EpicSpaceTroll139

Now that I finally have a replacement computer (free of charge due to warranty), I've gotten back to work in KSP! Been working on two projects for now. One of them is an improved Kurburgring lap time. I haven't made a full circuit in a while. Currently I'm working on my driving techniques as well as an Electronic Stability Control script which should be helpful in reducing the number of times that I send it airborne. Speaking of Airborne, just the feel of racing around in the car is making various songs from the Asphalt 8: Airborne run around in my head. Currently got Through the Gates - Celldweller looping over and over. Hoping I'll eventually be able to pull off some sick drifting like I remember from playing that game. Given KSP wheel physics, that might be a bit hard The second project I'm working on is semi-secret, but I'll say it will be something for my Dinosaur Emporium. Oh, and it's an icon.

Geonovast and Incongruous goat are both competing to get a new song stuck in my head. What I currently have stuck in my head though is music from the Asphalt 8 Airborne soundtrack. Specifically at the moment I have Through The Gates - Celldweller running around in my head. It probably doesn't help that one of the KSP projects I'm currently working on is turbine car racing. It's going to take significant improvements in both design and driving technique to reduce my Kurburgring Lap time from 56 seconds to something anywhere near competitive with the current 37 second record.

Actually the one I remember was slightly different. On yours, the thing was destroyed by heating. The one I'm thinking of was a submarine made from ore tanks and cabins, set that it sunk relatively slowly. It didn't reach the same speeds yours reached until it was just a few kilometers from the core. At that point the gravity ripped the heavy ore tanks away from the buoyant crew cabins. The kerbals thus escaped death, floating back up, while the ore tanks accelerated to extreme speed and suffered the same fate as your ship. That is really interesting what happens to the ore tank at the center of Kerbin tho.

I seem to recall seeing another image album from a similar glitch, but with an actual submarine-looking vehicle. As I recall, at a few kilometers from the core, it got ripped apart by the tidal forces.

It flew kind of like a cardboard box. In other words, it was pretty draggy, hence the 8 afterburning panthers. It turns out fairings don't make great wings.

I always love to see people venturing into the world of stock helicopters. You make me want to work on fixing mine, but unfortunately I am not able to play KSP at the moment. Is the tail juno there as a counterweight? Because ideally, a tip jet powered helicopter shouldn't need any significant anti-torque. Also, how easy is it to control? I remember making tip jet style helicopters before and finding that mass on the blade tips caused extra strong gyroscopic effects when steering. Also: You might want to check out this thread. Apparently the title is still referencing the problems that also broke literally all my helicopters. (1 fixed so far)

One of the craft I laugh at the most is my Flying Pancake. I mean... why?

Yah I suspected that might be the case, and I don't blame you at all.

It's... It's... BEAUTIFUL! Not sure whether it's even worth it once you get to this kind of part count, but I do see a couple places where parts can be saved. On the leading and trailing edge of the wings and vertical stabilizer, and on the leading edge of the horizontal stabilizer, there appear to be places where you use either the Small Delta Wing or Structural Wing Type D lined up next to each other, placed on different strips of wing parts. The number of these could perhaps be cut by 1/3rd to at a stretch 1/2 by replacing two of the small ones next to each other with 1 Delta Wing or Structural Wing Type D sunk in the middle with offset. The next one will only be useful if the wings don't flex much. Some of the line of Mk0 tanks along the outer leading edge of the main wing could theoretically be replaced with edited fairings. I know that a a 1.25m fairing base wouldn't fit in the outer part of the wing, but in my head I'm imagining the fairing base actually being in the fuselage, with the edits allowing the fairing to begin far out at the wing. That being said, I recall that you were having trouble with the large fairings causing your game to freeze up on mouse-over, so I can see why you might not want to do that. Anyways, whether you try those, or not, this is an absolutely amazing build. I would love to *attempt* flying it, and maybe try implementing those part saving measures, but I'm on a loaner computer that doesn't have KSP at the moment.

Having made Juno powered aircraft before, I can say that the lower the drag of your air-frame, the better the performance you can get out of your small engines. Similar with mass. Having lots of fuel of fuel may seem like it would give you more range, but there comes a point at which it lowers the performance so much that it isn't worth it. Having wide, double 1.25m intakes may look cool, but the Juno (or Junos on the latter) only use a fraction of that intake area, and the rest is adding drag. I wish I could find a better picture, but the top front plane in this screenshot is a roughly 3.25 ton jet powered by a single Juno. Being lightweight and aerodynamically clean (probably the only parts I could remove without making it un-flyable are the inner wing elevons), it is able to reach just under the speed of sound in level flight. Also, while not exactly comparable to a modern fighter jet, the low mass allows decent acceleration for the size of the engine. Range isn't half bad either, in spite of having less than 2 full nosecone tanks worth of fuel. Related to the topic of reducing drag, while useful on builds of all sizes, it becomes especially desirable in low-power aircraft to minimize the control surface deflection required to produce a given turn rate. Every degree a surface has to deflect causes a little more drag, and in the case of elevators, is a little less net lift on the aircraft. To minimize the required deflection of the control surfaces, one wants to put the center of lift as close behind the center of mass as possible without having stability problems. On this particular aircraft, I have the COL so close behind the COM that the reaction wheels of the cockpit and 2% authority on the v-tail is enough to produce reasonable turn rates, and at high speeds I can even turn the reaction wheels off. Another way to reduce drag on any aircraft is to add a small, positive angle of incidence to the wings, eg: tilt them slightly leading-edge up relative to the fuselage. That way they can produce enough lift for the aircraft to fly while the nose is pointed directly prograde (or horizontal in level flight), minimizing profile drag from the fuselage. Getting the angle right might take some testing however, and it will only work perfectly at certain speed/altitude combinations, so you have to pick a throttle setting and altitude to optimize it for. Overall though, having an angle of incidence on the wings improves speed, and by the same token, range. Don't give them too much angle though, or the aircraft nose will have to point below the direction of travel, which is just as bad as having it above. Anyways, that's enough of my babbling. Those jets do look cool. It's a shame we don't have engines in-between 0.625m and 1.25m so they could get good performance while still having the same form. Though I guess if you're not against clipping...

