Kerburettor

Thanks for the info. Does it mean I can safely download an older version to use in KSP 1.8? If yes, which one?

Thank you for your availability! I'm playing KSP 1.8 with 6 mods (as indicated by my GameData folder): kOS, Smokescreen, Clickthroughblocker, Blizzy's toolbar, Real Plume and Real Plume Stock. I installed them with Ckan, and made sure that they were all compatible with v1.8 only. Actually only 4 of those are displayed as "installed" in Ckan, Real Plume and Real Plume Stock are found in the "cached" section, and I'm not sure what this means.

Thanks for your answer. I've just tried to modify the curve handles under "emission", "energy" and even "speed" and it yields the same result: nothing happens. I've also tried another engine (the KS25 vector engine) and still nothing. I thought it was probably due to me launching from the runway so I switched to the launchpad, in vain. I was following the same procedures as shown in this video: and apparently this person manages to get visual stuff happen when he changes the values of some fields such as "randomInitialVelocityOffsetMaxRadius". I'm using realplumes stock for the configs. Is that potentially a reason why there is no change in terms of visual effects?

Sorry for the serial-posting but I've got to give some updates: I've managed to land a Skylon which contains two Mk3 passenger modules. The set of modifications - compared to the previous version - can be found in the last post: The engine nacelles aren't attached to the wing anymore but to the fuselage thanks to a suggestion by JadeOfMaar, which tricks the game into thinking that the engines cause virtually no stress on the wings. After removing open struts, draggy control surfaces that I clipped inside the fuselage and by adding plenty of big-ass wings, the spaceplane pretty much flies itself home with relative ease, with a lift to drag ratio of around 2.5 during landing. These are not the numbers you'd find on a commercial aircraft but considering the previous version used to generate more drag than lift, I'm happy with the behavior of this machine. It doesn't need too much speed to maintain level flight. More successful landings to come, hopefully! Do note that this nacelle design doesn't leave much room for error. If one doesn't manage to land successfully during their first attempt, loading a quicksave prompts the game to reconsider its former choices. Because the RAPIER modules are enveloped inside an open fairing (nozzle), the game now somehow makes the fairings heat up. They subsequently explode which can jeopardize your second attempt, especially if you are in the transonic regime and undergo asymetric explosions. A workaround is to set the throttle at full thrust to blow up both fairings on each side of the aircraft at the same time. The RAPIERs will be unimpeded and you'll be able to land safely. Unfortunately, esthetics often conflicts with practicality.

Hi, I've downloaded the latest version of the mod from Ckan but can't figure out how to modify the pre-set configs of my engines. I'm especially talking about hybrid/turboramjet engines such as the RAPIER and the Whiplash. When opening the Smokescreen user interface, I just cannot modify the parameters such as position offset, rotation and whatnot. Nothing happens when I click on "Apply" and the parameters revert back to their previous value when I click on the "rebuild" button. See this video for instance around the 40 seconds mark:

Alright, your suggestions were actually pretty spot on! I attached the nacelles to the fuselage using the mirror mode and offset them, then I removed all the struts and autostrutted the components of the engine instead. Turns out, the struts I put inside the engine (to hold the different parts into place) get "open" when the engine is attached to the Skylon. They generate a lot of drag and induce that nasty-looking Mach effect. I also made the mistake of autostrutting the engine components to their grand-parent part,which in my case were the mirror parts attached on the other side of the Skylon. This means the engines weren't attached to anything except the wing tip which is a very fragile joint. I decided to strut them to the heaviest part of the airplane which is that massive orange payload in the cargo bay. All of a sudden, the Skylon could tip its nose up right after take-off and reach high accelerations (~ 5 Gs) without a sweat and most of all, in one piece. I also decided to remove the control surfaces I artificially clipped inside the fuselage in order to move the center of pressure upwards. I felt like the dihedral angle did not do much in ensuring roll stability and I thought I had to do that. It felt like cheating and not only does it not feel realistic, this "solution" also adds quite the amount of drag. All in all, having open struts in my aircraft and clipped control surfaces inclined at a high angle did not help at all. Thankfully, removing these clipped surfaces didn't seem to negatively affect roll stability, at least to an extent that would make my plane crash. In order to counterbalance the CoL moving downwards, I moved all the tanks and the engine nacelles down as well. I did observe a very slight tendency to nose down during roll though, as the CoL is significantly lower than the CoM. But the plane remains flyable and I dare say it flies much better than ever before. I can now consistently reach orbit with a comfortable amount of Dv left (somewhere in between 300 m/s to 900 m/s depending on whether I fly without paying much attention to the controls or if I turn off the rocket mode early on and follow an optimal flight profile). Even better, as the Skylon doesn't need to have oxidizer leftovers in the tanks upon re-entry, I can decrease the amount of oxidizer and get less Dv once in orbit but more liquid fuel for atmospheric flight in the eventuality of a suboptimal re-entry profile. I'll probably release the engine and the craft file when I manage to land it consistently. I haven't tried any landing this evening because I was already busy with ensuring structural integrity against aerodynamic loads, but I guess the bird can withstand the accelerations of touch down now that the wings and nacelles are strutted properly. Oh yes, I also had to remove the Whiplash engines because despite the very beautiful blue color and small increase in Isp they provide, they were occluded by the wing tip and became a dead-weight when implemented on the Skylon. But now that the engines are attached to the central fuselage, I think I can safely place them back on. Let's also note that I have added three sets of big-S wings. Wings don't generate as much drag as fuselage parts so I figured that I could get way more lift without a strong impact on my net thrust (thrust - drag). Now I get approximately as much lift as drag and my net thrust often reaches values up to 2500 kN. Plus now the Skylon looks more like the real model.

It makes perfect sense! I will try this. Only option 1 seems feasible though, as adding struts is not possible anymore: somehow I can't attach struts between the wing and the cargo bay or between the wing and the root part of the nacelle which is the precooler. This problem has been occurring quite frequently on my bigger models but I can't put my finger on the reason why this is happening.

Thanks for the suggestion mate. What I usually do with the front landing gear is set the spring strength to a small number (typically .2 or .3) and increase damping. This allows the front to sink down and absorb most of the pitching moment. The distance between the tail tip and the rear landing gear is important and there exists a true risk of tailstrike if I don't pay attention to these parameters. But I was maybe wrong in my approach because I never properly characterized the landing gears on this particular system and just went full on guesstimation mode. What bothers me the most is why wings tend to spontaneously snap at high velocities in the lower atmosphere. I don't have FAR installed, and I am aware that the aerodynamic model has probably been considerably improved in v1.8 but nothing from the dynamic pressure readings in the video would hint at too many Gs being the cause for spontaneous disassembly. Sometimes, I reach accelerations of over 2 Gs in the lower atmosphere at relatively high speeds (cf. Descent manoeuver in the transonic regime) and the wings stay put.

Hi, This is an engine I created with stock and robotic (Breaking Ground DLC) parts. Like its real-life counterpart, it has a low-atmosphere air-breathing mode and a high-altitude rocket mode. These can be activated by pressing two separate keys to toggle the KAL 2000 part. The controller synchronizes air-intake opening/closing with the engine mode switch. Here is a video that goes through the main functionalities of the engine: Performance It generates 890 kN of thrust at sea level in Air-Breathing mode, up to > 2500 kN in flight and more than 1200 kN of thrust in rocket mode at sea level. However, due to the presence of 24 unshielded radial intakes for the ramjets, the engine also contributes its share of drag.

