Hikaru

I have no kerbals listed as losses in 0.21... However, I want to point out that before I started redesigning my spacecraft in 0.18 to avoid killing the crew as much as possible upon malfunction, I wound up with so many crew deaths that over a third of my entire persistence file was dedicated to keeping track of them. (It was in fact me trying to debug a problem with a ship that had null parts that made me notice that I'd... killed several dozen of the green guys...) So, while I am a saint when it comes to keeping my kerbals alive in 0.21, I am merely a reformed mass murderer if you take the longer view >D

Hmm. Depends greatly on wether or not stuff orbiting kerbin is destroyed too. I've got a space station with fuel and various supplies in orbit, as well as multiple unmanned tugs. Around gilly (moon of eve) right now I've got a kethane miner I've been doing experiments with. So, all together that's about five different spacecraft, which combined results in ... five kerbals. At least if the ones in orbit of kerbin were still alive, the ones around eve would have somebody to talk to; there's just enough room for everyone to fit in the station if they disembark. And with the kethane mining if they're careful they've got infinite supplies.

One of my most gratifying moments that was initially a complete horrifying epic failure happened in early 0.18; I was trying to do a rendevous with a space station already in orbit with a spacecraft that was empty, so it could offload the crew and take it somewhere. Just as it finished its circularization burn, it staged... *right in front of the space station* - KABOOM! - Luckily I'd designed the station so that the habitation section was isolated on the far end of the station. It quickly ran out of power due to having nothing to power it *with* and was a dead duck, but I was able to evacuate the crew and learned something about space debris that day.

And yes, there is still just enough clearance for a kerbal to get into or out of the ship from ground level. Here we see a volunteer standing right under one of the massive booster rockets.

This requires mechjeb http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/12384-PLUGIN-PART-0-16-Anatid-Robotics-MuMech-MechJeb-Autopilot-v1-9 and the fixed camera mod http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/12329-0-16-Multiversal-Mechatronics-Fixed-Camera-1-1 Link to the original Mk2: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/15536-The-Mk2 This is an updated version of the Mk2 with improvements in reliability and fuel efficiency. First of all, it was determined the cause of multiple crew losses with the previous design was due to the link between the command capsule and rcs tank being insufficiently reinforced for the parachute to be retained properly during high G maneuvers. A simpler design has been used since then, with the chute directly attached to the pod - multiple tests were performed with extremely high reentry speeds (>3000m/s) to determine the safety of the new design. This unfortunately means there is slightly less rcs available for turning, but it does not seem to be required in any case. Secondly, the addition of twelve more boosters to the first stage has caused slightly higher fuel efficiency in the later stages of flight, allowing for this ship to be used to get into a reverse orbit around kerbin successfully. Third, the camera locations on the upper stage were removed and now use a different mount which makes them far easier to capture interesting vistas without being blocked by the machinery on the ship. On the pad Close up detail of the lander and inner ladder workings. http://i.imgur.com/KXAiL.jpg Download from here and save as Mk2-R2.craft http://pastebin.com/YZZBeXPy

Whoops! I forgot it needed the camera mod. I\'m very sorry and will update the first post. Thanks for noticing!

This ship requires the mechjeb addon. EDIT: I forgot that this needs more than just mechjeb and also needs the camera mod r4m0n made here: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=14009.0 Thank you BlakJak and ToadDude for noticing the mistake I made, and my apologies for not realizing it beforehand. This is a complete redesign from scratch implementation of my rocket, as required by the changes in 0.16. This lander can land on kerbin, the mun, or minmus, and is using the 3 person command capsule, so you can do rescues with it. There is a ladder going from the pod all the way down the side of the ship (using two deployable ladders to cover the gaps between stages/the ground) so you need not sacrifice lives just to perform a rescue mission. Notes to orbit: When flying this ship into orbit I recommend that you set your target orbit to 150km, have the orbit turn finish at 100km in edit path, and have it stop staging at stage 6. At 10km, as it begins the gravity turn I recommend turning on RCS to prevent control loss due to excessive rolling. When stage 6 occurs, allow the outer ring of engines and tanks to clear before activating the next stage, or a collision will occur, destroying the majority of the ship. After stage 6 has shed, rcs should no longer be required. Notes when Landing on kerbin: The lander itself with full fuel *cannot* successfully land on kerbin. You will need to burn off about a tenth of the fuel in the outer tanks before mechjeb can land you. Also note that once the outer tanks have emptied you *cannot land* on kerbin, even by staging the outer tanks. Finally, note that the command pod *does* have an rcs tank attached to it, so if you are unlucky enough to have run out of fuel in orbit of kerbin you can jettison the lander entirely and slow your orbit enough using the rcs jets to parachute down to the ground. Big image of the ship on the pad:

Struts are the solution to your problem. For my rocket for each large tank I added to the ship I needed to have two struts holding it to adjacent parts, and one to two more to hold it to the inner/outer stages. An example of a recurring problem I had with my design was the decoupler and engine that connected the upper stages (lander) and the lower stages. The lander was so heavy that when the lower stages were near empty they\'d just crush the decoupler and engine, and destroy the rest of the ship as it collided with the debris remaining. For this specific decoupler, I had to use eight struts going from the bottom connection (fuel tank) to the decoupler, another eight struts going from the fuel tank above the engine on the lander to the decoupler, three struts on each wing of the lander to the fuel tanks on the outer ring of the lower stages, and finally, three struts from the outside stages on the lander to the decoupler on below the lander\'s engine. You can see the craziness here, or at least some of it: If you\'d like a more in depth look at how I set my ship up, I\'d be glad to disassemble it. Note that you cannot see it in this shot, but I found the aircraft decoupler to be a better choice for safely jettisoning parts over the square spacecraft decoupler. It\'s a weaker joint though, so you need to add - you guessed it - more struts.

