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Dunbaratu

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Posts posted by Dunbaratu

  1. When the ship breaks apart and the after-crash report shows the first failure as being an engine "colliding" with its OWN fuel tank, how on earth do you change the design to fix that? First off, "collide" is probably the wrong word to use since it implies that two things start off NOT touching and then touch each other through movement, and this is the exact opposite - this is two things that already are connected and the connection breaks and they become disconnected. That's sort of the exact opposite of a collision. Secondly, what on earth am I supposed to do about it? How do I make a connection stronger than simply attaching the engine directly to the tank? Struts don't work because there's no bits sticking out to strut to.

  2. If you can get this working, please let us know how. I've tried to do so myself, and even though the part isn't between two things, it removes the entire vehicle once a part is deleted out. I've also tried renaming it and copying the Resources tab to turn the part into a default part whilst leaving it's ID No. and orientation etc and that hasn't worked either...

    I ended up giving up and letting the station be deleted and I rebuilt a new one. When I tried copying the station from the old save back in, and then delete just the Buran Arm part from it in the file, It did load the station but something must have been wrong with it because when I try to focus on the station and move control to it, the game crashes, so I assume just deleting the PART section wasn't good enough and created some sort of invalid hanging reference.

  3. I accidentally deleted my space station because it had a robot arm on it, and I had to de-install the robot arm mod to make .20 launch things correctly, and in so doing the program deleted my space station because it refused to load a station with a missing part definition, and then it immediately wrote a new persistence file with the station missing.

    Sigh - that's a downside of buying the game through Steam. I didn't choose to upgrade. It upgraded for me when I tried running the game today. That ended up meaning I didn't know ahead of time an upgrade was coming until it was already in the midst of happening, and therefore I didn't have a chance to remove all mods first.

  4. 11 years and 364 days is more than 12 years :)

    a year for Kerbin is 106d 12h 32m 24.6s, according to the wiki

    I was going to ask which "year" was meant. An Earth Year, a Kerbin Year or a Duna Year? (And of course if you assume Earth year because of the "364" days being one day shy of an Earth year, you then have to ask WHICH specific Earth years you meant. Some spans of 11 years are going to include 2 leap years, and others are going to include 3 leap years, depending on exactly when those 11 years start in the leap year cycle.)

    Perhaps it would just be better to issue the challenge in terms of total number of days period.

  5. Landing legs on the roof, positioned upside down. can act as levers to try to flip the rover over. Test your design on Kerbin on the lauchpad first, before attaching the rest of the rocket stages to it. I can often deliberately cause a rover to fall on its roof by driving it off the launchpad very slowly so it falls off the edge of the platform and rotates as it does so. Then once on the roof you can test your self-righting mechanism.

  6. I can't figure out how to make a rover stop and stay stopped. As long as there's the slightest slope, the rover will start to roll. There seems to be no way to park it other than deliberately breaking the tires so the wheel no longer works like a wheel. Even rightclicking and disabling the wheel simply removes the ability to control it rather than stopping it, it still rolls freely after doing that. You can lock the wheel to stop it steering but that's not the same as locking it from rolling.

  7. The "skipping back into space" concern exists in real life because most capsules only have a limited amount of time that their life support systems will keep the crew alive. The capsule itself would eventually return to Earth

    So wait, when this effect is described as "skipping back into space" by the popular press, they're lying then? Because if all that's really happening is "the air slowed it down some, but not enough to completely kill the orbit" in no way is that even close to the act of "skipping" a stone on water. When skipping a stone, the stone would not have bounced up entirely on its own without the water being present. It still would have fallen and hit the ground of the water was missing. Therefore the water's presence is in fact *causing* the stone to bounce upward, imparting a force upward on the stone (and not just drag in the retrograde direction, but in fact a force that is actually upward). This is a terrible, terrible analogy if what's actually happening in shallow re-entries is that the air exerted no upward force whatsoever on the craft and instead exerted entirely retrograde force only on the craft (drag), and the air is not the slightest bit responsible for making the craft go back up into orbit at all, but rather the craft would have done that anyway and the air just failed to prevent it.

    Water *causes* a skipping stone to bounce upward. That's not the same thing as air failing to STOP a craft from the going upward it normally would have done anyway on its own.

    Is this another case where, when science is dumbed down for public consumption, it becomes incorrect?

  8. But a related question I have is this: If you Do remove parts from the parts folder for a ship that currently exists in flight, what happens? Does it keep the ship around but remove those parts from that ship? Does it keep the ship and NOT remove the parts, therefore causing a bug where it potentially crashes the program because the vehicle is making a reference to nonexistent data? Does it remove the ship entirely if it references nonexistent parts?

    And similarly, what does it do to ship designs you've already saved in the VAB using the deleted parts? Will it crash the game if you try to load those ships?

  9. The only reason for wanting a high thrust once you're in orbit is to cause your burns to be closer to pinpoint accurate. The maneuver nodes are calculated based on the assumption that you can provide all the delta-V you want in a single instant at a single location on your flight path, which isn't entirely true but is often close enough to true when doing very large orbital movements where you're still close to the same point in your elliptical geometry after several minutes of thrusting. But the downside to having high thrust is that it makes it hard to "STOP" your burn at exactly the point you wanted to. It starts to become hard to control when even at the lowest throttle setting the difference between burning 1 second versus burning 1.5 seconds makes the difference between hitting or missing your target. So it's a tradeoff how high you want your thrust to be.

    I find that I prefer low thrust, with the caveat that I have to remember to "straddle" the maneuver point time mark because of how slow it is. i.e. if it predicts that I will be burning for 2 minutes, then I want to start my burn at T minus 1 minute, rather than start it at T zero, so that the *middle* of the burn time is at T zero, rather than the start of the burn time.

    Also, when doing a slow burn at Apopsis or Periopsis where I know my maneuver node is entirely prograde or retrograde without the other two axis "knobs" having been twiddled, I find that I tend to ignore the blue maneuver marker and instead just burn using the retrograde and prograde marks themselves because I know the blue mark is only correct at one pinpoint time during the burn. I start my 4 minute burn and then keep a careful watch on the prograde mark and slightly rotate to follow it as it moves while I burn, so I'm never burning "up" or "down" during the slow burn.

  10. I'm confident that if we started launching our wastes into deep space on solar escape trajectories then we would not have issues with it on earth.

    Not for hundreds of centuries anyway.

    The success rate of rocket launches is nowhere NEAR good enough to risk carrying radioactive waste by rocket. Once it's in orbit, then yes it's a great way to keep it from contaminating anything and in space you won't even notice the radiation compared to what the sun already puts out. In fact there's not much reason to bother sending it to the sun. Just get it away from earth and that's good enough. The problem is what happens during those first few minutes of flight trying to get it up out of Earth's gravity well. A success rate as high as 99% would still be too risky, and in reality it's not anywhere near even that good.

    Here's a report just from a portion of 2012. Note: 78 successes and 6 failures. You don't want one of those 6 failures to be one that showers fallout from radioactive waste down onto the planet.


    =========================================================
    Vehicle Overall By Orbit Type
    Launches Earth-Orbit Earth-Escape
    (Failures) LEO >LEO Deep Space
    =========================================================
    CZ 19(0) 10(0) 9(0) -
    R-7 14(0) 12(0) 2(0) -
    Proton 11(2) - 11(2) -
    Ariane 5 7(0) 1(0) 6(0) -
    Atlas 5 6(0) 2(0) 4(0) -
    Delta 4 4(0) 1(0) 3(0) -
    Zenit 3(0) - 3(0) -
    PSLV 2(0) 2(0) - -
    Falcon 9 2(1) 2(1) - -
    Unha 2(1) 2(1) - -
    H-2B 1(0) 1(0) - -
    H-2A 1(0) 1(0) - -
    Rokot/Briz KM 1(0) 1(0) - -
    Vega 1(0) 1(0) - -
    Safir 3(2) 3(2) - -
    Pegasus XL 1(0) 1(0) - -
    ---------------------------------------------------------
    Total 78(6) 40(4) 38(2) -

    [a] Assumes that two unsuccessful, unreported Safir launch
    attempts occurred.

    (Source: http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/log2012.html )

  11. I'm curious how this worked, because when I tried it I failed hard. The wheels fall right thru the parts. Is it because it's so flat that the wheels fall thru and are touching the ground underneath?

    I don't know. I know that the panels did constitute a "bump" to drive up onto so the physics engine must be treating them as real objects for the wheels to interact with. But for attachment, I used a normal decoupler underneath the rover attaching it to the central axis of the rocket, and the docking clamps were originally not connected in initial construction. The rover was parked with it's clamp facing the front, and the lander's clamp was at the back. This is because you can't have two points of attachment in construction.

    I ended up going the skycrane route, a simple tank with side thrusters actually worked out perfect

    I was trying to avoid the problem of carrying around the takeoff fuel on the rover itself.

