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G Addict

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Everything posted by G Addict

  1. Anybody else getting NullRef errors from their launchpads? I've noticed it happen while timewarping, this goes away if you toggle timewarp again. Both the launchpads I've got to the Mun have thrown errors shortly after landing, causing low framerates and all built ships to spawn in contact with the munar surface, intersecting the pad and exploding. Could it be an incompatibility with the Lazor mod? Have I installed wrong? The pads appear to work fine for a while, but after they've been around a while (or maybe experienced a timewarp?) they break and do this. Edit: This happens with both the Hooligan Labs pad and the one included in this pack, I am using the 0.21 compatible DLL.
  2. Hm, from kepicness' NISP line it seems like my problems with the Bifurcator design are a lack of wing and possibly piloting skill. Our planes are pretty similar in mechanics by the looks.
  3. I find three high stacks of the big fuel tanks are best efficiency wise - three empty large tanks weighs as much as a big engine so once you get three it's actually best to have another stage with a new set of engines (or even better, make it so that you can use the same engines while jettisoning the empty tanks). OT, when your rocket makes like a concertina on launch due to crushing itself with engine power.
  4. Asparagus staging is where you have several radial fuel tanks + engine stacks all feeding fuel into the next stack via pipes, discarding each stack (or more usually pair of stacks) when it runs out of fuel. Say you have six stacks around a central one. Two of those stacks will feed into the two next to them, which will then feed into the next two, which will feed into the central stack. Only one (or two) two fuel tanks will be used at a time, and you discard any empty fuel tanks with non-burning engines as soon as they run out, optimising thrust-weight ratio and delta v.
  5. Since thrust is kilonewtons according to mechjeb, I'd say masses are in tonnes, which makes sense considering the relative size of the rockets. No way those masses are in kg.
  6. Am I the only one who uses the Poodle because it looks nice on a 2m command pod along with a 2m halftank? As has been said a few times already, the Mainsail is wonderful for getting those big payloads off the pad without building a stupidly huge cluster of smaller engines and inviting lag. Sure it's inefficient but it's easy. Most of my 3 kerbal rockets use a trio of 3x2m tank+mainsail stacks to get them to a reasonable height. One even uses mainsails all the way up to orbit! Efficient? Nah. Hassle free and ridiculously fast? You bet.
  7. I'll just try get another mission off with a full screenshot roll. I have screens of landing, but no ascent and only late reentry (at 10km, after aerobraking to reasonable speeds). Any chance of getting by with an already semi-proven plane? I'll attach the screens I do have.
  8. Why am I such an idiot? Just pulled a perfect orbit and land with an old version of the Bifurcator XN, which lacks the nuclear engine (imaginatively called the Bifurcator X), instead feeding that fuel to the aerospikes. But I failed to take screens of the whole takeoff and orbit stages, only remembering during reentry. Reflexive kicking ensued.
  9. Think you should swap the scores for Eve and Duna - Eve's massive gravity makes powered landings incredibly hard, while duna's got relatively weak gravity.
  10. Fair enough. I present to you, the Bifurcator XN nuclear spaceplane! It was actually just a test flight which I expected to fail very quickly, so I didn't take any screens until - against all odds - it managed orbit. After that, I think I had all criteria. I'm an idiot and landed on the wrong continent. Should remember for next time: it's the one that looks a little bit like Africa... Screen 6 shows the 72x77 orbit, 7 is during orbit, 9 is post reentry and 10&11 depict the landing procedure. The NERVA provides a good amount of delta v, but very slowly - it nearly dropped out of orbit. Staging is the two jets for ascent to about 8km, then the two aerospikes for leaving atmosphere, then the NERVA. I would've had better results from firing the nuclear engine while in the upper atmosphere instead of waiting for the aerospikes to burn out, but see above with relation to idiocy. I think it should be able to make a much higher orbit safely, but the Mun is stretching it. There's another variant without the heavy NERVA which pipes those fuel tanks behind the cockpit into the aerospikes. Didn't test that one, but it should orbit more easily due to having more readily available (but less overall) delta v. Once I iron out a few problems (like the jets being barely able to lift the thing) I'll go for the piloting awards - it's more than capable of pulling off a runway landing, even as-is.
  11. Is this completely dead or will entries still be accepted? I have an eligible 0.17 plane if they are.
  12. I've had a peek and come up with nothing, but apologies if chickenplucker's already explained. Why does the Bigtrak require cartcommand.dll instead of tosh's cart.dll? All it seems to do is cause clashes with the other cart mods. Something to do with the Bigtrak/Liltrak being command pods? And can I modify cart.dll based rovers to work with cartcommand? Is development still ongoing with this mod? Not a lot's happened in quite a while... On a more KSPish note, I've landed a Bigtrak on both Duna and Eve, both using a landing system based on RCS. After asking about it before, I completely forgot about the Puddle Jumper so used RCS in its place. Eve is really hard on the bigtrak - I was crawling up a 6km mountain at a painstaking 14m/s from my landing site, and my thrusters had been decimated by a hard landing. It was night, and everything was a deep purple. Very atmospheric. I also have one on Duna, whose RCS lander engines worked a lot better and touched down intact but were knocked off by my bad driving before long. That one's rendesvoused with my first interplanetary lander.
  13. Is there definitely nothing that could get in the way of the exhaust? If there's anything blocking it, even partially, you'll lose all the thrust from the engine which is blocked.
  14. Made it to Duna twice, first with a conventional one kerb lander then with a three kerb rover for exploration. Landed in a giant basin, mainly because it looked reasonably flat. I reckon I could get either spacecraft to Eve or Jool, but the innermost planet seems iffy. Need a lot of delta v to get that close in. Funnily enough, both of my Dunar landers would've been captured by Ike if I hadn't intervened, but I was most interested in the planet itself. The moon can come later. Next mission will probably end up being to Jool.
