olex

14 light-minutes away from the nearest human being, completely autonomously, a goddamn rocket-powered hovering skycrane just entered atmosphere at 21000km/h, evaded crashing into its own parachute, flew to a designated landing spot with only 2km of error, and landed a ton of a rover on Mars with a touchdown speed of less than 1m/s before flying away. Damn science, you scary.

The MR-1 Lizard successfully joined the Mote Base! A nearly perfect flight all-round: good ascent, dumped both booster stages into suborbital trajectories, reached the Mun with fuel to spare on a perfect 0° inclination orbit. Dumped the TMI stage after orbital correction and deorbit burn onto an impact trajectory. Used the braking stage to maneuver close to the base, dumped it after killing most of the lateral movement, touched the rover down gently ~800m from the main base. Drove the rest of the way, sadly the uphill drive consumed a bit more RCS fuel than anticipated, but there's still plenty left. Important: as mentioned some time earlier, if you want to drive around with the rover(s), please do so after posting your persistence file, so that people after you get the RCS fuel to play with, too. The Mote base is getting crowded, and a bit laggy. I didn't experience problems, but for those of us with less powerful computers, we might want to open another Mun location. ChronicSilence, you're up! Persistence file: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2844116/KSP/scb/2012-08-06/persistent.sfs

I\'d like to book a Mun flight, either to the existing base (although it is getting a bit crowded) or to establish a new one. I\'ll be bringing my new rover design - the Lizard:

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Donnard Kerman and I will be your captain on this flight from Kerbal Space Center to the Kerpan Island Holiday Resort. We will be taking off the runway 09 shortly. Flight time is expected to be 30 minutes. Please fasten your seatbelts, fold up the tables in front of you, set your reclining seats in vertical position and refrain from using electronic devices until we have reached our cruising altitude. In the name of the crew and Kerbal Airways, I wish you a pleasant flight! If you look out the windows, you can see we have released our drop tanks. Drinks will be served shortly. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now beginning our final descent to Kerpan Island. Local time is 11:23am, weather forecast is sunny, with no chance of clouds. We have touched down at the Kerpan Island Holiday Resort. Please remain seated with your seatbelt fastened until we have reached our final parking position and the engines have been turned off. Ladies and gentlemen, we have now reached our final parking position. You can now unfasten your seatbelt and exit the aircraft. Thank you for flying with Kerbal Airways, and we wish you a pleasant stay at the Kerpan Island Holiday Resort! ChronicSilence, you\'re up next.

That\'s a nice looking plane. I think my Kerbin base will be within your range, and I\'ll try to find somewhere where one can nicely land a large-ish plane like yours and mine.

Great idea. Just made a test flight to the south polar cap: my aircraft is able to cross the ocean and make landfall a little short of the pole (855km traveled). With some modifications, I will get that final hundred kilometers out of it for sure.

I would like to establish a base on Kerbin. Don\'t have a good spot yet - KSC-2 again would probably be frowned upon, but expect a similar range (~800-1000km from KSC).

At full throttle she will climb 'naturally' (without ASAS) at a much steeper angle, closer to 45°, and level out near cruising altitude. So either increase the climb angle before locking it with ASAS, or disengage ASAS altogether and only use it at cruising altitude. Or use MechJeb, the ILS is much more gentle and effective than the ASAS

This is my 0.15 long-range jet design, redone and improved for 0.16. Features include external drop tanks for very long range, sturdy landing gear, and ladders for the pilots to climb out and back into the cockpit. She will fly for over 800km, I think the maximum range if flown optimally reaches over 1000km. More than enough to reach the 2nd KSC with fuel to spare. She is not too easy to fly, but will get you there for sure, and look good doing it. Take off: Optional: disable fuel flow on the fuselage tanks to drain the drop tanks as quickly as possible. Enable precision controls, punch the throttle to the max. Keep it lined up with the runway, rudder only. When you\'ve just gone over the edge of the runway, gently pull up - don\'t overdo it, or you\'ll suffer a tailstrike. Cruising Cruise at full throttle. Optimal altitude with drop tanks was ~9000m for me, without drop tanks - ~13500 at the edge of jet engines efficiency, angle of attack is 5-10°. Drop tanks add a lot of drag and slow things down, but extend the range significantly - you want to drain them as quickly as possible, then get rid of them and climb to high speed cruising level. Managing center of gravity You can manage the CG of the plane by disabling fuel flow in fuselage tanks. If she pitches up too much at cruising altitude, disable fuel flow in the front to lighten the aft tanks, and the other way around. Not strictly necessary but helpful in maintaining optimal cruise. Landing Throttle down to ~33%-50%, care to keep the wings level - engines hang low on her, you don\'t want to graze the ground. Cut engines and step on the brakes as soon as you\'re down and wings level, no dangers here. The MechJeb ILS module does a really good job of flying her, just take off into the initial climb, set the cruise altitude and your heading of choice and off you go. However, she\'s not hard to fly in cruise manually either. Two downloads are attached, Leviathan 2 is the full stock one and Leviathan 2M is with MechJeb attached. Have fun and let me know what you think!

What I did to put a spaceplane on the Mun a while back was basically this. It had no RCS (or rather, it had the thrusters... forgot the bloody tank and only noticed during descent -.-), but it had the rear landing gear installed almost at the very rear end of the wings. So what I did was bring it to hover on the engine thrust, then pushed it up a bit and killed the thrust, tilted about 45°, and landed on thrust again, having decreased vertical speed to ~2 m/s and gained about 30 m/s forward speed in the process. Touched down on rear wheels, turned off the engine, let the nose wheel touch down, killed speed with wheel brakes. Sadly, because of the lack of working RCS that plane failed to come back - I tried using a hill to Evel Knievel it off the ground, but it sort of disintegrated on hitting the incline.

