king of nowhere
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Posts posted by king of nowhere
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i'm interested to try this myself, but is there some list of all the objectives that give you money?
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don't forget that you can also convert the ore to monopropellant, and those are generally hydrazine-based. so it would have to have nitrogen.
i don't think there is any chemical possible way to make it work
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I reached the point where my spaceplane is almost good enough to go ssto on eve. I realized that my flight profile requires a lot of powered flight before clearing the atmosphere, and i believe i could make the whole thing work if i could minimize drag. i've seen a youtube video of a similar design making it, but it goes faster in the atmosphere with less TWR than my model.
unfortunately, the game gives no indication on how to accomplish that. Having a thing that looks aerodinamic and one that actually is aerodinamic according to this game's physical engine are two entirely different things. sure, i activated the aerodinamic overlay, but a few red arrows aren't all that clear. and most of them are inside the plane, not visible.
today i had a moment of insight, where i decided to look at the game wikia, that reports drag factors.
except, i'm seeing that every single wing has a drag coefficient of 0.2 and a lift generated of 1 (1 what?) every 100 kg of weight, every single fuel tank of 0.3-0.2 (whatever that means) regardless of size or inclination, the MK3 cargo bay has 0.2-0.3 (why the different order over the fuel tanks?), nose cones have 0.1 regardless of shape (i always thought that the more inclined nose cone had better aerodinamic to compensate extra weight...). basically, it's no use at all.
i know about not having open nodes. i reluctantly gave up on having a clamp-o-tron (except a shielded one, but now i'm seeing the wiki reports the same drag values for it than it does for the standard version). I attached the rockets behind radially mounted nose cones, and the thing has nose cones on both ends.
for reference, this is my most successful model
though not by far the only model i tried. for example, this other model does not generate enough lift to take off, despite having a greater lift-to-weight ratio
and this one, that only has the wings rearranged, will tend to deviate on the side mid-flight for no apparent reason
so, how can i improve my aerodinamic when i'm not getting any useful feedback besides -this flies, this doesn't - ?
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i recomment using large tanks. your refueling trips will become a big nuisance if they require 20 trips each time. using refueling extensively, i ended up loading the convert-o-tron and drills directly on a ship that goes up and down from the planet. it's less efficient because you have to drag along the weight of those mining equipment, but it's much faster in-game, because you don't have to drive a rover from the base to the lander all the time.
whether you end up doing that or you make a full mun base, i have a few more recomendations
- make your lander with a large base. it will be easier to land, which you will want to do often
- make your lander with lots of reaction wheels, and possibly a good rcs system. you will have to dock often, so you want to make it manueverable for easy docking. for the same reason, put your docking port somewhere easy to reach.
- once you are around mun or (worse) minmus, oberth effect will be unfavorable. i discovered that to make big burns, it is often less convenient to launch from there, even if you save 900 m/s to get out of kerbin's gravity well. there are ways around that, of course, my favourite one is to launch back towards kerbin and get a gravity assist from it, though it requires to time well the manuever. anyway, you have to take that into account. you also can launch a very big fuel tank (mine has a 600 ton capacity) that you refuel around mun or minmus, then you bring it back to kerbin orbit to refuel stuff there. you only have to refill it once in a while.
- put an expert engineer with the mining equipment. it's not strictly necessary, but even a level 0 engineer will quintuplicate the yield over no engineer at all.
my standard refueler has 1 convert-o-tron in the middle and 4 rockomax 18 ton around it. it is very easy to land and manuever. i used a single wolfhound engine with a TWR around 0.5, which is good for working on mun. i also made a larger version that holds 300 tons and have 5 wolfhounds (with 4 convert-o-trons and 12 drills), but that one is significantly harder to land because it grew in height more than in diameter; i made it to refuel my 600-ton orbital tank in a reasonable time.
i also have a few space stations that double as fuel depots, but most times i refuel directly from the mining ship.
