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diablos

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    Bottle Rocketeer
  1. Same thing on my part. I *can't* go back, everything just looks so cartoony.
  2. Yes please! Been meaning to ask around on the forum about lifting re-entries, since I couldn't manage to pull one off using current stock FAR (regardless of any attempts at using off-center ballast or tons of SAS torque to keep the nose up). You the man, Ferram!
  3. If anything, at 104km the atmosphere is too low, but unfortunately the lowest atmo pressure you can have in KSP is 10^-6 SL, so there's really very little FAR and RSS can do to simulate realistic orbital drag. Would be kinda cool if I were able to dispose of spent booster stages by leaving them in a ~150km parking orbit, though.
  4. Don't understand what you mean by "FAR setting". You don't need to tune FAR itself, it's already awesome As for your rocket designs, it really depends on the parts you have available, the mission profile, the spacecraft, delta-v budget and tons more variables. For sensible designs, I'd recommend having a look at real launch vehicles. With FAR+RSS+MFS you've already got mostly realistic physics and proportions going, and real rocket engineers have optimized the heck out of their launchers and spacecraft, so learning by imitation is a good start.
  5. As long as you stick to relatively cigar-shaped objects, you should be able to fit them inside of the largest fairings (3.75m expanded etc.). The Procedural Fairings mod might also help. Also keep in mind that since the delta-v budget requirements with RSS are much higher, the resulting payload-to-launcher mass ratios are much greater (i.e. larger launchers, smaller payloads), so you're probably gonna have to do a whole lot of on-orbit or post-landing assembly anyway. That's how in real life the MIR the ISS and everything else larger in space was built, and that's also how all long-term Lunar and Martian outposts are planned to be constructed. There's no launcher in the world that will bring several hundred tons of payload into orbit in one go, much less send it to the Moon or Mars and land them there. The biggest, most capable thing that we ever built was the Saturn V, and even that maxed out at 120t. And it was the size and mass of a freakin' skyscraper.
  6. Terminal velocity, mathematically, is really just the velocity when two opposing force vectors cancel out. Obviously, when falling, your downward force is dictated by gravity, whereas the opposing vector is your drag (dictated by your surface area and shape). FAR doesn't change gravity, but it does change drag, rather significantly. Originally, KSP simply calculates drag as the lump sum of the drag of all of your components, regardless of whether they're exposed to the airflow or not. FAR does much better modeling here, and so by virtue of rockets being pointy at one end and having a much smaller surface area, their drag is far less in that direction. Therefore, your engines don't have to overcome nearly as much drag and so your terminal velocity on ascent is much higher, to the point where you almost don't have to worry about it at all. The overall tradeoff is that you should start doing your gravity turn much sooner, so that you minimize the amount of time you're burning against Kerbin's gravity. I typically start at around 400-600m, or about 20-30s after liftoff. Be careful about too aggressive maneuvers with FAR though - since FAR takes your relative angle to the airstream into account, any strong maneuvering while in the thick of the atmosphere at significant speeds (typical rocket Max-Q comes at around 400-500m/s at ~10-15km in altitude, ~1 minute after liftoff) can cause the dynamic pressures to overcome your thruster/fin control authority and tear your craft apart.
  7. @KhaosCorp FAR changes the atmosphere and makes it a lot less soupy, so atmospheric drag is far less of a concern in rocket ascent. The practical upshot is that you can all but ignore terminal velocity on ascent.
  8. My apologies for sinking my teeth too deep in this. I really don't mean any animosity towards you. I'm strictly trying to debate the issue, not the person.
  9. No, what you're giving are anecdotes, not data. I've seen people testifying on their heart of hearts to the most stupendous claims you could ever imagine. But they, like you, are probably forgetting the first rule of honest discourse: the easiest person to fool is yourself. Reminds of this part: http://youtu.be/NSJElZwEI8o?t=8m44s Also, what part of this story doesn't math tell? What hidden variables have I missed? I've stared my fair share of times right at the horizon from flight altitude and never had the confidence to declare with bold certainty what you claim. As Richard Feynman famously said: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/richardpf137642.html That you would perceive me challenging your claim to be "uncivilized" or "hostile" clearly tells me that you believe it for other than rational reasons. Frankly I couldn't give a damn either way - maybe you did see it, or maybe you didn't. All I'm saying is that based on the math, the odds are highly stacked against your claim.
  10. It's much more likely you saw the edge of your own circular horizon. Sorry, but math doesn't lie. I don't mind about difference of opinion - e.g. your claiming that the game feels the same with RSS+MFS is entirely plausible - but you don't get to invent your own facts. Honesty matters.
  11. Wait, so you're saying that RSS+MFS is "[..] the same game" as stock, but you didn't try orbiting the thing? Fine, what delta-v does MechJeb or Kerbal Engineer report? Stats mean nothing without context. Your craft might very well be lighter and more powerful, but if it doesn't even get you into orbit vs. originally getting to the Mun, then how can it be the same? Couple of points: RSS doesn't do anything to rockets, only MFS does. Also, TWR means nothing without contrasting it with the delta-v budget. I can build a super-light rocket with a TWR of >50, but with only 50m/s of delta-v. Will it get me anywhere? Nope. But OMG look at that TWR!!1! Yes MFS makes stock rocket parts more efficient. In fact, stock Kerbal parts underperform relative to real-world rockets, partly in an effort by Squad to balance the game and make it challenging enough (esp. after they had made it a lot simpler by reducing the sizes of planes and giving them unrealistic densities). If you're playing stock KSP, you're probably justified in saying that MFS makes it "too simple". But enter RSS. Just for a Munar orbit-and-return mission you're going to need about 14.2km/s of delta-v. Using that rocket, you'll get about a 5t spacecraft back to Kerbin (assuming your maneuvers are optimal). All that says is that with MFS your first stage is overpowered or too small (in terms of fuel). Either get rid of the SRBs and improve your payload to orbit mass fraction, or add more fuel to the first stage (increase your total delta-v).
  12. Sorry, but I call BS on this, and here's why. On a good day, given very clear skies, you can see about 100km through the air. Even assuming the Earth's surface is a perfectly smooth sphere, you'd get a curvature of less than: (modeling the Earth's surface as a flat disc here, since on these scales it's a reasonably good approximation) 90deg - arccotan(166m / (2 * 100000m)) = 0.05deg Or about 3 minutes of arc. For comparison, Tycho Brahe, one of the best astronomers before the invention of the telescope, managed about 2 minutes of arc, in perfect viewing conditions in the dead of night. No way you're gonna be able to discern a 3 arc minutes of curvature spanning your entire field of view on a rough surface with non-ideal viewing conditions. For comparison, this is how the actual curvature looks like from almost 100 times higher than what you said (and thus amplified by about 100x): http://www.dedleg.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/light_on_plane_wing.jpg
  13. Khaos, we gotta start talking basic rocket currency here, because everybody here is talking past each other. Please tell, what were the payload mass fractions to a ~200km orbit of your rockets in stock vs RSS? In my experience, on stock KSP, 10% was easy to achieve and 15% doable. With RSS, with an LH2 upper stage I can manage between 3-4%. If I only use LiquidFuel (rocket-grade kerosene), I barely manage 2-3%. Using only basic tech packages, after much trial and error and lots of tuning I finally got there at ~1.5% (with a 5-stage rocket, mind you). Now you showed a rocket which by your statement has a total mass of ~450t. How much of that actually makes it to orbit in RSS? By my reckoning it's not going to be more than ~10-15t (~2.5-3.5%, though that depends on fuel and engine choices - something that is not apparent from that screenshot).
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