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king of nowhere

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Posts posted by king of nowhere

  1. On 12/8/2020 at 3:00 AM, FlamingPuddle01 said:

     I think the important thing to keep in mind is that I'm looking for a reason to justify using the space station with a fancy orbit instead of building the space station with a fancy orbit for a specific reason.

    well, you could download the kerbalism mod, that would add concerns like food and radiation shielding that will justify the fancy station...

  2. 1 hour ago, AHHans said:

    Kerbnet works a bit like looking down at the planet with a telescope, you can only see  - and thus put a waypoint marker - a limited area below your craft. The size of that area depends on your orbit (the farther away you are from the planet, the larger the area) and the field-of-view (FOV) of the "telescope" - i.e. the probe core or scanner - that you use.

    So to see a larger area you can choose a wider orbit, move the FOV slider in the Kerbnet window to the right (if you haven't done that already), or choose another probe core that has a larger maximum FOV. Or a combination of those.

    As @Caerfinon already mentioned: anomalies (monoliths, DSN antennas, Mun-arches etc.) show up as a "?" on the kerbnet scan when they are detected.  One problem is that most probe cores have only a relative low chance of detecting a certain anomaly per day, the exception is the RoveMate that will detect all anomalies in its FOV. The drawback is that its FOV is rather tiny, but that can be (mostly) compensated by putting it in a high orbit. So in my current "I want to visit all anomalies" career I put a satellite with a RoveMate into orbit of all planetary bodies.

    if i pass over the same anomaly multiple times, do i have new chances to discover it?

    do i need to control the craft in orbit or can i just forget it there? can i speed up time a lot and spend some dozens orbits in a few seconds to find all anomalies?

     

  3. 1 hour ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

    As Donald Sutherland said in Backdraft:

    Burn it. Burn it all.

    burning oxidizer would consume rocket fuel too, which you can burn in the nerv for greater efficiency.

    i have a spaceplane with a mix of darts and nerv. fully fueled, burning the rockets until there is no oxidizer and then the nerv, it has a range of 4000 m/s. if i dump the oxidizer, i have 4500 m/s.

    I need the darts to get in orbit, but once there, i have no reason to keep oxidizer

  4. 3 hours ago, vv3k70r said:

    Misunderstanding. I refer to that every vesel use external force (against environment) to change orientation.

     

    yes, ok, but there is a large difference between using an rcs thruster, that's precisely aligned to ggive torque, and using a main engine, whose thrust vector goes very close to the CoM and provides very little torque and a lot of unwanted thrust. i belive it can be done, and it may even be more efficient on some extremely light probes. that does not make it advisable.

    a very small reaction wheel, something in the 10 kg range, would be useful.

    30 minutes ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

    The most useless thing I’ve found in KSP is the drain valve and its 5 seconds of ISP- there’s always something better to do with those resources as you can get thrust or possibly power generation (throttle so your TWR is below 1 when landed) from them instead of literally throwing them away.

    there's already been a discussion on this. if you have a rapier, or a mix of rocket and nuclear engines, you may want to dump oxidizer.

  5. 1 hour ago, Vanamonde said:

    You could also try using a joystick. You'll likely need one anyway, since the problem you describe is far worse with aircraft. 

    on the other hand, every aircraft i've ever flown (which, admittedly, were not many) had a point where it remained stable on its own. so once i found it, i could remove my hands from the control, and the plane would keep circling the planet even if i left the game running in the background.

    with a rover, otoh, i need to manuever. i'm past the point where i need to circumnavigate craters or slopes, but every time i hit a bump i don't land perfectly straight and my course is altered, i must compensate eventually. and i have to dodge the occasional surface feature.

  6. i just discovered the functionality to set waypoints with kerbnet - just after i am mostly done exploring several planets and i won't need it for long anymore. but anyway

    i noticed that if i have a ship in orbit, i can only set a waypoint underneat the ship. or rather, in the narrow cone underneath the ship. i am in an equatorial low orbit, and i can only mark points a couple degrees north or south. i want to make a waypoint to a crater around 25-30°N, and i have no way to do it. even if my orbit was polar, i'd have to wait until i am exactly over the place to set a waypoint. I can see it would work much better if i was in a high polar orbit, but i'm not there.

    is there some easier way to set waypoints?

    since i'm here, and i just discovered kerbnet: i know it's supposed to detect anomalies, but how does one do it?

  7. 23 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

    You can hit caps lock which reduces control parts. I have no idea if it also reduces steering speed but it's reasonable to expect it. Reasonable enough to suggest and try :)

    You can use a controller. If you can get it to work, I've never bothered but I hear horror stories. Presumably the analog controls would work on steering.

