus is still going to be slow. Gold is heavy. Like a well-oiled machine, the crew and return vessel arrive for the third mining and science mission. Barring mishap, this should finally pay for my R&D upgrade. The bang heard when I get within 200m of the base is the rover snapping to a particular altitude due to the KAS pipe connection... makes me jump every time. So, some numbers for balancing purposes... My launcher costs 142k, but you get 100k back with a decently close return. I have to do three launches for a gold run... two fuel, plus one for the crew/gold transport. In all probably about 150k in fuel and lost parts... for which I get 1.2 mil in pure gold. There is also the setup cost of the Mining Rig, Power Plants and Carryall discussed earlier, but all potentially have a very long life (provided you don't mess something up) and the Carryall can be used for other missions. In the same amount of time I guess I could do 3 or 4 contracts instead of a mining run. Of course, not everyone goes to the time and effort of doing reusable vehicles... it would be much more costly using throwaway stuff.

Full process from launch, to deployment, to return. The trajectory was perfect but I choked and flipped it a moment too soon. Hey, I got it on the green in one... so I think I'm under par for the course. With a lot of pilot input the small gridfins were just enough to keep things under control while inflicting minimal drag.

Yay... thanks for all your hard work Galileo, you're a star.

I didn't think of it like that... totally legit bling shielding.

I've noticed that sometimes I get a twisting motion on craft landed on your legs (not just on the launchpad). Is this a known or stock problem? I've only seen it on Kerbin, my various craft landed on Minmus are fine. It's a very minor thing and might easily be related to another mod, but I thought I'd mention it. Full modlist in the video description.

Which was my next question... please tell me that kerbal irradiation is not persistent between missions? or at least that they get some of it scrubbed off them based on how much downtime they are given? Someone really needs to make iodine tablets for KIS... me thyroids are humming.

New Gold Return Vehicle design, now with eight tins (1.24 mil funds), landing legs, gridfins for stability and RCS engines for docking with the Carryall and de-orbitting. And yes... I'm totally fine with kerbals spending eight days in a flimsy metal tin with no radiation shielding.

The Mining Rig has a lander can at the bottom (1 kerbal), the Science Lab is a Mobile Processing Lab (2 kerbals) and the return vehicle /gold hauler has a Hitchhiker can (4 kerbals) but none of this is shielded. There is also a rover for the Rover Science mod. Only the crew hab / power plant has a fully shielded hitchhiker. Usually there are four crew (2 scientists, an engineer and a pilot) but at the time of the storm it was during a rotation so there were eight and the old crew died off before I'd finished filling the gold cans, even though I'd put them in the shielded hab. I think it was just too much on top of the mild rads they'd had there for some weeks. I've returned the new crew with the gold this time until I can improve the shielding, so research has stopped. What I may try is just disconnecting the KAS pipe from the shielded habitat during a storm. It kinda makes sense actually as you wouldn't want resources being pumped from an irradiated part of the base.

Right... that maybe explains why I lost four Kerbals in the last storm. I had dutifully stuck them all in the only shielded habitat (the Hitchhiker in this pic) for the duration but they got absolutely hammered by the rads. It doesn't help that they're on Minmus for longer than I'd want anyway due to research and gold mining... but it seems there really is no substitute to fully shielding everything.

A little question about radiation... is it based upon which part a Kerbal is actually in or is it an amalgum of the total shielding on a craft irrespective of where the Kerbal is?

Having done more landings now the drag is not as excessive as I first thought, I think there were other factors at play in the other vid. You can see from the Trajectories mod here how much difference they make. With practice it's easy enough to estimate how far short you will land and deliberately plot a course that's going to overshoot a bit. I'm also going to try using the small gridfins rather than medium which might be just enough.

Using SVE & SVT, among other mods... a good example of godrays...

I've been looking again at reusable launch vehicles and - within the limitations of my current career tech - have come up with a new craft that uses parts from this mod. So I have some observations specific to my particular experience that you may like to consider. For a while I experimented with using two stages and returning the first one directly to the launchpad. This provides 100% reusability (or rather 80% once the lost fuel is taken into account). But it means flying two craft, using Flight Manager for Reusable Stages (or Dark Multiplayer in my case). If you want to return the second stage, then you're talking about much higher velocities, landing on the next continent (and therefore getting less funds back) or doing a full orbit to the KSC and coming in really fast. Then I realised I was doing it wrong. Most of the value is in the engines and the various whistles and bells on the rocket core. If you can get all the engines back anyway then the logical thing is to combine the first and second stages, go large on the engines and use drop tanks. In reusability terms you lose about 10% at most, but you save yourself lots of time and effort. I hope you are listening, Elon... Once you are at orbital velocity you cannot come in engines first and therefore have to come in head first, using a heat shield. To do this you need weight (fuel) pumped forward to balance out the weight of the engines. If your engines are heavy this requires a lot of fuel... more than you need for a propulsive landing. The logical thing therefore is to add some aerodynamic control (gridfins) to the back on the craft to keep it pointing in the right direction. So... what I don't like is the extent of the drag on the grid fins (which is the reason why I do not use stock airbreaks, which are just ridiculously overpowered). I think grid fins should provide good control (so you can fight against the flipping) but less drag. Is this possible? As you can see from the vid we're actually only talking about a short perilous period where the weight distribution is fighting against the aerodynamics. Hey look! Gameplay! I should point out that I'm not moving to 1.2 until the majority of my many mods are playing nice, so if you've changed something for 1.2 I've probably missed it.