paul23

Making tourism contracts pay even more makes anything trivial. Keeping your space program afloat and in the positive money shouldn't be trivial. It should be the hardest part only possible after you managed to perfect all tricks in the book regarding space flight.

Hmm what "property" in the save file corresponds to this? I might go for modifying the save file manually.

Simple physics should make clear it's a myth. "Bouncing" doesn't add extra energy to the object that bounces (where would it come from), at most it is elastic and hence has equal energy. When you are in an orbit that is very clearly not going outside the earth's sphere of influence and the re-entry vehicle has too less energy than required for escape velocity, there's no way you can "suddenly gain energy". To gain energy you have to put work in it. This is just a basic thermodynamic law.

Well can this be done after going into flight? The station is (was) at "10", same as the ships (default).

Well as per title: my space station is constantly being renamed to the craft that is docking, leading to a lot of confusion and annoyances. How do I prevent the station name from being changed?

Would it be an idea to change the landing legs so they're more than a visual difference? Like some legs have more travel distance than others? Also with FAR, is the aerodynamic docking port actually more or less aerodynamic than the shielded docking port?

The difference with a gravity turn is indeed not the "steering" - however the gravity loss is similar (equal) to how you try to do a transfer when not doing instantaneous burns at peri/apoapsis. Rather you do them starting from the half pi mean anomaly point up to the apoapsis. I wonder now: you do take the remaining delta-V after circularizing not after reaching apoapsis right?

A full calculation is found in this point at wikipedia. However the jest of the topic there is that the center of gravity needs to be in front of some point "neutral point", which is based on the lift of both the tail and wing. A canard type craft can never be stable, so you constantly have to correct. It's important to realize that stability is important, but one can fly without stability. An unstable craft is like balancing a pencil on your fingers: you constantly have to correct. Luckily we have something called "computers" - or "SAS" in ksp that can correct this to a certain point. If sas won't be able to, you probably also won't be and you'll have to increase the control surface volume (area * distance from center of mass). I have never ever anyone use "negative angle of attack" (or negative lift when horizontal for that matter) so I can't talk about that. If you mean negative cl-alpha: well that's impossible even a simple plate has a positive cl-alpha coefficient. Static jaw stability is reached simply by having a larger (non moving) vertical lifting surface behind the center of mass. Just like longitudinal stability, it's just easy since there is no main wing. Further stability can be achieved by giving dihedral (in case of wings below body) or anhedral (when wings are above the body) to the main wing. If it's dynamically unstable it is probably causing a dutch roll. A combination of yaw and rolling movement. This is a particularly nasty eigenmotion as improving dutch roll stability reduces the spiral stability (and vice versa). Some aircraft (cessna citation) even opted to go for unstable spiral motion in favour of keeping dutch roll stable. The cause is that when ailerons increase a rolling motion one of them has more drag, thus creating a yaw effect (adverse yaw). The yawing motion (correction) causes a rolling motion as the angle of one wing more perpendicular to the airflow than the other. Dutch roll can be reduced by putting the wings below the center of gravity, reducing dihedral angle and reducing wing sweep.

Using throttle to limit yourself to get a "neater looking path" is really bad idea. A "gravity turn" is better since there are no "steering losses". However steering losses are very very small compared to the gravity losses. So limiting thrust (and thus "burning longer" increases gravity losses. The improvement in steering loss can never offset this. The other loss is of course drag, but even for drag it's better to "steer later and more aggressive" than "lower thrust". Actually a "90 degree initial turn" would be ideal if there would be no gravity. initially one does have a sideway velocity but no vertical velocity, in other words if kerbin would suddenly become a point mass we'd be at the apoapsis of an elliptical orbit, the best way to raise periapsis is not to "travel outwards" but to travel forwards (sideways). The only reason we go "up" first (apart from the very few km for ground clearance is to get out of atmosphere.

If you go for profit the tourism contracts will outshine everything, by a large margin.. Sadly.

Solution is indeed to stop the rolling authority on the wings. - Or putting the wings on the other side of the aerodynamic center. Can I do this in vab already? I think the reaction wheel is enough control for roll during launch.

I notice that I keep getting the "same" (launch a space station at xyz - while I already have more than I can manage) mission I do not wish to have over and over, and due to the limit of 3 missions max I do not get other missions. How does the mod limit the amount of total missions you can get to 3? - and can I improve that number with a module manager patch?

Hmm but that would mean I'd also be unstable in the rolling direction when lifting off, or when I go nose down descent. I didn't notice that. As for stability: FAR removes that "difference": drag & lift work both equally based on density & velocity (as it should be, they have the same factors and same formula in reality).

Another thing that bit me at first is that they need to "touch" without relative angle, so they need to nearly flatly touch each other (like within 1 or 2 degrees). For long and heavy craft the moment of inertia is the most difficult thing and actually aligning them takes me more time, even with docking point alignment indicator.

Oops, I forgot a lot of mods add extra "Modules" to the craft file even for vanilla parts (mechjeb for all etc). I've remade the craft in a fresh install of ksp 1.7.3, it should work now perfectly and I tested it. I notice that the rotation start "later" and is "slower" in the vanilla atmosphere (at least not going into kraken territory). However the effect is still there, where the SAS is actually rolling in the wrong direction and hence increasing the roll. Updated the craft file, it should now show in 1.7.3 and 1.8 at least. Sorry and thanks for warning me. I need to get some video capturing tools first, but it's quite simple: Top is a docking port + okto2, then some utility (reaction wheels, rcs tanks) and the airbrakes attached to those (to give a stable descent). A hitchhiker, big 2.5m tank and finally a mainsail. Parts don't particularly matter those, it's about the geometry. Okto is put on "default" setting for landing, but forward & reversed gives the same problem (if I aim the craft correctly). You can see the sas has a maximum roll deflection, but when in game the roll deflection is actually increasing the roll motion, so SAS should deflect the other way. Putting SAS off actually makes the craft "stable" (so it is aerodynamically stable). However then doing a suicide burn might topple the craft, since it's unstable in the other direction, kind of need SAS for a retroburn. And as I plan to let these things go automatically (many launches) using Mechjeb it's even worse.

