Eric S

So in some ways, not that different.

I will confess that when doing asparagus staging designs, I have no qualms about hand-editing the file to get the placement I want, though I only edit the vertical position for the most part.

Yeah, my first hint that I had overdone it was even though I was opening the 10 in pairs, the last 4 wound up getting opened at almost the same time because the atmosphere was fading so fast.

There were points for at least one size of DEMV, I just can't remember which one.

I thought I might be overdoing the air intakes at 5 per engine. Good to know.

Yes, they could. For that matter, we could probably approximate what one unit works out to by examining the work it does, but we'd probably get a lot of contradictory answers that way. Even using the same method, I'm sure that someone would argue over what ion engine we should use as the basis for the comparison, for example. However, I think the devs want to avoid that, as it would allow them to get cornered by realism-fact-checkers far too easy.

Probably talking about the reworked aerodynamics model that will make nosecones on fuel tanks actually reduce drag instead of increasing it.

The original gave nothing for the ANT (other than corporate loyalty) since it's easy to drop a buttload of them. I think it only extended the distance between craft if one of the craft was a recon with... I can't remember which DEMV, but the ANT didn't count if I remember correctly.

Here's your problem (or at least one of them). Assuming you have your RCS turned off (it's off by default), your engines aren't firing, and you're out of the atmosphere, your only ability to turn comes from the reaction wheels of the command pods. Having ASAS turned on while you do this is bad as mentioned above, but if that's not the problem, it's probably that you don't have enough torque from reaction wheels. The thing is, the stat you're looking for doesn't appear in the VAB. Command Pods have two stats, rotPower and linPower. I think it's the former that you're concerned with here, but it doesn't really matter since almost every pod I've ever seen has the same values for both stats. This stat reflects how much torque the command pod can subject the craft to. Most of the manned command pods have a rotPower in the range of 5 to 20. Most unmanned command pods have a rotPower of 0.5. The Stayputnik, however, is the exception to that second part. It has a rotPower of 0.3, meaning it will only turn a ship 60% as fast as the other command pods. Now, that's plenty of rotPower, possibly even too much, for a very light satellite. But between the FL-T800 and the LV-N, you're definitely not a light satellite. If you're trying to turn with those still attached, the Stayputnik will have a hard time. So, the first step is to use one of the other probe command pods, ANY of them would be an improvement. They might weigh a little bit more, but the weight of the probe pod is insignificant compared to all the other stuff. At best, that's going to have you turning about 66% faster. If that's still not enough then you either need to add more pods (the rotPower is basically additive), or turn your RCS on. You could even stick a Mk1 pod under a probe pod just for it's greater rotPower, flying a potentially kerbal'ed ship unkerbal'ed.

It can be, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is. If you're having to burn below the horizon by the end of the burn, you might want to get more aggressive with your "gravity turn." An earlier/faster gravity turn will impart more of your thrust into orbital velocity and less of it into vertical velocity so that you're still following the prograde marker when you reach apoapsis. With the right gravity turn, you could be hitting your desired orbital velocity just as you hit the desired apoapsis. Disclaimer: I'm not claiming that this "right" gravity turn is the most efficient, just saying that it's right for what's trying to be achieved here. On the other hand, if it's not the most efficient, it's probably not too far off. You'll still want to be mostly vertical for the first 10Km or so, I usually start with about 2 degree turn early on so that I'm not dropping boosters on the launch platform, follow the prograde to about 10K, and then start pushing it over, harder at first, but then backing off so that I'm aimed 2-5 degrees below the prograde. Given that you want to do a continuous burn, you may want to do a bit more of a turn right away.

The damned robotics stuff is not without issues, and I'm not aware of a Canadarm mod other than the one linked. I haven't used the arms much yet, so can't speak for their stability, but I have way too much experience with the docking gymnastics you get using Damned Robotics to dock two craft.

Given the changes between this and the SEAV challenge, it sounds like you're optimizing it for balloon descent/ascent. Not only does that knock off far more delta-V than the mountain top launches, it also makes landing in the ocean and getting back out of the ocean trivial, since balloons make great uprighting mechanisms, especially in that repurposed soup that Eve uses as an atmosphere. Other questions: Since we're returning to Kerbin in this challenge, unlike the previous one, at what point do we measure the mass of the craft? I'm mostly wondering about leaving a return stage in Eve orbit so that I don't have to lift it from Eve, which I'm assuming would be counted, but it feels like it's opening things up to more Kerbal solutions that might not necessarily fit into standard accounting. It might not be worth the need to dock to save lifting about 1.5K delta-V though. Oddly enough, my SEAV entry (at about 34 tons if I remember correctly) could have returned to Kerbin given it's leftover fuel (assuming a near-perfect transfer, that is), and since it used a balloon descent/ascent, could have easily landed in the ocean for a sample. I may still have that .craft file somewhere.

Kerbal Crew Manifest. Lets you add/remove kerbals while on the landing pad, or move them around between habitable areas of your craft at any time.