  15. My default altitude is 12km, as this seems to work well for all sizes of plane. As a rule, light planes with a lot of wing area are best going high, while ones with less wing or more weight will prefer lower altitudes.
  16. Is there a puddle jumper in the latest dowload? People are talking about it, but it wasn't in my downloaded zip file.
  17. I recently built a plane based on the GDI Firehawk from the Command and Conquer series. Now, this aircraft looks nice but, true to the original design, has no tailfin making it incredibly unstable. Still, it flies with a bit of wrestling so I decided to make its maiden flight a shot for the North Pole. Jeb naturally stepped up to the plate in order to pilot this thing, and we took off. The first challenge, banking around steeply to a northbound heading without plummeting out of the sky was overcome with ease and I relaxed a bit - maybe it wasn't so bad to fly after all. After a bit of flying, I decided to test its ability to fly high-atmosphere using an aerospike meant to simulate the craft's stratoshpheric engines. Up we went, to 45000m before burning out and plummeting back into the atmosphere at 800m/s. Once we were low enough and slow enough, the autopilot was disengaged and we continued North. Not a hitch in sight. About half an hour in, the fuel started running pretty low and it was obvious the target wouldn't be reached, so I called for a landing on a nearby plain. Jeb comes in with the engines off, hoping for a glide - landing, but vertical speed was too high and he had to engage the engines, coming in at high horizontal speed. The wheels touched the ground so lightly the suspension didn't even notice, and Jeb let it coast for a bit, got bored and pulled the plane into a powerslide, causing the whole thing to disintegrate. I thought he was lost, but then, out of the wreckage, rolled an intact cockpit with a very much alive Jeb inside, grinning like a maniac. Normally I'd end the flight and leave him to his fate, but at least he gave me some amusement. So, I dispatched a rescue plane designed to have the fuel to reach the poles and more by flying low and slow on its hour long journey to save Jeb. And so, he was rescued by his eternal pals Bill and Bob and given a severe dressing down by Command for trashing the so-called FiyaHawk.
  18. Your centre of mass will be way off your centre of thrust. Unfortunately, short of ugly counterweights on the other side of your shuttle, there's not really a solution. You could try adding more control surfaces, which may fix it while you're in the atmosphere, but once you're in the upper atmosphere it'll just happen there instead. EDIT: Ah, it knocks off your other engine. Yeah using the decouplers which put the solids further from the tank should fix that. Use the hardpoint ones - they're lighter and about as strong as the old style decouplers.
  19. There was a challenge thread a while back where people had to guess the identity of craft others had made. Wanted to put one of mine on there, but I can't find it. Your Arwing looks awesome though even if it doesn't fly too well, much better than anything I've come up with when trying to recreate a plane. I was working on a Firehawk attack jet from Command and Conquer earlier on, and got a design to fly, along with the ability the original has to enter the upper atmosphere using rocket engines. It's surprisingly stable for a craft without a tailfin, but I'd still not fly it for fun and its range is terrible. But it was still fun recreating a craft in such a way that it'd fly. Here's a link to a picture of the 'actual' thing: http://cnc.wikia.com/wiki/File:Firehawk_CC3_DevRend1.jpg
  20. I put some of my munolith hunter satellites into polar orbit around, oddly enough, the Mun. Kerbin I generally don't bother unless I intend to land something on one of the poles.
  21. The \'dong\' when he hit the ground was priceless.
  22. Does the craft *have* to be a shuttle, or can a fully reusable rocket be used too? I think I have a few SSTOs lying around, and I bet I could make them do powered landings.
  23. So, the answer is, as always, moar struts. Just that it\'s actually even moar struts. Could\'ve sworn I\'d used enough. Thanks all.
  24. Anyone got a good way to shift centre of mass using useful parts? I\'ve got a promising design, but it needs a long tail+ control surfaces to take off successfully. Unfortunately, the only place a tail could feasibly go is already taken by an equally important engine, so I\'ve had to mount it on top of the plane. It now flies like a dream in atmosphere, but because of the centre of mass being above centre of thrust, it goes nose over tail pretty quickly once it\'s out of the atmo. I could just stick a few low profile decouplers on the bottom or something, but I\'d rather have something useful there instead of dead weight. Too low for placing fuel tanks - they\'d screw with the landing gear, but I can\'t really think of anything else. Don\'t need any more wings. Anyway, I\'ve got a good feeling about this one. Entry once I\'ve sorted this problem out. :
  25. So, just got 0.16 and I\'m liking it a lot, though it would be nice if my silly massive rockets would stop imploding for long enough that I can actually launch them. What this post is really about is a specific type of engine - the larger liquid rocket for main stages. Do they rip themselves apart at maximum thrust for anyone else? If I\'m sufficiently far through the atmosphere or in space and throttle even one of them up, it breaks off and shoots through the remainder of my rocket. Last time it happened my command pod was the only thing that survived - not much use when you\'re in a 100km orbit! I mean, sure, I can just avoid using 100% thrust, but that seems rather silly to me. Another oddity is the large SRBs - they\'re incredibly heavy for the amount of thrust and burn time they give compared to the small ones, so are more or less useless for most applications. Still, EVAs are fun and I\'ve already stranded a one kerbal lander on the Mun (silly Jeb, he mixed up the landing gear. The whole thing actually came down intact, but one leg goes down while the others go up, meaning it\'s not stable, and while it survived the landing on the Mun, I\'m dubious as to whether it would survive a kerbin landing.), the first rescue mission for which is actually the one I discovered the 100% problem. So, the rescuers are stranded in orbit while Jeb\'s twiddling his thumbs in a crater somewhere. :
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