quasarrgames

My current research and development process in a nutshell:

I don't think anyone actually knows what the B thing is other than a random overused symbol

why did i make this what is wrong with me

I was a teenager 5 years ago so let's see where this goes... -Be more cautious with just how much time you play Kerbal Space Program. -That being said, you know how your velocity with a rendezvoused target gets larger overtime seemingly for no reason? That's because your periapsis and apoapsis aren't exactly aligned. -If you want to stand out and increase your chances of getting into a good university/job, find a project that you really like and make it real. -Invest in Bitcoin

Ayy it's great to see that this thread is back. Been building a new fleet from the ground up. Can't wait to have some more battles. If that's an open challenge, I'll gladly take you up on it :).

I've been toying with the idea of trying to make a stock sea level Eve SSTO for a while now. Though impossible with conventional engines, with propellers it might be possible. Such a craft would need to have: -At least 4km/s of delta v (a mass fraction of at least 3.2, assuming an aerospike was used) -A propeller that could get the craft to an altitude of at least 25km on Eve (about 8km on Kerbin), preferably going 100-200m/s at maximum height This seems on the very edge of possibility, but i've seen people do some incredible things with stock propellers, so i'm holding out hope that it can be done. I'm working on it too (no pictures yet). The best i've been able to do while getting a mass fraction close to the target is 80m/s in level flight, while an optimal plane would probably have an airspeed close to 250. Good luck and Godspeed.

Yes, but he shied away from cryogenic fuels and mostly used hypergolics in his designs, correct? I thought monopropellant was a better analogue to hypergolic fuel. The SRBs are there just because it's very hard to get a pure monopropellant rocket out of the lower atmosphere with a sizeable payload.

Now your job is to make a launch system reminiscent of the designs of Von Braun: low-tech, but overengineered to the point of insanity. RULES: -The ONLY engines you are allowed to use are the Flea, Hammer, and the monopropellant thrusters -ISRU is not allowed -no probe cores. Dropped stages don't have to be crewed, however. Just time their parachutes right. -no hyperedit or other similar cheats -please check with me first to see which modded parts are allowed The part counts aren't as crazy as you expect. This 124-part, 160-ton expendable rocket can get 15 tons of payload to orbit with fuel to spare. Categories: Mini Braun: Get 3 kerbals (in command pods) to the surface of the Mun and back. Braun: Get 50 kerbals (in command pods) to the surface of the Mun and back using an at least partially reusable launch system. Brains And Braun: Get 50 Kerbals (in command pods) the the surface of the mun using a rully reusable launch system (including the lander). Crazy Braun: Get 70 kerbals (in command pods) to the surface of Duna and back using a fully reusable launch system (not including the lander). Super Braun: Impress Me. My entry: Coming soon!

Would love to participate in this challenge. Only problem is you'll need a lot of dry engine mass to make a VTOL, more than the gear would take away (gear set only weighs 0.135t in total). However, using a VTOL would bring this challenge into the realms of some of the best pilots in the biz, like @Cupcake.... Also, aren't kerbals in chairs worth it purely because they're lighter than any probe core + antenna with strong enough range? Finally, have any of you had success with building up speed in the upper atmosphere? I've been trying shallow zoom climbs, but i can rarely get above 1500m/s without sacrificing almost all my vertical speed.And this is with a TWR of 0.38. This touch-and-go tactic is easily exploitable, and can make the challenge comparatively easy. I've been experimenting with it too. You take a long needle made of fairings that weighs about half a ton, and fly at orbital velocity JUST low enough that the needle skins the top to tylo's mountains. The ship goes pinwheeling like a madman, but fairings are indestructible, and provided you've strutted your ship up nice and snug it'll survive. Highest delta V i've been able to get was 6700m/s, and only about 1000m/s of that was non-nuclear. In desperation i compiled a list of exploits that MIGHT be considered ok in this challenge, but i have no idea: -clipping tons of fuel tanks inside service bays and fairings so they don't have drag -sliding bare-bottom across the runway without landing gear -Starting your craft on high launch clamps (how high is too high?) -bringing a capsule, which just so happens to come with infinte eva propellant, so you can get out and push™ infinitely (ableit VERY tediously)

