Hotaru

In my career mode currently I have two classes of SSTO (which I posted here in the SSTO showcase thread if anyone's curious). One is a four-passenger spaceplane, the other is a 2-ton-to-LKO reusable rocket. Both are pretty much 100% stock (there are a couple of mods involved but they don't affect the ships' performance at all), and both have been extremely profitable. The spaceplane costs 35,428 funds per unit and 952 per flight in fuel costs, for a total cost of 1,123 per Kerbal to orbit (including the cost of the ship amortized over ten flights). That's compared to 42,864 per flight (14,288 per Kerbal) for the expendable rocket it replaced--an order-of magnitude reduction in costs. The rocket costs 33,933 per unit and 5,275 per flight, for a total of 4,334 per ton to LKO (again amortized over ten flights). Compared to 25,900 per flight (12,950 per ton) for a comparable expendable lifter. Not quite as dramatic an improvement but still better by a factor of about three. Whether the benefits scale up to heavy lift vehicles or not I don't know (I have a 3.75-meter reusable lifter under construction but it hasn't flown yet), but I bet they do. Wanderfound's SSTO above costs 176,000 funds or so (not sure how much is fuel and/or payload) which is about twice the cost of my current expendable tanker ship (which is basically just a Jumbo tank with an engine, probe core, and docking port, launched by an expendable lifter), but being fully reusable I expect it would make up the difference after three or four missions at the most. I don't think SSTOs are dead in any sense! PS. Actually it occurs to me the rocket is not 100% stock, it uses Procedural Fairings, which are so essential I often forget they're not stock. It would perform about the same with stock fairings though, just wouldn't look as good.

I'd have lost interest long ago if not for mods, to be honest. There's no single mod I literally couldn't play the game without, but if I didn't have MechJeb to automate repetitive tasks and give me delta-v info, KAC to keep track of multiple flights, and Procedural Fairings to give me non-useless fairings (and probably one or two other mods I'm forgetting as well), I'd probably get bored and/or frustrated pretty quick. And of course there's a whole suite of cosmetic mods that I consider borderline-essential as well. That said, I do find playing the game with only stock parts to be an interesting challenge. That's ultimately the way the developers envisioned the game being played, after all. Adding part mods makes it a lot harder to keep the game balanced, things can quickly get much too easy. Personally, I like to either keep my parts catalog mostly stock, or balance out part mods (which tend to make things easier) with realism mods like TAC LS (which tend to make things harder). The end result is a similar level of difficulty on the whole, but a challenge that feels more realistic and less arbitrary and video-gamey. I could definitely still enjoy the game even if I couldn't have part mods.

Finally tore myself away from sandbox long enough to make some progress in my career save. Here's the Starlet Alice returning from the fifth mission of my SSTO program: It did a variety of odd-jobs in LKO, delivered some tourists to the Kilgore Station and back, removed some unnecessary components from Kilgore and returned them to Kerbin (helps with the part-count, plus I get some cash back), rescued a Kerbal from LKO, and bolted some retro-rockets and a chute onto a derelict Mark 1 pod, which Jebediah then flew back to KSC to be recovered. Not a particularly profitable mission but all stuff that needed doing.

Very cool! Love the interior, all the right-color lighting and everything. And working escape pods, always fun.

My dad wanted me to show him something straightforward in KSP, so I sent Jeb, Bill, and Bob to the Mun with the stock Kerbal X, fully expecting to have to rescue them later. Turned out, in spite of making a mostly MechJeb-free flight (including a rare manual descent and landing), the Kerbal X in 1.0 makes it to the Mun and back with about 100 m/s of delta-v to spare, presumably thanks to the new aero causing it to waste less fuel during ascent.

Impressive! Especially doing it in one shot. I've never even seriously contemplated a manned Eve surface expedition, I'm still working my way up to Duna. Not bothered by the non-stock parts personally, I almost never play a fully stock game and KW and B9 are two of the best mods out there in my opinion, both fill in a lot of major stock gaps.

I voted internal only, actually I have it turned up to 200% for internal and down to 25% for external. I love it in IVA view, really makes you feel the acceleration on launches and reentries. I like it in external view too, in principle, but I found the swaying effect really distracting since I could never tell whether the camera was swaying or the actual rocket, so I had to turn it way down so it's hardly noticeable anymore.

