duckunlimited2

10% chance? More like 100% when I try to warp through a planet.

Well it has too much lift now. Take like 25 wings off of it. Put the most lift on the back, attach control surfaces on it too. Add two canards on the front. The control surfaces on the front would angle downwards to help it from flipping backwards. If it still flips backwards, manually angle the canards downward from the SPH using the wasd keys while holding down shift. If the angle becomes way to ridiculous, get rid of the canards. Put a small hard point on the nose of the plane (straight up like its a tail peice) and attach a control surface on the top of the small hard point. the control surface by itself has very little lift value but it still a control surface so it can still control the pitch of the plane. That last method helped my last space plane fly stable. Small hard point and control surface on the front. Very little lift, but still able to control the pitch of the plane. My plane also liked to flip backwards. but I moved most of my lift to the back and I had virtually no lift in the front except for that control surface on the small hard point. That solved the flipping.

That, or we can wait for kosmo-not to get a guide up. That, or I will get a guide up. Actually, I already posted a rendezvous guide that is perfect for interplanetary rendezvous. Some people had a hard time understanding it though so the thread kinda died some months ago. If you want me to post the url, just say so. I'll probably rewrite it to make it easier to understand a week before .17 is released. That, or kosmo-not will get one up before me.

Tripp14, that is very impressive. I have trouble just getting spacestations into kerbin orbit.

Hmmm, I'm trying to make sense of your post. So, you started on the ground with a rocket that's 500 kmu and holds around 100,000 fuel units. Than you blasted it into a 100x100km orbit. After that you were left with about 25000 fuel units. From then you burned till you hit kerbin escape and kept burning until you reached an apoapsis 27million meters above kerbol. From then you returned back to kerbin and simulated your landing on the foreign planet. Right? We'll give you first for now for doing it old school. edit: Also, links on the first post are fixed.

Well, apparently I haven't made this challenge hard enough seeing that many of you have posted groundbreaking vessels even able to traverse between the stars and stuff and what not and....yeah. (that was sarcasm ) Anyhow, I'll delay my challenge's death for a bit and post another interplanetary vehicle I've been working on. Hopefully this would inspire some of you to create your own interplanetary vehicles and post it here. If not... well I'm on the top of my leaderboard so that's victory enough for me. Alright. So ARK (showcased above) apparently has some bugs. First off, whenever I'm burning and accelerating, I noticed it tends to wobbles a bit. It pitching back and forth a few degrees. I normally can live with that since SAS tends to keep it pointing in the relative direction despite the wobble. However, I was testing it without the extra weights. with the dummy weights attached(300kmu by the way), the wobble becomes more pronounced and the craft starts to shake quite badly. SAS still keeps it in the relative direction but the shaking makes it hard to do clean burns. Sometimes the shaking is so bad, the craft starts to spin. Other times, the engines just rip off because the weight is so immense and I'm left with a destroyed craft and no engines. (sorry for no pics, I know it would have made it better) Therefore, a redesign was needed to keep it from shaking apart and ripping its engines off. And this is the result: ARK 2.0! Alright, some major design changes were a shorter body, better distribution of weight, more RCS fuel, and better placement of SAS units and RCS ports. All in all, it accomplishes my goal. It barely shakes even on a full burn making it much more stable. Another change was the choice of command pod. The lone kerbal in the lower right corner indicates that I'm using the mk 1 pod. however this rocket can accommodate 10 extra kerbals thanks to the crew tanks located in the front. I'll be bringing along 9 kerbals in this vessel for its maiden voyage to the red planet once .17 is released. Probably its only drawback stems from its lack of engine power. only 6 engines power this beast and when all of them are burning at full throttle, it can only give about half the engine power of its predecessor. Another drawback is the fact that the fuel tanks are drained at different rates. the center tank drains four times faster than the two side engines. The good thing is I can enable and disable the flow to help balance out the vessel as it burns preventing it from wobbling, but it also means that at certain times, the vessel would be even more underpowered when it try's to accelerate. Here are the weights that simulate the load of other vessels it would carry. They are the colored tanks on the top and bottom. I speculate the center of gravity with and without the dead weights is around where the nuclear generator is. (thats the circular body part where the weights are attached) The nuclear generator has SAS parts both directly on top and below it and those three parts act as a dampener, absorbing any wobble the vessel may have. adding the weights right on top of the dampener area only makes the dampener better at preventing wobble. As far as fuel and weight is concerned, its about the same as its predecessor so I believe it would reach kerbol escape with 50% of its fuel left over just like its predecessor.

