Ravenchant

Now that I remember, @NathanKell did it without unlocking anything. If it's still possible to do, that may be the winning strategy

You need Early Avionics and Early Orbital Rocketry at most. My entry would be disqualified due to Taerobee fins (and launching from Woomera), but 37.7 tons using a RD-103, AJ10-37 and three Baby Sergeants sends the 10-kilogram probe into orbit with some delta-v to spare

This sounds exciting, I'll certainly be following the project! Not contributing, unfortunately- don't know much about RP-0 and time could be a problem.

Purely rocket-powered cruise missiles are a less than useful contraption, especially when they need cryogenic propellant... so I'm hand-waving this away as an engine testing platform for a single LR-101 (Atlas vernier). Managed to fly it about 90 km before it ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere in India

My only regret is that I have but this many likes to give. That Topaz looks amazing!

And what magnificent beasts they be! Titan I replica, I'm using it as basis for converted satellite launchers. Stay tuned (or not).

Probably more trouble than it's worth. Obviously no descent is going to be without gravity losses, but if we include a 500 m/s margin (for a total delta-v of 2500 m/s) and an engine with a specific impulse of 306 s (certainly not outlandish for storable propellant), a 300-kg probe could afford around 130 kg dry mass. I'm no expert, but that seems doable.

But the impact is not going to last nearly that long- the probe is colliding with a solid surface. For a basic order-of-magnitude calculation, let's assume constant deceleration during impact. From a velocity of 2 km/s and a one-second impact duration, this gives us a deceleration distance of approximately 1 km. Of course the ice would vaporize during the impact, possibly softening the blow, but we're still talking hundreds of meters. Can we send airbags which would measure hundreds of meters across to jupiter? Even a gas-filled sphere a mere 100 m across filled with hydrogen at 1 bar and room temperature would have a mass of, like, 50 tons. Yeah... Edit: airbags might be useful in a scenario where the lander's only braking propulsion is, say, a solid motor. Fire at the right time, decouple, inflate and let the final couple dozen m/s be cushioned. But this kind of landing profile seems an unlikely choice today.

Made a partial skirt for the missile engine. Will be optional. The rest of the skirt won't be modelled since a) then you couldn't see the engine and b) it can easily be made with a procedural interstage fairing. Maybe jet vanes though? We all know that feeling Well, maybe not all of us...but I certainly do.

Small correction: assuming decaying thrust, ditch your SRBs when their TWR is equal to the vehicle's TWR. So the moment to ditch is when thrust(boosters) = thrust(stack)*mass(boosters)/mass(stack). Of course, that's easier said than done. The main stack's thrust should be largely constant if you have the bulk of the atmosphere below you, and I guess kOS should be able to keep track of the rest.

This clip does a good visualization. Unless the "wavefront" propagates exactly at the centreline between the two beams, they get squeezed and expanded by different amounts. http://i.imgur.com/0VhrXPV.webm

There's the matter of deciding which individuals exactly get to share the prize, should be a thankless job. Anyway, now that a whole field of astronomy has been finally validated (not to say it wasn't "valid" before, but making direct measurements is a great leap) we should see plenty of research grants I wonder if the plan for follow-up missions to LISA pathfinder will be adjusted. A strain resolution of 10-21 in two decades suddenly sounds a lot less groundbreaking...

Alas not currently, but two of the shapes and textures are bundled with PF-FE.

Yup, like the flight software on the ISS, quite a lot of satellites and probes (Rosetta and part of Cassini, for example) and several launch vehicles. Fun fact about Ada and reusing old code, this is how the first Ariane 5 failed. Its inertial navigation system used the same code as the one on Ariane 4, the problem being that Ariane 5 had a different flight profile and its lateral velocity reached higher values than the program was designed for, causing a rollover when converting from 64 to 16-bit format. The guidance system shut down, the rocket attempted to do a rapid course correction and started breaking apart, so the self-destruct was triggered.

You can lock the shape of procedural fairing pieces and put them on Infernal robotics hinges. However, I don't know it such a contraption would actually shield the payload.