Damn, this is the first craft I\'ve tried to fly that brought my PC to its knees (1-2 fps in flight). And here I thought the i7-860 can still be considered plenty powerful. Oh well

Successful touchdown on Mun, in excitement, forgot to get approach image A nice and safe stop Liftoff! Uh oh, out of fuel! Won\'t make the coastline, Prepare for emergency water landing! They all survive. Fortunately the isolatable cockpit break away system worked. Trial and error for this one, Well actually I did have a bit of practice with two other challenges. First, most of this rocket is based off my bioman challenge which was very interesting to get done, to say the least. I have done numerous horizontally configured vertical landers for Mun, this time it was to combine them. Get the horizontal path in, and use the thrusters to keep drop from too much. I have had other failures, getting launch path and balance on the lander right, but not interesting enough to screenshot, etc. Mostly I would just abort and re-land. I have built x-prize style aircraft before. and with clever work, I could make one to work for this, but the size can get annoying, I like to stock parts challenge. Maybe later :3 This is uncannily similar to what I started building earlier today to make my next Mun landing with, at the second arch I found. How much work did it take to get the vertical boosters balanced? Or do you just compensate the thrust-induced tilt with pitch trim?

I\'d really like to see docking mechanics implemented in the game at some point. Then this challenge can be done properly without mods, by launching separate modules and docking them in orbit - the same way the ISS is being built. It could also be then used as a spacedock of sorts - once could send up multiple modules (propulsion modules, landers, orbiters, whatever) and build large interplanetary craft in orbit, before sending it away.

I have borrowed the Logitech Extreme 3D from a flatmate for KSP, and it works quite well. Mapped the thumb knob to camera controls, flying jets is very nice.

So I took a look at the stock repository, and only found one Munar rover in there. That\'s not in order. So this here is the rocket and rover I created to explore the first Munar arch I found. It turned out to be an OK design, I think. Rover in KSC ground test: Rocket on pad: In Munar orbit: After touchdown: Rover separated and ready to go: Checking out another lander nearby: Scenic shot with a Mun arch: The first stage is sort of overpowered, but I like to have some safety - better to have more fuel than you need than not enough. Feel free to remove the boosters, they are really only there to save some time on ascent. Prior to launch, hit G to hide the lander wheels and extend the landing feet. For some reason extended wheels make it extremely unstable on the pad (like, constant 8-9g standing still unstable). Staging should be self-explanatory: boosters ignite together with first stage, get into orbit with first stage or into high orbit with the second, second stage for the transmunar burn, orbital injection and corrections around the Mun, third stage for the deorbit burn and most of the descent, and the little engine for the actual landing. No RCS is really needed until you are on the Munar surface, however you might want to use it for maneuvering with the second and third stages still on, because the craft is kind of heavy. After landing, shut off the engine and turn off the SAS. Stage, separating the rover from the lander. Extend the rover wheels and enable RCS. Use some forward translation to just separate the rover from the lander, and tilt it wheels down. Let the rover fall to the surface - it should hold up, the lander isn\'t very high. Congratulations, you have a rover on the Mun. To drive, use RCS forward/backward translation. Turn it with yaw controls, attention - it\'s reversed for some reason. Pay attention to where you\'re going, the rover tends to pull to the left rather a lot. It will also roll in tight turns - use roll control to counter, and to recover if you actually roll the thing over. The highest speed at which I felt comfortable going in a straight line was about 10 m/s. If you use the wheel brakes, be very careful - it\'ll tip over and self-destruct very easily; retroburning with RCS is much safer. The three RCS tanks should be good for about 2-3km of driving on the Munar surface, more if you can modify it to go straight without constantly correcting the sideways pull. Have fun with it, and let me know if you have any comments, suggestions or improvements!

Thank you I\'ve been to the States a few times, and watch a lot of movies and TV series in English - it seems to help. My mother tongue is actually Russian. The rover is based on a screenshot I found on Reddit (/r/kerbalspaceprogram). It\'s a bit fiddly to get off the lander module, many hectic RCS burns and some swearing are involved. It\'s also badly balanced and pulls heavily to the left when driving, and I have rolled it on the Mun multiple times - but it can be rolled back up on the wheels using RCS. I will be building a bigger, more stable rover soon to explore the second arch - thinking of putting some engines on sideways and landing it wheels down.

Well, I finally found the forums. Hello everybody! I\'m Olex, from Germany. I\'m actually in the same town as the ESA\'s Satellite Control center... not that it\'s in any way relevant. I\'ve found out about this game a week ago or so, played the demo first, and bought the full version soon - this is definitely worth 15$, probably more in fact. I feel that I need to thank the authors of this game, it\'s absolutely awesome. I\'ve always been fascinated by space, and this just gives me so many things to go and try out, it\'s incredible Can\'t wait for the 0.16 to come out. So, what have I got so far? Some dead Kerbals and debris in permanent orbits, sure... but also, I\'ve got a space plane to the Mun: I also got it back and landed on Kerbin, but didn\'t take screenshots of that. And just today I found one of the Mun arches, landed next to it, and used the landed craft as navigation help to guide down a Munar rover. All stock parts, I haven\'t used any mods yet. So, I\'m definitely having fun with this, and more crazy things sure are to come

I did a wheels-down spaceplane landing on the Mun yesterday. Screenshots: Landing sequence: powered descent on the rocket engine up until a meter or so above surface, burst of throttle to float momentarily, flip wheels down with about 45° nose up, power up a bit, and land carrying some forward speed. Stop with wheel brakes. I also saw a Youtube video where vertical RCS was used for the final touchdown after flipping the plane horizontal.