  12. Flipped over 5 times now :) Good thing there's quicksave!

    Build your rovers with a self righting mechanism (haven't any of you watched Robot Wars in the 90's?) like in these pictures:

    00254488F463E687EB8B73911B42536053FA165D

    D3B6D4C628B9E4C394AFF2F5E691E8305B1041F7

    Mine are built from stock landing legs parts - mounted on the roof of the vehicle. To get mine to work I had to rightclick them and operate them selectively one at a time instead of using the "G" key to do all at once, because I had to alternate using the left and right pair rather than toggling them together all at once, but the design did work.

  13. The limit only applies to the vehicle currently being controlled. All other vehicles other than the current one are operating on a more limited physics model that doesn't try to calculate all those things that tend to go wrong in the calculations when time is sped up. So to speed up the time on your low-altitude craft, go switch to another vehicle that isn't low altitude, and time warp from there, then switch back to your low-altitude craft.

    The things that do not get calculated on secondary vehicles other than the current vehicle include:

    - Rotational velocity (the vehicles stay frozen in their current orientation and all rotational velocity is forgotten and zeroed out, which also has the side effect of stopping wobbling, if you're looking for a cheaty way to do that).

    - Atmospheric drag (This is why debris can orbit Kerbin on low orbits like 30Km without degrading and falling in. That's a bit annoying because it means to de-orbit debris you have to get it to hit the surface, not just hit atmosphere.)

    - Component stresses and impacts (i.e. the ships won't break apart from wobble, or collide with other craft - they just pass through each other).

    Because all these things are turned off when calculating the vehicle as a "secondary" object and not the primary one, the reasons for disallowing fast time warp at low altitude are gone when the ship isn't the primary one you're looking at right now.

  14. No screenshot, but: I attached a ring of solid fuel boosters, and radial decouplers for them. I didn't carefully watch the staging list it automatically generated for it. On the launch pad I hit the spacebar for "go" and the solid fuel boosters turned on... and decoupled the moment they did so. I sat there on the launch pad not moving and watching the boosters fly up up and way.

  15. Mun Roller and Come Backer One

    Mun lander with a Shrimec(*) and a platform to take off again. All parts stock, no mods:

    (*) A term from Robot Wars TV Show meaning self-righting mechanism used when you're knocked upside down. No, I have no idea why there's a letter "H" in the abbreviation. I didn't invent the term.

    In Transit to Mun:

    59BF3DC3AFD8E9E1C1B36348D18088A40D5C2EDC

    Making de-orbit burn for landing:

    9363915EB49C6064A0D38BACCD9E37CD36E35FC9

    Landed:

    06A4ECEB868B4C64A351AD322D6E5A90FDDCA2D9

    Disconnected from lander platform and starting to drive:

    4BBEFDC12D128589A2666DC427ADC236E198DA79

    Self Righting mechanism (made of landing legs upside down on the roof) pushing lander back onto its wheels again after a driving mishap:

    00254488F463E687EB8B73911B42536053FA165DD3B6D4C628B9E4C394AFF2F5E691E8305B1041F7

    Driving rover back onto lander platform after an excursion. There is a docking clamp at the front of the rover that will connect to the clamp on the lander when it drives up against it:

    14341E451EF0179826E2AD8F8F9FFDE758EF5C59

    Clamped to lander for re-flying:

    9D06876A2AF17004C9A03CA9150BEACBA36407FA

    And take off again, ready to be taken elsewhere on the Mun (or if I had better skill at landing and hadn't wasted almost all my fuel trying trying to abort crashing trajectories over and over, to be taken back to orbit around Kerbin again and dock with a space station.) :

    E283FC9E78511151333CBC89A8DD0D2AD2508115

  16. Here is a screenshot of it about 15 seconds after it happened so you can see:

    96C03C97802FB9494178A999904FE52F2D1C9FDB

    I was attempting to use the construction technique I'd heard of where you can force docking couplers to couple rotated the way you like by using two of them next to each other, so your RCS thrusters on your components are aligned and not off-angle from each other.

    But the problem is that I can't decouple them without one of the bits breaking off as shown in the picture. I rightclick on one port in the pair and say "disconnect", then quickly click the other one and do the same, and the two ship modules drift apart as expected, but one of the couplers breaks off its module when I do so. This keeps happening each time. I scrap the mission and try again, and after three tries I'm getting frustrated.

    What am I doing wrong?

    I thought that disconnecting both at the exact same time might help so I put them into a common control group to be activated with one keypress, but when I press that key.... nothing happens. The only decoupling I can do is manually with the rightclicks.

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