Col_Jessep

I agree that the air brakes are too cheap and too light. But instead of modding the mod I might go for some expensive and heavier visual fluff. Maybe one of the B9 cockpits. If it was just about the costs and weight I would just slap the inflatable heatshield on, it's cheap, light and reusable I think. That would be boring though. I don't want to add a giant part that will be only used very occasionally. They heat up but not too badly, 500-600°C, which is quite manageable. The forces on the air brakes miniscule. Each one only provides 0.03kN drag compared to the 30+kN of the large tank (at the time you hit the thicker part of atmo). The trick is that they just give you that little amount of drag in the upper atmosphere that you need to go from Mach 6.5 to 5.8 or something. Doesn't sound like much but it's enough to make reentry survivable. I can even retract the flaps when I hit the thick part of the atmosphere. If I retract them at 32km they already have slowed me down enough to survive reentry. Keeping them deployed after that is just to keep the crew from turning their helmets into barf bags... Now there is a challenge I want to try! So if you would design the drag brake like a ring around the ship that increases the radius and has no sharp edges the shock flows would be reflected away from the ship, right?

Hi! TL;DR: I'm using air brakes from B9 to increase my drag in the upper atmosphere. This decreases my speed faster and the ship doesn't heat up as much. I'm using a good number of mods and I'm working on a way to build my Kethane Nomad. Basically, a science vessel that can fly to another celestial body, scan for Kethane, land on a deposit, drill, refine its fuel and take off again. I'm also using Mission Commander so money is limited, fuel is very expensive and I want a way to explore a lot without straining my budget too much. Taking off from bodies with an atmosphere is not ideal with the current design, so no need to think about aerocapture. Aerobraking however would be really nice, especially in the Jool System. The obvious solution would be ablative plating since the inflatable shield is too large and might spin my Nomad out of control. I wasn't too fond of bringing several ablative heat shields or to only have a limited amount of aerobrakes. The heat during reentry is mostly caused by the compression of the air in front of the ship, not by friction. Slowing the vehicle down with increased drag should therefore help to keep the temperatures down, right? Time for testing! I brought a 24 ton vehicle into LKO. Its AP is around 90km and PE at 30km before I decoupled the engine. All tests were done from the same quicksave and without any steering/burning on my part. I point the nose retrograde and disable SAS when I enter the upper atmosphere. The winglets and air brakes keep the vehicle pointed retrograde. Test 1. A vehicle of comparable size and mass braking in Kerbans atmo without air brakes or ablative shield: The vehicle spontaneously disassembled itself a split-second after I took the screenshot. This is probably what my Nomad would experience during aerobraking in Jools atmo. Test 2. Reloaded the quicksave and didn't separate the ablative heat shield before reentry this time: The heat shield is completely spend but the vehicle survives. Test 3. This time I deployed the 22 air brakes before I enter atmo: The vehicle heats up to ~850°C which is still within acceptable parameters. Aerobraking should be doable. A nice side effect is that the increased drag slows you down before the parachutes deploy. That means fewer chutes... <3 Test 4. Air brakes and ablative shield: Only a third of the ablative shield is used up instead of 100% without air brakes! The temperature stays under 400°C the whole time. My question: Is this a legit way to deal with reentry heat? Would it work in real life? Or did I just stumble about a weakness in the way those mods integrate? My idea was to slow my ship down as much as possible in the upper atmosphere. Scott Manley (who else?) gave me this idea when he turned his space shuttle in the upper atmosphere left and right to increase drag and kill velocity before dipping into the thicker parts of the atmo : What are your thoughts?

I like multiplayer and often delve too deep in it. Still, I don't see the potential for KSP. The game engine and implementation is ill suited for large player projects, something that KSP would desperately need to be successful as multiplayer game. I don't even want to point out all the problems that come with netcode, latency and time warp.The reason (private) Minecraft servers are fun is because players have large projects they can work on as a team. But the Youtubers can't even build a space station or Eve base without severely limiting the number of parts a player may use. If you want to have a multiplayer game with space ships get Space Engineers or Star Quest. Those games are much better suited for it. I don't think KSP's design makes for a good base for a multiplayer game. I hope I'm wrong but I don't think so.

Sorry, but I'm pretty sure you will find this to become extremely boring after a couple of hours. I know many singleplayer games that would have profited from multiplayer. KSP is not among them. At least not in its current form with all the lag we already have in regular singleplayer. If we could build space stations with 5000+ parts and take control of Jeb in first person mode and walk in those space stations...