that sounds exactly like the plan I'm going to do to get my kerbals on the red planets but mildly simpler. Instead, my mothership would take more than just a lander. It will take a planetary habitable pod, a surface escape space plane, 2 mannable rovers (one each for the planet and moon), a moon lander, an emergency space vehicle (just in case the surface escape space plane and moon lander doesn't have enough fuel to return to the mothership; they should have enough fuel to get into orbit though), 2 unmanned rovers, 3 satellites, 4 probes (the probes help me get a feel of landing on a unfamiliar planet) and 40 kerbal mass units of "dead weight" as a stand in for food and supplies. In all, the vehicles and supplies the mothership will carry would be around 300 kerbal mass units. I will get the vehicles to the red planet via an orbital construction spacedock on the mothership. I will also add the 300 kerbal mass units of dead weight on the mothership to simulate it bringing the vehicles to the planet. I am confident that the mothership would be able to get its load to the red planet. I'm am also reasonably confident it can go back home. I mean, come on, it has 99,200 fuel units on it. 9 kerbals would take this extended mission. 3 on the planet. 2 on the moon, 3 in the mothership acting as command central and controlling the unmanned craft. And 1 lone kerbal in the emergency space vehicle acting as command central for the moon kerbals. So what do you think of my mission?

I would turn off the rcs upon touching the surface of the mun though. Sometimes, especially when you hit a slope and bounce, the rcs trying to correct the tilt will unintentionally create horizontal movement.

No, there's no trick to it. It sounds like you did everything right (descend very slowly, cancel out any horizontal movement, etc). I think the only thing left to do is practice. It will work eventually. You can also help your chances of landing right side up by modifying your design. A wider base and less tall lander can help from tipping over.

Wait they landed. Darn I just realised I'm a like 30 minutes behind on the stream. I shouldn't haved paused.

An excellent night. I'm listening to NASA TV while playing KSP. Great way to spend a night 8)

I already got a method that works. I'll post it sometime before .17 comes out in the how-to forums section.

I was able to launch an entire station from the ground to orbit once. I used massive amounts of Fuel and mega engines to do the job, but all the parts just made it lag terribly so I had, for the first time ever, use mechjeb to assist with the launch. It was so unwieldy in flight, that i ended up with an orbit that had apoapsis at 200km and a periapsis at 150km. Now I send stations up piece by piece with orbital construction. Very handy mod. You should try it.

10/10 Great picture with great character in the rendering. Plus its jeb, i think.

In the third diagram, the red planets orbit would not be circular, it would be elliptical like the second diagram. There is no way around it I'm afraid.

Wow, that sucks! Especially when your last account had over 600 posts making you like senior spacecraft engineer.(obviously that title no longer exists here) Yeah I checked your profile looking for an email but couldn't find any. Your best bet is admin help. Don't worry, Skunky would eventually see this post and correct things . Oh and welcome to the forums!

And As Tradition here is my attempt: I give you the ARK: Its an interplanetary mother ship meaning that its supposed to hold crew, supplies, and other craft with it during its journey across the solar system. I plan on using orbital construction as a way to hold the smaller craft. I\'ll also use dummy weights to simulate the smaller crafts attached to it. But for now, its being tested without any extra weight. A noteworthy mention: These engines have a thrust value of 340ish units and are 1 meter in size. These engines in comparison to the gargantuan vessel you see is quite small and underpowered for this rocket. However, the amount of individual engines there are make up for it. (It was planned for 20 engines, but somehow one came off during my transfer to the spacedock in orbit.) With smaller engines, they are more fuel efficient so I tend to stick many small ones on craft that reach gargantuan sizes for fuel efficiency. Now this rocket is twice the height of the launch tower. Its center rod thingy is 3 meters in diameter. Its radial tanks are 2meters and the radials around the radials are 2 meters as well giving it a max thickness of 11-12 meters. This thing weighs a whopping 660 kerbal mass units! You think thats alot, wait to you see the amount of fuel it holds. 99,700 fuel units! tha\'ts almost 100,000 fuel units. The fuel alone consists about 5/6ths of the weight of the rocket. Yep, 550 kerbal mass units of fuel. If you think I\'m cheating, I will tell you that the fuel tanks I\'m using is from the KW Rocketry mod, and I think most of us feel that its a pretty balanced mod. Despite being huge, it doesn\'t lag my computer because I designed it with the idea of using as little amount of parts as possible. But it holds more than the necessities to carry out its mission. So I got this in a 80km orbit around kerbin then started burning relatively in the direction of kerbin\'s direction of travel. I hit kerbol escape velocity some minutes later and shut off the engine. In the end I still had 50% of my fuel left. 50,000 kerbal mass units still left to burn. Here's the proof in my tracking station. Just made it to escape trajectory. So there you go. Here is your first example peoples.