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10 hours ago, Spricigo said:
Quite the contrary in many cases. Prograde/retrograde burns are cheaper when your speed is high, normal/antinormal burn are cheaper when your speed is low. That means if you combine both is not the ideal moment for at least one.
yes, but if you want to match your orbital plane, you have no choice on when making the normal/antinormal burn. and while you are there, the savings for pitagora's teorem for adding a prograde or radial component to the burn generally far outweight the loss of efficiency. especially when going to closer planets, like eve and duna, where the difference between different parts of the orbit is not huge.
furthermore, the best place to make a prograde manuever is the apoapsis, but you cannot make a correction burn there. if you are going to eve, then by apoapsis you are already on eve, and if you are missing, you must make your correction before that. if you are going to outside planets, then apoapsis is when you start and of course it would be great if one could make a precise burn and be already on a perfect intercept upon leaving kerbin, but good luck on that. they are called correction manuever exactly because you wouldn't need them if the original manuever was 100% accurate.
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4 hours ago, radonek said:
Will try. So far, I test it unladden on Kerbin, under assumption that lower gravity on Mun or Ike should be roughly balanced by fuel load.
Hinges are unpowered and unlocked so that each wheel pair can follow terrain slope. Ruggerized wheels don't have enough suspension travel length to handle this and inner wheels would come out of grip. (You can also see terriers on each end for propulsion.)
while those hinges do indeed look cool, they are not strictly needed, and may be causing the problem. you could try removing them just to see how it goes. i use robotics a lot, but they are kraken bait.
it is also possible that this only happens in high gravity. have you tried this rover on mun? maybe the problems will just disappear.
I failed to notice the rockets at first.
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this one look like a rockomax jumbo 36 ton tank. incidentally, i use the same fuel tank for my rover, and i use 8 ruggedized wheels for it, just like your model. My rover has a few extra funcionalities that raise its weight to 50 tons, still, i never had any problem with suspensions. and that's both with full tank or empty tank, on mun and on minmus equally.
P.S. why are the wheels attached to hinges? i cannot figure out their purpose
P.P.S. i also cannot figure out why your rover has RCS thrusters. i don't see rockets on it to make it fly
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One thing i want to add is that when you make the plane change manuever on the ascending/descending node, that's also the perfect place to make a correction manuever. the reason is pitagora's theorem. if you have to burn 400 m/s for plane change, and 400 m/s prograde, you burn at 45 degrees and you end up spending 400*square root of 2 m/s, which is less than 600 m/s. A net saving over having to make the two burns separately.
For the same reason, a small inclination correction when leaving kerbin SoI can be convenient, because you are already bunring 1000 m/s, so you can slip a 2-300 m/s in another direction almost for free (1000 m/s prograde + 300 m/s normal will result in just 1044 m/s total). Of course it won't fix your inclination completely, because you are not in an orbital node. However, you can use that to move an orbital node. For example, you can minimize your inclination. or you can push the node closer to kerbin, so it will happen when your ship moves slower, and it will be less expensive to change orbital plane.
those tricks may save a little bit of fuel, though they won't make a huge difference
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6 minutes ago, Wobbly Av8r said:
Many folks want to think of Minmus as a tall mountain on Kerbin that they can jump off of to other places but are stunned when they encounter the issues you have; the key to using Minmus is to understand that you have to FIRST escape Minmus' SOI and THEN escape Kerbin's SOI. Attempting to do both in one burn, depending on where you're going AFTER the burn, can diminish or completely remove any advantage you might have had operating from a Minmus orbit.
here you are faced with the potential of two burns - maybe 30 days apart - to leave Kerbin's SOI from Minmus orbit efficiently
I don't get it.
So, you make a small burn that would put you out of minmus SoI, but still around kerbin. then what? you make a burn from there? you're still going to be pretty slow, around 5-700 m/s. which is still a strong improvement over minmus, granted. But it's still no more efficient than launching directly from Mun orbit. i doubt it could come close to the efficiency of a kerbin gravity assist
Unless i've misunderstood what you're suggesting. Anyway, mun orbit to kerbin gravity assist has the right balance between efficiency and complication for my tastes.
