davidparks21

Ohhh that's what "combinable" means?! Thanks both of you, I was indeed reading "combinable" as "relayable".

I have 2 vessels sitting within a few meters of each other in orbit of Gilly. One has a Communotron 88-88 antenna and shows full signal strength back to KSP. The other has an HG-5 and shows "Not connected" and "Limited probe control". I am able to enable/disable SAS, orient prograde/retrograde holds and engage engines, but I can't use normal ASDW navigation to orient the vessel. I surely can't explain this behavior, can anyone else?

In addition to the there-and-back mission to Eve this challenge has to be able to continue on and handle Laythe, Tylo, etc. It's a heck of a lot more than a lander can that has to make the ascent off Eve. I've gotten an ascent to work, at least from the mountains, but the entry heat generated by putting such a large vessel down on Eve became an even bigger problem than the ascent.

Eve is wicked hard for me so far... I've never actually succeeded at getting off Eve before taking on this challenge.

The engineering appears done, so I hereby announce the launch of Krispy Kerbal Enterprise's grand tour attempt. After a few spins in the sandbox simulator our engineers have shown: This booster aided SSTO can indeed make it's way off Kerbin in once piece It can indeed launch off Eve from 5,000m and make its way to the surface of Gilly for refueling. And it can land under power at least in KSPs back yard. The idea is to take off from Kerbin in one piece, refuel at Minmus, and do a powered landing on Eve's peaks. The 6 large boosters will be shed on the ascent from Eve, and the rest of it is designed to SSTO every other body, landing under power. Full mining capability is built into the SSTO portion. Wish these two kerbals luck. This may take them a while... Mission updates: [14 June] Blamed on faulty nerves of our newly christened green pilots, a less than optimal first launch of the bohemith left the grand tour team a few dv shy of minmus, stranded in near kerbin orbit they called for help, and after a nearby refueling vessel made a quick detour, they have returned safely to KSP for what some kerbals have dubbed the "Grand Do Over". [18 June] Reentry into Kerbin after the Minmus mishap went well, everyone survived and landed intact, however it did reveal one problem, we completely melted our ladder system from reentry heat. The engineers ran a few simulations of reentry heat on Eve and confirmed that the ladders have no chance of survival as-is. It's back to the drawing board to find a way to not melt ladders on entry to Eve. The best proposal so far: A large central heat shield discarded after the Eve landing. [23 June] The grand tour has now relaunched with a slightly modified plan and a new massive heat shield designed to sustain the extreme heat of Eve atmospheric entry. The extra drag added to the launch necessitates a refueling in LKO before launching on to Minmus, then Eve. [24 June] Well, I got blindsided by the fact that the new heatshield was blocking the mining drill on the Minmus stop. Had to ditch the heat shield to get the drill working, so it's back to KSC again for some more tweaks. [26 June] Relaunched successfully, the trek to Eve was anything but quiet, it turns out that aerobraking on Eve is not possible in such and un-aero friendly vessel. The extra insertion burn forced an additional stop at Gilly to top up. [29 June] Our march through the Kerbol system overcomes its 2nd major milestone, landing on Eve Mission Review: Chapter 1: Kerbin to Kerbol - That launch took every bit of fuel we had. The massive heat shield cost probably 500-1000dv on the ascent and stopped us from using the LV909 to get to Minmus. With that heat shield, necessary to enter Eve atmosphere, we now need a LKO refueling stop. Good thing there's a refueling vessel nearby. - Refueling in orbit using a previously captured asteroid and dedicated refueling vessel. - Refueling stop on Minmus, with the next stop at Eve. We'll take every drop of fuel we can fit. The descent to Eve will require two in-atmosphere burns of ~1000dv each, plus the burn to get there. - A powered gravity assist off Kerbin puts us on our way to Eve. [*]Chapter 2: Eve - There was no way to aerobrake around Eve without disastrous consequences, the insertion burn left us shy on precious fuel needed to survive Eves descent. An additional stop at Gilly was added to top off the tanks. - A successful landing, but missed the peaks by a few kilometers. We'll need to do a little grasshopper maneuver to get into position for liftoff. Luckily it was a reasonably soft landing, only blew 1 or 2 struts. I think the hardest part is behind us now.Eve hop-to-the-peaks maneuver Eve Ascent Gilly

I've got an SSTO that can land and and return from every moon of Jool, and in fact hangs out there as a refueling depo for passer by's, it's got its own built in mining capability (1.0.2) that it takes with it. It's big, but not obscene, and is sleek enough to handle the Laythe atmosphere. I bet that could land every body but Eve, and it's not such a stretch of the imagination to leave Eve for last and re-construct it into a hybrid SSTO/staged system that leaves everything behind on the final stop at Eve. I could also imagine bringing out a mothership with a couple of landers, perhaps one for mining the smaller bodies such as Gilly, and another for landing & redocking. Perhaps you even bring enough equipment along to stage some pieces on both Tylo and Eve and SSTO the rest. This is an interesting challenge, I'm quite confident that it *is* indeed possible. I may just take it up, it's no small order feat, but it would be a heck of a trip!