Well I have made a craft that is supposed to land (and lift off) again vertically. It's a single stage to orbit craft, and shouldn't use any modded parts anymore. However upon flying the craft I notice it starts rolling out of control if I enable SAS. - Worse I notice that the roll motion implied by SAS is actually causing the unstable roll, yet the yaw and pitching motions are fine "cancelling" things out the rolling motion is actually "reversed" upon landing. I've tried reversing the control from the probe, however that just makes the whole thing unstable. So what am I doing wrong? How can I prevent the rolling into kraken drive? The craft file made in vanilla 1.7.3 You can test it by putting the craft into low kerbin orbit (either flying or whatever other method), and then lowering periapsis to 45ish kilometers. (much lower and the craft starts disintegrating). - Make sure to enable the brakes (airbrakes). Around 30km altitude the craft will start rolling and you'll actively have to counter this, making controlled landing hard if not impossible.

Even with FAR the aerodynamic model/physics system is so limited that I loathe making aircraft. It's fine for simple things like a rocket, but making an aircraft is just awkward. The big problem I see is that most people here make aircraft that are basically "rockets with draggy wings", very high TWR (far above 1), dynamically unstable (often even statically unstable) and no way to get off the launchpad other than by "hacking throught rotation wheels". A real aircraft has a 0.2-0.4 TWR, and fighter jet 0.8-1. (almost) All upwards force is due to lift, the engine is just a means to overcome the drag of the wing not to "get up there". One can hardly blame others though, where in real life we use supercritical airfoils to get the aerodynamic center (and perform better near mach 1) further back for delta wings I don't even know the pressure distribution given the parts of ksp. And that's just for static stability. A common unstable mode I see for crafts in ksp is the longitudal phugoid. (You drop down by having the nose go down, then as you gain speed your nose goes up again, losing speed making the nose go down, and the "wave" you hence make will grow instead of diminish without user input. To cancel this the elevators and trim surface are ever so important. Not only the size/position but also the way they are attached, in "hands free" some craft are stable when the elevators are in a fixed position. Other designs are stable when they are in a free flow position where they can rotate freely around a hinge and follow the air stream. And if they are in a free flow position the hinge point actually matters ever so much: is the hinge/rotating point before or after the aerodynamic center of the elevator Oh and then we don't even talk about high lift devices: modern aircraft really can't function without those, the landing and take of speed would be so high they would need runways a magnitude higher than we have now. KSP doesn't even have those, all my craft have ran off the runway before getting anyways near nose up moment. No without wind tunnel tests, actual design choices instead of just visual cutesy. Design for form instead of design for function.

I guess indeed nuclear fuel is the solution for the energy. With solar power a 42 ec/s at minmus means -to survive the long cold night fof 4405 seconds- to take 180k charge storage. I've looked at near future electrics: nut that would still mean many charges. Orbitting jool even gives more time in the shadow.

Yeah I noticed that one, sadly it seems to no longer being maintained after 1.7.1.. And the source isn't available so it can't be picked up :(.

Well I find flying quite boring and a "drag". So I prefer to land vertical. The problem is (as always) topping over: the easy solution would be to use landing legs. However the current landing lags are not even large enough to reach the bottom of a mainsail - so how am I going to actually "land" with these? I'm playing 1.7 right now, though I'll jump to 1.8 as soon as kopernius (and outer planet mod) have been updated, so if anyone knows of a mod for 1.8 I'd be ever so grateful.

Well I plan to make such a station around Jool as personal thing, so supply missions are kind of a long term idea, and I think it's better to have enough miners at the several moons. Which mod do you think about for large habitation? The stock alike station parts expansion? So far those only give me 4 player "cabins". (And a very, very efficient 1 player cupola/command pod/science provider). I have also a mod that provides realistic "launchpad recovery" times of 1 month+ as it's surrealistic that you can launch multiple vehicles on the same day.

Well I'm playing with FAR, so the voxel based aerodynamics make transporting weird shaped things a real troublesome "thing". Especially for "deep space" missions like to duna/gilly it's hard. The probe that will orbit duna is based around the 0.625 meter parts (oscar tank). With two out of shape parts: a reflector KR14 (from remote tech) and the survey scanner. The reflector at least has the width of a 2.5m part. So adding a 2.5 meter fairing would work for that. However the survey scanner is so out of balance. Putting that to the side makes it stand out about 4.5 meters, so I'm adding a massive fairing with mostly empty space, just to make the thing aerodynamically balanced. Is this the best solution?

It's not what you can or not can do. It's the idea behind the maneuver. The idea of a bi-elliptic is to increase the apoapsis as far as possible. That is the fundamental part of a bi-elliptic maneuver.

oops.

Well then you ought to calculate it yourself, each engine has a given Isp, and since you chiefly just use a single (type) of engine: delta-V = Isp * 9.81 * ln(mass_at_start / mass_fuel). Or even easier so you can just read numbers in the VAB: delta-V = Isp * 9.81 * ln(mass_at_start / (mass_at_start - mass_at_start_when_fuel_removed))