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you can also use less propulsion power. if your claw attachment is floppy, exherting less force on it is likely to strain it less.
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i can't really figure out what kind of trajectory you are trying to get, but i have a couple tips to add.
1) you mention minmus, i assume you're passing through it. I assume you have a refueling station on minmus? anyway, minmus look like a great place to launch a interplanetary mission, already on the edge of the sphere of influence, low gravity to make it very cheap to escape... i made that mistake myself.
Minmus is horrbile as a starting place to go anywhere. And the reason is oberth effect. i thought the difference would be mild, but it can take upwards to 5 times the fuel to make the same manuever. this soon overtakes the advantage on not having to climb out of a gravity well. A mission starting on minmus going anywhere except eve is more expensive than the same mission starting in LKO.
Mun is a much better place. it is only mildly more expensive, but you get better oberth effect. going to jool starting from mun or LKO is about the same cost, it is convenient for going closer.
the real best option, though, is to refuel on mun and leave by making a gravity assist around kerbin. this way you get both the discount on leaving the gravity well, and the oberth effect. You can do that from minmus too, but the slow and inclinated orbit makes it more difficult. it's difficult to set up this gravity assist perfectly, getting it good enough to save some fuel is not too complex.
So, if you were making your big burn to escape kerbin SoI in minmus orbit, you can save a lot by either doing it in LKO, or by using a gravity slingshot around kerbin.
2) there is no mention of where you are going to intercept the comet; time concerns favor intercepting it at periapsis, when it is closer. but it's much cheaper to intercept it at apoapsis. it's generally somewhere around eeloo's orbit, meaning 2000 m/s from LKO to reach. but once you are there, both you and the comet are moving so slowly, you only need a few hundred m/s to adjust for any difference of speed and inclination. similarily, getting back on an intercept to kerbin is also relatively cheap.
you'll intercept kerbin at high speed though, so aerocapture won't generally be possible.
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On 9/12/2020 at 1:22 AM, Lt_Duckweed said:
I'm fairly certain this s a visual UI only bug. Stratz and I saw something very similar with our Jool craft, where the blades still had drag listed in their part windows, even though the bay was closed. But it was purely visual, the blades were actually producing no drag, but when you closed the bay it didn't update the UI correctly.
I can sort of confirm this. i did check in controlled circumstances, and indeed i found that the propellers stop producing thrust. the reason i didn't realize this is that i was around top speed the previous time i checked, and the plane without propulsion started moving downward, getting speed and giving the illusion that propulsion was staying the same.
i cannot be sure that there isn't any residual drag, but if there is, it must be minor
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7 hours ago, Linkageless said:
I too, have notice this RUD after set position to Eve, with the indestructible cheats enabled. (I even found some previously solid designs that didn't need the cheats at all falling apart when loading on the KSC runway.) I've found the 'unbreakable joints' cheat seems to spontaneously stop working, persisting after revert to launch or SPH and initially resorted to quit/start the program.
I then discovered that it almost always can be cleared by disable/renable the unbreakable joints cheat. After this problem is usually cleared.
It's not clear if this is a change in behaviour however, as I've only really recently been pushing the boundaries of what my feeble laptop can handle in terms of spaceplane complexity. My machine runs hot and most atmospheric flights are in the yellow not-quite-realtime, only eased by reducing graphics effects. Certainly I recall it being a problem in 1.9.1 which has persisted in 1.10.
Hope that helps!
problem disappeared a few days later, just as mysteriously as it appeared.
if what you say works for all, it is possible that after i got tired of building the spaceplace, i got back to the other flights, i untagged unbreakable, and this may have reverted the bug.
