stratochief66

Nope, not realistically. You're free to take your favourite engine and make it do so, unrealistically.

That looks really impressive. I look forward to the new features, whenever they are ready I am curious if it would be possible to have a corona effect visible when the sun is eclipsed? I haven't run into an eclipse yet, but my guess would be that currently the answer is that there isn't one.

And here is my Smirnoff - Venera 1 craft It uses the some tantares spherical tanks, but beyond that it is 'stock' RP-0 (RO/RP-0/RealChutes/SXT/VSR, etc.) https://www.dropbox.com/s/lujn9acyf94tzxj/Smirnoff%20-%20Venera%201.craft?dl=0

Pretty much no engine would work on the surface of Venus, as the atmospheric pressure pushes so hard back against your exhaust. The same effect lowers the efficiency of a rocket engine at the surface of the earth, but that effect is so intense on Venus that rocket propulsion from the surface wouldn't be worth it. Someone could make a mod for using balloons to float a craft up from the surface of Venus, an existing mod might even be modifiable to do that already, but I haven't looked into it. Exploiting buoyancy would be the way to go.

I state in the very little text I wrote that I sourced the Vostok itself from Tantares.

@chrisl Yeah, balancing should be for the recommended mods, as they are recommended, I personally play without Entry Costs most of the time (since i'm mostly just testing and relaxing) so your numbers made sense to me. However, as @NathanKell says, balancing should be for the recommendations which include entry costs which are quite high (20-40x the parts cost as NathanKell pointed out) and that is if you select all the right parts, I usually mess up and end up buying extra parts as I fumble through to a final design. @chrisl A 250k launcher by the 20-40x range would cost you 5mil to 10 mil in entry costs. Now obviously you had a few of those parts unlocked/bought already, and some could be applied to other missions, but you should see @NathanKell 's points from those numbers. High entry costs are what justify the high ratio.

I couldn't find an active thread of these craft, so I figured I would try to start a new one. I will share my first human rated RP-0 craft. It uses the Tantares Vostok, but beyond that it is 'stock' RP-0 (RO/RP-0/RealChutes/SXT/VSR, etc. I'm sure someone could improve in this craft, I personally dislike how the side boosters look. Anyone else who wants to is encouraged to post a picture and link to their craft file, with a description of what mods they used to make their craft https://www.dropbox.com/s/jr68oxz5cki73lk/Marx%20-%20Vostok%201.craft?dl=0

Thanks for doing all the research chrisl ! I think there should be a narrower milestone:repeatable reward ratio, between 2-13 seems quite wide. What do you think would be a decent ratio to aim for? 2-4 perhaps? I would have to do to the dV and mass math to see if 6 times the reward makes sense there, but it sounds about right. It takes a lot of extra dV & mass to re-achieve lunar orbit, then to send a craft back to Earth and have it survive re-entry. I also agree with making the LLO a milestone rather than repeatable. Achieving LLO feels like a milestone on the way to surface missions. Of course, all I can do here is weigh in. I don't know the contract creation or modification system at all, but if you PR some of these ideas (or we can discuss them more here or in an RP-0 Github Issues page where they are easier to reference) they sound reasonably likely to be merged. @PTNLemay if you are still around, I think those engines don't gimbal. In RO/RP-0 you either rely on aerodynamic surfaces like wings to help you hold a position, or the ability of the engine nozzle to move (gimbal). I think the engines you are using there don't gimbal, and so one you are above the air, you would need to either use engines that gimbal to keep the craft pointed forward, or use spin stabilization. If a craft is spinning along its long axis (like a top) forces that try to tip it over can effectively be resisted due to the spin, causing the craft to stay pointed forward.

So I did some decent testing *pats self on back* Scatterer V0.0235 looks great in RSS with DX11. The ocean works as intended and looks excellent. The PQS/SS transition is a little rough, but it has been that way for at least a few versions back and isn't a huge concern for me. I just shorten it to a 2km window at 100km myself. With OpenGL I get that static-y effect on the water that @blackrack said looked like a mipmap issue, and the sunflare doesn't work. I also once in a while get the purple blip like in davidy12's most recent picture there. I have confirmed my graphics card settings have nothing special set. The water has always appeared this way for me in OpenGL since scatterer started modifying the ocean appearance. Link. I tried all various KSP settings (fullscreen on and off, -popupwindow, various in-game AA settings) and nothing changed. I also tried this version with just Stock KSP and scatterer, and the same situation exists. Same ocean appearance and lack of sunflare. If i go back to Scatterer V0.0233 the sunflare works in all situations under OpenGL. So, I will be using either 0.0235 if I can get my RSS/RO/RP-0 within memory limits with DX11 (it looks amazing!) or 0.0233 OpenGL if I can't.

