Streetwind

Addon support questions should technically go into this forum: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/forums/13-Add-on-Requests-and-Support In the meantime, have you managed a successful manual landing (without mechjeb) using this vehicle? Maybe it is struggling to offer enough deceleration. Eve has a very, very thick atmosphere (5 times as thick as Kerbin's at sea level), so parachutes work great there. Duna on the other hand has a very thin atmosphere only. Parachutes there slow you down a little, but you must still make a powered landing in nearly all cases. If you don't have any engines to land with, then mechjeb can't land it (and neither can you).

Deorbiting on your return to Kerbin? Or deorbiting to land on Duna? In both cases: have you considered aerobraking from the transfer directly into the landing? Even if you have a lander that needs to decouple from the mothership, just decouple it after aerobraking but before the mothership circularizes. It will remain in an orbit in which it will return to the atmosphere again on the next loop.

Nice mission report! Nicely designed spacecraft too.

That's because travel time can be timewarped away in an instant, long transfer burns cannot. Short routes are a niche application, usually relevant when playing with life support mods that require you rescuing stranded Kerbals on a tight schedule.

The closest thing we have to a vampiric engine is probably the KE–WAITNONOSTOP–01 Kerbal Unreconstitutionator from the Kethane mod. It can consume Kerbals to produce kethane, which is a universal material that can be converted into all sorts of fuels. So if you ran out of fuel somewhere, you could technically recycle excess crew members into fuel. It's not exactly what you asked for, but it's the closest thing we have. You would have to write a mod yourself to replicate exactly what you want.

That engine cluster honestly is really, really beautiful. I need to try something like that. Well, as good as I can make it without part clipping, anyway. My craft always end up looking a terribly utilitarian patchwork of randomly colored parts stuck together... EDIT: The engine trail mod is HotRockets. And the RTGs are not enough, as he wrote he can burn 55 seconds until the buffer is dry, which then needs 8 minutes to refill. Maybe one could attach a solar array to a decoupler and use it to be able to burn continuously for the initial ejection, then discard the array when the craft is underway (as it becomes ineffecient way out at Jool anyway).

This, honestly. It's the NERVA project taken to it's logical conclusion, the highest efficiency nuclear thermal rocket without radioactive exhaust. It's a theory at this point, but not because it's impossible to build. Much rather, it's pointless to build because no government would commit to legalizing it. If that was not a hindrance, we'd have this flying already today.

Look at RLA then for a balanced alternative (see post #5). Try the arcjet at 1 kN thrust, 2100 Isp. Half the burn time, you just need to bring a little more fuel. But Xenon is so light that it barely adds anything to the craft's weight.

Hitting "return to space center" instead of "revert flight" after an impromptu, totally un-space-worthy boilerplate test launch in the career mode save. Which of course has multiple Kerbals on board.

I would summarize the secrets with: - minimalism in construction; it doesn't need to be pretty, it needs to be functional and light --- don't overfuel, calculate your dV and only bring what you need; that Isp isn't just for show - solar panels for missions to Dres and below; use as small panels as possible in large amounts, only go larger if you run out of attachment space --- RTGs for Jool and Eloo - electric buffer storage is lightweight and can allow longer burns even if your power income is below the draw of the thruster(s) --- everytime you use a girder, you could be using a battery bank instead, which weighs less and gives you buffer - escape burn in 8-10 min bursts around your periapsis, do other missions while it loops back around; keeps burntime boredom down and exploits Oberth effect --- have a good eye when to start capture burns (usually well outside of SoI) --- bring a good book

That clipped-in landing gear looks like a band-aid trying to tape the wings together

My best mission will always be my first Mun landing that didn't crash and burn (took about five attempts). Vehicle was manned and return-capable too. Doesn't matter if I do the same thing half-asleep nowadays, back then I felt like the king of the universe. Of course, there was also that moment where I was testing the physics behavior of various crafts and on one of the various launches accidentally hit "return to space center" instead of "revert launch". With the result that I now had a craft consisting of nothing but a mk2 lander can, an X32 fuel tank and a skipper engine in a highly inclined orbit. And one of the two Kerbals inside was Bob of the original trio, who I didn't want to lose. I mean, what would I do without Disaster Bob, the only Kerbal who constantly stumbles from one emergency to the next for some reason? Due to TAC life support being installed, electric power was disintegrating at a rapid pace, the only generator was the engine on limited fuel, and if the EC gauge ever hit zero I would not be able to control the ship to restart the engine anymore. No time for a rescue mission that would have required carefully matching the screwed up orbit, no parachutes and not power to keep the two Kerbals alive... I reckoned that the situation had officially passed the Godzilla Threshold, and so I did the only option left to me: deorbit burn and reentry, followed by a powered landing. On Kerbin. With a top-heavy vehicle that I had to land straight up balanced on its engine. I think I earned myself that "**** yeah!" yell when I pulled it off