Thanks! And I really like that idea! Which is why I have more goodies to show today: Sorry for the long absence as well. Didn't intend for this thread to die, I just wanted to make sure all these designs were perfected. Swallow (African Variant) - Heavy Atmospheric Constructor Tested to lift up to 70 tons. Its built-in vernier engines also make grabing payloads easy. To dock with a new payload: 1- Press 1 to disable 6 of the ship's engines, making it easier to control your throttle. 2- Set the ship to point "radial out". This will make the ship always point upwards, making maneuvering much easier. 3- once you get close to your payload, try to keep your thrust just barely below hovering power, and use the vernier engines to maneuver onto the target. You'll bounce a little, but you should dock in no time. Download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yndudyvw8ykhehp/Swallow (African Variant).craft?dl=0 Monarch Econ - Cheap, Fast, Fun Leisure Craft Designed for consumers who want to have fun. How to get to orbit: 1- Turn horizontal as soon as possible, then pull up to 25 degrees once you reach 500m/s. 2- Turn down to 10 degrees at 8km. Engines should switch over at 1650m/s or so. You should get to orbit with about 1000m/s of delta v. Turning back to horizontal is a tiny bit tricky. Here's a good way to do it: 1- Slow down as much as possible, then point upwards as much as you can. 2- If you can't get vertical, give it a little bit of gas. 3- Once you get vertical, just turn on "radial out" and you should be fine. Download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/izr61vfy82g9fay/Monarch econ.craft?dl=0 Phoenix M2: Long Range Party Ship Comfortably gets 3 kerbals to orbit with almost 2800m/s of delta v. Flight instructions are the same as the Monarch. Just set your control point to be the top docking port. Download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tdin0atailjr3ke/Phoenix m2.craft?dl=0 Hope you like them

Let's take a minute to remember the olden days, when jet engines were practically warp drives and the atmosphere was indiscriminate of a rocket's shape. Though years of updates have taken the game a long way, some still long to feel the hypersonic wind in our hair atop a pancake-shaped ssto dropship. Alas, atmospheric drag has made dropships like this infeasible... Until now. How? I've reapplied an old technique tor creating crazy dropships the game THINKS are streamlined, but arent. It just involves stacking fuel tanks on top of each other, like a rocket, and then offsetting them to the sides to create a sideways fuselage. Sadly, all parts have to be oriented into the airstream, meaning it's much harder to make something look aesthetically pleasing. Still i tried my best with these creations. Jerdon's Babbler - Proof of Concept Named after a species of bird that was rediscovered after being thought to have gone extinct. Fitting name. Despite its unaerodynamicness, it's a great SSTO, with 1400m/s of delta v in orbit. Swallow (African Variant) - Heavy Atmospheric Constructor Tested to lift up to 70 tons. Its built-in vernier engines also make grabing payloads easy. To dock with a new payload: 1- Press 1 to disable 6 of the ship's engines, making it easier to control your throttle. 2- Set the ship to point "radial out". This will make the ship always point upwards, making maneuvering much easier. 3- once you get close to your payload, try to keep your thrust just barely below hovering power, and use the vernier engines to maneuver onto the target. You'll bounce a little, but you should dock in no time. Download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yndudyvw8ykhehp/Swallow (African Variant).craft?dl=0 Monarch Econ - Cheap, Fast, Fun Leisure Craft Designed for consumers who want to have fun. How to get to orbit: 1- Turn horizontal as soon as possible, then pull up to 25 degrees once you reach 500m/s. 2- Turn down to 10 degrees at 8km. Engines should switch over at 1650m/s or so. You should get to orbit with about 1000m/s of delta v. Turning back to horizontal is a tiny bit tricky. Here's a good way to do it: 1- Slow down as much as possible, then point upwards as much as you can. 2- If you can't get vertical, give it a little bit of gas. 3- Once you get vertical, just turn on "radial out" and you should be fine. Download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/izr61vfy82g9fay/Monarch econ.craft?dl=0 Phoenix M2: Long Range Party Ship Comfortably gets 3 kerbals to orbit with almost 2800m/s of delta v. Flight instructions are the same as the Monarch. Just set your control point to be the top docking port. Download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tdin0atailjr3ke/Phoenix m2.craft?dl=0 Monarch - Luxury Ion Skiff [Under Development] If you can afford the rediculous price of Xenon, this little ship is great for journeys to almost anywhere, with its near 4000m/s of delta v. Still needs some solar panel and aesthetics optimization. Swallow (European Variant) - Under Development Obviously all these designs were inspired by @Cupcake.... I hope i've made dropships worthy of his ingenuity. And yes, i'll post download links... eventually...

Hey guys, what's the best way to maximize propeller speed? My propeller planes can't go above 30m/s for some reason. AKA, what's the best way to mimimize friction and maximize lift for an engine, and keep this lift at high speeds?