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11 hours ago, Spricigo said:
It may be. Cargo bays are know to have been doing strange things before (e.g. shielding things while open and not shielding while closed). It may also be he case that your propeller are clipping through the bay's walls, for what the game is concerned the propellers are outside, thus exposed to drag.
i checked, they are not.
closing and reopening the cargo bay also does not work. i found out, though, that closing the bay, saving the game and reloading it, that works. not ideal, as reloading a game with the airplane in midair will make it lose some momentum but, lacking anything better, it can be dealt with.
QuoteJust my opinion, but I don't think is smart to pretend to not know a good way to do things just because someone thought of it before you.
my purpose is to invent an eve ssto. if i just wanted to use one, i'd go on kerbalx and look for it. if i was doing this for a job, that would be the best solution, but in this case "fun" requires me to figure stuff out.
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2 hours ago, Spricigo said:
C'mon guys! My longest burn took less than 20min(game time) and I sweared to never let it happens to me again.
actually, once you get past a few minutes, the lenght of the burn is indifferent. 5 minutes, 20, 3 hours, in any case you are not going to stay there all the time watching it. you set your attitude control to hold the direction (without those advanced probe cores, i would never try it), you press alt-tab, and you do something else while the game runs in background.
in my case, i wanted to make a solar probe to reach the inner solar atmosphere, for that i needed 8 km/s of deltaV (actually i managed to save some withh an eve gravity assist), and once i was there i needed at least the 1.5 ton inflatable heat shield as payload, plus all the science instruments. ion propulsion was the only practical alternative to making a ridiculously huge rocket.
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6 hours ago, yeyehboi said:
ok so i know im asking a lot of questions but im new and i want to know more about this game lol, so the question is how do i use RCS thrusters on a kerbal, because sometimes i cant get back on my ship and i cant put my experiments back in the ship, i also sometimes float away in space and cant get back on my ship. so i was wondering because i have seen people use RCS on kerbals so how do i do that?
when i started this game i did the same. unfortunately, there's no other way to learn.
the first times i was using the jetpacks, i didn't knew i could go up and down with shift and ctrl. mentioning it in case you also missed it.
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my rover has 4 terrier engines attached on G-01L alligator hinges that it can point downwards to fly. two of them are further mounter on G-00 hinges that can turn them backwards, to help push the rover on steep slopes. I also made an add-on to land on tylo that has 4 additional terriers on 1P4 telescopic pistons.
so, yes, they work, though there is some shaking. i can get away with it because the terrier is a fairly low powered engine. i certainly could not do it with a vector or mainsail.
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1 hour ago, Spricigo said:
In any case, not planing to make my picnic there.
Anyways, you missed the point. While Eve is regarded as "The Final Boss" for stock KSP, there are people playing with mods to make things even more challenging. Real Solar System replaces the 'toy solar system' of Stock KSP for, well, exactly what it say in the tin. Realism Overhaul bring to the game life support, part failure and a bunch of other things that a stock player may not even know are a bunch of things (e.g. Ullage).
2)it is still kid play compared with the accomplishments of real space agencies and people.
yeah, i'm going to install those mods as soon as i finish squeezing what few objectives i miss. and even with those, it's still easy compared to reality. personally, it makes me appreciate more how difficult is space exploration.
2 minutes ago, FleshJeb said:(Sorry to jump on OP's thread)
In this case, I'd build the props with the blade edge facing forward in the UNdeployed position, and an action group to toggle it. As soon as you light the rocket, hit the AG and they're in the minimal drag configuration.
i did. still, they create lots of problems. i never cared much for aerodinamics, until i tried to make things fly on eve.
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i tried putting the propellers of my space plane inside cargo bays so that when i close the cargo bay, they would not screw up aerodynamics. i've seen it done on a youtube video, and while i feel bad copying ideas, my eve ssto project was going nowhere and i decided to make an exception.
except, it does not stop aerodynamics from affecting my propellers. aerodinamic overlay shows no difference with closing the cargo bays
experimenting with it, i confirmed the lack of difference by flying with the cargo bays closed. it keeps flying, propelled by the propellers
i discovered that the way to keep aerodinamics out of the cargo bay is to keep it closed before starting. in this last experiment, i closed the cargo bays before moving the plane, then i used rocket propulsion. the cargo bay, is, correctly, isolated from aerodinamic disturbances
unfortunately, this does not solve my issue, as i need to use both the propellers and the rockets in the same flight.
is this a bug? what can i do about it?