@OP: I really like the adapter you got going at the end there. What is is built of? It's difficult to see but it seems like there's 16 engines on there. The top part is an upside down Rockomax quad adapter, but how are the engines affixed to it? Also, how heavy is that craft compared to the 8 kN of thrust it's getting? The engines alone are 4 tons, and all those RTGs can't be lightweight either. As far as electric propulsion goes, some mods can give you a lot of extra options. RLA has some half-size radial attached ion thrusters, and a 1.25m part that combines 4 regular ion thrusters. Both of these exactly maintain the TWR and other stats of the stock ion thruster, if you're concerned about balance. Next to that, it also brings arcjets and resistojets, which are almost exact ion thruster clones except that they trade thrust potential for Isp (1kN/2100 and 2kN/1050 respectively). They too come in radial and quadmount variants. The only downside is that they don't get those fancy HotRockets effects without manually extending the configs If you feel more adventurous, you can try the Near Future Propulsion pack. It adds many different electric engine systems, most of which are quite honestly overpowered compared to stock. But even if you don't want these, there's parts in there which can greatly enhance your stock ion thruster experience, such as a large selection of multiadapters specifically for small engines (there's a 2.5m --> 8x 0.625m + 1x 1.25m one there, so with RLA's quad thruster you could fit 12 ions on a regular 2.5m part without having to resort to exotic part clipping). There's also a trio of lower profile inline battery parts that let you get large amounts of EC into a craft wthout having to stack huge battery towers (and yes, they maintain the stock "weight per EC"). This is especially great for probes which you want to keep small, but still able to operate power-draining equipment (and the electric propulsion to some degree) while they're in the shadow of whatever they're orbiting. Also, bigger solar panels beyond the size of the Gigantor, and onboard nuclear reactors for power production as an alternative to spamming RTGs everywhere. I've actually been building a lot of unmanned probes with the help of the two above mods (and a generous helping of the nerfbat in case of Near Future, courtesy of ModuleManager). Kerbin and both its moons have electrically powered mapping/prospecting satellites in orbit, a fourth one is on its way to Moho ahead of future manned missions, and the other planets and moons will get their own when the transfer windows roll around. And I'm planning a kethane ferry for shipping between a mine on Minmus and a processing station in Kerbin orbit that will likely be using one or two VASIMR plasma drives configured to very high specific impulses. After all, fuel efficiency is important on ferries that transfer something meant to be processed into fuel, so it makes sense to go electric here. Also, pushing the empty ferry out to Minmus should not require much thrust, and escaping back to Kerbin with a full load and aerobraking avoids overly long burns on the return too.

Another thing that makes a low-g footrace interesting from an atheltics perspective is the treacherous difference between mass and weight. On the moon, you only weigh one sixth of what you do on earth; but your mass as a whole - and thus your inertia - remains the same. It would be incredibly easy to propel yourself to very fast running speeds (limits of your pressure suit permitting, unless it happens in a pressurized indoors environment), but the impact of your legs on the ground would grow to higher proportions than what we experience on earth. This would also be dramatically amplified by uneven terrain. If you think that less gravity means you won't tire as quickly, think again. Also, it becomes a game of figuring out how much you can push yourself - how fast you can go before you risk injuring your ankles or breaking a leg the next time you hit a bump or the track slopes up. Especially since low-g environments promote the weakening of bones and muscles.

I'm sure that most of you will have heard of EVE Online, space drama sandbox extraordinaire. The Iceland-based developers of said MMO host a convention in Reykjavík every year, called Fanfest. During Fanfest 2013, there was (for the first time, but hopefully not the only time) a series of panels under the motto "Making EVE Real", where guest speakers from private companies were invited to talk about topics that appear in the game, but may soon exist in real life as well. And thankfully, these panels were recorded on video and made available online. I personally found watching these panels great fun, and I think that anyone with an interest in near-future space development (or in the case fo the first video, something more theoretical) will enjoy them as well. What do you think? Do these speakers have a point? Can what they plan to do, really be done? Or are they crazy and will go bankrupt in short order? And if they suceeded, what would it mean for space development in the coming years? It may also be fun looking up where these companies are now, almost a year later... Video 1: Richard Obousy of Icarus Interstellar wants to travel faster than light. (Brief audio issue at the start, gets fixed after a minute) Video 2: Chris Lewicki of Planetary Resources wants to go asteroid mining. Video 3: Michael Laine of LiftPort wants to build a space elevator... but not the way you think. Fanfest 2014 is coming up in May, I believe. Let's hope they have another series of interesting guest speakers there. Because one thing is for sure... we seem to be on the cusp of an era of private space development enterprises. The number of ambitious startups will only go up in the near future.