So I figured out one good way of building a Mark 3 SSTO... ...TweakScale abuse! There are a couple of odd effects but it happily carries a full Jumbo tank to orbit and back with a single TweakScaled Rapier. All well and good in sandbox mode, not sure how/if I'll use this in career though. Even if the scaled parts themselves are balanced, which I'm not 100% sure they are, unlocking 3.75-meter Rapiers at the same time as 1.25-meter ones feels like cheating. Really wish we had bigger stock air-breathing options... guess I'll have to wait for B9 to be updated.

They're complaining because they're veteran players. New players just have to learn from scratch how to fly in the new aero, veterans have to forget four years of flying in the souposphere first. (I was the opposite. I flew X-Plane for years prior to getting KSP, and never did learn to fly in the souposphere. Now that we've got actual air instead of soup, I'm happily building SSTO's.) On topic: Your Moho lander turns into a Moho flyby when it arrives and you realize you need 3 km/sec of delta-v just to burn into orbit. (That was me for sure, still haven't managed more than a flyby. Moho has given me new appreciation for why we've only orbited Mercury once in real life...)

Or you do what I did on my first one in 1.0, after not looking up how much power it would take, and put four OX-STAT's on it.

Here is a pack of simple female Kerbal textures. Not as good as some of the other texture packs out there, I'm afraid, but since nobody has yet released a set for the new female Kerbals, I thought it would be nice to have at least a basic one to play with. As tempting as it was to mess with them endlessly, I wanted to get something up sooner rather than later, so I only spent a couple hours on this, most of which was learning to make halfway-decent hair textures in GIMP--I will probably tinker with it some more and maybe upload a better version later--would like to add some different hairstyles rather than just different colors at the very least. Shame we can't edit the ponytail mesh. My first mod by the way, hope I'm doing it right. Download from SpaceDock Download from Dropbox CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0

Very interesting, thanks! So it really is realistic to have some engines be practically useless in atmo. Of course whether it makes sense from a gameplay point of view is an unrelated question--personally I think it does, but obviously plenty of others disagree!--but it's good to know the real-world baseline at least. PS. Funny how some of the names have kind of "caught" and others haven't. I almost immediately got used to calling the LV909 the "Terrier," but I still call a lot of them by their numbers. I like some of the new names but not all, some of them lack the nice sense of progression in size of, for instance, Poodle, Skipper, Mainsail, that helps remember which is which. The old SRB's are now "Hammer," "Kickback," and "Thumper," but I sure can't remember which name goes with which booster--there's no indication which is bigger, no connection between the names and the character of the particular rocket. I'll probably keep calling them Trashcan, BACC, and NASA SRB.

3, 5, 6, 10, 16, and 20 all sound like me either now or at some point in the past. Never done 15 but sounds like a good idea. Will try it at next opportunity. Hopefully will remember to do it in my sandbox save, not career. Here's another: your launch pad needs frequent repairs cause you keep dropping spent SRB's on it. Or cause you often forget to check your TWR and your rockets go down instead of up when you release the launch clamps.

I don't like it. Honestly, it doesn't limit where I can go--that's more a question of mass than part count--but it limits what I can do once I get there. I generally find before I upgrade the VAB I have to sacrifice things like science instruments, antennas, extra batteries, solar panels, and so on, and all that does is mean I have to make two or three flights to get the science I could've gotten in one--making the early-career-mode grind just a little bit worse. Same for action groups. It's not like not having action groups actually prevents me from doing anything, at least not with early-game ships--all it does is mean that I have to either right click or rearrange stages on the fly if I want to, say, abort. Both just feel like arbitrary gameplay limitations imposed to give me an artificial reason to upgrade the VAB/SPH, whereas most of the other building upgrades make a little more sense. Not sure what I'd add in their place, though, to be honest. Maybe move the size restriction from the pad/runway to the VAB/SPH, and keep only the mass restrictions for the pad/runway. Still plenty of reason to upgrade, makes realistic sense (VAB can only hold so big a rocket, pad can only support so much weight), doesn't feel arbitrary. Thanks Lord Aurelius for the link, by the way, I did not know about that mod & will definitely be trying it out next time I start a new career save! (Ironically I'll actually probably use it to increase building costs by about a factor of 10, so I can turn fund penalties way down and have civilized Kerbal hiring costs for a change. Unless it lets me adjust those too...)