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my longest burn had been 3 hours. if i recall correctly, i spent most of that reading a book
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22 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:
(And if you think Eve is bad- Venus has an atmosphere that’s 90 times thicker than Earth’s (or Kerbin’s), it’s hot enough to melt lead and it rains pure sulphuric acid near the surface!)
a common misconception. sulfuric acid does not get anywhere close to the surface, because it has a boiling point somewhere above 300 °C, which is well below the surface temperature. there is some sulfuric acid rain in the high atmosphere, but any droplet evaporates again much before reaching the surface. that means there's still sulfuric acid vapors all along, though.
still, in the list of reasons venus is awfully hard to explore, sulfuric acid rain doesn't come near the top ten.
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i have no ideas for a solution, but i can say that i also had things that always worked suddenly stop working. like a docking port connected to a robotic arm that always connected nicely, until at some point it caused bugs every single time it attached. or a plane that flew straight, then i try it again one week later and it tilt to the side almost immediately.
actually, i have a suggestion: reinstall the game. this game sometimes pick up glitches, and some of them can be fixed this way. my docking port bug got fixed like this. my plane, unfortunately, not.
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make sure that the order of decoupling is set up properly in the VAB. often i make a craft perfectly calibrated, then i decide to add one piece, and that piece always get shuffled in the wrong place, and can cause funny moments if i don't remember to fix it.
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11 hours ago, Grogs said:
I've seen enough posts from @king of nowhere to make me think this is at best extremely difficult. Admittedly, king of nowhere is trying to make a dual electric/rocket powered SSTO, but it still looks pretty daunting even for a simpler craft.
making an electric plane or helicopter that can fly on eve is not too difficult. it took me several weeks to manage one, but mostly because i had no experience with atmospheric flight.
reaching orbit as ssto, though, is extremely difficult. turns out, just because i can reach 20 km of height with propellers and have 3500 m/s of rocket fuel, that's still a far cry from getting to orbit. atmosphere is still dense enough to give problems up to 50 km, and the propellers are now causing huge aerodinamic problems. and 3.5 km/s are not enough to reach orbit. and of course i can't load more fuel without needing more propellers, which would be heavier, negating the advantage of more fuel.
the worst thing, though, is that now i'm facing a lot of problems i'm sure are glitches. i'm sure of that because previous models, which i tested many times and had good atmospheric flight, are also suddenly giving problems.
i've seen a youtube video of a guy who made it with a plane, it got to 15 km with propellers, then it had 3.5 km/s with rockets, and it finished circularizing with nuclear engines. still, he had almost no payload (it's one of the first result if you search "ksp eve ssto").
on the other hand, if you don't need to make an ssto, then using propeller power is a good alternative to a first stage. in fact, it's probably cheaper and lighter to lift up to 15-20 km that way than with a rocket, then detach that first stage and have two more rocket stages. Still not easy, but if one has good knowledge on how to make an helicopter in this game, it's not too complicated either.
also, making a small helicopter as rover for eve is not difficult. i managed one within a week, while it took me three weeks to make my big rocket fly with helicopter propellers, and one more week to accept that the design would never get close to reaching orbital speed.
finally, a little precisation, atmospheric pressure on eve at 20 km is a bit less than 0.5 atmospheres. 1 atmosphere is a bit above 14 km. still, as i said, the atmosphere is dense enough to give problems all the way to 50 km.
drag management
in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials
Posted · Edited by king of nowhere
i tested in case i splash down in the ocean, and my plane can use its propellers to move around in water too. so, i can say i already have a flying boat!