Found a fission reactor to research more deeply. 100kW electric, 400kW thermal for 0.5T, what a deal! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_Affordable_Fission_Engine

More than just your save file would be important in figuring out what caused your bug. Are you running stock or RSS, are you in Linux or Window, DX9 DX11 or OpenGL, etc. For example, I'm building up a new RSS install on Windows, currently running DX11 and I got a full lock up on hitting the water. I haven't seen that issue before (because I rarely hit the water, except on a capsule return, but I'm taking note of my settings so I can note what was the same and what was different next time I have the issue, if it occurs again.

Thanks for the RO pull request @Shadowmage, it worked very well On the topic of cutting down part count, it would be nice to have a fuel tank that could be converted to a habitat in flight, after the fuel has been drained or used. For example, the Skylab was originally conceptualized using this 'wet workshop' concept. Since you are in the 'early concept dev' stage, I figured this was a good time to mention it as it certainly doesn't seem like a feature that could be thrown in at the end.

@Lothaar I haven't had any time to work on it since my last video, busy busy. I am hoping to be able to get 'close enough' using roll control -> directional lift to target a previous landing site, but I am very skeptical as well if it will be enough. i fully expect to have to make some serious kOS code to achieve my goal. I will have to 'one shot' the landing site from a flyby velocity of 6-8 km/s, and I'm pretty sure I can only see predicted landing sites using MechJeb or Trajectories once I enter Mars' SOI. The Trajectories mod is damn useful IF you are willing to use an old version of FAR back when Trajectories would function with FAR. Particularly since you are using a ballistic and propulsive craft, that should be very useful once you get used to telling Trajectories how to work (ie. inform it you plan to come in retrograde. If I were trying to do that (which I might try, as I think targeting the same site with your craft would be easier than with mine) I would fire the engines shortly in orbit to target the landing site, then only trigger a suicide burn near the last second and burn all the way down to the landing area. I have even half seriously considered putting wheels on my first landing craft, so I could bring it closer to the human landing party during the year or so of their surface mission before the ascent to orbit.

Very cool! I'm glad that someone is doing something with my recent RealISRU additions, and very glad it is something this cool Because I am using aerobraking and lifting to bleed off my speed I am looking for the lowest points on Mars, so I don't know of any good locations to land near the equator. I can really see your having trouble with too high of a TWR. Perhaps if you place your engines in pairs, at the ground you could be down to just 2. That should get you to a low enough TWR to land more easily. I asked @NathanKell if there might be a way to reset ignitions by having an engineer astronaut interact with the engines, as after a few trips to the ground you would run out of relights. Are you still planning to ferry CO2 up to the station and perform the bulk of your ISRU up there? Any ideas for a feasible energy source to power your ground based resource harvesting & ISRU? I haven't yet found a source for a reasonable mass for a nuclear source capable of generating multiple kW.

There are actual limitations in the chemistry. No matter how high your combustion chamber pressure is, or well tuned your nozzle design is, there are limits. If you check page 9 of this document, they list the maximum they expect to get, which might be the chemical limits, I'm not sure. Depending on where you want the extra throttling, you could consider putting your engines into a could of symmetry groups and using an action group to leave some of them off entirely, or shut some of them off when you really want deeper throttling. If the maximum throttle down per engine is 30%, but only half of your engines are running then you have effectively throttled to 15%

@blackrack The most recent version is looking excellent in RSS now, thanks! I found that increasing the atmoScale to ~3.5 causes the sun and sun flare to fade in colour a bit as they cross the horizon. I'm currently doing a little DX11 & OpenGL testing, I will report back if I notice anything interesting or unusual.

Issue 1: Place the info in the description text for the craft? ie. under where you name it, you get a little window. Issue 2: My 66kn engine is pretty much the CECE, with a slightly different mixing ratio. With SE-RWGS you can achieve any amount of oxygen you want, but the paper provides specifics for energy consumption and ISRU hardware masses for the ratio I went with. If you're willing to guestimate a bit you can probably make a different version of my ISRU unit(s) that output a different ratio. Or, you could create a seperate unit to produce the additional oxygen requested. I might re-visit that once my craft starts to come together and I make modular life support producing ISRU units. There is/was fairly little demand for methane powered engines, particularly deep throttling ones, until recently. If you want to go bigger, the SpaceX Raptor is definitely bigger.

@Lothaar it sounds like you have made enough progress to spin off your own thread! You could post about your mission objectives and accomplished goal, as well as epic screenshot galleries and your craft files. I look forward to seeing and possibly using your craft Edit: Also, Starwaster's "114 ec / watt of heat removed" would be in a vacuum. I haven't yet researched what the rate would be on the surface of Mars, but it would be much lower since surface cryogenic radiators would have access to convective and conductive heat transfer, not just radiative.