Honestly, I find a lot of the engines almost interchangeable in a lot of situations. At the very least, I generally have at least two or three choices for most situations. Poodle, Terrier, 48-7S cluster, or radial 24-77s for a medium lander? Twin-Boar, Mainsail with boosters, or T30/T45 cluster for a mid-game lifter? Picking the most efficient option often gains me only a few dozen m/sec of delta-v on a ship with several hundred or thousand, so I often end up picking an engine based on other considerations--looks, TWR, configuration, cost, landing-gear clearance, whatever. That said, I do think the current balancing could do with some tweaking for consistency. Why, for instance, does the Ant have 73% less ISP in atmo while the Spider--basically a radial Ant in other regards--has only 10% less? Out of curiosity, what actually IS realistic in this situation? I've always thought of the Terrier as an analog for the Apollo LM engines--would those really have been 75% less efficient in atmo? I know some engines are optimized for atmo and some for vacuum, but is the difference really that big? I'd have guessed more like 25%.

Torus station R&D.

Orbited my first torus. Not sure what I'm going to do with it, mostly just wanted to see if I could get it up there. This one's in my sandbox save, maybe if I get enough cash I'll order one in career.

I mostly like to keep my rockets roughly rocket-shaped (even pre-1.0), but I thought I'd have a go at the torus problem. The key, I figured, was to design a launcher that carried the torus nearer the bottom than the top, so it acted to stabilize the whole thing rather than destabilize it. There were other keys, as it turned out, such as getting the boosters to not collide with the core on separation, making sure each stage had ample TWR, making sure the whole thing had enough delta-v to get to orbit, and adding enough struts so it didn't fall apart on the launch pad. This one is the Mark IVB. You can guess at what happened to Marks I through IV. Fortunately this was in sandbox mode. These things are 600,000 spacebucks each, I'd have bankrupted my current career mode on them after three attempts. Two, if you count the repairs to the launch pad after the Mark III booster-bombed it. Not going to clutter up this post with pics of all the failed attempts, think I'll put those in the "post your fails here" thread.

Piloting an ion probe: On Minmus at night: You didn't say anything about mods so I assume they're OK... wish I had more varied locales but I haven't sent Val or anyone else much beyond Kerbin's SoI. There's a couple more of her from the same trip in this post here.

Successfully tested an air-portable rover inspired by the old Mako from Mass Effect. It uses rockets rather than parachutes because it's mainly meant to be dropped onto the Mun, Minmus, or other airless bodies. It has about 350 m/s of delta-v, and the landings are quite a bit smoother than the original Mako. Crew portrait after first successful drop. Rover driver (Bill) and dropship crew (Lisbel, Hanbald, Desbin, Kirfry).

I've noticed this as well, I've occasionally seen smallish SSTO's reentering with aft CoG's go into a tumble during reentry around 30,000 meters and 2 km/s. Rather than disintegrating as one might expect, they almost instantly slow down to around 500 m/s at 20-25,000 meters, after which it's pretty easy to transfer fuel forward and recover. I don't think it would be a problem if it was a little less pronounced, or if the spaceplane was more likely to break up when this happens (larger ones do, but smaller ones usually don't). Of course, real spacecraft (Shuttle, X-15) did reenter at 20-40 degrees angle-of-attack, but they didn't hit quite the brick wall that a spaceplane in KSP does when reentering underside-first. Another questionable effect I've noticed is that airbrakes become effective before serious heating starts to build up, making it possible to avoid heating entirely on some designs by adding lots of them. I've especially noticed this on reusable rockets that need lots of airbrakes to stay stable in a tail-first reentry. They frequently make it all the way through reentry with no visible flames. (The same is true, incidentally, of reentering Kerbals.) To be fair I don't think anybody's saying the new aero is perfect or unexploitable or anything, just that it's a huge improvement over the old souposphere. I'd be curious if the same effects happen with FAR.

Bizarre! Gives me confidence in KSP's physics engine, though, to see it replicate correctly such a strange real-life behavior.

Launched a mini-shuttle: Deployed an electric lawn chair: Went to Minmus:

Playing sandbox mode last few days, so more pictures for this thread than usual... So I was experimenting with Kerbal Joint Reinforcement settings, trying to build an unstable rocket that would flip so I could see if it would break up or not. First rocket I built was a Mark 1-2 pod on a Mark 3 fuselage with a Mainsail--far from being unstable, it went straight into orbit. Cool, I thought, forgetting about the instability experiment--I'll build this into an operational SSTO for my career save! So I refined the design a bit and launched it again. This was the result: This one I liked to look on less as an unsuccessful test of a new rocket and more as a successful test of a new Launch Escape System: Working on a cargo plane. It flies great, and lands great most of the time, but every now and again I get impatient and set it down a little too hard. Then this happens: On this run my land speed record rocket managed to at least burn out all its boosters before exploding. The ejector seat worked, though: Testing a new Aerospike SSTO. I foresee a problem: