Ravenchant

@Mecripp Sure, updated! And thank you for noticing, I guess it got broken when Dropbox changed how public folders work. The new link is here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rvxemqa7igmyhoy/Gryphon Fairings v1.4.zip?dl=0 But keep in mind it's two years old now, so...likely horribly broken. I'll take a look at it, but don't expect it before mid-February

Supersonic banking turn 15 m above ground. Eat your heart out, Tom Cruise. Granted, the whole thing disintegrated a bit later, but that was because Bill pulled the stick too hard.

@NSEP some of the later Gemini missions, upon docking with the Agena, attached a tether to it and even sort of spun around a bit for artificial (micro)gravity, you could try that

Hey, that rings a bell Your Stargazer is top-notch, by the way! As long as we're posting air-launched stuff, here's my carrier plane after its first successful landing: Taking off with the rocket... ...and the rocket in flight. It's a three stage solid vehicle coming in at about 1500 kg, give or take, but very temperamental. I had to do like four tries to get it into orbit, half of the time it would just flip over after release. Stage 1 gets it above the Karman line and the fins provide control, then the fairing is ejected and nitrogen thrusters underneath align the whole thing, a set of small solid rockets spins it up and stage 2, then 3 are ignited. The payload needs to include a probe core for staging, but I got around 20 kg to low orbit and 10 kg to a very elliptical one. Not useful at all, but a nice exercise in minimalism.

@Krases does...does the last one have 90 F1s in the first stage? Talk about a falcon heavy In unrelated news, I've started playing again after a 4 month pause so new stuff is coming soonTM. A bit of hardware for crewed Moon landings is designed, right now it looks like a multiple-launch lunar orbit rendezvous architecture.

Indeed, it's a bit pudgy. Maybe you could withhold the kielbasa for a while Did the lander go to Titan or Saturn itself?

The Mlaj-3 apparatus opens its petals and phones home after a soft landing some 40 km west of Lindsay crater, December 1969.

Say what? In most vehicles that do this, the stage starts 2-3 seconds before flameout (for Chang Zheng, the verniers are ignited 6 seconds ahead, that's the most I could find).

@Phineas Freak has done a lot of work on making the mod compatible with Realism Overhaul - proper sizing, propellant usage and other things. It will be supported in the next release. As RO isn't updated to 1.2 yet and it seems you are really impatient, I suggest following this spreadsheet to manually install the needed mods, then download the RealEnginesPack compatibility patches from the RO Github repository. This should fix some of your issues.

Yeah, it's easier to see from the underside They're attached to a thing procedural tank and offset, the tank itself is mounted on an IR hinge which sits on a stubby procedural wing pylon for clearance (not the same probe, but the panels are identical).

@DrLicor, they come with RO as far as I know. Each wing is one large-ish fixed panel and two small ones.

Pfft, this thread needs more replies. @Firemetal, how is your landing coming along? Anyway, here's Kaon: It was supposed to lift around 12 tons to low orbit, and K-mesons have approximately half the rest mass of protons, hence the name. But it actually does quite a bit more, 15.5 tons to a 65° inclined low orbit. The lower stage, block-C, has 4 NK-15 engines. I couldn't get them to fit on a 4m core, so they are arranged in a thrust structure underneath the 2m kerosene tanks. Also, they magically can gimbal (sekrit dokuments tovarischi xaxaxa). The insulated central tank is 4m across and holds liquid oxygen. The upper stage, block-L, has a single NK-19 engine burning for almost 7.5 minutes and starts out at a paltry 0.57 TWR when flying with maximum payload. Chinese-style hotstaging (the interstage remains attached to stage 1) Test payload. Roll control of stage 2 is via nitrous oxide thrusters, but they're pretty weak. As for craft files: The Kaon one is here, I think RP-0 and SovietRockets are enough for it to load. I also added two launch towers to the subassemblies folder, one with arms as seen below and the other without it to remove the IR dependency. That rocket, btw, launched the TLI stage for a crewed Moon flyby, with the Gemini launching separately. Here's the whole complex just before docking:

[F]irst teaser of a hot rear end, more pics and a DL link following soon In unrelated news, I finally managed to get into orbit around Venus. With two craft, no less! Also, the most recent mission report is here in case anyone wants to read those.

Good luck, and keep us posted! But a crewed Gemini capsule sips 2 kilowatts and IIRC the small panels give like 40 watts apiece when fully lit? Better double up on those batteries

I for one am still on 1.1.3. But yes, the prerelease apparently works if you take some time to set it up manually Looking good! What are you using for power generation? Batteries are fine if you plan to stay on the surface for a day or two, but for longer missions fuel or solar cells would be the lighter option.

