nyrath

Well, the short answer is that NASA spacecraft have to work in the real world, and NASA cannot afford to take any risk that even remotely threatens the life of an astronaut. Unlike KSP

Whoa! That's heavy-duty. Just when I think I've seen all the crazy things people do with the Orion mod, somebody like you invents an entire new category. Sorry about that. Blasted bomb explodes 23 meters under the pusher plate, if the ground is closer than that the ship goes kablooey. I've spent the entire freaking day trying to make my "Physics.RayCast" hack work. There is a lot of math in there. Just about five minutes ago I finally figured out how to derive all the myriad factors needed, and the raycast finally detected the launch pad grate. And there was much rejoicing. Hopefully that was the hard part.

If you mean the ln() thingy, that is called a "natural logarithm". It is generally not calculated, in olden days it was looked up in a book of logarithm tables, nowadays people use spreadsheets and calculators. In MS Windows, there is a calcuator application. When you run it, you can drag down the View menu and set it to "Scientific". So: delta-v = 800 * 9.8 * ln (50/20) 50/20 = 2.5 You type 2.4 into the calculator, then press the ln key: delta-v = 800 * 9.8 * ln (50/20) delta-v = 7,840 * ln (2.5) delta-v = 7,840 * 0.91629073187415506518352721176801 delta-v = 7184 m/s

Yes, it is definitely the nuclear charge. I set it so the charge blows up at the bottom of the pusher plate (instead of 23 meters below it) and it lifted off just fine. I tried removing the collision mesh for the charge (and set it for 23 meters below the pusher plate) but it still blew up the entire rocket. I am currently coding it so the plugin scans along the trajectory of the nuclear charge, and if there is any obstruction the charge will stop short and explode in front of the obstruction. This is not easy. But I love the charge animation so much I'm willing to do the work.

Thank you, that certainly seems like you've found the problem. I'll focus on fixing it. Currently each nuclear charge travels to a point 23 meters below the pusher plate before exploding. This means that if you start with no launch struts and the plate flat on the launch pad, the charge travels 23 meters into the ground before detonating. OMG! That's gorgeous!

On the strength of these leads, I'm going to try altering the charge canister code: removing it, taking away the canister's collision mesh, etc. May take a day or two.

Something obviously changed in the KSP physics model between 0.20 and 0.21. That's what is happening to me. If I just place a control pod on top of the Orion engine and launch that, everything is OK. If I put anything (and any number of things) between the control pod and the engine, upon launch the part disconnects from the control pod (or whatever is above it), they ram, and everything explodes. They do not disconnect if I never hit the spacebar. Struts have no discernible effect. Using boosters to launch is a Kerbal solution, but since the Orion excels as a heavy lift engine, that sort of defeats the purpose. I've tried reducing the mass of everything to 1, turning off the magic mass transfer, but it still goes boom. Maybe it is just because the engine is too huge. But nothing I do seems to fix it. I'm still trying to think of something.

Ummmm, am I the only person having a problem with my mod? If I stack to items on top of the engine, it blows to kingdom come as soon as I try to lift off. To attach to the side? I'm not sure what I can do. Does not work at all? Youch! I'll try and fix it.

You probably already know this already, but there are some nifty diagrams of wet workshop space stations constructed out of Space Shuttle External Tanks here: http://www.astronautix.com/craft/stsation.htm

That's odd. When you install it in the VAB a standard rocket engine icon should appear in the stage list to the right. In the image below, I added a capsule, a magazine array, and an engine. As soon as I added the engine the staging icon appeared. Can you try that and see what happens?

Today, a Russian cargo rocket was launched on course to the international space station. There was a tweet: https://twitter.com/ISS101/status/361227567094702080 T+7:00: Progress M-20M Target Orbit: 193km (+7/-15) by 245km (+/-42km) Inclination: 51.66° (+/-0.06°) Period: 88.59min (+/-0.37) Much to my surprise, that made perfect sense to me. I suddenly realized how much I had learned just by playing KSP.