    Other than those two guesswork things that might not even work, I can't think of one. Even considering mods, which you don't want to consider.

    caps lock works wonderfully. thanks, this saved me a lot of troubles

  8. when using the wasd controls to change attitude, the game always push in the chosen direction as much as it can. this works for a spacecraft, where rotation is slow and you have no reason to delay. unfortunately, it works really poorly for rovers and planes.

    on a high speed rover, i want to make small manuevers. more times than i can count i crashed the rover because, while i tried to give the key the quickest touch, it wasn't slight enough and it produced a massive turn that sent me tumbling.

    is there any way in the stock game to reduce steering speed?

    for planes i could manually reduce the maximum angle of control surfaces, though the thing could bite me if i actually need a steep manuever. for rovers i would like to reduce steering range, but it's pretty much the only thing in the wheel you can't control.

    P.S. I do NOT want mods. I don't like the idea of installing a mod for everything, and they invite krakens

  9. 7 hours ago, FlamingPuddle01 said:

    Oh, and would doing this make it repeatable? because ultimately I would like to set up a station moving between both bodies that I can hitch a ride on whenever I need to do a tourism quest

    i have to calrify first, a cycler does NOT save fuel.

    sure, the cycler will keep moving between both bodies, at no cost, but to dock with the cycler you have to match its speed, which is already equivalent to the speed needed to reach the other body. quoting from wikipedia,

    Quote

    Once the orbit is established, no propulsion is required to shuttle between the two

    but that doesn't mean anything. once you make your ejection burn and enter the hohmann transer orbit, no propulsion is required. once you already made your manuever, no propulsion is required.

    in fact, i dare say a cycler wastes more fuel. though in real life you have the advantage that you can make it bigger, and you only need the extra speed for the probes that will dock with it. so you can have a massive space station where your astronauts can live during the several months of transfer, while the probes needed to get to the station are smaller and can skip most basic necessities, since they will only be inhabited for a few days. in ksp your astronauts can live forever in an external seat, so you have no such limitations.

     

    that said, a cycler between kerbin and mun would orbit kerbin with low periapsis, and its apoapsis would get close to mun. it should stay out of mun sphere of influence, or th eorbit would be perturbed. and it would need to have the orbit syncronized so it will get close to mun at each apoapsis - it doesn't help if you're at the same apoapsis if mun is on the other side of the orbit. for minmus i'd say it's impossible to stay syncronized with minmus while avoiding mun entirely; eventually you'll end up in mun SoI, and the gravity assist will kick you off trajectory.

  10. 1 hour ago, PaperAviator said:

    correct me if I'm wrong but pretty sure that the mk2 crew cabin and the hitchhiker storage container are both inferior in cost/kerbal and mass/kerbal to two mk1 business jet cabins

    the mk2 part has excellent heat resistance, though, making it best suited for atmospheric reentry. as for the hitchhiker storage container, it is indeed inefficient, but i used it in many applications where i did not have mass problems because it looks good.

  11. 52 minutes ago, Laie said:

    Well, @bewing called it the "absolute worst case" -- think of something like this, maybe even worse:
    manynodes.jpg

    It is possible to create lots of maneuver nodes in a relatively short timespan if you interface with the API. Both kRPC and kOS will provide convenient ways to do so. The above represents a constant 40mm/s² burn... I think. It's been a while. I'm pretty certain that I didn't account for fuel consumption when making that picture, but you get the idea.

    I've actually flown missions with that scheme: plotting lots of nodes only to figure out when to start the engines and begin the prograde-only burn. I guess one could also calculate it by other means, but I cannot.

    I don't think any of my transfers ever took longer than 1/4 orbit, and the extra dV expenditure (compared to a short, high-TWR burn) was on the order of 15%.

    that's quite a nice image, and it underlights the problem i was raising: if you actually do your burn like that, how can you predict where you'll end up? you started burning on one side of the orbit, and you exited on a completely different side. real space agencies have softwares to do those kind of calculations, and i'm sure some mods can allow the same. without access to those resources, though, that kind of manuever cannot be predicted accurately enough to be of any use.

    1/4 of the orbit is still a manageable time. in my cases i needed a 20 min burn, and i got a result like the one in your picture, where i ended up pointing in a wrong direction.

  12. 1 hour ago, bewing said:

     As I recall, the absolute worst-case result is the square root of 2 worse than an optimally efficient burn. (ie. 41%)

     

    I doubt it. I mean, that's the result you get by integrating the cosine over the whole orbit. it assumes that, while you burn, you stay in orbit. which is not what's going to happen. especially with the orbital approximation of this game.

    what actually happens is that, as you exceed escape trajectory, your ship is going to leave orbit entirely. and it's going to come out of your SoI pointing at a completely wrong angle. I'm too lazy to produce screenshots right now, but I can. I did send a spaceship with TWR 0.11 to jool. twice. unless you are talking about raising your orbit in a spiral, which is what is done with real life ion propulsion, but i'm fairly sure that's more than a 40% loss of efficiency.