There was a private company with aims to build a space elevator on the moon. Turns out, while technology is at least decades away from pulling it off on earth, contemporary technology could do it on the moon. "Could" with a big uncertainty factor, because nothing remotely like it has ever been attempted. I can dig up the video... in fact, I may make a new thread because there were multiple interesting videos that are worth posting.

Au contraire, it is happening quite well. I've plotted quite a few vectors and timewarped a bit in sandbox mode, and now I've got a rough idea what I need to watch out for (and how to force a transfer outside of a proper window). I'll freely admit that it'll be imprecise, but it certainly won't be random.

Now those are some proper airscoops!

No, I've not launched anything yet, gotta design a spacecraft first. Also, from what I've estimated so far, I seem to be much too early on most encounters apart from Moho, so waiting a bit longer won't hurt.

Ah, I see. Well, it wouldn't work anyway since Eve itself won't be anywhere near the point of contact, so the window is likely way off anyway Was just wondering if the relative positioning of the nodes had any significance.

That helped a lot! I managed to get a Moho intercept. My next question is now: is there a way to estimate if that is a "good" intercept or not? And: does it matter, or should I just go with whatever intercept I get since it doesn't matter much? I would assume that travel times would be greatly affected. The intercept I hit during my test was about 27 days. Upon trying Eve, I found that the ascending/descending nodes I'd need for an inclination burn were a few degrees behind Kerbin and a few degrees ahead of periapsis, respectively. Which would mean I wouldn't be able to do the inclination burn until I was very close to already touching the target orbit. Is that a situation where I should recognize that the window is way off, or does that simply mean I need to maneuver differently? Yeah, that's more or less exactly what I don't want, but thanks anyway

I know there's plenty of websites and ingame tools that tell you the optimal times to depart Kerbin for interplanetary voyages. But I've always given myself the rule that before I let automation handle something for me, I must learn to do it by hand. So now I am looking at the solar system view and scratching my head. On some planets, I cannot get a proper encounter no matter how hard I try; at least, not directly from Kerbin. I could go into a solar orbit and treat it like a rendezvous and it would probably work, but I assume that these planets are simply well out of their ideal transfer window right now. On other planets I can get an encounter directly from Kerbin. The question here is, how do I judge if what I have plotted out now is a good course? How do I work out if waiting will improve or worsen the situation? This is something I've never thought about before. Again, I'm not looking for the already well-known and calculated numbers. I'm looking for the means to calculate - or at least, eyeball - them myself. If I end up a whole month off because I use huge simplifications, that's fine. I just want to be roughly able to tell "bad time to launch" apart from "good time to launch", and "situation improving" from "situation worsening".

That requires enabling part clipping via the dev menu though, doesn't it?

This is true. The mainsail is not very fuel efficient. You can judge rocket engine fuel efficiency by looking at the value named Isp (meaning specific impulse). It is a measure of how "hard" the engine throws its reaction mass out the back, and thus, how much forward momentum you gain from it doing so. Engines with a high specific impulse can get you more total acceleration (and thus a higher final speed) out of the same amount of fuel than those with low specific impulse ratings. Therefore, Isp is functionally identical to a car's "gas mileage" spec. Do not confuse this with thrust, however. Total acceleration is one thing, but thrust describes how quickly you get it. Engines with high Isp (like the LV-N) tend to have low thrust, and engines with high thrust (like the mainsail) tend to have low Isp. In your case, you benefit from switching to smaller, higher Isp engines because you apparently did not need all the thrust the mainsail provided. Thrust and Isp are interrelated when determining actual fuel consumption. You pay X amount of fuel per second for every kN of thrust, and the X is determined by Isp. If you have two engines with exactly the same Isp, and one generates 200 kN of thrust while another does 400 kN, then the second one will consume exactly twice as much fuel per second as the first. But if the second one had a lower Isp, as high thrust engines usually do, then it would have to spend more than twice the fuel. Generally, rocket engines have two Isp values: "ASL" (atmospheric sea level) describes what you get on the launchpad, and "Vac" (vacuum) describes what you get outside the atmosphere. The second value is always larger because the presence of an atmosphere causes backpressure on the rocket engine's exhaust which lowers its efficiency.

That may have been because you chose a symmetric second layout. And in that layout, despite the fact that the reaction wheels are far away from the center of mass, the center of torque is still exactly congruent with the center of mass. Both setups are basically identical, and as such, it's no surprise that the results are identical. Try again with: - both reaction wheels where the above screenshot shows one, and none elsewhere - both reaction wheels at the far end of a single tank, and none elsewhere This will contrast a case where the center of torque is close to the center of mass with a case where it is well away from the center of mass. This should result in a very noticable difference - unless placement truly does not matter.