Hattivat

You do realize that this makes DRE reentries exponentially harder? (smaller area = lower deceleration)

Are you sure you have included the electricity consumption of your antenna(s) in your estimates?

Hello and welcome to the RO community. Your rocket did not lift off at first because its thrust-to-weight ratio was too low at sea level. I recommend you use Kerbal Engineer Redux or Mechjeb when designing rockets to see what your thrust-to-weight ratio is and how much delta-v you have. Please note that for the first stage you want to look at the sea-level TWR (Mechjeb calls this stat "SLT"). In general it is very recommended that you read the guides on the RO wiki, such as this one: https://github.com/KSP-RO/RealismOverhaul/wiki/First-RO-Rocket As for going up - everything seems to be OK, in real life (and consequently in RO) getting straight up is pretty easy, it's what sounding rockets (and many amateur rockets) do. The hard part is getting enough horizontal speed to stay up. Your ship needs to fly at the speed of about 8000 m/s in order to achieve orbit. Considering losses due to gravity and air resistance, this means that your rocket needs about 9300 m/s of delta-v in roder to reach low Earth orbit.

I've done it back in 23.5, so it might have changed slightly, but back then it was significantly lower than on Earth, but not as low as you might think. Slightly below 30 km IIRC. Don't remember how much it ablated. In any case, the big challenge is designing your craft in such a way that it will stay aerodynamically stable (ie. pointing in the right direction) throughout the aerocapture.

Another example is Topaze (the second stage of the Diamant rocket):

So beautiful

The new engines look fantastic, definitely checking them out and subscribing

Ah, yes, I'm also using that assemblyfile, forgot what it's like without it.

Just use the Transfer Window Planner, last I checked it worked perfectly well with RSS.

KSP measures thrust in kilonewtons, so all you need is a converter. It says 36 mln kgf equals 353039.4 kN. Now the question is whether this figure is for vacuum thrust or sea-level thrust. Hopefully the former, because the latter makes it all more complicated. The chamber pressure is, I'm afraid, not enough to determine the Isp with an acceptable degree of confidence. What you really want is Isp (at sea-level and in vacuum, separately) and mixture ratio. By the way, Astronautix is not the best of sources (we've found it to contain mistakes on multiple occasions), it's better to use source documents whenever possible, such as these: https://archive.org/details/nasa_techdoc_19880069339 https://archive.org/details/nasa_techdoc_19880069340

@mecki: you probably already know this, but others reading this may not, so I think it's a good time for Real Chutes 101: First, enter the VAB, pick a real chute and place it anywhere. In the top left corner you have the button to switch to the "action groups" mode. Click it. Now click the parachute you have placed in the VAB. This should open a big Real Chute menu on the left side of the screen. There is plenty of options you could tweak manually, but for now it should be sufficient to scroll down and click "apply". This will automatically adjust the size of the chute to the mass of your payload and your desired landing speed. Actually, I think we need to add a tutorial on such things to the wiki, might do it myself over the weekend.

Hm, you do know the trick with tilting your rocket slightly at the launch pad to launch it at a different biome (e.g. the seas)?

Ask yourself - did real-world rocket science start with taking samples of the ground around the launchsite? Was the first rocket we fired carrying a manned capsule? Obviously, the answer is no. A lot of effort went into ensuring that this mod be as realistic as possible, so the answer to 99% of possible problems is: you do what they did in real life. In this specific case, you launch sounding rockets to progressively higher altitudes.

That's Europa 1, which was partially, but not completely, based on Black Arrow.

Considering that all of the heavy electronics equipment was concentrated on one side of the command module, that would be pretty hard to achieve, they didn't carry that much food.

I'm fairly certain neither Gemini nor Apollo could change their center of mass, it was offset at all times. Yes, it was offset so that rotating the capsule on the roll axis could change its course (if it wasn't offset, such rotation would have no effect), but it wasn't the offset center of mass itself that caused the rotation, that was accomplished with roll RCS thrusters.

@mecki: In reality it is shifted all the time, but people were complaining about how that made it harder to control manned rockets during launch, so it was made into a selectable option. And the reason Launch Escape Systems' thrust is offset is AFAIK simply so that it gets the capsule away from the path of the rest of the rocket, avoiding the possibility of being rammed by it. @Esc@p3 Velocity: The simple rule-of-thumb is: do not use anything that has "lqd" (= "liquid") in its name if you need to store it for long period of time. If something has "liquid" in its name, it means that it is NOT a liquid under normal conditions. Take liquid oxygen as an example - it is only liquid because it is extremely cold, and once it gets warmer (for example, warmed by sunshine) it transforms into the gas that you breathe every day, and is no longer suitable for fuelling your engine. This is the price you pay for the higher performance that these propellants have. As Rabada said, you need to use storable hypergolic propellants (such as hydrazine and its varieties MMH, UDMH, and Aerozine) for longer stays in space. @DaZeInBok: Most people don't know this, but KSP is producing logs all the time, not just when there is an error. First open up your KSP and play until it crashes. Then go into your_ksp_folder/KSP_Data and find output_log.txt Open it, and search for the phrase "out of memory". If you find that in your log (most likely you will), it means that you are running you KSP too close to the memory limit, and the 4th rocket launch pushes it over the edge. You will either have to do something to reduce your memory usage (such us using Active Texture Manager and/or fewer mods and/or lower-res RSS textures and/or running with -force-opengl) or learn to live with it.

It works, thanks Tellion!

I'm by no means an "expert programmer", but I did manage to set up ubuntu without breaking anything, so I think you guys can as well. As for setting up repositories and the rest of command line things - you do not need to type that (at least not on ubuntu), you can quite simply find whatever you need by googling it and then copypaste it into the command line terminal. Do note that keyboard shortcuts do not seem to work in the command line, but right-clicking and selecting "paste" DOES work.

I'll try to find time to check it soon, in the meantime lemme give you a bump.

Looks awesome!

Yes, it's here (scroll down for WIP ones): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rSxyNjWSH7eWtUgRstVq_2jDGnAhTwtEiwyNIJhVALg/edit#gid=149381527 But sadly none of the mods you have mentioned are on it at the moment. Adding them with the sort of accuracy that is standard for RO would require a fair amount of research and work, but if you are feeling up to the task, you are very welcome to contribute towards making it reality. In which case feel free to hop on the IRC channel and ask for guidance.

Nice! (10chars)

First of all, Deadly Reentry shall soon be phased out of RO in favor of RealHeat, so many things will likely change. However, one thing that will certainly not change is that for returning from beyond LEO you want to perform a lifting reentry, like the real-life apollo missions did, as depicted in this video: (please note that this video is somewhat outdated, we now have a "descent mode" option added to capsules to make this easier). In short, you want to use your built-in RCS (it is there for this purpose) to maneuver your capsule in such a way that it generates some lift, and this way stays longer within the upper part of the atmosphere.If I read your description right, what you did is called a ballistic reentry, and is what the earliest capsules did (Vostok, for example). It results in uncomfortable G loads even when returning just from low Earth orbit, and is hardly survivable for anything beyond that.

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