I've had this happen twice now, I have an asteroid in tow, and when I time warp with the drill running the asteroid deflates to 0 mineable material. In case #1 I was ejecting a class D with 100T of mineable material. I shut down the engine, and had only a small ore tank that was empty (300 units of ore). I had just burn through 2700 dV (painful on one nuke engine), which means I mined 300 units of ore many times over already, and the mineable mass had dropped maybe 10 or 20 tons, about as expected by weight. When I shut down the engine and warped a couple years forward (I left the drill on) to meet Jool, when I came out of warp the asteroid had 0T mineable, and my ore tank wasn't even 100% full. Second case I had a class D in LKO, this time with 500T mineable material. I connected a couple of drills (two docked mining vessels), and had 3000 unites of storage for ore. I timewarped a few orbits around kerbin and when I came out I had 3000 units of ore mined, not all the fuel converted yet, and the asteroid had 0T mineable material. There's no way that one largeish ship could have taken 500T of material right? I mean the entire vessels, fully laden at launch only weighed 132T. I was expecting to get a half dozen or dozen full refueling stops out of that asteroid. Are these (known?) bugs I'm experiencing?

I noticed that when I had the heat data enabled in the context menu (via the F12 debug menu) that the game would crash when my SSTO would reenter (I was losing parts due to heat). When I did not enable the toolbar heat data I was able to make the entire trip successfully without crash (and after adding a couple of air brakes, without torching my engines and wings).

Luckily for KASA the KSP program keeps a spare parts junkyard consisting of the left overs from many a crash landing and late night unintended ignition at the lab. Perfect for just such an occasion when the budget is severely limited. Our spend thrift engineers are proud to have been able to put 12 z-400 batteries into LKO orbit just above 72,000m. There wasn't anything pretty about the aerodynamically incoherence two-stage rocket that got it there, but there it sits, just waiting for the day a Kerbal finds himself stuck in orbit without a battery in sight. After crunching the numbers the bean counters have come up with a final tally of \F 9,955, and some of them have begun openly questioning whether there is budget enough to cover their next paycheck. The engineers tell us that this rocket was controlled by a Probodobodyne probe core hidden among the battery packs. Perhaps entirely coincidentally Probodobodyne, Inc. has recently reported one of it's early test-model probe core units missing inexplicably.

I'm trying out v1 (1.02) for the first time. My first attempt at a small SSTO using a turbo jet (and a couple ant engines) didn't go nearly as well as it has in past versions. Right at about 20,000m the turbojet's thurst drops off very quickly. I'm assuming this due to the new physics and is realistic and accurate. But I want to ask in case there is some trick I need to know about. Previously I could fly upward of 30,000m given a couple of intakes to each turbojet. This time I was able to get my speed up to just shy of 1000m/s at around 18,000m giving me nearly 300 in thrust. But as soon as I hit ~20,000m the thrust drop drops out, even though I'm still got my speed in the optimal range and seem to have plenty of excess air intake. I see threads that talk about peak performance of the turbo jet at 1000m/s speed, and about more drag and such. But I didn't see any threads that explain why the turbojet loses thrust at 20,000m, given that I was near ideal speed and seemed to have plenty of air intake available (under 50% air intake usage). If drag caused me more challenge, or thrust dropped out due to speed I would understand perfectly well, neither are the case though, so I need more explanation as to where apparent 20,000m ceiling comes from. I notice a new piece of tech called the "Engine Pre-cooler" (I don't have it yet so haven't tried) but wondered if it was more than just another air intake?

Right, because of the discreet SOI construct in ksp. My end goal is still to understand and be able to do the math in reality. I figure that doing a ksp tool is a good starting point. An achievable goal.

Fantastic response!! Thank you so much for taking the time to write that! I'm pretty sure I can handle the differential equations, though it'll take a tad bit of study to come back up to speed. I've coded in java mostly, and for problems such as learning algorithms I prefer MATLAB, which incidentally makes cuda support near trivial, so I'll probably start there. I think my biggest deficiency is numerical analysis so I'll start there. I'd like to code a tool that aids with identifying and planning multi step gravity assists in ksp more fluidly than trying to link up each hop individually. At least as a project to drive me to learn the subject in general.

I'm interested in learning how to do n-body gravitational calculations. I wonder if anyone can suggest good texts on the subject (strong preference for eBooks), or any other resources I might look to in order to come up to speed on the subject. I'm willing to tackle reasonably significant resources on the subject, I don't just want the overview. I noticed this book on amazon (though no eBook version), but since I don't know what I don't know yet, it's probably best to ask. http://www.amazon.com/Gravitational-N-Body-Simulations-Algorithms-Mathematical/dp/0521121531

Hi, I absolutely love this mod, thank you so much for it. I just have one question, I'm trying to understand why I don't see trajectory information calculated past the atmospheric encounter on a fly-by. The image below shows it, that altitude isn't pulling the vessel in for a landing (there's no 'X' anywhere), but there's no white on the far side of it (presumably that trajectory will carry me out of Laythe orbit). I'm trying to set up an aerobrake on Laythe that puts me on course for Tylo, but fly-by's like this don't seem to work the way I would expect. Thanks! David

Assuming you only burn your engines at full thrust (obviously it's wasteful to drift down slowly at half thrust, wasting fuel against gravity), and no atmosphere, would it be equally fuel efficient to burn off your horizontal DV first, let yourself drop straight down, then perform a vertical thrust to kill the vertical DV (as late as possible)? Or is there a cost savings to coming in at shallow angle and burning off DV directly against retrograde? The former approach makes landings easier to target, but I ran out of fuel unexpectedly trying this on Tylo recently (burning off 2000 DV on a shallow approach against mountains is risky business). Perhaps I just underestimated my DV requirement (easy to do on Tylo), but I wasn't sure if this approach had cost me something in efficiency.