Hmm. I personally use and love mechjeb, but not for the reasons some might. Personally I know how to fly my ships off the pad into an orbit and land them anywhere myself, as well as do inclination changes/whatnot by hand. However, the human in the equation isn\'t a precise pilot. While I am able to fly a ship into an orbit on manual, I will never fly a ship of the same design into exactly the same orbit every time, so when I\'m designing a ship and tweaking it, it\'s difficult to impossible to figure out the effect my changes are having on fuel consumption. Therefore mechjeb is an invaluable tool when testing a ship design. This does not mean I use mechjeb for everything, all the time. While I prefer to use it for launches and landings, I have always overengineered my landers to a ridiculous extent - every single design I have made can be landed by me on manual on kerbin. It might be a rough landing, but it\'ll be survivable. So, when mechjeb fails due to collision - or because of some bug in mechjeb\'s programming - I can take over. Just my two cents.

I threw another video together as you can see. Personally I\'m not sure which shot I like more, that of the landed ship cam on minmus that I posted earlier or this one.

r4m0n\'s been busy. His camera plugin\'s not ready yet, but it\'s letting me take shots like this. There is *so much* this plugin will allow me to do once it\'s finished....

Thanks to a plugin still in development by r4m0n, I was able to take this video with a fixed viewpoint. I have wanted to do something like this forever!

Hahaha. You know, I have to admit *every single freaking time* I get Jeb in the ship now, I park it somewhere obscure and not noteworthy, just because I can\'t bear to get him killed on purpose. This makes testing new designs difficult sometimes, since often enough he\'ll have died due to an obscure flaw in a spacecraft earlier, I\'ll be testing various changes to make it not happen again - and then I kill enough crews that they pop up again. At that point I usually just shuffle the thing off to the right of the KSC platform and leave it there. :

This ship requires mechjeb, but is otherwise all stock. If you\'ve used or seen the previous design tests I\'ve made, you\'ll realize this is based on those earlier designs. However, this variant uses the aircraft engines now available since 0.15 to reduce weight and fuel consumption - no longer do we need to light the rocket engines until around 10-12k. Unfortunately doing this has made the rocket slightly more complicated to fly - it is suggested that you disable the auto staging feature of mechjeb when using this ship, and instead, manually stage it. Specifically, it is important that around 12k when you start losing velocity that you ignite the rocket engines, and wait until the efficiency level of the jet engines has reached 0.00 before decoupling them. Otherwise they will most likely crash into the ship, or otherwise cause an explosion that will most likely destroy the ship. Another important note, I\'ve noticed in 0.15.1 and .2 so far, that loading a ship which has landing legs deployed from persistence will tend to cause that ship to be damaged, destroyed, flipped over, or otherwise. So I redesigned this ship to support landing on its legs, and then retracting them so it could be placed on engines for saving to the persistence file. The quad tiny engines have the same thrust/weight/efficiency ratio of the larger engine I used on previous designs, while having about an eighth more thrust available total. Another advantage is that it\'s much more easy to tell how much fuel remains. One last thing I forgot to mention, I\'m interested to hear from anyone how the legs perform. I rejiggered their placement on this ship so that they\'re less likely to rub against eachother, but I haven\'t done much testing. I\'d appreciate any feedback on how they perform, and suggestions on placement assuming they need to be moved again.

Well, it seems my original thread was archived a while ago and I didn\'t notice, so I can\'t reply to it. Here\'s the old thread: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=3206.msg32791#msg32791 Since then I\'ve made a number of videos, but kept forgetting to post them here. Without any more wasted time, here we go: One of my first designs created for 0.14 which incorporated the then new landing legs; I specifically created this video to test a new encoder I was using, and it worked a bit better than previous videos. As people asked for annotations, I whipped some up describing what was going on in the video. Soon afterwards I became enamoured with mechjeb; one of the first things I tried to do was discover how well it could handle a damaged or otherwise unflyable-by-a-human vehicle. Turns out, it can handle some things well, others not so much. This was the first craft I redesigned from scratch; I noticed many of my assumptions about part weights were wrong, and the redesign was done to address this, specifically this uses radial decouplers whenever possible since they\'re half the weight of a vertical one, and tries to keep the weight as centered near the base of the ship as possible. When I took this video originally I thought I had discovered a bug; instead I discovered shortly afterwards that it was meant to work in this way. Obstructed engines provide no thrust - I even hacked a booster into orbit to test this. (Not shown in this video) This was the first aircraft I created in 0.15. Reversed engines work great! Turns out revving the engines on an aircraft in the water really screws with your fps, and plays havoc with the sound effects engine too - [glow=red,2,300]Warning! Noisy![/glow] I discovered shortly afterwards that you could attach aircraft engines to spacecraft - this was a prototype design just to show its feasability; aircraft engines work *very* well up until around 10-12k, and comparatively sip on fuel. The engines in this video were all drawing off of one tank per wing. Later experiments got up to *eight* engines per wing and it was still stalling at 12k with plenty of fuel left in the one tank!. A minor design change from the previous prototype, but really this is all about the camera perspective used. I just wish there was a camera mode that worked relative to the ship\'s orientation rather than anything else. I really like how you can see the ship vibrating from the first stage\'s engines. This shows staging in space with one of my latest designs, then demonstrates just how *insanely precise* mechjeb can be - lands within four meters of a spacecraft. Finally, I end the video with a successful attempt to replicate a Mako style landing from Mass Effect using an unmanned mun rover.