I finished another model, and while I haven't even begun to delve into Blender's more advanced options, it seems like an improvement in quality from the first one. It's ~3600 tris, so a bit resource-hungry. OTOH, even with that I'm positive that some of the pipes connect in wrong places... anyway, tomorrow starts the horrible task of UV-unwrapping. It'll be a while before it's in the game. Also, @DavidBowman, this may be of interest to you

Made my first mod part RO-compatible. Here it is powering a pair of boosters on the Europa 2/TA L17 (only I forgot to add fins. Whoops!)

Gadzooks. Well, thanks for clearing it up Adjusting the empty mass should do it, though it's not an elegant solution by any means.

Quick question: Can ModuleEngineConfigs deal with fuel tanks? I made a part of which all but one configs need a furfuryl slug for startup, so it has a resource tank included. I'm looking for a way the remaining config can delete the tank (!ModuleFuelTanks didn't do the trick) or at least empty it.

This one And it appears I was wrong- the gimbal on Émeraude was 5°, apparently Diamant A had 6°.

It's aliiiiiive! Thanks for your help, people Starting a new Unity project and importing PartTools again did it. Now it even manages to have animated gimbal, just needs a better texture and Real Fuels compatibility. Speaking of gimbal for these engines, @CobaltWolf, I don't know if you have the stats already, but I searched fruitlessly for a while and finally found some info on an obscure French site: L'engin reposait sur une table par l'intermédiaire d'une couronne orientable de + ou – 5 degrés permettant un réglage fin en Azimut. 5° actually sounds really impressive for such a low-tech engine!

Thanks, NecroBones, you seem to be right The relevant log portions are: Load(Texture): UPP/Vexin/vexintex Load(Model): UPP/Vexin/model Texture 'UPP/Vexin/model000' not found! So I renamed the texture from vexintex to model000, and the opposite error appeared. Having two instances of the texture under different names solved the error as far as the log file is concerned, but the part is still not showing up. I must have messed up in Unity.

Ha, we all know that procrastination mood =D And thanks. It is indeed the engine on Diamant! At least, it's supposed to. Nozzle dimensions are accurate, the rest...not so much. I tried adding a stock effect and using the format you suggested...will try reinstalling PartTools next, just in case.

Wow, that was quick! It was, I just re-exported it as model.mu and changed the line to mesh = model.mu accordingly, doesn't work. Edit: if it makes a difference, one set of girders apparently has the normals flipped, but this should only matter visually, right?

I'm sure this has been asked umphteen times before, but my part is, after being exported from Unity and getting a hastily written .cfg file, not appearing in the VAB part list at all. I've given up on trying to animate the gimbal for now to reduce the chance of hierarchy errors and stripped everything down to its bare necessities, to no avail. Here's a screenshot from Unity And the config, partially copied from a stock engine. Can a kind soul help me spot the error? Possible anomaly: when imported into Unity, the model was solid pink and I needed to manually assign a material to it. PART { name = UPPvexin module = Part author = Ravenchant mesh = Model.mu rescaleFactor = 1 node_stack_top = 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0 node_stack_bottom = 0.0, -0.375, 0.0, 0.0, -1.0, 0.0, 0 TechRequired = propulsionSystems entryCost = 2800 cost = 200 category = Propulsion subcategory = 0 title = Vexin/Valois manufacturer = OKB Gryphon description = Test attachRules = 1,0,1,0,0 mass = 0.252 heatConductivity = 0.06 skinInternalConductionMult = 4.0 emissiveConstant = 0.8 dragModelType = default maximum_drag = 0.2 minimum_drag = 0.2 angularDrag = 2 crashTolerance = 7 breakingForce = 200 breakingTorque = 200 maxTemp = 2000 // = 3600 bulkheadProfiles = size1 MODULE { name = ModuleEnginesFX thrustVectorTransformName = thrustTransform exhaustDamage = True ignitionThreshold = 0.1 minThrust = 18 maxThrust = 18 heatProduction = 150 fxOffset = 0, 0, 0.125 EngineType = LiquidFuel PROPELLANT { name = LiquidFuel ratio = 0.9 DrawGauge = True } PROPELLANT { name = Oxidizer ratio = 1.1 } atmosphereCurve { key = 0 236 key = 1 201 key = 12 0.001 } } MODULE { name = ModuleGimbal gimbalTransformName = thrustTransform gimbalRange = 2 gimbalResponseSpeed = 8 useGimbalResponseSpeed = true } }