The white-ish centre part of the station and Gemini capsule are from FASA, the docking ports as well as the forward set of solar panels from RaiderNick's Salyut and Soyuz mods (dunno which). Most of the other stuff is made from procedural parts and fairings.

Wow, that thing is big. Impressive work on the spacecraft, too! How did your lens caps fare? Good job! Paraphrasing a certain rather famous author, half of RO's difficulties are now behind you=) Anyway, I reckon I'll spam this thread some more, here's a year-and-a-half old thing recently rebuilt for 1.1.3. Not terribly useful, but it's RP-0 stock so if anyone wants to play with it it's in my craft file folder. Eaglet Basically a small ICBM with the warhead and decoy attachment points swapped for payload interfaces.There's three of them and, oh right, no fairing. Like on a couple of Russian sea-launched missiles, everything has to fit in the last interstage. After orbital insertion, the upper stage discards its main engine and can maneuver using nose-mounted post-boost thrusters before the satellites detach. Due to proximity to the engine, they have to be covered by protective shrouds during launch, but...eh. Would've made it even more useless. Payload: 100 kg to low Sun-Synchronous orbit, ~150 kg to LEO from Wallops? GLOW: 40.0 t Cost: 24.4 million in 2017 USD. But at least the military pays for it... Upper stage after engine ejection, two satellites visible. This is an old pic from 1.0.something, but I didn't change much. In other news, you'll get to see a crewed circumlunar mission soon, along with a couple of more modern vehicles=)

The second Earth Orbiting Laboratory (EOL-2) "H.S. Leavitt" snugly wrapped in its fairing prior to launch from Florida... ...and, a few days later, accepting its first two-person crew for a month's stay.

I'm fairly certain the issue is due to the way part costs are applied: in the RP-0 tech tree, there's no issue (except for the ridiculously expensive Castor 120), but those prices are for the case + propellant. In the game, when you place a part, you pay the RP-0 cost for the empty part plus the propellant cost, and HPTB & co. aren't exactly cheap (I just checked the UA-1204: from 4600 to 7500-something funds).

Ooh, a thread I can contribute to @winged, I'm going to copy your posting style if you don't mind. The rockets are great btw! Here's a link to a Dropbox folder with the couple of crafts I feel are good enough to share. I only have pictures for a couple of them right now though, so I'll "present" the rest later. Rhea A+ So, this one is a workhorse. 3.35m wide core with 4 LR89-NA-5 engines on stage 1 and a matching fixed LR-105 with 4 LR-101 verniers for attitude control on stage 2. 3m wide payload fairing when flying cargo. Hot-staging. Payload: roughly 4 000 kg to LEO -or- advanced Gemini for station mission, as pictured below. GLOW: 222.8 t Cost: varies, but 60 million in 2017 $ for cargo version. Rhea B A 1.8m diameter restartable upper stage with an AJ10-118E engine on top of the Rhea A+ stack for GTO and lunar/interplanetary missions. It does look a bit weird though, and the fairing space is very limited. Payload: ~1 000 kg to GTO or ~600 kg to TLI GLOW: ~225 t Cost: 65.4 million in 2017 $ Here's the upper stage in action Iapetos 1A10/1A00 4.57m core diameter, 4m fairing, 2 UA-1204 solid motors serve as its first stage. The two LR87-H2 vacuum engines ignite about 15 seconds before burnout. Version 1A00 has no upper stage and can place...well, I never tested, but I'd guess 7 or 8 tons in LEO. 1A10 has a hypergolic upper stage with 2 XLR-81 engines as used on Agena B. The thingy could be built around 1965. Probably. It also has some issues with low core TWR, but not that bad. The version on Dropbox has a long fairing for station lifting, I used a shorter one for lunar probes. Payload (1A10): ~10 000 kg (LEO), ~3 000 kg (GTO), ~2 600 kg (TLI) GLOW: varies, 526 to 536 t (1A10) Cost: varies, 248 million in 2017 $ for 1A10. These solid boosters are suspiciously expensive. Upper stage in action G-8 "Grom" So, this one launches from Yasny in Russia. 8 NK-9 engines propel the first stage and are arranged in a flared base around the 3.6m diameter tank to avoid sticking out at the edges. Stage 2 uses a NK-9V engine along with a LR-101 for roll control and, like the Rhea rockets, uses hot separation. The fairing is 3m in diameter and can contain a 11D33-powered third stage for GTO missions and beyond. Payload: ~5 500 kg to LEO (2-stage), >1 000 kg to TLI (3-stage) GLOW: ~211 t Cost (2-stage/3-stage): 58/65 million in 2017 USD Test of 3-stage version with engineering payload:

>looks at roundel I'm sure RYAF wouldn't have minded to have a couple of these before the war

1.1.3 actually. Here's a link to the GitHub repository

@Sir_Fanch Weeell, I would generally be interested but with the "speed" I've been doing things at lately, it would take roughly forever. Do give it a try, MM isn't as bad as it seems at first!

