Kasuha

It's not broken. It just does not work the way you'd like it to work.

Because orbital mechanics? Bi-elliptic transfer costs less dv than Hohmann transfer in this case, the inclination change is huge and by slingshot you save a lot. I made a simulation; 6000 m/s dv just to lower your periapsis, another 2700 m/s to lower the apoapsis. That's already almost 9000 m/s dv and I'm not counting inclination change. Gravity slingshot off Eve won't help you as much as Jool - you'll spend a lot of momentum on inclination change which costs a lot of dv at that place. Using Jool, you'll get the inclination change and the periapsis together for about 2500 m/s. And lowering the apoapsis will come about 800 m/s more than from Kerbin leve, i.e. some 6000 m/s total. You'll be saving at least 3000 m/s dv on it.

If you don't exclude jets then most economical way to get 100 t to orbit is using some 20 turbojet engines. It can get the job done with no staging and return to KSC for full recovery, all you pay is fuel.

That suggests you're doing something wrong and perhaps it would help if you provided more details. Existing ways of navigation may not be completely comfortable but their combination allows you to rotate the Kerbal in any 3D direction.

You can rotate a kerbal by dragging with left mouse button. Click on the Kerbal in jetpack mode and drag up/down. Free/Orbital camera provide you two perpendicular directions which the Kerbal will consider up/down and reset to after pressing Space.

If you put your Kerbal on a ladder, adjust your camera to look at him closely, and press shift, you may notice he changes his pose. If you press W/A/S/D while still holding shift, he changes his poses further, looking in the direction of the key. And if you press Space while holding shift+W/A/S/D, he will jump off the ladder in that direction. I found it quite fun to play with. But I also did not succeed in making the Kerbal to climb up the ledge using that. I too use the angled ladder segments workaround and I agree with you it is ugly. There used to be a mod with some ladders that allowed climbing a ledge but I don't know if it's still around. Edit: Forums do not allow me to visit the thread.

Does it do that if you close the game, start it again, and then go straight to that satellite? Or did you fly some mission before that, perhaps using the Claw part? Claw is known to sometimes cause problems (internal data corruption) with similar effects to what you describe. Are you using any mods, including perhaps some that have not been updated for 0.24.2?

Yes, that's the problem with Jool assists. That depends on how you enter Jool's SOI. If you're coming on optimal trajectory (Hohmann transfer), you can't lower your periapsis any further. So you need to use suboptimal transfer with way higher apoapsis, that will give you the impulse needed to be able to reach high inclinations or low periapsis. Or you can fix that by powered slingshot, i.e. burning at periapsis of the slingshot. Uses less dv but it is way trickier to set up. Then you made your adjustments too late or at wrong places. Correctly made adjustments (if you already have an intercept) don't need more than single units of m/s dv.

I have no idea why is this called "tundra" orbit of it is necessarily around Sun (Kerbin's SOI can't hold such apoapsis). Best way is probably to launch to Jool and use its gravity slingshot to reach desired inclination and periapsis. You will still need to come with extra energy or make the slingshot powered to achieve that. Then lower the apoapsis from periapsis. As for answer how to determine that: I just launch at the body I want to slingshot off, then I manipulate the trajectory within the SOI from far away to achieve the desired ejection direction. If you do it from sufficient distance, these maneuvers cost single units of dv. Acquire an intercept, place a maneuver about halfway through the transfer, pull handles (or use mouse wheel over maneuver icons) and watch what your exit trajectory does.

On a ladder, the Kerbal follows certain path and that allows him to traverse from one ladder to another. To be able to climb up a ledge, the ladder would need its path extended by a curved bit at the end and that might interfere with matching the ladder to another ladder. But with tweakables it could be done that there would be an option if you want to use the ladder to climb up a ledge or not.

Any wings with symmetric airfoil do the same. Symmetric airfoils are used e.g. for aerobatic airplanes.

Wings are horizontal so they produce no lift. And the ring of control surfaces below them is placed the wrong way, they act in opposite direction. Give those wings a little tilt and it will go up. Edit: and it also needs more wings Edit2: longer wings help as they meet higher airspeed and therefore have higher lift at ends.

I'm with the polar parking orbit group here, if you're planning to visit multiple places on the planet, park in polar orbit and let the planet rotate below you. The same for any kind of surface scanning. You can park in polar orbit regardless of direction from which you'll come, there's onyl slight problem with phasing the ejection. but for that, all you need is a bielliptic plane change directly to the inclination in which you need to eject, and if you're lucky and do it right that change already comes with great deal of your ejection burn.

To me it is like if I have found a block of soap in a box labeled "butter". I actually did some experiments on zero-g flying previously and here I thought hey, maybe it's time to pull this design out again? ... (reading the rules) ... Oh right, someone has no clue what Vomit Comet is. I can understand that finding a good name might be the greatest challenge sometimes but in such case, calling it after the objective might be probably the best thing to do. Of course there's no problem with getting creative about the name as long as it is not misleading. What about "Maximum stress challenge"?

KSP is kind of like an RPG game, but instead of leveling up your character, you level up yourself. And you cannot delevel or start from scratch. That's kind of a problem, actually. Requests for realism in KSP are something like requests for adding more endgame content in any other game. Experienced players are becoming bored with the game or its individual aspects being already too easy for them and want some further challenge. KSP as it is has rather steep learning curve compared to any other game. As it is, KSP is demanding but also rewarding and exciting since the wery beginning. I believe every experienced player can remember things in KSP that started as absolutely impossible, went through challenging, daily routine, and ended up too boring to do. Increasing realism usually means making things harder. That will result in increasing perceived difficulty of the game. Overdo it, and it will be more demanding for everyone, but exciting and rewarding only for some. The rest will just find the game too hard, frustrating, and boring since the beginning. My opinion is that probably best way to introduce realism into the game would be through "ascending" through different universes. You start in current Kerbal system with its current planets and its soupy atmospheres and once you finish the Career game in it, another universe (actually just a planetary system) opens for you with more realistic physics. Some things become perhaps easier, most things become slightly harder. Your designs from the old world will mostly not work because of differences but you'll still carry the experience with orbital physics and you'll be able to refine it in a world closer to reality. If you pass this, a real solar system (or something of its scale, just inhabited by Kerbals) opens for you. This way it keeps the simpleness and arcade-y feeling at the start but gives you the endgame thrill so many people are asking for.

