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Hattivat

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Posts posted by Hattivat

  1. BTW. Can someone provide a tutorial for Ferram Aerospace. I mean the calculator when you construct a rocket and the flight utility when you start a rocket. Both makes no sense to me..

    Neither is necessary for rockets, close them. They are mostly only useful for designing airplanes. Rockets are fairly straightforward - if it looks like the rockets that fly in real life, it will fly with FAR. In case of problems, add some (rigid) fins or spin-stabilize.

    Oh, and a rocket-building tip based on that imgur album: It is generally better to build interstages where the "fairing base" is below the engine (ie. at the top of the stage below), not above it. Also, it would probably help your stability if the bottom stage was not narrower than the second stage, this might let you get away with smaller (and thus lighter) fins.

  2. Procedural SRB I have made to mimic the 5 segment SRB has the exact correct burn time and thrust in the VAB (according to mechjeb) it also has a sea level T:W ratio of 1.28 when burning with my 4x Rs-25d. I load it onto the launch pad and all of a sudden the SRB thrust is listed as 150 kn when I activate causing my rocket to fall back into the launch pad.

    I've gone over the numbers over and over again but for some reason my procedural generated SRB's aren't carrying their correct thrust values onto the launch pad from the VAB.

    SRBs have thrust curves, meaning that their thrust is not constant with time, and RO simulates this pretty well. So your SRBs will only get to their "correct thrust values" about a second after being fired, and after reaching this peak value the thrust will gradually decrease. Liquid-fueled rocket engines also need a little time to get going, which is why you should always fire your engines before releasing the launch clamps, as they do in real life.

    Example thrust curves depending on the shape of the channel carved in the solid fuel:

    PropellantGrains.gif

  3. edit: The first two pictures look quite good!

    old post, I missed the update:

    Well, that KSC terrain certainly has a foreboding, alien colour :D

    And as for the Martian sky, this is obviously a conscientious topic, and I am not going to pretend that I am an expert who knows exactly what the "correct" true colour for it is. All I know from looking at hundreds of pictures is that it is definitely less red and generally less vividly coloured than the surface, so that is what I would personally stick to. If "being alien" is the aim, then perhaps this sort of pinkish brown would work? http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/images/Curiosity-Rover-Portrait-Mars-Mojave-Selfie-pia19142-MALHI-full.jpg

  4. Are Hubble pics white-balanced?

    http://www.redorbit.com/media/uploads/2005/10/4986bbeb5a541b9a59f6d5d09e290340.jpg

    Or ground telescopes?

    http://www.damianpeach.com/mars1112.htm

    Sure, there is variation due to innumerable variables, but I have never seen a non-altered picture of Mars where the atmosphere was redder than the surface.

    edit: Great job on making it less shiny though, that is a major improvement.

  5. I don't want to spoil the fun, but the Martian atmosphere is not reddish. The pictures I have seen show it range from bluish white to brownish yellow, presumably depending on position relative to the sun and the seasonal variation in dust levels. I any case, I don't think it was that red even on those ridiculous old pictures when NASA was applying a red filter to everything to cater to the popular imagination of "the red planet".

    Here's some recent orbital pics from ISRO's Mars Orbiter: http://www.isro.gov.in/sites/default/files/article-files/pslv-c25-mars-orbiter-mission/celebrating-one-year-of-mars-orbiter-mission-orbit-release-of-mars/Mars-atlas-MOM.pdf

    Here's pictures of Mars taken by Hubble: http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/solar_system/mars/

    And here's a ton of ground-level images from Curiosity: http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/

  6. Also what's the best way to go about making sure the dry mass is correct or... Realistic I want to say. Because I'm not necessarily going to go for replicas. If that's the case I can just look up how much fuel they used and the dry mass. But for custom builds I'm worried I wont be able to get the dry mass right with the procedural fairing walls and the inner tanks them selves.

    For starters what's a good utilization setting for when I'm building the inner tanks? 99%?

    You will have to experiment and compare your results with real-world examples. My guess would be: Balloon tanks at ~95% utilization.

  7. You get it because in weightlessness there is no "down", so fuel no longer drifts towards the engine on its own, and does not stay at the bottom of the tank. It is a major problem and design consideration for real-life rocketry. If you ever wondered why probes often use a solid rockets as the final stage, now you know - SRBs don't suffer from this problem. The solution is either a long RCS burn forward to push the main engine fuel "downwards", or to carry small solid rocket boosters and fire them just before igniting the main engine for the same purpose.

  8. Intresting, you got any sources to back this up?

    Just use your google powers to find the Isp and density of the Aerozine/Nitrogen Tetroxide and UDMH/NTO combinations, and you will see that they match what you see in-game, no sources necessary.

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