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.

After doing several launches with the previous design I learned it *also* has an absurd amount of instability. Randomly, launches will fail, or work. I can\'t really explain it - but the workaround appears to be to add struts to the top of the boosters and attach them somewhere higher on the ship. This does NOT fix its torquing at launch time, nor could I fly that beast on manual. So, I redesigned yet again... After doing several more redesigns of the booster stages, it seems that it\'s simply easier to add an extra three liquid fuel tanks to the stack than it is to make multiple booster stages work. To give some idea, the complicated booster staging I\'ve been working on for something like 23 revisions. I\'ve never been able to make it work like I wanted - this ship design is the first one that seems to fix all of the problems I have been having without driving me crazy by being weirdly unstable.

Sadly the design had more problems than just that. I\'ll explain in my next post.

This is a minor revision to V17; after thoroughly testing it the design unfortunately was topheavy and tended to flip over during the second booster stage. This revision prevents this problem by putting all of the boosters at the bottom of the ship. It puts quite a bit of torque on the entire ship while firing the boosters due to weight and thrust changes, but the winglets appear to be enough to keep it on course during this difficult phase. Honestly I\'d like to come up with something less failure prone, but it appears I will need to either rethink the entire design from scratch again or come up with an idea I haven\'t yet to correct this problem.

This was a pretty shot of one of the poles I got while screwing around with a bad ship design. I\'ll have to try landing there, looks very white.

This experimental design was created after I observed the differences in weights between vertical and radial decouplers, as well as observations made from the previous designs here http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=10747.msg163986 This is all stock save for the side mounted mechjeb, (1.8.1) and requires KSP 0.14.4 Several changes were made due to observed oddities in the previous design: Huge amounts of drag (up to 75% during launch phase!) due to far too many boosters firing on the first stage. Instability due to the ship\'s center of weight being fairly high at parts of the launch phase. Weights of radial decouplers and vertical decouplers was observed to be a large unexpected factor in spacecraft weight. Fuel inefficiency due to the liquid engines firing as soon as possible, rather than after the solid boosters had finished firing. Some of these observations were a big surprise to me. For instance, the radial decoupler is half the weight of a vertical - so it makes more sense to have a wider ship than a taller one simply from that. Since I also gain more stability during launch, this also helps in ways I did not expect. Mechjeb 1.8.1 added an interesting feature for its autopilot for launching to orbit which gives you statistics for how your ship\'s thrust is being used. I was shocked when I discovered 3/4 of all the thrust being put out by the first stage of my ship was being eaten by drag alone. I was even more surprised when I discovered that simply by letting the solid boosters act alone in this design rather than having the liquid engines fire right off the pad the ship actually has slightly more fuel left in orbit. This particular variant of the design can get to a 100km orbit via mechjeb with a tiny bit of fuel remaining in the launch phase tanks with four full tanks on the lander. The ship can then land on the mun, as well as fly back and land on kerbin with the remaining fuel.

This is the fourth revision of this design generation. I think I\'m pretty comfortable with the end result; mostly this is the same ship as in V1 except that I removed the 1m mechjeb and replaced it with a side mounted one. There seems to have been some confusion in discussions I\'ve had with others about how the lander\'s engine is able to fire during launch without using the fuel on the lander; more or less this is due to me chaining fuel lines from the lowest tanks on the outer ring to the innermost tank on the lander. If people had actually tried launching my ship they would have noticed the tanks on the lander weren\'t being used until orbit, but very obviously some people aren\'t doing that, and this video I made is for them. You can easily see the fuel lines (and struts) in this video, as well as the fuel levels.

Decided to fiddle around with trying to make as small a lander as possible that was mechjeb certified. I had mixed success; it\'s not possible for me to land this manually, and mechjeb seemed to have serious doubts about its ability to land while the side tanks were attached. However, it\'s perfectly possible to land this without them if mechjeb is active. ... Unfortunately, I then neglected to realize I was launching in a clockwise orbit and wound up in an orbit around kerbin with insufficient fuel to either slow down enough to miss the mun as it approached me, nor speed up enough to avoid it. Hilarity ensued as the mun recaptured me and I was gravity assisted into an ejection from both munar and kerbin orbit. The poor fools are now orbiting kerbol with no way to return home. The design has many pluses to it due to the reduced weight of the lander; since I removed the rcs tank, the 1m mechjeb and replaced the lander\'s lfe and lft with the smaller variants, to orbit had slightly more fuel remaining in the launch tanks. Unfortunately due to it\'s much lower thrust, the lander has to do a much longer burn to get it into munar orbit, and although it\'s slightly more fuel efficient I don\'t particularly like its handling, especially since there is very little leeway once you land on the mun to get back to kerbin, as well as the very obvious fact that I am incapable of landing this by myself. I think the next redesign I do will reequip the larger lft and lfe and keep the rcs fuel. There\'s a big difference having the extra thrust of that engine, and having the rcs fuel makes correcting bad orbits easier. (and gives you one last method to return to kerbin if you really screw things up.)

Hmm. Interesting ideas. I\'ve also had people suggest other things, such as simply replacing the lander\'s engine on the current design with the smaller variant; turns out that the fuel efficiency of the smaller engine is about the same as the larger one, and the weight difference matters not a bit due to my design having the lander\'s engine lit for the entire flight after the solid boosters drop. Replacing the 1m mechjeb with the radial one is something I hadn\'t thought of, and I\'ll be trying it out on my next redesign. I deliberately have \'too much\' fuel radially coupled to the lander along with landing legs for a variety of different reasons. Primarily it\'s so that I have a wider base with which to add stability when I\'m landing things manually - mechjeb is nice, but I always like to have the ability to land the thing myself if something goes wrong. There are other reasons - due to the lander *having* too much fuel, I deliberately use it to do the munar insertion orbit from kerbin and decelleration from munar orbit to landing using the fuel on the side coupled tanks. The three side coupled engines and tanks are dumped shortly after achieving initial orbit around kerbin, and so are obviously unavailable for the rest of the flight. The radial decouplers are there so when the lander\'s side tanks are empty and I want to take off from the mun, I can easily drop the unnecessary weight and conserve whatever fuel is remaining in the last tank. One thing I *have* decided is a bit redundant is the rcs fuel tank and thrusters; I\'m simply not using the things as much as I used to. It\'s possible I may not get rid of them though, it\'s always nice to use to manually change your orbit height in very small amounts rather than having to use the main engine. Thank you for your suggestions.

It\'s been a while since I posted any new ship designs. I\'ve been slowly learning how to lower the amount of fuel required for my ship while also making the lander it launches lighter and stronger. This version of the ship is all stock except for mechjeb, which you can find on these forums. This particular variant of the ship was able to launch, orbit kerbin, orbit the mun, land on the mun, launch off the mun, orbit the mun, and then aerobrake and land on kerbin with about 10% fuel left in the last tank. While this is a perfectly good and working ship, if you have any suggestions on reducing the fuel or weight required further, I\'d love to hear from you.

Ah, my apologies for creating a confusing design. The fuel lines (the yellow colored strut like things) are taking fuel from the bottommost fuel tank and sending it to the 8 engines as if they were attached below the 3rd fuel tank. Skunky is right about the LFE\'s - I normally use solid rocket boosters as the first stage of my ship, and all liquid fuel engines afterwards. Being able to throttle down is also important once you get into an orbit so you can have fuel to do things later. This particular ship just uses the solid rocket boosters as attachment points for the liquid fuel engines. They aren\'t used at all. You probably shouldn\'t build ships like this >D