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned before, but for side/lower stage boosters, a propellant like ALICE might be effective. The fuel seems incredibly easy (and a bit safer) to make compared to the other fuels discussed here. In addition, the Isp of the propellant seems to get drastically better with the size of the booster. For a respectable 1ft diameter booster, i'd suspect an Isp of 250s could easily be achieved. The only major drawback seems to be that a large amount of spent fuel seems to want to stay inside the rocket after combustion, but i suspect that this is simply because little research has been done into optimizing its fuel flow. In addition, how small could the payload be reasonably made in order to still communicate with earth? Several kilograms of payload seems a bit heavy. Finally, i don't mean to beat a dead horse, but how much money would this "amateur" rocket be expected to cost? A few thousand? A few hundred thousand? A few million?

wE mEET aGAIN cAPTAIN cAPITAL!

of course, as long as it's below the 1000km limit

Since cubic octagonal struts are incredibly light, they can be accelerated to insane speeds. Jettisoning them from your ship using the strongest decoupler in game will acelerate it to 6000m/s. Firing it with engines even increases this speed. So can we use this technology to shoot at really faraway things, like other planets? THE CHALLENGE: Hit various moons and planets with cubic octagonal struts by firing them from cannons in kerbin orbit. THE RULES: -No modded/hacked parts that give insane thrust or have zero mass or anything like that. Orbital telescope mods are allowed, however, so that you can aim at faraway planets. -Your projectile must be a cubic octagonal strut and NOTHING ELSE. You can fire multiple cubic octaginal struts at once if you wish, however. -Your cannon must be in an orbit around kerbin no higher than 1000km -You must post a picture of your orbital cannon and a picture of the octagonal strut at its destination -Scoring will be separated by which planet/moon was shot at -Scoring will also be separated into highest/lowest final velocity -getting into a planet's sphere of influence is acceptable, but will automatically be ranked lower than all shots that actually hit said planet -HAVE FUN! My attempt: LEADERBOARD: Mun - @icantmakemodels, impact, v=3193m/s Minmus -Quasarrgames, SOI, v=21558.1m/s Duna Eve Jool

@Cupcake..., do you think you may ever go back to creating futuristic, SSTO dropships like in the good ol' aero days? I understand that it's a much more draining task now, but i'm sure that someone with your level of expertise could still create some amazing dropships again.

I believe recovery of upper stages won't happen in the near future unless we find a better form of heatshielding. I actually believe that rocketry will briefly go in the opposite direction, with more private firms producing expendable, solid-fuelled rockets to carry tiny payloads. However, if ULA figures out how to recover their lower stages, then yes, more payload will be launched with partly reusable rockets.

Very good point. Perhaps i should have clarified what i meant be "common". This would be a future where most humans had uploaded their consciousnesses into machines. People could engage in "interstellar travel" uploading their consciousness across the vast black to a new world, all they'd need is a powerful radio broadcaster/reciever. However, you'd still need interstellar fleets for creating new colonies and for physical enforcement. How else would you fight back against alien agressors, or reclaim mutinous colonies that stopped communicating with other worlds? And what of the few flesh-and-blood human colonies scattered throughout your domain? How do you keep them in check? That's what the story would be about. The physical humans trying to maintain and control the tangled interstellar web they call society. Obviously having near-lightspeed travel would prove an invaluable advantage. If one empire sends their battleships to a star 10 lightyears away at 0.05c, and another empire sends them at 0.1c, then the second empire has 100 years to weaponize their destination and repel others. Thus, empires would be in constant competition to create the fastest ships possible. You weren't kidding. I didn't realise just how much energy it would take until actually doing the calculations. Accelerating a small aircraft carrier to 99% of the speed of light would require as much energy as the ENTIRE EARTH gets from the sun in A DECADE! Holy hannah that's a lot of energy. I now see why everyone's so skpetical about near-lightspeed travel. However, i'm still keeping hope alive that we'll find a way. And about the Bussard Ramjet, that estimate seems to require a LOT of assumptions. In all the designs i've seen the ramjet deflects incoming hydrogen into its exhaust nozzle at angles of 45 degrees or more. That seems like a lot of energy wasted. If you simply put the collector far in front of the ship and deflected the incoming hydrogen into your engine by only a fraction of a degree, you'd save a ton of energy and drag. Combine that with a low-drag scoop like the one designed by Cassenti, and cause the fusion to happen by inertial confinement as it passes through the bulk of the ship instead of being caused by the shear compressive forces of the hydrogen striking the ship, and the design seems a lot more probable to me. Then again, i'm not an astrophysicist, just saying what seems logical to me. Sorry if it comes off as ignorance. oooh now i like THAT idea! That sounds interesting as well. Ha, what about blasting a neutron star with antimatter and harvesting pure neutronium that flies off it? (silly idea, but i wonder if it would actually work...) What about channeling the extra heat into a small amount of secondary reaction mass? That's an interesting idea too. A kind of black hole battery. And i was expecting time dilation to be much more drastic. Oh well. Using multi-decade sleeper ships works too. P.S. It's strange to me how new estimates for the energy requirements of alcubierre drive travel are SMALLER than the energy estimates for near lightspeed travel.