By now most of the community would know that new planets are going to be released in the next patch. I also know that most of us are scrambling away designing rockets that could hopefully make it to said future planets. So I created this thread as a way for us to showcase our interplanetary vessels. This thread can also act as inspiration and a good learning experience, through example, to those having trouble creating their own interplanetary vessel. Furthermore, this is in the challenge part of the forums for a reason. I will be ranking our creations. My logic in ranking would be my own methodology and it will stay secretive (most of the time it would be how my gut feels because I have no idea on what regard I would rank them. I.e thrust-to-weight, distance, efficiency, looks, I really don't know) But don't fret, I will include all and give nice comments like I did in my last challenge, RCS AVIATION: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/13221-RCS-Powered-Aviation?highlight=powered+aviation Rules and guidelines 1. Pictures! I need pictures of the craft. Any picture in any setting. I will use them to judge design and looks. 2. Please give me the total amount of fuel it can holds. 3. And also give me the weight. This helps us gauge how gargantuan (or tiny in comparison) the vessel is. Of course it also must function so please do the following: 4. Starting from an orbit around 100,00m high around kerbin, you are to thrust until you run out of juice or achieve a kerbol escape velocity 5. From there, if you ran out of fuel, tell us how high an apoapsis you were able to to achieve around kerbol ( I pity the crafts that can\'t escape Kerbin\'s gravity) 6. If you reach kerbol escape velocity, shut down your engines immediately and tell us a rough estimate of how much fuel you still have left. Other mentionables 7. Balanced parts please. You know what they are. 8. Utilize the orbital construction plugin: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/9283-0-16-0-Plugin-Orbital-Planetary-Construction-V9-3 It helps getting the vessel up in a 100,000m orbit around kerbin a hellz of a lot easier. 9. The Kerbal Engineer part also helps by telling how much fuel units and kerbal mass units your vessel has:http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/9063-Plugin-0-15-KICOIT-Kerbal-Engineer-0-8-Advanced-Brakes-v2-1 10. Be creative, and don\'t be shy about telling a bit more about your craft and the story behind it. Rankings and Notables 1. Shedao's "IP Lander" and "IP Return" for doing it old-school and actually blasting itself from the surface to a kerbol escape velocity. Also for simulating the stranding of Jeb on a distant planet. 2. duckunlimited2's "ARK 2.0 for its ability to prevent kerbalnaughts from hurling chunks caused by wobbling. 3. duckunlimited2's "ARK" for being first in making the rankings and for being 200% more powerful for the mission it was designed for. 4. 5. etc, etc Now go, create, and show-off, beautiful interplanetary vessels and motherships my pretties! =P

Twinky, what server are you on? I\'m in the US

I\'ve made a craft that has enough juice to get to a neighboring planet and have some pretty advance know how orbits work so rendezvousing with the planet would be easy. I believe without docking, most of us would be using the orbital construction mod as a means to create the massive ships needed for interstellar travel. Anyway I\'m going to start preparing for this update. I planned on doing something spectacular when planets come out and it finally came. Oh, we probably need to create some bigger rocket engines and fuel tanks, lag is going to be a problem with all the parts for our massive ships. Better to simplify the quantity aspect.

I think White Owl has an account. He mentioned it once in his lets plays. I have a crazy Idea. We should organize a tank company made up of KSP players. How cool would that be.

Stopped playing WoT like 6 months ago for various reasons. By the time I stopped, the highest tier I reached was tier 8 and it was with the pershing. I could never seem to gain enough credits to buy the Patton for some reason. I was stuck on tier 8 for, what it feels like, forever. My favorite tank to play was the Chaffee and I did some pretty amazing stuff with that little beast. (It could also explain why I could never save enough credits for the Patton.) I don\'t know if I\'d ever go back into WoT. Life starts to get serious when you near 18 years of age, so probably not.

The only time I ever used mechjeb was to put a space station up into orbit because it caused incredible lag that made it impossible to fly manually. I also had to help the mechjeb out a little in the gravity turn and the circularization process because it had trouble controlling the heavy build. It just illustrates a point: human finesse always triumphs over automation. But I do admit that mechjeb is an incredible plugin. I was awestruck during the first few attempts of getting that station into orbit. ??? Edit: I\'d also like to add that there are times and places for everything. I needed mechjeb on that launch and it did deliver.

YAY!!!! I hope he shares his cake with us. :-*

I like how when your on the mun and you are controlling a kerbal going like 30m/s and you hit the ground, he starts bouncing across the surface all ragdoll like. What makes the moment is you can switch to another kerbal near to the bouncing kerbal and you get to see from his vantage point the bouncing kerbal pass by him. Its very comical ;D