    in my experience, the best way to deal with low twr is with tricks. first one is raising periapsis peemptively. you have to burn for 2000 m/s, but you can burn the first 900 while still remaining in kerbin orbit. so, do that first, and then you only need to burn for 1100. which is still a huge amount with twr 0.1, but still manageable. if you have to go nearby, like to eve or duna, you can eliminate any problem with this strategy (actually, you can get there with a mun gravity assist without making long burns). It works best if you make your long burn in a long orbit, perhaps returning from a moon. maybe that's what you mean with suicide oberth burn? if that's the case, i can confirm that it is fairly efficient, as you will have a long time when prograde will coincide with the direction you want to burn.

    another option is raising periapsis. it's something you normally want to avoid, you gain no benefit and you lose oberth effect, but it makes your orbit flatter, reducing cosine losses. can be worth doing in some cases.

    but the best option by far is to avoid big burns by using gravity assists and other convoluted trajectories that only require correction burns.

    last but not least, making manuevers in kerbol orbit is also a good way to avoid cosine losses. sure, you'll lose all oberth effect, but at least your orbit is so slow you can spend hours making your burn without any noticeable loss

    In my case, i found that i needed over 2500 m/s to go to jool immediately, but i could lower it to 2200 by going to duna first, entering a high orbit that would put me eventually around ike, and then from ike fall back towards duna and make the bigger burn there.

  13. 25 minutes ago, Mikenike said:

    I do it constantly, mostly on Kerbin though, I pop them all the time. It happens when you go too fast and do crazy stuff, and another way is to put too much weight on it

     

    i go too fast and do crazy stuff all the time. now i'm roving on tylo, and due to good gravity, lack of atmospheric drag and smooth terrain, i reached 100 m/s several times. i exploded the rover when i lost control, but again, never happened to break a wheel.

    as for putting too much wheight, i have no idea how much would be too much, but with 8 ruggedized wheels i can barely move upslope. i cannot climb more than 5 degrees of incline without help. that would make me think the weight is too much. but then, sometimes i lose control and the rover capsize and slams violently on the ground with a single wheel, and the wheel stays whole. i also did drive over 100 km on kerbin to go scan giant quartz, and i exploded wheels, but never broke them

  14. 23 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

    To protect the game from cruelty, I guess. This suggestion appears repeatedly with same result: no animals will be added by Squad.

    so, you can do cruelty on human(oid) as much as you like, there was even a challenge to make torture implements with the game, but absolutely no animals. :confused::confused::confused:

     

    huh. i stopped reading to post this, but apparently i'm not the only one dumbfounded. i blame politically correct

  15.  how can you not have attitude control on a ship? if you must point your rocket in one direction, and you are not and have no reaction wheels, are you going to turn on the rocket in the wrong direction and use gimbaling to eventually move it right? i can't believe this can work.

    personally, since my light probes still need some kind of science capacity, i prefer to use the rgu; it has reaction wheels AND science container integrated, it's the lightest and least encombrant combination i can get of those 3 parts. If i need stronger reaction wheels and more battery, i use the hecs2.

     

    speaking of command moduels, what about the QBE? 30 kg heavier than the okto2, same functionality. are there any reasons to use it where you would not be better off using an octo2?

  16. 1 hour ago, Corona688 said:

    For what?  And how?  Is there an appropriate way to use it we just don't know?  Like many unexplained things in KSP, I think it's apeing something real, but we were never told what...

    it uses for the rcs the same commands you use for the jetpack, making it slightly more intuitive to use for somebody who learned to use the jetpack but not the rcs

  17. 13 minutes ago, DAFATRONALDO2007 IN SPACE said:

    What??? that large remote guidance unit is pretty good for space station Modules for when you cant attach command modules or don't want to put one and yeah its very heavy but its a compromise. Its like saying the R.A.P.I.E.R engine Is totally useless because its the least efficient jet engine of all yet it is a hybrid engine?

    i just can't see what's the advantage over using the smaller rgu - possibly into a service bay, that on a ship that big is practically a guarantee. an advantage that would be big enough to justify 0.4 tons of extra weight.

    Quote

    to me  think the MOST useless is the Drain valve.

    i have a mothership with nuclear engines, and a lander with normal engines.  nuclear engines are more efficient, and they do not use oxydizer. i needed some extra deltaV, and i wanted to dump my oxydizer supply. as far as nuclear engines are concerned, it's just dead weight, and it would be more efficient to do it than to burn the conventional rockets.

    i couldn't do it because i was missing a fuel valve. not for lack of engineering, i made it and then deleted accidentally. it's not the only time i found myself longing for one. sometimes you desperately need to get rid of weight, and if you have isru you can always get more fuel.

    3 minutes ago, Corona688 said:

    KSP's built-in docking mode.  I've never seen anyone even mention it when people ask how to dock.  As far as I can tell it does nothing except deprive you of half your controls.

    i've used it occasionally.

     

    so, i find this thread very interesting. apparently, there isn't anything that everyone agrees is completely useless.

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