Each individual section should be balanced, otherwise you'll have problems getting them into orbit and rendezvoused before you even have to worry about how they balance together. And yes, wobble will probably be an issue as well. Personally, I recommend the Common Berthing Modules addon to help with that. There's also a Docking struts addon and the Quantum struts addon.

That's not easy to judge until you've experimented with it, since the wobble isn't a linear function of the length. Without any reinforcement, just shortening one of my motherships by 25% took it from almost wobbling itself apart (it actually did once during testing) to almost no noticeable wobble. Not saying you're wrong, just that that problem comes on a lot faster than you expect.

I like the thicker designs to be honest, I'd really like to do something like the Venture Star (flying wing shuttle design). This was just a first pass to experiment with how high/fast I'd get with a given amount of thrust and air intakes. As for skill vs design, the first landing missed the runway by about half a continent, and the second one barely overshot the runway. The only technical problem with landing seems to be that the slightest bit of roll causes one wingtip or the other to hit the ground, at which point the Very Bad Stuff Ballet Dance Troop comes out to perform. The rear landing wheels are actually attached to the wing about half way between the center stack and outer stack rather than to the outer stacks to angle the nose up a bit on the runway which cut my required airspeed to launch in half. Moving the rear landing gear to just outside the outer stack would probably help the wingtip problem, but might cause me to start seeing the kinds of problems you're describing. As for KER, I modded my base command pods to automatically include it, I just never got around to doing the same for the spaceplane pods.

There's two of them already in game. And they're doing it, this isn't a released game, you've preordered a game that is in alpha, and the closest thing I've heard to an ETA is one dev commenting on them being at least a year from release. They're working on a rewrite for the parts code that should help this quite a bit, but I have no clue when it will be ready.

The way I do it is to have the second vehicle go to a lower orbit, then do a hohmann transfer from the lower orbit to the higher orbit so that both craft arrive at the intersection at the same time. It's easy to do once you get used to it. Basically, you want the ship in the higher orbit to be a bit ahead of the ship in the lower orbit when you start your transfer burn. By setting the higher vehicle as your target and then playing around with maneuver nodes, you'll get a feel for the timing.

Not realistic to blame him for it. Bush announced the retirement of the shuttle program in 2004, with a planned retirement in 2010 when the US portion of the ISS construction was completed, but was delayed because that work wasn't completed on time. Not to mention the fact that I don't think we can really blame Bush either, as even if he did make the final call on it, he was probably just approving other people's recommendations. I don't think even NASA expected the shuttle fleet to fly this long. The Hubble missions were just about the extent of the shuttles range, as I understand it, at about 2-3 times the altitude of the ISS.

A screenshot of the ship or the .craft file would be helpful. If I had to guess, I'd say that your engines and fuel tanks are in separate stacks that aren't connected by fuel lines, or you've got a separator/decoupler between the engines and fuel tanks in the same stack.

This is my first, and so far only, plane of any sort. Managed to get it into orbit within an hour of deciding I wanted to build one, though I may have overdone the air intakes, I don't gain much from those last few intakes. It is so far only technically reusable, as I haven't managed to land it without knocking something off, though that's almost definitely a limitation of the pilot and not the design.

I miss the shuttles, but more because we don't have a replacement for them at this time (and given the way the federal budget goes, that may become NASA's steady state) than what they'd been doing recently. That will probably fade when the Falcon 9 starts boosting manned dragons. Frankly, the idea of commercial space missions thrills me more than anything NASA has done in LEO lately, which isn't surprising seeing as the reason they gave for cancelling the shuttle was that they wanted to focus on missions outside Earth's immediate influence and let the commercial entities take over the day to day LEO stuff.

Yes, I think whenever you undock two parts of what is effectively one craft, you always stay in control of the part with more mass. It might be random and I'm just seeing a pattern that doesn't exist, but I'm pretty sure that you can't manage to control the part you want by the way you undock. However, yes, the [ and ] keys are just what you need to know about.

Return, especially to lighter planets like Mars. While Mars would be harder to get off of than Duna, I'm assuming that Mars vs Earth is approximately equal to Duna vs Kerbin, and the Duna surface -> Kerbin landing trip is trivial compared to Kerbin surface -> Duna surface trip. I'm also assuming that we'd either manufacture fuel on Mars, or leave a fuel supply in orbit so we don't need to lift the transfer fuel back up from the surface of Mars. Even without either of those tricks, my most recent lander/ascent/return vehicle was a single stage with just under 2.3K delta-V, though it didn't use any of that for landing.

This is usually caused by animated parts colliding. It can also happen with non-animated parts where the VAB lets you put them too close together and then they try to stop overlapping when the physics engine starts. Finally, I've seen this happen with standard EA-4 struts that don't collide with anything. Given that the only thing you changed was the landing strut, I'd take a close look at anything near the landing strut to see if something might be coming in contact with the landing strut.