That likely works because the total force on a 2mm hole is a few grams, while the force on an airlock sized hole would easily be several tons.* I know in the book he did fix it with epoxy and such, but it was a much more involved process and resulted in something far more substantial than taping a tarp over the hole. I do seem to recall reading about that Red Spot hypothesis somewhere. Seemed bizarre. One would need the airflow to be very cold, powerful, and gentle all at the same time to make it work. *Yah I know grams and tons are units of mass. Multiply them by 9.8 if you want the actual forces lol

That may be true, but I feel like something that cost about 2500 dollars should wear out after 3 years or more, not 3 months Also keep in mind that computer repair is a job too.] Edit: I should be able to make a new dinosaur SoonTM

My computer is under warranty, and even if it wasn't, I'm not really sure I could open it without breaking it. It's a Microsoft Surface Book 2, so pretty much designed so nobody can open it lol.

I imagine some of these might have been mentioned before, but I think my favorite bad-science-in-science-fiction moments were. 1. In the movie version of The Martian when Whatney fixes the missing airlock hole with what I recall was literally a tarp and some tape. Did anyone seriously think that was going to stay on there when the hab got refilled with any significant atmosphere? I know the whole premise for both book and movie with the dust storm causing havoc and thus a mission abort was a bit sketchy, but it's way better than the Hollywood idea of fixing a gaping hole in a pressure vessel with a tarp and tape. 2. In Interstellar when the Ranger shuttle clips a cirrus cloud, it chips off a piece as if it was actually a monolithic floating piece of ice. Was that supposed to be a joke? I don't have to be a meteorologist to know that's not how clouds work! 3: In Gravity, how Sandra Bullock and Co. went from the HST to the ISS on a jetpack... It was like something straight out of KSP Anyways, those are my favorite Bad Sci Fi moments

Wow! I never thought I would make it on here! Thanks everyone! I will bring more dinosaurs as soon as I sort out my problematic computer.

@Dman @Castille7 Thanks! I am pleasantly surprised. I would be working a more dinosaurs now but unfortunately, having just gotten back from the service center yesterday, my computer has developed a new problem, this time apparently with either the fan* or the temperature control system, which is resulting in the computer throttling its performance to keep from getting more than slightly warm to the touch. The end result being that KSP runs at 3-5fps. *The thing regularly sounded like a jet engine before it went to the shop for a charging issue. Now I can only on very rare occasion hear a tiny wimper from the fan if I hold my ear up to the vent.

On the subject of keeping oxygen from leaking away over large time scales, perhaps one way to get around the issue would be to bind it with hydrogen, turning it into water. That water could be easily kept frozen hard as a rock considering the lack of heat an interstellar vessel would be exposed to. Many bodies in our own solar system such has comets have have ice as one of their main constituents; ice which has presumably been there since before the sun was even created. It would of course take a decent amount of power to melt and then split the ice into oxygen and hydrogen when the oxygen is needed, but it might be worth it for the simplification it brings to storing the oxygen. Something to note on journeys of millions of years is that you now have to worry about more than just external radiation. You have to worry about mildly radioactive things on your own ship. I'd have to check the calculations myself, but I recall from watching a Isaac Arthur video on interstellar travel, that assuming no dna/cell repair happens when in cryogenic sleep (if that is a thing), and that current radiation dosage models are correct, over 500 years or so someone would accumulate a lethal dose of radiation from just the small amounts of mildly radioactive isotopes such as Potassium-40 which are normally in the body. Presumably one might have to worry about something similar with regard to electronics, but it would likely be easier with processing to weed out the radioactive isotopes in electronics production than to get rid of all those isotopes in a person.

Went from the insanity of Super Mario 64 Marygoround music with the King Boo laugh in the background to something with a bit more bass. Thinking back to the time when I watched The Phantom Of The Opera on broadway. Good times

I may or may not be going insane.

Definitely spaghettification caused by getting stuck in some whacky contraption I was testing. Don't remember the specifics.

Oh yes that's a good one too!

Got a John Williams classic stuck in my head right now. It provides good inspiration for the crafts I'm building right now.

@Red Thought screenshots and a list of the mods you have installed might help us to figure out what's causing your problem. Does this same problem occur without mods installed? I understand the frustration. I myself have experienced many gamebreaking bugs in the years that I've played KSP. Sometimes it was a bug in the stock game. But most of the time (and especially since 0.25 onwards) it has been because of some mod I had installed. Complain if you must, but nobody can help you if they don't have a good idea of what exactly happening (eg: have a screenshot, gif, or video of the issue as it is happening)* and what mods are installed. And we want to help. *words can only go so far

That is... weird... to say the least. I have never seen this before... Wouldn't make sense for it to be stroboscopic effect either because you can see the white spiral doohickey on the spinner is turning how you would expect. Have you tried it with your various mods uninstalled (just cut/paste them out of the gamedata folder)? Maybe one of them is having some bizarre effect on the direction of rotation for all jets? I'm really at a loss for what would cause that.

F-1 powered A380?