Hrmp. I don't understand why Railgunner2160 and I are having so much trouble. Magnemoe, when you launch, do you elevate the Orion rocket on launch struts? A Mark1-2 command pod on top of an Orion engine with a magazine frame, plus three 3.5MN magazines will launch just fine. But if I put anything under the command pod, the instant I launch, whatever I put has a structural failure with the command pod. Then everything explodes, except for the poor command pod which drops and rolls around. I'm currently tracing through the code and it is driving me crazy. It is happening somewhere between the time when a bomb command is issued, and the time the bomb reaches the detonation point.

Alas no. I've had so much trouble with density that I'm afraid to mess with it. If I was to change it, I would be responsible to deal with the Depredations of the Kraken. I think it would be best if you rescaled it for personal use.

How did you manage to prevent it from blowing up on the launch pad? The instant I lift off, the first nuke causes a Structural failure on linkage between FL-R1 RCS Fuel Tank and Mk1-2 Command Pod, things start colliding with each other and multiple explosions ensue.

How do you initiate the install process? OK, finally managed to figure it out. You have to right-click on Kerbal in your Steam library to delete local content. Click on Kerbal in Steam. Then Steam gives you the option to install.

No, I'm having Orion problems with almost anything stacked. Octstruts, monopropellant tanks, habitat cans, superstructure. All go boom. I even tried turning off the recoil shock impulse the Orion give, no effect. And setting the mass of the magazines and engine to 1. I'm still working on it.

So far with the new 0.21, all my Orions are exploding on the launch pad. I'm working on it. Hmmm, that's odd. If the control pod is on top of the engine, it launches just fine. But if I slip a monopropellant segment or an ASAS in between, everything explodes.

As a rule of thumb Isp and thrust are inversely related, that is, as one goes up the other goes down. The classic example is comparing a mainsail to an ion drive. By comparision, the ion drive has a fantastic Isp, but the thrust is pathetically weak. Isp similar to "miles per gallon" in an automobile. Acceleration can be figured by dividing the thrust by the ship's mass. If you are trying to lift-off from Kerbin, and your ship's acceleration is less than 1 g, your ship is just going to vibrate on the launch pad while it burns all its fuel and goes nowhere. This is why you generally do not see any ion-drive booster rockets. Thrust-to-weight ratio is a rule of thumb measure of how powerful an engine is. You divide the engine's thrust by the engine's weight (which is the engine mass times 1 g). If it is less than 1.0, you cannot use the engine to help a lift-off. Generally the only time you care about the thrust is for purposes of lift-off or landing. But there are limits. Ion drive has a thrust so low that your burn time can be measured in hours. Thrust power is the thrust times the exhaust velocity, then divided by 2. This tells you how many watts of energy the engine puts out. Since it takes into account both thrust and Isp, it is a good way to measure the relative power of all the engines. Exhaust velocity is Isp time 1 g. If you are stuck with an engine with low Isp, your rocket will need huge amounts of fuel in order to create the required delta V. There is a limit to how much fuel you can add before it becomes counter-productive. The way to get around the fuel limit is to use staging.

Alas, as it turns out that is an urban legend, propagated by Jerry Pournelle https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.arts.sf.written/E1OSDY6JrRs

That will work. User configurable is always good as well.

If I may make a suggestion, you might consider adding a "stage lock" control (default is mod-L). Accidentally hitting the stage control at the wrong time is a annoyingly common problem.

An engineer friend of mine did a few pointless calculations to figure that a hogs-head of beer would give about 0.0084 kN of thrust with a specific impulse of about 8.5 seconds.

Yes, I'm with you, ammonia. -40 celsius is far too hot for liquid methane. Probably pure ammonia with no water.

To do that make the Atmosphere Curve have something like atmosphereCurve { key = 0 5000 } or an even higher number. Just keep in mind that you'll have a rocket engine that only exists in fantasy. I'm not sure why your ElectricCharge hack did not work. But you really do not need it if all you want to do is cut down on fuel consumption.

That's putting it mildly. Some hypergolics were quite good at rapidly dissolving human flesh, so poisoning was only an academic risk. In World War II, the German Komet rocket planes had a few crashes while in development. All that would be left of the pilot was a skeleton.