Oooh it was supposed to be a Corona capsule! And yeah, now that I looked at the photos again it's even a bit too wide for the Chinese one...should be around 1.2m diameter. You know what we can do? We can make a duplicate part with MM and write separate configs so both capsules will be represented. Given that I don't think the historical Corona could've survived a trip from the Moon or an interplanetary trajectory, it opens up more options as well. I'll get right on it!

The real-life equivalent that looks most like it would be the Chinese capsule (to be) used on Chang'e 5 missions, but it's rather beefy. You won't mind lugging 600 kg of equipment around just to return some samples? Edit: @CobaltWolf RO stuff is done, or at the very least close enough for the parts to be usable- I ended up turning it into something similar to this even though lots of things are a bit off, but if it's meant to be more of a Corona-type affair I can redo it. Prices and tech tree integration for RP-0 will need to wait for someone more knowledgeable than me =P @PART[SampleReturnCapsule_CargoBay]:FOR[RealismOverhaul] { %RSSROConfig = True !MODULE[TweakScale] { } @MODEL { scale = 2.333 , 2.333 , 2.333 } %node_stack_top2 = 0.0, 0.5105, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1 %node_stack_bottom2 = 0.0, 0.09892, 0.0, 0.0, -1.0, 0.0, 1 %node_stack_top = 0.0, 0.53776, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1 %node_stack_bottom = 0.0, -0.18664, 0.0, 0.0, -1.0, 0.0, 1 @mass = 0.350 @title = Large sample return capsule (cargo bay & heat shield) [1.4m] @manufacturer = Various @description = Lower part of a rather large and heavy return capsule, attaches below the avionics part. Its heatshield can withstand a Lunar return with at least 140 kg (tested) of rocks, top-secret film or whatever else you may want to return. [Diameter: 1.4 m] %skinMaxTemp = 3600 %maxTemp = 1000 @buoyancy = 1.2 !MODULE[ModuleAblator] {} !RESOURCE[Ablator] {} MODULE { name = ModuleAblator ablativeResource = Ablator outputResource = CharredAblator lossExp = -7500 lossConst = 0.10 pyrolysisLossFactor = 6000 ablationTempThresh = 400 reentryConductivity = 0.01 charMax = 1 charMin = 1 } @MODULE[ModuleAblator]:NEEDS[DeadlyReentry] { @name = ModuleHeatShield depletedMaxTemp = 1200 } RESOURCE { name = Ablator amount = 50 maxAmount = 50 } RESOURCE { name = CharredAblator amount = 0 maxAmount = 50 } } @PART[SampleReturnCapsule_Parachute]:FOR[RealismOverhaul] { %RSSROConfig = True !MODULE[TweakScale] { } @MODEL { scale = 2.333 , 2.333 , 2.333 } %node_stack_bottom = 0.0, -0.10965, 0.0, 0.0, -1.0, 0.0, 1 @mass = 0.110 @title = Large sample return capsule (avionics, parachute & RCS) [1.4m] @manufacturer = Various @description = Top part of a rather large and heavy return capsule. Features 8 attitude control thrusters, avionics and a parachute. Its batteries only store a day's worth of power and the built-in antenna has short range so make sure to include a service module when returning from, say, the Moon. [Diameter: 1.4m] @buoyancy = 1.2 %maxTemp = 1000 !RESOURCE[MonoPropellant] {} !MODULE[ModuleReactionWheel] {} !RESOURCE[ElectricCharge] {} @MODULE[ModuleCommand] { RESOURCE { name = ElectricCharge rate = 0.05 } } @MODULE[ModuleRCS] { @thrusterPower = 0.075 !resourceName = DELETE !PROPELLANT {} PROPELLANT { name = Hydrazine ratio = 1.0 } !atmosphereCurve {} atmosphereCurve { key = 0 210 key = 1 80 } } MODULE { name = ModuleFuelTanks volume = 20 type = Fuselage basemass = -1 TANK { name = Hydrazine amount = 20.00 maxAmount = 20.00 } TANK { name = ElectricCharge amount = 5000 maxAmount = 5000 } } } @PART[SampleReturnCapsule_Parachute]:NEEDS[RemoteTech] { %MODULE[ModuleSPU]{} %MODULE[ModuleRTAntennaPassive] { %TechRequired = unmannedTech %OmniRange = 300000 %TRANSMITTER { %PacketInterval = 0.3 %PacketSize = 2 %PacketResourceCost = 15.0 } } }