Apologies. I don't have time today to provide tons of info, logs and screenshots, but shortly I will update this post with logs and a link to some screenshots. On further testing I was very surprised to see scatterer instantly appear again at 300km altitude. Standard reminder, I run win32, oceans disabled, OpenGL. I have RVE (which relies in EVE Overhaul) installed for the clouds and such. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ym5akkphqcig4qo/AACewltGzgatnUZxtdmV9pdMa?dl=0 http://imgur.com/a/BfJD5 Hopefully @Theysen or another regular RSS user can answer any follow-up questions or requests you might have, or confirm/deny that they see a similar issue.

RSS looked super-borked with the most recent update of Scatterer. The sun flares didn't show from the ground or in orbit, and the scatterer atmo effect disappeared once I entered SS. Which is to say, the scatterer effect does still appear from the ground.

@cytosine I think either scale or rescale (or both) should be set to 1. The reason is a glitch that causes the part to revert to its default size if it is the base part of a craft. @NathanKell might have a better idea about the rest. I've seen !mesh in a number of RO configs, that might be related?

I used the data from this paper and have added a complete set of Sabatier-Electrolisis-Reverse Water Gas Shift parts tailored to Mars ISRU that are now in RealISRU http://www.pioneerastro.com/Team/RZubrin/Mars_In-Situ_Resource_Utilization_Based_on_the_Reverse_Water_Gas_Shift_Experiments_and_Mission_Applications.pdf Enjoy!

Sure there is a chance, if you configure it and submit the config to the RO Github. If you research sources for the real masses and dimensions of the parts, you're most of the way there. We're happy to help you learn to make your first realism overhaul config, there are tons of examples to draw from to see how its done.

It is generally good to say whether you mean stock or RSS, as many of the people who help and answer questions around here primarily play RSS. I'm assuming you mean stock (?). Some people like ablator to ablate realistically, others don't see the reason of having X amount of ablator if most of it isn't getting consumed during re-entry. I haven't seen a consensus on this one way or the other, so roughly half of users are going to be annoyed whichever way it is set up. If you want to see how to make it ablate less I suggest you take a look how we have it set up for RO and modify from there if you want. https://github.com/KSP-RO/RealismOverhaul/blob/master/GameData/RealismOverhaul/RO_SuggestedMods/FASA/RO_FASA_ApolloCSM.cfg#L344-L360 At what altitude does the Big G capsule act strangely? Take a look at the CoM of the craft in the VAB in the configuration you are seeing the problem in. If the CoM is fairly high, it might be worth lowering it like we do for some parts in RO, like this: https://github.com/KSP-RO/RealismOverhaul/blob/master/GameData/RealismOverhaul/RO_SuggestedMods/FASA/RO_FASA_ApolloCSM.cfg#L220

I want to brainstorm some precursor missions that would make sense to test the technology and leading up to a full, manned Mars Direct style mission. I like the idea of ambitious precursor missions that allowing testing/proving of multiple enabling technologies at once. The of the major enabling technologies I see myself being able to prove out at this point at: * Multi-ton lifting body EDL * Surface ISRU * Ascent to Mars orbit I believe I could design a small craft, not too much larger than the largest craft already placed on the surface of Mars, that is capable of landing the small form ISRU units on the surface and powering them via the sun. Effectly, the same scale as the current RealISRU test craft 10. I don't want to make the single craft too ambitious, so I would only size it sufficiently to return to Mars orbit, but not to return the sample to Earth. If that mission runs successfully, the surface samples from this craft could be transferred to a second craft that returns them to Earth, or an Ion craft could be sent along with the craft, capable of sending the sample back to Earth. The second precursor mission would be an unmanned dress rehearsal of the ascent craft used for Mars Direct. It would also include hardware capable of sample return, possibly some small rovers as well. This craft would use RTGs for power and the 100 class ISRU hardware. It would fuel up over roughly a year, sending a man scale heat shielded capsule (with a small solar support bus w/RCS) on an Earth return trajectory for sample return. This might end up being mostly roleplay, since without learning Infernal Robotics (IR) I don't see an unmanned method to pass surface samples from a rover or science package into the return capsule. I am also notoriously terrible at rover design. An obvious but exceptionally challenge will be proving that I can land 2 craft within 100 metres of each other. That is something I would like to do before committing humans to a mission, but I can't think of a way to add more value and science to doing this. Perhaps a twin mission, like the twin Mars Exploration rovers? If just one succeeds, it still demonstrates the ISRU and surface sample return missions. Or, the second vehicle landed could be my prototype second Mars Direct vehicle (the habitat and outbound manned vehicle, currently undesigned). a rover & automation could use that habitat to attempt to remotely farm food or perform surface biology experiments, or even basic secondary ISRU like metallurgy and fabrication? Or, it could just be a straight landing of a Hab, intended for potential use in a future human mission? See, tons of options. I'm curious of people's opinions of the validity of these tests, or other potential missions that could also serve to prove the technologies required for the future human mission.