Thanks mate. I had managed to do that by adding a few lines in the cfg file in pretty much the same fashion it is done in Nertea's mod, with different values for Isp in the atmospheric/velocity curve sections. What bothers me is fuel consumption. Realistic values for Isp lead to a crazy volumetric flow rate of LH2 and LOx in closed-cycle mode. Obviously, increasing thrust (at constant Isp) is always going to cause my propellant consumption to skyrocket and putting 8 RAPIERs on my craft is bonkers. Next time I play, I'll try divinding the number of engines by two and see if that helps although it will force me to drastically modify my ascent profile due to a much lower T/W ratio. Do you know of any mod that records data from your flight profile in real time such as thrust, lift, drag, fuel consumption, ... and stores it inside a/multiple file(s) for later analysis? Edit: I need to mention that, as thrust reaches a peak near the 10-13 km range, my air-breathing LH2 consumption increases nearly 10 fold compared to ground-level flow rate. Also, the ratio of LH2 to intake air had to be turned on its head otherwise a realistic ratio (cf. this thread) would cause my engines to flame out under minimal throttle. This is ridiculous.

Hi, My question was probably not asked in the right subforum so I'm re-asking here. I would like to know how to tweak config files to create an air-breathing jet engine that works on LH2 (from a real fuels mod for instance, or similar) and intake air. I'm using the Real Fuels mod, Stockalike RF configs and the Solver Engines Plugin. Thanks

Yup. I haven't really tested them but it looks like most of these actuators will break down under the weight of a big SSTO (> 100 T). One of the big hinges holds remarkably well though. I stuck my front landing gear to it (the medium sized) as any bigger landing gear does not have the ability to steer. I made it fold and unfold multiple times and so far it hasn't let me down. But I think I will resort to mods. The level of detail I want to give my model airplane will be too far a stretch for stock KSP.

Hello, I'm trying to reinvent canards and control surfaces in general. I find the array of choices to be rather limited in the stock game and would like to take a rotation servo from the Breaking Ground DLC, slap a wing or wing connector onto it and get a semi-autonomous appendage that can perform an action dictated by user input and counteract an external disturbance through a feedback loop. For instance, let's consider a pair of canards tasked to output, say... a pitching moment. They will have to produce a certain amount of torque in order to form that pitching moment. Because of flow turbulence and the dynamic response of the whole aircraft, we need to measure the difference between the input and the (actual) moment created and feed it to a controller that in turn generates a correction, hence forming a closed-loop control system. Basically, SAS. Do not hesitate to correct me, btw, as automatic control is not my primary field of interest. I think this is achievable with kOS because the programming language offers quite a lot of flexibility, but I would like to try this without using any mod. As far as I know, there exists no such thing in the robotic parts pack and despite being rather handy, the KAL-1000 controller doesn't seem to be able of automatic control, but merely stores predefined commands. It can act (automatically) but does not react. Has anyone found a way to achieve control nonetheless? Thanks,

Salut Neoks et bienvenue sur le forum!

All things considered, it took me more than a week. The construction process is governed by a lot of trial and error and I wasn't really sure what I was trying to achieve at first. I knew that I wanted to build a replica of the SABRE engine, being inspired by Kronus' model which is pretty spot on in my opinion. However, his model suffers from an unhealthy amount of part clipping and I've already experienced fiery explosions from sticking a rocket engine on the mounting point of a RAPIER engine or on a grandparent part and moving the rocket around doesn't solve the conundrum. If I manage to fuse two RAPIER engines together without invoking the Kraken or logically overheating something, be sure that this will be found in the newest version of the Skylon replica. As things went on, I thought the engine began to look the part. I decided to go for it and build the Skylon. Edit: I've got to correct myself a bit. I did manage to stick rockets behind the RAPIERs. You've got to place them, translate them backwards until they get inside the RAPIERs and then move them outwards so they don't aggregate near the center where heat fluxes are tremendous. But the only ones that fit are the Terrier and the Reliant. The Terrier is by far the more economical engine from a fuel consumption point of view, but it isn't necessarily the most efficient considering its low thrust in vacuum. The Skylon is a heavy beast and 8 times 60 kN is not gonna cut it, plus the fact that you have to carry their dead weight around until they're being used. It's not worth the hassle.