Wishing to make a little novella set a few thousand years in the future where interstellar travel is comon. In the hopes of using time dilation as a plot device, I want to make some ships capable of travelling at close to c with a constant 1g acceleration, while staying within the realm of possibility. I was hoping you guys could help to make sure that the propulsion concepts i was planning to use were still scientifically accurate, for the most part. To solve the "where did you get all that antimatter?" hole, I know that the collision of two specific kinds of white dwarves can generate lots of antimatter. Since fusion reactors somewhat replicate the conditions inside a star, it seems feasible that a very powerful, unstable fusion reactor could produce antimatter. So what if the reactor destroys itself in the process! You have antimatter! Let's just assume it's a very expensie fuel source. The only somewhat cheaty thing i plan to do is give humanity thermocouples that are close to 100% efficient. I'd prefer not to have to deal with hundreds of kilometres of radiators. Now on to the ideas: Antimatter- So i know that typical matter-antimatter collisions produce exhaust velocities of about 0.33c. Too low for me. I also know that pure electron-positron annihilation produces velocities closer to 0.56c, which is what i need. Is there any possible way to magnetically store electrons on their own, or to supercharge normal matter with hundreds of electrons apiece and store that? (don't mind if the magnetic storage takes crazy amounts of energy (thermocouples!) or if some of the fuel decays over the two-year transfer time due to quantum tunneling). Also, what are the actual equations that are used to determine the destructive capabilities of antimatter? Bussard Ramjet- I know that these supposedly have a "terminal velocity" of 0.2c, but this assumption seems to imply that the hydrogen is sped up to roughly the same speed as the ship before being fused. I was planning to use a series of magnetic wireframe nozzles a couple hundred kilometres across placed a few light minutes at maximum in front of the ship to ionize the incoming hydrogen (using beamed power from the ship) and nudge it into the ship's reactor. These nozzles could also use the ionized hydrogen to propel themselves at the same pace as the rest of the ship. Light Sails- Probably incapable of near-lightspeed travel, but maybe a cheap way to transport cargo at reasonable speeds. A ship could use an engine to get close to a star, and then unfurl a solar sail at perihelion. A quick calculation based on the amount of power the earth gets tells me that a circular 100km sail placed 6.4 million km from the sun (the closest we can get a spacecraft with our current technology i believe) would be hit with about 3.0*10^16 watts of energy (give or take an order of magnitude). Is this reasonable? Black Holes- Could a black hole be used as a gravitational slingshot to get ships close to the speed of light? Thanks for reading this.

Would it be possible to make solid fuel structurally stable? For instance, i know that rubbery ammonium perchlorate composite propellant is usually held in place by hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene. Would it be possible to replace the polybutadiene with stronger and more stable (but still combustible) medium? My theory is, if you could do this, you could create a solid fuel stage that would require much less housing and structural support, perhaps even none at all. you could even remove the nozzle, instead opting to design the fuel block with a bell-shaped cavity at the bottom, and the fuel would have to be ignited and burned from the bottom up. And as has been proven with rockets like the SS-520, a controllable engine nozzle is not necessarily needed for a functioning rocket. Of course the fuel block would have to be very well designed and catalysed so that it would burn completely and maintain its shape. However, with no structural support needed, a rocket like this could achieve incredible mass ratios, to the point where even with the low ISPs of solid fuels, significant payload fractions could be achieved. In addition, the cost of launch could be significantly reduced, as complicated casings and staging mechanisms wouldn't be needed. I see it as a great way to partially negate the tyranny of the rocket equation. However, i'm not an aerospace engineer. Could any of you clarify if this propulsion method would be possible?

Raplace the fusion engine with an orion pulse drive, double or triple the transfer time, and it'd work just fine i think

8/10 doesn't mean you're not an alien, but good enough To prove that i am a human, i have synthesized sequenced my whole genome. I think you will find it satisfactorily similar to the genes of a normal human:

If we're going to restart: there's one change that should be made: I think some people (myself included) were getting bored of this because launches were so infrequent. Given that someone could build a rocket in a day or two, waiting a few months for a launch also seemed a bit unrealistic in proportion to other timescales in the game. Just saying, it would be good for a new RLKSP to draw off of other community projects like the Stock Community Space Station and Naval Battle Club, in that people could reserve dates in which they could launch, and the save could be pased to them on those dates, and we could use an honor system to report failures and such. Would make launches much quicker.