Very nice misson, congratulations to completing the challenge! I'd just like to point out that your "double apoapsis" ascent method is IMO suboptimal. You may get some total velocity but you're losing your upwards momentum and need to fight gravity to get it back. I might be wrong about it but every time I overshot my ascent and had to fall a bit to get air again, I spent more fuel and time getting to orbit than when I made sure my ascent is monotonous.

I don't think the actual Vomit Comet would score high in this challenge. Its aim is doing quite the opposite to the objectives.

The meaning of "bigger is not better" is in the fact that fuel tank with engine gives you exactly the same performance as two fuel tanks with two engines, assuming you run them at once. Apart of that, there's of course many ways how to build rocket bigger to make it better.

You cannot move bodies in the game using engines or fuel but you can use Hyperedit to give them new orbital parameters. So yes, using Hyperedit you can put Gilly in orbit around Kerbin.

I never had cash shortage in the career run. Up until the moment when I got the turbojet, I used SRB-lifted rockets. SRBs are cheap so writing them off was no major problem and then I made sure I'll return the rest of the rocket to KSC or as close as possible. I usually ran several contracts in single mission, usually three or four. Sent two scientific missions (again with suitable testing contracts), one to Mun, one to Minmus. Then I concentrated purely on contracts giving science and stopped running science missions at all. When I unlocked turbojets I built jet-powered lifters and starting there all my costs were for fuel only. Every time I returned from a mission, there was about a million more on my account. I finished the tech tree using science from contracts and only after that I started taking "send science data from..." or "plant flag on..." contracts just for fun.

I love it so much I had to try it too, alias shameless copy. I would never guess it can do the job. Except I formed it to have landing gear instead of the reaction wheel. 20x20 to land to almost 100x100 with fuel left, probably thanks to saved mass.

I'm more interested in talking numbers and facts than impressions and nuances of english language. I don't find such definition useful. Whether or not you're able to get out of atmosphere on jets with given amount of intakes depends on your piloting skills. By putting strong restriction on them for good pilots, you're putting unnecessarily stringent restrictions on less experienced players. Also, I was expecting talking about where the ridiculous amount of intakes starts with airhogging. Your limit is IMO ridiculously low. Absolute majority of spaceplane users in KSP would IMO qualify as airhoggers. The idea of restricting number of intakes per mass of the plane is nice, though. I like it. Applying that to limits I consider common sense, i.e. one jet per 10 tons and three intakes per jet would yield about 0.3 intake per ton. That sounds reasonable to me.

"Ridiculously" is just your emotion on it, not an objective assessment. I agree it makes things easier. If you want to defend the "ridiculously" part, please come up with an example showing any ridiculous difference. That comes with jet engines, not related to intake spam. Even with 0.1 RAM intake per ton as per Jouni's definition, you save a lot of fuel and money by building lifter stages with jets. Once you have your fully recoverable SSTO lifter, more intakes make it easier but not even significantly cheaper. KSP is a game, not a simulator. Almost everything in it does not adequately represent how its real-life counterpart functions.

Okay, that sounds like a definition. A bit strict to my tastes and most less experienced spaceplane pilots would be pretty upset about it but it at least quantifies things. My plane had 5 t with one intake. Gotta try it with a 10 t one. "Well past" is not the right word here. There's no way to go faster than 2400 m/s on turbojets. Maybe some 30 m/s if you use intakes at level which even I consider reasonable, and 200 m/s if you really go nuts. It still won't get you to Mun. Or just a small impulse in the right direction to jump out of the atmosphere and get rid of all drag-related issues. I still don't see any substantial benefit coming out of intake spam here. No matter how high you can fly on what throttle, you can't go faster than 2400 m/s. You can't fly to Mun on jets unless you use stored air. Which I agree is an exploit. You can kick yourself on trajectory with apoapsis above atmosphere and periapsis in ground or in atmosphere, and you can still do that with even less intakes than your definition considers normal. Then you got to circularize and based on how well you have kicked yourself you may need more or less of rocket fuel. Besides saving insane amounts of fuel on lifting yourself through the atmosphere which already comes with turbojets with any amount of intakes, we're talking literally tens of units of fuel per ton less or more needed to circularize. Do you really consider that substantial? I don't. Personally I see intake spam (as in huge amounts) as a newbie thing. If you need to spam intakes it means you can't fly planes efficiently. Actually planes intended for newbies (such as stock ones) should IMO contain sufficient intakes to let even inexperienced player reach orbit. I'm not talking about spamming, I'm talking about amounts maybe 3-4 times higher than what's set by your definition. Not extremely easy but also not extremely hard. The better you get the less intakes you need up to the point when you start finding less intakes too uncomfortable. That's no exploit, that's how you find out where you have the most fun. Then, if you want more challenge, you can start building SSTOs using normal jets.

Those flying strut nubs next to the decoupler suggest there's something wrong with the ship structure. When designing a rocket, if you place something in symmetry on a part, then make sure you don't try to place that part in symmetry again. While it can be used to achieve some cool effects like 5-fold symmetry, it's also known to cause problems like that a part appearing to be attached to something is in fact attached to something else.