Doing it without batteries and solar panels is a challenge. Add a mod like Deadly Reentry and limited money from Mission Controller and you can be looking at a major challenge. I like challenges in KSP. I enjoy bringing Jeb, Bob and Bill to the edge of the solar system. I just wish there was a good reason to do it! Science is not the answer. A multi-probe ship to Jool will do just fine.

I think we are not really talking about the core problem when we talk about about resources or multiplayer. The core problem of KSP right now - as I see it - is the lack of things to do once you have landed. Of course you can build a colony on the Mün or Duna. Who of us hasn't done it? And then what? There is really not much to do after you planted your flag and pocketed your dirt sample. And why should you come back? Some celestial bodies present you with a challenge that is fun, like Moho, Tylo or Eve. (Yay, out of fuel!) Some have a neat special feature that makes them interesting like Laythe or Duna. (Yay, spaceplanes!) However, you can fly your airbreathing engines around Laythe all day but there is still nothing to do but bring out more fuel and admire the landscape. Why would resources have been a great solution to this problem? Done right they give you a reason to go out exploring and mining day after day. I've seen some of you guys hate on Minecraft but Notch did one thing right: He gave you a reason to stop building your cobblestone monstrosity and dig to the center of the earth (sorta) repeatedly. At some point even your diamond pick is done and you need a replacement. Exploiting resources to build what you want can basically stem your entire game as Minecraft and Terraria have proven. Is it the only solution? Nope. There are a lot of popular mods and different players like different playstyles. I'm sure Whackjob might not be that interested in mining the resources for his "rockets" legitimately on Dres and Eeloo. Might take a bit too long... Career mode, science, payed missions... there are a lot of ways to extend KSP's lifespan. Admittedly, the career mode introduced in .22 had a very short-lived fascination for me. Once you get the batteries and solar panels it really just becomes a grind tbh. And I have recently added FAR and Deadly Reentry just to make it more interesting. Now I have started playing with Mission Controller Extended to simulates a real Space Program. Still, there is this one blind spot left: I EVA Jeb, plant a flag, pocket some local rocks, type my report and there is nothing left to do but admire the view. Unless you have Kethane installed of course. So, what's the conclusion? Resources are not the only solution to keep the game interesting long-term but probably one of the best solutions. Squad should look at resource management again. If the first implementation was not fun they did something wrong. Because resource management can be extremely fun! Ask any strategy fan out there. Concerning multiplayer: I honestly don't see how this will be more than a bubble for KSP. Multiplayer can carry a game like Minecraft because you can get 10 friends together and work on a giant project for weeks or months. Well, try to build a space station in KSP with 10 people. Oh, everybody can only use 25 parts for their module or KSP turns into an unplayable slideshow for everybody? Yup, sounds like fun for - oh about 10 minutes. You got some packetloss just as you were trying to land? Oops, 3 hours of designing and flying down the drain. PS: If you can tell me why multiplayer would be fun, please do! I can honestly not think of any worthwhile long-term project for multiplayer KSP but I would love to try if it is not a complete waste of time.

I went from "I should restart KSP after I got into LKO..." and frequent crashes due to running out of memory to a memory usage around 2.5GB! Thank you so much! I was already very fond of your Clouds & City Lights but I really love the possibilities you opened up with this mod. With FAR, B9, KER, Kethane and C&CL I was really scratching the 3.5GB mark and had to uninstall some mods I really wanted to try (Nova/KW).

Yes, always take screenshots please! Upload them to imgur.com and post the link that looks like this: [noparse][/noparse].

I rebuild your ship and burned off the right amount of fuel. You have 270m/s fuel left in the ship and Jeb has another 600m/s in his EVA pack. You have two options: You can either try to land or you can try to bring Jeb into an orbit around the Mun with his EVA pack. Landing is dangerous. Bringing Jeb into an orbit around the Mun is the better choice. burn your engine prograde until you run out of fuel and then get Jeb in orbit on Eva fuel. You can just aim for the milky way. Then send Bob or Bill in a another ship to pick Jeb up. Good luck!

Today it's Minmus, tomorrow the Mun and soon it will be Tylo. The basics are the same for every powered landing, for some of the other places you just need a rocket with more oomph. Congrats! It's a larger step than you might think.

You should get that down to 10m/s or bring enough fuel to slow down with the engines.

I was bored so I Youtubed you how I got the Flyer 2 into orbit. The only changes were that I traded 2 of the liquid fuel tanks for LOF: Probably not the best ascend but I hadn't flown this bird before. · Beginn with gaining altitude fast. · Build up as much speed as possible. · One Turbo Jet needs ~ 0.08 air, so throttle back if you fall below 0.16 on this SSTO. · You can drop lower again to gain even more speed! Sometimes that's advisable. · Once you are not getting any faster you want to start climbing again. · Switch to rocket engines and pull the nose up if possible, to 30-45° if you can. · Get your AP to 75-85km. Burn the rocket engines again if you are dropping below 75km. · Circularize. · Be nice to cats! =3 Maybe it helps somebody. I had fun but I would probably switch the large control surfaces for several small ones and add some larger wings for more lift.

You can build fun SSTOs with SABREs. And they are not just limited to planes either:

Here is my mission report: If you are having trouble getting enough delta-V you should try to put everything that you don't need for the ascend on decouplers and drop it on lift off. Use girders as landing legs and stick all the parachutes, batteries and science stuff on them. A close-up of my lander: And don't rely completely on large solar panels! The can break on Eve. I think my panels broke when I used time warp to walk my Kerbal to the lander. Put some drogue chutes on your lander if you can to minimize the stress. Eve's dense atmosphere will slow you down more than Kerbin's. Don't forget that your Kerbalnaut has mass in the command chair! Add 90kg (100 to be save) and make sure he doesn't throw your center of mass off. Happy ascending and good luck!

This is what I sent to Jool: There were 6 probes on it originally. It worked pretty well except for the decoupler. It added weight on one side and I had not accounted for it. The probes fly fine at 20-30% thrust but I can't control them at full throttle. Now, if you want to land on every moon things get a bit more complicated. I send an extra mission to Tylo for a manned landing:

Hmm, I see your problem. You don't have thrust for the fuel you need without Mainsail engines. And you are not using any fuel lines to pimp your rocket. Thankfully that's easy to fix! Let's begin with the engines: You can attach more than one engine to your fuel tank and if you need a heavy lifter early in the tech tree you will have to cut a few corners: You probably don't have those little cubic octagonal struts unlocked yet but there is another way: Use the 'Tail Connector' form the Aerodynamic tab and press the W key once. Now you can attach it to the 2.5m tanks and stick rocket engines on it. With 6x LV-T30 and one LV-T45 in the middle you got 1490kN thrust compared to the Mansail's 1500. The whole setup is slightly heavier than the Mainsail but it will certainly get you into orbit! If this is not to your liking you can use radial mounted Rockomax Mark 55s to buff your center engine: None of the above solutions require part clipping but you will have to nudge some of them into place with some patience occasionally. You know how it is... Other than that you can use Asparagus Staging like suggested or use fuel lines to transfer fuel from the outer tanks to the center tank. It's not necessary though. Here are two examples: This is a 80 ton lifter without use of fuel lines. Yes, the part count and engine number will probably lag a bit but it works fine otherwise. And now for the big finale: Meet my Insanity Mark 14. As you can see she has 14,500 delta-V. The twist is that she is build from parts of the first 3 tech levels. (+solar panels because I'm not that insane...)

The girders worked fine on my Eve lander but it weights only 32 tons:

When you fly SSTOs you actually don't want to climb fast! You want to gain as much horizontal speed as possible and then 'sail' to your apoapsis on as little rocket fuel as possible. If you are seeing the airflow drop push down the nose! Once you have picked up enough speed you can start to climb again slowly. But as the air gets thinner you want to keep your nose mostly on the horizon until you switch to your rockets.

Well, I was bored and started working on an improved version. I tried to keep the visual theme you were going for but one thing lead to another and she became a Big Girl. She still needs some balancing and I have to check if and how much the center of weight will move back after you have used up all the rocket fuel. But I think I'm close.

I made a couple of adjustments but tried to keep the spirit alive: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2449177/Kerbal%20Space%20Program/XSP-32%20A.craft I'm not happy with her yet although I got her into space alright. She still flies like a brick and landing is no fun. She buckles and kicks. I think she could use more lift. If you want I can polish her up a bit more. PS: Are you okay with part glitching? I can probably hide a lot 'under the hood' and make her look nice and clean.

You can use the KSP Launch Window Planner to get encounters at any time really. If you stick to blue areas you will be fine. Careful with everything yellow or red. The red zones can turn the 1,600 delta-V for a Duna transfer into 18,000.

It does work without hack gravity. Of course not with the orange fuel tanks... But it works! You must be doing something wrong. PS: Here is a video with console open as proof:

You mean like lifting 3 orange tanks without using any engine at all? It's slow of course but hilarious at the same time. Just some wings, reaction wheels and some RTGs in case the sun goes down before you reach a reasonable height...

Oh, can I take this? I love to hide stuff in planes... The Hurricane it perfectly stable and flies very well btw. It reaches Mach 7 and only needs 40m/s to go into a stable orbit.

Don't forget to put 1 or 2 ion engines on your vehicle for fine adjustments. It's probably the only use they will ever have.